All throughout the Bush years, whenever I needed to turn my attention away from our collective nightmare, I visited the website for the Hubble Space Telescope. I looked in awe at theimages of star formation in the Eagle Nebula, or at indescribable grace of the Sombrero Galaxy. (Did you see the new red spot on Jupiter?)
Later, during the worst of the chaos of the Iraq war, domestic spying, the politicization of Justice, the suppression of climate science...(stop me, please), I tracked the progress of those doughty twin rovers across the surface of Mars.
As the inquiry at Abu Ghraib was getting underway, and we were confronting the reality that our country tortures people, I watched the Cassini probe send back haunting images of Saturn and it rings, and for the first time human eyes saw the slushy surface of Titan.
Seeing those early images of an alien landscape gave me hope and optimism for what we as a species were still achieving. Here was the spirit of exploration in its purity and innocence, motivated not primarily by profit or power but by human curiosity. Whatever Bush and his cronies were doing, our species had roving cameras exploring another planet. We were one step closer to finding evidence for what many of already believe; that there is life beyond Earth, and that ours may be only one of an amazing number of living worlds.
And tonight, after executing a very complex descent with pinpoint accuracy, NASA landed Phoenix on the surface of Mars to search for that life. Go to the website and watch the video of the celebration at mission control.
I don't care who's blowing up what. There's hope for us yet.