Don't You Just Love Being Alive Today?
Mankind dreams of going to the stars. Today that is just a dream, pregnant with possibilities. But some things have already been accomplished. This essay contains links to sound files which were released by the ESA Cassini Huygens Project.
We are often told – usually by scientists – that since time immemorial, mankind has dreamed of going to the stars. The truth about that is that we probably haven’t been dreaming it for that long. Until a few hundred years ago, stars to us were little more than astrologically significant pinpoints of light against the Sphere of the Universe, rather than the far distant suns that we believe them to be today.
However, since we have come to the realisation that the stars are also hanging up here in the same kind of space that our own planet dwells in, we have wondered what it would be like to voyage there and how this may be achieved.
A whole range of plans have been considered, from a ship that travels a respectable fraction of the speed of light to the nearest stars, to a slow moving ‘generations’ craft which aims not to have the initial astronauts reaching the stars, but their descendants. Both of these plans, to the optimistic and futurist-minded, seem plausible within the next hundred years.
Others have set out, not the plans for space migration, but the inspirations and preparations on a more humanistic and spiritual level.
One of these was Timothy Leary, whose eight circuit model of human consciousness proposed four less commonly (and for many people, never) experienced neural circuits. The training and employment of these circuits, Leary maintained, was preparing mankind for future evolution and migration into the weightlessness of space. His model has received enthusiastic backing from numerous free-thinking camps as well as some more cautious support from academic schools of thought.
However we view all of these models and dreams, we must remember that at this stage in human history, they are just that: dreams and ideas. Heavy with possibilities, but not yet manifested.
In many ways, this, then, is the best time to be alive. It is the time when our minds are full of dreams and we don’t know what is feasible and what may be unachievable. We have the luxury of the vast swathes of human imagination, and the potential to dwell open-mindedly on the ideas, optimistically working towards our goals.
For it is when we truly don’t know what is possible and what is not that the human spirit comes out strongest, and a burst of development occurs.
Those who are working on many fronts towards space exploration and migration are not held back by the sense that it may be impossible but are driven forward by this very lack of knowledge. They have a clear field in which to play and experiment and are striving in new territory and uncharted frontiers. It is in these social and scientific fields of extraterrestrial engineering and human spiritual development that we should expect the most exciting technologies and social changes to arise.
In the meantime, it is both inspiring and enjoyable to think about the things we have achieved.
In 1997, the Cassini-Huygens probe, a joint European-American project, was launched and sent, via Venus and Jupiter, to visit the planet Saturn. Some of the highest quality images and data were received from the Cassini orbiter which has made close approaches to many of Saturn’s moons. On its way past the largest of these, Titan, it dropped the Huygens probe.
Titan, shrouded in orange clouds and haze, has often been a mystery to astronomers. It has often been suspected that the cold temperature of Titan means that the compound methane, a basic organic chemical and building block of life, exists there in solid form, as well as liquid and gas. Liquid methane rivers, methane vapour clouds and solid methane ice and rocks have been surmised on this world which seems like an early version of the Earth locked in deep freeze.
What the Huygens probe found as it dropped through the orange atmospheric haze into the mystery beyond were great canyons cut by liquid channels (of methane?), clouds of methane vapour and methane rain, and a soft mud-like surface.
In other words, Huygens didn’t so much as touch down on Titan as splat-down.
And this is exactly why it is amazing to be alive today. This is the most distant landing from Earth that any of our constructed objects has ever made, but not only that, with the tools on the probe, efficient radio telescopes and receivers picking up the signals, and most of all, the Internet, we can get up close and personal with Titan.
The ESA Cassini-Huygens Project website has released numerous images and raw data from the mission so that we can sit in our homes and stretch our daily experience not just to another place on the planet, but to a completely different world with a completely different environment.
And from viewing the images, and hearing the sounds, it seems like no place we’ve ever seen before. Our mindsets expand to beyond the confines of our planet and reach out as far as the orbit of Saturn.
In this spirit of this sentiment, here are two sound files taken from the Cassini-Huygens website, which were recorded by the sound microphone on board the Huygens probe as it descended through Titan's atmosphere.
The first is the sound of the Huygens probe’s radar as it fell through the moon’s atmosphere and approached the soft ground of Titan’s surface. One can hear the radar blips, and part way through, we hear the probe picking up and tracking the surface. The sound rises as the ground approaches and we get the impression of the probe hurtling ever closer to that alien world.
The second file is the sound of the high altitude winds of Titan’s upper atmosphere. Although it often sounds like little more than white noise, the knowledge that this sound comes from a probe over 80 light minutes away from our home planet lends the sound a wonderful sense of exploration. Close your eyes and listen to the breeze of another world…
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