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When I was a child I read about the frontier in history books, and saw The Final Frontier unfold in 1966. And in science fiction, three words from Robert Heinlein’s The Star Beast stuck with me forever: “Space is vast.” Three short words have spawned a gushing river of thought.

Components of modern outposts are crafted on Earth and then flung into Space, and we endlessly wonder what friends or foes or indifferent Others are out in that vastness.

2020 1015 inktober outpost

2019 0702 space brace

“Space is curved,” they tell us in school. Forgive a bad pun, but it’s hard to wrap your mind around that. Space is a shifty word. It’s the Final Frontier. It’s a place to do your thing, as in Art Space. It’s spooky woo-woo, as in Space Case.

Words don’t come anywhere near Reality, but they’re what we have to approximate it. The specific definition for the space that is curved is approximately “everything and all the nothing in between and beyond.” Really hard to get down to brass tacks, isn’t it?

But if we start simple, imagining a Universe with only two chrome spheres in it, fifty feet apart, motionless relative to each other, each with a mass of one kilogram, we can get a glimmer. They instantly cease being fifty feet apart. They move toward each other. As they get closer the attraction increases. Soon they make contact.

Add more objects and the Universe gets more interesting. The more massive an object, the more attractive it is. (Except for bachelors like me.)

Space Brace

Sustenance IS the J*O*B
Paparazzo IS a star
Andalucia and a pea
Craft a plotted story arc
Excellence is never free

There’s a lot more to say, especially to make the poem more comprehensible, but a) Mystery makes Life delightful b) I am on a bus and soon to get off. Two lines should strike a good balance. “Paparazxo” IS a star.” Paparazzo is Observer. If not for Observers, the Universe would not be self-aware, and would effectively cease to exist. “Andalucia and a pea/Craft a plotted story arc.” Though one is large, the other small, they still interact; they attract each other. That’s how it works, my friends.

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The starship Enterprise, as conceived by Gene Roddenberry, whom Nichelle Nichols, who played Lieutenant Uhura, called “The Great Bird of the Galaxy,” will endeavor in the 23rd Century “to boldly go where no one has gone before.” But Arthur C. Clarke, much more scientifically attuned than the late great Roddenberry, says, “The truth, as always, will be far stranger.”

Meanwhile humans of two different hegemonies have ventured beyond our atmosphere. This page has a hint of the magnitude of that very real endeavor, the various forces (gravitational, ideological, economical, teleological, and so forth) influencing the effort, and the hope and the despair of the future of human space exploration. Part of the hint is that in free fall, there is no rightside-up; we groundlings can’t take in a page like this in one glance, or even one gaze. Betters than us (or is it we?) will follow, I hope.