News
ENLARGE
Good morning and welcome to Summit Up, the world's only daily column wishing it could be a painted lady butterfly. For one thing, we just love the idea of carefree fluttering from blossom to blossom, collecting pollen. Aside from avoiding the occasional hungry robin, we envision this as being pretty close to the ideal life, taking the best that nature has to offer without having to worry about deadlines, mortgages and car insurance.
And secondly, as we see it, it could be our only chance to fulfill a lifelong dream and travel into outer space.
MILLIONS OF SUMMIT READERS: “What? Outer space? That's, like, so 20th century. Haven't you heard? The new frontier is inner space. We're going to clean up all our ghettoes, put a Buick in every garage, a chicken in every pot and make sure that all our kids are getting straight A's before we even start thinking about outer space again.”
SUMMIT UP: Buicks? Are you kidding? Besides, mankind — and butterfly-dom — is destined to journey into the universe. It's inevitable.
And as a next step in that journey, several painted butterfly larvae will travel into orbit aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis, with liftoff scheduled for Nov. 16.
The larvae are from the Butterfly Pavilion in Westminster, a well-known field trip destination for Summit County schools.
The idea, according to a press release from the pavilion, is to observe their life cycles and behaviors in microgravity.
We're not exactly sure why they chose butterflies for this experiment, seeing as how these delicate creatures already seem to exist
in their own anti-gravitational dimension. We're thinking they could have picked something with some mass to it, like a banana slug or a sea cucumber, but we're good with butterfly larvae. It's so, so ... Kafkaesque, what with the transformational allegories.
Maybe that's what the space program needs to become sexier in the eyes of the public again, some good space literature, ya know. Enough of this green-skinned alien-with-a-ray-gun stuff. We need to send some of our best writers into space and let them come up with New Stuff — think Hemingway on the moon.
Visitors to the pavilion during the latter half of November will be able to follow the experiments in real-time as part of a special butterflies in space exhibit, comparing the Atlantis butterflies to a control group kept at the pavilion. According to the folks at the pavilion, some of the information will be used as NASA plans manned expeditions to Mars.
How cool is that?
We out, cocooning!
And secondly, as we see it, it could be our only chance to fulfill a lifelong dream and travel into outer space.
MILLIONS OF SUMMIT READERS: “What? Outer space? That's, like, so 20th century. Haven't you heard? The new frontier is inner space. We're going to clean up all our ghettoes, put a Buick in every garage, a chicken in every pot and make sure that all our kids are getting straight A's before we even start thinking about outer space again.”
SUMMIT UP: Buicks? Are you kidding? Besides, mankind — and butterfly-dom — is destined to journey into the universe. It's inevitable.
And as a next step in that journey, several painted butterfly larvae will travel into orbit aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis, with liftoff scheduled for Nov. 16.
The larvae are from the Butterfly Pavilion in Westminster, a well-known field trip destination for Summit County schools.
The idea, according to a press release from the pavilion, is to observe their life cycles and behaviors in microgravity.
We're not exactly sure why they chose butterflies for this experiment, seeing as how these delicate creatures already seem to exist
in their own anti-gravitational dimension. We're thinking they could have picked something with some mass to it, like a banana slug or a sea cucumber, but we're good with butterfly larvae. It's so, so ... Kafkaesque, what with the transformational allegories.
Maybe that's what the space program needs to become sexier in the eyes of the public again, some good space literature, ya know. Enough of this green-skinned alien-with-a-ray-gun stuff. We need to send some of our best writers into space and let them come up with New Stuff — think Hemingway on the moon.
Visitors to the pavilion during the latter half of November will be able to follow the experiments in real-time as part of a special butterflies in space exhibit, comparing the Atlantis butterflies to a control group kept at the pavilion. According to the folks at the pavilion, some of the information will be used as NASA plans manned expeditions to Mars.
How cool is that?
We out, cocooning!
