Tonight we were at the library, as I needed to pick up an inter library loan book. As per usual they had a table of old books for sale, which I was flipping through.

One of those books was “Astronomy”, published some time in the early 1970s. Towards the center were some really fuzzy pictures of Mars and Saturn. And it occurred to me. This was prior to the Viking missions, and the Voyager missions. In 1970 our understanding of even our own solar system was incredible elementary.

As I now look at beautiful images taken by Hubble over the last decade, it’s hard to believe how recent all this knowledge really is, and how much more we are sure to discover.