A new space mission has been a smashing — literally — success! Stay tuned as they unscramble the fuzzy images at JPL/NASA and bring you the origins of life on earth (perhaps), or at least another installment in the odyssey of a comet through long reaches of nothing.
I find this mission compelling because of its astonishing accuracy and because its aims are so lofty: nothing less than the hope that we might discover how life arrived on earth. Growing up with a scientist father, I was fascinated by the idea that nothing much had been determined about the big questions of life on earth and life elsewhere.
My father read a lot of science fiction, much of it written by rocket and aerospace scientists like himself. Doc Clark (who in an article called “Ignition” recounts the day my father blew up a test lab, to the amusement of all the engineers) and Isaac Asimov (who was still trying to decide whether to be a scientist or a writer) were two of his buddies. Asimov’s new books proudly adorned our living room bookshelves. Along with them came fascinating stories about black holes, the new-new things in space theory. I grew up having these concepts explained to me, and having stories read to me by my father from A Space Child’s Mother Goose — a copy of which I still have. Here’s a tidbit, a taste of my strange childhood:
Little Bo Peep
Has lost her sheep,
The radar has failed to find them.
They’ll all, face to face,
Meet in parallel space,
Preceding their leaders behind them.