Books and Writers and stuff

If you want to write, or if you already write but want to get better, or if you just want to have a great time with other writers - Pikes Peak Writers Conference is the place.  It offers workshops, panels, speakers, and classes for every type of writing.  Don't miss it next year.

I had a great time there talking to Seanan McGuire, writer of urban fantasy and the InCryptid novels.   (I had a model Dunkleosteus with me: she immediately recognized it and loved it so much she posed for pictures.)

Reading Midnight Blue Light Special, one of the InCryptid line. The Price/Healy family is charged with keeping cryptids, many of whom are shape-shifters living in inhabited areas, from the public eye and from the hunters of the Covenant of St. George. Cryptids in this book include pretty much all the animals of cryptozoology (the hero rents her apartment from a sasquatch) plus several from fairy tales and some original species of her own, so it's not cryptozoology in the sense of focusing on real or necessary plausible animals, but she's clearly read the literature and includes cryptids from around the world and tosses off lines like, " If wishes were horses, we'd have an easier time feeding the chupacabras." It's a wild, funny, and original series. I recommend it!

I read Steve Alten's reissued Meg, in a special edition bundled with the prequel Meg: Origins. It's not often an author gets the chance to go back and rework the introduction to his world. He adds a pretty good prequel, fixes a couple of things that were eyebrow-raising the first time around (Meg v. a wading T. rex is now a simulation), and gives one of his better characters, Terry Tanaka, more to do. (The swipe at Richard Ellis seems petty, though: Richard savaged the science in the original Meg, and so did I: Alten has fixed some aspects of that as well.) The book still doesn't rise to the level of his best cryptozoological work, The Loch, and his SF novel Sharkman (Sharkman's science is iffy, but well within the allowable "reach " for a SF tale, and I gave it a top review for its superb characterization), but Origins should win some new fans for his universe of big-toothed predators.

I meant that about the Writers Conference. I'm already signed up for 2016!

Earth Day, a Pulitzer, and a planet full of species

Happy Earth Day!

A lot has been happening on our little planet.  Some of it, despite the seriousness of our ecological predicament, is good news.   In fact, all of it's good news in some way.
First, we know we are in the middle of the sixth great extinction, but we need to make people more aware of it.  The people who hand out Pulitzer Prizes have given this awareness a big boost by picking, as this year's winner in Nonfiction, Elizabeth Kolbert's compelling, highly readable, and powerful book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.   I can't say enough about this book: Kolbert is authoritative, engaging, and memorable in her assessment of the science and her first-person reports on her trips to see the threats and the threatened species for herself. There have been five mass extinctions in known geological history, the most recent being the impact which ended the Mesozoic, and Kolbert documents the way human beings have brought about yet another mass extinction. Some of the extinctions are unwitting (early Native Americans certainly didn't intend to wipe out the mastodon) and some shockingly deliberate, as when a scrounger stomped on the last viable Great Auk egg ever to exist.  Kolbert recounts her own journeys, ranging from the depressing to the amusing, to pull us in and give the science a human dimension, but she never lets herself overpower the story.  Rarely has an author provided us with such a compelling account of an ongoing crisis which demands global action before we lose yet more irreplaceable creatures and their habitats.

  

In the meantime, that good news I mentioned? We are  still finding new species, and every news article on such discoveries is one more little ray of hope (and prod to action). We have a new frog from Costa Rica, Hyalinobatrachium dianae, that, despite being less than 3cm long, looks startlingly like the beloved muppet Kermit.   We have new action on protecting key habitat around the world - whether a habitat corridor in Suriname  to the world's largest marine reserve around Palmyra Atoll, Johnston Atoll, Wake Island, and other terrirories in the Pacific. In the latter case, a national monument created by President Bush in 2009 has been expanded five-fold via executive action by President Obama.  And we learned more about existing species that will make a difference in conservation planning, the most striking example being the fact that western Pacific gray whales migrate over 27,000 km and intermix with eastern gray whales.

Finally, science has restored Brontosaurus to its proper stature: the of iconic and beloved king of the plant-eating dinosaurs. If all's not right with the world, we are at least making some strides.

The big guy (Wikipedia Creative Commons license)

New species of beaked whale?

There are 22 known species of beaked whale (though not every one is accepted by every expert).  So what happens when scientists record calls that sound like a beaked whale - but don't match any known species? Well, they publish a paper like this one.  There is no certainty without more data, but we may well have detected a new species.

Bobcat v. shark

I sued to fish in Sebastian Inlet, just north of my hometown of Vero Beach.  Turns out this bobcat (a BIG bobcat: maybe they are growing larger without competition from the near-extinct Florida panther) decided to go fishing, too.  If someone said they'd seen a bobcat jump into the ocean to haul out a shark, I'm not sure I'd believe it, but the picture is here to prove it. (Not "here" as in this post - copyright law, you know - but in this news story.)

Amazing.

"Bully for Brontosaurus!"

That was Stephen Jay Gould's title for an essay in which he argued that some things should be called just what they are called and a brontosaurus is a brontosaurus.  Well, everyone thought it was an apatosaurus, mislabeled.  Turns out it's not.

Bronto is back!

Classic AMNH brontosaur skeleton (with, somehow, the skull of a brachiosaur...) 

Now we can get back to arguing whether Pluto should be called a planet.  (HINT: Yes)

Museum Exhibit: Mythic Creatures

This is a great exhibit (currently at the Denver Museum ofNature and Science), created by AMNH, Field Museum, and others. It mixes real animals (life-size Gigantopithecus (biggest primate ever) and Aepyornis (elephant bird of Madagascar), mythical (European and Chinese dragons, a stunning model of Sinbad's roc as a giant golden-eagle looking bird, mermaids, Inuit and Japanese water spirits, among others) and cryptozoology. There's an interesting setup where you can "See a Serpent" by moving whales and dolphins through waves and getting the impression of a large single creature. The Denver Museum added mythic creatures of Colorado, with a jackalope, a fur-bearing trout, and other creatures. Bigfoot gets a surprisingly brief mention given his prominence among cryptozoological creatures.   There are short videos on animals of land and air (the land one includes anthropologist Adrienne Mayor talking about fossils and their interpretations as mythical creatures and comments by George Schaller). It's a terrific collection with a good exhibit store (none of MY books, though cryptozoology authors Loren Coleman and Ivan Sanderson get in, along with Mayor and some modern bestiaries.)  It’s in Denver through the summer!

The fate of Steller's sea cow

The known history of Steller's sea cow is well known, tragic, and short.  In 1741, naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller was shipwrecked on Bering Island.  This is one of the Komandorski Islands, which lie between Kamchatka and the Aleutians. There he and his companions met the sea cow.  It was a huge plant-eating mammal, up to 35 feet long, with a bilobed tail like a whale's and a placid disposition that made it easy to approach (and to harpoon).   After Steller's crew finally returned to civilization, sealers and other voyagers began stopping off in the sea cow's haunts to slaughter the inoffensive mammals for their meat.   By 1768, the species had apparently been hunted to extinction.

There are a few odd data bits about the sea cow that hint-just hint - it hung on a little longer.  Native hunters reported killing them as late as 1780. Early Russian colonizers of Bering Island reported sighting sea cows in the 1830s.  Fifty years later, the explorer Nordenskiold returned from the region with a sea cow skeleton of unknown age and a tale of a live sighting from 1854.  In 1910, fishermen in Russia's Gulf of Anadyr reported a sea cow stranded on the beach, but the report was never investigated. Other Russian sightings in 1962 and 1977 came to nought.

Now we have some science indicating that the animal's range was, in fact, greater than we thought - although, alas, they don't hint at survival but at an earlier extirpation event.    It extended, not west or south as sometimes suggested, but north to Alaska's St. Lawrence Island. Bones collected from the island were spotted at a handicrafts show in faraway Atlanta, Georgia (USA), having been made into knife handles, and the provenance traced to St. Lawrence.  They were analyzed by the team of Lorelei D. Crerar , Andrew P. Crerar , Daryl P. Domning , and E. C. M. Parsons.  (They also offer some older history I was unaware of: that "According to the fossil record, animals in the genus Hydrodamalis inhabited coastal waterways from Japan through the Aleutian Island chain to Baja California during the Late Miocene, Pliocene, and Pleistocene. Hydrodamalis gigas was still present in the Aleutian Islands and central California less than 20 000 years ago." )  

The St. Lawrence population was apparently wiped out or driven out by Yup'ik  hunters around 900 AD.  So it is that one of the most fascinating animals in modern history met its fate as the hands of hungry humans: not once, but twice.  

Other references: 

Haley, Delphine.  1978.  "The Saga of Steller's Sea Cow," Natural History, November.

Mackal, Roy.  1980.  Searching for Hidden Animals.  New York: Doubleday.

Stejneger, Leonhard.  1936.  Georg Wilhelm Steller.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard  Press.

New species swing in

As I like to point out, we get a lot of new species every year. Most are tiny invertebrates you wouldn't notice even if you stepped on them (especially since you would be on the bottom of the ocean and therefore drowning), but the mammals, birds, sharks, etc. keep coming too.

A Field Museum expedition to a white-sands forest - an environment I didn't know existed - came up with three new plants, four frogs, four fish, and a titi monkey of striking coppery appearance  made of which one scientist said, "none of the experts... have seen this coloration before, and there isn't anything like it in the Museum."

Never stop exploring!

Book review: The Species Seekers

The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth
Richard Conniff
W. W. Norton & Company (2010)

In this excellent book, Richard Conniff introduces us to the scientists, naturalists, dilettantes, and others (from the brilliant to the crazy) who contributed so much to the natural history we know. While the focus is on zoology as developed by European and American seekers, this also works as a history of the natural sciences in the 18th and 19th centuries. This period saw hunting for new species raised to a manic level it's never attained before or since. When professional scientists were few, species-hunters came from every walk of life - doctors, sea captains, hunters, and women, who didn't get their due then and don't really get it now. (I had no idea that Beatrix Potter, creator of Peter Rabbit, was a bona fide expert on the fungi who was shunned by organized science in England.) Conniff creates an especially vivid portrait of Mary Kingsley (who died young in 1900), who was as daring a field collector as anyone. 
I've often thought a book could be written strictly on the scientific contributions of missionaries: Conniff does not neglect them, recounting Father Armand David's many daring discoveries in China. The famous names like Darwin are here, of course, but along the way we also meet such men as Walter Rothschild, who proved a hopelessly incompetent banker (the family has basically erased him from its history) but a keen naturalist and a funder of major collecting expeditions: Paul Du Chaillu, who made countless real contributions but also created the myth of ferocity among gorillas, and the men and women who supported the more famous naturalists (one item that sticks in my mind is Sir Richard Owens' wife's diary entry about coming home to find a dead rhinoceros in her no-doubt-immaculate front hall.) 
Some of the naturalists here may have hastened the demise of species by taking specimens seemingly without limit, but others foresaw the need to start protecting the natural world. Their discoveries also contributed greatly to the development of the idea of natural selection and to its subsequent refinement. Conniff presents this in roughly chronological order, and it's fascinating to follow the narrative as naturalists slowly put the pieces together and began to understand such concepts as ecosystems and natural selection pressures.  Conniff gives us these people as they lived, not ducking the racism, sexism and imperialism that plagued even the greatest minds of the day, but not wallowing in it either. This thoroughly researched and superbly written book is a time machine to the great era of species-hunting, and I cannot imagine any student of the natural sciences who will not enjoy the ride immensely.

The Skeptic and the Sasquatch

I haven't spent much time on sasquatch lately.  I'd have snorted "impossible" and closed the file a long time ago if it wasn't for the uncomfortable fact that there are sober, intelligent citizens who insist they've gotten a good look at it.

The investigators for the North American Wood Ape Conservancy (NAWAC) (who I always liked, even if their name implies preexisting belief in a "wood ape," for renaming the phenomenon so they could start fresh) didn't get a close look, but they did what is, compared to most of the dreck in this business, a very careful investigation over a four-year period that collected a lot of secondary evidence, from thermal images to rock-throwing, that couldn't be easily explained. I still would have passed it by if it were not for Sharon Hill, a geologist and a well-respected, smart skeptic who runs  the Doubtful News blog. Sharon read the report and agreed that a lot of this was very puzzling and needed answers to questions like (my wording) "Who trekked many miles into the wildest part of Oklahoma just to heave rocks at bigfoot hunters?" She wrote a very good post on it.

She has never, and does not now, endorse sasquatch as a real animal. She looked objectively at the report and agreed the investigators seemed sincere, didn't leap to conclusions, and had genuinely puzzling experiences.  (Here's the report.)

Well, you'd think Sharon had come out foursquare for demon-hunting, poltergeists, and New Age medicine.  Some of the comments from fellow skeptics focused on the report itself ("chock full of assumptions" was one fairly reasonable line) and others dismissed Sharon's seeming indulgence of such nonsense. One skeptic dismissed it with, "I'm astounded that any of this could be considered evidence."  

Now there are a lot of sincere people looking for sasquatch, and there are a lot of publicity-seeking idiots, and there are certainly hoaxers.  And missing one of the largest species in North America seems, on the face of it, not possible.  But the response went a little - well, unscientific.  No one accused Sharon directly of being an idiot, but a lot of them implied it, and, while some did read the original report, others flatly refused to.   (My favorite line posted in defense of the investigation was,  "Drunken hillbillies would have to be little more than brain dead to be hanging out in this very remote area, over a four year period, looking for an opportunity to throw rocks at investigators who are brandishing rifles.") As Sharon put it, “Several people misunderstood my approach. I have gained much information and understanding by not being hostile or dismissive to those on the metaphorical “other side of the fence”. I’m not out to debunk Sasquatch. I wish to understand what people are experiencing and why they conclude this creature is real.”

The point I'm getting at here is that Sharon considered the evidence and published a well-reasoned, objective review knowing full well that it would not go over well with some of her friends.  Her approach was scientific, just as it was when she destroyed the Melba Ketchum idiocy. The NAWAC people have not proven sasquatch exists: they have proven they encountered a lot of puzzling incidents. That's all Sharon said. Fellow skeptics shouldn't be taking her to the woodshed for it.

Press on, my friend.

An interview with Cryptomundo.com

One of the most popular cryptozoology sites, host for some great debates, is www.cryptomundo.com.  So I was happy to answer questions posed by moderator Craig Woolheater about my novel The Dolmen, which I think of as horror but certainly has a cryptozoological premise.

Craig carried an announcement when it came out and has now followed up by posting the interview. Thank you!

Seas, Sharks, and Serpents

My current nonfiction project is a tome on the discovery and legends of marine life, covering creatures new, remarkable, and mythical.  The idea is to present the wondrous discoveries we're making in the context of our long and fractious love affair with the oceans themselves.

I was originally hoping for 2014, but that date went by pretty fast. I'd hoped to get it out this year, but no luck: there's just too much recent material to digest. So here we are looking at early 2016.  I hate missing deadlines, but there's a good reason: to make the book better.

Ownards!

Add a new moth to your closet.

Thanks to correspondent Laurence Clark Crossen, I need to add another newly discovered species, the enigma moth of Australia's Kangaroo Island.  The tiny, handsome gold and purple moth is referred to (inaccurately) as a "living dinosaur moth." What's special about it? It carries many "primitive" traits that go tens of millions of years back in moth evolution. So scientists are very happy to see it alive. (I don't know what a "living dinosaur moth" would actually look like - maybe like Mothra in the Godzilla movies? )

Exciting new species - as usual

If this blog has a purpose, it's to remind people there are still discoveries to make in the natural universe, from Earth's jungles to the remotest stars.

So we have some things to celebrate!

First, from Myanmar, welcome back Jerdon's babbler (Chrysomma altirostre altirostre). This bird, perhaps overlooked because it's one of the hundreds of species ornithologists refer to, sometimes despairingly, as LBJs (little brown jobs), vanished 73 years ago.  Scientists have just published the news that they rediscovered the bird last year in the Bago region of Myanmar.  They targeted it by looking for patches of suitable habitat (grassland, in this case)  in the known range that had not been logged, burned, developed, or otherwise ravaged in the interim.

Now we've got even bigger news, a new primate. There are over 30 species of the diminutive monkeys called titis (genus Callicebus) in South America.  The largest are not even a half-meter long, and several species look considerably alike (known as cryptid species), all of which makes discovery a challenge. Nevertheless, the challenge has been met.  Welcome Callicebus miltoni, unmistakable with its long orange tail.

I can't find non-copyrighted photos of either yet, but follow the links and meet our new (and old) neighbors!

I'm back - literally

Friends,

This blog has not been update in some weeks.  I must plead distraction: I was preparing from back surgery and then recovering from it.  I'm back!

And speaking of bones like the ones my surgeon was messing with, here's a great photo my daughter took of the Dunkleosteus skull in the museum on the University of Nebraska campus, where she attends.
Onwards!

Pick a Peck of Paleontology Postings

There's a lot going on in the world of long-dead animals.
There doesn't seem to be an end in finding prehistoric species.  We know, logically, that a limited numbers of species have lived on Earth, but we clearly haven't found them all yet, and they just keep coming.
The last few years have given us the biggest bear (we think) that ever lived, Arctotherium angustiden, the biggest snake (the 12-13m Titanoboa), , and the biggest crocodile, Crocodylus thorbjarnarsoni, along with the ancestor of today's sperm whale, who by the way was even more formidable than the modern type.
Then in just the last week we added two discoveries. Scientists exploring the Peruvian area of the Amazon basin found seven species of crocodiles, including three new species, dating back 13 million years (2.5 million years older then the Amazon itself). There have never been as many species of croc living in the same habitat at the same time.  This find dwarfs modern diversity (we don't have more than three crocs in the same area today) and introduced three new animals, including a weird-looking clam hunter with rounded teeth and the snout of a shovel.  As paleontologist Rodolfo Salas-Gismondi put it, "We uncovered this special moment in time when the ancient mega-wetland ecosystem reached its peak in size and complexity, just before its demise and the start of the modern Amazon River system." Wow. Cool.
In the second item passed onto me by my friend Kris Winkler this week, paleontologists are exploring, with exquisite care, a specimen never seen before: a frozen baby woolly rhinoceros. Hunters who found "Sasha" took her for a recent reindeer carcass until they saw the horn. She is estimated at 10,000 years old, and scientists hope she yields high-quality DNA (not to make new rhinos - that is still beyond us - but to sequence the animal's genome and learn far more about it than we know today).   The animal was a contemporary of the famous mammoth, but there's some debate over its appearance.  Not anymore.
Exploration goes in every direction - across time, across space, across the frontiers of the mind. We are privileged to live in  a time with more tools for exploration than any society before us.  We shouldn't waste the opportunity.

The giant snake Titanoboa swallowing a crocodile 

(NASM exhibit photographed by author) 

Goodbye to a hero of science

You can say"heroine" if you want, but I like Sigourney Weaver's argument that a "heroine" is someone who needs rescuing, while the hero is a person who does the rescuing.  Dr. Eugenie Clark tried to rescue the entire ocean system of the planet Earth. The "Shark Lady" was a pioneer of marine biology and exploration, a pathfinder expanding women's role in science, a tireless advocate for conservation, and the woman who brought sharks out of the shadows and showed us how complex and fascinating these "mindless killers" really are.
Clark was born in 1922, of mixed American and Japanese parents.  She grew up in a time when it was hard to be a woman with professional ambitions and even harder to be half-Japanese.  Still, she had a fascination with marine life early on, and her hero was the conservationist and bathyscaphe explorer William Beebe.  By 1950 she was a Ph.D. in marine biology. She had already done her early field work in the South Pacific, where she learned what an important resource local fishermen could be, and at the famed Scripps Institute and the American Museum of Natural History.
That was only the beginning for Dr. Clark.  She published breakthrough work on sharks in professional journals as well as books for popular audiences (I still have an ancient copy of her first, Lady with a Spear),  She was founder and  director of the Cape Haze Marine Laboratory (now the Mote Marine Laboratory)  for shark studies. She took Peter Benchley diving after he published Jaws and helped persuade him to do conservation work to help offset the damage the novel and film have done to sharks. She won an Emmy for her underwater films, cruised with Jacques Cousteau on the Calypso, and taught marine biology at the University of Maryland from 1968 to 1992.  She won countless accolades for her nonstop work on sharks, marine life in general, education, and conservation. Her endless curiosity led to her down such avenues as marine paleontology, riding a 50-foot whale shark, and becoming a founding board member of the International Society of Cryptozoology.

Fair winds and following seas.

Photo More Marine Laboratory

The puzzling Red Planet

Mars has gotten our attention from the ancient days, when it was Ares, the God of War, to the latest probes by rovers and orbiting spacecraft.  While nowhere near Earth's size, it's the only planet in the solar system that might harbor life similar to Earth life.  Therein lies the fascination.
We know the planet has no canals (remember, the search for"canals" on Mars arose from a misinterpretation of the word "canali," applied by Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli in 1877 to  straight lines that, well, don't exist either).  The human eye and the telescopes of the 1800s had limitations, one of which was a tendency to make separated features look like they were making a straight line.
 Ever since the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spotted slopes and "beds"  that looked like they were made by flowing water, we've been looking for more evidence.  These formations might have contributed to the "canali" appearance, but one Mars scientist, American William Hartmann, had already suggested another explanation: the apparent lines, or segments of them, were plumes of dust blowing off peaks in Martian windstorms.  Because of Mars' thin atmosphere, the plumes were highly visible and the dust blew a long ways. That made sense, and some such plumes have been spotted by the Hubble and other instruments, but they don't really explain what what we're seeing right now.
Amateur astronomers in 2012 were the first to spot two plumes, streaming out hundreds of kilometers long and wide and rising 250 km high.  They may be dust or ice, but either way they shouldn't rise so high in the thin atmosphere and low gravity of Mars before becoming so spread out they are invisible.
I'm not going to try to offer a solution here: it's way out of my depth.  But the point to be made is that this is our closest, most studied, and most Earthlike planetary neighbor, and we still don't thoroughly understand it.  We don't know for sure whether it had flowing water, although most planetary scientists think it did in the distant past. We don't know whether there are still occasional surface water flows. We don't know if it's sterile, if it used to harbor life, or if it harbors life now.
The only way to solve all the mysteries of Mars is to go there. NASA these days talks a good game, and their Orion capsule and Space Launch System may be useful pieces of a Mars expedition, but we're not really doing significant work on long-term habitats for humans or on landers that could carry astronauts.  In other words, they're dreaming about a landing in the next two decades, unless they want to start or at least plan real work on the missing pieces.  
Still, someone, someday, will go.  I volunteer.

World's scariest fish? The frilled shark

The frilled shark isn't the biggest of sharks. It has a clean record where maneating is concerned.  So why are its rare appearances greeted with such freaked-out responses from humans?
Basically, the 2m frilled shark, like the goblin shark (which looks nothing like it, but engenders similar responses and may by 5m long, to boot) don't fit our picture of what a shark looks like. The frilled shark instead fits our picture (inaccurate though it may be) of what a prehistoric monster looks like.  With a gill "frill" extending around the body, an elongated shape, and a relatively blunt head with 300 teeth, it doesn't look like a medium-sized, harmless animal, even though it is one.  It simply looks weird, and we go crazy over it (hint to SyFy Channel: an 8m frilled shark would make a great centerpiece for a horror movie.)
Oddly, the head and even the teeth of the frilled shark bear an interesting resemblance to those of the leopard seal. This fierce Antarctic predator (with at least one definite human death to its credit) can be 3m long and has no business looking like a shark. But that's convergent evolution for you.

Hail Columbia: A Last Note on NASA's Day of Remembrance

Recollections... Waking on a clear weekend morning here in Colorado, casually logging on to check my Email, seeing the banner, "NASA Loses Contact With Columbia." Turning on CNN. Watching more CNN. Explaining it to my daughter, then 11. Wondering how it had happened, what it would mean.

The technical answers have long since been settled. The human answers, as always, were not as simple. They drift out in fragments over the course of history, debated, challenged, finally settling but never quite settled.
Worth it? Of course it was not, in a logical sense, worth losing seven people for a science mission whose returns would not have been of great importance. Death, as Ulysses Grant once said of war, "is cruelty and you cannot refine it." Nor can you romanticize it. Nor, when there gross errors in judgment made, can you excuse it.
I submit, however, that any calculation about the worthiness of the voyage is incomplete, nay, unfair, unless it takes into account the desires and motivations of the voyagers. The seven people on Columbia did not just accept the risk of venturing, in a craft built by fallible humans, into the most hostile realm we know. They sought the risk. They spent years training, competing, and demanding the right to take the risk.
Whatever judgments we might make on the costs vs. the returns of their efforts as explorers, the explorers themselves had no doubts. Every one of them was a bright, accomplished, highly educated human being. Not one was foolish enough to think there was no risk. Not one hesitated.
Indeed, they did everything they possibly could to qualify themselves to stand out among their peers and earn the chance to risk their lives in a cause they deemed worthy.
By that standard alone, they were the best our species had to offer. They were sent forth into the last unknown ocean, explorers in an age when most people in their society place high value on safety, comfort, and surety.
Godspeed, Columbia.