Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan [33]
We have just begun to search. Maybe life is hiding on Mars or Jupiter, Europa or Titan. Maybe the Galaxy is filled with worlds as rich in life as ours. Maybe we are on the verge of making such discoveries. But in terms of actual knowledge, at this moment the Earth is unique. No other world is yet known to harbor even a microbe, much less a technical civilization.
CHAPTER 6
THE TRIUMPH OF VOYAGER
They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; these see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.
—PSALMS, 107 (CA. 150 B.C.)
The visions we offer our children shape the future. It matters what those visions are. Often they become self-fulfilling prophecies. Dreams are maps.
I do not think it irresponsible to portray even the direst futures; if we are to avoid them, we must understand that they are possible. But where are the alternatives? Where are the dreams that motivate and inspire? We long for realistic maps of a world we can be proud to give to our children. Where are the cartographers of human purpose? Where are the visions of hopeful futures, of technology as a tool for human betterment and not a gun on hair trigger pointed at our heads?
NASA, in its ordinary course of doing business, offers such a vision. But in the late 1980s and early ’90s, many people saw the U.S. space program as, instead, a succession of catastrophes—seven brave Americans killed on a mission whose main function was to put up a communications satellite that could have been launched at less cost without risking anybody; a billion-dollar telescope sent up with a bad case of myopia; a spacecraft to Jupiter whose main antenna—essential for returning data to Earth—did not unfurl; a probe lost just as it was about to orbit Mars. Some people cringe every time NASA describes as exploration sending a few astronauts 200 miles up in a small capsule that endlessly circles the Earth and goes nowhere. Compared to the brilliant achievements of robotic missions, it is striking how rarely fundamental scientific findings emerge from manned missions. Except for repairing ineptly manufactured or malfunctioning satellites, or launching a satellite that could just as well have been sent up in an unmanned booster, the manned program has, since the 1970s, seemed unable to generate accomplishments commensurate with the cost. Others looked at NASA as a stalking horse for grandiose schemes to put weapons into space, despite the fact that an orbiting weapon is in many circumstances a sitting duck. And NASA showed many symptoms of an aging, arteriosclerotic, overcautious, unadventurous bureaucracy. The trend is perhaps beginning to be reversed.
But these criticisms—many of them surely valid—should not blind us to NASA triumphs in the same period: the first exploration of the Uranus and Neptune systems, the in-orbit repair of the Hubble space telescope, the proof that the existence of galaxies is compatible with the Big Bang, the first close-up observations of asteroids, mapping Venus pole to pole, monitoring ozone depletion, demonstrating the existence of a black hole with the mass of a billion suns at the center of a nearby galaxy, and a historic commitment to joint space endeavors by the U.S. and Russia.
There are far-reaching, visionary, and even revolutionary