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Near Miss

Loved this story about trees whose seeds have been to the moon and back. The fact that these seeds could  have been the subject of a scientific experiment but were not, should have been fussed over but were largely neglected and forgotten makes you wonder about the grand missed opportunities in life. 

This applies to the life of the ordinary person but also that of larger institutions and society overall. There are many misses in business and they speak to the lack of foresight on the part of the person who passed on what would turn out to be blockbuster. The story of these seeds is more like a near miss - atleast some of those trees survive to this day. If there were learnings to be had from controlled experiments - that was a big miss

All the trinkets and tchotchkes that the Apollo astronauts took with them in their personal canvas bags are cool for this reason, bestowed with a magical sheen the second they were returned to Earth—space souvenirs. But the seeds that Roosa, who died in 1994, carried feel different from other mementos. They weren’t put in museums or auctioned off. They were buried in the soil of the Earth, the only soil like it in the solar system—in the entire universe, as far as we know.

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