When I was growing up, I waffled between being an astronaut or a teacher for an occupation. Later, when in Boy Scouts trying to get my first merit badge, I changed my mind. That is until my math scores had everyone convinced that I should instead study computer science. Oy, was that a mistake. Turns out I’m not left-brained enough. In fact, I supposedly use both hemispheres equally.

Yes, I’ll end the suspense — my first merit badge was Astronomy. It was quite fun and got most of it done at night, which meant I got to stay up past bedtime many times during the process. One of the projects was to place sticks in the ground with string and measure the shadows; then work some formula and come up with the answer they did. I didn’t get their answer. I tried again — wrong. So I did whatever any 13-year-old would have done. I reverse engineered the figures. Yes, I was that good at math. Thinking back, that’s scary. Perhaps a job at Enron would have been good for me.

To this day, I still enjoy reading about space and have posted a few things here about some of the missions going on and, yes, making jokes about them. It’s the best of both worlds (pun so intended). Part of that is getting Astronomy magazine’s e-newsletter to keep up with what’s going on in outer space. (The magazine itself is almost $45 a year. My wallet starts crying every time I think about subscribing again.)

Their latest newsletter has a link to a survey they are asking everyone to take. Your incentive is a chance to win a piece of meteorite that landed 4,000 - 6,000 years ago in Argentina. Pretty cool in itself, but they continue with the marketing piece saying, “Don’t miss this opportunity to own a piece of the universe!”

Do me a favor. Go outside and find a rock and bring it back in with you. I’ll wait…

…

…you have your rock? Claim it as your own. Your precious. Go ahead. It’s yours. You possess it.

Congratulations! You own a piece of the universe.

Oh, wait! Your body is yours, right? At least we have the illusion of owning it. Guess what? YOU are a piece of the universe! Oh, sure, you didn’t burn through Earth’s atmosphere and crash land in Argentina, but you are made up of things that did crash into Earth.

Dude — you ARE the universe.

Whoa! This posting is WAY too deep for me. I’m going to have to go shopping at a clothing store that uses sweatshops and listen to Alanis, and maybe even run into another tree to make the ‘deep’ go away. Blog atcha later.

Listening to: Into Ether - Babble

Hollywood has tried several different ways to eliminate them. Bruce Willis blew it up. Uh…. Okay, so there is only one way Hollywood has dealt with an impending asteroid crash into our big, blue marble.

There have been several theories rocketed into the limelight in the off chance that another giant rock were to end our time on Earth just like the Dinosours. Yes, Dinosours. Because they’re all bitter about being wiped out. And, of course, dead.

Back to those plans for diverting imminent disaster. They are generally in line with how we have tried to deal with other problems: bombs, robots, nuclear energy, people dying anyway, etc. Stuff that, unless there is enough to completely vaporize the boulder, would just break it up and it would crash into all of the Americas not just deep into Canada. (I say Canada because they seem to be the only country that can take a joke and that is going to end shortly since the conservative party has taken over there as well.)

Enter two NASA astronauts with a gentle, Taoist way of averting disaster. Send up an unmanned craft into the asteroid’s pull and nudge the asteroid off course with that evil, demonic, atheist, scientific discovery — gravity. You know the first law that heathen, Isaac Newton, came up with? The idea is that the craft would exert enough gravitational force to push the asteroid slightly off its current course and away from Earth possibly causing it to crash into another planet millions of light years away sometime later, but that’s not our worry.

It’s a solution so simple that anyone who has studied physics and astronomy should have smacked their foreheads. Like I did. So they say instead of the world ending in 2036 when a thousand foot wide, 50 million ton hunk of space rock divebombs into the planet, just send up a ‘gravitational tractor’ up by 2029 and our problem is solved slowly and patiently with no explosions or cracking up. In other words, just like Taoism teaches.

Now if only our Earth-bound problems would be so easily solved.

Listening to: My Own Way - Duran Duran (because fastlad posted a picture of them with the lyrics to the song and brainwashed me into listening to it)

Today at 4:24 EST, NASA’s next phase in Mars exploration fires its rockets for orbit insertion. Yes, I know I could make about a hundred bad puns here, but I’m not. This kind of stuff is why I’m such a queek (queer + geek = queek) to begin with.

NASA is 2 for 4 with this maneuver recently so the odds make for some good space drama and fingernail biting, but if the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been programmed correctly and there are no problems, we’ll soon have even more of the Mars information that the two land rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, only scratched the surface of. (Yes! That was a pun.)

The next step is 6 months of aerobraking to get the orbiter in optimal orbit for studying the planet. Included in the space craft is a camera that is more powerful than anything sent into space, so the pictures should be phenomenal.

Listening to: Who Can It Be Now? - Men At Work

UPDATE (3:20): I’m watching NASA TV (Major Queek!) and just saw the joyous reaction as they received a signal from the orbiter. "Right on the money!" was shouted after all the microphones came back on after being muted from the entire crew yelling. It was very cool. Even better is all the smiles around Mission Control as they reestablish contact.

UPDATE (3:26): It’s official. MRO is in orbit around the planet Mars.

In early September the European Space Agency will be hurtling their SMART-1 spacecraft straight into the Moon - all for the sake of watching something blow up. Have these “scientists” ever watched TV?

With this silly “research” ploy, they are either going to cause the moon to fall off its orbit where it will crash into the Earth a la the out-of-control planet that kills off all life left stranded on the planet in When Worlds Collide or it will force the Moon closer to Earth in its orbit.

This scenario involves the end of civilization as we know it and we’ll find ourselves, 2000 years later, in a strange, new world of savagery, super science and sorcery. A place where we’ll have to use our strength, our courage and our fabulous Sunsword to fight off mutants and evil sorcerers with our companions Ookla the Mok and Princess Ariel riding on our equarts and screaming things like, “Demon dogs!” and “Ariel! Ookla! …Riiiide!”

There is only one way to save the Earth. We must pack up Martin Landau and shoot him directly to the surface of the Moon. There is nothing that we can do about there being no Moonbase Alpha or Eagle spacecraft to take him there, he just has to be on the Moon when SMART-1 strikes . If, and only if, Mr. Landau is there, the explosion will hurtle the Moon out of Earth’s orbit into deep space where it will meet weird aliens and travel further and further away from us as it falls into freak space warp, uh, thingys.

No offense, Mr. Landau. We really love your performances, but we are talking about all life on Earth. Have a safe trip!

Listening to: Sun City - Artists United Against Aparthied