Seriously, prove me wrong.  We just discovered, today, that there’s ice on Pluto.  Yeah, we found that out today.  We crazy humans are still discovering things, big things about our lunatic universe.  And where there’s ice, even if it’s not frozen water, there’s still some likelihood of life, however primitive.

For perspective on how long New Horizons has been flying (nearly a freaking decade), when this mission launched the number one song in America was Kanye West’s “Gold Digger” with Jamie Foxx.  I tried to discover if NASA put a track of it on board, but the absence of such a statement indicates to me that they did not.

Which is good, because holding such a song in its memory banks would cause the probe to be fired upon by any reasonable sentient race.  In the commentary from Star Trek V, Priceline Senόr Bancό de Rόbber Bill Shatner admits the reason the Klingons blew up the Pioneer probe is it had a video copy of “Gold Digger” on it.

“Oh God, what are they wearing?  And, oh, please oh God, make it stop.  Fire.  Fire now!”

We’ve now visited every planet in our system.  (screw all haters; to me, Pluto is always going to be a full blown planet; dwarf planet my ass)  And all were visited with robots.  So the only questions is what’s next for the robots.  And what’s next for us?  If you’re alive today, most of you (I hope) will live to see a human walk on Mars.  And what a day that’ll be.

Pluto’s buddy Charon

the Rock of the hour

wave for a moment, if you will, through the camera; and ponder humanity’s awesomeness