In the two days before the shuttle Columbia disintegrated and traced that awful sparkling arc across the Texas sky, I’d already been thinking about space. On Thursday, I’d read a Harper’s article about the unthinkable catastrophe a relatively small asteroid hitting the Earth would cause. On Friday, I’d finished a National Geographic piece about the incomprehensible mystery of countless galaxies speeding throughout an expanding universe. The asteroid essay warned of the unavoidability of humankind’s eventual extinction. The galaxy story spoke of humankind’s daily discovery of additional star systems out at the edges of infinity. And then …
