I am not really sure where I heard it or read it but a monk once said, "It is better to travel a hundred miles than to read a hundred miles of scrolls." I couldn’t agree more, but if you could do both, why not? So early on, I decided that if I couldn’t travel to all the places I wanted to go to  to the Amazon Rainforest, to the depths of the ocean or even back in time to the Renaissance  I would make it a point to read about them and travel to them not by plane, boat or train but by paper and ink. All it takes is a good book, a nice comfy couch or whatever you could find, and your imagination. Though I did most of my traveling via books, planes were also a good alternative. My father would always say that experience (and education, too) is what we need to survive nowadays. And we would make it a point to jet set into the wild blue yonder a couple of times a year. But of all the places I would have wanted to go to (the Inca Ruins at Machu Pichu, Peru or go on a Mediterranean or an Alaskan cruise), space was, is, and always will be my dream destination.
Ever since I was small, my younger sister and I (before the youngest was born) would convert our bunk bed into a space shuttle (we chose it over a rocket so that it would be scientifically correct to use it again and again) complete with mission control (couch) and crew (stuffed toys and dolls) and make up stories about being captured by invisible and obviously non-existent space aliens. Our bed would be a mess after that game  stuffed toys, dolls and bedsheets everywhere  and us laughing our heads off. Our pajamas would be our space suits, backpacks our life-support system, and a piece of paper with drawings on it stuck with masking tape on a barbecue stick our flag during our moon landing. But we stopped playing that game for reasons I didn’t really know. Maybe we grew too old for it, maybe our yayas got mad at us for making such a mess or maybe we just got tired of it. But even then, space was, and is, still a part of me.
What I like about space is that there are always more questions than answers, more mysteries to solve, more thoughts to ponder. The existence of the unexplained and unexplainable always seems to grab my attention. They always present challenges  when one is solved, another emerges. And, of course, there’s the beauty of it  the beauty of something so infinite and mysterious, and the fact that different people have different perspectives. Show different people a picture of a crescent moon and one might say it looks like a cookie bitten into a weird shape while another might say another thing. I would say it looks like the cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland, "a smile without a cat."
It might sound strange but our differences seem to unite us when it comes to astronomy. We are one species, one race, and we share one planet and one home. These days, with the aid of technology, space is being used as a weapon to send out missiles and to spy on other countries. Why don’t we use space to unite us rather than separate us? If peace is within our grasp, why don’t we grab it and give it a chance?
In Greek and Roman mythology, the gods and goddesses would put heroes and great animals and creatures up into the night sky to be constellations. I used to look for the outlines of the heroes Orion, the great hunter, or maybe Pegasus, the winged horse, and find comfort in just knowing they’re up there watching over us. Recently, I haven’t seen them maybe because of the smog in the air or maybe because of the bright lights in the city. Maybe I just didn’t try hard enough or maybe, just maybe, I didn’t believe in them anymore. That is my worst nightmare. That one day, children or even children at heart won’t see them anymore because of pollution, lights or even worse, because they don’t believe in them anymore. When you do not believe, they do not exist and when they do not exist, they are gone forever. Please never stop believing.
(Editor’s note: This essay was one of the winners in the Museo Pambata and Philippine Astronomical Society’s on the spot essay writing contest held last Feb. 17 at the Tuklas! Science Room of Museo Pambata in celebration of National Astronomy Week.)