BUT A NEWSPAPER IS BETTER
"Can we continue to luxuriate in a vanity which had assumed that all this -- all these billions of years, all this vastness -- was only about us?"
"After all, we've been standing on a promontory for three years now that has put us within sight of -- well, call it what you will: the Big Bang, Creation. I like Creation. It gathers more resonances"
Shamelessly stolen from
"Wisdom in a scoop of space dust"
by Tom Teepen of Cox News.
Because of small articles like this, which appeared today on page twelve of our daily newspaper, I am convinced that I'll always want a print copy in my hands to read at my leasure. It's easy to miss a gem like this on the net.
After a time consuming and futile internet search so that I might share it with you, I called our local newspaper, the Daily Breeze for help. The nice lady who answered the phone walked me through the the process on their website.
I was caught as soon as I saw the headline.
Now, doesn't this make you feel better than only reading all the scary stuff?
LONG LIVE THE PRINT MEDIA!
Here is the whole thing.
Hope I haven't broken any copyright rules....
"Wisdom in a scoop of space dust "
---By Tom Teepen
Our deepening science and our jack-rabbitting technology, which together are expected to catapult us into a future glittered with dazzling accomplishments, are less expectedly leading us as well, and faster and farther, into a past barely within imagining.
It is an awesome journey, and it is my sense that very few have noticed. Small wonder, I suppose. What is to be gained from pioneering on the past's frontier except wisdom? And that only if we're lucky. The past promises no Blackberries. It will stock no retail shelves, birth no industries.
Still, only days ago, NASA's Stardust vehicle raced back to Earth at 29,000 miles an hour with news of the Solar System's first days, some 4.5 billion years ago.
The probe scooped up "dust" from the comet Wild 2 near Jupiter, material likely unchanged since the earliest days of our neighborhood. Analyzed, the material will be the morning news from a time before geology.
But even that astonishing accomplishment -- all the more astonishing for being taken as more or less routine these days -- is just fill.
After all, we've been standing on a promontory for three years now that has put us within sight of -- well, call it what you will: the Big Bang, Creation. I like Creation. It gathers more resonances. Either way, in 2003 a year's worth of data from a NASA probe a million miles from Earth produced, in effect, a snapshot of the universe as it was just 380,000 years after the start of time.
Imagine: in a universe 13.7 billion years old, to come within 400,000 years of its beginning, within 200,000 years of the time when the stars first blinked on, is to feel, if only vicariously, the afterglow of time's seminal instant.
Scientists these days can decode "background radiation" -- the faint traces of traces of traces of ancient light -- as surely as archaeologists find narrative in pot shards, ruins and patches of language snatched back into readability from near fatal disuse.
We are moving from speculation in these matters to observation. That is an epochal turn, and never mind that the change is largely unattended. Its neglect now won't forever ward off the unsettling questions that will grow with the inevitable spread of awareness.
Can we continue to luxuriate in a vanity which had assumed that all this -- all these billions of years, all this vastness -- was only about us?
If we cannot, how will we re-situate ourselves and our purpose in this story that is indifferent to us? Will we even continue to suppose we have purpose? If not, will we become neglectful to our fate or more mindful to it? Doesn't even a faint possibility of purpose oblige us to bend to its construction?
Will we come to believe that we have an abiding indenture to the stewardship of this tiny place that has been, by whatever chance, left in our care? If humankind is in any way special, if only for the novelty, how dare we collapse the biosphere that supports it? Can't we make more of ourselves than an anomaly?
All of these questions and more are offshoots from the question that has hung over us from the start: can we turn knowledge into wisdomn time?
Originally published Tuesday, January 24, 2006
Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers who is based in Atlanta. His e-mail address is teepencolumn@coxnews.com.