Science is making great strides. Whenever I read the science pages (when I can find no inspiration for my blog in the regular news and I don’t feel like writing a diary blog) or watch some science program on the Discovery channel (Myth Busters doesn’t count – I like Myth Busters, but it isn’t really what I’m talking about here), I am simply astounded at how fast the human race is progressing.
It seems that soon we will be able to communicate with Orangutans, cure all diseases, control our offsprings appearance and IQ, colonize Mars, make anything we want with a replicator 3-D printer, recreate extinct species a la Jurassic Park, mine the asteroid belt and meld minds with computers, thus becoming, rather than just creating, artificial intelligence.
I am confident that we will accomplish all of these worthy goals eventually, but when I step away from my keyboard and go for a short walk in the real world, it doesn’t seem that things are changing all that fast. Some of it may be the way things get reported and a great deal of it may be me believing what I want to believe.
Discovering more every day
There are two recent science stories I’d like to comment on. 1)The Higgs Boson’s existence has been confirmed. 2) Voyager 1 has left the solar system. The thing that both of these stories have in common is that I thought, in both cases, they were settled news months ago, and we were just waiting for the application.
Apparently, I was wrong again. In the case of Voyager 1, the confusion seems to be over exactly where the edge of the solar system is. Since nobody, nor any man made object nor, as far as we know, anything at all from inside the solar system, has ever been outside it before, we don’t know exactly where the edge of the solar system is, or what it consists of.
A while back, Voyager started moving through a big band of magnetic activity. Since that’s right about where we thought the edge of the solar system would be, and we’re expecting interstellar space to be cold and empty, (but how do we know that? Maybe interstellar space is just thick with magnetic waves and fields, oscillating like crazy.) Maybe that magnetic band seals our solar system off to interstellar visitors, like if the world was Australia, that would be our barrier reef, and maybe it will keep the aliens away until we’re ready for them. Or maybe Voyager, 6 hours or 6 months from now, will pop out of that magnetic field like a cork and suddenly be in the realm of “The Federation,” with alien messages passing back and forth all around them. That would be totally cool.
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