Shuttle before the Sun

Just like millions of other people, I gazed with awe at the photos of Atlantis and Hubble flying across the background of the Sun’s titanic disc. That the Sun, our relatively small, inconspicuous and average star, is so enormously huge might easily dwarf and asphyxiate any thoughts of the grandeur of human civilisation. But still: for human-created objects to be visible at these distances, even for such tiny periods of time, is already an achievement. We are in space, be it the final frontier or not; let us stay there and go even further. Let us take proper care of the good planet we’ve got here and find some others like it one fine day. Because there’s no road to happiness, happiness is in the road; and what other thing can give us more roads than the unbelievably vast Cosmos? Q. W3ary out.