Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

Anonymous asked: do u ever cry abt space rovers bc we sent them out there to d i e

Okay, I mean, on the one hand yes.

But on the other hand, like.  

Do you ever sit back on your hands and look up at the stars and think about how we put little pieces of ourselves in space rovers and sent them up there to explore.  

About how humanity could have named them anything and we called them Curiosity and Voyager and searching-words and traveling-things.  

About how we crave exploration and learning and newness so much that we taught them to do the same, to seek knowledge and answers all their lives–because that’s all we do, you know, we have our little batteries going boom in our chests and we learn and grow and travel as much as we can before our batteries run down.  

About how we put a Golden Record of information from Earth in a ship and sent it out, just on the random off chance that someone would find it, and people added greetings and kind words and “please come find us, because we’re alone in this endless black and you might be alone too and maybe we can be not-alone with each other,” and then we entrusted it to one of these things that we had made. 

About how space rovers are each a message in a bottle, the best and most curious part of humanity, the part of ourselves that we hope is at our core, the part of ourselves that we believe is the most worthy.

About how we filled them up with our souls.

Because sometimes I think about that, and then I really cry.

proserpine-in-phases:

roachpatrol:

i really, really hope that whenever we actually get to space for real, like past mars, the universe turns out to be exactly as goddamn weird as we have all been expecting all this time. like, space whales past jupiter. palaces of methane ice on pluto. old gods lurking around in the asteroid belt. the ghost of ancient vengeful alien sailors crewing their ghost ships in eternal loops through the oort cloud and sirens off alpha centauri. in a hundred years i want one of my great grandkids to unfurl a holographic map, and look at the little notation hovering a hundred light years past vega that says here there be dragons (no really) and smile, and set sail. 

look i am already in the car with the keys in the ignition i am so here for this

(via slyrider)

Planets i learned about via youtube while procrastinating my english essay

jessicajungcanliterallybuyme:

Planet 55 Cancri e is basically a giant diamond. like the planet is a diamond. and it would be worth $26.9 nonillion

Planet Gliese 436 b is an ice planet that is constantly on fire do to its close proximity to its parent star. the ice doesn’t melt bc the planet’s gravity is so strong it physically prevents the ice from melting

Planet HD 189733b rains sideways glass…. constantly

Planet J1407-B has planetary rings that are 200x the size of saturn. if saturn’s ring were as big as J1407-B’s we’d be able to see them with our naked eye from earth AND they would dominate our sky and look larger than a full moon

Planet Wasp-12b rotates so close to its parent star that its slowly being consumed by the it

Planet Gliese 581c is one of the candidates for a planet that can support life however it orbits a tiny dwarf star and is tidally locked so one side is constantly subject to immense sunlight while the other is constantly in darkness. there’s a small area of the planet however, that is just the right temp to support life. u just can’t step out of said area. the skies are red and the plants would have be a black color instead of a green bc they would use infrared light for photosynthesis. (a message was actually sent to the planet in 2008 in hopes that there’s life on the planet but the message wont reach the planet until 2029).

Planet GJ 1214b is a water planet nicknamed “water world” is has no land at all and the water is so deep it goes down miles all the way to the planet’s core.

Planet Wasp-17b is the largest planet discovered thus far. its so large its existence contradicts our understanding of how planets are formed. and it has a retrograde orbit, so it orbits in the opposite direction of its parent star.

Planet HD 188753 has 3 suns you should have triple shadows and there would be almost daily eclipses. and no matter which direction u face on the planet u would always see a sunset

Planet HD106906b is the loneliest planet discovered thus far. its known as “super jupiter” bc its 11x bigger than jupiter. it orbits its parent star at a distance of 60 billion miles (which is v strange) hence why its the loneliest planet.

Planet Tres 2b is the darkest planet known. it reflects less than 1% of light (it reflects less light than coal and black acrylic paint). the tiny part of the planet that does reflect light is red making the planet glow a dim red.

(Source: cherriamour, via notbecauseofvictories)

you-have-startled-the-witch:

audible-smiles:

the solar system is probably most purely, simply fun exploratory experience humans will ever get to have, because there’s nobody there! there’s no colonialism and we don’t have to worry about aliens yet, so its just. fun!

we just land a robot on an empty planet and make it do wheelies and every few days we find like a cool rock and scientists yell about it on twitter

it’s the tutorial levels

(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)

joshpeck:

vethox:

Look at your wrist, see the blueish veins? The blood flowing through them contains hemoglobin, a protein that has four iron atoms incorporated into its structure. Iron is only naturally produced in one place, it can only be forged in the core of dying stars.

Every time you look at your veins, remember that you are built from, and kept alive by, pieces of stardust.

This is actually a thing, to the very best of my knowledge!  Iron might not be only produced in the heart of a star on its way to going supernova (I would need someone with, y’know, actual degrees to say that for certain), but that’s certainly a major source!  The way stars work is through fusion, or taking two atoms of an element (or different element) in an environment of massive heat and pressure and joining them to create a new element.  Fusion gives off massively more energy than fission, which we’re more familiar with and can actually do ourselves with elements like uranium, but the hiccup in fusion is that there’s a point at which the energy gain is no longer high enough to offset the density of the atom created.  So, fusion works GREAT on things like hydrogen or helium, which are both very small and therefore easily fused to give massive energy yields–this is why the biggest stars tend to burn very hot (not an absolute rule), because they have so much of these smaller elements available.  These enormous stars–the sort of stars that die with a bang (nova/supernova) rather than a whimper (petering out)–burn hot and build up enormous pressure in their core, so the deeper you go the bigger the elements are.  

Iron is the turning point, the point where you stop getting energy from fission and start getting it from fusion instead.  As you work up toward iron from hydrogen on the periodic table, you get less and less energy from fusion, and as you get further from iron, into the higher numbers, you get steadily more energy from fission until you reach what we recognize as the radioactive elements, which break up easily enough to be practically applied for energy gain.  Iron, however, is basically neutral: it won’t give energy either way, and managing either one would require a massive energy output.  So, suppose you have a really huge star, a giant of some kind, and it’s been burning away happily for time immemorial (I don’t really have the time to go get data for star lifespans, I’m supposed to be studying for my organic chemistry final), fusing hydrogen into helium and helium into lithium and so on and so forth.  And now it’s reaching the end of its life and the elements it’s creating are getting up to the teens and twenties, and it fuses two oxygens into an iron atom.  That’s the cutoff: the star has now started to die.  The dense iron building up at the core of the star causes it to collapse inward, building pressure, and when the pressure inside gets too much…boom.  Supernova.

So yeah.  Iron is the element that kills stars, and it’s the element that keeps us alive.  It’s…it’s pretty damn cool.

(via yea-lets-do-this-shit)

lavabendingfirelord:

entropysamples:

lavabendingfirelord:

is same-sex marriage legal in space bc i know where i want to get married

In a legal sense marriage is a union between person recognised by the law. There’s no government body in space so technically not. 

On the other hand you can just call your ship a community and have it officiated by the captain, first mate, or, in the case of the first mate marrying the captain and so on, just move down the rank hierarchy until someone on the ship isn’t involved in the marriage.

Also can I come. I support your marriage, but more importantly I like space.

This just in: I can get married in space and you’re all invited to my gay space wedding.

(Source: cosmicspacequeen, via starwarsisgay)