September 251, 2006 - Imagine spending your entire career on a single project and by all accounts having that project deemed a success. This scenario sounds almost too good to be true for many of us in the scientific community where failure in an experiment is often more common than success. However, this is exactly what happened recently when the Cassini spacecraft orbited the largest moon of Saturn, Titan, and sent a landing craft, Huygens, to the surface. The objective of this project was to land on the large moon called Titan and send back information on the composition of the surface. From this perspective the project was a success; we got 180 hours worth of data from the surface of Titan but is that the proper measure of success? Shouldn’t we ask ourselves how this improves the quality of life for me or the other 6 billion inhabitants of Earth, especially considering the astronomical price tag for such an endeavor? In light of these questions I would consider the Cassini project to explore Saturn a waste of both time and money.
It is clear that the scientists and engineers working on this project (some have spent there entire careers on this) are obviously brilliant. After all they programmed the Cassini spacecraft to make two passes around Venus in an effort to gain the speed necessary to make it past Jupiter to Saturn. The plan was to then pass through a gap in the rings so analysis could be done on the rings themselves before the spacecraft was to orbit Titan itself and provide data about the atmosphere and surface of Saturn’s large moon. As a part of the project, Huygens would detach from Cassini and proceed to Titan to complete its part of the mission. Is this amazing? Absolutely-I was glued to the television until 1:00 AM watching the documentary. The question I have is concerning how practical it is to use research dollars and obviously extraordinary human talent for a project like this. It took over 7.5 years just to fly to Saturn in the first place (it is over one billion km away) and many billions of dollars to develop and build the rockets and satellite equipment in the first place. I just see some more significant problems in this country (not to mention in Europe, which partnered with NASA for this project) that could have used some more attention during that time span. I could likely list many things that should take priority, but I’ll just briefly mention two. Both of these are very broad topics under which many specific projects fall. First is human medicine. Billions of dollars are already spent on this each year, but it does not seem to be enough. There are still millions of people across the globe that die from preventable and treatable diseases each year. Maybe we should allocate more money for disease prevention and treatment and less for space exploration. A second more reasonable use of the money and time used to explore Titan would be to find and develop cleaner burning, more economical energy supplies. Like or not, we as humans do have an impact on our environment and it is imperative that we take care of it as best we can.
Don’t misunderstand me. I’m all for scientific research, including exploration of outer space-indeed I’ve been fascinated by space exploration since I was a child, but in our world today there just seem to be more important issues. Of course this type of work is sold to us as taxpayers as an effort to study what the early Earth may have been like. So we are to believe that any results from Titan have some practicality because they tell us something about our origins. The problem here is the incorrect assumption driving the research in the first place. Even if Titan is like the earth when it was “formless and void”, how can you prove this? Therefore, we are left with data about the composition of the surface and the atmosphere of a moon that is over 1 billion km from earth and little else. No one’s life is saved with this information and we still pollute the environment by burning fossil fuels. One interesting piece of information did come from this work. One of the scientists involved confirmed that the data demonstrated what is known as the anthropic principle which says that the conditions on Earth are perfect for harboring life and that other places in the universe are not. I could have told him that for much cheaper than the billions spent to fly to Titan.
I firmly believe that it is incumbent upon us as Christians and stewards of God’s creation to use our natural resources and to learn what we can from nature. However, does this mean that we should fund and support any and all reasonable research projects proposed by the scientific community? We as scientists generally do a good job discerning good science from poor science, but should we focus more on overall benefit to mankind rather than simply a means to satisfy an intellectual curiosity? These are important questions that every scientist, whether they consider themselves a Christian or not, needs to ask themselves. Unfortunately, I don’t see enough people asking it. Rather, this type of research is yet another example of a project whose true purpose is to try and provide evidence for a worldview with very little if any room for a Creator God.