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British Man Trades Frequent Flyer Miles for Space Shot
lvmoon writes "Start saving up your airline miles. Alan Watts, a British businessman, was able to use his 2,000,000 frequent flyer miles for a space flight, a ticket aboard a 2009 Virgin Galactic space flight." From the article: "Electrician Alan Watts said he flew to and from the United States on Virgin Atlantic flights more than 40 times in the past six years, earning him enough miles to take the trip into space with Virgin's space wing, London's The Sun newspaper reported Friday. The trip cost 2 million frequent flier miles, compared to the 90,000 miles required for a first-class flight from London to New York." Besides being funny, does this say anything about space travel in the 21st century? Is space is no longer the final frontier? I'm pretty sure Roddenberry didn't have frequent flier miles in mind when he came up with the Enterprise.
He's lucky too because he's got this free ticket in before the much expected hyperinflation in the air-miles currency.
This surprises some people but in fact, air-miles are a form of currency. They can be exchanged for real world goods and services and therefore have an intrinsic real world value. The problem is that the vast majority of air-miles go unspent. Since a constantly increasing amount of currency is chasing a limited amount of goods the value of the currency is constantly falling.
The fact that this guy was able to accrue two million air-miles doing a normal job tells you that inflation has already crippled the currency. I soon expect air-miles to be practically worthless.
Simon