Monday, July 05, 2004

Mission Saturn

Mission Saturn: Catastrophe in waiting?

Boy, are these people for real? I cannot imagine how people can think (now, are these people really thinking?) like this. One astrologer mouths about the Cassini mission "Man will never reach there. He will be destroyed before that. He should not even attempt to build such enmity with nature and, least of all, with such powerful planets". Another's pearls of wisdom go like this "Those monitoring the spacecraft will definitely be affected". And I do not even want to go into the psyche of the journalist who thought that this was worth being published. There were a couple of astrologers who held a different view, but as always, imbecility of imbeciles outshadows sanity of normal people.

I believe in Astrology, but I believe more in Freewill. Astrology can probably give a direction to our lives, but what we make of it is left to US. I have seen some people with supposedly great horoscopes choosing to make their lives miserable and what is worse, succeeding there. The problem with Astrology is that it gives lazy people a convenient excuse for their misery. Hey, working is hard. Do not work; just blame the poor planets for being unsuccessful!

Coming to this news item, is the theory that shani is vindictive, excuse enough for stalling the mission?. The mission itself obviously requires enormous amount of work. My professor is working on the Cassini mission to Saturn, and I read some papers about it. It is really, really involved and one must be perseverant and really, really learned to do that stuff. And it indeed distresses me that the so-called astrologers actually say these things about the mission in an offhandedly and irresponsible way.

Recently, I was watching a program on PBS, about Galileo. Galileo had a lot of opposition from the church for supporting Copernicus's heliocentric theory. In a letter, Galileo said, and I quote "But I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forego their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them”. The same argument holds here. With all the technologies available today, let us expand our horizons. Let us know, or at least try to know everything there is to know about everything. Let us not lose the curiosity we had when we were children. It is a wonderful thing!

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