On the 55th Anniversary of the Moon Landing, Look to the Heavens, To the Stars … and Dream
As we commemorate the 55th anniversary of Apollo 11, it has become a truism, even a cliché, that the sky is no longer the limit, now that there are footprints on the moon.
And especially now, now that we have laid down tire tracks on Mars.
Practitioners of science in recent years have also provided life-affirming signs of hope for gaining a greater understanding of the mysterious universe hiding in plain sight around us:
We landed the Perseverance Rover on the surface of Mars as part of NASA’s project InSight, an extremely complex and delicate multi-year mission that, somehow and amazingly, went off flawlessly, by using the gravitational pull of that distant planet as a slingshot to precisely guide our planetary probe to its intended destination, where it will transmit data to earthbound scientists and provide some answers about our vast universe.
And emerging out of Perseverance — fully developed, like Athena from Zeus’s head — came Ingenuity, a helicopter that achieved the first powered flight on another world, overcoming that planet’s exceedingly sparse atmosphere.
The Hubble Telescope, after experiencing a malfunction, is now operational again, and once again continues to astound us with every new revelation about the previously hidden universe swirling around us.
And now eclipsing even the Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope is providing humanity with the ability to peer even farther into the heavens, and even further back in time toward the dawn of the universe and the Big Bang, than ever before.
The observatory, the most powerful telescope ever launched into space, could offer a closer look into when stars first appeared, how the earliest galaxies evolved, and the nature of dark matter and dark energy, as well as add knowledge to the question that most stirs the popular imagination: whether other planets exist out there that can also support life.
And a few years ago, we finally saw, at last, an image that for decades has been the subject of much tantalizing speculation and theorizing: a ring of fire and particles swirling around a black hole, an object of such unimaginable mass and density that nothing — not even light — can escape its awesome and irresistible gravitational pull.
The image was the product of a global community of scientists and researchers working in a coordinated fashion that effectively transformed a networked complex of far-flung detectors and powerful computers into an Earth-sized cosmic telescope capable of peering deep into the universe.
The concept of a world that is knowable by human reason and scientific inquiry is the culmination of thousands of years of human observation, experimentation and discovery.
As the celebrated physicist, mathematician and astronomer Sir Isaac Newton once said, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
The earliest humans looked at the stars in the nighttime sky and dreamed of distant lands beyond the horizon, of worlds beyond the physical Earth.
Gradually, as they began to recognize patterns of regularity, they were able to chart the stars and reference them to navigate the seas, formulate their calendar, and prepare for the planting season.
And, as they increasingly recognized, despite the apparent randomness and chaos of Creation, the physical universe actually exhibits patterns of intricate, subtle and profound organization — embodied in the word cosmos — which evoke existential stirrings and give rise to a sense of joy, wonder, reverence and awe.
And once we realize the beautiful, harmonious, rational basis for universal patterns of organization — and with it the understanding that our lives, too, can also have meaning, order, and purpose — the question then becomes:
How shall we organize our own affairs and personal relations, and those of our community, our nation, and our world, so that we may live our lives in harmony and in accordance with a universal order in a way that ensures peace, justice, freedom and dignity to all living souls on our planet?
How can we walk this Earth in grace as brothers and sisters — each made just a little bit different, to encourage and challenge us to recognize and celebrate our common humanity — and how can we share this world and this commonwealth as family?
That is where the excitement from scientific achievements and discoveries comes from: the sense of joy and wonder we experience when we contemplate the awesomeness of nature and the beautiful sense of harmony, symmetry and order in a living, evolving, unfolding Creation, and the ecstatic feeling that we are also on our own journey of discovery through a vast, inter-connected universe.
There’s something powerful, elemental — even evolutionary — about our reaction to the starry sky. It’s at once revelatory and humanizing, and about the closest we can get to contemplating the infinite, and its ability to inspire awakens something deep inside us, and the stirrings that it evokes has led us to science, religion, art and exploration.
But in explaining the ultimate truth, both science and religion ultimately … fall short. But science holds its truth as provisional, a mere work in progress, and always, always — always — subject to change upon additional information.
And that’s because science is not actually about “knowing” anything for certain, but about gathering, evaluating and verifying evidence.
When a scientific theory is put forward, it is rigorously tested and reviewed by many independent researchers, and if the original findings, upon rigorous testing, can be consistently replicated, then the theory becomes accepted as the best explanation to date and will stand until someone puts forward a new theory which either disproves the current one or advances it from its present position.
What we have, then, is a convincing body of evidence provisionally agreed upon by the scientific community which represents our current state of knowledge and our best thinking, but which is also subject to constant questioning of accepted truths.
And since there is always more to learn, the notion of scientific certainty runs contrary to the spirit of ongoing, independent inquiry and the belief that all knowledge is subject to rigorous scrutiny.
Which leaves us with questions and uncertainty. And here, here on this Earth, we must live with the sometimes vexing matter of complexity, doubt, and ambiguity.
But this very questioning and uncertainty can also be the springboard to new discovery.
Because, after all, we were put here to explore, create, and discover, and when new evidence clashes with old ideas, that’s when progress can be made.
And so, ever onward, as we have done since humans first roamed this Earth, we fix our gaze to the heavens, to the stars …
And dream.
By Randy Abraham
