By Jerry Burke
Space. The final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Earth. It's continuing mission: to explore strange, new devices to add to your cell phone. To seek out new rumors about celebrities and new photographs of said celebrities naked. To boldly download the latest sex videos starring Paris Hilton, where many men have gone before.
Technology used to mean something. A hundred years ago, we were traveling by rail, fighting wars with cavalry and burning fossil fuels for energy. Today, there are more cars than people in the U.S., we can blow up a latrine from the upper atmosphere and we're, um, burning fossil fuels for energy.
OK, maybe we haven't come all that far. But last week, it appeared that one of our greatest scientific triumphs, the Voyager 1 probe, had just left the building.
Launched in the summer of 1977, the same summer that saw "Star Wars" pack 'em in at the theaters, the Voyager probes were sent out to literally go where no man had gone before: the four giant, gaseous planets beyond Mars. They completed that mission in 1989, but since they were built in a time when "Made in the USA" meant something, they kept right on moving.
Last week, cruising at a speed of 46,000 mph and already 9 billion miles from Earth, Voyager 1 began flirting with the edge of our solar system. It still has enough fuel to send back data for about another 15 years, providing us with the first recordings of just what is going on beyond our tiny corner of the galaxy.
But, lo! The $4.2 million a year needed for the staff of 10 scientists to continue monitoring the probe and its little brother, Voyager 2, is on the chopping block in President Bush's 2006 budget. For the record, $4.2 million pays for roughly 34 minutes of our war in Iraq.
Small potatoes, yes. But the elimination of science is nothing new to this administration. When the Republican-controlled House voted last week to lift the ban on stem cell research, Bush was predictable in his response. "I made [it] very clear to the Congress that the use of federal money, taxpayers' money, to promote science which destroys life in order to save life, I'm against that," Bush told reporters. "Therefore if the bill does that, I will veto it."
Oh really? Well, the budget also calls for $8.5 million for a study of how to build new and better "bunker busting" nuclear bombs. I'm pretty sure they destroy life, even if it is in an effort to save ours. Get out your veto pen (for the first time), Mr. President!
And while you're at it, can we cut the record $68 billion for research and development of weapons when our main enemy today employs such awesome technology as box-cutters and exploding vests?
Space used to be our new world, just begging for exploration. Now, we're more interested in putting $100 million-a-shot lasers up there instead of space stations. "Space superiority is not our birthright, but it is our destiny," Gen. Lance Lord told an Air Force conference in September. "Space superiority is our day-to-day mission. Space supremacy is our vision for the future."
It's our destiny? Where have I heard that phrase in the last week?
The ironic thing about this military glut is that Voyager, still running on the cheap like a 1985 Hyundai, carries a copy of a gold-plated copper disc, containing sounds from Earth and the word "hello" in 55 languages. It's the ultimate expression of hope: a message in a bottle, hurled into the vast sea of space, just waiting to be found.
And what if, some day, another species does find it? What if they spend years trying to decipher it, still more years trying to find a way to get here, only to find that we are long gone, blown up by our own weapons or ravaged by diseases our pharmaceutical corporations now consider not profitable enough find a cure for? Wouldn't that be a great legacy?
We need to keep moving forward, not looking back to a golden age of morals that never existed in the first place. Profit at the expense of progress is never a fair deal. We already know how to kill more efficiently than any civilization ever and, in turn, we have become desensitized to the real cost of war.
Let it go. We're already spending six times as much on defense as any other nation and we're still not safe. Find the answers to the mysteries, feed the hungry, unite the world in the common cause of progress and our enemies will have no choice but to slink back into the holes they came from. The only people who listen to hate are those who hunger for truth.
Let's serve them up a banquet of real miracles.
