An expansion of the universe invisible to the eyes, someone called it. Here is something to wonder about, scratching the surface of an itch to know about other life, other lives. But we haven’t even scratched it yet, someone is always saying, regarding the surface of knowing. Good point, considering how it’s piled thick with questions and hardware: scopes, coronagraphs, spectrometers, and I don’t know the names for the odds and ends you can hang off any of the little hooks and Velcro patches: soil samplers, wave detectors, and whatever that thing is that measures the acceleration of entropy or the relative distance between stars. Both of these are apparently on the increase, but so is the rate at which we can proliferate tools, such that it’s hard not to wonder if the question of the moment doesn’t have at least something to do with finding some limits, the way children looking for structure will push and push, looking for the moment when someone comes in to say, No, that’s enough, which is code, in certain contexts, for You’re safe. Stop here. Set those down. Rest.
