In his wonderful When the Earth Had Two Moons, planetary geologist Erik Asphaug points out after bearing “the brunt of earth’s gravity for another three years in storage,” when the Galileo mission was finally launched, 2 ribs of the umbrella-like antennae that was to beam data back down failed to open. That forced the back-up antennae, capable of transmitting less than 0.1% of the high-gain antenna’s capacity, to takeover. Enter image compression, now known as the JPEG, and 70% of the data mission was accomplished. Whew. But sharing his many stories—that Columbus knew the size of the earth, it had been established for centuries, but intentionally underbid the cost & complexity to make it happen; how, in the 3