OK. I think I’m getting to know what you mean a little better. So now, let me ask you a question: Do you have any idea how many recipes for stew there are in the world? Damn! I would venture to guess that the number boggles the mind. It wasn’t enough for someone to invent the stew in the first place. Some other people, a lot of other people just had to go and screw with it, ad this and that, take away this or that, on and on ad nauseam. Who ever invented it decided it was perfect the way it was. Why screw with it? So you stop adding stuff to yours while I add different and extra stuff to mine. The point here is that even though it’s perfectly fine to stop searching, asking or wondering, my feeling is that it’s really not our nature. Applying your logic in one respect it seems to me that it would never have occurred to people to get behind the guy (maybe a collective guy) who dared to think that we should go to the moon. I can hear the conversation: “You want to spend how much?” “It’s going to take how long before we actually land?” “You mean people can die doing this?” “You’re telling me that after all that we’re only going to bring back some rocks?” “Screw that!”
I think this insatiable desire to know is implacable in the human race. It will always exist. While you may be content to just contemplate the moon on a clear and cool Texas night, in the Houston Space Center the majority of people are probably wondering what life will be like when humanity reaches the middle of the Galaxy. They won’t be here when that happens, but it doesn’t stop them from wondering and helping with advances that may one day make it possible.
I don’t think you would agree that going to the moon resulted in “… spend[ing] billions on it without a practical end in sight?” I can’t begin to list for you the technological benefits that you presently enjoy which resulted directly from the research and discoveries that resulted from the “moon project”. If you were to look in every corner of your house, I’m almost certain you’ll probably find something that you can attribute to what resulted from the “moon” project. Going to your physician and realizing what it is that may keep from dying will probably yield the same result.
Let me tell you why we should bother since I’ve often thought about what sort of thing could significantly change the entire world as we know it. Actually, I’ll give you two examples: 1) Do you remember all the hype about “Cold Fusion”? It stood to revolutionize the way we get energy. It would be cheap and relatively easy to make. Well, just think – If we could come up with a way to produce energy independently, I mean a way that mom and dad could produce sufficient energy to run an entire house and meet all the energy needs of the family, cities would disappear. One of the major reasons we congregate in our modern Babels is because of the infrastructure it provides (water, sewage, electricity, gas, etc). The manufacturing sector would also radically change. There would be so many things that would not need manufacturing which are now necessary if you live in city. People could grow their own food a lot easier having energy to pump water in places that were previously inaccessible. We could really redistribute the population of the Earth and cause less of an impact on the environment. Do you think this is not possible or too far-fetched? Sometimes I feel we’re on the verge of it, judging from the experimentations that go on around the world. So, it may not matter to you that “…smashing itty bitties together at blinding speeds and ‘observing’ the vanishingly fast pieces” in order to find the Higgs boson is a holy grail of Science. But, others think that finding it could lead to unimaginable benefits.
2) OK. How about those “Supernatural” dimensions? As a young child, I was really into science fiction and wondered what it would be like to go into another dimension. After taking Calculus in college I realized that the stuff of fiction was really not the result of over-active imaginations. I learned about imaginary numbers; I learned about a two dimensional object with only one side; I learned about a torus which lead to the n-torus or an “n-dimensional compact manifold”; I learned that mathematicians had been playing with multiple dimensions since the 1800’s and could add and subtract them. Do you really think we’re that far away from at least understanding what that could be? Think about how transportation would change, not just here on Earth but in the universe if we found a way to transport ourselves around by just crossing through another dimension. We think the portal is there because we can already do it with “itty bitties” in a particle accelerator. Now if I could only get the consumer version of that, I wouldn’t even have to say “Beam me up, Scotty”.
I understand if you don’t want to know and don’t place much importance in the kind of research that is so removed from us that it won’t make a difference in our lifetime, perhaps even several lifetimes beyond ours. It really doesn’t affect me here and now either. However, it’s inevitable. And while I’m not a researcher or a scientist, I think some of those guys have balls as big as church bells for daring to trudge on in their quests when no one else thinks it’s worth it.
Etude.
