“What can be more soul shaking than peering through a 100-inch telescope at a distant galaxy, holding a 100-million-year-old fossil or a 500,000-year-old stone tool in one’s hand, standing before the immense chasm of space and time that is the Grand Canyon, or listening to a scientist who gazed upon the face of the universe’s creation and did not blink? That is deep and sacred science.”
A Proetid trilobite, a member of one of the last surviving families of trilobites, living until the mass extinction at the end of the Permian about 250 million years ago
For my 12th birthday in 1986, my grandmother sent me a card covered in people doing grown-up jobs — fireman, policeman, doctor, teacher, and astronaut. Inside, the card informed me that I could grow up to be anything I wanted to be. A few short months after the Challenger disaster, Grammie had crossed off the astronaut and written, “Except this one.”
Despite all that the Shuttle has accomplished in the intervening 25 years, America’s relationship with the space program has never been the same, and human space flight at NASA has merely hobbled along — at least compared to the giant leaps taken in the 60’s and early 70’s. I may still believe that our 43rd president was the worst in our history, but one thing he did right was to set NASA’s sights beyond low earth orbit again, to the Moon and Mars.
The launch of Space Shuttle Atlantis on its final mission today marks the beginning of a strange gap in America’s history of human space flight.
The Orion/Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle is still under development, as are the commercial launch vehicles designed to take astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station. Until these new systems come online, NASA astronauts must hitch rides aboard spacecraft built and launched by other countries. Perhaps we’re witnessing the birth of a new, more cooperative era, but it feels strange that NASA is no longer self-reliant.
Someone recently asked a random online forum what one place we wanted to go most in the universe. Most people responded with answers bounded by Earth’s atmosphere, but I couldn’t help imagining what a trip to the moons of Saturn — Titan, Tethys, Phoebe, and dozens more.
Chris Abbas created a video featuring Titan and its moons that captures their mystery without diminishing the real science behind the Cassini mission that sent back these images. Make sure to expand the video to full-screen for the full effect.
After I posted my sad tale of lost antiquities, I went back down to the basement and gave the search another shot. Thanks to some minor flooding last autumn, I’d carted most of our still-packed boxes around fairly recently, so had a pretty good idea where my Paleolithic tools might be. Two boxes into my search, I found them.
Each tool is fascinating, but one in particular has intrigued me and made me question the label of “crude” I had applied in my review of the Burke Museum. I learned to respect the maker of this tool — presumably a scraper — only after turning it over and over in my hand, until suddenly it just fit. The basic problem was that I was trying to hold the tool the way they’re displayed in museums, with the “interesting” side up (below, left). By turning the tool the other way around (below, right), all its bumps and ridges slipped into place.
Specifically, the bulb of percussion slips under my thumb and the ridges fit my fingers. After a little more experimentation, I found two more ways of holding the scraper. It even has a plane where you can rest your finger to apply greater pressure (below, left) while cutting.
But all of that is just “basic functionality.” At first, I thought the tip had broken off, but in reality the exposed cortex appears to be part of the “design,” with several stripes from the ancient sedimentary stone left in place. Similarly, the flint-knapper has left a strip of the lighter-colored cortex in place along the non-cutting edge. These little touches add absolutely no functional value to the tool. They’re just, well, beautiful.
The reason I love archaeology is less about the science (though I’m passionate about that, too) and more about the connections I feel with the people who came before me. Through this hunk of stone, I find myself connected to one specific person who did something special with their chert scraper more than 18,000 years ago.
Andrew-Becraft.com 