Cosmic Views
A successful space shuttle mission such as the recent Endeavor journey is a triumph of human ingenuity and inventiveness over the harsh elements of extraterrestrial travel. But while a flight even a few hundred miles above the Earth’s surface is absolutely an extraordinary adventure (as is even the most mundane commute between point A and point B by conventional air travel), our most celebrated, high-mileage astronauts are really no closer to the stars than any of us on the ground. The rest of the universe is just so far away.
What humankind yearns for is much more than a mere skip across the sky. Even the Moon was, and one day Mars will be, just a baby step for our species. Our desire to know what is “out there” and to “be there” (even if that may be generations from now) is a force that drives us ever outward. These are the deep motivations, cosmic views that first pushed us to colonize almost every nook and cranny of this planet. “Because it is there,” is enough; once we perceive another “there,” we aim and fire. Whether our tools of travel and conquest are balloon, spacecraft and bathyscaphe, or simply hiking boots and machete, it seems no target is eventually inaccessible.
The astronomer Edwin Hubble likened this quest to a military reconnaissance: a literal “scoping-out,” a visual examination of the territory ahead before sending in the troops. To this end the telescope was his tool and the methodical gathering of scientific information through observation his procedural map. Astronomy, he wrote, was “the type specimen of pure science.”
“There is a unity in science, connecting all of its various fields,” Hubble continued in his essay, The Nature of Science. “Men attempt to understand the universe, and they will follow clues which excite their curiosity wherever the clues may lead.”
Human curiosity is insatiable. Recent news articles point out how new technologies—new tools of exploration, indeed, one must echo Hubble: tools of reconnaissance—allow us to become unbound by our physical need for attachment to this little place in space. From our safe vantage point at home, we can view the farthest “there” and contemplate in ever more profound ways the things we just don’t yet know.