Day 33 - My fascination for space

Since I was in the 6th or 7th standard I have always been fascinated by space and its limitless potential. I moved from Ahmedabad to Mumbai in the 6th standard and joined school mid-way. A group of friends used to discuss Kepler's laws and Saturn's rings and I could not join in the conversation. So I started to read up about them and got hooked for life. I went back and told them about the gaps in Saturn's rings and from them on I was hooked to the stars.

As I grew older my fascination grew for space travel and its potential to free human race from the Earth. In this fertile environment came STAR WARS from George Lucas. Imagine a 9 year old boy who is just discovering space and liking it, sitting inside a theater and seeing his imagination come to life. Space travel, fights, aliens of different kinds, humans.......WOW......and in all that such imaginative characters as Darth Vader and Jabba the Hutt! Star Wars laid the foundation of my scifi fascination. Even today I am a huge kid when it comes to Star Wars and all my friends and family know that.

I have dragged my friends to Star Wars movies where they have rolled their eyes while I have been engrossed in the movie. In fact when Star Wars - Revenge of the Sith was premiered in India and I had the tickets, my wife could not come with me. So I called up a friend and I told her that I can take you to this movie but you have to understand that I may not talk to you when the movie is going on and I may potentially ignore you completely. I had goose bumps when Anakin Skywalker finally becomes Darth Vader.

In my workplace a small corner of my desk is occupied by the characters of Star Wars and this will only grow.

This fascination was also fueled by TV series like Star Trek at an early age and then Farscape later on.

The next logical step was books and Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke gave wings to my imagination. I still call them my gurus. While Asimov's Foundation and Robot series painted the life opera and the fight of good-v/s-evil on a galactic canvas, Clarke's Odessey and Rama series raised ethical questions about humans and aliens. I loved (and still do) them immensely and even today will pick up scifi book over any other.

My fascination is such that three of my '10 things to do before I die' have something to do with space!

You may call it an escapist thing or you may label it as a dream to break free, but for me space and space travel is about the immense potential for human life to go beyond the 'cradle' of Earth and explore this huge galaxy and universe that has been given to us. I find it absolutely impossible that we are in this obscure corner of this lonely galaxy and that we are the only intelligent beings in the universe.

Skeptics say that we have not found any inkling of intelligent life out there in the universe. But this is similar to us being a small tribe in the deepest jungles of Amazon and thinking that we are the only ones when just a few thousand Kms away there are skyscrapers, neon lights and technology far beyond our imagination. We just need to find the path that will lead us from the deepest Amazon jungle to a village nearby and from them to a city and a town and the capital of the country. What the Amazon tribes count in footsteps, we count in light years.

Its just a matter of time!!