a star is dead: glimmers of grief within science, education, and space exploration

Anyone who knows me probably knows I dropped out of high school, and that I struggled immensely within the education system. I also grew up with a parent in my life being deeply skeptical of science, to the point of being a flat earthling & against medical procedures involving any punctures of the skin.

I grew up believing in a central God, someone who had an end path for me and a promised future. Religion is guaranteed as a lush ending, no matter your trials and tribulations on Earth. That combined with growing up in a strongly anti-science household lead me to not understand the world in its’ true forms, but rather as a person in the audience understands the set of a theatre.

This is all aesthetic and surface level, there’s nothing underneath.

I don’t necessarily remember the moment when I truly grasped what it meant to exist within a world that was a greater system. I just knew that what was around me was there and mine because God brought it to me.

In retrospect, there is a lot of grief I experience when encountering those who believe in pseudoscience and homeopathy. While being the guinea pig child of a conspiracy theorist, I fell deeply in love with space and coding. Prior to my academic Icarus-ing, I wanted to become the first female undergraduate with a degree in AI from Carnegie Mellon. I had dreams of potentially attending the USC Viterbi school of engineering to work in robotics.

For years, I took photos in front of every Tesla sign as a show of my immense love for science. I applied to NASA internships 4 hours away because I felt I wanted it so badly that I would commute from Palm Desert to Edwards AFB everyday.

I watched a man named Scott Kelly come back to Earth safely, and in the greatest moment of my childhood, I stood up and asked him in a room full of strangers if he ever dealt with how much emptiness space contained, if he ever looked outside to see the expanse and the insignificance all in the face of it.

Someone flagged me after to go into a back room and take a photo with him, a prized possession I have printed out in a copy of ‘Endurance’. When I got done with the event, I got in the car and almost cried of joy talking about it and how much it meant to ask him anything. The very real response I got — “Did you ask him how they faked the moon landing?”.

I remember reading a quote once along the lines of, “What does the threat of death mean to Eve in a garden where nothing has ever died?”.

When I grew up, I dealt with the same issue. What does it mean to be full of life in a barren universe when I didn’t truly know the mechanisms of being alive?

When I think of my issues with pseudoscience, my pain point is their inability to realize the magic we already have.

There is no need to invent new things, because everything we have is already quite astounding. There is already a deep beauty at work through everything: our planes, boats, weather, surgeries, gardening, construction, manufacturing, energy generation.

Of course, this rejection of those countermovements is a projection of the fact there is people who understand the science, and I don’t know if I can ever be one.

I cried for a bit prior to writing this essay, thinking of the person I could have been if my autism was diagnosed earlier, and was given the proper supports. I want to know who I would be if I was able to channel my brain into pursuing science as a career instead of lusting over my obssession with it, like a teenage boy over an Instagram model.

Nevertheless, the past changes for no one — we must carry those dead versions of ourselves as the cost of being the version who is alive.

Academia Amanda is a version of me that’s been dead for a while. She still surfaces with anguish often. I try to console her through always learning, reading, and trying my best to fill in what I don’t know. I feed her small miracles of science as much as I can.

A small miracle of science is that we use radioactive materials in smoke detectors, a feared thing turned into a symbol of safety. When cancer patients need chemotherapy, a mediport is installed so the patient doesn’t have to be pricked repeatedly.

When I get extremely overwhelmed, I go watch planes land at airports. Visual proof in front of me of how something so dangerous has become routine and predictable through our efforts.

When airplanes land, they use Instrument Landing Systems that shoot radio waves at a plane (which the plane also shoots back and all around) to track where it is along the runway and to collect instrumentation data.

Genuinely, I am asking because I cannot contain it — how beautiful is that? A world where we have not only learned about waves and frequencies, but know enough about it to manipulate it to guide us into safety through the most treacherous conditions we can fly in.

I did an experiment after having a PTSD breakdown over trust one night, driving home on the Oregon coast. For 2 straight hours, I said, “Get home safely, I love you” to each car that passed me or that I drove by. And I counted.

Until I realized that I passed 50+ cars in what I imagined was a lonely road home, I don’t think I truly understood the scale of how trust has enabled our modern world to exist.

Everywhere we see science in action and our modern world doused in empathy and safety because of it, and we barely even recognize it for the miracle it is. How penetratingly lonely is it for us to look into the universe and to see nothing from the blissful comfort of our alive world?

We go up into what we as humankind have interpreted to be the limits of heaven, and we see nothing like ourselves there. Even what we see up there isn’t what it currently is. When a star dies, we don’t see it immediately. We are living things under a constant celestial graveyard.

We, by the sheer effort and research of hundreds of thousands before us, know that we are very warm and alive against a very cold cosmic backdrop.

We are all we have. If we lose sight of how rare we are, there will be nothing coming to save us.