On Yahoo! News, a news article was posted the day of July 17, 2008 that talked about a French woman whom by accident discovered she had the chance to go into space and float in the largest vacuum in the universe. She had bought herself a Kit Kat chocolate bar when on the wrapper she saw that a competition was being held, with the prize being an opportunity to enter the far deths of outer space. Initially, Mathilde Epron, 32, didn't think she was going to win (as do many of us whenever we see competitions on soda bottles and s'mores), but then, just uot of curiosity, she fished the wrapper out of the trash and guess what - she'd won the competition! As an air hostess, this was a great opportunity for her. She commented on the situation, saying, "For someone who works in air travel it's really a dream come true,". The winner will get four days of astronaut training in Oklahoma City, here in the US, and then experience weightlessness aboard the XP aircraft built by Rocketplane (a company known for devising aircrafts that will allow for cheap flights into space), which will rise 100 km (60 miles) into the air.
All of us can defnitely agree that Mathilde Epron is one lucky lady. And this story made me think about something we've all wondered ever since first grade, when we learned about the 8 (or possibly 100, for all we know) planets of the solar system, when we learned that there's a world beyond the neighborhood where we lived. To learn that, at that point, was a revolution in our understanding of the world. It made us comprehend that there was something beyond the city limits, and that there always has been. And, now that space technology has become so much more accessible than it was before, 50 years from now, the new vacation getaway might just be the Moon and not the Bahamas. Who knows, maybe 1,000 years from now, we'll all be living on the Moon or on Mars. The latter is a somewhat feasible solution, as global warming and other environmental dangers continuously deteriorate the condition of our planet, and the idea of space stations supporting masses of humans becomes all the more likely to become a reality.
Knowing that there's an unlimited amount of space and of just stuff beyond our Earth makes us realize, over and over again, that we're simply a particle of dust in a huge windstorm, a minute needle in a haystack. It make su realize that we've still got a long way to go in getting to know our own universe.
To read the original news article, click here.
-Tomás at Large
Sources: "Air hostess picks up chocolate bar, wins space trip", Yahoo! News
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