And I'm FINISHED! :)
I finished The Dream of Spaceflight just now after 2 solid days of reading. The last chapter was very short in comparison to the rest of the book so I only have one quotation to post from it... the closing to the entire book.

"Generations will come and go, civilizations will rise and fall, and long after Earth is vaporized by the sun and humanity is either extinct or evolved into other beings, Voyager will drift silently onward, carrying the message through countless eons: that there was, at our time and place in the cosmos, an awareness that knew something of its world and something of itself, an imperfect people of irrepressible spirit, of an imperfect people of irrepressible spirit, of mathematics and music, of love and wonder, who dared to dream of reaching the stars.

This was a decent book... not as good as I had expected, but it was kind of a 'motivational book' of sorts... that sought to place reasoning behind the space program... you know... why its good to have a space program!

So now that I've finished this book I should go to the bookstore again... It's been a long time since I've just read for pleasure! Its something I've kinda subconsciously missed... but I'm sure when I get back to Tech in late August, that I'm not going to be doing much reading again.

Hey Chapter 4... I'm almost done!
First quote of the chapter: "Where there is no vision, the people perish." ~ Proverbs 29:18. This means that without a source of meaning larger that of your own ego or beyond survival itself, you're left in a world full of void. How boring that must be!

Next, I found some interesting statistics that I could've used back in high school in junior english when we had to write our persuasive papers. I wrote mine, unsurprisingly, on why the space program was a good investment. Here's what The Dream of Spaceflight had to say about the topic:

"Even in the days of Apollo the public lost interest after the first lunar landing. Having beaten the Russians in the Super Bowl of space, we went back to business and Monday Night Football. After six walks on the moon, the last three were scrapped, saving seven-tenths of 1 percent of Apollo's total cost. Yet the $24 billion Apollo program cost each American only a dollar a month for nine years, and this ignores exponential returns to the economy. The $38 billion spent on space between 1961 and 1972 was barely 1 percent of the national budget, 3 percent of the amount allotted to social programs, and half the figure for detected welfare fraud. Had even this moderate commitment to space persisted, we would have walked on Mars a decade ago."

More quotations: "Wonder, in its larger sense, denotes the mysterium tremendum, the aura of unfathomable majesty, utterly humbling and wholly Other, surrounding the sublime and terrifying unknowns that border our models of reality.... Thus we gaze into the night sky and feel not diminishment but dilation. We sense the vastness and passion of creation and glimpse an equally vast interior - the 'enormous geography of the soul,'..."

"the less one explores, the less comfortable or compelling exploring becomes."

"The sense of wonder - the need to find our place in the whole - is not the only genesis of personal growth but the very mechanism of evolution, driving us to become more than we are. Exploration, evolution, and self-transcendence are but different perspectives on the same process."

"To believe less - or believe more - is to live in the shallows of what it means to be human."

"A young space enthusiast once asked von Braun what it takes to send a man to the moon. His answer is his epitaph: 'The will to do it.'"

The Dream of Spaceflight, vol. 3
Now for the highlights of Chapter 3: 'Seeking the Center at the Edge' By the way, this book is mostly a book who's purpose is to inspire you to say 'yay spaceflight' not really to provoke critical thought on controversial issues; therefore, most of my posts on this book have been and probably will continue to be quotations I think are spiffy.

"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."
~T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

"'Some Part of our being,' said Carl Sagan, 'knows this is from where we came. We long to return.'"

"Perhaps the disenchantment is that of a nation entering middle age. 'The youth,' wrote Thoreau in his journal, 'gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.'"

"Seeing our own essence in the floating Earth, we are finally more sacred than our works. 'No longer that preposterous figure at the center, no longer that degraded and degrading victim off at the margins of reality,' wrote MacLeish, 'man may at last become himself.'"

"A fragmented, depersonalized, demythologized society spawns cancerlike individuals who lack a sense of anything larger than themselves and who thus destroy the social organism that sustains them. Simultaneously alienated and inflated, the ego becomes obsessed with order and control, barricading itself into a tiny clearing in the dark forest of the soul. Cling to a false self, one loses receptivity to the symbolic unconscious, and with it the ability to experience wonder. "

The Dream of Spaceflight, cont.
So in between running tests here at work, I tend to have some time on my hands... at least today. So I've been reading that book some more. I'm on chapter two now, entitled: The Romance of Spaceflight: Nostalgia for a Bygone Future

It mentions an artist, Chesley Bonestell, who was famous for his works of a space nature. I checked out some of his stuff online... its quite impressive. http://www.bonestell.org/Page_30x.html

Also in this chapter it suggests that there are seven zones of human experience. The first five are the 'natural zones':
1) the area of sensation immediately touching the sking
2) the area within two or three meters in which most social interaction takes place
3) the maximum area of social interaction, reaching out a few hundred feet
4) the area that extends as far as one can see or otherwise gather information from any one location
5) an irregular and varying area made up of all the zone-four areas that a person experiences during a lifetime

Beyond the five natural zones are two conceptual constructs:
6) the surface or biosphere of the Earth
7) the universe as far out as one can conceive - the realm of transcendence, the literal locus of ultimate answers to all our "why" questions.

The book alludes to the fact that any 'god' that humans might refer to would be a part of the 7th zone of human experience. To quote the book (disclaimer... this is a quote, NOT my ideas): "To conceive of the transcendent requires a symbol. One cannot worship "God" - a word, a vague feeling, an intellectual abstraction; one needs an image: Jesus, Buddha, a bearded man in the sky, a painting, a statue. Yet the natural tendency is for the image to literally become God, and the larger, elusive feeling that empowered the symbol fades, eclipsed by a host of this-worldly connections. Finally demystified, the statue reverts to its status as mere artifact. Thus every symbol contains the seeds of its own desacralization. The millennial nature of Christian theology generated the idea of spiritual progress, which spawned the notion of salvation through success in this world, which led to the secular idea of material progress, which in turn began to desacralize Christian theology. The last stage of this process is fundamentalist dogma, in which symbols have lost their numinosity and have degenereated to mere signs"

I know that's a rather long quotation... It actually took up most of the page it was on in the book. I understand how the author intended for this long, drawn out description to emphasize a point he was making, however, what he said clearly demonstrates that he is most likely agnostic. Saying that Jesus is not one and the same with God. He says that Christianity is a desacralization. {sidenote: I'm not doing as good of a job today defending my views as normal... but I just wanted to state some of these... quite honestly all i've done really is list several points that I generally would be able to extend upon in at least a paragraph each. bear with me!}

More knowledge from another book
I was at the Air & Space Smithsonian shortly after having finished the book I had to read for my internship. I was roaming the book section of the gift shop and ran across a book that was on sale for just $5, called The Dream of Spaceflight: Essays on the near edge of infinity by Wyn Wachhorst. I haven't read much of it yet, but I've had a chance to get through the forward and preface, and begin on the 1st chapter (titled 'Kepler's Children'). SO i have a few quotations from this book that I thought I'd post.

"To gaze into the night sky and feel the vastness and passion of creation is to glimpse an equally vast interior. We are aware of the stars only because we have evolved a corresponding inner space."

"Beyond all the political and economic rationales, spaceflight is a spiritual quest in the broadest sense, one promising a revitalization of humanity and a rebirth of hope no less profound than the great opening out of mind and spirit at the dawn of the modern age."

"'Let us create vessels and sails adjusted to the heavenly ether,' Kepler wrote to Galileo, 'and there will be plenty of people unafraid of the empty wastes. In the meantime, we shall prepare for the brave sky-travelers maps of the celestial bodies.'"

"What motivates those who venture over the edge, who trek over barren plains, through tangled jungle, or across the Arctic waste?... [it] is a sometimes selfless obsession with reaching the pristine edges of reality...the attempt to complete the grand internal model of reality, to broaden the context of meaning, to find the center by completing the edge."

"'It is part of the nature of man,' he adds, 'to start with romance and build to reality. We need this thing which makes us sit bolt upright when we are nine or ten and say, 'I want to go out and devour the world.''" (Ray Bradbury)

"'There can be no thought of finishing, for 'aiming at the stars' is a problem to occupy generations.... No matter how much progress one makes, there is always the thrill of just beginning.'" (Robert Goddard)

[It was] "Ed White, floating over the milky blue vastness of teh Pacific with that flash of sunlight on his viosr, that best captured the exhilaration, the euphoric liberation of a species come of age....'I don't want to come back, but I'm comin,' he said. 'It's the saddest moment of my life.'"

And as a side note... Books that Kepler Wrote
* Somnium - Kepler's vision of life on the moon
* Harmony of the World - Even through all the hardships Kepler faced during his life, he was convinced that it was still beautiful.

From the Earth to the Moon - Jules Verne

and thus ends the first chapter.

Long Time, No Post

Well, its been well over a month since I posted up here. I suppose I just haven't been 'inspired' by anything recently to write about here. I've been in College Park, MD since May 31 at the University of Maryland for a program called RISE doing research in the electrical engineering department (I know its not my major). I've met some pretty cool people and had time to hang out with a few of my friends from VT. Two of the people in my group at RISE were born and lived a good portion of their lives in another country.

Maria grew up in Romania. When she was really young, her dad was on a business trip in the US and decided to never go back to Romania (Romania was having a rough time... corrupt gov't and the works..). Anyway, once word got around that he had never returned home the government began harassing her family. While they attmepted to get out of Romania to join her dad in the US, the government wasn't giving them permission to leave and kept trying to get them to fess up about the father's wherabouts. Anyway, by the time the family finally got permission to leave, the government had collapsed and was beginning to rebound, but they were sick of the way they had been treated so came on to the US anyway.

Aimi spent most of her life in Nigeria. Her mother had moved to the US when she was very very young. But Aimi stayed in her town in Nigeria. Her father had many wives and so she really didn't get a chance to get to know him. Other members of her family took care of her until she was about 17. Then she moved to join her mother and sister in NYC. She spent about a year there before her mother kicked her out. So at 18, Aimi had spent only a year in the states and was supporting herself.

I'm so impressed by these stories of their lives. Its very brave of them and I have so much respect for how far they've gotten.