Staring Into Space
No sooner did we get done reading that the universe may be composed of cosmic bubbles than astronomers found unexplained threads millions of miles long woven through the cosmos. And now Voyager 2 sends back mysterious pictures of far-off Uranus and several of its moons--humanity’s first close-up look at that planet. Nearly three decades into the Space Age, the solar system still has unexplored worlds.
It has been a while since the nation’s space media converged on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Pasadena for a planetary fly-by. At the urging of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Congress has given vast sums to the manned space program, and the golden age of unmanned probes has passed. More’s the pity. Unmanned exploration is cheap compared to the cost of putting people into space, and the pictures of up-to-now unseen planets are worth the cost. They whet the imagination. What are these places like? What can scientists learn from them?
The driving force behind this effort and many others is the urge to find out--one of the hallmarks of humanity and the characteristic that provides our name, Homo sapiens , man the knower. As far back as we know, people looked into the sky and wondered what was up there. Voyager 2’s encounter with Uranus is just the latest and the most technically advanced look so far.
So, too, does the urge to understand impel those who look at soap bubbles and imagine the universe, and those who study telescope photographs, noticing and puzzling over those threads. What are they? Where did they come from? How did they get there? Will their existence require revisions in current theories?
Questions are so much easier to ask than to answer. And answers themselves are tentative and subject to change with new data. Some answers have practical benefits. Many don’t. Some don’t now but may in the future, and there’s no way of knowing for sure which is which. The whole process of finding things out is very inefficient and hard to manage, and that sometimes makes it seem haphazard.
The world is better off for knowing things than for not knowing them. It thrills us to figure things out and to see things that no one has seen before--such as Uranus and its moons, which are more plentiful than scientists had imagined. Someday somebody may point to the nighttime sky and explain everything--bubbles, threads and all. Until then, theories, guesses, hunches, data and pictures will suffice.
