Big Sky Cairn

Are there aliens? I don’t know. But neither does anyone else. So I have to take exception to Carter over at The Hardliner for taking AG Candidate Lee Bruner to the wood-shed for contributing a small portion of his unused computing capability to SETI. Certainly putting this on par with a candidate who wants to abolish the U.S. Constitution and another one with a federal warrant for his arrest is going a bit too far. What Lee is doing is actually kind of cool… in a very nerdy way.

Yeah, I like me some sci-fi. I grew up with Star Trek: The Next Generation, Ender’s Game is one of my favorite books and I currently can’t get enough of Stargate: Atlantis. I like sci-fi because it unleashes the imagination to give real science direction. Clamshell cell phones existed in the 1960s and they were called Communicators.

Maybe this is why, while I would love to see a number of federal departments and agencies dropped into wormholes to the Gamma Quadrant, I have never had a problem with NASA. Sam Seaborn gets it:

Sam Seaborn: There are lots of hungry people in the world, Mall, and none of them are hungry because we went to the moon. None of them are colder and certainly none of them are dumber because we went to the moon.

Mallory O’Brian: And we went to the moon. Do we really have to go to Mars?

Sam Seaborn: Yes.

Mallory O’Brian: Why?

Sam Seaborn: Because it’s next. Because we came out of the cave, and we looked over the hill and we saw fire; and we crossed the ocean and we pioneered the west, and we took to the sky. The history of man is on a timeline of explorations and this is What’s next.

Exploration is an important part of what it is to be human. NASA’s out there on the front line, and as a percentage of the budget they do it for pennies. And you gotta give NASA some love. The marriage of two fields - science and government - that have an affinity for technical jargon and acronyms. Scientists and bureaucrats notoriously flaunt their exclusionary dialects like a badge. But NASA has avoided this pitfall. A mathematically constructed super-massive gravitational center with an event horizon out of which light cannot escape? Call it a black hole. See my point?

Anyway, the whole point of exploration is discovering the unknown. And for there to be unknown, one has to admit that there are things they don’t know. That’s the same principle that SETI - the search for extra-terrestrial life - embodies. Mocking a candidate for helping with the exploration of the unknown?

“Creative people who can’t help but explore other mental territories are at greater risk, just as someone who climbs a mountain is more at risk than someone who just walks along a village lane.”

R.D. Laing