The manifesto of the committee to abolish it.
To be honest, I had never previously realized how terrible outer space is.
3 thoughts on “Outer Space”
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The manifesto of the committee to abolish it.
To be honest, I had never previously realized how terrible outer space is.
Comments are closed.
CAOS reminds me of SCAM, the Society for the Conservation of Angular Momentum. It’s dedicated to preventing planetary probes from stealing angular momentum from Jupiter and other planets by performing slingshot maneuvers.
There was a time when I was looking for something to do, so I joined the local astronomy club. We advertised to the public that we were having a “star party”, and club members set up telescopes of various kinds and sizes in a city park. I had set up binoculars on a camera tripod and pointed at M31 — the Andromeda Galaxy.
“What are we looking at?”
“You are looking at the Andromeda Galaxy. What you are seeing as a faint smudge of light is only the inner core — the galaxy extends across the sky for many full-moon diameters, but its outer reaches are very faint. The pictures of it you see in astronomy books are the result of powerful telescopes taking long time exposures.
What you are looking at, by the way figures into the “second revolution” in our understanding of the scale of the universe after that of Copernicus many centuries earlier. Astronomer Edwin Hubble found variable stars in the Andromeda Galaxy of a known brightness pattern, establishing it to be distant, making it an “island universe” larger than our own Milky Way galaxy, leading to our current understanding that our universe is much more vast than we could imagine, indeed populated by “billions and billions” of such galaxies.”
A few feet away, fellow club members have set up one of those fancy Schmidt-Cassegrain telescopes with the computerized sky-tracking drive.
“What are we looking at?”
“Sa’durn” was the terse reply.
Long before Charles Murray published “Coming Apart”, something told me that I didn’t “fit in” . . .
Looks to me like the same sorts of people who are pushing the “Mundane Science Fiction Movement” crap: Earth is all we have. Earth is all we will ever have. Earth is all we are allowed to ever imagine having. Learn to like it.
Just like the people in the the backstory of the saga of Antonia DeVilbiss, the ones who carried on about how ending crewed spaceflight was “growing up” and focusing on solving “practical problems in the real world” instead of “running away” and chasing dreams of adventure.