It’s been 10 days and I’m still in a state of astonishment, trying to wrap my little Earth-bound brain around the stupendous fact that Juno was only one second late for its rendezvous with Jupiter — one second!
After a 1.7-billion-mile journey to Jupiter that took about five years, it was only late by a flickering blink of an eye. This is even more mind-bending when you consider there are 31,536,000 seconds in one year’s time, or 187,748,400 seconds in a five-year period (counting a leap year’s extra day).
At one point, Juno was moving at a mind-boggling 165,000 miles per hour until National Aeronautic and Space Administration scientists on Earth “told” it to fire its reverse rockets to slow down so it could enter into an orbit around the gaseous giant, Jupiter. (Juno is so faraway it takes 48 minutes for signals from Earth to reach it, and vice versa.)
At the time Juno received and acted upon the time-for-orbit signal, that was the exact time and place where the spacecraft was one second late.
Isn’t it stunning to think a team of brainy people, using phenomenal technology, can achieve a feat of such precision when most people can’t even get a microphone system to work in a local meeting hall?
When I first heard the news about Juno’s triumph, I was elated. I desperately needed some good news, a reminder of humankind’s goodness right after hearing about the butchery in Baghdad where more than 200 people were ripped to pieces from bomb shrapnel after which many (including women and children) were incinerated beyond recognition in the flames that followed. That horror was compounded later by news of the killings of the two black men (in Baton Rouge and St. Paul) and then the savage ambush of Dallas police officers.
With such a barrage of atrocities, we all need daily reminders of goodness. This world seems to have become such a sad, mournful place when murderous barbarism can run so rampant on the same spinning planet on which so many noble and life-enhancing achievements have taken place throughout the centuries: the growth of some enlightened civilizations, democracy, justice, arts and culture, technological innovations, cures for diseases, decency, kindness, compassion and, yes, the kind of dazzling technical teamwork that can send a spacecraft 1.7 billion miles to a planet where it arrives only one second late.
There was another bit of news that stuck in my craw for the past 10 days. It was also good news – well, mainly anyway. A cab driver in Boston picked up a customer and dropped him off at a designated place. A bit later, the driver noticed the man had left in the back seat a backpack. He decided to check the bag for maybe an ID card with a phone number or address. After opening the bag, he found a huge packed wad of $50 and $100 bills – $187,000 worth, to be exact.
The driver was flabbergasted, to say the least, especially as he remembered the man had told him, en route, that he had been living in a homeless shelter for the past six months. When the honest cab driver took the bag of money to the police, officers discovered a document with the money showing it was a disbursement amount from an inheritance.
Later, the man, missing the backpack, called the police to see if the bundle had been found and turned over. After proving his identity, the man was able to retrieve his windfall. That story made me wonder: How could a long-time homeless man, suddenly coming into a vast inheritance, be so absent-minded as to leave his cash treasure in the back of a cab?
What I ponder even more, though, is how could that man be such a cheapskate as to “reward” the cab driver with a tip of $100? Yes, that is what the miser gave the Good Samaritan: 100 bucks, hardly enough to pay, say, a monthly electricity bill. That amounts to 1,870th percent of the tightwad’s inheritance. The good, kind taxi driver didn’t complain, but in my opinion, I would call it as close as you can get to no good deed going unpunished. As they say on this sad, crazy, spinning planet: “Takes all types.”
