Constable: 2015 good for Pluto, fossils, gays, climate

In 1968, assassins killed Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. The North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive during the bloodiest year of the Vietnam War, when 16,899 Americans were killed. North Korea captured the American surveillance ship USS Pueblo. And the Democratic convention in Chicago featured violent clashes between police and protesters.

Yet, 1968 was also the year Apollo 8 circled the moon. Star Trek's Capt. Kirk kissed Lt. Uhura in television's first interracial smooch. Cars of that year were the first models required to meet emissions standards. Television debuted “Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In” and “Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.” And Chicago hosted the first International Special Olympics Summer Games at Soldier Field in Chicago.

So if you think 2015 was all terror attacks, cop shootings, mass shootings, racial unrest, religious ugliness, plane crashes, earthquakes, the slaying of a famous lion and people getting angry about everything said by and about Donald Trump, you should also realize that 2015 was a pretty awesome year for anyone who cares about Pluto, fossils, gays and the global climate.

Astronomer Larry Ciupik of Chicago's Adler Planetarium can sum up 2015 in a single sentence.

“It's water, water everywhere,” gushes Ciupik. “In terms of the real story of 2015, it's the confirmation that water is so important.”

The unmanned spacecraft New Horizons, about the size of a grand piano, spent nearly a decade making the roughly 3 billion-mile trek to Pluto, but it sent back stunning vacation photos. The downgraded planet and its five moons are home to giant ice volcanoes, surfaces sculpted in ice and canyons formed by frozen water.

“We've speculated that water would be more abundant in the outer solar system, and now we're finding it,” Ciupik says, adding that scientists found lots of water throughout space in 2015. “There's frozen water on Pluto, and water under Mars, and water in the largest asteroid, Ceres, and water abounds on moons of the solar system.”

Earthbound scientists made news in 2015, too. An intrepid team of anthropologists working the Rising Star underground cave in South Africa unearthed fossils that suggest a previously unknown species they dubbed “Homo naledi,” featuring legs and feet built for humanlike walking, and arms and shoulders more suited for apelike tree-climbing.

Leader Lee Berger, a paleoanthropologist at the University of the Witwatersrand, advertised on Facebook before selecting six petite women from around the globe who could squeeze through a 7-inch gap, crawl through the darkness and return with more than 1,500 bones.

“Quite apart from the great scientific importance of the discoveries, that project broke a lot of new ground in terms of providing access to the general public as it was progressing, giving a wonderful chance to many young anthropologists, and allowing people around the world to print copies of the main finds,” Professor Robert D. Martin, emeritus curator of science and education at the Field Museum, says in an email from his home in Switzerland. “All in all, this sends a very positive message. Perhaps the most important aspect of the Rising Star project was its truly international reach.”

About the same time, modern humans were making news in the United States.

“A year is always a mix of bad and good,” says Michael Ziri, director of public policy for Equality Illinois, “but marriage equality was the highlight.”

When the Supreme Court essentially legalized gay marriage in June, President Obama tweeted: “Today is a big step in our march toward equality. Gay and lesbian couples now have the right to marry, just like anyone else. #LoveWins”

“I think this will be seen as one of those great civil rights benchmarks,” Ziri says. “Until that final word came down from the Supreme Court, your relationship was based on what state you were in. … It's not that way anymore. It's the law of the land.”

Mount Prospect native and Second City instructor Judy Fabjance needed to travel to New York to marry her wife in 2013. The couple repeated the ceremony locally in 2014 when Illinois became the last state to legalize same-sex marriage before the Supreme Court's definitive ruling.

“I really did not believe it was going to happen in my lifetime,” says Fabjance, a co-founder of the GayCo comedy troupe that performs Jan. 8 at The Metropolis in Arlington Heights. “It just means great things for the children of our future.”

About that future.

“I do think a bright spot in 2015 is, as a planet, we were able to come together to really agree that we can address one of the biggest problems humanity has ever faced,” Abigail Derby Lewis, a conservation ecologist at the Field Museum, says of the international climate agreement reached in Paris. Negotiated by 195 nations, including the U.S., China and India, the agreement aims to curb global warming, reduce pollution in the global marketplace and measure the effect of those efforts just five years from now.

“I think it really hit the mark,” Lewis says, explaining how important it is to have 195 nations concede not only to abide by the agreement but also to review the progress in five years. “That was huge. It did give me a lot of optimism.”

A nice positive step, but 2015 probably won't go down in history “as the year we saved the planet,” says William C. Barnett, chairman of the history department at North Central College in Naperville. Just 2 years old during that turbulent year of 1968, Barnett takes special interest in African-American history and environmental studies, which remain key issues a half-century later.

This year's removal of the Confederate battle flag from the South Carolina capitol grounds as part of the fallout from the shooting massacre of nine black churchgoers in Charleston was significant, Barnett says. The focus on police violence against black men might seem like a 2015 issue, but it was around in 2014, 2013, and years and decades before, he notes. “It's really a complicated issue,” Barnett says. Social movements often seem small until the day a change is cemented, such as what happened with support for gay marriage.

“I think our 24-hour media cycles make us feel as if we're in continuous crisis,” and political candidates like to position themselves as leaders who “can solve that crisis,” Barnett says. “I think 2016 could be a pivotal year.”

The presidential election might be the most important change on tap for 2016. But buoyed by some good news in 2015, some people who have been frustrated for more than a century are predicting a historic happening that would make 2016 truly unforgettable. The Chicago Cubs are favorites to win the 2016 World Series.