The Greeks and Romans had a god for just about everything. Not to be politically incorrect but basically when they ran up against something they couldn't explain, they called in the gods and attributed things to them. Saturnus was the god of the harvest; the Roman secretary of agriculture in a sense.
Saturn-mania has struck. Not really but if curiosity killed the cat we should all be a foot in our graves because of that big bright light in the western sky. When you consider that same big bright light has looked as it does for the past bazillion years folks, tended to notice like we do now every evening. Imagine how it must have looked before we dumped all that stuff in the atmosphere. On close approaches, like now, it must have been some pumpkins. And that is the rub of things.
We needed a telescope to see the "rings" and before that amazing advance, it was the same bright blob we see now. We needed a tool to get the full impact. When some of us were kids, there were less than a dozen moons. Now there are 62 and counting. Tools give us so much information and the gap between us is how many tools we have at our personal disposal. Books are tools. The Internet is our current supreme tool. There will be more in the future. The point is sometimes we need help in seeing things for what they really are and adjusting our spheres of knowledge and comprehension accordingly.
Help comes in the form of telescopes and books, Internet and enlightened curiosity. If we don't keep looking closely and always asking to see "more", we may as well go outside at night and mumble thanks to Saturn(us) for the upcoming great harvest.
No comments:
Post a Comment