Curiosity...

In just a hair under a week, humanity will have landed a third mobile robot on another planet.

On Monday, August 6th, at around 1:30a EST, the "mobile science lab" rover named Curiosity will land in Gale Crater, on Mars.  Mars has very little atmosphere with which to slow down a robot the size of an SUV as it plummets to the surface from outer space, and so landing the rover has become a famously complicated endeavor dubbed, "The Seven Minutes of Terror."  It is one of the single most complicated operations ever undertaken by Mankind, and it's an all-or-nothing deal; if any one thing goes wrong at any point, then the whole process will fail, and the rover will slam into Mars at several thousand mph, creating a new surface feature, Curiosity Crater.  (Take five minutes and watch NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory's video explanation of the Seven Minutes of Terror here.  You'll be glad you did.)

If it lands safely (and it is far from guaranteed to do so - no one's ever done it before, and it is impossible to create on Earth the conditions necessary to accurately test it), then it will spend the next several years (dare I say, decades?) roaming about the planet Mars, searching for evidence that life has ever existed on the red planet.

I'm having a hard time trying to figure out how exactly to explain why this fascinates me so much.  I think for starters, it is simply an amazing thing, when you stop and think about it.  Purely amazing.  We are controlling robots on Mars.  How fucking unbelievable is that?!  Robots on Mars.  It sounds like a science-fiction story.  And it is!  Except, it's not fiction.  It's fantasy, brought to life.

And I think it also has something to do with something I touched on yesterday.  It is a "living" example of the incredible, awe-inspiring things that human-beings can accomplish.  How can it be that a bunch of balding monkeys could so quickly push themselves to the point that we're firing off robots to explore other planets?  It boggles the mind!

What a piece of work is Man!  Look what we can do!  So what if no one has ever done it before.  That's precisely why it must be done!  From the moment the first of us picked up a rock and used it to smash open a nut (or a skull), our single purpose has been to learn, to discover, and to do the things that have not yet been done.  Every single one of us for the last 200,000 years has done our part to push forward that line of what-is-possible, even just a little bit, in our own way.  It is what we do.  It is all we do.

And, in just a hair under a week, we're going to do it again, in a big, big way.  And I will no doubt find myself once again struck dumb with awe at the notion of all that we are capable of achieving.  We are, each and every one of us, absolutely, fucking, amazing.

Just look what we can do.