I woke up today to hear that President Obama had just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. I was probably as surprised as the President was. I’ve been rooting for him for a long time and generally approve of his work despite what is being described as a slim list of practical accomplishments. I’m not that bothered because what most politicians call practical accomplishments are often little more than short term or stop gap solutions to long term problems. Obama seems to look far into the future without being completely captive to the next election.
Its ironic that many of my allies in the fight for a vote on the Red Plan are ferocious critics of Obama. A couple of them keep sending me emails that are getting passed around that are alarmist, sometimes silly and/or even sinister. My father-in-law also sends them to me.
The future is always a worry, especially to those for whom it is slipping away. I understand. About a year shy of my sixtieth birthday I too feel less able to steer the world where I think it should go. I take comfort, however, in our steady creep towards the lofty ideals set before us by our predecessors. Its best not to get to depressed or paranoid when we take the step back in between two steps forward.
As I write this I’ve got a real time image of the Moon on my computer beside me and I’m five minutes away from watching today’s crashing of two probes onto its surface to see if water gets kicked up.
I’ve got four NASA or ESA websites on my list of favorite links and visit them regularly to see what the latest pictures of the Saturnian system or Mars or Mercury are. In a few minutes I may see a puff of dust rise up from the Moon.
Space-log 2009 – Zoom in on that crater. Let’s see what we see. (holding breath)
and …………………………. not all that much!
Just before impact I woke my wife up to watch with me. It turns out we also live in a world where our scientific experiments have to do a lot of our seeing for us. The crash was anticlimactic visually. I’ll have to wait to see what the instruments tell us. That’s why I subscribe to Discover Magazine.
It was a $79 million dollar crash making it a tad more expensive than the Ordean Project. Let’s hope that what we learn from both collisions will be worth the expense. After all, Vietnam taught us not to go and fight in a war that was none of our business. Right?
