I finally finished reading Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything during the pandemic. It’s a great read if you’re looking for a nonfiction book. At the beginning of the book, there’s a part that just set the entire thing up for me: elements easily found on the vitamins shelf at your local drugstore are the same elements that made us. Yet, if you were to snatch all those elements up and mix them, you couldn’t create a human.

Here’s another fast fact about me: I never grew out of wanting to be an astronaut. I have terrible eyesight, I have a fear of falling, and I hate flying. So, I think it’s safe to say I’ll stay on Earth for the foreseeable future. However, I am drawn to books, series, and movies about space. For All Mankind (Apple TV+) is set during the space race of the 60s. It imagines a world where that race didn’t end with the US landing on the Moon. It’s an alternative universe plot, and when NASA announced it had found evidence of water on the Moon in 2020, I immediately screamed, “They got it right!” Sometimes fiction can become a reality.

I am fascinated by space.

Bryson examines many things, hence the title of the book, and it’s easy to veer off into learning more about the topics presented, but his simplistic approach to explaining the universe is what wowed me. The difference between Bryson and Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Welcome to the Universe is, well, Neil’s an astrophysicist with an uncanny ability to communicate scientific jargon in a way that’s much simpler but still over my head at times. Bill is just as intrigued by the phenomenon that is our galaxy as I am.

I used to think we (humans) were alone in the universe. I no longer believe that. The amount of what we don’t know about our universe is unimaginable. And to think, we’re now on a mission to learn about life on Mars. How amazing was it to see Perseverance touch down on the surface of the Red Planet?

My interest in space stems from my high school physics teacher. He believed in parallel universes (hang with me here). That take on the universe made me question things. Not that I necessarily believe that I exist as the exact opposite of who I am in another universe, but that we have continually proved that things we thought didn’t exist do. I can’t wait to see our return to the Moon, colonize Mars (hopefully without The Martian plot playing out), and where we go from here.

I’d like to find out if space is indeed the final frontier.