Shock and Awe

• Share

(2 of 2)

Just two days before the tsunami, the Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn received instructions from this frail little species three planetary orbits away, and proceeded to detach and launch its Huygens probe to fly suicidally down to the giant moon Titan--measuring, sensing, learning and teaching through its final descent. All for one purpose: to satisfy the hunger for knowledge of a species three-quarters of a billion miles away.

Huygens carried no passengers, only the product of thousands of years of the accumulated knowledge of a race of beings that is, until proved otherwise, the crown of all creation. Even as Earth is tossing us about like toys, our own little proxies, a satellite and a probe, dare disturb Saturn and Titan. What a piece of work is man!

And yet how frail. The most famous reaction to disaster is that poignant cry from a radio reporter sent to cover the landing of the airship Hindenburg in New Jersey in 1937. Suddenly it goes up in flames. Bodies burn and fall pitiably. "Oh, the humanity!" Everyone has heard the cry, but it is puzzling. It has little logical meaning. It is but the primal expression of anguished fellow feeling for the fate of unknown human forms falling from the sky. At times like that we literally feel the humanity.

And at one other time too. Beside the sorrow of our frail humanity there is also the glory of our genius. Amid the shock and grief at our common helplessness before a cruel ocean, there is also this: when Huygens sent back those wondrous pictures from the surface of Titan this past Friday, we were reminded once again of our stubborn little common human greatness.