Space and time
Jul. 9th, 2004 08:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmolinguistI am again admiring the pictures from Cassini.
Saturn is so far away: it takes seven years to get there. Of course the probe didn't fly in a straight line; it looped around other planets first, using their gravity to speed up. Still, that's a long time, and that's the best we can do these days.
I remember hearing about Cassini's launch ... I would've been in my first year of high school in 1997. Seven years seemed an impossibly long time to me--about half my lifetime, at that point, but only a third of it now. The people in charge of this mission knew where they'd be in seven years ... at least inasmuch as they knew where Cassini would be, if all went well. I definitely had no such structure to my own life.
But even so, I would not think that I'd have met someone in another country on the Internet--a medium I'd almost never touched at that time--and be staying at his house by the time Cassini got to Saturn in the crazy, far off, futuristic, not real year 2004.
Saturn is so far away: it takes seven years to get there. Of course the probe didn't fly in a straight line; it looped around other planets first, using their gravity to speed up. Still, that's a long time, and that's the best we can do these days.
I remember hearing about Cassini's launch ... I would've been in my first year of high school in 1997. Seven years seemed an impossibly long time to me--about half my lifetime, at that point, but only a third of it now. The people in charge of this mission knew where they'd be in seven years ... at least inasmuch as they knew where Cassini would be, if all went well. I definitely had no such structure to my own life.
But even so, I would not think that I'd have met someone in another country on the Internet--a medium I'd almost never touched at that time--and be staying at his house by the time Cassini got to Saturn in the crazy, far off, futuristic, not real year 2004.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2004-07-09 02:07 pm (UTC)Life's kind of weird that way. Even one year ago, I would not have imagined half the things that take place in my life now.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-07-09 02:38 pm (UTC)Actually, that's the best we could do seven years ago. If we were to launch a similar probe today, it would probably be equipped with an ion engine of the sort successfully tested on Deep Space 1 (http://nmp.jpl.nasa.gov/ds1/).
(no subject)
Date: 2004-07-09 02:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-07-09 04:40 pm (UTC)It's true that my life has no structure, but I like it when my journal has some in spite of that fact ... or maybe because of it. :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-07-09 04:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-07-09 09:23 pm (UTC)