“Sunshine,
Allow me to be a bit forward…
…you made my heart cum.
-itsmesanjeev
“Black. Black. Black. Black. Black. Black. I go back to, I go back to-”
— Amy Winehouse
So the Era of the Space Shuttle is Over,
And it’s kind of sad, because the space shuttle is perhaps the single strongest symbol of the progression of science and its unrelenting conquest of the unknown. But that’s the thing with progress- it progresses.
As do we.
And if you can make no other argument for the rewards of space exploration, make that one: perspective. Seeing the Earth float around like a little marble may make you feel small, but it should remind you how much smaller all of your problems are. Carl Sagan said it best, when commenting on a picture the of Earth taken from the edge of the solar system:
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Look again at that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
