Voyager's trip to Neptune, the full eclipse of the moon, the Perseid meteor shower -- August has been a celestial month. And refreshing. It's good for the spirit to be occasionally overawed by the universe. So often we feel limited, and pictures from Neptune remind us that each of us is at the center of more than just a bedeviled and foreshortened psychological universe. A good searing meteor across the sky can sometimes ease our lives more thoroughly than the most ardent discussion with a therapist.
The Voyager journey has called attention to a very basic fact about our natures, a fact we never think about, or if we do, prompted by a Carl Sagan Parade magazine article, we don't give much weight to. A fundamental tenet of quantum physics is that nothing exists until it's observed, which means that the observer, in a real and not a metaphorical sense, creates what exists. As we interpret the data Voyager sends back to us we are continually creating a hybrid creature called the "human-being-slash-universe," a creature that brings into being both itself and the world it lives in as it observes itself learning about itself and the world it lives in. (Got that?)
An easier way to say it is this: humans are important to the universe because without us, the universe would not exist as it does. This is not hubris; it's quantum mechanics. This isn't to say that how we notice the universe couldn't be improved. But humans are not aberrations, they are not a pestilence, even if they act like that sometimes. There is a "natural wisdom" in the universe that tells us that we are needed if the universe is ever to become fully whatever it's going to become.
George Bush wants to go to the moon and to Mars because it will do our characters some good: we'll find new resources to exploit and in the process we'll redeem our spirits (at least until we screw up our new environments) -- a practical approach laced with a little "wow." But there's a better "wow" for our money. We should go to the moon and Mars because that's where we are, literally. Not just because we are made of the same stuff as the stars, but because both of us, planets and people, need each other if we're ever both going to become what we're going to become.
In The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, a colonist takes his daughter to one of the canals to show her a Martian. As she looks into the water she sees herself -- she has become the planet. In the same way, the pictures Voyager sends back are really family pictures; we can see ourselves becoming ourselves as we look at them. The more we look, the more we look like the universe, and the more the universe will look like us.
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