31 Days of Planets: Songs

Day 30

Who wouldn't like a musical post? There are lots of songs about planets, space, and exploring the great unknown. Let's start with a general look at the universe as a whole:

Now look at our solar system. I recommend imagining this as a metal song - it's much better. In fact, I think they should redo it as such, because in reality it's pretty boring: 

This is one of my personal favourites. I mean, who doesn't love Phineas and Ferb?

I would be remiss if I didn't include a little bit of Carl Sagan: 

And maybe a song about the future. The lyrics to this song go something like "where was I when the rockets came to life, and carried you way through the alligator sky?" And I would like to know - where exactly are they going?

In conclusion, play all the songs at once!!! And just see the magic that happens.

A SPACE EXPLOSION!!! (a supernova)

Picture from NASA.

31 Days of Planets: Ceres

Day 29

I CAN'T WAIT UNTIL 2015!!! That's the year the Dawn probe reaches Ceres! Can you imagine the math it must take to calculate a path to get to a planet? Incredible. It's like aiming for a moving target and taking it fifty years to get there. Actually, NASA launched Dawn in 2007, so that's only eight years, but still! Magnificent. And it stopped at Vespa on the way - a bit of a detour. But still! Magnificent. I'd both love and hate to see the equation.

Now Ceres is a dwarf planet - the only one inside the inner solar system, in fact. It is also the largest asteroid. It was named after the goddess of growing plants, the harvest, and motherly love.

I know the picture is blurry, but just imagine. In two years, we'll have magnificent pictures of this beautiful dwarf planet - close up!

In conclusion, "let's go see the asteroids, let's go see the star-ar-ars! Cowboys, heroes, cops and robbers! Glamour and strife! Bigger than life!"

Pictures from Wikipedia.

31 Days of Planets: Discworld!

Day 23

Discworld is awesome! It is one of my favourite places of all time. It goes like this...

"In a distant and second-hand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part...

"See...

"Great A'Tuin the turtle comes, swimming slowly through the interstellar gulf, hydrogen frost on his ponderous limbs, his huge and ancient shell pocked with meteor craters. Through sea-sized eyes that are crusted with rheum and asteroid dust He stares fixedly at the Destination.

"In a brain bigger than a city, with geological slowness, He thinks only of the Weight.

"Most of the weight is of course accounted for by Berilia, Tubul, Great T'Phon and Jerakeen, the four giant elephants upon whose broad and star-tanned shoulders the disc of the World rests, garnlanded by the long waterfall at its vast circumference and domed by the baby-blue vault of Heaven.

"Astropsychology has been, as yet, unable to establish what they think about..."

-The Colour of Magic, by Terry Pratchett, the man

Terry Pratchett, a brilliantly eccentric gentleman of great writing prowess, created this fascinating and wonderful world - a disc which sits on top of four elephants which sits on a giant sea turtle which swims through space - it's brilliant. Just brilliant.

I hope to meet Terry Pratchett. Sooner than later, preferably. 

In conclusion, go read Terry Pratchett.

Pictures from here and here.

31 Days of Planets: Earth 2.0

Day 18

Three-ish days ago, scientists announced the discovery of an Earth-sized planet in the Alpha-Centaui system- which is made up of 2 sun-like stars and one red dwarf. They call it Bb. This new Earth-sized planet is a bit too close to its star for our comfort, averaging a 1,200 degrees Celsius. Maybe we could dig tunnels and live underground? At any rate, the idea is that if there is one small planet in a solar system, there are likely more small planets. This is exciting, because the likelihood of finding a small planet in the Goldilocks zone is high - and it might support or already have life! 

The other awesome thing about this planet, is that it is only four light years away from Earth. Now granted it would take a while to get there, but astronomically speaking, it's really close. One news article used the phrase "an astronomical stone's throw" which I think is a really intriguing statement which shows the clear concept of our own, tiny concept of distance in contrast with a universe-sized concept of distance.  

Some scientists think that NASA should drop everything and go find it. I say, one step at a time people. I'm all about going to find it, but we haven't even been to the moon in ages! I think that all kinds of astronomers would like doing all sorts of things, and instead of arguing about which things to do, we should just find ways to do more - and cheaper is probably better, so it might be a good idea to start with the solar system first. Besides, for all I know, one the Voyagers will just happen to end up in the Alpha Centauri system before we know it!

Here's a picture. It's not a photograph - don't be deceived!

In conclusion, Earth is not alone in the universe. And neither are we, probably.

For more information, read this article.

Picture from all the news articles.

31 Days of Planets: The Blue Giant

Day 13

A blue giant is actually a star. And it is gorgeous. Watch Stargate Universe.

Since today is the 13th, I felt it was only natural to take a break from planets and do a star. Of course, this star isn't necessarily real...

It looks like this:

When the Destiny (the space ship) was being attacked by bezerker drones, they needed to recharge by flying through a star. So they used a blue giant planet instead of their typical stars. Desperation calls for desperate measures, I suppose.

In conclusion, watch Stargate Universe.

But really, you can read about real blue giants here.

Pictures from Stargate Wiki.

What They Really Found On Mars

NASA's new social media effort, mainly the "7 Minutes of Terror," seemed to work miracles for the general public's interest in space. Based on my own Facebook wall (and my cat's Facebook wall), many, many people who aren't interested in anything that happens outside of about 10ft over their heads, began posting links to information about Mars, links to videos and information, and statuses about how cool space is and Mars is and etc, etc.

I was not surprised, however, (although a bit disappointed) when the excitement died down within 48 hours after the landing. The posts petered out. The likes and comments ceased. A week later, the news posts are even mostly gone (except for the thing with Obama).

I'm a little sad. I had hoped that combining the Curiosity's epic landing with the upcoming election would make space travel and discovery a major topic for the Presidential candidates.

It didn't.

So we're back to the same old grind, with a few new people who are excited about space, and a large number of people ready to jump on the bandwagon if anything interesting happens.

Something interesting did happen, though. Something that no one is talking about. Do you want to know what they don't tell you? Do you want to know what they really found on Mars (besides dirt)? I'll give you a hint. It was the same thing they found on the moon.

Yep. Daleks. We're all going to die. End of the world. Christmas, 2012.

Let's hope the Doctor is ready and waiting.

I drew some Daleks

One is wrong, one is ... well, closer to right. :)

I also drew space.

It's not quite Daleks in space.

But this one is!

Daleks in Space:

My Cat, the Hacker-Mob Boss

Most people know what their cats do when they're at home alone. Eat, sleep, and sleep, are three very common examples.

My cat, on the other hand, Goblin, is a very suspicious sort of cat. When I come home, she always runs away. When I am in the bathroom or kitchen, she just sits there and meows. The rest of the time, she sits in the corner, under my desk or in awkward places and just stares at me. She doesn't move or blink. Just stares. For hours.

Like this:

When I'm sleeping she either sits on my head, sits on the window sill above my head, or races back and forth maniacally chasing Christmas bows that don't move and pieces of string that don't fight back.

So then I wonder: what does Goblin do while I'm gone?

Here's the thing: NASA was hacked 13 times last year, and 48 NASA laptops were stolen in the past two years. Do I think my cat stole them? No. I think she paid someone to do it. I think she was the hacker, however. She's like a hacker-mob boss who runs a ring of ridiculously smart criminals that are trying to take control of the space station. NASA claims that the space station is safe, but if Goblin can speak Russian, then they had better watch out.

""But why?" you ask. "Why would Goblin want to take control of the space station?

"Don't you read the news?" I reply. 

Look at these headlines: Hundreds of Cats Rescued in Animal Cruelty Case at Caboodle Ranch, Cat Count Nears 70 at Elmer Avenue, President of California Fish and Game Commission Shoots a Cat: Now He Is the One Up a Tree, 200 Cats Removed from NY Home, and worst of all, Japanese Cat Lovers Snarl at New Law which puts a curfew on the public appearance of animals. They have to be home by 8:00pm!

Goblin the Hacker-Mob Boss is merely trying to command a new life for cats of all breeds. By taking control of the International Space Station, she knows she can negotiate for a cat-sized spaceship which she will then command, taking as many cats as possible away from here to start a new life on a far away planet--a planet of milk and fish. I wish her luck.

Imagining the Universe with Kitty Litter

If you imagine the universe, instead of as what exists beyond the the thin layer of elements that separate us from everything, but as an endless expanse of darkness with droplets of stars floating in determined circles around massive all-consuming, all-absorbing black holes, you'll discover that this is impossible. No matter how hard I know that the universe is thirteen billion years old, that stars are so massive it could take 1100 years to fly around one (a big one) in a jet plane, that millions and billions of these objects inhabit the rest of the dark, vast expanse of everything--in my head the looming rent bill still seems bigger.

When I see this picture-- 

--the biggest thing I can imagine is a dust storm blowing over cities and farms and continents. But this picture represents the birthing process of stars: the Orion Nebula having babies as big as or bigger than our sun, far bigger than our Earth, and incomprehensibly larger than me.

I'm a girl. Sometimes I feel fat. Well. Here's the thing:

Watch this. 

I'm not fat.

I like to imagine the universe. I spend hours and days and months and eventually years trying to picture it, to capture it with words or pictures or simply with thought, but I never will. I also don't care. Despite the immense impossibility of ever understanding the whole thing, it still fills me with wonder (which is a great feeling), reminds me that there's so much more to find and see than the little things that sit in front of me everyday, and it makes even the most mundane seem valuable.

Our magnificent universe, working and working without ever stopping, building and destroying, thinking and innovating; our magnificent universe, functioning in perfect rhythm, ignoring tiny little me who so admires its beauty and grace but still creating the perfect conditions for my existence; our magnificent universe filled with massive stars and planets, made of every element imaginable, filled with black holes and galaxies, life and death and existence, is swirling around itself, dying and breathing and living, and I am lucky enough to be allowed to change the kitty litter.




For more cool things about the size of the universe, check this!

Canning Peaches in the World Inside My Head

In my head is another world. This world is a magnet for thoughts. It's a world that draws people who think so much that they forget to shower, who think so much that they look like they're floating somewhere else, who think so much they don't notice they've been standing in the middle of the sidewalk for fifteen minutes. Here people keep swarms of stinging insects in boxes and use shopping carts like summertime sleds and find ways to rappel from the clouds. Instead of metal and paper, currency is made of ideas.


In my world you can see the stars and no one is afraid of the dark. When the sun comes up, the sky changes into a thousand colours before it balances out into just one, and when it goes down in shatters into a different million coloured pieces that fly out into the vast expanse of everywhere and light up the dark with shining pricks of white light, a hundred billion miles away.


The trees are triangular. There is grass too, almost the same wavering green and winking lavender as the trees, and it spreads out from your feet in every direction, as if you are its source. It pours down the hill, spiky and filled with life and pizzazz. There are little flowers, blue ones. They look like your eyes, sparks of colour, sparks of life in the endless green. I can hear a river. It swishes an hiccups and bellows. It spins and tangles with the earth; it ducks under bushes and careens around trees. And then it takes a mad leap into a different large bit of water that's just biding its time until the dam breaks.

The sun is a square, if you look at it for too long. The clouds float around masquerading as rabbits and flying horses and Jesus' face. The people that live here have black skin, as black as the night sky and more beautiful than the earth itself, and white skin too, and all different shades of brown.


My mother and father live here, and sometimes I help Mom can peaches. It is very satisfying to have the peach juice running down your arms and the slices of peach splop-ing into the bowl of lemon juice. I like the way the boiling hot peaches almost scald your hands when you hold them tightly, and how the skins just slide off into a sticky, sweet blog of peach. The smell is there too, potent and alluring and delicious; and every so often some of the peach doesn't come off the pit and I can BITE it and the sweet juice runs down my throat and chin. Then, when all the peaches are peeled and sliced, Mom comes along and puts them in jars and heats the jars until the're really, really hot and the lids seal themselves. Then we put them in the basement and can eat them all winter long. The bits of peach stick to my skin and dry, and the smell lingers on my hands and arms for hours an hours, no matter how hard I scrub them--except I don't scrub them because no smelly lotion in the world is better than the scent of fresh peaches.

And in my world, while I'm helping my mother, sometimes the wind howls and roars, and the rain attacks with the fury of the gods. Pools form and water tries to race uphill, and the street lights sparkele and dim in the wild torrent of air that billows and gusts and bellows. Occasionally it simmers down to a whisper, but only to gather strength before launching another massive attack on the trees and the houses and the people who were standing on the sidewalk and thinking so hard they forgot to go inside.


Then I realize that the world inside my head looks and awfully lot like the world outside me head, so I move from my spot on the sidewalk to go explore this world instead.

Fission Rockets. Deep Space. Opportunity.

Technology is a weird animal.

Look at some of these recent headlines:

"NASA Rover Spends Winter Probing Inside Red Planet"

"Beijing Releases Air Pollution Data""

"Nike Unveils Wristband that Measures Athletes' Movements"

"Congress Shelves SOPA, PIPA"

"Project Bitfrost: Rockets of the Future?"

"Internet Uprising Shuts Down Piracy Bill"

"1st Private Rocket Launch to Space Station Delayed Until March"

"Rescuers Use Explosives to Open Costa Concordia Wreck"

"Senior Al Queda Figure Killed In Drone Strike"

Talking about it can sound like a foreign language, but technology allows us to do an awfully lot. We can change the structural shape of our faces. We can travel anywhere--to China, to Antarctica, to the top of Mount Everest, to the bottom of the ocean, to space. We can make the blind see and the deaf hear. We can destroy entire cities. We can build entire cities. We can build machines to do our work for us--from calculators, to computers, to oil drills, to remote surgery, to robots, to space probes.

But you know where we've failed? Rockets.

Look at it this way: if you bought a computer last year, it's already old. This form of technology is progressing so rapidly that in the last fifteen years we've gone from giant clonky old things with very limited storage space and processing power to the average consumer having instantaneous access to information and being able to store multiple terabytes of it with their own equipment. The phones we carry around with us everyday have more processing power than a room full of computers did in the 1980s. Playing music in the last twenty years has gone from 8track tapes to regular tapes to CDs to ipods.

But since the Cold War, since we put Buzz Aldridge and Neil Armstrong on the moon, how far has our rocket technology come? To answer this question, let me quote Tabitha Smith, research lead for project Bifrost: "The rockets that sent men to the moon were powered by chemical combustion, which in its most powerful form ignites hydrogen with oxygen. The space shuttle main engine, essentially the state of the art for rocket propulsion, uses the same chemicals." In other words, this technology hasn't progressed very far. This method of propulsion, while it does its job getting us beyond the atmosphere and into the empty space beyond, can't take us very much further.

Rockets are not only used for spaceflight but for war. We use rockets for warheads and rocket sleds, fireworks and ejection seats, satellites and jet packs. So why have we neglected research in this area? Probably because it's expensive.

There are new technologies on the horizon. Currently, scientists are working on Project Bifrost, which is a method of rocket propulsion that uses fission instead of combustion. If this technology succeeds, it would allow scientists to man deep space missions, to go search for and visit all the new planets the Kepler telescope is finding, to explore nebulae and galaxies and to experiment with time by orbiting a black hole.

I want to go to space. But more than that, I want us to go to space. I want humans to spread out and multiply, to occupy other planets, other galaxies, other worlds--to explore the universe.

Here's why:

It's beautiful, it's magnificent, it's breathtaking. It's a risk--one that I hope we are willing to take.

Build Fission Rockets, Become Aliens

Rockets are the key to getting into space. Not the kind of key you keep in your pocket which allows you to access your house, but the kind of key which you keep in a giant laboratory that allows you to access the entire universe. Until now we've only used combustion rockets to do anything--destroy cities, launch missiles, power jet packs, send men to the space station and the moon. But now the anonymous "they" are working on fission powered rockets.

What is special about those? you ask. 

Well, think bigger. Think bigger than Earth, think bigger than Jupiter (my favourite planet), think bigger than our star or our solar system--think deep space. Millions and billions of stars occupy our universe. And dozens of planets orbit those stars--totaling dozens of billions. Imagine that we can fly out into nowhere, soar among the stars.

Whenever I hear someone use that phrase, I always imagine standing among trees or among a crowd of people, except instead of people or trees there are stars. But it will be nothing like that. To soar among the stars is to fly between them with millions of miles between, seeing their glow on the other side of the dark matter that surrounds us, on the other side of the vacuum filled with rocks and dust that sits between our tiny vessel and them. It is to be alone in the dark, always moving forward, always searching.

Sounds lonely. But it also sounds amazing. So what are we waiting for? Let's build those fission rockets and get going. Let's give our scientists jobs. Let's catapult the best and the brightest of the human species out into space to start looking for other places to go, to live, to populate. Instead of waiting for the aliens to come here, let's go be somebody else's aliens.

It's our new mission: build fission rockets, become aliens.

Here is a video in honor of Carl Sagan, one of the greatest thinkers of our time. Enjoy. And go be an alien.

A Closet Full of Teleports

I used to have this closet--just a little bit bigger than a shower. At first it was filled with my parents' stuff. After a fair amount of begging, my parents let me move their stuff into a different closet. In place of their stuff I put two bookshelves--each filled with books (naturally). 

The thing about books is that they're filled with stories--and not just stories, but whole worlds with their own laws of physics, their own gods, and their own fantastic people--and books allow us to enter their worlds, learn their physics, meet their gods, and watch their people.

It's like having a closet full of teleports.

I organized my books by colour. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, then black, grey, white, and brown. I knew every book I owned personally. I knew what colour it was. I knew what characters were in it, who wrote it, what happened in it, the laws specific to its universe. I read them over and over--and not just my favourites--all of them.

That said, my favourite books did get special treatment: I probably read Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card) eight times (and the rest of the series almost as much), and I read Ella Enchanted (Gail Carson Levine, don't watch the movie) four times a year for at least six years--and I still read it at least once a year. The first chapter of Emily of New Moon (L. M. Montgomery) always made me feel better when I was irritable (it still does), and just this weekend I finished The Runaway Princess (Kate Coombs) and The Savage Damsel and the Dwarf (Gerald Morris), both for the nth time.

My favourite author of all time is Terry Pratchett, partly because his sarcasm is fantastic and partly because his universe is so huge and likeable. Every book I've read by Neil Gaimon has piqued my interest, and Wordsworth is my favourite poet. Or maybe it's Coleridge... ("I fear thee ancient mariner! I fear thy skinny hand!")

Then I went to college. And you know what? I took my books with me

But there are so many--J. R. R. Tolkien, Kurt Vonnegut, Charles Dickens, Ray Bradbury, Arthur Lobel, Roald Dahl, Mark Twain, Edgar Allen Poe, Christopher Paolini, C. S. Lewis, Rudyard Kipling, William Shakespeare, Michael Crighton, James Herriot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Franz Kafka, A. A. Milne, Tamora Pierce...

Go read them all.

Each book is a little piece of the universe (or parallel universe)--it's another place, another time, another world where anything can happen--since I myself cannot go whirling through the stars, I send my brain on extravagant journeys with hobbits and dwarves, or sit down to eat breakfast with a Wookie and a Martian. I even feel this way about text books. Even though I am not experiencing mysterious places and creatures, I am visiting my own world with new eyes and from an untried perspective.

A closet full of teleports. 

Now I keep them everywhere: in my kitchen, my living room, my bedroom. I leave piles of them on the floor next to my bed and scattered over my couch--on the coffee table, by my desk, in the bathroom.

This way, if I ever want to go somewhere, I don't have to go very far.

Because I have a house full of teleports.

You Never Know What Might End Up In Your Backyard

I like to think about the universe. It's big and dark and full of mysteries. Lots of people think there can't be aliens because we haven't heard from them by now. But what if we are the oldest species in the universe? Somebody had to be first, and they say that our universe isn't very old. And who knows how old universes have to be to have babies? Or maybe we're not babies: maybe we're fleas. Either way we have to expand outwards. If we're babies, we have to grow up. If we're fleas, we have to hop to the next planet over--because that's what fleas do.

Here is a picture of an alien that I drew. It might be smart, it might not be. But I like the horn:

Whether or not aliens are real, there are some very alien-like things right next to you. For example, NASA found an arsenic-based life form out in California. Now we all know some crazy life forms live in California, but up until recently, they were all thought to be carbon-based. This has forced NASA "to redefine the quest for other life in the universe." Or how about this: they recently found a rare mineral, previously thought only to exist in moon rocks, in Australia. Other alien things include bees, dead spiders, coffee, the British, teenager's bedrooms, Obama, and pickled watermelon rinds.

As the oldest species in the universe, we should constantly be on the alert for life, intelligence, and the pursuit of alien beings. In the Milky Way alone there is the possibility of 100 billion Earth-like worlds. Imagine the possibilities--recently, a black hole shot two "cosmic bullets" from it's terrifying depths. No one knows what these are. My guess? Spaceships. Intelligent life from somewhere else in the universe: they've found a way to travel via black holes.

So watch out. You never know what might end up in your back yard.

The Day the Sun Got Littler

This morning I couldn't see the sun because a dull cover of grey clouds ensconced the chunk of landmass where I live. But there I sat, still contemplating the sun and her magnificent death rays and reading her online dating profile, when I surprised myself by thinking, "well, that's not very big!" To put it in context, consider the two freaking gigantic black holes recently discovered by some astronomers in California. The article states, "Both encompass regions or 'event horizons' about five times the distance from the sun to Pluto." 


So I decided to do some math.


Math can be quite inspiring.


The distance from Pluto to the Sun is 3.67 billion miles*. 3.67 billion miles times 5 is 18.35 billion miles across, a number that is impossible to grasp. For help understanding big numbers, ask xkcd. Basically, the span of the biggest black hole's event horizon stretches for this number of miles:

18,350,000,000 miles

My next step involved finding out the size of the sun, because the sun is the biggest thing I know and can see and with which I mayhaps have some sort of understanding. So I read about the sun... heat... fire... solar system... moon... mass... distance... earth...

diameter: 864,938 miles.

And I thought to myself, "well, that's not very big."


Of course the Earth is smaller than the sun, and the continents and oceans are smaller than the Earth, and you could keep going like this until you get to quarks, but compared to the vastness of the universe, the sun isn't very big. Neither are we.


But who cares? Because we have great big minds which try ever so hard to encompass great big ideas which are mind boggling and socket blowing and bubble popping all at the same time; and despite our desperately diminutive state of existence, we will continue to build whopping big robots that explode from the surface of the earth in search of life on other planets, we'll still jump in front of trains to save a little girl's life, and we'll still continue to fight with each other, just to prove that we're right.


*Speaking of Pluto, the probe which is set to reach the not-quite planet in 2015, moved closer to Pluto than any probe before it three days ago.) 

This is the universe, exploding

Do you ever think about the fact that everything around you is moving outwards, away from the center, wherever that is, expanding and enlarging and stretching until one day everything will freeze into a giant block of frozen universe? In my brain it looks like the end of an explosion, where the force of the blast is still pushing the whole universe away, and just for a moment everything pauses in midair. I imagine that we're still floating on the force of a blast, drifting out among the rocks and stars that also float away, dancing in an esoteric spin, without touching, without talking, only gazing at the vast, dark space beyond our little bubble of safety, and drawing (or in my case, inking) quite small pictures of quite big things which we can't actually see.

This is the universe, exploding.

Buckets Hold More Than Water

Carl Sagan, one of the most brilliant men of the 20th Century, described Earth like this: 


"Our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this cosmos, of which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky." 

If the Earth is a mote of dust, what am I?

Easy: I'm just me. 

Here is my list of things I want to do before I die, in no particular order:

Publish/finish my novels.

Go hang gliding.

Touch dry ice.

Introduce my cat, Goblin to my big brother and sister-in-law's cat, Chloe.

Fly on the Virgin Galactic (anybody want to give me $200,000?)

Write about flying on the Virgin Galactic.

Have Elton John sing "Rocketman" to me.

Go to Alaska and meet a bear.

Be a Verizon Cell Phone Tower Fix-it Man.

Take a cosmology class.

Meet Terry Pratchett.

Learn how to drive a tractor trailer and/or a backhoe.

Hug my mom. Pull my dad's beard.

Buy a nice writing desk and put it in a room with a window and a rug and a book case.

Watch my little brother play a show on drums.

See the aurora borealis, possibly while I'm in Alaska.

Any more suggestions?

Circling the Dragon Sphere

My favourite thing about flying is everything. I have no issues with airports. I have no issues with security. I love taking off and landing, and turbulence just makes my life that much more interesting and exciting.

The thing about flying is the space under me, the space above me, the space around me. There's so much space when you're 50,000 feet above the surface of the Earth.

I like to imagine flying, with nothing and no one around. To be completely alone, with only wetness of the clouds or the occasional greeting of a bird; with the landscape moving slowly underneath me, the planet rolling on it's axis, spinning the trees until their leaves fly off into the never ending universe. Everything else is stuck to the dirt and rocks, at the mercy of the dragon sphere with fire churning in her guts, lights shining in her eyes, and dirt under her fingernails.

Flying is like making the Earth turn faster. It's like running on a ball. I can see the green and the blue and the colours upon colours spinning underneath me faster and faster as I speed forward at the speed of sound. I can see the black inimitable magnitude of space over my head, stretching out infinitely, past the trees and the clouds and birds, past the ozone, and past the capsule of safety surrounding the dragon sphere.

And suddenly I want to go to space, to feel the space, to be succumbed into all that is nothing but the vast darkness and silence which is neither dark nor silent, but rather filled with the homes of a million million faces visible only as pinpricks of light an incomprehensible lifetime away.

So if you happen to have a spare $200,000 in your pocket, I hope you find it in your heart to buy me a ticket on the Virgin Galactic.