10/8/2002: Quaoar

[MaggieL]

Originally posted by Undertoad
Mankind's understanding of the universe has come an enormous long way in the last decade. Although the mysteries still confound us in very uncomfortable ways, Hubble is a giant leap forward, it's truly amazing.

I remember the profound influence the first "big blue marble" images from Apollo IV had: when we were first able to see the entire planet in a single picture.

While the images really conveyed little in the way of scientifically new information, those of us who were around then looked at the planet in a fundamentally different way from that day forward. To my mind, it was not accidental that the environmental movement really began to gain traction then and in the following few years; one could not look at those images and not come away with the clear understanding that the Earth, as incomprehensibly big as it is, is a *finite* place. Folks who grew up with those pix in their science books may have trouble appreciating how that was a "The Day The Universe Changed", in the James Burke sense.

Now, some three decades later, we turn our lenses *outward*; and are awed by the sight of "galaxies like grains of sand" beyond the sprinkling of "local" stars in the foreground; each one with it's own unique spiral form, assortment of color, and polar inclination in space. While the first Apollo images taught us at a gut level how small the Earth is, the Hubble Wide Field Camera and it's successors show us at that same level how big the Universe is.

You can't buy that kind of understanding. All the hard science from Hubble (and there's been a *boatload* of it) is pure gravy next to paradigm building at that level.