Next Stop: New Dirt.

As our lives unfold on this Earth, there are events that transpire that leave indelible marks on us. Moments frozen in time, left to bounce around our existence and surface at various intervals. Moments so profound, monumental, or tragic that we likely have no problem answering the question "Where were you when..." For me, among those moments, there is one that stands out. One that exemplifies one attribute of Humanity. The Challenger disaster.

Since Adam and Eve were sent out of the garden of Eden, Mankind has had a compulsion to explore, a desire to see what is on the other side of that hill even if it is only more dirt. Because it is unexplored dirt and that, for some reason intrigues us, draws us to see, to learn, to experience something new. We see this drive throughout history in big and small ways. From our first bicycle that allowed us to reach beyond the distance we could walk into the world, to names like Marco Polo, Ernest Shackleton, and Henry Hudson who stretched Mankind's knowledge to the ends of the Earth. But this drive to expand and explore has even flavored many of our television shows. Star Trek. Firefly, Wagon Train. Battlestar Galactica. Stargate. Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Little House on the Prairie. Seaquest DSV. Lost in Space. The Man From Atlantis, and others have had the exploration of various frontiers somewhere in their makeup. 

"In fourteen hundred and ninety two…" say it with me "… Columbus sailed the ocean, blue." Most of us learned that little poem in grade school but did you know that the largest of Columbus' four explorations consisted of like 17 ships and about 1500 crew? Even if you knew that, I bet you did not know that some 60 years earlier, the Chinese Admiral Zheng had 317 ships some of them 10 times the size of Columbus’ and 27,000 crew! These Chinese ships plied the seas of Southeast Asia, sailed to India, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and down the East Coast of Africa and possibly even touched the Americas decades before Columbus.

Considering this, shouldn't we all be wearing silk robes and eating with 2 sticks of bamboo? The reason we are not is because around 1430 A.D. China decided to build a wall and close themselves off from the rest of the world in xenophobic isolation. They gave up their thirst for discovery and instead became doomed to be themselves discovered. It becomes obvious that squelching the call of exploration means stagnation of a society.

There is a line from the movie Interstellar that I find very applicable. "Mankind was born on this planet, but we were never meant to die on it." I wonder if the script writer really knew how true that statement is, even if not in the way they meant it. This world is our cradle, our playpen, our yard fenced in by moments of Time. We spend our "celestial childhood" here, learning what we can about how we fit into God's plan so we'll be better prepared when it comes time to "shuffle off this mortal coil" and enter the true reality of Heaven.

On this day, 30 years ago, 7 people gave their lives in the pursuit of exploration. Seven more names to add to the list of courageous explorers. Seven more names to challenge a new generation of explorers. 
Don't forget them: Sharon Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, Judith A. Resnik, Francis R. (Dick) Scobee, Ronald E. McNair, Mike J. Smith, Ellison S. Onizuka