Billions are spent to send men to the moon. Now the talk is of Mars. Telescopes are trained on space to find distant planets, orbiting distant stars, that are capable of sustaining life. But, you know, the universe makes the kind of stuff it’s good at. Chances are, if there are other worlds, they are just as likely to be here as anywhere else.

Crab Spider on a Mariposa Lily Bella Vista Grassland

Two species that seem to be surviving the replacement of the grasslands with weeds, more or less.

These spiders spend their lives in aerial, floral worlds. Think of it. There is a plant, that eats the sun and lives in the air, only lightly settling down on the earth to keep from being blown away, and there is a creature that lives within it, in the light. Maybe this earth is not one world, but thousands, if not millions, all of them possibilities of the universe that take on a particular shape when they strike a particular planet — in our case a world of life. Maybe the world is a universe in which worlds show up in different life forms, and this one is raised up into the air and the light. At any rate, it’s beautiful, and sometimes surprising, too…

Green Sweat Bee and Crab Spider Together

No doubt, the spider was waiting for something a little less formidable. (That’s her, to the left of the bee. Those narrow purple petals are actually very stiff, and force the bee to climb down into the pollen and then up onto the pistil to get to the next patch of pollen, and up and down and up and down. They make a pretty good hiding place for a spider, too, should she need one.)

Beauty is the sense of balance that sorts the universe out, and since science is a part of the universe, it sorts scientific ideas out, too. A little more time spent out in the grasslands might give many of the answers being sought for right now among the stars.