An obsession with space

I’ve been a little obsessed lately.  Not in a bad way, but in a very good way.  The planning of the Rocket Fox series has helped, in a large way, stir my interest in something I hadn’t thought of in a long, long time.

I’m obsessed with space.

Some might think it’s that vast emptiness of nothing, but I see it more as the opportunity to explore.  That exploration either comes in the form of books or television series or movies.  Even video games and art.  Some of the greatest pieces of art come in the form of starscapes.

Some of those images are either composites of the Hubble telescope or images from the mind of an artist who has an idea of what some distant galaxy might look like.

Composite of images of the active galaxy Messier 82 from the three Great Observatories: Hubble Space Telescope, Chandra X-Ray Observatory, and Spitzer Space Telescope. X-ray data recorded by Chandra appears here in blue, infrared light recorded by Spitzer appears in red. Hubble's observation of hydrogen emission appears in orange. Hubble's bluest observation appears in yellow-green. Photo: NASA, ESA, CXC, and JPL-Caltech

 

Firefox space red desktop wallpaper. Rather fitting, actually, for what I've been working on. Click the image to see a bunch more desktop wallpapers under the theme of space.

Of course, there’s also been a renewed interest in watching television again.  I’d grown really tired of television lately.  Nothing had really piqued my interest.  There was Battlestar Galactica, if only because I remember watching it as a kid, and I’ve been watching that a little bit.  But I’ve also been watching a lot of the different Star Trek series.  Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise.  Even a few of the movies, including the most recent one.

There has also been video games, two of which include Star Trek Online (it is amazing to pilot a starship through the far reaches of the galaxy and explore) and Bioware’s Mass Effect Series.  The soundtrack for the latter I find incredibly amazing, and it’s actually helped me with my own writing.  Especially with Rocket Fox.

Champions Online has been helpful as well, if only to add a piece to that science fiction aspect.  There is a hideout in the game that places your characters on a moon base which is well crafted and looks as though they’ll be adding to it in the near future.

Swift Fox at the entrance of the moon base hideout.

Rocket Fox, in action apprehending criminals.

This has also been giving me a little bit of hope.  Hope for the future.  Space exploration can be seen that way, because it’s the last great frontier of exploration.  What’s out there, exactly?  Well, we know what some of it looks like, but we don’t know everything about it.  It is interesting to note that some recent discoveries, whether technology or announcements by NASA, were sort of predicted by science fiction.

Data pads in Star Trek look at lot like Kindles, Nooks and iPads now.  A planet discovered by NASA’s Kepler Telescope looks similar to Earth like conditions, and is described in a way similar to a description of a planet in Douglas Adams‘ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

An artist's concept of Kepler-22b, a roughly Earth-size world orbiting within the habitable zone of a sun-like star 600 light years from Earth. Click the image for more details. Credit NASA.

So there’s hope.  Maybe one day, some one will set foot on a distant planet similar to Earth.  Until then, there’s always science fiction.

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