I am an anorak of space, the final frontier.
I have therefore been excitedly watching, listening and reading the daily summaries coming from NASA about ‘Curiosity’, or more formally, the ‘Mars Science Lab’. Man, those pictures are so clear!
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| (Not a Martian goat) |
It’s all a glowing endorsement of humanity’s number crunching skills and understanding of the science involved in getting something from point A (Earth) to point B (Mars). This understanding comes to us without, as a species, having been any further than the moon. It’s a remote understanding and clever guessing and eliminating things we realise must be wrong, leaving us with what’s right.
So many calculations and influences had to be taken into consideration in order to successfully land ‘Curiosity’, including that bizarre process needed to slow then lower the MSL onto the ground. We worked all that out before finally doing it.
It appears that it all functioned perfectly despite being such a left-field approach.
The human mind is a brilliant thing.
Surrounded by the wonderful yet confusing ‘machine’ of existence, within which we are but a minute part, our minds think ‘outside of the box’ in search of solutions.
We are not just explorers using remote controlled equipment that is so far away that it takes 20 minutes to receive our instructions, and then a further 20 minutes to report back. We excitedly poke, prod and learn. We check and re-check our findings, ponder, project and explore further. We constantly push the envelope. We enjoy doing this. It’s not harmful. It’s fun. It defines us.
If humanity has a purpose, then it it is to be the librarians, the chroniclers, the cataloguers of life, the universe and everything.
We should be proud that we do this really well.
What is bizarre though is how the intelligence, logic and understanding we truly have is not being shared across all of humanity. With one end of our knowledge and understanding we are able to think about, calculate and then look for Higgs Boson, or put ‘Curiosity’ on a far distant planet.
But here’s the worry. We are doing all this real mind expanding stuff at exactly the same time as a goat is being held in a police cell in Africa. The local police chased a car-jacker trying to avoid capture but lost him. All they could find was a goat. They therefore assumed that the car-jacker had magically turned himself into that goat.
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