—
When I was about six years old I drew a crude picture of a space man. When I say crude, I don’t mean the little man was doing anything crude, but rather an admission that I was not a child with much artistic talent.
However, like most young children, I delighted in drawing. Like many boys, I was fascinated thinking about what there might be out there in Outer Space. My mother was fascinated by my fascination. She took an art class on using acid to etch designs into metal plates. My mother had artistic talent, but she chose my little space man for her etching.
Today I saw another space drawing. It was the Google search automation drawing of the day. It depicted the Cassini space probe taking a selfie to commemorate the date in history that the Cassini craft began it’s plunge into the planet Saturn.
Cassini is taking it’s plunge with a bunch of plutonium on board. Got to have it for power as solar energy is a bit thin that far away from the Sun. Nothing to worry about here. It is a different kind of plutonium than the stuff they make bombs out of. Plutonium is one of the most toxic substances known to man. There have been no reported problems to date with Cassini because of the super safe plutonium containment system designed into the space ship.
Yes, the super safe containment system will disintegrate along with all of the plutonium, long before it could cause any problems with Saturn, due to the friction of falling into Saturn’s atmosphere or something like that. Enough is now known about what can go wrong when nuclear radiation gets out of control on Earth, that we can safely say that Saturn will be just fine, when it meets Cassini.
So much is now known about Saturn and its moons that it is very unlikely that anything can go wrong and thanks to the Huygens part of this mission, there is a chance that something very right may occur.
As you know the Huygens part of this mission landed on a moon of Saturn called Titan. Oh, you didn’t know that? It happened in 2005, not that long ago. Unlike the supposed trip to the moon, where there wasn’t anything to see, this was not the case for Titan. There just hasn’t been much reporting on this, but if your curious you can always go to the Google box, today featuring a selfie taking space probe, to learn more. I know you have been busy trying to pick the March Madness college basketball winner, trying to make a living, wondering if your health insurance will cover looking into that funny feeling you have been having, what happened in New York City and Washington, DC on 09/11/2001 and trying to figure out if Planet X is real, but if you have a few minutes. . .
Now what could happen is the Cassini’s plutonium could trigger a chain reaction explosion, that could transform Saturn into a yellow sun. This might just turn Titan into paradise for people. Where the spiritual path to Paradise may be quite murky the technology to make Titan the place that you want to spend as much time as possible, may be more certain.
If such technology does exist do you think they are going to tell you about it? I don’t think so. What do I know? Nothing, that’s why I’m writing this as satire. What I do know, is that most of us having been paying too much attention to the wrong stuff. This is obvious. There is nothing special in me saying so.
One of my great disappointments from childhood, is that the best new space knowledge is kept very secret, with the great telling of lies part of the smoke screen. “Chem. Trailing” airplanes provide some of the actual obscuring agents, if you believe any of those chem. trailing nut jobs.
It is much easier for me to believe in government sanctioned sources of information and the respectable mass media, when it comes to Outer Space. If I consider the theories that seem to make the most sense to be the products of science fiction, con-men with conspiracy books to sell or folks suffering from mental illness, I feel less strange on this strange planet. If I write satire, that helps as well. That and knowing if something goes wrong out there it is not my fault.
◊♦◊
Get the best stories from The Good Men Project delivered straight to your inbox, here.
—
Photo Credit: Getty Images