Of Interest in the Heavens

There are two professions that started at the dawn of humankind, or so common knowledge says. One is prostitution, but I'm not going to talk about that in this entry... maybe on a later post, heheh. The other oldest profession is astronomy. The conjecture suggests that the regularity of the heavens have made the primitive humans take note of what's above their heads. When this regularity can be linked to the seasons that mark the abundance or scarcity of food, it became serious business.

To my three-year-old self, such patterns would not have been evident. What got my attention instead was the pictures of multicolored spheres from an astronomy and meteorology picture book from Japan (strangely enough, the meager text on it was in English). I later learned that the book is just one volume in a set of books on science and technology. With further explanations from family members, that was how I formed my first interest and from then on I had been mindful of what goes on in the sky.

Of course the interest will not last if it isn't nurtured. There were other science books in the house, and when my reading skill was good enough, I started reading them too. Never mind that the books were a decade or two behind the times, but being written in the 1970s, in the age of lunar exploration, the tone of enthusiasm was there, that the possibilities for humankind were endless, and those were enough to keep my own interests up. I think I would recommend for learning about the sciences in general and space in particular, fiction or non-fiction, material made during that period 1960-1979. We didn't have cable TV yet when I was a kid. I wonder how I would've geeked out at Discovery Channel that time. Nevertheless, the written material was plentiful enough: Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian, Air & Space, National Geographic, Scientific American among other subscriptions my father maintained for some time.

School was a disappointment in developing my interest. Before third grade, there was no science subject at all and whatever science there was, it was only integrated in a monthly newsmagazine meant for that subject which combines geography, history, civics and social studies in one blurry mess. When the science subject did come, astronomy, a topic located at the final chapters of the textbook, was almost never discussed. Woe was me who couldn't show off my knowledge in astronomy.

With all these seemingly keen interest, it would've been a matter of consequence that I end up an astronomer. Yet space is just one of my interests. I might really be more of a jack of all trades than to be specialized in something. On the other hand, I might just be making a feeble excuse for the lack of enough zeal, or worse, lack of enough capacity to grasp the knowledge and skills to become an astronomer. Alas, it might have been easier a hundred years ago, yet the science and math have grown leaps and bounds since then. Thusly I take refuge in my other interests like, in this case, writing, such that I may mentally explore along with my gentle reader, the intricacies of the study of the stars, and contribute to it as other writers of science in fiction and non-fiction have done so before me.