In the Violent Void

“The maelstrom that swirls around the north pole of Saturn.

It is this week’s image from Cassini taken in the infrared. This beast is about 1200 miles across and blows with the fierceness of 330 mile/hour winds … 50% faster than the winds that leveled Moore, Oklahoma in May 2013. Exploring the outer planetary systems that orbit our star is not for the faint of heart.”

-Dr. Carolyn Porco,
Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations (CICLOPS)

When I see images like this or learn about exploding stars and black holes, I find that I have absolutely no lens through which to look except the human experience. That means I can’t actually imagine 330 mile winds because there’s no way I could experience them. I’d just end up dead. Given all the really intense events going on out there, and all the foreign environments, it’s amazing to me that we’ve put craft and, especially amazing, people up into interplanetary space.

This wonder was amplified by reading Mary Roach’s book Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, in which she, in her usual hilarious voice, researches and brings to light just what it takes to put humans in space.

“To take an organism whose every feature has evolved to keep it alive and thriving in a world with oxygen, gravity, and water, to suspend that organism in the wasteland of space for a month or a year, is a preposterous but captivating undertaking. Everything one takes for granted on Earth must be rethought, relearned, rehearsed — full-grown men and women toilet-trained, a chimpanzee dressed in a flight suit and launched into orbit”

Use of tools began with seemingly simple stone knives and then expanded exponentially to the point that we’re now able to sustain ourselves in a violent void.

It’s just amazing.