Our Pale Blue Dot…

Dear Friends,

See if you can detect the pale blue dot in a sunbeam. There is in this image our Earth seen from 6 billion miles away by a robot, Voyager 1, that was launched from Earth in 1977. Our home world is only one pixel in the image. Those of you with still keen eyes might discern a spot, a dust mote, a piece of cosmic lint stuck in the middle of the orange band of Sol's light beaming across the right of the frame. That is us and all we have ever known, both our cradle and perhaps our grave as a species.

This link will take you to a fine summary of the situation that is our present, past and future. It is recited in eloquent terms and precise cadence by a clever fellow by the name of Sagan.

Please do pass this on. Encourage your friends and neighbors to look to the stars and into each others' faces, to look down at the ground beneath their feet. You might suggest that we all put what we can see ALL together and arrange our affairs with a little more kindness as we circle 'round the sky.

Thank you, Dr. Sagan, Ad Astra

Res Ipsa Loquitor,

SCS

Spiritual and Cranky!

Dear Friends,

I got pretty cranky yesterday morning when I encountered a commentary by this yutz, Alan Miller, on CNN calling folks who were "spiritual but not religious" lazy and timid. Hey, boss, you take a look at a Universe that stretches from before the beginning of time and all the way to the end of time. See a universe that is one of an infinite variety and multitude but has perfected itself to create Human eyes and Human minds that seek to comprehend it and all the other possible creations in every possible dimension within and without time. Look into the near emptiness of space and see Reality being born out of that emptiness adjacent to dark stars that drink up even the aether of light born out of nothingness.

In this Universe matter is mostly unseen and most light dark, most truth must left be unspoken about the hidden mysteries on worlds beyond our dreams begging to be revealed in a place where Space and Light bend and few so-called facts can be trusted from our vantage. We cannot know where and how fast It becomes new or old or not at all; no more than that cat in a box that has puzzled us since those cats Heisenberg and Schroeder dreamt it up or not. The end of the story of that cat does or does not forever live in a book that has no beginning nor end.

So, stand there at the edge of a sky with new stars birthing new planets and look at them. Stand alone without some old man in a throne above the clouds of our piece of lint in the Cosmos, this pale blue dot, our home world circling an unremarkable star at the tenuous fringe of one galaxy swirling amongst a trillion others. Now, tell me that I am lazy and timid. Brother, what I just described is where I live and it is not a place for the timid. To you I say, welcome home.

Res Ipsa Loquitor,

SCS

Tasting Comets…

Comet Kohoutek Seen from Earth in CE 1973

Dear Friends,

Have you every tasted a comet? I bet you have. When you were a little kid, did you ever stick your tongue out as a snowflake fell in a blizzard? That tiny bit of water melting in an instant upon your tongue was from a comet. Have you ever mopped your brow after an afternoon of playing in the sun? That salty and sweet flavor of sweat came from a comet. Have you been to the sea? All those gazillions of tons and 1.3 sextillion liters of water and much of the stuff of our own beings and every living thing we know came from countless comets falling through ancient winds in an orange sky of nitrogen and methane and ammonia to deliver us water and the chemistry of life. When you inhale that breeze on the surf, you are breathing a comet.

That surf you feel vibrating at about one and a half cycles per second is the vibration of our Home World’s Moon bouncing around Terra as it wobbles about old Sol. It is also a cerebral sound; it is the frequency of our Human minds at rest and in meditation. It is no wonder that we can sit for hours or lie with our eyes closed under the Sun listening to that beat. Listen long enough without distraction and your own pulse cleaves to that rhythm. It slows. You are at Home under the arc of a heaven that once rained down comets.

Hic Finis Est,

SCS

Neil Armstrong, Ad Astra

Neil Armstrong, Ad Astra

Dear Friends,

One of my heroes died yesterday afternoon. You might have heard of him. He might be one of your heroes, as well. That is likely if you were a thirteen year old boy on July 20, 1969. His name was Neil Armstrong. He was the steely eyed missile man who flew a space ship clear to the Moon and was the first Human to touch its face, to trod its dust under his boot heels and come back home with a trove of dumb old, very old rocks.

Armstrong had previously shown his mettle flying fighter planes over Korea, blasting toward the edge of space in rocket planes that nobody was sure would real work, and safely landing a crazy contraption called the Gemini 8 that spun out of control one hundred and four miles from Terra Firma. It was spinning at one revolution per second while coupled to another craft. He and his crew mate could barely see straight, their eyeballs bulging and heads swimming from the force of the gyrations. Armstrong could hardly lift his right hand and hit the small button to turn the damned machine off. He worried that he might vomit into his space helmet and thus suffocate, but did manage to do what a real test pilot always wishes to do. He got himself and his partner back down on the ground in one piece.

About three years later on Armstrong faced a couple of other challenges not anticipated in his training to make a landing on Luna. First off, there were then no really good maps of their intended place of touch down. As they, he, the Commander, and Buzz Aldrin, Armstrong’s pilot, descended to the surface they found that the supposedly safe terrain was littered with boulders and craters. They had overshot their place of supposed safety and were running low on fuel. Neil and Buzz, saying not a word to each other as they kept mission control a quarter of a million miles away apprised of the mess, morphed into a four armed, quadruple-eyed single pilot. One took control of the altitude of their little craft, and the other manned the joystick controlling its forward motion. With less than half a minute of fuel left, they made a safe landing. Had they not, their craft made with a skin as thin as a foil wrapper on a piece of chewing gum, would have become their coffin… and not a very fine coffin as expensive as it was.

Anyhow, once down on the surface, they were told to get some sleep. Who can make a perilous journey to land on the friggin’ Moon and then want to take a nap? They refused their orders and got dressed for a little jaunt. Of course, they had to take along that danged American flag to plant and their first problem was getting the thing stuck into the hard lunar soil so goddamn President Nixon could interrupt their work on a useless task for the TV camera for a useless interview with the “boys” to be telecast and recorded on a tape that would be lost in an obscure closet somewhere yet to be discovered in Texas… or maybe California… or maybe Florida. These guys just risked their necks to get to the Moon and they had to stop what they were doing to pose for a dumb ass TV commercial for a crooked politician.

Whatever. The fellahs did get back to work. Buzz spent a good deal of time doing what seemed to be the Bunny Hop as he figured out how to move around in those ridiculous suits that were like balloons you wore. Neil got most of the chores with the digging and laying out experiments as his pilot looked like he was high on nitrous oxide at a Grateful Dead show before that camera. Then they had to go back into their rickety little Moon Ship for that snooze before going back up to the orbiting command capsule… if the rocket in their own ship would light as promised.

That proved to be a problem. The rocket was actually in fine shape, but Buzz bumped into the switch that turned it on when he was getting back into the Lunar Module. It broke off. Fortunately, he had a Bic pen. He took off the cap and jammed it into the switch. They were on their way back home. Buzz is still both proud and abashed by this episode, forty-three years later.

So, the guys, Armstrong and Aldrin and the command module pilot, Mike Collins, head back home in what had become at this point, well, essentially a flying outhouse. After six days with about as much personal space as a phone booth provides… things were getting a little stinky. When the recovery crew opened the hatch to the Apollo 11 capsule, they almost lost their lunch. No portion of a trip to the Moon and back, including prying three adventurers out of their tiny space craft is for sissies.

Next came the quarantine in a little trailer home. The astronauts needed to be isolated to protect the crew of the aircraft carrier that had picked them up from imaginary space bugs. The thing was hermetically sealed but fitted with a large picture window so Nixon, yes him again, could drop on by to have the plucky boys make another TV ad for him. He took a short break from compiling lists of Jews and other enemies, plotting burglaries and assassinations to say how proud he was of the brave Americans confined to a silver tube on wheels after spending seven days at the edge of Death at every moment, with each flip of a switch, with every move in a terribly confined space with no escape. Now, they were trapped yet again having to put up with Nixon.

Of course, Nixon had almost nothing to do with the guys triumphant and daring trip to the surface of the Moon and back. The men who actually engineered the politics and economics required to perform such a feat, JFK and LBJ, were either murdered or banished in disgrace. Nixon’s joy at this reality was barely concealed behind his smug and clueless pronouncement of the achievement that he shared with the brave explorers. They put up with his nonsense and went back to their jobs, now essentially working as lab rats being examined to see if they would die some hideous death from an alien microbial beasty.  The boys were good natured about living in their terrarium like some exhibit at a zoo. They played a lot of cards and gave interviews over the phone and did their best to explain what they had done and experienced to the folks back at NASA and JPL, and to the world.

After being let out of the big test tube, the guys were sent to perform in parades and publicity functions. They pretty much hated that. When the hoopla was done, they each went their own ways. Buzz had a hard time for a while: depression and much booze. He eventually rebounded to become the preeminent Celestial Mechanic of our age. His ideas might finally get us to Mars. Collins went on to a life of public service and as a business leader in the private sector. Armstrong took a path rather different than his two colleagues who sailed with him to the Moon and back.

He moved back to his home in Ohio and became an engineering professor at a little state college. He seldom made public appearances but for showing up in class on time. He taught young people about the practical matters of solving little problems or hard problems for folks; making devices that might just become pieces of the next great space ship or a washing machine.

Armstrong could have cashed in his golden ticket of fame. He did not. He chose to make a modest living as a teacher and tend to his family and community. He touched the face of the Moon, but he chose to be firmly planted and steady to his principles right here on Earth. He humbly demonstrated to us all how to be Human when an entire planet assumes that you are more than Human. A little light went out of the world with the departure of a modest, brave and hard working man. Tonight or any night, if it is clear and the Moon is high, give that piece of rock and dust a wink and nod. One of our kind dared go there first and stomp gentle on its rough hide.

Hic Finis Est

SCS

Coming Soon…

Dear Friends,

Coming soon to an electronic bookshelf near you…

©SCS

A Trip to a Far Away Moon…

Dear Friends,

1,216 billion kilometers, about a billion miles away from the pale blue dot that is our home-world, is a very small world that we humans call Enceladus. It is a moon of Saturn, and it circles and swims amidst the most dense portion of the gaseous, ringed and giant planet’s E-ring. Enceladus is so tiny that its entire diameter could be nestled in the distance between Montreal and Washington, D.C.

Something interesting is happening out there. On a patch of dust where ice serves as the fifty-mile thick rocky mantle and crust of a deep frozen speck of creation, there are geysers. How can this be? Perhaps, we thought, under that frigid presentation to early robots visiting from Earth, there is an ocean. The founts that emerge from this world’s surface are rich in water and the chemicals sodium and potassium. Nitrogen makes up a good portion of the ice that cloaks the roiling, hidden ocean that is bubbling in the massage of Saturn’s titanic gravity. Beneath that ocean lies a core of iron, silicates, and carbon. On Eceladus there is the chemistry of life.

We wonder, what sort of life might be bubbling in that dark ocean that has never seen even the dim light of a distant sun? The clever machine, Aldrin II, completed its seven year voyage to the Saturnian system in 2028. It threaded its way through the debris of the great rings to orbit Enceladus and then descended to its surface. There it deployed Aldrin’s cryobot, Armstrong. It took six months (in Earth time) to bore down to the ocean through the mantle of ice. Eventually, however, there the great question was answered; at least in part.

The briny deep was a soup of pre-biotic and biotic materials, detectable to the robot’s “senses.” Amino acids complexed into RNA, DNA and proteins, flakes of what could have passed for earthly flesh and weird bits of what seemed to be vegetation but contained no chlorophyl were abundant near the ocean floor where sulfurous fumaroles vomited out the substances of the ancient world’s core. Peering into the murk, Armstrong detected in this exobiology what appeared, at first, to be bacteria to any doctor born of our terran orb. On closer examination, this first judgement was precisely wrong.

The bugs of Enceladus were all inside out. Exterior to their lipid cellular membranes was their genetic material. It makes sense that nature might direct such an evolution. In a cozy but constrained womb such as this weird ocean, evolution had opted to make the exchange of genes as convenient and speedy as possible. Higher up the food chain were similarly constructed creatures. Their bodies had the appearance of flattened eels that squiggled through the waters. Their guts secreted their gastric juices through a slimy skin that was covered with long cilia that captured their digested food and swept it into pores and thence, apparently to an alimentary canal that had no mouth but the being’s surface. It did, however have an anus, from whence the rich broth of the Enceladan biosphere was, in part, derived.

There was more. That plant like detritus was revealed to be the dissolved remains of plankton-like beings that had evolved to bio-fluoresce to signal each other in the otherwise impenetrable darkness of their home in an encapsulated deep. With this talent they gained the ability to form jelly-fish-like colonies, massive creatures that captured and consumed the eel-creatures. They lived on top of the alien food-chain, died and just fell to pieces.

Twenty years after his arrival in the alien deep, Armstrong still swims this strange ocean. It continues to report back. Alas, almost nobody is listening but kids who are strange, have never kissed a girl, and have time on their hands. The governments of The Allies have cut back budgets for space exploration. There are wars to pay for. Meanwhile, the people of our gloom benighted orb may yet hear news of a species that might want to speak to us through a piece of our technology made from junk made from stuff we dug from this Earth, and flung toward the stars.

Hic Finis Est,

S