…I’m starting to wonder--
could anything possibly live here?
It’s dark. It’s cold.
I’ve brought this gift of chocolate cupcakes.
I don’t think I’ll find anybody to eat them.
                                                      from Life on Mars
                                     written and illustrated by Jon Agee
                                    Dial Books for Young Readers, 2017
    I’m not that much of a science fiction fan, but a short story by Ray Bradbury, “Dark They Were and Golden Eyed,” has stuck with me all these years. I remember it being about the necessity of accepting change and the inevitability of assimilation. I mention it now because it takes place on Mars. 
    I grew up when Ray Walston played a wacky Martian neighbor in the sitcom “My Favorite Martian.” The song “Telstar” rocketed to #1 on the music chart in 1962. The Space Race pushed reality toward the boundaries of Science Fiction. And it seemed like the whole human race was obsessed with outer space, space flight, and space travel. Reaching the moon was certainly do-able. Could a trip to Mars be far behind?
    Even after the Challenger disaster in 1986, NASA continued to do its work, astronauts continued to make discoveries, but it seemed like our heart wasn’t in it. In February 2003, when the space shuttle Columbia broke up as it returned to Earth, killing all seven astronauts on board, NASA suspended space shuttle flights for more than two years while it conducted an investigation. Another successful shuttle flight was completed in 2006, but when the International Space Station was complete in 2011, the shuttle missions ended and funding became harder to get.
    But just three months later, November 2011, the Curiosity rover launched its 293 million mile journey to Mars. It landed safely about seven months later.
    In 2016, Elon Musk headed his SpaceX rocket to the International Space Station to resupply the astronauts. The world noticed. 
    Then on Saturday afternoon, May 31, 2020, NASA astronauts launched a commercially built American ship operated by an American crew from American soil. It was the first all-American mission in nine years.
    Meanwhile, Curiosity has quietly been exploring the surface of Mars all this time. As of February 21, 2021, Curiosity has been on Mars for 3038 sols, or Martian days (3121 Earth days). Here’s Curiosity’s home page. https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/home/ where you can see what it’s been up to.
    The goal for Perseverance, to land in the Jazero Crater, was tricky. It needed to avoid the rocks at the bottom that would surely damage the craft.
    Perseverance’s safe and careful perfect landing on Mars last Thursday (February 18, 2021) at 3:55 pm EST, got the ground crew at NASA’s jet propulsion lab cheering.
    Scientists think the crater is the site of a lake bed that dried up 3.5 billion years ago. There's a chance that before it dried up, it was home to some form of Martian microbial life. There's also a chance the rover instruments will be able to see a signature of that life in the rocks in the crater, like a fossil. 
    While NASA’s Insight rover is already probing deep into the surface of Mars, Perseverance will look for those signs of life. It will also collect and bring back rocks and soil with the intention of returning it on another mission. Scientists can study the Martian material with equipment too large and too heavy for easy transport. Perseverance's mission will last about one Martian year, about 687 earth days. 
    Here’s Perseverance on Mars! https://www.enterpriseai.news/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Perseverance-Mars-rover-NASA_600x.jpg
    According to National Geographic and mars.NASA.gov Several spacecraft are already transmitting data from orbit: NASA’s MAVEN orbiter, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and Mars Odyssey. The European Space Agency (ESA) operates Mars Express and Trace Gas Orbiter. India’s Mars Orbiter Mission is also still orbiting and transmitting information. 
    The United Arab Emirates launched its probe called Hope on July 20, 2020, from the Tanegashima Space Center in Japan. Their goal is to provide scientists with a complete picture of the Martian atmosphere. They promise to share the data. As of last week, Hope is on a two-earth-year orbit around Mars.  
    China’s spacecraft also arrived in Martian orbit last week. It's preparing to send a lander and robotic rover to the surface later this year. 
    Everyone is working to help us Earthlings learn about the Martian atmosphere, its landscape, seismic activity, how the planet has changed over time and if life has ever existed there. 
    Maybe we’ll even learn a little more about ourselves along the way.
    Here are the first pictures sent back by Perseverance. https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/images/ Hover over the image to get a description. Click and see a larger image and the narrative explanation written by NASA.
                                               --stay curious! (and look up)

    Dear Gazelle,
        … You make me want to be the best ox I can be, so I thank you again. You are the unflattering light of my life.
            XO,
            Ox
                                            from XO, Ox: A Love Story
                                                    written by Adam Rex
                                           illustrated by Scott Campbell
                                             Roaring Brook Press, 2017

    I’m not unfamiliar with the lunar year. Jewish holidays are based on the lunar calendar and each Israeli month begins with a new moon. Each month in the twelve-month year is 29 or 30 days long. To compensate for the shorter year, a leap month is added seven times during a 19-year cycle. This adjustment ensures the holidays fall during the correct season, making them seem to come “early” or “late” in the Gregorian calendar we are all used to.
    The traditional Islamic calendar is also tied to the lunar cycle. Like the Hebrew calendar, the sum of their twelve lunar months is eleven days shorter than the solar year. Without the use of corrective mechanisms like leap days and leap months to synchronize the lunar calendar with the solar one, Muslim holidays occur earlier and earlier in each solar year. But that is not important. Time is time. A month is as long as a month is. Holidays occur in their appropriate month, no matter what the season. 
    Chinese years are based on the lunar calendar, too. The New Year begins on the first new moon after the Winter Solstice. Like the Hebrew and Islamic calendars, the traditional Chinese calendar uses a twelve-month cycle of 29- or 30- day months and compensates by adding a whole month when needed to keep the months in their proper seasons. 
    We recently (February 12, 2021) entered the Year of the Ox. Knowing the name of the year is only a small fraction of the complexity of the Chinese Zodiac and the astrology determined by it, though. Stars are aligned or not with each other. Particular signs can be auspicious or not, depending on many factors. The Feng Shui Institute offers an overview of how to read the Chinese Zodiac. https://www.feng-shui-institute.org/Chinese_Astrology/interpretation.html 
    It would be interesting, but more complex than I’m willing to consider right now, to compare a reading using the Greek Zodiac we are familiar with along side the traditional Chinese Zodiac. Just sayin’.
    According to https://www.chineasy.com/the-characteristics-of-each-chinese-zodiac/, in Chinese culture, oxen are symbols of wealth, prosperity, diligence, and perseverance. They are quiet, steadfast, and methodical.
    The five elements, metal, water, wood, fire, and earth, contribute to our understanding, too, and help determine how we will all fair during this Year of the Ox. This being a metal year, we celebrate the Metal Ox. Attributes of metal include firmness, rigidity, persistence, strength, and determination, self-reliance, and sophistication.
    Combine the qualities of an ox with the qualities of metal, and people who are metal oxen are said to be hardworking, active, always busy, and popular among friends. Barak Obama is a metal ox. 
    Looking ahead to our Metal Ox year, we might expect an emphasis on metallurgy (Jewelry? Cars? Hammers, nails and I-beams?) and a focus on diligence, wealth, and a quiet, methodical movement forward. 
    Many traditions help usher in the New Year. Preparations begin early. On the 26th day of the previous month, festive cakes and puddings are served. They symbolize wishes for improvement and growth in the coming year. A thorough cleaning is done on the 28th day of the previous month, and welcome banners are hung on the 29th. Family reunion dinners take place on New Year’s Eve. The menu is important. Foods associated with luck, like fish and puddings as well as food that mimics gold ingots, like dumplings are often served.
    Some families stay awake past midnight to welcome the New Year as soon as it arrives.
    Parents give red money envelopes to their children.
    People parade in the streets.
    Here in the West we say “Chinese New Year,” but the holiday is celebrated in many Asian nations including Viet Nam, South Korea, Thailand, and Malaysia. 
    The New Year celebration culminates on the fifteenth day of the holiday (this year February 26), when the Lantern Festival is celebrated. Many cities around the world still put on massive lantern displays and fairs on the final day of the festival. Some cities shoot up fireworks.
    In this year of COVID-19, most festivities both in cities and families have been cancelled or curtailed.
    On February 26, I won’t wash or cut my hair. I could be washing or cutting away my luck in the New Year. I won’t sweep my house or clean anything. That might destroy the good luck that arrived just after midnight. The Chinese word for "book" (shū) sounds exactly the same as the word for "lose" so giving a book as a gift or even reading a book yourself is an invitation for loss. That will be hard for me. I wonder if reading on my tablet counts?
    I’ll will wear red, a lucky color, and some jewelry to honor the metal in my life. I’ll ponder my many gifts that make me feel grateful.
                                          -—stay curious! (and celebrate)

    But he still pulled up the weeds around it every day and sprinkled the ground with water.
    And then, one day, a carrot came up just as the little boy had known it would.
                                               from The Carrot Seed
                                               written by Ruth Krauss
                                       illustrated by Crocket Johnson
                                                 Harper and Row, 1945

    My grandmother saved her seeds from year to year and planted her whole backyard, part of her front yard, and that little grassy strip between the gravel on her driveway with vegetables and flowers. I don’t know what happened to her seeds when she passed away. I’m pretty sure neither of my aunts took them. I know my mom didn’t. So they and their progeny are lost to obscurity.
    On a grand scale, forward thinkers devised a way to protect the world’s food crops from falling into oblivion. In 1996, the first Global Plan of Action for conserving and using crop diversity was adopted by 150 countries. In 2004, the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture was put into place to help support this global system in a sustainable way. The Crop Trust was born and its Seed Vault opened in 2008.
    The Svalbard Global Seed Vault houses seeds of over one million crop varieties from over 5,000 species. The seeds arrive from countries the world over and are catalogued and stored deep inside a mountain halfway between Norway and the North Pole in a $9,000,000 structure. The permafrost, thick rock, and low humidity ensure the safety of the seeds, even if the Vault loses power. 
    From their website, “The Crop Trust is the only organization whose sole mission is to ensure humanity conserves and makes available the world’s crop diversity for future food security.” https://www.croptrust.org/about-us/  
    The Crop Trust and the International Rice Research Institute signed a long-term partnership agreement in 2018. In it, the Crop Trust agrees to fully fund the essential operations of the IRRI genebank forever. From their website https://www.irri.org/our-work “IRRI works toward finding solutions for the world’s biggest challenges and contributing to the UN Sustainable Development Goals.” They fight hunger, poverty, and inequality while working toward responsible consumption and production, climate recovery, and good health and well being.
    Besides working with the IRRI and governments around the world to develop crop conservation strategies, the Crop Trust studies how we can sustain ourselves in light of population growth and the changing climate. Their Crop Wild Relatives Project is a global long-term effort to collect, conserve, and use wild relatives of cultivated crops to develop food crops that will thrive during the changes our climate is undergoing.
    Crop diversity ensures food security, helps adapt to our changing climate, reduces environmental degradation, protects nutritional security, reduces poverty, and ensures sustainable agriculture. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is an insurance policy of sorts, to back up the many seed banks all over the world serving to ensure crop diversity. 
    My daughter sent me one of the most interesting sources for seeds. It’s not a seed bank or a warehouse. It’s a seed lending library. Located in the Concord, MA Library’s Fowler Branch, patrons are encouraged to check out a packet of seeds (5 packet limit) and grow them. They encourage, but don’t insist the growers reserve a couple of their best plants, allow them to “go to seed” and return their harvested seeds back to the library. This will help the seed lending library become self-sustaining. https://concordlibrary.org/resources/concord-seed-lending-library 
    Another website lists seed lending libraries from all over the world. Unfortunately, while over 80 locations are listed, you can’t search by location to easily find one close to you. https://www.seedsoftimemovie.com/find_seed_libraries It’s an interesting browse, though, and while you’re there, you can watch the Seeds of Time documentary. 
    During the Cold War years of the 1950s, my dad thought it would be a good idea to dig a shelter in our backyard, just in case. He didn’t do it. I’ve seen enough apocalypse movies and read enough books to know that if someone dropped a massive bomb, I would not have to worry. I’d be dead along with everyone important to me, probably. 
    But even if the ice melts and sea levels rise, the Global Seed Vault, at 426 feet above sea level, is high enough to be out of the water, even in a worst case scenario. And the permafrost will keep the seeds cold. 
    Seed samples sent to the Vault stay in possession of the country that sent them. The first withdrawal was made in 2015 by Syria who had been storing seeds since 2012. Thirty-eight thousand seeds were removed by researchers and sent to Lebanon and Morocco. The Syrian non-profit organization that contributed the seeds moved to new quarters after rebel forces took over their area of Aleppo. The organization, the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) continues to deposit seeds, coming now from their new locations. They also continue to withdraw seeds, as necessary. https://www.croptrust.org/press-release/vault-continues-prove-value-world/
    The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is "owned and administered by the Ministry of Agriculture and Food on behalf of the Kingdom of Norway and is established as a service to the world community." https://www.wur.nl/en/show/CGN-seeds-in-the-Svalbard-Global-Seed-Vault-FAQs.htm  In case of famine due to war or natural disaster, we'll be able to start over.
    Good to know. 
                             -—stay curious! (and plan your garden)

Bird:  Everything looks spectacular from a space shuttle, I bet.
Judith Resnik:  That’s true.
Bird:  What’s it like, anyway?
Judith Resnik:  It’s like being far away and close at the same time. Floating in a world that belongs only to you, but also belongs to everyone else.
                                            from: We Dream of Space
                          written and illustrated by Erin Entrada Kelly
                                               Greenwillow Books, 2020

    It’s sometimes hard for me to see the big picture. Whether it’s deciding on the structure of a novel I’m working on or changing up my grocery shopping habits from daily trips to a weekly (or longer) plan, sometimes I get lost in the details of the trees, so to speak, instead of taking in the whole experience of the forest. 
    But, some people are naturally big picture thinkers.
    Frank White is one. Mr. White is a Harvard graduate and Rhodes Scholar. He has a Master of Philosophy Degree in politics and, in 1987, coined the term “Overview Effect.” His book of the same name is in its 4th edition. He interviewes many astronauts and cosmonauts and reads their writings to help him describe the life-changing effect of viewing Earth from outer space or the moon. Simply put, the Overview Effect expresses a feeling of awe for our planet and an overwhelming desire to work for its protection. It becomes an almost universal mindset of those lucky enough to have experienced space travel.
    Less than a year before White published the 1st edition of his book, the Challenger space shuttle exploded killing everyone on board, six astronauts and one teacher. People were questioning why we were putting so many resources, time and money as well as human life, into a program that experienced more than its share of tragic setbacks. As he tried to articulate an answer, White discovered Space Philosophy. He asked the fundamental question many were asking but no one was answering, “What is the purpose of space exploration?” His partial answer, “the Human Space Program will engage all of us as ‘Citizens of the Universe.’” That answer is more fully developed in his 2018 book, Cosma Hypothesis: Implications of the Overview Effect.
    Most of us will not have the opportunity to rocket to the moon or Mars, or spend time exploring outer space. The question for me, then, is how to translate this experience for us, the everyday citizens of the universe. How to feel that awe, show empathy to our neighbors near and far, and become motivated to help Earth survive when our feet are firmly planted and gravity and inertia work to hold us here. 
    Even though it’s been around for over 30 years, I’ve noticed a spate of articles on the Overview Effect recently. Others must be on my wave length. 
    In its January/February 2021 publication, the Sierra Club quoted astronaut Ron Garan, “[Earth] looks like a living, breathing organism. But it also, at the same time, looks extremely fragile.” https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2021-1-january-february/books/big-picture-benjamin-grant-overview-timelapse 
    On June 3, 2020, Dave Mosher of Business Insider quoted NASA astronaut, Bob Behnken, “You see that it's a single planet with a shared atmosphere. It's our shared place in this universe.”
    In the same article, Mosher tells his readers, “Psychologists say the effect isn't just a matter of idle curiosity, but perhaps an essential part of maintaining mental health on long-duration space missions.” https://www.businessinsider.com/astronauts-describe-overview-effect-seeing-earth-from-space-emotions-feelings-2020-6 
    Could a similar mind-set help us maintain our own mental health right here in our everyday lives? Help us spend a little more time looking outward to the universe and each other and a little less time looking inward to all those everyday problem out of our control?
    And in August, 2020, https://spacecenter.org/photo-gallery-the-overview-effect/ posted a photo gallery on its blog. The images are spectacular, awe-inspiring, and worth the click. 
    You may not be as awed as an astronaut, you may not feel their overwhelming urge to protect our fragile home, or become more empathetic to friends and neighbors, but the change in perspective was enlightening for me! 
    Here’s what I wrote in this space on July 23, 2019 in a post about food waste:
    “From the distance of outer space, it is easy to understand that boundaries between countries are drawn by people. It is easy to imagine oceans and jungles teaming with life. Harder, though, to remember that everything is finite.”
    Everything is finite, though. And change is our only constant.
                              -—stay curious! (and keep looking up)
                         Happy Groundhog Day!!