Les Trains de Projectiles pour la Lune

Discovery — to wander in search of the unimaginable, to get lost trying to find the pearly gates of a new world — that is the gold of the adventurer. Here I sit, safe and steady, born too late to explore our planet's life and too soon to explore others. Sitting at the window and staring at the port, a child's imagination is stirred by the berthing ships, all those stories from another world coming to shore — wild animals, a diving mountain, colossal monuments, treasures unseen, what could those sailors tell about all that's hidden by the sea? Growing up, Jules Verne's imagination kept peeking through the window. The yen for adventure led him to give up on a law career, leading him not to the other side of the world, but to all the corners of the library. Though his tales accurately described many cultures and sites, even predicting technological advancements such as rockets and submarines, he owed the precision of his conjectures to intense research, friends among the scientific community, and a prodigious imagination. The illustrations of Verne's books, including those by today's artist, likewise stirred the imagination. 

By way of comparison, the Hudson River School was an inspired group of painters based in New York. By the middle of the 19th century there was still a lot of North America still unknown to settlers and the wider world, and so these painters aimed to find and depict the hidden beauty of the new continent. Imagine what it would be like to come across the Upper Geyser Basin, to see all those crazy colors, the insanity of the scenario, almost alien for a new eye. They wanted people to believe such places existed, but also for them to feel fascinated; thus, huge canvases were painted in a subtle mixture of realism and romanticism, not unlike de Montaut's depiction of a voyage to a far-off moon. Not even Jules Verne could imagine that someday, touching a lighted glass that fits in a pocket, a child could travel via real images to any part of the globe. The world that the Hudson River School tried to show is now easily viewable via Google Earth, but as magical as it might seem to navigate by Street View, it appears to me that the wonder of absolute discovery has been lost. It is hard to be surprised when all the expectations have been managed, all the places visited. So it was with great excitement that I waited for NASA's announcement this week, which revealed that plumes of water have been sighted on Europa, a small, ice-covered moon orbiting Jupiter. 

In the 1970's scientist came to the conclusion that some life forms, as an alternative for photosynthesis, exist by chemosynthesis — gathering energy regardless of sunlight. So it is especially exciting to hear that Europa, one of Jupiter's moons suspected for some years to contain frozen water, has eruptions composed of water vapor. It gets us closer to discovering that there is liquid water underneath the outer ice layer — a key element to sustain life (at least for life as we know it). Who knows but someday soon a crew of intrepid adventurers will land on Europa and travel within some Jules Verne-like submachine inside the ice capsule, seeing for the first time ever the answer for one of the ultimate questions: Are we alone in this universe? Oh, what an epiphany that would be. 

- Artur Deus Dionisio. 

Thank you, Mark, for inspiring today's description :)