We, the pioneers.

[Shortlisted for Guardian and Wellcome Trust Science Writing Prize 2012]

As Voyager 1 cradles the edge of our Solar System, poised to enter the vacuous expanse of deep space, we are approaching a milestone that many on this planet are not aware of. As this magnificent example of human engineering leaves the confines of the warm embrace of our Sun, at ~120 AU a now faint and distant beacon in the enveloping darkness, we will become an interstellar species. The gravitas of this monumental achievement should not be overlooked.

Whilst it remains theoretically feasible that our universe may be teeming with life, intelligence of space-faring calibre may be exceedingly rare. We, the product of a knife-edge balancing-act between biological, geochemical and astronomical implausibility, are lucky to be  here at all.  The inordinate complexity, the innumerable coincidences and the eventual culmination of 3 billion years of evolution - we stand on the peak of the impossible, gazing out into the void, with Voyager as our first envoy to the stars.

It is unlikely, but not impossible, that any interstellar civilisation has come before us. We've been listening for our galactic neighbours, via the enormous ear of SETI, for over 50 years to no avail. No radio chatter, no xenoarchaeology nor ambassadorial spacecraft. Given the ubiquity of planet forming material, and what we consider the relative normality of our watery home, the emptiness - the silence, is paradoxical.

The galaxy is ~13.2 billion years old and our 4.5 billion year-old Solar System has orbited its centre ~25 times. This planet has been habitable for around 4 billion years, and based on our best estimates, we have another half a billion or so to go before the evolution of the Sun renders the planet uninhabitable. We've been hitching a ride through space for one hundredth of one percent (5 million years) of the age of our planet, and have had space technology for one thousandth of that  time (50 years).  Assuming this is the case for most habitable planets, and knowing as we do that exponential colonial growth is impossible, it seems likely that if intelligent civilisations had arisen at any point in the history of our galaxy, and at some coordinate closer to the galactic core, there has been little evidence to suggest that they ever made it out this far. Given that colonisation infers a survival value, the fact that nearby planets give no indication of being inhabited leads to the conclusion that there are likely to be no other colonisers out there.

What conclusions can we draw from the silence? Well, conjecture abounds. Perhaps the galaxy is teaming with civilisations who have consciously hidden themselves from us until we overcome some technological or societal hurdle that would usher our entry into the 'galactic club' - perhaps superluminal travel or the formation of a world government? Who knows. In the immediate future, and without too much speculation, we can possibly infer that we may be the only intelligent civilisation ever to have arisen, in this neighbourhood anyway. If so, that places quite a burden on us, whether we realise it or not, to protect our planet and each other until such time that we can make our own way through the stars. We, or most likely our distant descendants, may be the sole custodians of the true meaning of existence, nature and the universe; the formulators and keepers of the 'theory of everything'. Their success, and ours in the meantime, depends on the decisions we make now.

We are the pioneers, but we are also most certainly endangered by our own machinations. Up to this point, some of those decisions have been rather poor and have possibly compromised the very habitability of the planet we draw life from. Others, like Voyager et al. have been great. This humble, unassuming vessel represents the first step of an infant civilisation adopting a truly universalist, extrospective outlook. With 10 - 15 years of power left, Voyager will continue to take measurements and beam information back to Earth on the transition through the heliopause and the composition of the interstellar medium. After its batteries have died and its instruments have gone silent Voyager will continue to obediently sail through the depths of space on a mission lasting an eternity; a mission with no end and no more formal objectives. The spacecraft will not decay in the vacuum of space and its form and technology will be preserved indefinitely as a timecapsule to the stars. Long after the Earth has ceased to exist, Voyager will remain.

The Atmospheric Mirror

[2013]

When viewed from space, the Earth glows like a blue marble under the light of the distant Sun. Azure oceans lap against the jagged coastlines and pale clouds swirl gracefully across its face, temporarily obscuring from view the brown-green landmasses beneath. From this vantage point, there is little to suggest that intelligent bipedal apes are scuttling around the coasts; confident of their centrality to all the workings of the cosmos, yet mostly unaware of the intricate complexities of its operation.

With the exception of five hundred  operational satellites amidst a sea of orbital debris, one permanently occupied space station in low Earth orbit and two intrepid robotic explorers on the planet next door (Opportunity and Curiosity), humans have little visible presence outside of the Earth. In spite of our delusions of grandeur, we assume that no evidence of our global civilisation could be detected from light-year distances.

However, if we imagine that somewhere in the menagerie of stars that make up our local neighbourhood in the Milky Way, on a planet not too dissimilar from ours, an alien astronomer was perched at his (or her) telescope one night staring out into the dark when our Solar System happened into view. What would they see? Just another star on their survey, if relatively young and brighter than most, but perhaps one of many observed that evening. Initially, the blinding glare of the Sun would obscure our family of planets from direct view. Luckily, there are a number of ways to circumvent this problem. Using indirect planet detection techniques familiar to us such as radial velocity measurements or transit timings, the planetary companions of this curious yellow dwarf star are revealed:  four gas giants and four smaller worlds. If the exo-astronomer ran their observations through their superior spectrometer however, chances are they may be intrigued by the results from one tiny blue planet in the orbit of this humdrum star.

Spectrometers measure the properties of light, first emitted by stars but then altered by the constituent gases of the planetary atmospheres through which the beam passes on the way to the receiving instrument. Different gases absorb light at different wavelengths to produce characteristic spectra and the composition of the atmosphere mirrored in the light can be teased out of the noise with sufficient skill. The high levels of water vapour, oxygen, methane and other gases associated with biological activity discovered in the atmosphere of this planet should result in the alien equivalent of a raised eyebrow. Methane is a ‘reduced’ gas and is usually rapidly destroyed in the presence of oxygen, meaning that detecting an appreciable amount of both may suggest that a biological mechanism is responsible for their continual replenishment. This mismatch is identified as a 'biosignature' – a sign that this planet may harbour life.

Planetary atmospheres are something we are all intimately familiar with. The Earth’s is flush with life-giving oxygen, greenhouse gases essential (in the right balance) to maintaining a clement climate and an ozone layer that shields us from the Sun's harmful rays. Most of us will never leave its gaseous embrace, and without it life would be extremely difficult. However, we take for granted the atmosphere's ability to act as a mirror of our activities detectable from astronomical distances, able to reflect the unique signatures of the gases injected into it and hold them there for those with the correct instruments to see.

Further studies by the inquisitive alien astronomer would reveal a soup of exotic chemicals in the atmosphere of this distant little planet: increasing levels of carbon dioxide along with a suite of destructive, industrially produced compounds like chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). There is no known biological pathway for producing CFCs, so their detection in the atmosphere of this planet is a strong indication of the activities of industry. They have struck gold (or the equivalently rare element on their planet) by discovering compelling evidence for the existence of another technologically advanced species. In doing so, they may have forever altered the way their civilisation views itself - one of perhaps many in a vast, galactic family.

Cloaked in an imaginative example, this is the theory that lies behind using spectroscopy as a method of detecting life, and perhaps even advanced civilisations, across the depths of space. Two promising space telescopes, TPF (NASA) and Darwin (ESA), were cancelled due to budgetary constraints, so for now at least interstellar planetary spectroscopy remains out of our grasp. However, the hope is that instruments of the near-future will be able to examine the atmospheres of exoplanets to search for these signs of life. Until they can, it might be worth remembering that we might not be the only ones able to gaze into the Earth’s atmospheric mirror.

Planets of Purpose: Desolation and Meaning in an Empty Universe

[2015]

There were two kinds of landscape characteristic of the inner planets of the Sun: the purposeful and the desolate.

Stanislaw Lem - Fiasco (1986) [Ch.1, tr. Michael Kandel]

A loose rock tumbles slowly down a slope in a lonely valley on Mars. The hill of its origin seems unfamiliar and alien - it is more crimson and notably steeper than any rise on Earth due to Mars' oxidizing environment and lower gravity. A loose conglomerate of ruddy scree, it seems completely devoid of life. The rock, idle in its elevated resting place for perhaps eons, now dislodged by a chance landslide caused by a violent Martian windstorm, rolls to a stop in a new location in the dry valley below. No human eyes have ever seen this boulder, no one has sat atop it to survey the panorama of the valley where it sat, or pounded it with a rock hammer to determine its composition, or crudely scrawled their initials into its surface in an attempt to immortalize a teenage love affair. What purpose, if any, does this boulder serve? Life cannot shelter beneath it or break it down for nutrients because no life exists on this frigid, desiccated planet. It inhabits an exclusively abiotic world, and whilst it will be shaped by powerful winds into exotic and unfamiliar forms, it will eventually be blown to dust by the continual onslaught of sandstorms, dissipating gradually, grain by grain, into the chaotic atmosphere. The universe seems no richer for its passing.

Desolation is a ubiquitous feature of the solar system. From the barren, scorched and pockmarked surface of Mercury, to the icy solitude of the gas giants, and out to the lonely minor planet Pluto in its long, dark trundle around the Sun, these are entire worlds devoid of life and the patient sculpting of natural process we are so familiar with on Earth. Their terrain is of great interest scientifically, but it is obvious that these are worlds very different to our own. They lack a certain something, an inherent dynamism that it seems only biology can imbue. They seem alien, and they are in some sense, but this feeling of other-worldliness issues forth from the unfamiliar landforms and empty horizons, broken here and there by topographies of pure abiological physicality. Nothing about these geographies serves a 'purpose'. The craters of Mercury, or Mars, or any of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn, stand magnificent in their grandeur, but alone in the emptiness of space: many will never be explored, never investigated, chaotic in their form and distribution, but ultimately meaningless in their existence.  It is my expectation that if we were to find another planet on which life had a foothold, that world would seem somehow more familiar to us, if undoubtedly exotic and bizarre, than a planet entirely devoid of biology.

This lack of purpose, of meaning, is obviously an inherently human concept, and whilst it results in an obvious planetary dichotomy (as illustrated by the quote above), it is this contrast that should provide us with perspective on our own planet and a greater appreciation for even the smallest action borne from the ancient, intimate dance between life and our world, choreographed by natural selection and honed by a run lasting billions of years. For if we consider these alien features to be meaningless and purposeless, it follows that the only 'purpose' that exists is that which began on Earth, and which emanates now ever outwards, shaping, and in some cases, biasing, our view of these barren worlds. Meaning is a concept that we as humans can and do impose upon desolate landscapes. We name features on distant planets, we photograph their lonely surfaces and seek explanations for their existence, but only as an aside in our quest for a greater understanding of our place and purpose. Even here on Earth we occupy the least biologically productive environments, sometimes for science, or for economic gain, or just for the challenge, but by our very presence in these once vacant landscapes, we provide a center of purpose. The once empty environment now provides a backdrop to the human drama, an extension of the boundless stage on which we carry out the acts of our lives; a silent witness to hours, days or years of collective human strife and trivialities. But is this really all meaning is? An inherently dichotomous characteristic of place that only exists relative to biology's insight or attention?

In searching for a word to convey this sense of emptiness, of this abiotic 'nothingness', the limitations of terrestrial linguistics shaped by our Earth-bound experiences and history are revealed, and the true magnitude of the desolation - often global, near complete - remains difficult to comprehend and to express cogently. A world without any 'meaning', any direction, any sense of teleological drive. An environment surrendered to entropy and shaped by chaos and the haphazard actions of an abiotic 'nature'. This is a nature unbounded by the necessities of life, in which soils and rocks remain untouched by biology but are instead molded, as clay in the hands of an inanimate potter, by purely physical processes: wind, fluids, irradiation and planetary tectonism. It seems that these are the environments most favored by the universe as they litter our solar system, and almost certainly exist around billions of other stars in our galaxy and beyond. Can it really be that an entire galaxy could exist in this state of meaningless stasis? Barren, empty reaches awaiting the arrival of life to imbue meaning upon the void?

It is possible that humans are the only intelligent observer species ever to have arisen in this galaxy. If that is the case, we have a great responsibility, not only to preserve our planetary sanctum for future generations and to continue to unravel the esotericisms of the universe, but to further safeguard our existence as the fount, the point source, of absolute meaning. The universe, it seems, is indifferent to our struggles, but we can elevate ourselves above the insignificant by our individual introspection and collective scientific extrospection.

We are the Gods of Purpose, and all the universe is our Eden.

Untranslatable

[2015]

There is a word in Japanese, Yūgen (幽玄), derived from the study of Japanese aesthetics with no English equivalent, that perhaps comes closest to describing the profound sense of the enormity of the cosmos: to despair and be humbled by the insignificance of the struggle against the indifference of the universe, whilst also appreciating the sad beauty of human suffering. I often find myself grasping for a word to describe this reaction when discussing astrobiology with people, other scientists or members of the public, who find the entire field incredibly depressing; who, at some level, acknowledge the futility of our search for meaning in the distant reaches of space. Some find the emotional burden too great to bear, triggering a minor existential crisis. “It’s better not to know”, they say.

On one hand, who can blame them? It’s not like we’re expecting answers to many of The Questions that astrobiology and astronomy are trying to solve in our lifetimes. Science is a gradual process after all, and one that will last as long as there are still questions to be answered. The relative insignificance of our personal lives, our careers and relationships, cast against the enormity of the cosmos and separated by orders of magnitudes of space and time, so clearly presented, can prove a bit too much. The Astronomical Perspective can be overwhelming, and astronomy, as Carl put it, is a humbling experience. I’d like to adopt yūgen as a general descriptor of these feelings.1

Astrobiology is a scientific discipline practised from deep within in the realms of bounded rationality. These bounds stem from a definite, fundamental and detrimental lack of information about the system, as well as a possible cognitive and technological limitation in processing of the limited information available to us. We definitively lack the resources to arrive at an optimally rational conclusion regarding our place in the universe, the existence of suitably habitable environments elsewhere, and the possibility of life on other planets.  And yet, we know we’re close. We suffer a kind of collective Dunning-Kruger effect regarding how little we know, and how little we know about how little we know. We’re approaching that greatest of unknowns, cobbling together a piecemeal scientific narrative as we go, but missing so many parts of the puzzle that it’s not even clear what it is we’re building. Yet, something innate drives us onwards. Some part of us that has always been, as if a distant memory or half-remembered dream, within our genetic luggage and passed on to us from pre-human ancestors.

The size of our brains relative to our body size (also known as the encephalization quotient (EQ)) has, in fact, shrunk in recent times, peaking ~30,000 years ago after 2 million years of expansive growth. I’ll leave the anthropologists to argue over why and what this means, but making assumptions about intelligence and EQ we can assume, therefore, that our extremely distant ancestors may have gazed up at the canopy of the night sky and felt that same intangible yearning as we do. At least, there seems to be no cognitive reasons that they couldn't have done so. Maybe it was even more pronounced by the gulf of knowledge that separates their knowledge of the cosmos from our own? The bright band of the Milky Way stretched out overhead, unobscured by pollution, but hidden by ignorance; an unknowable story waiting for a narrator, one that would not arrive in earnest for thousands of years. In the meantime, complex and anthropomorphic mythologies were borne and woven by the tapestry of human imagination and fuelled by our penchant for storytelling.

Perhaps, that sense of insignificance, that yūgen, was even more heart-wrenching in the very distant past when we were young, when our contemporary achievements in understanding of our place in the greater Story would seem unfathomable, akin to magic. Perhaps, yūgen has been a driving force in our history as long as we have existed? I’m not suggesting an evolutionary driver akin to bipedalism, but perhaps a minor constituent of the human story that contributed an unquantifiable edge to our tale. An ember burning near the edge of the campfire of humanity’s intellectual awakening, smouldering away throughout the ages whilst we built our temples and cities, waged our wars and battles, waiting for the spark of enlightenment to burst into an inferno of curiosity and discovery.

That’s why I’m optimistic about our search. Sure, we may not find any concise answers to the ‘big’ questions in our lifetimes, and we’ll probably always have that sense of yūgen when faced with incomprehensible enormity on galactic and light year-scales, but rather than hiding in the dark, we should embrace the feeling of astronomical despair and turn it into a creative force for discovery! If you don’t like being insignificant, find something that makes you significant. Yūgen will be passed on to the next generation of curious scientists and philosophers, and as it has done in the past, it will drive us on to more profound questions and more mysterious unknowns.

1 If any Japanese speakers are reading this, please let me know if I'm using this word incorrectly – my understanding is that the context is important

The Great Revolution

[2011]

Around 2.3 billion years ago our planet underwent what was perhaps the most significant and dramatic revolution in its history. However, this was not a revolution that we may be familiar with. There was no political basis to this transition, perhaps involving a suppressed population rising up in unison against a brutal dictator. This was a revolution was on a truly global scale and it was instigated by the chemistry of the planet. In this case, and quite literally, change was in the air.

During much of the Archean eon, between 3.9 and 2.5 billion years ago, the composition of the atmosphere of the Earth was dominated, as it is today, by nitrogen, but also by gases such as methane and hydrogen sulphide. These gases are 'reducers' (as opposed to 'oxidisers') that 'donate' one of their electrons to another substance in reaction. Oxygen, an oxidant, was a minor constituent, representing less than one part per million (1 ppm) of the atmosphere. About 2.3 billion years ago however, this all changed. This momentous and eon-defining event is known as the Great Oxidation to earth scientists, and it represents a truly life-changing transition in the history of the planet. Oxygen concentrations jumped (in relative terms) to between 1 and 10% of the present atmospheric level (PAL for short).

The puzzling thing however, is that oxygenic photosynthesis (OP) had already been active in primitive cyanobacteria (similar to the one above) for at least 300 million years before the Great Oxidation, originating sometime between 3.2 billion and 2.6 billion years ago, with the most convincing evidence placing its genesis at 2.7 billion years before present. Organisms had evolved the extraordinary ability to use photons of light to split water molecules and combine them with carbon dioxide to form complex sugars, in the process releasing oxygen gas as a by product.  The evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis was in itself an incredible feat, involving some of the most complex cellular biomachinary ever discovered.  Why, then, was the atmosphere of the early Proterozoic eon so oxygen-poor?

The answer, it turns out, is a rather complicated one. Oxygen concentrations during the transitional period before the Great Oxidation, but after the evolution of OP, were spatially variable, concentrated around the organisms responsible for its production as a waste gas. Any oxygen that made it into the air was quickly destroyed by reaction with methane against the backdrop of a highly (ultraviolet - UV) irradiated atmosphere. The reductant-dominated atmosphere was a product of volcanic out-gassing which provided a constant source of reduced gases such as hydrogen, hydrogen sulphide, methane and carbon dioxide. Any oxygen that wasn't destroyed by reaction with these gases was mopped up by the large swathes of reduced material likely to be present on the surface of the Earth - including iron and iron pyrite (which was transformed from its reduced ferrous state to its oxidised ferric form) and resulting in the iconic banded iron formations (or BIFs) associated with this time. It would appear that oxygen could not maintain a foothold in this reducing world, struggling to maintain a low concentration which would have been spatially patchy and probably variable in time as well. Its sources were balanced by its sinks, as the chemists say.

In order to come to dominate, something would have to break the cycle - an imbalance between the sources of oxygen (i.e. the oxygenic photosynthesisers) and its sinks (methane photolysis and reaction with reduced gases and material from the mantle). Luckily for us as oxygen dependent organisms, something did break the feedback loop and that something was the humble hydrogen molecule.

Hydrogen in its elemental or 'free' variety is a reductant, reacting excitedly with oxygen to form water vapour, but in the upper atmosphere it behaves rather differently. At the base of the atmospheric homopause, around an altitude of ~ 100 km, water vapour is absent - frozen out at the stratospheric 'cold trap' at 20 km, but hydrogen molecules can be found hitching a lift within the structure of the methane molecule (CH4) which is light enough to rise through the homopause. The methane molecule  is attacked by the UV-generated radicals in the upper atmosphere (O, OH) and yields hydrogen atoms that can diffuse right to the very top of the planetary atmosphere, known as the exobase, at around ~ 500 km. Here, some of the light hydrogen atoms - the high energy tail of the distribution - are accelerated to a velocity that allows them to overcome the gravity of the Earth and permanently escape into space. This mechanism, over millions of years, resulted in a net increase in oxygen by the erosion of a finite hydrogen (reductant) reservoir, pushing the balance of sinks and sources of oxygen to the side of the sources. This process is still occurring on the Earth, but at a much lesser rate than in the past due to the fact that methane is now less abundant than it once was.

At a critical point, estimated to be around 1 ppm by volume of oxygen, an ozone layer began to form in the stratosphere. This layer served to shield the Earth below from UV light and thereby prevented the reaction of methane and oxygen in the lower atmosphere, shifting the balance in the favour of oxygen once again and increasing its concentration further still.

The age of oxygen had dawned.

Perhaps I disposed of the political revolution analogy too soon. Let us think of oxygen gas as a suppressed minority but with the great potential to usher in a new age of organism diversity and to completely revolutionise the Earth system. Methane & co. form the oligarchy of the reductants, dominating the atmosphere and violently reacting with any oxidants they encounter (using their oppressive, ruthless army of UV light) to prevent an oxidising majority from forming. They insist upon the use of traditional, inefficient metabolic pathways such as hydrogen sulphide fermentation to power the small, putative organisms over which they rule. But the agents of change, the oxygenic photosynthesisers, are working studiously to infiltrate the atmosphere and gradually, with the protection provided by the revolutionary guard molecule, ozone, they eventually overthrow the reductants, banishing them to the depths of the oceans, lakes or the guts of cows and ushering in a new age of glorious oxygen domination!

Of course, this is just a metaphor and not a particularly good one at that. The real revolution took hundreds of millions of years and firmly without the inferred teleology or determinism that stems from my anthropic bias. Oxygen is a poison, and to the majority of life on the early-Earth, the dawn of the Great Oxidation marked the end of their reign as surface dwelling organisms. However, without it complex organisms would not have evolved. Anaerobic respiration is several orders of magnitude less efficient and therefore unsuitable for powering large, complex bodies that require more energy - energy that can only be provided by an oxygen metabolism.

Humans and their Machines

[Written prior to MSL Curiosity launch in 2013]

Since the dawn of civilisation, humans have gazed up at the stars and planets overhead. Even now, separated from our forebears by an expansive gulf of time, technology and knowledge, the stars remain distant, esoteric but evocative targets. Our curiosity and thirst for understanding drives us on, pushing the limits of human endurance, engineering and science to the point where 528 humans from 38 nations have flown beyond the tenuous envelope of gases clinging to the surface of the Earth into wilderness of space. A first, unsteady and cautious step into the vast unknown that surrounds our tiny globe. Of these, only 12 have stepped foot on the surface of the Moon. At over 385,000 km away, reaching the desolate face of our lunar companion remains the pinnacle of manned spaceflight capability, yet it is a mere stone's throw from Earth in astronomical terms. We peer out from the relative safety of our home, edge into the abyss that surrounds us and tentatively contemplate its content.

The delicate squishiness of the human form is not conducive to the hostile environment of space. Fleshy bags of meat and fluids don't travel well in a vacuum, the near absolute-zero temperatures dessicate skin and lung and our fragile bones snap and break easily under undue strain. Bombarded by radiation, and far from the protective effect of the ozone layer, our cells mutate and die.  Ingenuity and engineering have surmounted these problems in the short term by wrapping our bodies in spacecraft and suits, but the frailties of our terrestrial form remain.

As with many aspects of our lives, we have increasingly outsourced the monumental task of space exploration to robotic envoys. Obedient, unfaltering and better able to withstand the hardships of space travel, these metallic pioneers are our eyes and ears in the depths of space, straddling the boundary of the known and unknown to help us elucidate the mysteries of our near and distant planetary neighbours. Beacons in the fog, they light the way out into space.

Moreover, these scientific emissaries are more than merely (very expensive) collections of navigational equipment, cameras, sensors and propulsion. They are more than laboratories, more than the experiments they conduct, or the raw data they return. More too than the images they record, most never seen by the eyes of a human. These magnificent machines, representative of the peak of human exploratory technology are much greater than the sum of their parts. Often the result of years of international collaboration, teamwork, anguish and joy, these are the ambassadors of our knowledge, the manifestations of the spirit of human curiosity and the first steps of a lonely species wandering out into the darkness. Whilst they wander space in isolation, they have the dreams and imagination of many people behind them.

This is why, when a launch fails or an unmanned probe goes missing, the loss is felt by us all. The cost can be counted in dollars or euros, but the real price is the setback to the campaign for understanding that our failed or lost probe was spearheading. A scout lost to the enemy. I've heard stories of folks who cried at the loss of Beagle II (the British-built Mars lander lost to the Martian atmosphere in 2003/4), and who amongst us are not moved by xkcd's wonderful homage to the late (but very successful) MER Spirit rover?

On the eve of the landing of MSL Curiosity, the most complex rover ever designed, it is worth bearing in mind the hard work and dedication that it took for the latest generation of scientists and engineers to push the limits of our understanding and put a car-sized robot on Mars. I wish all those involved in the construction and operation of this wonderful machine the best of luck. Earth is rooting for you!