Why Taxes Are Not Altogether Bad

A couple of things made me feel good the other day, and I realized they had taxes in common. One was taking the first tomatoes home from the community garden I have a plot in. The community garden is in the park across town. It's a lovely park, with large, scenic ponds you can fish in or just stroll around, looking at the reflected trees and sky. It has a stage where they put on free concerts. It's got soccer fields and bike paths and all kinds of good stuff. I don't mind paying taxes for that.

So anyway, I took the tomatoes home, thinking about how they were the first trickle of what will soon (we're having a hot spell) be a headlong rush of ripening tomatoes. A ripe tomato is one of the good things in life, and so is homemade marinara sauce you store and then have in the dead of winter. It's like storing sunlight.

The other good thing bubbled up out of the media, not daily life. The media's offerings mostly tend to depress or horrify me, but this caught my eye and intrigued me. I hadn't heard of the Kepler Mission before, and if you haven't either, it seems they've got a satellite trailing the earth in its orbit, searching a star cluster for earth-sized planets in the "habitable" zone where it's not too hot or too cold for life—or, at least, life in a form we can comprehend. The satellite—technically, it's a satellite of the sun, not of the earth—is capable of detecting a "transit," in which a planet passes across the face of a star and dims its light. But that's not all it can do—the other day they tested it and found it could also detect the dimming caused when the planet went behind the star, which means Kepler is sensitive enough to see the light from the planet itself, even when the planet is light years away. A light year is six trillion miles, by the way.

This promises to give us information about the atmosphere of the many planets we now know to be out there among the stars. And it promises to tell us more about the possibility of life on them. That's pretty cool. I'd like to thank the astronomers, rocket people, engineers, and everyone else over at NASA, including the janitorial staff who keep the place tidy, for making this happen. It makes me proud of my society. And I'm glad to pay taxes to support it. While we're on the subject, I'd like to proclaim from my tiny little balcony here that I'd also be glad to pay a bit more if necessary so that we can have insured health care for everyone, just like every other prosperous nation. I'd like to see commonsense reform of the health insurance industry, and if we can't have that, then a single-payer system. I don't go to town-hall meetings and yell like an idiot about things of which I am wholly ignorant, or spend the whole day writing moronic comments in all caps on comment threads. But I'm politically active and I jolly well vote. I have no idea how many politicians read my blog, but I'm just sayin'.

So. Anyway. Kepler. I woke up this morning with Venus rising over the treetops to the east and thought about something I'd read in the "frequently asked questions" section of NASA's Kepler site. The question: "When and if we find these exoplanets, what next—will there be a manned mission to those planets?" The answer was that it would take thousands of years to reach even the nearest planets "at any speeds we can attain at this time in history."

I registered that at the time, and filed it away, but it was only in the predawn stillness, with the morning star rising out my window, that I really thought about the way that was phrased. "At this time in history," they said. See, I find it quite cheering to contemplate our capacity for wonder and our hunger to explore. So much of what we know about ourselves is depressing. But that one little item about Kepler in the news led me to the anonymous writer for the NASA site who said we can't travel to the stars now but whose reference to history left the echoing implication that at some other time in history we certainly might.

Evidently we still have dreamers and explorers among us. I'm glad about that, and glad to have tomatoes ripening on the vine. And now it's fully today, and I don't know what more I'll discover to be glad about as the day goes on but I imagine I'll find out.