Saturn and Segregation

I'm writing this post with rosy cheeks after having come inside from standing in the cold mountain night air. I set up my telescope in the parking lot of a hotel and aimed it at a pale yellow speck of light left of the waning gibbous moon. Unlike the shimmering blue of the hot and distant B giant star Spica above it the tan light was steady.

I centered the speck in the telescope's viewfinder and adjusted the focus until it was brought into sharpness. A tiny cream jewel was revealed. Even from this distance of 1.3 billion kilometers the icy debris surrounding Saturn shines brightly in the light of our shared star, visible as a tiny hoop hugging the little marble world.

In the fleeting moments of atmospheric steadiness a faint point of light to Saturn's upper left, which I perhaps only imagined to be perceptibly orange, materialized out of the glowing background of mostly scattered moonlight. This was Titan, the largest moon in the Saturnian system and the only known world with an atmosphere comparable to Earth's and with rivers and lakes of liquid hydrocarbons at -180 degrees Celsius.

In October of 1997, the same year I saw comet Hale Bopp from an altitude of 30,000 feet, an unmanned space probe was launched on a complex trajectory that eventually saw it arrive in the Saturnian system nearly 7 years later and begin to orbit Saturn and make close passes of its rings and moons. Powered by the radioactive decay of a synthetic element Cassini's cameras captured a perspective of the ringed gas giant and its miniature solar system of orbiting worlds in unprecedented detail.

In this image the organic rich hazy atmosphere of Titan contrasts against the brighter cloud tops of Saturn in the distant background. The planets ring appears almost as a line in this near edge-on view. The true breadth of the rings is hinted at only by the shadow they cast on the planet below.

When Cassini passes into Saturn's shadow the faint glow of its more subtle rings comes into view as they are backlit by the Sun. The sharp main rings can be seen to be surrounded by a faint G ring, as well as a very broad and diffuse E ring beyond that.

Just inside the G ring to the upper left is the spot at which Cassini aims its enormous main antenna for transmission. This is the Earth; the present home of the entire human species. It was a similar picture of our tiny abode basking in the heat and glare of our star that inspired the late astronomer Carl Sagan to write about the pale blue dot.

All 7 billion of us, accompanied by 10 million or so other species, dwell in a thin shell of blue gas clinging tenuously to a wet rock hurtling around our star at 107,280 kilometers per hour in a ring of orbiting debris much larger but less densely populated than those of Saturn. Peering across the immense void of interplanetary space at a distant inhospitable world can make one acutely appreciative of his own and those he shares it with.

One of the biggest challenges to the continuation of our species is maintaining a cohesive society in the face of a trait the humans of today have inherited from their distant ancestors, no doubt of great use at the time, to view themselves as part of a group to the exclusion of others. A human will find a trait it shares with others and use this to define itself as part of a group with that defining trait to the exclusion of all those humans without it. Those in the group tend to want to isolate themselves from those outside of it.

In the mid 20th century many people defined themselves by race. Colored people were not slaves anymore. They were human beings with the right to live free. But whites and coloreds weren't supposed to mix. That was wrong. Nobody could articulate exactly why it was wrong but it was commonly understood to be so and few would question it. So white people went to white restaurants and colored people went to colored ones. White people married white people and colored married colored. With the typical 20/20 hindsight through which we view history we only now see the error of our ways.

In the 21st century age seems to have become one of the most widely used characters by which to segregate humanity. There are children, teenagers, adults and the elderly who are regarded as very different classes of people. Perhaps none is more or less valuable than any other, but they're different nonetheless and each should mainly interact with others of their class. If you don't believe this do an experiment. Make friend dramatically different in age from you, especially a child or young teenager if you're an adult. Then watch how people react. "You're friends with a __ year old?"

Why do people react like this? Is it not possible that any two people, regardless of their respective years of birth, can have enough things in common to build a relationship upon?

It's different when you're talking about adults and children, some will insist, because we want to keep the number of adults in a child's life to a minimum to prevent potential abuse. But isn't a child with half a dozen adults in their life who they feel they can talk to about anything better off than a child with one and no one to turn to if that one is abusive, or with only same-age peers who might be similarly so.

A __ year old and a __ year old don't have much in common, they'll say. When I was 5 years old a family friend set up a small refractor telescope in the yard and I got my first real look at Jupiter and its moons. This is one of my happiest childhood memories. Although he was old enough to be my dad he and I became good friends and spent a lot of time together pursuing our shared interest in astronomy. I'm fortunate that my parents were open-minded enough to allow us to be friends. I suspect many would not have.

I bring this up today after spending the evening in a hot tub talking to strangers of all ages. One pair I met was a young man from Edmonton and his new friend from England who was planning to visit Cross Iron Mills mall tomorrow. I told her about the stuffed animals at the bass pro shop and she told me about her cougar sighting back home and why she suspects it was originally someone's pet. Closing time came and the three of us emerged from the hot tub, grabbed towels from the table and dried off, continuing to chat for a while before we would split into our gender segregated change rooms.

An older woman with an English accent poked her head in the pool room door and began yelling at the girl and then at me. "She's thirteen fourteen", she said. I stared at her blankly waiting for her to elaborate. She just repeated "she's fourteen years old", clarifying a bit and seeming to resolve her earlier confusion about the girl's age. I briefly wondered why this woman didn't know whether the girl was 13 or 14 if she really was her guardian.

After she repeated the number several times I continued to look at her expectantly hoping she would explain the path of logic that would connect this fact with her reason for being upset. The explanation never came. Apparently the mere magnitude of her age was supposed to justify a verbal quarantine that I was being chastised for breaking.

I said a pleasant goodbye to the girl and her friend who were both clearly embarrassed by the woman's behavior. I can't help but wonder if future historians will look back on our attitudes and wonder how we could have made such an obvious mistake.