A rchive Date
[ 30-01-2004 ]
Category
[ Science ]
sub-Categoy
[ Astronomy ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/gleeson.html
Why Mars matters
By JOHN GLEESON - Winnipeg Sun
January 30, 2004
If some clown ever asks you why you live in a place that gets colder in winter than a Martian summer, tell him you're here to ensure the survival of the species.
See, by living, working and raising children in a lethal atmosphere, Manitobans are conditioning themselves for a long future in outer space.
That's why they'll be eating perogies on Venus and yelling "hurry hard" on the moons of Jupiter. The Americans will get there first, of course, but Manitobans will be sent in to colonize and plant the hydroponics.
Space people, Manitobans - same difference.
Now, if you're asked why people should want to go into space anyway - why they're sending probes to Mars to collect a lot of specialized data that won't feed a single starving child on Earth - there is actually a highly compelling answer to be found in the writings of one of the great heretics of 20th century science.
Most academics would cross the street in minus-40 to avoid a passing reference to Immanuel Velikovsky.
For good reason, too. Categorically dismissing Velikovsky - and his wild claims of documented cosmic catastrophes visiting Earth in ancient times - is simply a matter of academic survival.
Take the case of Gordon Atwater, who was curator of the planetarium and chairman of the astronomy department at New York's Museum of Natural History when Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision was published in 1950.
"Although Atwater was skeptical of many of Velikovsky's findings ... he took the records of worldwide catastrophes in historical times to be evidential," esteemed New York academic Horace M. Kallen wrote 20 years later, "(and) urged open-mindedness toward the book."
Atwater was fired from both positions.
Longtime Macmillan editor James Putnam, who offered Velikovsky the book deal for Worlds in Collision, was also fired.
When some of the top scientists in the U.S. threatened to cancel textbook orders, Macmillan caved in. Doubleday published the book and, of course, it became a No. 1 best seller, a "pop science" staple of the '50s and '60s.
Albert Einstein, who took a strong interest in Velikovsky's writings, urged the author to "savour the whole episode for its humorous side."
But the attacks didn't stop. In 1979, the year Velikovsky died, the highest profile scientist in the U.S., Carl Sagan, wrote a shocking condemnation of Velikovsky's theories that was not only full of errors but (and Velikovsky's critics admit this) seemed to be deliberately deceptive.
That's nothing new, either. Most of the scientists who've attacked Velikovsky have never read him; they've read summaries of his theories, which are almost impossible to summarize.
One of the biggest misconceptions is that Velikovsky tried to force science to conform to myth - as if his entire case rests on mythology.
Velikovsky was undoubtedly guilty of practising bad science.
In his quest to "know everything," he committed almost certain blunders, perhaps the most academically fatal being his assertion that a comet that almost wiped out humankind circa 1500 BC was eventually captured in the Sun's orbit and became the planet Venus (Sagan couldn't let go of that one).
Global catastrophes
What Velikovsky does argue convincingly is that the surviving records of virtually every civilization and culture on Earth describe essentially the same global catastrophes - all experienced from their respective time zones.
Yes, he cites The Book of Exodus and The Illiad, Babylonian, Egyptian, Buddhist and Hindu religious texts, as well as Aboriginal, Polynesian, Maori, Icelandic and Finnish traditions; but he also cross-references "the myths" with secular chronicles, records and calendars (from China to Mexico) and passages from the works of the great philosophers and historians of antiquity.
"The memory of cataclysms was erased," Velikovsky wrote, "not because of lack of written traditions, but because of some characteristic process that later caused entire nations, together with their literate men, to read into these traditions allegories or metaphors where actually cosmic disturbances were clearly described."
Where Velikovsky was revolutionary (even in his own field of psychology) was in his assumption that ancient peoples were not idiot children prone to lying or hallucinating; they were survivors honestly attempting to describe physical events of devastating, traumatic impact.
Even if we just take it as a "fun" read, as Isaac Asimov suggested, we walk away from Worlds in Collision realizing how vulnerable we are in a cosmos of unthinkable destructive power.
Without any misguided human pressing a button, Earth can become a smoking ruin in the blink of an eye.
That's why Mars matters - why exploring and eventually colonizing space is an impulse too strong to resist.
Like living in Manitoba, it's about survival of the species.
John Gleeson is the editor of the Winnipeg Sun. He can be reached by e-mail at jgleeson@wpgsun.com Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@wpgsun.com. ]
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