| Who cares how many rings Saturn has? Let's take care of the problems here before we impose our will on other galaxies; Let's get our own house in order and embrace the Earth as our life-sustaining force before we start messing with other planets and other forms of life. Maybe Nikki Giovanni turned my head a little when I heard her speak at a Madison YWCA luncheon a few years ago. She essentially said that when NASA gets around to sending humans on a mission to Mars, they'd better have Black astronauts on the crew because African Americans are the only people who have survived long passages in the dark to unknown lands. Maybe my interest in space is heightened by my recent awareness of Neil DeGrasse Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Maybe this growing interest is fueled by the book "Pale Blue Dot" by Carl Sagan that I'm finally getting around to reading many years after it was given to me as a Christmas present. Maybe the knowledge we gain from space exploration appears to be a remarkable value in comparison to the trillions of dollars and thousands and thousands of lives that we force into the meat-grinder of war with the macabre recipe only yielding a despicable and insane hunger for more war. I find myself paying more attention to space these days; both inner and outer. For example, space pertains to the manner in which we see our possibilities. We can see our opportunities for fulfillment as narrow, constricted and limited or expansive and limitless with boundaries defined only by our imaginations. Our physical environments can influence our inner beliefs. If we live in tiny apartments it may be that much harder to envision spaciousness. But on the other hand, such an apparent constriction can increase our hunger to travel to other frontiers with outer space sometimes referred to as the final frontier. Physical space or lack of it will conjure up different possibilities in different people, but limiting possibilities or restricting space is not justifiable or conscionable under any circumstance. No one has the right to say, "That's good enough for them." I studied T'ai Chi some years ago. I remember what my instructor said to me one day. She said that I moved rather gracefully, particularly for a big man, but that my movements were small and that I should stretch out more to claim the space that was determined by my size. Her words were even more significant than I realized at the time I first heard them; their wisdom has seeped into my consciousness over the years. Yes. I was and probably still am in the habit of making myself smaller than I am. Yes. I do, for the most part, have a penchant for trying to be unobtrusive. Maybe at least some of this comes from having grown up in a small apartment in housing projects where the subtle message was perhaps that I should be thankful that I was "allowed" to exist at all, and any ambitions beyond survival were demonstrations of ingratitude. Who knows?/But what I do know is that the twin Voyager I & II spacecraft was launched about 30 years ago and that the mission was only supposed to have lasted for five years. Well -- three decades have passed since it took off and the Voyager is still out there gathering data and sending back images of worlds infinitely further away than those shown in the 1950's Rocky Jones Space Ranger and Flash Gordon television series. And the end of the universe is still not in sight. The Voyager's present rate of speed is about 38,000 miles per hour. There are 24 hours in a day so the Voyager travels about 912,000 miles in the time it takes our little Earth to circle the sun. At that rate the Voyager travels about 332.9 million miles in a year or close to 9.9 trillion miles in 30 years. What do these numbers mean? The best I can do is to break it down into what I can begin to get my limited mind around. A round-trip between New York and California is about 6,000 miles. 9.9 trillion miles is about 1.7 million New York/California round-trips. This is just a guess, but I'd wager that your frequent flyer miles would expire before you completed that many trips. I spent the better part of yesterday in waiting rooms in a medical facility. While waiting, I became familiar with just about all the magazines, furnishings and patterns in the carpets. I also learned where all the bathrooms were. There were two aquariums on each of the three floors. They held beautiful and exotic-looking fish of many colors. The fish didn't have to worry about food or natural predators. I know this statement is presumptuous because I don't know that fish ever worry about anything. Maybe worrying is an exclusively human blessing or curse. But what really struck me was that these marvelous creatures were swimming in tanks that only held about 24 cubic feet of water while the volume of the Earth's oceans is roughly 322.3 million cubic miles. Liberating the fish is not on my list of things to do today, but it is incumbent upon me to think beyond the barriers of the glass walls that I swim inside of and allow the unfolding of the inner space that is vastly larger than anything I've attempted to describe here. |
| Simple things/Lang Kenneth Haynes Outer space, inner space |
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| To some extent, we are all willing victims of hype. For example, the mere mention of space exploration conjures up the usual objections. At least they did in me: We could spend that money much better on Earth; |