(I send a sort of opinion piece around to a few dozen friends and interested parties via e-mail on an irregular basis. This is the last one. Since this board is based on Space after all I thought it might be worth showing you all.)

A Sense of Wonder
The Monthly Mumble
© 2004

Since humans were old enough to open their eyes and look outside the nest we’ve looked around us and wondered. We wondered why... wind blew, it rained, lightning strikes, sunrise and sunset? Why birds fly south in the winter, and back in the spring? Why is the sky is blue and grass green, why do we breathe?

The constant quest for the answers has consumed us, moved us, made our lives better, and worse. The answers have given us life and death, joy and sorrow, laughter and tears, health and sickness. Human existence is better today than it was last year, last century, than any time in known history. And yet, we still search for answers, it is one of the most important differences between us and the rest of the critters who inhabit this speck of spatial debris.
We see, we wonder, then are driven relentlessly to know the answers.

Let me narrow my mumbling a bit for your inspection. One of the most mysterious vast wonders we see around us is when we step outside on a clear night and look up.

They’re up there, those tiny lights in the sky, for many of us they whisper things that only our soul can hear. They call to us as they have to many who came before us in the countless millennia we’ve existed. Our eyes see, our heart yearns, our souls ache to know, what is out there? What wonders make a home in the unimaginable vastness we can see so little of. Those secrets wait for us to find them, we just have to look in the right places and ask the right questions.

We have begun, we look farther, deeper into that vastness each day. Secrets are picked out of the slimmest scraps of information grudgingly pried from many sources. New insights as to how this place we live in was born, and in time perhaps how it may die. We look in all directions, all parts of existence. From the immense macro of our bubble of space we know as the Universe, to the infinitesimally micro of the Quantum levels where even greater secrets may lie.

We have barely begun the journey to those tiny lights above us, we’ve poked at the bars of our crib a few hundred times. We have learned as much, maybe even more about ourselves in the process than anything else. We’re taking a short break, gathering our breath for the next wriggle. We’re not learning to walk, we’re not even crawling yet, we’re learning to roll over after our diapers are changed. .

Someday humans will step onto the strange soil of another world in the light of a strange sun and pick up a rock. They will poke at it, scrape a little off and peer at it in ways we can only imagine. And once more another secret will be revealed to the age old sound.

Of wonder....being satisfied.