Welcome to the Spacing Out blog

You know, trying to come up with a topic for your very first blog post is hard. You want to make a solid first impression—be witty and charming while also being knowledgeable and informative. Good luck with that. Happily for me, I have space on my side.

Work at a science museum long enough and you’ll discover a universal truth: whoever a guest is when they visit us, at one time they were (or quite possibly still are) a kid who loved space and dinosaurs. You were into one or the other when you were a kid, you know you were.

I can’t help you much with the dinosaurs (although we have many excellent educators here at the Museum who can). But if you want to talk space, I’m your huckleberry.

One of the coolest things about space is that it’s universal. No, I’m not just saying that to make a dumb pun, although it certainly was one and you have my deepest apologies. I’m saying it because looking up at the sky seems to be hardwired into the human brain (and not just us either—other animals track the sky). Astronomy is the oldest of the natural sciences, with evidence that ancient humans from a multitude of cultures around the world closely watched the heavens, turning the sky into a combination map, calendar, and storybook.

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We’re still doing it, only now instead of recording constellations in paint on cave walls and carving moon phases into mammoth bones we can gaze into the Universe’s farthest reaches with the finest telescopes ever engineered. Our maps may be drawn using radial velocity measurements of distant stars, our calendars set based on precision measurements of orbital motion, and our stories made of the births and deaths of solar systems, galaxies, and universes, but as we peel back the mysteries of the cosmos one wavelength and one light year at a time, we’re still doing the same thing our ancient ancestors did. We’re still looking up and wondering. We’re just being all high tech and fancy about it.

Today we can go out and touch it. We’ve put footprints on the Moon, rover tracks on Mars, and radio signals out in deep space moving ever farther from their origin (accompanied by the quiet hope that someday someone radios us back). We’ve buzzed the clouds of Venus, dove through the rings of Saturn, and whipped right through the heliosphere to taste the flavors of interstellar space and the winds from other stars.

And what does all of this looking and wondering and exploring bring us back to? A Universe that is a mystery wrapped in a conundrum tied up with a lovely enigmatic bow. We may know a lot more about the cosmos than our ancestors who watched the stars with their eyes, but it just slams home how much we really don’t know.

What caused the Big Bang? What goes on inside a black hole? Is there other life in the Universe besides on Earth? I would love to be able to answer these questions for you. And who knows, if this blog sticks around long enough, I just might be able to one day. But I’ll bet you dollars to donuts (an expression I had to look up after I wrote it because it occurred to me how odd it sounds) that those answers, if and when they come, will bring a whole flood of new questions with them.

Because that’s the other thing about space—it’s infinite in its mystery and majesty. Its beauty is unparalleled, and you don’t have to have an astrophysics degree to appreciate cosmic loveliness when you see it. And there will never come a time when we’ve seen everything. There will always be something beautiful, something fascinating, something absolutely bizarre that we weren’t expecting. We’ll never know it all, not if we keep searching until the heat death of the Universe. But we sure as heck can enjoy trying.

And in my personal (totally unbiased) opinion, that beats a dinosaur any old day.

Welcome to Space Oddities, a blog from Spacing Out. I hope you’re going to enjoy this journey.