Smile, you are in space

As you read this, a smartphone is orbiting overhead. Our own PSLV rocket sent it up there. Of course, you can’t call ET with it. Nor can aliens use it to call us earthlings searching for the signs of their presence (or absence).


The phone is a nano-satellite in disguise and all it has on its memory is a collection of screams! These are meant to test the hypothesis that in space, no one can hear you scream! It’s a mission Lewis Carroll might have concocted. The Anglican clergyman, who wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, was a mathematician-cum-secret photographer.

He also went around in the guise of an Oxford don and wrote utterly mystifying poems such as Hunting of the Snark and Jabberwocky! The notion that one cannot hear a scream in space got a boost with the sci-fi horror movie, Alien, Ridley Scott made in 1979.

The Scream in Space project now whizzing around is sunnier, being just a bit of science-related fun. That endeavour is well worth spending time and money on, especially in a world being bombarded by negativity as much as cosmic rays! The redemptive power of humour has also vitalised spiritual traditions of the world.

In the Bible, for instance, when 90-year-old Sara gives birth to Isaac (whose name means ‘he who laughs’), she says, “God has brought me laughter and everyone who hears about this will laugh with me!” For, as the adage says, laugh and the world laughs with you; weep and you weep alone. “

For,” as the poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox added in Solitude, “the sad old earth of ours must borrow its mirth, / But has trouble enough of its own. /Sing and the hills will answer, /Sigh and it is lost on the air… Rejoice, and men will seek you; /Grieve, and they turn and go.”