This week’s Flashforward Friday: Comets!

If you’ve been living in a cave, you might have missed the wonderful news that we landed on a freaking comet. Imagine throwing a dart and hitting a bulls-eye over a million miles away. Yeah. That’s freaking awesome!

XKCD has an awesome series of comics they did live during the landing, which you can check out here: http://xkcd1446.org/#7

Even cooler is the sound the Rosetta Comet was/is making–some folks say it sounds a lot like Predator.

This week alone, scientists made transparent mice, Fukushima radiation was detected off the coast of California,  lava destroyed a house in Hawaii, and countless other scientific breakthroughs or disasters, but landing on a comet. To me, that’s a level of amazing that I’ve only read about in sci-fi.

If we can land on a comet, what does the future of space exploration look like? How does and will our understanding of the universes change as a result?

Makes me want to write a story about landing on a comet. I wonder how many other writers are toying with this idea as we watch history unfold.

One of my favorite images floating around from all of this is the one of one of the engineers:

In Seattle, most companies and people don’t care if you have tattoos, piercings, non-traditional colored hair, etc., but in many parts of the U.S., tattoos are synonymous with the lazy, the unemployed, the drug addicts & alcoholics, and the high-school drop-outs. It’s an idea I find incredibly ignorant and insulting.

The color of your skin, including your ink, has nothing to do with your abilities, nor does the color of your hair, your eyes, or anything else about your physical appearance.

This guy landed a freaking rocket on a comet using math most people wouldn’t even begin to understand. Remember that the next time you let your prejudices hang out.

I bring this up because as we explore space, I wonder what we would do if we encountered intelligent alien life. Would we react as people did in District 9, as we do when we see folks different from ourselves? Or have we finally begun to reach the point of intellectualism where we understand that different doesn’t mean bad?

I would like to think the latter, but I’m not so sure yet. We landed on a comet, which is amazing, but we’re still infantile in our development.

(Comet image Copyright ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM, CC BY-SA IGO 3.0).