Sunday, August 01, 2004

Another World

I will try to not always reference the distant past in this here blog; but I am doing so again this Sunday morning. Thanks to Carl Sagan, I have a very deep interest in and respect for science; the Voyager probes that took such amazing images of Jupiter & Saturn in 1979 - 1981 helped cement this interest/respect.

Well, people, human exploration is once again at Saturn's door. Click on the title of this post to see the images being relayed from the Cassini-Huygens probe; the probe is providing images that make the Voyager images look like the product of a 110 camera. Plus, Another World is the name of a comic book shop in Eagle Rock (on Colorado Bl., before you get into Pasadena) that I frequented as a mispent youth. I also got to see the likes of Ray Bradbury, George Takei (ha HA), and Roy Thomas read ficton there (the comic shop, not Saturn). Hello Mr. & Mrs. Costa!

There are a ton of images at the Cassini-Huygens site; but as you look them over, imagine each one as a vantage from a space station. HEY! We RIGHT NOW have a little robot orbiting Saturn. 2 robots are currently surveying Mars for us. Maybe in another 20 years (okay...60 years) Earth's astronauts will head for Titan and its space station as they head for even more daring journeys into interstellar space...and beyond...it's our destiny. We are children of the stars, our very bodies (in a much more basic form) once cooked in the heart of a gigantic sun. We will one day live among them as we today live among the suburbs of Los Angeles.

I owe the last parargraph to Carl Sagan, more or less. That isn't all I owe him.

"DATA! Spell 'knife!'"

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