Back when I was a kid I found an old atlas that had been on the family shelves since the early 1900’s. I used to browse through it looking at all the places that had changed. The map of eastern Europe was, as you can imagine, a far cry from what it later became, with the pre-World War I world vividly sketched in those musty pages. But what really caught my eye was one of the maps of South America, showing an area of Brazil that was still marked ‘unexplored.’ It was the only such place I could find on any of the maps, and it filled my adolescent head with thoughts of adventure. I wish I had that atlas nearby to scan from, but the image below gets across the feel of those old maps.

Henry M. Stanley I’m not, but exploration has huge appeal, and to get the pure product today, we have to move into space. Out there most everything could be marked ‘unexplored.’ Sure, we’re getting to know the planets, but we’ve only had a few missions beyond Mars, have yet to see Pluto/Charon close up, and are only now finding the larger Kuiper Belt objects. Looking out to other star