Events of recent days have got me thinking. Just things running round my head, but they
ran till they gained momentum, gained shape and substance, and now they need to
come out. I am the first up in my house,
at least on a school day, and this week the International Space Station has
been passing over Britain just before sun rise.
Out of my bedroom window shines Venus, the morning star, and on the
opposite side of the house, Jupiter, the king of planets. One morning I was even able to get my
telescope in to my daughter’s bedroom, and let us see Jupiter and its four
moons, just before the approaching day swamped the opportunity.
The ISS has been the scene for another triumph, albeit more
regional, with the first British citizen in space completing our nation’s first
spacewalk, an event that was very well covered I must say. It got me thinking about the big picture, a
picture so big it’s not really possible to see it, but I’m trying, I’m always
trying. Some people can’t see it, or won’t
see it, and I don’t understand that; it leaves me bewildered.
Astronomy is the father of science, at least as we understand
it. It is the father of the scientific
method. Those four moons I saw in a line,
with Jupiter in the centre, marked the death of the religiously driven geo-centric
model. If four small moon clearly
orbited the much larger Jupiter, then why would the very large sun orbit the
tiny Earth? By watching Venus we were
able to measure our whole solar system.
By timing the transit of Venus across the surface of the sun, as seen
from widely spread, but known locations on the Earth, the diameter of Venus’s
orbit, and thus all other orbits, could be calculated. We were able to turn ideas, scientific ideas,
in to predictions, and turn predictions in to mathematical models, and add
observations to let those models provide answers to questions that had been
mere philosophy for millennia.
With the sky accessible to everyone, the huge amount of data
that the early astronomers quickly gathered allowed the other newer sciences to
flourish. Cartographers could make
better maps as location could be more accurately determined. Geologists, who were beginning to suspect the
biblical age of the Earth was very wide of the mark, had their view reinforced
by structures in the heavens that could not be young. The laws of movement, conservation of momentum,
conservation of angular momentum, and gravity could be tested to a degree
impossible in the rudimentary laboratories of the time.
As our instruments improve, as the distance we can see
grows, as the context we reveal expands, we see ourselves as less and less the
centre of a myth, and instead part of an enormous and beautiful story. A story larger and more glorious and more encompassing
that any mere human made fable could ever be.
I know someone, a friend, who is very much in to personal
development. Now, I had long assumed
that self-development is automatic; the result of been a person, and moving
forward through time, but self-stagnation seems to be the more common
result. When asked ‘what are you, what
do you represent, what is your own purpose?’ most are apparently left dumbfounded.
So what am I? What do
I represent? Do I have a purpose?
I represent reason over ignorance, fact over myth, knowledge
over superstition, wisdom over dogma. My
purpose is to be part of a future brighter than our past, where learning and understanding banishes the fairy stories of the old world to the archive of cultural history. Where blind acceptance is replaced with curiosity and enquiry. We live on a tiny world, a pale blue dot, a
speck of dust suspended in a sunbeam. We
have grown here, but we cannot remain here.
As our knowledge has grown, our power has grown. Now our power cannot be sustained on this
small world. We are changing it completely,
and no matter the good intentions of some of us, no matter if we all took the environmental
cause to heart, universal access to our current technology is not possible, in
the long term, on so small a world. We must
spread out, we must find new homes, new resources, new horizons to venture
over.
Our galaxy contains approximately four hundred billion
stars, most of which are main sequence stars.
Planets out number stars, we know that, we just don’t know by what
factor, but a conservative number would be a trillion planets. Rocky worlds seems to be a minority, although
this may be a limitation of the technology we use to find them. Rocky worlds with a stable habitat at the
temperature water remains a liquid will be rarer still, but they will be out
there; hundreds of millions of new homes, hiding in the darkness.
When the first humans leave the Earth with no intention of
returning, the technology they take with them, the way they survive in their
ship or habitat for long periods, how they are fed and watered and breath, how
the crew selection works, how the craft are designed, and how the tasks and workloads
are managed is all been learnt now, aboard the International Space Station.
Yesterday two men opened the airlock and stepped outside to repair
a piece of power infrastructure, fit a valve, and lay a data cable. How many times in the millennia to come will
humans step in to vacuum to fix the very thing keeping them alive? How many kilometres might they be from the
Earth, how many light years? When I
watch the live stream on the internet I am watching what we can achieve when
people from a hundred nations work together for a common purpose; I am
watching mankind bettering itself.
This century will see us change from a single planet species,
bickering over our limited resource, to a multi world species with resource we
can barely count.
Science has gotten us here, the scientific method; the only
reliable way to separate fact from fiction.
That is what I think of when I see the heavens revolve above
me. That is what I think when I see man
made points of brilliant light race over head.
This is where I find my purpose.
