LOOKING UP
LILLY, BEE AND SHADOW
There they are every night, shinning, twinkling and teasing. Thousands and thousands, millions with a good scope, before our eyes, and each holding a mystery. Origin? Composition? Status? We theorize. But as for hard certain data, our knowledge is limited. There is more we don't know about the stars, the space between them and their life cycles, than what we know.
Like some of you, it is hard to understand how we can live daily, beneath this arc of mystery, in this cosmic neighborhood and be so unconcerned about our neighbors.
The program of the Mars rovers, and the deep space exploration of programs like Voyager, Hubble, Herschel, Galex, Cassini-Huygens, Dawn, Chips, Epox1 are exciting and critical to our future.
Of course funding is limited by perceived priority, needs and political will. It is great that visionaries like Richard Branson and Elon Musk are bringing an entrepreneurial spirit to space exploration, but it is still extraordinarily little, given the vastness of what we humans don't know.
It seems silly, no, primitive that we bipeds who share the resources of this blue planet spend billions and billions on how to whack each other on the head than we share to understand the rest of the neighborhood just over our heads. Pitted against the mystery of the cosmos we are more alike than different. And whether fundamentalist Muslim, Evangelical Christian, oligarch, naked indigenous child in the wild, military commander, skateboarding teen, or whatever our persona or place, we are subject to the same forces and changes in nature.
The Asteroid fly by last week, the unexpected meteor and meteorite strike in Russia, and the history of planetary change because of previous cosmic collisions remind us we share this spaceship earth.
It seems that with even a moment of thought a wiser course is to pool our knowledge and riches and work together as planetary citizens. Kind of hard to do when my God is right and yours is wrong, when my nation is more powerful than yours, when I have more than you, when you are trying to take what belongs to him, and on and on. On second thought those are distractions and divisions that might be surmounted if we understood that despite all pretense, we really are all the same-planetary citizens. We face the same fate and after all we share the same stoop here in the milky way galaxy, which out in the sticks of the cosmic neighborhood.
I rather like it when nature sends us this kind of message, putting the human species in its place. I don't wish physical harm to people, of course, but large scale calamity is strangely reassuring, as it reminds us that we're not that important, and hence have neither the right nor the responsibility to master the universe.
ReplyDeleteYou are right indeed. We have neither the right, nor the responsibility to master the universe.
DeleteWe also lack the skill.
You remind me of words from the movie "Contact," where Jodie Foster's dad says, "If there isn't anyone else out there it's a tremendous waste of space." Love the pictures. They make me ache for warmer weather.
ReplyDeleteWhen the meteor hit in Russia, a comment I read on a blog summed it up:
ReplyDelete"Someone needs to get to the landing site immediately, if there is a space capsule with an infant boy inside we are all saved!"
Well played, Jager
ReplyDelete