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Voyagers Like Us
And yet, when I leash up my big fuzzy dog Tiny and take him outside for an evening walk in rural Northern Minnesota in a season of ever-shorter days, I still look up. A clear night sky on a crisp evening still inspires that sort of wonder that projects like Voyager and science communicators like Sagan (not to mention the late great Patrick Stewart and Star Trek: The Next Generation) once imparted to me. And I recognize that despite the fact that science as a publicly-funded enterprise (rather than an avocation of pallid upper-middle class eccentrics, as in the more distant past) has been put with less than noble motives to less than noble ends, there is still a message in milestones like Voyager that remains important, maybe even more so now.
Mithridates and the June Bugs
I am wondering aloud whether the technological society we inhabit should be treated like Mithridates treated poison, or if we are just as doomed as the June bug. I could hardly argue that electric light is a bad thing; it’s made the night, and in many cases, the day, a far safer place, and as someone who reads a lot of books it’s hard to imagine my vision would be any good anymore if I read all those hours by candlelight. I feel for the June bug, and after learning more about them, made an effort to scoop them out of the pool, even if, to my chagrin, sometimes I’d find another, or even the same, June bug flailing helplessly in the water minutes later.