My mind is boggled

Yeah, I knew about the spacecraft that landed on the comet -- and it seemed just one more of what we're used to in our exploration of space, starting with the moon landing 45 years ago.   What used to seem like a miracle is now just another ordinary achievement of science and technology.  Read the headline, skim the article.   Ho, hum.

But then I did read a little more about this little Philea lander that's about the size of a washing machine, we're told.    About how, without gravity on the comet, it's had trouble staying put and keeping its solar panels turned toward the sun, with the result that its batteries ran out.

What stunned me and boggled my mind were these facts:

1.  This is all happening 300,000 million miles from earth.

2.  It took the mothership, Rosetta, ten years just to get there.

3.  The comet is traveling in its orbit around the sun at more than 40,000 miles an hour.

4.  Data from drilling into the comet's surface will be transmitted and analyzed by scientists back in Darmstadt, Germany with the hope of learning more about the mysteries of the universe.

5.  I don't know what form -- some sort of radio signal, I suppose -- will actually travel back those 300,000 million miles in a form that can yield useful information?    How can that be?

Now I am back in the boggled-mind world of miracles and futuristic fantasies.   The miracles of modern science and technology so far surpass the advances we have made in human sciences and ethical policies -- that boggles my mind too.

Ralph