And, yeah, so Curiosity sent those first images of Mars Earthward fourteen minutes later and in seeing the rocky Arizona-like surface of a place so unimaginably distant that my brain had no relevant way of calculating it, and with Jeremy, the physicist, explaining why you could really only travel to Mars every two years when the Red Planet reached its closest proximity to Earth, and why the magnitude of sending a manned mission may be so onerous that there's talk of the first explorers basically signing up for a one-way trip, but there will no doubt be volunteers for such a grim undertaking because that's the nature of us, and it makes you think about how many early humans, in order to leave the Asian continent and populate the distant islands of Indonesia and beyond to the most remote destinations in the Pacific, must have set off in rickety canoes and never returned before there was any promise of other lands. But still they went, right? We know they did. And in this, there's something almost mystical—that no matter our limitations, no matter the sheer volume of sins and cruelty we've visited upon each other over the millennia, there is still that light of consciousness that compels us, that makes irresistible the continued journey both outward and inward, that the light will never go out as long as curiosity resides within, and if that puts a jagged little stone in your throat that, perhaps, totally inadvertently, leads to an errant welling in your eyes, it's appropriate and completely okay.