QQC 2

“If someone struck a match on the Moon, they could spot the flare.”

Seriously?

"With their radio telescopes they can capture wisps of radiation so preposterously faint that the total amount of energy collected from out­ side the solar system by all of them together since collecting began (in 1951) is "less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground" in the words of Carl Sagan."

Dang. I thought space had a lot more radiation than that.

"Pluto in Christy's photo­ graph is faint and fuzzy - a piece of cosmic lint - and its moon is not the romantically backlit, crisply delineated companion orb you would get in a National Geographic painting, but rather just a tiny and extremely indistinct hint of additional fuzziness. Such was the fuzziness, in fact, that it took seven years for anyone to spot the moon again and thus independently confirm its existence."

If pictures aren't really like that, are all the pictures of space including those from the Hubble telescope, artist interpretations? 

Then, if they are all artist interpretations, how do we know what planets really look like?

"Lowell, who came from one of the oldest and wealthiest Boston families (the one in the famous ditty about Boston being the home of the bean and the cod, where Lowells spoke only to Cabots, while Cabots spoke only to God), endowed the famous observatory that bears his name, but is most indelibly remembered for his belief that Mars was covered with canals built by industrious Martians for purposes of conveying water from polar regions to the dry but productive lands nearer the equator."

WIN.

"This was the first American-discovered planet, and no one was going to be distracted by the thought that it was really just a distant icy dot."

We Americans must have some thing about claiming space. WE did put a flag on the moon after all.

So if Pluto really is a planet it is certainly an odd one. It is very tiny: just one-quarter of 1 percent as massive as Earth. If you set it down on top of the United States, it would cover not quite half the lower forty-eight states. This alone makes it extremely anomalous; it means that our planetary system consists of four rocky inner planets, four gassy outer giants, and a tiny, solitary iceball."

If its so small, why did they classify it as a planet and then changed their minds. Imagine if a comet of that size it the planet. I wonder. Would it destroy the planet or break it in two? After all the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs was about 6 miles across. 

"The reason the Voyager craft were launched when they were (in August and September 1977) was that Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune were aligned in a way that happens only once every 175 years. This enabled the two Voyagers to use a "gravity assist" technique in which the craft were successively flung from one gassy giant to the next in a kind of cosmic version of ""crack the whip." Even so, it took them nine years to reach Uranus and a dozen to cross the orbit of Pluto."

I didn't know we had already been to Pluto. Huh. I wonder when we'll get people on the ice moon of Saturn to check it out. 

"Our solar system may be the liveliest thing for trillions of miles, but all the visible stuff in it - the Sun, the planets and their moons, the billion or so tumbling rocks of the asteroid belt, comets, and other miscellaneous drifting detritus - fills less than a trillionth of the available space."

Reminds me of Planck's time and how its so small. How does space expand? Where does the universe expand into?

"The total now is "at least ninety," about a third of which have been found in just the last ten years."

We should stick flags on all these too. Just in case someone doesn't get the message. 

"A manned mission to Mars, called for by the first President Bush in a moment of passing giddiness, was quietly dropped when someone worked out that it would cost $450 billion and probably result in the deaths of all the crew (their DNA tom to tatters by high-energy solar particles from which they could not be shielded)."

Sounds painful. But, if they do eventually get to Mars we get to explore the possibility that maybe there was once water on the barren planet. 


How many planets/moons have had what we thought to be some form of water?


"For all we know, the North Star, our faithful companion might actually have burned out last January or in 1854 or at any time since the early fourteenth centuIy and news of it just hasn't reached us yet The best we can say-can ever say - is that it was still burning on this date 680 years ago. Stars die all the time. What Bob Evans does better than anyone else who has ever tried is spot these moments of celestial farewell."

QQC

“To get from “protoplasmal primordial atomic globule” (as the Gilbert and Sullivan song put it) to sentient upright modern human has required you to mutate new traits over and over in a precisely timely manner for an exceedingly long while. So at various periods over the last 3.8 billion yeas you have abhorred oxygen and then doted on it, grown fins and limbs and jaunty sails, laid eggs, flicked the air with a forked tongue, been sleek, been furry, lived underground, lived in trees, been as big as a deer and as small as a mouse, and a million things more.”

“Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely - make that miraculously - fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans. every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a little charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result - eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly - in you.”

Why are we mammals and yet, while we grow hair, its not like a pelt like a chimp or other similar life being?

When do could we have the technology to look at our family trees that far back in time?

If every single person came from an attractive pair, have we rooted out genetic disease and physical malformities? And if so, why do malformities occur?

If its the drive of every animal to reproduce and pass on their genes why do we think? What happened to our natural impulses or instincts?

Why are we the only species to develop higher thought? Or so we think?