The intrigue is definitely building. What are we looking for out there in the deep and dark space? Surely we don't suspect a Planet X, Nibiru, or the likes to be out there and headed in this direction. Tell me that's NOT what this is about. I can understand the secrecy behind X-37B, but what's up with Sophia? Are you wondering about all of this as well>?
Looking somewhat like a traditional shuttle but at roughly one-quarter the size, the unmanned X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle took off for its maiden space voyage from Cape Canaveral in Florida and reached a low earth orbit late in the day. The X-37B is intended to serve as a platform for experiments and to offer insights on transporting satellite sensors and other equipment to and from space.
So they say!
As part of this initial mission, the Air Force will evaluate the X-37B's guidance, navigation, thermal protection, and unmanned operations in orbit, re-entry, and landing. It will function in space like other satellites, with operators on Earth monitoring its travels. Eventually, the Air Force will tell the space plane to head home. But no one knows when we will bring it back home.
Here were poor streets where faded gentility essayed with scanty space and shipwrecked means to make its last feeble stand, but tax-gatherer and creditor came there as elsewhere, and the poverty that yet faintly struggled was hardly less squalid and manifest than that which had long ago submitted and given up the game.
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
Then on Tuesday, NASA offered the first media tour of the world's largest airborne observatory.
The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) is a former Pan Am Boeing 747 carrying a 40,000-pound, 98-inch-diameter German-made infrared telescope. A massive hatch opens in flight to allow the telescope to do its work. And just what work is that? At a time when we're in trouble financially, why are we sending this experiment into space at a cost of say $15,000 an hour. Tell me again, why is this so important when we're cutting back on other space programs?
SOFIA is expected to capture its first infrared images in flight in six to eight weeks.
Let's see infrared cameras that can see in the dark: see things that we're not capable of seeing here on earth. And just what are they looking for? Let me ask a couple of what seem to be reasonable questions. Could we be looking for a brown dwarf, an approaching meteorite, or some small but destructive fly-by planet? Could our X-37B carry weaponry that we hope could shoot down, deter, or change the course of such an object?
Analogies between the stage and the screen assume that they deal with the same material. But they don’t. The material of the screen is not actual objects but images fixed on the film. And the very fact that they have their being on film endows these images with properties which are never found in actual objects. For instance, on the stage the actor moves in real space and time. He cannot even cross the room without performing a definite number of movements. On the screen an action may be shown only in terminal points with all its intervening moments left out. Similarly, in watching a performance on the stage the spectator is governed by the actual conditions of space and time. Not so in the case of the movie spectator. Thanks to the moving camera he is able to view the scene from all kinds of angles, leaping from a long-distance view to a close-range inspection of every detail. It is obvious that with this extraordinary power of handling space and time—by elimination and emphasis, according to its dramatic needs—the motion picture can never be content with modeling itself after the stage.
—Alexander Bakshy, U. S. film critic. repr. In American Film Criticism, ed. Stanley Kauffman (1972)
Surely I'm just wildly guessing. Right?
As a spiritual-futurist, I have a BA degree majoring in history. One cannot know the future without knowing the past which holds clues to what is on the horizon. The world is in such a rapid expansion of knowledge that we are close to entering a tipping point that will forever change earth as we know it.