To answer your question, David Bowie, no, this doesn’t mean that Curiosity scientists found life on Mars–only conditions suitable for it to exist. This is only the discovery of a setting, the stage for a primeval drama. But it’s still impressive. Mars is a huge planet and the Curiosity rover is a small, plodding thing, which cuts an unassuming profile as it diligently sifts through the dust. It moves gingerly across the landscape. It is a laborious little laboratory, and Mars is a huge jarring vista of red under a harsh, dark sky.

These discoveries, although tantalizingly vague, are testament to the power of properly applied technology: against all odds, on a distant planet we can only dream of visiting ourselves, Curiosity’s fiercely economical little corral of tools, leveraged in just the right manner, can reveal magnitudes. Pretty cool.

John Grotzinger, Mars Science Laboratory project scientist from the California Institute of Technology, celebrates the discovery of an ancient environment so benign that “probably if this water was around and you had been there, you would have been able to drink it.” It’s a satisfying mental image: instead of a souped-up golf cart preciously vaporizing pellets of rock, imagine scooping handfuls of Martian water from streams long since run dry. Your thirst slaked, you brush the red dust from your knees and stand to see the Earth, a significant blue dot on the horizon.

Which is why I’m so pleased to announce the existence of precisely such a little thing: my brand-new collection of essays and arcana, High Frontiers, fresh from the presses of Publication Studio:

High Frontiers brings together disparate pieces of my writing from all over the web, newly polished, lined up in a row, and illustrated: things that made their debut here on Universe, science fiction criticism and reviews from my sister blog, Space Canon, and articles originally penned for the World Science Foundation, Motherboard, SEED Magazine, and Rhizome.org. Subjects covered range from submersibles to mycology, surrealism, cyborgs, machine learning, love, and art on the moon; it includes interviews with Dr. Oliver Sacks, Trevor Paglen, and Ursula K. LeGuin, and a couple of weird poems, to be safe.

From the introduction:

Art, science, poetry, technology: these all create models for reality, chance forecasts for the future, incant their vision to the public, and ultimately inform complex nesting sets of shared truth. Science fiction is shockingly predictive, while science itself often demands broad suspension of disbelief. Those who seek to understand the ultimate nature of the universe are not only creating testable, theoretical models; increasingly, it’s the questions themselves which unite us. Where do we come from? How can something come from nothing?

Publication Studio is a press based in Portland, Oregon, with outposts all over North America. They print and bind beautiful books on demand, as well as maintain a digital commons where anyone can read and annotate books for free. I’m a big fan of what they do: Publication Studio is really a laboratory for publication in its fullest sense. As they say, they’re into “not just the production of books, but the production of a public.” High Frontiers is available for sale on their website, in physical and DRM-free eBook versions. The physical edition designed was laid out entirely by yours truly, with a cover design by Jona Bechtolt, and it’s a really delightful little object, a handsome addition to any self-respecting polymath’s home library.

In 2013, we may be on the tail end of print book-making in its traditional forms, and that’s a longer conversation. For the time being, I’m happy just make satisfying objects, and to find a marketplace in which to share them with people. Like Universe, this book is a labor of love, and your purchases support me (and Publication Studio) directly.

There’s the distance between people, who subconsciously space themselves apart, providing a reliable visual matrix of intimacy. It’s no coincidence we use the word “close” to describe our most intimate relationships: to whisper and caress, we draw near to one another, less than six inches apart. For chatter amongst personal friends, the norm ranges from 1.5 to four feet. The more estranged, the farther away we shrink. Social distance for interactions among acquaintances overlaps with the previous category, but ranges outwards to nearly twelve feet. Of course, we don’t always have the luxury of being in one another’s company: these days, intimates whisper sweet nothings across fiber-optic lines thousands of miles apart.

The study of these social distances, and their cultural fluctuations, is called proxemics, a term coined by the anthropologist Edward T. Hall. We’ve all experienced the lizard-brain unease of violated proxemic standards: the dreaded “close talker,” the gradual inching-away of cooled intimacy. These concentric circles are so engrained in our picture of normality that they seem to affect our relationship with the idea of distance, too. Things perceived at point-blank range–the faces of our loved ones, our direct sensorial and tactile experience–are comfortingly familiar. We are “close to” such closeness. Trusting, we allow the neighboring world to touch us, never pausing to question if perhaps (and why not?) the ground might suddenly cease to support our feet, or if the familiar push-back of haptic touch might dissolve to a vague nothingness.

Then there’s the distances of the global everyday, regularly collapsed: foreign stock markets, video conferences with traveling colleagues, news broadcasts from around the world, and our knowledge of people and places beyond our ability to sense directly. In the proxemic model, these might correlate with a tertiary circle–not intimate, but knowable. Although I have never seen the pyramids at Giza, I’m certain they exist. Unlike the ground beneath my sneakers, I don’t currently take them for granted, but they don’t seem impossible, either: I might conceivably, one day, stand at their cyclopean feet. I know people who have made the trip. The distance is broachable; it can be calculated in human-lengths.

But there are limits to comprehensible distance. A few exponential clicks away from our bodies–outwards to the cosmos, or inwards to the molecular world–and distance, as a human concept, loses all meaning. I’m reminded of the Ur-iconic Charles and Ray Eames film, Powers of Ten, which deals with this eventual sameness-in-quality of very small and very large scales: no matter if you go in or out, if you go far enough, distance plunges into an abstraction so total it is nearly impossible to hold in the mind. It’s like the very idea of infinity. When you picture such scales, as David Foster Wallace wrote in Everything and More, his excellent history of infinity, you “feel, almost immediately, a strain at the very root of yourself, the first popped threads of a mind starting to give at the seams.”

The prevailing cosmological model of the formation of everything (the Big Bang Theory, of course) posits that the physical universe began as a condensed point which exploded outwards throughout space and time, and which continues to expand. Feeling the insane magnitude of the universe is tantamount to understanding the massive forces underlying its expansion, because, of course, in the language of astronomy, distance is time. We measure objects’ distance by the time it takes their light to reach us; the farther away, the more ancient, the more complicit with the birth of time itself.

And the more our systems of seeing and knowing break down, incidentally. It’s in infrared that scientists peer, straining, at objects near the far edges of the cosmos–because the universe is still expanding, the farther away we look, the faster objects are moving away from us.

One of the strangest truths of astronomy is the notion that objects we see in the night sky–or through telescopes, for that matter–may no longer themselves exist, and that with truly distant things, we glimpse into the past. It’s strange precisely because we don’t associate time and distance with objects in the visible, tangible world; the pyramids aren’t old because they’re far away, after all. This is a variety of thinking about distance that is natural to science–intrinsic to our working theories of space and time–but which only applies to unthinkable scales.

When I attempt to conceive of, say, MACS0647-JD, the farthest known galaxy, I feel as though the energy which rent the universe has grasped me in its teeth and is whipping me like a rag-doll through space. I feel like I am falling at untold speeds. The distance itself is like a force. Even gazing at something visible, like Jupiter or Mars pinpricked in the night sky, feels not like standing at the foot of the pyramids but deep below them, cast into the black-pit of an immeasurable well from which I can barely see the sky.

So they built LOLA, or Lunar Orbit and Landing Approach, at Langley Space Center: a system of massive glowing murals and scale model-orbs criss-crossed with ribbons of track. In total darkness, pilots would ride in carts along the tracks, poised at relevant angles from the ersatz moons, and practice translunar approach and orbit establishment in a field of simulated stars, front-projected onto screens by a four-axis “star ball” mounted over the cabin.

The “cockpit,” a chair wedged into an overhead gantry, was equipped with a closed-circuit television which served as a monitor; the would-be Apollo pilot would peer at a painstakingly airbrushed cratered lunar surface slipping below on a revolving conveyor-belt. The LOLA Simulator was a huge project–setting NASA back $2 million at the time–a fair indicator of the effort (and resources) being poured into the space race in the early 1960s. It didn’t last long, though. The entire machine was dismantled not long after Apollo 11 graduated from fake moons to the real deal, when NASA discovered that the real difficulties for lunar pilots, namely the rendezvous with the Lunar Excursion Module, weren’t represented in the simulator.

I discovered this fragment of space history accidentally; archival photos of buttoned-up aerospace engineers silhouetted in dark rooms surrounded by false moons leapt out at me during routine image-searching. It’s beautiful and somehow sobering. A simulator is nominally technical, a tool designed to whittle the bracing effect of surprise into a manageable sliver. Pilots run simulations over and over again to prepare themselves, to commit to muscle memory the duties they might forget under duress, but one can never truly prepare for space. One can imagine it (we all do) and even learn to anticipate its constraints, but being human is inextricably bound to being on-planet. Blasting away is a great strangeness, and how can one ever be truly ready for it?

Most flight simulators, even the sophisticated ones pilots train on today, with their wild capacity for roll and yaw, recreate the experience of flight from within a contained cockpit. They are closed boxes of illusion. And since astronauts and pilots always have a task–a context to separate them from the inkiest black–the simulator is usually a task-practicing machine: how to take off, how to navigate contingencies, how to operate the heavy machinery. Except, maybe, LOLA wasn’t. Rather, LOLA seems like it served other purposes, too: not just a tool but an engulfing experience, a doorway into another world, a simulation of the more ineffable and unforeseeable eventualities of spaceflight.

I can’t help but be reminded of David Bowman, in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, coming across the famous black monolith in space and proclaiming, with stricken awe, ”The thing’s hollow—it goes on forever—and—oh my God—it’s full of stars!” An infinity, contained within something deceptively small: LOLA, the cosmos inside a building, in its analog glory, ushered pilots into such a picture. Alone in the darkness, cloaked in dots of light and suspended over a gleaming sphere, an astronaut could learn not only to land his craft, but to land his mind–softly, like a settling bird–on the moon.

Bonus: All this cosmic exploring is great, but once you land on the moon, you need to know how to navigate the terrain. Via the excellent Venue project of North American land exploration, check out this former lunar surface simulator in Arizona, built from a volcanic lakebed pockmarked with manmade craters. As space enthusiasts, we should mourn the loss of these incredible environments, so integral to the history of human exploration, the places where we took our first baby steps into space. As Geoff Manaugh writes, “an Offworld Landscapes National Park or National Monument is an incredible thing to contemplate.”

The average Louvre visitor generally spends about 15 seconds viewing the Mona Lisa. There are countless other images–ideas too–that share this aura-smashing cultural ubiquity. Who could give an unbiased critique of the Venus de Milo, or the Last Supper? Even the iconic “Earthrise” image of the whole Earth taken from space, which changed the world when it was first seen, is now little more than a bumper sticker. We always seek the new, in the arts, precisely because an overly familiar image conceals as much as it reveals; we become blind to the everyday. And the Mona Lisa trumps them all: by some unspoken consensus, it has always been the image with which the West represents its cultural legacy. It is easily the best known, quantifiably the most visited, and probably the most parodied work of art in the world. Now it holds the auspicious status of being the first piece of art beamed to the moon via laser.

The smiling Gioconda traveled nearly 240,000 miles in digital form from the Next Generation Satellite Laser Ranging (NGSLR) station at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, a robotic spacecraft currently in low orbit around the moon. By transmitting the image piggybacked on laser pulses routinely sent to track the craft’s position, the team achieved simultaneous laser communication and tracking–a first for one-way laser communication at planetary distances.

It seems we’re due for an update of Benjamin’s oft-cited essay. Perhaps The Work of Art in the Age of Optical Teleportation? Of course, the notion of flattening the complexity and totally specific context of a piece of art–in this case, 16th-century Florence–in order to transmit it, efficiently, across minds and generations like a winsome smiling cultural totem: well, it’s not that different from using compression to reduce a painting to its simplest numerical essence.

In order to make the cosmic transmission, the Mona Lisa had to be converted from a 500-year-old oil painting into a teensy 152 x 200 pixel array, each pixel of which was converted into a shade of gray, represented by a number between zero and 4,095 (the first fifty, presumably, were especially exciting). Each pixel was transmitted by a laser pulse, with the pulse being fired in one of 4,096 possible time slots during a brief time window allotted for laser tracking. The result: a data rate of about 300 bits per second. Not great for an internet connection, but then again, we’re talking about metamorphosing a priceless emblem of Western art into incorporeal units of measurement, destined to be launched on a river of light to a spacecraft hanging around the moon, so, not bad.

The glitches and errors caused by Earth’s atmosphere were tidied up with Reed-Solomon correction, which is the same compression coding we use for CDs and DVDs. Conceptually, this is nothing new. After all, the Mona Lisa currently pulses around the planet in digital form, bandied about on vast fiber-optic lattices under the sea and across the globe, all day every day. You’ve loaded her image just now, decoding my low-resolution desktop file from your home computer. Presumably, in the future, moon colonists and astronauts will be able to perform similar feats from desktops linked to the near-space laser Internet.

Walter Benjamin argues that the purpose of art can change over the years. An ancient sculpture or idol can begin its career as a cult object, central to a specific ritual use, and then grow to be appreciated aesthetically, historically, or forgotten entirely by different societies throughout time. “The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition,” he writes, “This tradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable.” The purpose of the Mona Lisa, in 1503, was simple: it was a sign of wealth, of patronage, and had a practical function, as a portrait of the wife of a middle-class silk merchant. Later, after the vagaries of history displaced it from Italy to pre-revolutionary France, it served to represent monarchical power; it wasn’t until the 20th century–after a highly-publicized theft and rediscovery, and lots of speculation–that it became the most famous painting in the world. That it started to belong to everyone. And, in suit, became a unit of communication itself.

Benjamin writes that “the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice–politics.” Why did NASA choose the Mona Lisa to beam up to space? It’s no simpler, technically, than any other image. The very specific and pointed choice of something so neutrally iconic is a political one: or, rather, a canny public relations move. Whether or not it intended to, NASA used the Mona Lisa as cultural shorthand. Even if you only read the headline of this story, the essential is communicated: we stand at the temporal zenith of an unbroken legacy of intellectual adventuring, we can draw lines of inquiry–after all, DaVinci was a consummate doodler of flying machines–through time, across boundaries, and into the bleeding edge of the present all while honoring those who came before us.

A jellybean, a piece of confetti: it seems her language is primed to describe nuances between round things seen from afar. Like the Eskimo, I imagine, with their apocryphal hundred words for snow, this astronomer undoubtedly boasts a pantheon of personal metaphors for “dot.” Through a wide rectangular slit in the domed ceiling, the cosmos lies in wait, ready for the focal beam of the telescope itself: like a plastic straw, I’m told, poking into an ocean of night. The sky is uncharacteristically alive for Los Angeles, a lattice of flickering light nearly indistinguishable from the trembling, smog-blanketed city we glimpsed through the valley below as we wound our way up the mountain.

I think she conjures the hole punch because the edges it punches aren’t quite clean, and stars like torn paper are crenulated, fringed with wisps of filament. Clearly they are pieces of something bigger, a whole sheet of paper somewhere, meaningful in its completeness, and whose exacting, cookie-cutter perforations are just a concession to some order we can’t quite perceive. From where I’m standing, on Earth, at the foot of the ladder and looking up with my naked eyes at the stars, all of them look like jellybeans, or confetti.

Now I’m up the ladder and it’s precarious, insensibly parked; I have to wedge my foot on the heavy metal casing of the telescope for balance. I perch strangely and squint into the eyepiece. Inside, the sky is still black but suddenly it’s the black of space, not the black of night; of course they’re the same thing, but the fractal glimpse though lens separates them. It’s the black of space now, and, as promised, I spy a jellybean. Or something like it, bluish and strangely aqueous, as though it really were made of jelly, lit from within. Hanging there in the center of the circle, my straw-hole of vision. Neptune.

The pleasure I take in this sight is complex, subtle. At a star party a few years ago, at the McDonald Observatory in the desert reaches of West Texas, an astronomer stationed at a telescope-–pointed at a nebula, I forget which-–gravely intoned to me, “this is the farthest thing you’ll ever see.” That’s the essence of it, and what makes it impossible to really appreciate. Through the eyepiece of an optical telescope, you see something right in front of you, and your brain says, there it is: a jellybean, four feet away. Of course, Neptune is 17 times the mass of Earth and far-flung as it gets, but that doesn’t compute. It might be the farthest thing you’ll ever see, but it looks so close, and in the absence of contextual clues, the ordinary functioning of perspective fires and misses.

And so your awe is self-inflicted. Your awe is one you name to yourself. You almost have to say it out loud, “that’s Neptune,” forcing the cognitive dissonance into place. Once there, accepting that your mind has seen farther than biological limitation is its own challenge; the implications take their time unfolding.

When the 100″ Hooker telescope at Mt. Wilson saw first light in 1917, the poet Alfred Noyes was present. Noyes was so moved–by the long journey up the mountain, the egglike domes of the observatory on the hillside, the cathedral feeling of the structure–that he ended up writing a trilogy of epic verse, The Torchbearers, about the history of science. Its opening poem, “Watchers of the Sky,” describes in meandering and awestruck detail the strangeness of the telescope, its ability to collapse distance and transmute meaning onto specks of light:

Then I, too, looked,
And saw that insignificant spark of light
Touched with new meaning, beautifully reborn,
A swimming world, a perfect rounded pearl,
Poised in the violet sky.

Noyes is describing Jupiter, by far the most impressive object visible through this kind of telescope; even in miniature, you can make out its whirling stripes and characteristic red spot. A marble ringed by four radiant sister-moons. I saw it too. After a series of variable jellybeans, its obvious planetness floored me. The astronomers had saved it for last, knowing it would spoil everything else. Because, honestly, it mostly all looks the same to the untrained: Neptune and Uranus both milky orbs, the stars of various sizes all literally twinkling, the nebulas so delicate you have to look away immediately to pin the fairy’s-breath of dust in your mind.

Jupiter, albeit toylike, is fiercely recognizable; the awe I feel looking at it is more real, less contextual. It looks like a picture. It’s not as difficult to understand. It draws all the other marbles into place. Without this clear reminder of scale and distance, the candy-bowl of jellybeans and pearls would otherwise melt together, a testament perhaps to the difficultly we take in perceiving space as a horribly vast and three-dimensional void populated by giant fires, orbs of gas, and ice.

The mirror of the 60″ telescope at Mt. Wilson is milled from 1,900 pounds of champagne glass, the only material at the dawn of the 20th century thought capable of supporting the necessary weight. If you aim a flashlight into the underbelly of the telescope, it gleams a deep green. It’s appropriate somehow, to welcome distant light to Earth with this fanfare, to usher it home from its long dark journey into glass designed to cradle and protect something sweet and intoxicating, best appreciated in small sips.

Or, as Noyes wrote:

The polished flawless pool that it must be
To hold the perfect image of a star.

I interviewed Dr. Sacks in 2007, on the subject of his fantastic book about music and the brain, Musicophilia. I found him to be every bit the disarmingly candid, loopy boffin of his public persona, and was genuinely thrilled to hear about his approach to science as a form of storytelling. To wit, from our 2007 interview:

Universe: The New York Times famously called you the ”poet laureate of medicine.” Are your books science or literature?

Oliver Sacks: For me, an interest in science is inseparable from an interest in the lives of scientists, and the lives of ideas, as well as in storytelling. In medicine, of course, narratives are essential: the patient tells you what’s going on, and you try to match this with stories heard from other patients. I love to give personal accounts, to try and enter people’s experiences and describe them, and I don’t think there should be a space between literature and the sciences. I think that the sciences should be literate, and that their function is not only exposition, but storytelling. Certainly for myself, science has to be combined with stories–but also stories have to be combined with science. Although I may tell a story of someone who has musical hallucinations, or cannot tell one tune from another, I also want to know what goes on in their brain, and why this is the case. In a way, these are somewhat like detective stories.

Oliver Sacks’ new book of neurological detective stories, Hallucinations, purports to tackle the uncanny boundaries of human perception, those strange neurological ghosts we sometimes encounter on the edge of sleep, under the influence, or when systems in our brain go wonky. To celebrate the occasion, my friends at the World Science Festival are bringing us Sacks in conversation with journalist John Hockenberry. They’ll discuss the cultural history (and contemporary science) of the hallucinatory experience, as well as how Sacks’ forays into psychedelia turned him on to a lifetime of puzzling out the mysteries of the human mind.

Since we can’t all be there in person, the Festival has set me up with a high-tech live stream of the event, which I’ve embedded below. I’ll be watching it live this Friday (tomorrow) at 8:00PM eastern time, and I recommend you come join me in tuning in, turning on, and dropping out!

Ed: Now that the event has passed, please enjoy this instant replay!

Alas, it couldn’t last forever. In his genuinely beautiful book, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (which just came out on paperback) neuroscientist David Eagleman proposes a parallel trajectory for neuroscience, booting the mind from its pedestal to remind us, yet again, of the folly of human self-importance.

Eagleman presents the idea, based on the most current science, that the phenomenon of consciousness is one of the brain’s lesser functions. The conscious mind calls the whole machinery “I,” but we only become aware of thoughts, behaviors, and actions significantly after the bulk of our brains have already done the heavy lifting. Incognito abounds with examples of brain functions that happen without our knowledge, from the simple kinetics of attraction to strange phenomena like “blindsight,” in which some blind people can correctly guess what they’re looking at (beyond what random chance would predict) because a low-level operator part of their brain is still chugging along undeterred. Most of what we do, from tying our shoelaces to producing speech to playing video games, is done by hidden subroutines without much conscious awareness.

Consciousness, Eagleman suggests, is just a system for meting out the lower programs–a kind of superintendent for the automated systems whirring below the hood. It’s only when we need to learn something new, or our cognitive routine is interrupted, that the superintendent lumbers out from its office to give matters a look-over. In terms of total neural function, it’s a pretty small-fries gig.

This view of mind shatters the ego, much like a heliocentric Earth shattered Renaissance cosmology. To some, it might seem almost sinister. Like a squirrel eviscerating a pile of nuts, Incognito methodically cracks every natural preconception its readers might hold about their selves, until it feels like there’s nothing left but empty shells. What is spiritual fervor? Perhaps just a temporal lobe seizure. What is sexual desire? Just a complex subconscious perception of smell and symmetry. What is aggression, emotion, sadness, a temperament? Glitches in the wet lab. We are the sum total of our chemicals–neurotransmitters, hormones, viruses, and genes–at any given moment.

Catalyzed by these chemicals, countless hidden programs drive our actions, and our brain (the left hemisphere, actually) makes justifications later; free will is a story we tell ourselves, often in retrospect. The entire subjective world is tied to biological machinery, with little room for a ghost in the machine. At present, neuroscientists have not found any spot in the brain that is not driven by other parts of the network. That is to say, there is no independent, or “free,” part of the brain–a detail that slays the most sacred cows of the human experience. “If  there’s something like a soul,” Eagleman writes, “it is at minimum tangled irreversibly with the microscopic details.”

I’m left with this sense of a hulking, somnolent beast that churns far below the waterline of my me. Or, too, a mess of rival processes, endlessly redundant, working simultaneously to address the myriad problems of existence, without much concern for any meta-narrative I might pour on top of them. But here I am writing this review now, seemingly of my own volition, so what’s happening?

Eagleman isn’t just an explainer; he’s a real writer with palpable awe for human mysteries (his solitary fiction work, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, is a book of great sentimental value to me). It’s this poetic sensibility, as well as Eagleman’s ability to contextualize what he calls the “dethronement” of consciousness, that makes Incognito transcendent rather than nihilistic. After all, biological reductionism is as ooky and threatening to the closely-held, ineffable stuff of humanness as quantum mechanics is to our sense of physical reality. But for Eagleman, the brain is a new cosmos. Just as living on the edge of outer space gives us a front-row seat to the drama of the void, so too does being the bearer of all this indifferent biological machinery. The seat of consciousness may be no better than a folding chair, but what a show.

For Felix Baumgartner, the daredevil skydiver who seduced the world with his chiseled jaw and seeming invulnerability to fear (and who broke the sound barrier with his body last weekend) the Earth is something else. The satellite he leapt from, a weather balloon 24 miles above the Earth, wasn’t his home. But briefly, and especially for the millions who watched the gossamer balloon float upwards to the strange blue-black gradient of space’s edge, it turned our home, the Earth, upside-down.

New perspectives on familiar sights have strange, heady effects. The Space Shuttle Endeavour caused a furor in Los Angeles last week as it paraded to its final resting place at the California Science Center; the relatively banal journey through what Angelenos call “surface” streets incited more hype per mile than its previous twenty-five sojourns to space and back, presumably because people were able, for the first time, to feel the scale of the thing, to see it in surreal contrast against the landscape of everyday life. Photos of its slow march through L.A. streets show the shuttle, a little worse for the wear, in silhouette against a Sizzler, a Midas tire shop, and the brown-to-tarmac gradient of Californian urbanism. Maybe NASA should have paraded the Shuttle around before its adventures in low-Earth orbit. Who doesn’t want to see something soar into the sky that once trundled through a Bed, Bath & Beyond parking lot?

On a larger scale, Earthrise, the iconic image taken from Apollo 8 as it shot towards the moon, instigated a global reevaluation of the planet. It was a fresh perspective on something we all took for granted, and many credit the picture for catalyzing the environmentalism movement in the 1970s. But as far as new perspectives go, seeing the curve of the Earth from space with your own eyes is the ultimate paradigm shift. Suddenly, the world, which for your whole life you’ve known to be solid ground–the very definition of flatness, made from dirt to be kicked up and buried under–is a round, dimensional planet. Like an apple, it whirls silently in space, as Dusty Springfield sang.

My parents, as children, gathered around black and white television sets to watch a man step onto the surface of the moon. The footage was blurry, delayed. Last week, my friends and I gathered in a different way. Alone, and together, we scrutinized the tiny face of the Internet, watching in real-time (and high-def) as a man stepped out of a capsule not dissimilar to the Apollo lander. It was just as tin-canny, as claustrophobic. In, fact Baumgartner himself suffered from such extreme claustrophobia in his spacesuit that he almost couldn’t bear to wear it. “As soon as the visor closes, there’s this nightmarish silence and loneliness,” he said in an interview, “the suit signifies imprisonment.”

"The sky starts at our feet. Think how brave you are to walk around." –Anne Herbert

Unlike the moonwalkers, however, Baumgartner didn’t take a step onto solid ground. He jumped into the void, and thanks to the placement of the camera, we jumped with him. We didn’t just watch the record-breaking skydive from the ground, or from his weather-balloon diving board. The 21st century is an epoch of P.O.V. feats, of go-pros taped to helmets and steering wheels, streaming the direct visual stimulus of unthinkable feats directly to our eyes. It’s a kind of exploratory telepresence; in our simultaneous visual culture, in which appearance is often conflated with experience, we feel we participated. After all, the moment Felix Baumgartner opened the door of his capsule and stood on the precipice, we all saw the curve of the planet at his feet. Would the moon landing have been different if the camera had been mounted to Neil Armstrong’s helmet? If his steps were, in a sense, ours?

Why is Felix Baumgartner’s jump so fascinating? It’s an act of derring-do of the most extreme order–and for that we all toast our Red Bulls–but there’s something more to it. It’s a gesture that actually inverts our picture of the home planet, shifting the Earth from something you walk on to something you leap towards. There’s no equivalent.

Well, maybe one: in 2007, I interviewed French parachutist Michel Fournier. Before Red Bull and Felix Baumgartner started plotting their total domination of the form, Fournier hoped to break Joseph Kittinger’s 1960 record for human free fall with a similar weather balloon-assisted technical leap called Le Grand Saut. “When you’re in the air,” Fournier, who had 8,600 parachute jumps under his belt, told me, “you are struck with such a high dose of adrenaline that you immediately take yourself for the most beautiful of birds, the bald eagle. Only parachutists truly know why the birds sing.”

No amount of Twitter feeds and livestreams can broadcast the inconceivable thrill and horror of making the jump ourselves–truly, only parachutists themselves can know how it feels. But even from the digital backseat, it goes to show that we haven’t yet run out of ways the Earth can amaze us. The Earth, maybe, is the new moon: a frontier that belongs to everyone.

Felix Baumgartner didn’t just jump. He fell to Earth. He abandoned himself to the single most universal faith we have in our planet: that no matter how far we stray, it will always take us back.

For a time in the late 19th century, it was believed that there were canals on Mars.

The Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, who observed Mars in 1877, was the first to describe, name, and lovingly illustrate mysterious straight lines along its equatorial regions, which he called canali. Viewed with the telescopes of the day, in brief instances of still air amidst the optical strangeness of atmosphere, Mars was tough to figure. There are areas which appear darker or lighter (these are called Albedo features); to an enthusiastic observer, it was easy to speculate of continents, oceans, or even straight-line canals.

Beset by the same optical illusions, many astronomers seconded Schiaparelli’s observations. The maps of the day show a Mars riven with peculiar webs and lines–lines which successive high-resolution mapping of the planet have definitively shown do not exist. The mechanism that caused this illusion appears to be internal: faced with a shifting landscape of foggy forms, glimpsed at through simple lenses of glass through the refractive index of Earth’s atmosphere, the human brain tends to impose order.

The persistence of belief in Martian canals is often attributed to a linguistic fluke, that the Italian canali, meaning “channel” (or watercourse, and not necessarily of unnatural origin), was mistranslated to the English “canal.” I really love this narrative of language shaping reality, but unfortunately it’s the astronomical equivalent of an urban legend. “Canal,” in fact, was used in the earliest English accounts, and Schiaparelli made no move to correct the misunderstanding, if he was aware of it.

Still, astronomers ran with the idea. The Irish astronomer Charles E. Burton made beautiful sketches of the lines, and (according to an unsubstantiated Wikipedia entry) speculated that they were ley lines used by Martian sorcerers. The American Percival Lowell, who founded the Lowell Observatory in 1894, made the most committed speculations on the subject. Despite ramping scientific skepticism to the contrary, Lowell almost single-handedly popularized the notion of the canals as proof that the planet once sustained intelligent life. His drawings of the canals look like Italian Futurist masterworks or the spacey doodles of Joan Miró.

“That Mars is inhabited by beings of some sort of other we may consider as certain as it is uncertain what those beings may be.” 
– Percival Lowell

In his books (sample titles: Mars and its Canals, Mars as the Abode of Life), Lowell put forth a theory that the canals were visible traces of an dwindling civilization’s attempts to tap the planet’s polar icecaps. The late 19th century was a period of great canal-building on the home planet–the Suez and Panama Canals were both freshly dug at the end of the 1800s–and so the dreamy hypothesis that Schiaparelli’s canali were irrigation canals made by intelligent beings resonated with the cultural imagination.

Later, Percival Lowell began to notice similar phenomena on Venus; simultaneously, as telescopes and astronomical technique developed, his theories were objectively discounted. More recent scholarship suggests that Lowell was merely observing projections of the vein structure of his own eyeball, a known nuisance among planetary observers using very high magnification. This would explain, among other things, the phenomenon’s consistency across two far-flung planets in our Solar System.

Given the symbolic parallels between outer space and inner space in many cultures, the fact that Percival Lowell spent an entire career mapping the strucure of his own retinas while believing them to be interplanetary ruins is very nearly mystical.

As it turns out, there really are canali, or watercourses, on Mars–but that’s just another marvelous instance of life imitating art. As for art imitating life, well, despite the fact that his scientific study was for nought, we can credit Lowell’s inverted astronomy with the origin of a lasting trope within the science fiction of the early half of the 20th century. His “vision,” if you will, of a dying Mars–and an ancient culture fighting to survive in its arid deserts–persisted in the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert Heinlein, and C.S. Lewis, to name only a few. One might even argue that Lowell’s theories about water scarcity form the basis of a broader conceit about aliens coming to Earth to pillage our resources, in which case he is the unwitting progenitor of everything from The War of the Worlds to Mars Attacks. 

But back to the canals: Ray Bradbury, in The Martian Chronicles, had them flow with poetic “green liquors” and “lavender wine” under the yellow sun. Later, Philip K. Dick would imagine despotic Water Workers’ Unions controlling access to the little sustenance the Martian canals eked across the harsh Martian landscape. It’s a broad spectrum, certainly, but many of the romantic associations we hold to Mars–the sense that it hangs in space like a ghost, a ruined sibling of Earth–are derived from these literary reveries, nearly all of which can be traced back to bad eyesight and illusions.