I was reading the label on the side of a package of fresh sliced pineapple today and it said, “Best if enjoyed by August 10, 2007.” Being the literal type, I immediately thought to myself, “So, I can only enjoy pineapple? What if I’m not a big fan of pineapple, but I eat it anyway? Am I ordered to enjoy it? And why that date? Does it turn into slop on August 11?”

That got me to thinking about all the little “directives” that companies lay on us as we use their products. They go through great lingual contortions to avoid saying the bare truth, which is, in the case of the pineapple, “This stuff’ll go bad if you don’t eat it soon.” (Which would be more sensible, and I’m all about being sensible, and critical thinking, and all that stuff…)

Anyway, when I read those disclaimers, I sense the fine touch of a personal injury lawsuit when I see things like that on product containers. So, then I got to thinking about what these same “safety” disclaimers would look like if applied to other things, like:

The Universe: objects in deep space are more distant than they appear.
(for all you cosmic expansion fans)

The Sun: best if enjoyed by 8 Billion SSE (Solar System Era).
(After that, it could start swelling and expanding, which spells doom for our planet.)

Earth: please use sensibly.
(It’s never too late to care for our environment. So far, it IS the only planet we have to live on.)

Nuclear Weapons: keep out of reach of children
(self-explanatory)

Supernovae: contents may explode under pressure
(you don’t want to be within a thousand light-years of these things)

Star-forming regions: warning—construction ahead
(or, drive carefully, children at play)

Gamma-ray Bursters: explosive content, handle with care
(best if enjoyed at galactic distances)

Methane atmospheres: may be harmful if swallowed
(similar to other known gas-rich regions, such as cre@tionist “museums,” intelligent-design “think” tanks, radical partisan political meetings, etc.)

The Big Bang: accept no substitutes
(so far it’s the theory that best fits the observed data)

And, of course, one of my favorite speed-limit truisms: 186,252 miles per second: light-speed, it’s the law!

UPDATE: After reading this entry, Mr. SpaceMusic thought those “sayings” were so clever I should do something with them. So, I did. You can get them on t-shirts now, through my Cafepress Store. I’ve created some unique designs using NASA space images and the sayings above. Each purchase tosses a buck or two my way to help support my website and my writing habit. Check ’em out!

So, what do people want to know about astronomy?

In all my years of doing “outreach” and “research,” I’ve never found one good answer to that question. It’s more like there are about a jillion good answers. Ask the question in a crowd and you get answers like, “Planets.” or “What came first, stars or galaxies?” or “Is there life out there?”

Back when I worked on the Griffith exhibits, one of the curators told me that there were six questions they heard the most from visitors:

• Why do we have day and night?
• Why do the stars appear to move across the sky through the night?
• Why do we have seasons?
• How do the phases of the Moon work?
• How do eclipses work?
• What does the Moon have to do with the tides?

That makes sense, since these are things we can see most directly from our vantage point on the planet. Once you understand those, you are prepped to learn about motions of other planets, the stars, and galaxies. And, we do live in a universe that is constantly in motion.

During one of the press conferences at AAS a week or so back I thought about the questions people ask about astronomy, and contrasted them with the questions astronomers ask about the cosmos. They are complex questions, but no more or less important than the ones “non-astronomers” ask. For example, one set of press conferences focused on black holes. These grab public attention because they’re such weird celestial animals. Most people want to know things like, “How do you detect them?” and “What’s it like inside one?”

Well, actually, astronomers want to know those things, too, and we have figured out ways to detect them, and know where to look for them. The questions astronomers are now starting to ask are things like “Do they exist in the centers of all galaxies?” and “What properties of black holes tell us about how they form?”

Eventually they’ll get the answers, which will find their way into public lectures where audiences can glean a little more about the universe as astronomers see it.

There’s not one Big Question about the universe. It’s more like a million, billion, trillion little ones that we seek to answer so that we can understand the whys and wherefores of the stars, planets, and galaxies that populate the cosmos.