Outer Space...

What could be the harm in watching several hours per day of the History Channel? Well, I don't know. It seems largely educational, and though educational programming often drifts into the realm of magical laymanism, it can not be worse than anything else on the tube. Sleeping medications, absurdly annoying and eyescratchingly tedious mini-plots and situations where even the dumbest American viewer is left either scratching their head or throwing garbage at the screen, car insurance commercials adopted into network sitcoms, beached and spoiled teenagers under the spotlight and interest of people I cannot imagine knowing, three free brushes included and one extra sonic scrubbling bubbler if you order within the next ten minutes.

I would like to be a scientist that studies black holes, quasars and subspace. To be able to hypothesize and flat-out guess whatever one can sufficiently explain before one's peers, achieving high-level degrees in quantum physics, black matter and things that most people cannot even imagine. I can imagine the rest of the universe, what a black hole might be like if I fell into the event horizon, stars that are hundreds of times larger than our own, and even contemplate with a subdued anticipation and anxiety that which will never be discovered in my lifetime. I can perceive the infinite void with pocketed matter spiraling, clumping and collecting all around, slowly being drained into the garbage disposals of the Universe until there will be nothing left but the greatest nothing you cannot imagine because it just seems so big over your head.

But, I was not around when these things were discovered, nor would I have had the brainpower to have been a part of the moment. I can only take for fact, what the scientists and doctors of the farthest reaches of space have told me. If I had been born a few centuries earlier, most likely I would have been shocked to learn that the Earth was round, that the Earth was not the center of anything, and that there were such things as other planets, floating around the blackness just as we were, only devoid of anything but dust in the wind and ammonia ice in the fault lines of empty pointless distant worlds. You could stand on the surface of Mars, Titan or Europa--some earth-like orb, with your space suit, and hear only the sounds of inorganic activity. No smell but whatever acrid poisonous gas fills the particular atmosphere and causes your sinuses and eventually your head to explode. No smell but the chemical interactions occuring around you completely lifeless but still moving, swirling and eroding whether you stayed there and watched or not. Gamma rays are bursting off in the far reaches of the Universe, thousands of light-years away emitting more energy than anything our galaxy as ever seen in the past few million years. Beautiful explosions of light and some things that might be even faster and even less tangible than light, with no one, I presume to witness the whole spectacle.