Not much to share on the writing front today - pretty much the whole day was given to family, cooking big meals with enough leftovers to carry us through a few days, and playing so, so much legos.
I'm currently reading Wind, Sand, and Stars, an autobiography of a French mail pilot in the late 1920's and early 30's. Reading it, I'm struck by the sense of a spirit of exploration.
It's what draws me to much of the fiction I read, too. Diving into a new world is an exploration of a milder, less life-threatening type, but it is an exploration still. Watching Star Trek growing up gave me that same sense, that humanity was constantly pushing itself to learn more about our universe. Even X-Files, really, was a part of it, for it also gave me the chance to imagine that our world was more mysterious than what I experienced in my own day-to-day life, that there was so much more to be discovered.
But barely 100 years ago, that spirit of exploration was much more prevalent. Air travel was just developing, and routes needed to be found. Pilots would seek their way across the Sahara desert, crash their planes, get captured by local tribes, be ransomed away, then hop right in a new plane the next day and try again. They sought passage through mountain ranges their planes couldn't fly over, often crashing as they navigated the turbulent skies.
I think one of the reasons I'm drawn to space (and sci-fi), is because it is the one frontier (deep sea probably qualifies here, too) that humanity hasn't explored in person. I want to see us venture into the unknown, because it's where we learn not just about the universe, but ourselves.