Out of this World

It's 300 million miles away!

How can we be such idiots on the face of the earth? I mean all the useless killing, the king's ransom countries pay for weapons and killing instead of for human needs, the heedless pollution of our planet, and our determination to destroy ourselves by continuing to heat up the Earth until it cooks us all. And then one day the news tells you that human beings have succeeded in landing a craft on the surface of a comet speeding towards the sun at over 34,000 mph. Landing a craft from an orbiter of the comet which has been there for a number of weeks. An orbiter that took ten years to rendezvous with this comet. This kind of thing truly takes my breath away. How is it that creatures who can do this--and not just do it, but have a burning desire to do it--cannot figure out how to live in peace with their fellow man on the only home we have?

This mission, carried out by the European space agency, promises to provide tons of information we don't have now about the composition, makeup, and behavior of these plenteous citizens of the solar system. They hold keys to the origins of the universe itself. Wow. Stupendous.