As one year ends and another begins, sometimes it’s best to focus neither on the frustrations of the old or the worries about the new, but instead on things that can be unifying and inspirational any year and anywhere. Perhaps by happenstance, that’s exactly what three stories did on a single page of the Dec. 28 New Orleans Advocate.
The first story told of two men, American Colin O’Brady and British trekker Louis Rudd, who hiked separately across the entire continent of Antarctica without aid of wind or resupply. Others had died in prior attempts, but O’Brady accomplished the feat on Dec. 26 and Rudd finished two days later. (Both had begun their journeys on Nov. 3.)
The second story was the quirky one: “Man tries to cross Atlantic in barrel.” Yes, you read that right: A 71-year-old Frenchman (71!!) has set out on a 2,800-mile journey from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean in a plywood barrel, 10 feet by 7 feet, complete with a (very) tiny kitchen area. There are no steering mechanisms. Jean-Jacques Savin will rely on ocean currents alone to propel him across the sea.
The third and (I think) most important story on the page was about NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, which was to pass within 2,200 miles of a tiny celestial body called Ultima Thule — the farthest-away world yet reached by a human-created object. Ultima Thule is a billion miles beyond Pluto, an astonishing four billion miles from Earth. NASA has now been broadcasting photos of the orbiting rock-ball since early January, while seven instruments on New Horizons amass scientific data.
This little machine NASA sent into the heavens nearly 13 years ago, moving at a mind-boggling 31,500 miles per hour, can still respond to human command, compile data, and send us pictures from an object so small and far away we didn’t even know it existed until it was discovered by the massive Hubble Space Telescope — itself a technological tour de force — in 2014.
In other words, New Horizons already was eight years on its journey to Pluto before man even knew Ultima Thule existed, yet our remote-control engineers sitting in Cape Canaveral could alter the small ship’s path to pay the rock-ball a visit. As the Associated Press story in the Advocate explained, this fly-by will let mankind analyze “a preserved relic dating all the way back to our solar system’s origin 4.5 billion years ago.”
Stories like these teach us that the God-given mind and will of man can be glories to behold.
