I have been thinking about our stratosphere and outer space lately.
When I flew out of Palm Springs on the way home to Vancouver at the beginning of April, it was very thought provoking to gaze out the window of our early morning silver bird. There was a near full moon, the sky was dark to the west, and beginning to glow orange to the east. The San Jacinto range was beginning to weakly glow with the early sunbeams reaching the rock. The Little San Bernadino range was still in the shadows, still sleepy and grey. Mission Hills was sleepy too! Not too far north we passed San Gorgonio Mountain and a lovely little town with ski trails standing out white against the somewhat treed terrain. A nice lake filled out the picture on that range. We quietly pushed further north and would soon begin to see the coastal clouds, hanging like a shroud, waiting for breezes, waiting for the sunlight, keeping the landscape below cozy until dawn. These clouds would part as we reached the verdant hills south of San Francisco. And, interestingly, as I watched our course to the airport, the near full moon was still watching us. It is the great thing about space and distance…….we never really move far enough to lose contact with the moon, especially in the same time zone.
Other thoughts that rambled around my head that morning were related to the astonishing thing we call man-made flight.
Birds have shown the way. They are the really athletes in this medium called air. But humans are good mimickers and have learned to emulate with considerable ease. Whether one looks back on the mythology of Icarus soaring too close to the sun, or to a nearer point in time when the extraordinary brilliance of Leonardo da Vinci imagined flying machines, it is still pretty exciting to pause on the word flight. From Orville and Wilbur, to the great inventors of the big air balloons, to the cataclysm of the Hindenburg, to the origination of rockets, and satellites, we have progressed in our efforts to tug on gravity and literally “reach for the stars”. We have, like Stephen Hawking advised, looked upward and outward, to a place we little know, to outer and deep space. We managed unbelievable feats to get to the moon and back, and to now reach for Mars. We have sent probes to deep, deep space. Astronomy and astrophysics have never been so compelling. We are not completely up to the level of the Jedi and hyperspace, but we have the right idea. Our little place in our galaxy and in the almost dimensionless depths of the universe, or even parallel universes, challenges the senses of we Earthlings. We are lucky to know just how much is left to know, far beyond a near full moon.