Jack Tame: The miracles and mysteries much closer to home

The pictures made it look like a parody.  Eleven minutes after taking off from a West Texas launch site, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space capsule touched down with its all-female celebrity crew. Bezos opened the capsule door and greeted his fiancé. One by one the women filed out, each in their snazzy blue, flared space outfits. Having technically been in space for just four minutes, the popstar Katy Perry knelt down and kissed the ground.    I feel the same about space tourism as I do about climbing Mt Everest. In the broadest possible terms, the idea is really appealing. I’d love to go to space! But as it stands today, actually appreciating how much resource is involved, and the extent to which money rather than talent is the only thing separating anyone from the loftiest heights... I can’t bear the thought. We all know Jeff Bezos isn’t spending billions upon billions to push the boundaries of scientific understanding. He’s going as a vanity project. It all feels a bit gross.    Perhaps when space tourism is a little more normalised and they can achieve economies of scale, I’ll quietly eat my words and find the whole thing a little more palatable. But for what it’s worth, I’d hand my explorer-of-the-week award not to Katy Perry and Jeff Bezos’ other half, but to the crew of the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s Falkor vessel, who just captured the first ever footage of a colossal squid in its natural environment.   Colossal squid are the largest invertebrates on the planet – 500kgs without a spine! And yet for all that science has achieved, we know remarkably little about them. It’s only a century since the species was first discovered, and we know most of what we know about them today because of their predators. Sperm whales, in turns out, are much better at tracking down colossal squid than we are.   600m below the surface of the South Atlantic, somewhere off the coast of the Antarctic South Sandwich Islands, in an area so remote that the next closest humans were on the International Space Station, the group of scientists used an unmanned submersible to film the most extraordinary footage of a juvenile colossal squid. Forget anything that Katy Perry or Jeff Bezos’ wife-to-be might be seeing out the window of their shuttle; set against the absolute black of the deep deep, the squid was purpleish and orange, elegant, brilliantly, beautifully alien.  Isn’t it amazing that our species can send a rocket with a popstar to space, and yet it’s taken us until 2025 to actually record an Earth-based tentacled beast that can grow as long as a bus and weigh as much as a cow?   I just think it’s such a timely reminder. For whatever fascinations and discoveries await us in the infinite depths of the cosmos, there are still so many miracles and mysteries much closer to home, in the infinite depths of the real blue origin. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.