Aurora, Borealis:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_(astronomy)

There's cool pictures in the link about Aurora, which I only have seen once, in northern Maine, if it's a neat memory too.

What we chose to celebrate or pay a lot of attention to says a lot of who we are, and if it's sad that people die, one hundred years from now people will remember another event a lot more: July 20, 1969.

On July 20, 1969 Neil Armstrong and "Buzz" Aldrin became the first human being to step on land not of this Earth, saying as follows:

"That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."

They of course had done that in response to President John F. Kennedy's call:

" There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

     We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."

That remains true to this day, if sometimes we seem to focus so much on the small instead of the large, the painful, instead of the glorious, a curious part of our nature as to some self-destructive tendencies, if children don't seem to think that way, hence their status as natural born scientists.

So if we are to remember Aurora, why not let it be of the Borealis form, of what it is that remains to explore in Space, which is Infinite in character, and the better angels of our nature?

finis