Fopinions February: Space!

Fopinions February kicks off with a post on spaaaace, for shadaras! Very conveniently, space_swap, the space-fandoms exchange I mod, is in its final day of nominations – get those last-minute noms in! (Instructions. Tagset. Countdown.)

You know that joke about how there are two gateway drugs to science: dinosaurs and space? Well, I got hit with both of them, but space has remained dearer to me due to an additional love of science fiction. (The one way to get me settled at naptime was to recite planetary orbits to me, lol.)

There's just something colossally appealing in the whole vastness of space, and the roiling furnaces that are stars, and the fact that there's a whole undiscovered universe, full of little nooks and crannies, things to catalogue and observe and theorize about and maybe, perhaps, call home. I am small and the universe vast. This is thrilling and exhilerating. The world does not stop at my fingertips. It reaches out, and out, and out, and

One of the big images left in my mind is from Greg Egan's novel Diaspora, where the characters eventually discover travel between different universes of the multiverse, and find a relic – statue-piece – left behind by a different race. Yatima, our protagonist, goes to hunt down these pieces, of which one is left in each universe. In the final universe ve hops to, ve finds the final piece, and can piece together the message left behind by the Transmuters: an image of their ancestral form, looking up and reaching upwards at something they can never acquire. I don't know how the author intended it, but I always found it more aspirational than discouraging.

Space is a symbol of the vast as of yet unknown that is there to be discovered.

(As a child, my nightmares were about the Sun turning into a red giant, and the heat death of the Universe.)

And, because we are humans, we go and search and seek and poke and discover. In many ways, space and science bring out the best of humanity, the spirit of curiosity and collaboration, because there's a universe out there to explore, and we all need to join forces to make that happen. Humans build communities, that's what we do, and the scientific community might have its feuds and frauds, but we can achieve much. This is why I'm a scientist. This is what I want to do.

Given that my eyes are now misty, let me end this piece by reproducing a poem I wrote from the perspective of the Cassini space probe I wrote as part of a fic for Yuletide 2017:

I, made for science, sent afar
To Saturn's moons and graceful rings
From Earth, a tiny wand'ring star
That outwards looks and outwards sings

It seeks to know, so I was sent
To knock and enter, look and learn
To find what planets underwent
And otherwise for answers yearn

I run in circles, orbit slow
Observe the beauty shown to all
Send Huygens down to Titan's snow
Take pictures that have Earth enthralled

Each day we fall in love anew
Saturn, how far I came for you!