A Rock in the Shape of a Peanut

©2019 by John LaTorre

Somewhere, out beyond the orbit of Pluto
There's a rock in the shape of a peanut.

How do we know this? Well, we sent a robot to Pluto, some years back.

It took pictures of the dwarf planet
Which used to be called a planet once.
(But Pluto is a dwarf planet now,
one of many dwarf planets in a huge debris field at the edge of our solar system,
a debris field we call the Kuiper Belt.)

But the robot still had a bit of fuel left,
so we sent it in search of a rock in the Kuiper Belt
That we'd just spotted with powerful telescopes here on earth.

What was this rock?
What was its size and its shape and its path through the cosmos?
We had to know.

So we spent thousands and thousands of dollars on expeditions to faraway places here on earth,
and set up telescopes to measure what we could of its trajectory and orbit.

And we measured its size from the star it blotted out in its transit.

But we still didn't know its shape.

And that was important to know,
because it could maybe tell use how the solar system came to be,
or so the astronomers tell us.

So we sent the little robot to take a closer look,
since it was heading that way anyway,
on its journey to oblivion.

And we found that the rock was shaped like a peanut
... a very big peanut, to be sure, some twenty miles long
but shaped like a peanut just the same.

Maybe it was a foolish thing to learn,
since the expeditions on Earth cost thousands of dollars to mount,
while children there were starving to death.

On the other hand,
the thousands of dollars weren't spent on weapons of war,
so maybe lives were saved. Who's to judge?

Such a curious species we are,
to care so much about a rock that we cannot see with the naked eye,
in a place we will probably never visit in a hundred lifetimes.

But now we know that it is about twenty miles long and shaped like a peanut.

And we have done several miraculous things in a row,
to send such a tiny robot on such a long trip,
to photograph the rock and send the pictures back at the speed of light,
which still took six hours to reach us from its location.

We have named this peanut-shaped rock "Ultima Thule"
which means "the farthest point."

But we know that this is a lie.

There are other points farther still,
and if our little robot does not reach them, other robots will.
Maybe these rocks will be shaped like carrots, or potatoes,
or perfectly round marbles like the rock we live on.
We don't know yet.

But we do know of a rock that is shaped like a peanut,
a rock we didn't know about at all until just a few decades ago.

And we know it because we simply had to know it,
because nothing would do but that we find out as much about it as we could.

These words define our species:
"What we can know, we must know.
What we can do, we must do."

If it should come to pass, in some unknowable future,
that some other life form might find those little robots
and trace their paths back to our rock that is shaped like a marble
And wonder whatever became of the life that spawned the little robots,

"What we can know, we must know.
What we can do, we must do."

will be as good an explanation as any

and would do nicely as an epitaph.