Twenty days ago we didn't know what Pluto looked like, let alone anything significant about its atmosphere and surface features. Today we have this:
New Horizons revealed a world we'd never truly seen before—and a world we'll never not know again. Venkatesh Rao has some thoughts on the matter, but I want to address a different problem.
New Horizons did not do a thorough survey. A great deal of Pluto was not imaged in such high resolution, and what was imaged was not truly studied at length. Already we have new questions: why is there haze in the atmosphere? What's causing those ice flows in Sputnik Planum? How about the terrain of Tombaugh Regio?
Some of these will be answered as the rest of New Horizon's flyby data is downlinked over the next several months, but some will persist for decades. It may be that New Horizons raises more questions than answers, but the statement doesn't sit well with me. Information is missing.
When one says "more questions than answers", they don't say anything about the kind of questions. Specifically, the questions that New Horizons raises are questions we never knew to ask before. Our overall picture of the universe has improved, and now we're working on the details.
I'm reminded of Asimov's The Relativity of Wrong, in which he writes:
I RECEIVED a letter the other day. It was handwritten in crabbed penmanship so that it was very difficult to read. Nevertheless, I tried to make it out just in case it might prove to be important. In the first sentence, the writer told me he was majoring in English literature, but felt he needed to teach me science. (I sighed a bit, for I knew very few English Lit majors who are equipped to teach me science, but I am very aware of the vast state of my ignorance and I am prepared to learn as much as I can from anyone, so I read on.)
It seemed that in one of my innumerable essays, I had expressed a certain gladness at living in a century in which we finally got the basis of the universe straight.
I didn't go into detail in the matter, but what I meant was that we now know the basic rules governing the universe, together with the gravitational interrelationships of its gross components, as shown in the theory of relativity worked out between 1905 and 1916. We also know the basic rules governing the subatomic particles and their interrelationships, since these are very neatly described by the quantum theory worked out between 1900 and 1930. What's more, we have found that the galaxies and clusters of galaxies are the basic units of the physical universe, as discovered between 1920 and 1930.
These are all twentieth-century discoveries, you see.
The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong. The young man then quoted with approval what Socrates had said on learning that the Delphic oracle had proclaimed him the wisest man in Greece. "If I am the wisest man," said Socrates, "it is because I alone know that I know nothing." the implication was that I was very foolish because I was under the impression I knew a great deal.
My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that "right" and "wrong" are absolute; that everything that isn't perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong.Asimov is right, of course. Some ideas are less wrong than others. Saying the earth is flat is less wrong than saying it is concave, and saying it is spherical is less wrong still. In truth, we live on oblate spheroid which is biased towards the south, with a considerable number of irregularities.
But we expect short inferential differences. We expect to say either the earth is flat or the earth is round. Explaining what's meant by "oblate spheroid" is too much for Greek commoner who has only the loosest grasp on astronomy and geometry. Similarly, the modern public expects scientific questions to have simple, straightforward answers. Most outstanding questions either have not been investigated or have considerable evidence on both sides. That's a level of nuance even those members of the public interested in serious questions has to muster. When you say "more questions than answers", most listeners aren't envisioning an ever expanding and detailed worldview. They see a list of questions getting longer, faster than we cross them off.
It frustrates me when space advocates say things like this. If we want to get a follow up mission to New Horizons (principal investigator Alan Stern has some ideas), it's going to take a better approach to science communication than that. The public is interested, but that interest could easily wane over the many years before another spacecraft can be designed, approved, constructed, and launched.
I love cool toys as much as the next person, and New Horizons is absolutely delightful in that regard—but that isn't why our governments spend billions of dollars every year to fund their space agencies. We're doing it understand our universe, our world, and ourselves. Space exploration is about exploration. We need enthusiasm for learning about the cosmos as we pursue the future of human spaceflight.
