Communal Jigsaw Puzzles

 

Ever since I've been at home following my surgery and hospital stay, Melissa and I have been doing jigsaw puzzles on our dining room table...the above three so far.  We take turns over the course of the day laying out each successive puzzle and then slowly-but-surely putting it together.  It reminds me of an old 1920s Laurel and Hardy short film involving a chase scene...with an ongoing jigsaw puzzle on a table.  Everyone is running about in madcap fashion...until they catch eye of the puzzle and feel compelled to pause for a minute and work on it.  I call it a "communal" puzzle that anyone's welcome to contribute to, but since we're empty nesters and the visitors we have don't seem that interested in it, it's just the two of us...and the puzzle, of course.  Now it's time to disassemble our latest and break open a new one...

The Moon is a Puzzle

 

Of course this article's title is a play on words: as you can see by the above photo the Moon is literally a puzzle, specifically of the jigsaw variety.  I got it as a gift last year and thought it was a bit challenging, although it was only 500 pieces.  Usually when I'm doing a jigsaw puzzle I start out looking for special standout parts to first assemble...the monochrome Moon, though, is largely an image of different types of black and white shading...but it was fun doing it!  One notable difference between the pictured final product and the real image I see through my telescope is that on the edges it isn't purely curved, but rather you can see the canyons and ridges poking out on the side.  As for the title's figurative meaning, astronomers were puzzled by a relatively small planet as the Earth having as its natural satellite such a massive object, much larger in proportion to the planet it revolves around than with any other...just look at Mars with its small, irregular "rocks" Phobos and Deimos...and same-sized Venus has no satellite at all.  But it has been widely accepted now than billions of years ago, while Earth was still extremely hot and molten on the surface, a dwarf planet collided with it, not directly enough to shatter it but at just the right point to where the two objects violently combined with the particles emitted from the Earth's surface thrown into space, eventually coalescing into what we now know as the Moon.  Such an unlikely accident in space has caused some to speculate that the subsequent development of life on Earth is much rarer elsewhere in the cosmos.  But each situation on each planet, in whichever stellar system you consider, will bring up special unlikely events that determine its present likelihood for life.  In any event, just about every time I look up at our Moon, it bugs me that folks were walking on it during my adolescent years...I'm becoming eligible for Medicare soon and nobody's ever gone back: I firmly believe that future historians will look back on this gap...more than 48 years now and growing...as evidence of the beginning of Western civilization's decline...