Month: July 2018

Enlarge / Planetary scientist Carolyn Porco speaks on stage at the National Geographic Awards on Thursday, June 14, 2018, at Lisner Auditorium in Washington, D.C. (credit: Taylor Mickal/National Geographic)

In its quest to find extant life in the Solar System, NASA has focused its gaze on the Jovian moon Europa, home to what is likely the largest ocean known to humans. Over the next decade, the space agency is slated to launch not one, but two multi-billion dollar missions to the ice-encrusted world in hopes of finding signs of life.

Europa certainly has its champions in the scientific community, which conducts surveys every decade to establish top priorities. The exploration of this moon ranks atop the list of most desirable missions alongside returning some rocky material from Mars for study on Earth. But there is another world even deeper out in the Solar System that some scientists think may provide an even juicer target, Saturn’s moon Enceladus. This is a tiny world, measuring barely 500km across, with a surface gravity just one percent of that on Earth. But Enceladus also has a subsurface ocean.

“I have a bias, and I don’t deny that,” says Carolyn Porco, one of the foremost explorers of the Solar System and someone who played a key imaging role on the Voyagers, Cassini, and other iconic NASA spacecraft. “But it’s not so much an emotional attachment with objects that we study, it’s a point of view based on the evidence. We simply know more about Enceladus.”

Enlarge / A USG router, a 10-gigabit Ethernet switch, and a 48-port PoE switch. This is what it sounds like when fans cry. (credit: Lee Hutchinson)

There is a moment of perfect stillness after the cable slips through my fingers and vanishes back up the hole in the ceiling like an angry snake. Then the opening stanza of a rich poem of invective leaps from my lips and my wife stares up at me from below, eyes wide, frozen just as I am, ready to catch me if I rage too hard and lose my balance.

But perched precariously on the top step of an inadequate and shaky ladder in the corner of my living room, drenched in sweat and speckled head to toe in pink insulation and sheetrock dust, body aching with dull red heat, I just can’t maintain the torrent of swearing. I’m too tired. The words die on my lips and I drop my burning arms to my side. Sweat stings my cut hands—“man hands,” my wife has always called them, hands that seem to always sport an ever-changing collection of cuts and dry spots and calluses and torn nails as house or computer projects come and go. Tiny drops of blood ooze from shredded cuticles.

Maybe I’ll just stand here for a few hours and not move, I think, mind going blank rather than face the thought of climbing back up into the baking attic and fishing out the cable from underneath mountains of insulation. Maybe I don’t even need Wi-Fi anymore. Maybe I don’t even need computers anymore. Maybe I should throw away everything I own and live in the mountains and grow my own food and never think about technology ever again.