Michael Griffin, the administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, placed an essay in 2007 on the NASA Web site in which he answers the question “Why explore space?”

It’s still there if you want to look at it, but don’t read it if you’re looking for a list of reasons for spaceflight.

His answer is that exploring is what great nations do and space is the place to do exploring today. So he’s saying the United States best keep its dragging-rear in gear or its going to get left behind on a overpopulated, greenhouse-gassed planet.

Randy Culp — I don’t know him other than from his Web site — has a list of 10 reasons for space exploration and his reason No. 9 is to “place a spy satellite over the Miss Hawaiian Tropics contest.”

Isn’t that like a man? In looking to the stars, he finds himself drawn back to the base things of earth.

In all the reasons given by dozens of experts on the Web, I don’t see one that says we must find life elsewhere in the universe.

But we must find other life.

That’s why we — along with help from Canadian and European researchers and companies — sent the Phoenix lander to Mars to look for life.

A lot of people say life exists on other planets, but I say we must find life elsewhere for several important reasons:

• We’re running out of cultural food experiences. I’ve had all the Chinese, Italian, Thai, Mexican, Ukranian food I can ever eat. I want some Martian dinner fare, or Plutonian, Uranusarian or Andromedarian meals.

And let’s be sure Banquet makes them available in microwave dinners.

• It’s imperative that the United States finds new life in outerspace first, so we can teach them the American measurement system.

If the aliens adopt the metric system, we won’t only be the last place in the world not using the metric system, but the last place in the universe using the metric system. We’ll be screwed.

Now what is it? A kilometer is six-tenths of a mile, or a kilometer is six miles? Good grief, see what I mean?

• We’re pretty sure Newton’s and Einstein’s laws hold true across the universe, but we need to see if Murphy’s Laws — you know, like “If anything just cannot go wrong, it will anyway” — are true.