What Does An Engineer Look Like?

An argument for re-defining what (and who) makes a good Engineer

Remember the story of Goldilocks? This originally was a fairy tale about an old woman, badly behaved, who broke into someone else’s house, sat on their furniture, ate their food, and ended up sleeping in their beds. When the owners of the house returned later, the old woman jumped through a window and disappeared forever.

It was only in later revisions that the main character morphed into a sweet young girl and the owners into a family with a mom, dad, and baby. Yet even with the upgrade in cuteness, the main character stayed true to her breaking and entering ways.

This story is very popular in many cultures. The Wikipedia article on the tale discusses possible analogous to Snow White and a Norwegian tale about a princess entering a cave of three Russian princes dressed in bearskins.

The popularity of the story is so much that the titular character has spawned astronomical lingo with the definition of a “Goldilocks Zone” around a star inferring that that range of space is “just right” for liquid water on a planet and therefore has the highest chance of carbon-based life.