So I was rummaging around in old photos recently and found another set of window seat photos, this time from August 2018 when I flew into Orlando on my way to watch a large rocket send a small robot to the sun. The photos are in reverse order because I thought some of the ones just before landing were kind of striking. It was a stormy summer afternoon, with dark clouds and beams of sunlight glinting off the many lakes in the area.
Because I was in sort of a space nerd frame of mind at the time, the scene reminded me of the lakes on Saturn's moon Titan, though honestly that's quite a stretch. For one thing, the lakes on Titan are filled with liquid methane, ethane, propane, and other very cold hydrocarbons instead of swamp water, pesticides, and golf balls. And if you happened to land in a lake on Titan, you'd freeze solid almost immediately, instead of being eaten by backyard tigers or bath salts zombies, or randomly whacked by the cartels. And that's if you aren't shot out of the sky first for violating HOA airspace. The only probe to land on Titan so far (as of 2023) managed to land successfully and then sent data for another half hour without being tasered or eaten, which seems to rule out the presence of HOAs and tigers, so there's that. Exo-cartels are still a possibility, though, especially if they had a someone on the inside at NASA or ESA and knew exactly when to lie low. We should have a better idea about this after 2034 when the next robot gets there.
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