These steely-lit days where the truth of our inadequateness pushes down on me as the sky fell on Atlas' shoulders often leave me feeling crushed with disappointment, and it seems for every brilliant breakthrough science makes three new questions spawn and the horizon, the edge of the universe, moves a little bit further away. Literally.
Space is big, Douglas Adams told us. Really big. And every time we think we might be a tiny bit closer to brushing the surface, a great bit fucking black hole swallows us up and we start again. So when there's been a stretch of time where we haven't had anything confuse us or disprove itself, I'm wary, because it won't be long before an obstacle springs out and we have to DO A BARREL ROLL!
Nothing has gone wrong, massively wrong, for a few months. This week I have pretty much every day been given a cold bucket of water over my face with complications. The LHC is finally working. Things were bound to go wrong.
It started with pretty much the biggest thing that we could have gotten wrong except for maybe that gravity pushes upwards instead- apparently, we've got our age wrong. Or the age of the solar system. With some scientific things that I haven't a clue about an ancient meteorite has been found to be 1.9 billion years older than it should have been. So we've lost almost 2 billion years in the beginning, and apparently that means everything changes. We know what we know because of the planets and elements around us. Those extra years mean we don't know if any of the rules to do with orbits, elements or anything else are true any more. Back to the drawing board.
We got an inch closer to learning what makes up 72% of the universe, too. Dark matter showed showed up for the first time ever in an intense photo from Hubble. It's shown up as hazy mauve, but we still don't know what it does, or have a chance of understanding it- the cloud pictured covers hundreds of galaxies thousands of light years away, so we won't get to it for a long time. Dark energy, meanwhile, avoided being examined at all- so 24% of the universe is still at large.
There was also, in brief, the discovery of a stellar system 127 light years away with at least five planets, probably seven, orbiting it. Most of them are huge gas giants. One of them is the least massive body we've discovered, 1.14 times Earth. Liveable on, perhaps, if it weren't for the fact it probably has no water and is baked dry.
Add to this the facts that the Sun is apparently changing it's rate of radioactive decay, which changes all chemistry ever everso slightly, two Saturn-mimics have been found in an unstable and as yet not understood binary orbit thanks to the US Kepler planet hunter (which we probably will never understand), and that even NASA appears to be giving up now and turning back home by employing space habitation techniques to save miners in Chile (not that this is a bad thing, just seems that as it is pretty much the only thing NASA is doing practically at the moment and it's on Earth, it's not really progress).
Oh, and then there were these guys- http://jalopnik.com/5619764/worlds-largest-amateur-space-rocket-set-to-launch
The world's largest amateur space rocket is set to launch on Monday. Wa-hey, you might think, but it was the final nail in the coffin of my fantasies this week. It's just so useless. Sure, I couldn't build one, but if after sixty years of having rockets we are solely relying on Danish people sending a tube halfway towards ISS (gee, thanks for pulling out of the one man race, America) then how exactly are we going to get to Alpha-Centauri at any point? When will we have at least some sort of base on our Moon (look up lunarcrete, really interesting)? Pfft.
The lightning days I'm wishing for probably won't happen. Do I begrudge the generation that gets them? Yes, I do. I'm reminded constantly of the chapter Brave New World in The War of the Worlds, where the Journalist is confronted by the artilleryman for the second time. He is deliriously harping on about digging to live in the sewers, washed clean by the rain, and starting again. The Journalist comments that this "strange dreamer" is terrifying in the distance between "his plans and his abilities." It makes me bitter, but that's us, right here and now. We won't build our underground worlds to rake on fighting machines. We are the artilleryman,destined to fail. And the child in me screams it's not fair. We should have the fun, dammit! Some of us might get to fly one of these one day.
Cynicist I am, about most things, but... Well, even with this week my quixotic hope will build up and I'm sure I'll be glazing over and imagining hearing my own breath in my ears, the shudder of engines running through the bulkheads and facing an open airlock again soon. I can almost see it now...
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