Space: humankind’s natural environment
The news on Earth this week: robbers armed with samurai swords hold up McDonalds restaurant in Winnipeg, cops in West Memphis use taser to subdue nude jogger, ‘good’ crocodile saved Sri Lankan pensioner during tsunami, and finally, granny ends up in hospital after mistaking superglue for eyedrops.
Following the success of the Huygens mission, it is almost as if humans were destined to go into space.
Within the last century, which is equivalent just a millisecond in the history of mankind and a nanosecond in the history of the Earth (I won’t bore you with the calculations), humans have managed to send astronauts into space, land men on the moon, put rovers on Mars, and now land a probe over a billion kilometres away on a moon of Saturn.
It should be clear by now that space is mankind’s most natural environment. Here we fight and destroy one another and the Earth’s environment, but in space humans are forced to collaborate and set aside their differences for a truly common cause. In this sense, Huygens is a triumph because it was collaborative and has reminded us again that space exploration is an essential, if not the essential goal of mankind.
The coming decades will be very important. The dangers we will be facing for centuries to come are overpopulation, the destruction of the environment, a decreasing supply of raw materials, intellectual deficiencies and malaise throughout populations, and a resurgence of religious fundamentalism both in the East and the West.
Unfortunately, at this point, we are not all united as to what needs to be done. But the exploration of space does provide a common purpose. So, bearing in my mind that with every setback (such as the Challenger and Columbia disasters) there are calls to abandon the space programme, it is the responsibility of all scientists to promote space exploration.
