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This week: Stranger than Fact Edited by: Robert Waltz  
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Sooner or later, everybody dreams of other worlds.
-J. Aleksandr Wootton
For most of the history of our species we were helpless to understand how nature works. We took every storm, drought, illness and comet personally. We created myths and spirits in an attempt to explain the patterns of nature.
-Ann Druyan
I find these comparisons particularly poignant: life versus death, hope versus fear. Space exploration and the highly mechanized destruction of people use similar technology and manufacturers, and similar human qualities of organization and daring. Can we not make the transition from automated aerospace killing to automated aerospace exploration of the solar system in which we live?
-Carl Sagan |
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Most of what we see in the sky is fairly predictable. Stars, which appear to be fixed; planets, which move in ways humans can understand and chart; the moon and sun, each with its own rhythm and pattern.
Even prehistoric humans measured these things. Places like Stonehenge and Mayan calendar sites were aligned with the pulses of the firmament.
But then, every so often, something awful and new would appear in the sky: a brilliant white orb with a long, streaming tail. They didn't fit into the neat clockwork mechanism of the heavens. And so, for many generations, the appearance of a comet would stimulate dread, start wars, provoke sacrifices and propitiations. Bad omens, they were. Portents of doom.
It wasn't until the dawn of science that we figured out that at least some of these strange objects were, in fact, predictable, having orbits and returning periodically. And it wasn't until even later that we determined what a comet was: rocky ice in a long, narrow orbit.
In a book, or movie, chances are that our first encounter with a comet would be with intrepid space explorers (similar to the movie Armageddon) or else when it's too late and the thing smashes into the Earth (as in the novel Lucifer's Hammer)
The reality, though, was a bit more pedestrian: We made a robot and sent it into space, using our knowledge of orbital mechanics to have it intercept a comet on its way toward the sun - knowledge with its roots in those ancient observatories that investigated the movement of the planets. It's not as viscerally exciting as a summer blockbuster movie, or as gripping as a novel; fiction is, after all, often stranger than fact.
The mission, as I'm sure you've already heard, wasn't exactly an unmitigated success; the lander didn't work as planned, and bounced a few times. But just as it wasn't a total success, it was also very much not a total disaster.
Funny word, "disaster." It comes to us from the Latin word for star, and a literal definition would be something like "bad star," in the sense that the astrological signs must have been out of balance, similar to the omen of a new comet appearing in the sky.
We humans sent a robot to a comet, and it's sending back data to help us understand more about the composition of these visitors from beyond Neptune and, possibly, some clues as to the origin of life on Earth.
It is a triumph of knowledge over ignorance, of facts over fear, and science over superstition.
And we need more of that. |
Some science fiction to celebrate space exploration:
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Fantasy: November 19, 2014 Issue [#6671]
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