New York Diary

Mars!

For those of you who haven't noticed, there now exists Google Mars. This is awesome. I take it as some great testament to mankind that we can map other planets, hurl ourselves through space, find liquid water on Saturn's moons, and speculate intelligently about life in the rest of the universe. But Q points out to me an interesting fact: if we count the ocean floor as mappable (which we should), then we now have better maps of Mars than we do of Earth. Mars, conveniently without liquid water, is easily mapped by satellites with high-resolution cameras. But Earth is different. We have clouds and haze and fluids that interfere; hover long enough over New York and you can get a good picture on a clear day, to be sure, but no amount of hovering is going to show you land features in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. This may well mean that we can tell each other more about the geological history, volcanic features, and plate tectonics of other planets than we can of our own Earth where these questions matter so much for practical reasons like that of tsunami prediction.

If we apply the Socratic injunction to "know thyself" on a rather grander scale than Socrates himself was thinking, then we might conclude that we'd do better to invest our resources into Earth studies than into grand schemes for space exploration. And, indeed, there's a lot of work to be done here--an infinite amount, perhaps--in order to understand our own world and, in the process, to benefit human life. It would be an undeniably good thing to have reliable early warnings of major earthly disasters, after all.

But I cannot get past the idea that cosmology, astronomy, and space exploration all get at fundamental questions about the nature and development of our universe that really oughtn't be pushed aside. This is non-obvious; one very smart coworker asks me, more or less, "Who cares?" He is not convinced that there is any point in the study of history, on an earthly or (especially) on a cosmic scale (since such histories, he maintains, don't even tell us about our own families, values, or cultures). He is all the more unconvinced that there is any reason to invest in understanding the mechanisms which govern very large objects--that is, objects and systems that are far larger than anything sensible on a human scale. What good is it, he asks, to know how big the universe is, or why red giants turn into white dwarfs, or how relativity curves spacetime?

It's a valid point. But it is also a point that calls into question the study of everything from particle physics to English literature, archaeology, and philosophy. Much of what we study--indeed, much of what we do, even if we don't "study" anything in any formal sense--is not instrumental. People have an unusual fondness for understanding; two-year-olds never shut up when asking "Why this? Why that? Why, why, why?" And the truth is, we very often discover that such investigations ultimately do help us get along in the world in very instrumental and useful ways.

But even if they don't, I think the asking is worthwhile if only for the possibility of some greater understanding. And it is not a good enough criticism, I suspect, to ask why we should desire understanding per se in the first place; such a desire seems quintessentially human to me, and not a question of "should" so much as a question of "must." In investigations of modern Mars and ancient Rome alike, I think what is going on is an attempt both to understand and to construct for ourselves our place in the world. We want to know where we come from, who we belong to, how we got here, how we work, what "our" culture is and how it developed. And, I dare say, we people want to have answers perhaps even more than we want to have right answers. Whether our stories place us in "the Western philosophical and literary tradition"; or whether they posit God, or gods, or evolution, or some combination thereof; or whether they tell us about the fundamental forces holding our atoms together or blowing them apart; we spend an inordinate amount of time investigating and retelling about where we belong in the order of things. And when we don't know, we still find reasons: the river flooded because the river gods made it to do so; the Earth is held up by Atlas, or tortoises, or is floating in some liquid; we got fire from Promethius. This is very odd.

But then, we like order and classifications. Our brains are designed to find patterns, and so we find them--even when they aren't really there. It's no surprise that we want to order ourselves and our place in the world, too.

What is surprising, perhaps, is that sometimes we manage to figure out natural order that really is there. That's where, for me, the whole "testament to mankind" thing comes in. I think we do that here on Earth with really quite surprising frequency. But it's all the more impressive an endeavor if we've managed to derive natural laws that work on a universe-sized scale, rather than merely an Earth-sized scale. Einstein trumps Newton any day.

And for all you English lit and philosophy types out there (and I include myself here): the prospect of floating around in space is awesome in the literal, non-colloquial sense of the word--the sort of brush with grandness that, I suspect, cannot but help to inspire such froofy things (and, yes, I say that with sarcasm) as poetry and the kind of wild philosophical speculations in which there may be great richness indeed.

posted by Skay @ 7:41 PM