VALE CASSINI

WHAT A GOOD CHILD YOU HAVE BEEN

So many pictures, so much knowledge, so many surprises, such an achievement...

Who would have thought we would ever see Saturn so closely, and from so many viewpoints?

What will all those good folk who dreamt you into reality, watched over you, marveled at your development., made you the center of their lives, so now?

Indeed, what will we, the rest of us, do now?

And to think that you did all this with computing power many times less that which runs our smart phones.

Technolgy over 30 years ancient!

Tomorrow morning I will watch, along with countless millions, your last hours and salute the amazing, stupendous achievement of our humanity that you demonstrate.

What moves me most of all is that this was accomplished through the collaboration, ingenuity, creativity, and dogged persistence of scientists, engineers, and many other metiers of almost 30 nations.  None of these, so it seems, participated out of patriotism, to aggrandize their own particular countries, but out of curiosity and the desire to know.  Is this what makes humans human, I wonder?

Is not this better than war?

Could this be a path to greatness for us all?

And is it not sobering to think that we might well know more about Saturn, it rings, its moons than about the great expanse of our seas, their underlying landscapes, and the creatures that live therein?
We have come to learn so much in the last century or so.  When my mother was born (in 1901) we had no idea that the Universe was more extensive than the Milky Way, or just before my elder brother was born, that there were many galaxies beyond our own.  Between his birth and mine, much of our understanding of the quantum level laboriously unraveled. And so on....

Might not the amazing advances on all knowledge fronts be a clue to understanding the essence of being human and that our ability to collaborate in such ways portent that we may be nearing the end of our adolescence, and be about to grow up?

Yet the pursuit of knowledge, which the scientific method has so aided, of itself, cannot yield the secret, or understanding of what it is to be human. Perhaps it is our reflection on what may be the implications of our discoveries, and what we have done, or not done,  that can take us to that level.

We have a little way yet ahead, miles to go and promises to keep.

Meanwhile, many thanks to the Cassini Team.