In a billion miles away, amidst the vast emptiness of the universe, an man-made machine is circling Saturn. It took this machine 7 years to reach its destination. Launched from the earth in 19997, Cassini today is sending back unprecedentedly pictures of Saturn and its satellites, revealing ice and organic molecules.
For most people on the earth, stars are like fairy tales. In our flesh eyes, they are hanging high up there in the sky, like dotted sparkles, with no significant difference from each other. When I told a friend about “billions of billions stars”, she raised her brow, “Really? How do you know for sure?” Apparently she is not convinced. Similarly, certain religious groups today are still questioning the age of the earth, or the idea of evolution. All of these are well-accepted facts in scientific community, yet cannot be easily grasped by our daily experience.
For lay people, science is just theories. It is theory about atoms, about molecules, and about stars. But when these theories meet reality, they became powerful force. From an elegant equation of Einstein we derived atomic bomb. From structure graph of a molecule, we build powerful drugs. From the calculation of the movement of planets, we can send a probe to a billion miles away. The result of science is the result of reasoning and reality checking.
Human being exists in two worlds, one is his own mind, the other is the environment around him. Our mind creates belief and a model of the world. It creates imagination and stories to comfort us. In harsh dire poverty, people imagine their life to be reasonably well. They need this belief to survive. The extreme example is North Korea, where people are made to believe that their life is far better than those in South Korea and in America. Regardless our belief, the world outside us has its own law that is not affected by our belief. You can tell yourself it is not cold outside, but you will freeze to death when you sleep in the open under zero temperature.
Science seeks to explain what exists outside us, which is independent of our personal wish. Religion seeks to explain what our deep wish and emotion are, and how we can be comforted with a good story. In many cases, we need both to survive, as along as we keep religion in a healthy boundary. When religion steps into the scientific domain, trying the uphold that the earth is the center, trying to insist that we human has nothing to do with other animals, or even trying to stipulate the age of the earth, problems arise. In al l of these cases, religion holds back us from understanding the environment outside us, and from harnessing the power of the nature.
The success of Cassini is the triumph of science, whose remarkable reasoning leads us to a billion miles away. It is the triumph of collaborative engineering, where engineers and scientists build a remarkable machine that can propel itself far into the universe, withhold coldness, and navigate smoothly into Saturn’s hazadous orbit.
As war is still raging on half of the earth away, I look up into the far away universe. There, outside this tiny planet called the earth, truth and reasoning prevails.
