DAN'S PAPERS, July 24, 2009 Page 35 www.danshamptons.com
Twentysomething…By David Lion Rattiner Sunset Philosophy
I watched this woman at NASA get very excited, talking about how a comet in the early ‘90s was going to crash into Jupiter and the Hubble telescope was going to be able to capture it. The woman, very much a scientist, was giddy telling the story. “It was so exciting watching this comet crash into Jupiter. First off, it proved to us that collisions with planets are very possible and a part of our solar system, and second we got to see the damage it would cause to the planet Jupiter.” I’m thinking, what the hell is she so happy about? Is she not making the connection that Jupiter is just a few planets over from Earth? Anyway, I watched some old footage from 1994 of this woman, giddy as can be with an ear to ear smile, as the Hubble space telescope relayed images back to earth of Jupiter receiving a barrage of nuclear explosions that could easily wipe out human life on earth. “We learned that the impacts from the comet caused explosions 5,000 kilometers into the sky!” she went on, “We don’t know when this
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One of the things that my Dad has always made a big deal out of is the sunsets out here. Growing up, sunsets were events, and I think the main reason my Dad bought his house was because of the spectacular sunsets that it offers. I never really got this fascination until I was out on Gardiner’s Bay sailing yesterday. I was on my boat at around 8:50 p.m, and the sun was just doing something I had never seen before. The sky was pink with shades of green and the outrageous sparkles on the water started to get me thinking about the Universe and God and things like that. I was having a religious experience watching this sunset over Gardiner’s Bay, and I haven’t had one in a while, except for maybe when I saw the movie The Hangover the other day. When you see a sunset like the one I saw on Sunday, you really just sit there in a state of awe. I had an ear to ear smile heading in. I docked the boat and started tying up the lines, praying that I would get the lengths right so I wouldn’t anger the Kalbacher’s boat, which is worth easily a hundred times more money than my sailboat, and headed home. At my house I was feeling pretty salty, took a shower, and started to watch some television, still with the sunset in my head, and flipped to the National Geographic channel which was doing a special on the Hubble Space telescope. “Cool,” I thought.
will happen with Earth, but we do believe it has happened before.” The comet, known as the “string of pearls” because it broke up into a bunch of smaller comets like a string of pearls before crashing into Jupiter, was a big highlight for science as Jupiter now has giant craters visible from space smashed into it. I was kind of buzz killed. But it didn’t end there. Next thing I know, the narrator is explaining how the Hubble space telescope also captured one of the most extraordinary images known to man, which is an image of the Universe that shows swirling balls of galaxies, hundreds of them. They were photographed by pointing the telescope into the black sky. “What the hell?” “These galaxies,” says the narrator, “Are billions of light years away and are just like our galaxy, the Milky Way. There is a very good chance that one of these galaxies, at least one, has a planet that can sustain life like earth’s.” So maybe when the string of death pearls hit Earth we can fly in a space ship a billion light years away to one of those planets, I thought. I felt the same way I felt when I learned the real ingredients to Jello. You can believe in all the proof that we are just a swirling rock in one very big universe susceptible to a comet death crash all you want. I’m going to believe in sunsets.