on the local news about a year ago.
A teen football player had died in a car accident.
The cameras showed all his friends after the funeral—these big hulking guys, all in tears, saying, “I loved him. We all loved him so much.”
I wondered if these guys had told the football player they loved him while he was alive,
or whether it was only with death that this strange word, love, could be used.
In books there's always somebody standing by ready to say hey, the world's in danger, evil's on the rise, but if you're really quick and take this ring and put it in that volcano over there everything will be fine.
But in real life that guy never turns up. He's never there. He's busy handing out advice in the next universe over.
In our world no one ever knows what to do, and everyone's just as clueless and full of crap as everyone else, and you have to figure it all out by yourself.
And even after you've figured it out and done it, you'll never know whether you were right or wrong.
You'll never know if you put the ring in the right volcano, or if things might have gone better if you hadn't.
There's no answers in the back of the book
There's difference between being dead and dying.
We're all dying.
Some of us die for ninety years, and some of us die for nineteen.
But each morning everyone on this planet wakes up one day closer to their death.
Everyone.
So living and dying are actually different words for the same thing, if you think about it
We are all dying,
every moment that passes of every day.
That is the inescapable truth of this existence.
It is a truth that can paralyze us with fear,
or one that can energize us with impatience, w
ith the desire to explore and experience,
with the hope- nay, the iron-will!- to find a memory in every action.
To be alive,
under sunshine, or starlight, in weather fair or stormy.
To dance with every step,
be they through gardens of flowers or through deep snows.
Pale amber sunlight falls across
The reddening October trees,
That hardly sway before a breeze
As soft as summer: summer's loss
Seems little, dear! on days like these.
Let misty autumn be our part!
The twilight of the year is sweet:
Where shadow and the darkness meet
Our love, a twilight of the heart
Eludes a little time's deceit.
Are we not better and at home
In dreamful Autumn, we who deem
No harvest joy is worth a dream?
A little while and night shall come,
A little while, then, let us dream.
Beyond the pearled horizons lie
Winter and night: awaiting these
We garner this poor hour of ease,
Until love turn from us and die
Beneath the drear November trees
The asteroid belt is a torus-shaped region in the Solar System, centered on the Sun and roughly spanning the space between the orbits of the planets Jupiter and Mars. It contains a great many solid, irregularly shaped bodies called asteroids or minor planets. The identified objects are of many sizes, but much smaller than planets, and, on average, are about one million kilometers (or six hundred thousand miles) apart. This asteroid belt is also called the main asteroid belt or main belt to distinguish it from other asteroid populations in the Solar System.
The asteroid belt is the smallest and innermost known circumstellar disc in the Solar System. Classes of small Solar System bodies in other regions are the near-Earth objects, the centaurs, the Kuiper belt objects, the scattered disc objects, the sednoids, and the Oort cloud objects. About 60% of the main belt mass is contained in the four largest asteroids: Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, and Hygiea. The total mass of the asteroid belt is estimated to be 3% that of the Moon.
Ceres, the only object in the asteroid belt large enough to be a dwarf planet, is about 950 km in diameter,
The Kuiper belt is a circumstellar disc in the outer Solar System, extending from the orbit of Neptune at 30 astronomical units (AU) to approximately 50 AU from the Sun.
It is similar to the asteroid belt, but is far larger—20 times as wide and 20–200 times as massive. Like the asteroid belt, it consists mainly of small bodies or remnants from when the Solar System formed.
While many asteroids are composed primarily of rock and metal, most Kuiper belt objects are composed largely of frozen volatiles (termed "ices"), such as methane, ammonia, and water. The Kuiper belt is home to most of the objects that astronomers generally accept as dwarf planets: Orcus, Pluto, Haumea, Quaoar, and Makemake.
Some of the Solar System's moons, such as Neptune's Triton and Saturn's Phoebe, may have originated in the region.
A trans-Neptunian object (TNO), also written transneptunian object, is any minor planet in the Solar System that orbits the Sun at a greater average distance than Neptune, which has an orbital semi-major axis of 30.1 astronomical units (au).
Typically, TNOs are further divided into the classical and resonant objects of the Kuiper belt, the scattered disc and detached objects with the sednoids being the most distant ones. As of October 2020, the catalog of minor planets contains 678 numbered and more than 2,000 unnumbered TNOs.
Ceres is a dwarf planet in the middle main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
It was the first asteroid discovered on 1 January 1801 and announced as a new planet.
Ceres was later classified as an asteroid and then a dwarf planet, the only one always inside Neptune's orbit.
A dwarf planet is a small planetary-mass object that is in direct orbit of the Sun, smaller than any of the eight classical planets. The prototypical dwarf planet is Pluto. The interest of dwarf planets to planetary geologists is that they may be geologically active bodies, an expectation that was borne out in 2015 by the Dawn mission to Ceres and the New Horizons mission to Pluto.
Astronomers are in general agreement that at least the nine largest candidates are dwarf planets – in rough order of size, Pluto, Eris, Haumea, Makemake, Gonggong, Quaoar, Sedna, Ceres, and Orcus – although there is some doubt for Orcus. Of these nine plus the tenth-largest candidate Salacia, two have been visited by spacecraft (Pluto and Ceres) and seven others have at least one known moon (Eris, Haumea, Makemake, Gonggong, Quaoar, Orcus, and Salacia), which allows their masses and thus an estimate of their densities to be determined. Mass and density in turn can be fit into geophysical models in an attempt to determine the nature of these worlds. Only one, Sedna, has neither been visited nor has any known moons, making an accurate estimate of mass difficult.
Eris (then known as 2003 UB313) was discovered in January 2005; it was thought to be slightly larger than Pluto, and some reports informally referred to it as the tenth planet
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– discovered January 1, 1801 and announced January 24, 45 years before Neptune. Considered a planet for half a century before reclassification as an asteroid. Considered a dwarf planet by the IAU since the adoption of Resolution 5A on August 24, 2006.
.svg){kind=small}
– discovered February 18, 1930 and announced March 13. Considered a planet for 76 years. Explicitly reclassified as a dwarf planet by the IAU with Resolution 6A on August 24, 2006. Five known moons..svg){kind=small}
(2003 UB313) – discovered January 5, 2005 and announced July 29. Called the "tenth planet" in media reports. Considered a dwarf planet by the IAU since the adoption of Resolution 5A on August 24, 2006, and named by the IAU dwarf-planet naming committee on September 13 of that year. One known moon..svg){kind=small}
(2003 EL61) – discovered by Brown et al. December 28, 2004 and announced by Ortiz et al. on July 27, 2005. Named by the IAU dwarf-planet naming committee on September 17, 2008. Two known moons..svg){kind=small}
(2005 FY9) – discovered March 31, 2005 and announced July 29. Named by the IAU dwarf-planet naming committee on July 11, 2008. One known moon..svg){kind=small}
(2002 LM60) – discovered June 5, 2002 and announced October 7 of that year. One known moon..svg){kind=small}
(2003 VB12) – discovered November 14, 2003 and announced March 15, 2004..svg){kind=small}
(2004 DW) – discovered February 17, 2004 and announced two days later. One known moon..svg){kind=small}
(2007 OR10) – discovered July 17, 2007 and announced January 2009. Recognized as a dwarf planet by JPL and NASA in May 2016. One known moon..svg){kind=small}
– discovered September 22, 2004. One known moon.
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