I’m Making A Bear-themed Newsletter.

bring back the habits that made you happy as a child. there’s no reason you should ever have to give up harmless things that bring you joy. you don’t have to age out of having fun. finger paint. write mediocre fanfiction and questionable poetry. put chocolate chips in your waffles. sing in the bath, and while working in the yard, and while washing your hands. hammer tunelessly on a piano. spin in circles until you fall down. climb a tree. just because you’re now in charge of your life doesn’t mean you’re expected to give up on the things that make life feel worth living

me: *sees stars and points at them* yes

person: what?

me: *sounding more forceful* YES

Me @ everyone: look at the moon

The Cassini spacecraft is a victim of its own success. It astonished scientists by finding conditions potentially suitable for life beneath the surface of one of Saturn’s icy moons, Enceladus.

When Cassini runs out of fuel it could accidentally crash into this pristine world, spreading earthly contamination. So researchers decided that the spacecraft must be destroyed. That’s why, on Friday, it will slam itself into Saturn’s atmosphere.

It’s a dramatic end to an impressive career. For over a decade, Cassini has orbited around Saturn 294 times, collected more than 600 GB of data, visited over a dozen moons and discovered at least seven new ones. It has sent over 400,000 images back home.

Saturn’s Strangest Sights, As Captured By A Doomed Spacecraft

Video: NPR’s Skunk Bear

gosh but like we spent hundreds of years looking up at the stars and wondering “is there anybody out there” and hoping and guessing and imagining

because we as a species were so lonely and we wanted friends so bad, we wanted to meet other species and we wanted to talk to them and we wanted to learn from them and to stop being the only people in the universe

and we started realizing that things were maybe not going so good for us– we got scared that we were going to blow each other up, we got scared that we were going to break our planet permanently, we got scared that in a hundred years we were all going to be dead and gone and even if there were other people out there, we’d never get to meet them

and then

we built robots?

and we gave them names and we gave them brains made out of silicon and we pretended they were people and we told them hey you wanna go exploring, and of course they did, because we had made them in our own image

and maybe in a hundred years we won’t be around any more, maybe yeah the planet will be a mess and we’ll all be dead, and if other people come from the stars we won’t be around to meet them and say hi! how are you! we’re people, too! you’re not alone any more!, maybe we’ll be gone

but we built robots, who have beat-up hulls and metal brains, and who have names; and if the other people come and say, who were these people? what were they like?

the robots can say, when they made us, they called us discovery; they called us curiosity; they called us explorer; they called us spirit. they must have thought that was important.

and they told us to tell you hello.