Poem

ESA/Rosetta/NavCam – CC BY-SA IGO 3.0

In November 2014 the Philae lander touched down on 67P.  As I tried to imagine what was happening there now, I realized that "there now" doesn't really have much meaning when "there" is 30 light minutes away.  And maybe "what's happening" doesn't have much meaning either, given that the region of spacetime outside of one's light cone provides the sort of causal isolation quantum computing engineers would kill for.

In a lapse of character brought on by mental fug I penned a poem

On Everett's Peak

 Rosetta, Philae, half an hour away if you're travelling light

Packed with meters, big and small

And a single transistor failure could ruin it all

Cosmic ray, beta decay, a single gamma misplaced

State changed, plan deranged, non-redundant memory defaced

It hasn't happened yet, at mission control, as far as it is known

At mission control, it hasn't happened yet, anytime in this light cone

It hasn't within, so has it without? Yes or no? Or mu?

Evidence for the putative event is barely to be found

Predictors of the system crash are light on the ground

It's place in past or future cannot be agreed

No statement about it can be confirmed
Except by our children selves

All of them

In thirty minutes time