Sometimes it amazes me how easy it is to become jaded, to allow the extraordinary to become at best commonplace and at worst unnoticed. 39 years ago today Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed the Lunar Module Eagle on the surface of the moon. This achievement, in my opinion one of the more amazing of human accomplishments, may get a 30 second mention on the news this evening.

I know, the world has more pressing concerns. The middle east is poised to turn into even more of a mess than it already is. The US economy is in a nose dive. Houses are being forclosed on at an amazing clip. And it goes on and on….

Today, just a minute or two, stop and think about what an accomplishment it was on so many different levels when the words below were being sent between Houston, Texas and the Sea of Tranquility on the moon.

Aldrin: Altitude-velocity light. 3 1/2 down, 220 feet, 13 forward . forward. Coming down nicely. 200 feet, 4 1/2 down. 5 1/2 down. 5 1/2 down, 9 forward. That’s good. 120 feet. 100 feet, 3 1/2 down, 9 forward. Five percent. Okay. 75 feet. There’s looking good. Down a half, 6 forward.

Mission control (Duke): 60 seconds

Aldrin: Lights on … Down 2 1/2. Forward. Forward. Good. 40 feet, down 2 1/2. Kicking up some dust. 30 feet, 2 1/2 down. Faint shadow. 4 forward. 4 forward. Drifting to the right a little. Okay. Down a half.

Mission Control (Duke): 30 seconds

Armstrong: Forward drift?

Aldrin: Yes. Okay. Contact light. OK, engine stop.

Armstrong: Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.

Mission Control (Duke): Roger, Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.

The Bad Astronomer, Dr. Phil Plait, writes about an excellent web documentary on Dark Energy over at HubbleSite.org. Physics - and especially cosmology - are heady subjects, so it’s nice when discoveries can be presented in an easy to understand manner. HubbleSite is a site that I always manage to spend a ridiculous amount of time on when I hit it. Last year, Alex and I watched their documentary on how Hubble works, which we both found pretty fascinating. I managed to blow most of my lunch the other day reading about and watching a video about the Hubble Deep Field.

I will probably show Alex this site in the next week or so. Even though it’s probably at the limits of his understanding, I think it’s good to expose him to it and have him ask questions. I remember driving my father crazy asking him questions about Cosoms when I was Alex’s age; now it’s Alex’s turn. Besides, I think that Alex gets a big kick out of coming up with questions that I can’t answer and have to look up. I’m guessing that will continue on as he gets older. I have mixed feelings about that.

The dark energy site also contains some additional materials which go into a great deal more detail on the topics discussed. I just want to pull one bit from this detail. This paragraph - which is talking about the recent discoveries in the field - shows the true spirit of scientific inquiry.

It shows scientists that there is a gap in our knowledge that needs to be filled, beckoning the way toward an unexplored realm of physics. We have before us the evidence that the cosmos may be configured vastly differently than we imagine. Dark energy both signals that we still have a great deal to learn, and shows us that we stand poised for another great leap in our understanding of the universe.

Basically, we don’t know everything. Hell, we probably will never know everything. The important thing is that we keep searching.

Growing up, Carl Sagan was one of my heroes - I watched Cosmos with my father when it was first aired. He later bought me the companion book, along with several other books on astronomy and cosmology - most likely as a way to stave off the hundreds of questions that I had after every episode. It’s funny, but 25 years later I still have that book - I just pulled it out the other day to show Alex when we were watching the remastered series.

I was cleaning up my computer today and found this bit of text saved off in a file. It’s a piece that eloquently and succinctly speaks to us all about our place in the universe. It’s something that I’ve read through from time to time whenever I needed a bit of perspective. Apparently I’m not the only one - as I went to post this, I found a link to a beautifully done video about our Pale Blue Dot which I’ve included at the bottom. Enjoy.

The picture above is of Earth (the dot in the middle) as seen from 3.7 billion miles away by the Voyager 1 spacecraft, on 6/6/1990.

… 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.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. 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.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
Carl Sagan, Random House, 1994

Alex, Beth, and I have been watching Cosmos together over the past few weeks. Well, to put it a bit more truthfully Alex and I sit on the couch and watch Cosmos while Beth plays her current game of choice on the Zodiac on the futon and listens to the Cosmos.

Why just listen? Her answer is that she loves Dr. Sagan, but he has a very “sing-song type of voice” that just makes her feel sleepy, so she needs something else to occupy her attention. Unfortunately for me, I’m thinking my voice exhibits the same qualities because she often nods off when I’m talking with her as well. So don’t feel so bad, Carl - you have company.

Sharing the same title as this post, the most recent episode we watched covers our planetary neighbor. Carl Sagan looks at Mars, both from a scientific and a historical perspective. He relates the fantastic tales of Mars - the stories of strange races peopling the red planet from Edgar Rice Burroghs, H.G. Wells, and Ray Bradbury. He reviews the case of Percival Lowell who was convinced (wrongly so) that there were canals on Mars which - to him - proved that there was an ancient race desperately trying to keep life in a dying land by taking water from the polar ice caps to the equatorial region. Equally importantly, he traces the ancestry of our robotic and manned space missions back to Robert Goddard who, while reading The War of the Worlds in a tree on October 19, 1899, found a spark of inspiration in the Red planet:

“As I looked toward the fields in the east, I imagined how wonderful it would be to make something that could rise to the planet Mars. I imagined how this thing, in a small size, would look if sent up from the ground at my feet. I was a different boy when I came down from that tree. For, at last, my life seemed to have some purpose.”

All of the exploration of space - manned and unmanned - can be traced back to these thoughts by a then 17 year-old Goddard. One spark of inspiration.

Alex alternated between rapt attention and complete uninterest - but this no longer bothers me, as it seems my son has this amazing ability to appear completely oblivious to the world around him only to come up with some detailed observation when you try and trip him up by asking a question. As I tell people, it’s one of his many little “gifts”.

Alex asked a number of questions during the show, which I tried to answer as best I could during the commercials. That’s always a difficult time for me - his enthusiasm is sometimes so great he shoots off on wide tangents with every statement. I try and redirect him without quashing his thirst for knowledge. It’s not always easy.

There was a small moment of family humor during this - I was explaining to him about satellites and he asked what the first satellite was. I told him about Sputnik, but he chose to interpret the name as Spudnik which he thought was really, really funny - saying (more than once) “hey, they named it after me. I’m Spud. That’s Spudnik”.

We finished up the night by getting on the computer and reviewing the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars 2K4 website. This is where I saw the effect of the Cosmos episode - Alex spent the entire half hour before bed time watching videos, looking at pictures, and working through the various interactive features they have on the website. We went back and reread this post from the day we went to NASA two years ago and attended a session with some of the MER project scientists. When it was time to go to bed he asked me if we could go out to this site and “explore” (his word, not mine) again.

As I tucked him into bed we talked some more about exploration, rovers, and satellites. His enthusiasm is both boundless and infectious, which got me thinking and looking at his from his perspective.

Right now, we have two robots crawling over Mars exploring the surface of an alien world while other robots orbit and observe the planet. But it’s more than just Mars - New Horizons is speeding off to an encounter with Pluto. Hubble, Chandra, and Spitzer are photographing the universe as it was millions upon millions of years ago. The Deep Impact mission provided us with a close up view of the inside of a comet. Stardust has returned material from a comet back to earth for further research. Not to be forgotten, Voyager and Pioneer provided us with our first views of the far reaches of our solar system.

The bulk of this information is available on the internet. The upshot of all of this on a very personal level is this fact: Alex and I are able to walk into my office and - within minutes - call up an array of information that 25 years ago would have been unthinkable to any scientist.

Talk about living in a world where the fantastic has become commonplace.

Phil Plait posted this letter a few weeks back over on the Bad Astronomy Blog, and I have to admit that I’m incredibly jealous. This is the letter I wish I had written! Because, almost uncannily, Dr. Plait manages to exactly echo my thoughts on the matter in his letter to current NASA head Mike Griffith.

Or maybe it’s not all that uncanny. From reading his weblog, his website, his book, and listening to podcasts where he has been a guest I’ve discovered that Phil and I have very similar views. The prevailing theme (at least to me) is that science is important, science education is even more important, and that you need to be logical and skeptical about things. I liken that last point to saying “get up and do a bit of work, will you? Don’t sit on the couch and let Fox tell you that the Apollo missions were faked - go out and find the facts and decide on your own.”

Or, as George Hrab would say, “think for yourself little man”.

As you may have guessed by the bit above, I’m a big fan of Phil and his work. His site, Bad Astronomy and the companion book “Bad Astronomy” - are two of my favorite resources for debunking bullshit like “Planet X” and the “Moon Landing Hoax”. His blog is always informative, and often alerts me to some new space science related fact that I’m not aware of. He regularly gives interviews (there is a good bit in his interview podcast with Slacker Astronomy where he gives two suggestions as to what that makes him - but I’ll let you find that out for yourself), debates nutcases (which I quite frankly wouldn’t have the stomach to do), and basically holds up the candle of science for all to see. Probably more importantly, he’s not afraid to shove it in someone’s face if it’s required.

Phil has been a part of James Randi’s Amazing Meeting for the past few years (and while I’m thinking of it, I’d like to send out a bit of an electronic “get well soon” to Mr. Randi, who recently suffered a heart attack and is in the process of recovering) - but unfortunately, Beth and I haven’t been able to go due to our family vacation schedule. We’ve been talking about how much this sucks, and are thinking of trying to juggle things next year so we can do our normal vacation while still having time to head off to Vegas for a week with our skeptical heroes. Hopefully, the Bad Astronomer will be speaking and we can buy him a drink to thank him for fighting the good fight.

One closing note. One of my favorite geeky/sciency quotes occurred during the Apollo 15 mission when Mission Commander Dave Scott stepped onto the surface of Hadley Plain:

As I stand out here in the wonders of the unknown at Hadley, I sort of realize there’s a fundamental truth to our nature. Man must explore.

Above my desk, I have a picture of the Apollo 15’s Lunar Module Falcon on the plain at Hadley. Jim Irwin, LM Pilot, stands at the left, saluting the American Flag. At the right, the Lunar Rover sits idle - waiting to explore. The Apollo missions opened great horizons for humanity - for untold generations humans gazed up at the moon. Apollo orbited the moon; they landed on the moon; they explored the moon. Every now and then I look at the picture - really look, and think to myself that I’m looking at the surface of the moon. With people on it. The moon. Wow.

But exploration is not just about manned missions - it’s missions such as Deep Impact, which we watched launch on vacation two years ago. It’s the Voyager (or Vger for the more Star Trek inclinded) missions that took pictures of Saturn and Jupiter when I was a child (and which now, year after year, scramble for funding lest they be shut off). It’s Hubble, the mission that brought the wonder and majesty of the universe to the ordinary person.

Dave Scott’s words resonate with me - I want my children to explore, to learn. It’s innocuous things like Steven learning to be a father with Kai, Malinda attending classes in Chemical Engineering, or Alex learning how to test a theory on Myth Busters. I want to learn as well - a day where I go to bed knowing a bit more than I did when I woke up is a good day.

Now the confessional part of the post. I unfortunately read this too late to send my own letter along to NASA - I’m aggregating this feed through bloglines, and with everything going on at work and home I haven’t had time to keep on my reading as I like to. However, I do urge everyone to visit the sites linked in here to learn a little, and maybe to take an active interest in this debate - NASA is paid for by our taxes, so we should make sure that their actions and direction are in line with what we want.