Google Earth has a new friend: the universe, right here on your screen.
Google Sky allows you to tour the celestial canopy. I think. I've tried downloading four times and still it quits "unexpectedly" (Send Report?). I've been as thrilled as the next person about the stuff coming from Google Labs, though Google Street, the (potential?) Peeping Tom, has me quite worried (likewise, Google Print, copyright laws and all). But I love the sky idea. I love the sky. Having pointed around the whole globe and now the whole universe, what's next? Google Me, Inside Version--Google Body?
Update: I am far from the first to think of Google Body, I've just discovered. One way that people get to blogs is through searches on topics (duh) - and it turns out that someone searched on Google Body, which got them here, which I then reverse engineered and have found these posts that reach all the way back to...March 2007.
Photo, Fly Me to the Moon, Kaikoura, New Zealand, 11 PM, March 5, 2007; for an excerpt from "A Long Prayer for New Zealand," read on.
From "A Long Prayer for New Zealand," an essay written while I was there:
The South Star (March 5, 2007)—It is a full summer moon on the fifth of March, Orion overhead, the Southern Cross to the east, the Pleiades setting in the west, so much light in the sky that the constellation Virgo (Miranda’s) and Jay’s Taurus and my Castor and Pollux are faint—if that. The very Milky Way is but a smudge.
It’s nearly ten at night by the time we reach the farm set high on a hill outside Kaikoura, far from the lights of the small village on the east coast of the South Island. The guide has set up a large telescope surrounded by small folding stools, one for each person on the Kaikoura Night Sky Tour, and brought along a thermos of hot tea (“Anyone take milk?” he asks). A horse behind the fence in the field whinnies in the moonlight as Hussein, the self-trained astronomer, streaks his laser pointer across the sky, educating us aliens from the Northern Hemisphere in the fine points of light in these heavens. I’ve seen the Southern Sky only once before—on the night the astronauts first landed on the moon, but while I remember clearly the handsome Mexican boys who were entertaining us, I have no recall of the Southern Cross.
Hussein looks as much like the person his name conjures up as I resemble him: a tall blonde Adonis with a British accent. I don’t have the nerve (though certainly the urge is strong) to investigate his background. But I’m never afraid to ask the stupid question, which the children remind me of rather frequently. When Hussein asks, You all know why the tidal swell fluctuates, yes, others nod, but, I, the village idiot, hazard a guess or two: Heat? Gravity? I see my kids, both well schooled in astronomy, raise their hands to their brows and avert their eyes, as Hussein politely explains the force of gravity to me. He’s not the first man to try and will certainly not be the last.
Would anyone like to see Saturn? Hussein has trained the telescope on the planet near the edge of the solar system. This much I know—oh, heavens, this can’t be right—what about Uranus or Jupiter or the once and future demoted Pluto (“never forget”)?
The night sky makes me tremble. The first time my star-aware then-boyfriend-now-husband toured me through the heavens as we stood on the frozen Lake Winnipesaukee, I trembled.
No numerical system accounts for billions of universes, googles of galaxies, and the infinitesimally speckish significance such suggest to our own lives. Quarkishness, leptrons, string theory all throw their hats in the ring to explain but none really helps. The reality of the nanoscale on which our lives balance is only to feel not describe. My mind floods with a memory from sixth-grade science when the teacher suggests that our entire universe may only be a molecule in the leg of a small chair in another world, which has worried me ever since: What if the chair leg breaks—or, worse, someone throws it in the fire?
I am ready for Saturn: I put my face to the eyepiece and there is the spheroid with its icy rings, a tiny cartoon in the telescope. I can’t control my “oh my gods” and the children’s hands are at their brows again.
And then La Luna, the full luna, with its blemishes from eons of strikes from cosmic debris: the Sea of Tranquility, the pocks. “Look at the edge,” Jay says. He too could be a cosmic guide: the edge of the moon as if it has been pared or sculpted or peeled, rippled against the black of space.
As I travel to New Zealand, more than a day’s worth of continuous flights, my descendants will travel there and beyond, to the unknown mysteries of universe, to civilizations of nameless people-oids, to the edge of the indefinite.
