Stop and Look Around
06 Jun 2023Vasil Vasilescu
People, so intent on getting from one place to another, rarely take the time to look around them. This sense of urgency (or maybe apathy) is particularly strong in the deep void where so many wonders go undiscovered because it is too inconvenient to stop and look.I can’t lie and say that I have not sometimes succumbed to the monotony of long-distance star travel and given a system only a cursory scan before moving on. There are times when long strings of uninteresting systems make you think the galaxy is populated by nothing but barely warm stars with orbiting lumps of ice for planets. However, there are explorers that miss things even in more interesting systems. Though, if an explorer misses something like a black hole hidden in the far reaches of a neutron star’s system then I’d argue they are just travelers going from one place to another as fast as they can, not explorers.
After all the years of deep space exploration, it still amazes me how often something is missed just because someone could not be bothered to perform a scan. Hell, I’ve lost count of how many terraformable planets and water planets I’ve discovered and mapped around neutron stars that are already registered with Universal Cartographics.
Recently there was a planet, sherbet orange with white icecaps, that reminded me of childhood summers and the orange creamsicles we’d rush to eat before they melted in the sun and dripped, sticky sweet, over our hands.
CB-24 is only 1200ly away. I wonder if they have an ice cream shop. I could go for a creamsicle.
