Watching the election results tonight, I keep thinking about the differences between Clinton and Obama's policy proposals for space exploration and how they relate to cautionary words from Stephen Hawking. First, here is Hawking's argument:

"It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species... Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of."

Certainly "the end is nigh" has been the paranoids' perennial rant for millennia, but it's only a ludicrous claim in the short term. The geologic record demonstrates that several mass extinctions have happened on Earth in the past, so we would require belief in well-timed divine intervention to argue that it'll never happen to us. And given the propensity of scientists to experiment with powerful technologies they don't understand, the statistical likelihood of our eventual extinction is certainly going up.

The problem is that we just can't know what we don't know, so it's impossible to predict how much time we really have. It could be millions of years or just a few days, and that makes the issue of long-term survival of humanity a political third rail. Nobody wants to sound like Chicken Little while running for president, especially since hope and optimism are key prerequisites to winning even a mayoral race.

So I didn't expect any presidential candidates to discuss this angle of space exploration explicitly, but I was flabbergasted when I found a comparison of the candidates' space proposals, showing that only Clinton and Obama cared enough to even state their positions on funding for space exploration.

I didn't really expect much from the Republicans on this issue when three out of ten candidates raised hands to indicate that they don't accept the theory of evolution during a debate in May, 2007. But Republicans have generally funded NASA better than Democrats in the past, so perhaps they're just giving lip service to the non-reality-based voters upon whom they depend to get elected. Still, it's a leap of faith for anyone that cares about space exploration to vote for a self-proclaimed luddite.

So I'm left with analyzing the press releases of Clinton and Obama, neither of which contains fine details. Clinton states that she'll increase NASA's funding, an unusual promise for a modern Democrat. For a moment I have a glimmer of hope. But then I read Obama's position, he literally wants to delay the Moon-Mars program by at least five years to pay for the early learning portion of his education proposal.

This sounds like ignoring a smoldering fire in your house so you can take a trip to the library. Another analogy that comes to mind is King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella scrapping Columbus' voyage so they could create a daycare program instead. Don't get me wrong, I wish we were spending more money on education already. But it would make a lot more sense to take that money out of the Pentagon's budget, it would hardly make a dent there.

The bottom line is that if elected president, Barrack Obama could possibly sacrifice humanity's only hope of long-term survival so he can show U.S. preschoolers just how much he cares about them.

Yes, it's change. It's just not wise.