{"id":8303,"date":"2013-04-10T10:00:15","date_gmt":"2013-04-10T16:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=8303"},"modified":"2013-04-17T02:26:45","modified_gmt":"2013-04-17T08:26:45","slug":"i-is-for-interstellar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/i-is-for-interstellar\/","title":{"rendered":"I is for Interstellar"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"winchgalmap3Sample\"<\/a>Right after I went through my Dinosaur phase, I saw Star Wars IV: A New Hope for the first time.\u00a0 Instantly, all that childlike excitement and exuberance was transferred from paleontology to astronomy.\u00a0 We had a series of about twenty astronomy books in my elementary school’s LRC (Asimov’s astronomy series, I believe–the ones with the gray dust jackets), and in about a year I’d read them all.<\/p>\n

Star Wars was fun, but what was really<\/em> fascinating was learning about the stars.\u00a0 When I started to grasp the scale of our galaxy–that if our solar system was the size of a milk carton, the Milky Way would be the size of North America–my mind was totally blown.\u00a0 Quasars, pulsars, black holes, white dwarfs, red giants–it was so amazing!\u00a0 And then, when I started thinking about all the other worlds out there, and what it would be like to visit them–that’s when I became a science fiction fan for life.<\/p>\n

It goes without saying that you can’t have space opera without setting the story somewhere in space.\u00a0 But the best space opera goes much further than that–it’s about space as the final frontier<\/a>, and humanity’s ultimate destiny among the stars.\u00a0 After all, if we as a species stay put on this pale blue dot<\/a>, sooner or later we’ll kill ourselves off or suffer another mass extinction event that wipes us all out like the Dinosaurs.<\/p>\n