thanks.

rocket fuel is probably less harmful in the current does the environment gets than the fumes in cars, or even the greenhouse gases we breathe and excrete daily, not to mention factories, cars and planes.

the point is, earth is big when you live on it, but we’re small by comparison with the rest of everything that exists.

i entirely echo the sentiment about needing to look out planetside while doing this, but worrying about a tiny planet orbiting a small, average star in an old galaxy about to smash into another old galaxy in an expanding universe that we don’t even understand fully seemto to me to pale by comparison to the prospect of learning more about that same universe, and applying that knowledge to our daily lives. we cannot understand our place in the forest of life if we refuse to look past the trees directly in front of us here.

long-term-wise, we are in trouble unless we continue to learn and grow and adapt to our environment, even if we are altering that by adapting the environment to our own comfort level.

in five hundred years, if we’re fortunate enough to have not nuked ourselves out of existence or burned away our atmosphere, the folly in our culture will be obvious to history, as will the achievement of exploring the rest of everything and taking it all into account, as opposed to the present plan of taking everything for granted, and barely acknowledging the literal fact that we truly know nothing of how the universe really behaves in all circumstances.

this is like seeing a miracle performed and restoring your faith in your personal myth of existence; it serves to bolster morale and remind us that we are capable of so much more than patty infighting over land or dinosaur sludge, or even worse, assuming we know everything and are somehow destined to inherit the infinitely large, largely unknown universe we so blindly ignore most of the time we spend thinking about “life”.

this is the last comment, i promise.

but, much like the audio clip i linked to, it is an abstract compared to seeing or hearing such things in person, which is neither practical nor feasible as of yet.

the point is, it’s an abstract the nonetheless represents unprecedented acheivment in the name of learning and proof that all hope may not be lost back here. it just means that there is so much we don’t know and that to assume we are in any way important, that exploring other planets in our neighborhood is not, displays the very ignorance that threatens our entire civilization (and i use that term loosely).

the more things like this we can show to everyone, the more everyone may come to appreciate what we’ve got and what we’ve got to learn.

i followed the coverage of cassini-huygens avidly when i found out there was a small audio sensor on the huygens lander and they have audio.

it’s fairly abstract, as the microphone had a 1 bit per second sample rate, but that bit was recorded in extreme fidelity and all aspects were analyzed to listen for thunder and, consequently, proof of rain storms.

regardless, it represents the greatest piece of sound ever to grace my brain.

the volume shifts for reasons unbeknownst to our scientists, and the probe returned gorgeous pictures of a worl with a tenuous atmosphere made of chemicals that help form life. it drizzles these chemicals and they form lakes and snow. the moon is distant and shrouded in clouds, so it is twilight dark at the brightest noon there, and colder there than almost anywhere in our solar system, save for triton and pluto. the gases we flatulate and what microorganisms breathe out naturally are the air, water and snow and surface pebbles there instead of the volatile gases we know them to be on earth.

we don’t know anything about titan other than what we can see, and what little we got from the probe, but the mystery for me is more fun than a complete analysis. it’s amazing to think that as much as we think we know about our own world, there are countless others whose environs are based on the same chemistry and physics that made us able to eventually dicker about the best wrong explanation for why we exist at all. and we don’t know why the volume swells on the recording. from a metal ball with gauges we dropped on a moon of a planet over an hour away from us at the fastest speed in the universe.

it just serves to remind me (and hopefully others) that even though most of what we can see outside our planet seems desolate, it is rich with variety and rife with potential. it is a beautiful place, no matter where you look, because nearest we can tell, it’s just like that because of the way things work in this continuum.

in other words, the universe is an infinitely large flower which may or may not even be ripe for the picking. and we are lucky enough to live in it and be curious enough about it to explore, examine and enjoy it for what it simply is.

that picture gave me goosebumps like the huygens recording did. because you are absolutely right. one robot homed in and took a photo of another robot descending to help us learn more about a planet we’ve never set foot on yet. truly amazing to behold.

here’s the link to the audio direct from the european space agency’s website:

http://www.esa.int/esaMI/Cassini-Huygens/SEM85Q71Y3E_0.html

I understand what it is, that’s amazing yes, but the photo isn’t amazing at all.

If it was a HD photo that was super clear it would be more amazing, but I’m sorry there is nothing really special about this photo.