The Questions

In my fireplace room, there is a map. It is a map of the world which highlights Canada’s involvement on the world stage. Although we’ve never aspired to police the world in any superpower type role, we are quite involved internationally. Our Beaver Tails are available for sale in countries such as Malaysia, Costa Rica, and the Philippines. Bombardier Inc., a Canadian company, now has interests on every continent. As of 2004, Japan even had a theme park named “Canadian World” which featured a replica of the house, church and school, found in Anne of Green Gables. I wonder if it is still open.
One item of particular interest is the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) radio telescope being built in Chile. Canada is part of a multinational effort in building this telescope that is being touted as helping us to be able to look at the origins of the universe. ALMA’s own website carries with it this slogan, “In search of our cosmic origins.” It’s a large and ambitious project, expected to cost around $600 million Euro. It should be nearing completion as we speak.
ALMA isn’t the only astrological game in town. In my mind, the most notable telescope would be NASA’s Hubble Telescope. It doesn’t take a lot of research or ingenuity to discover that the same manner of thinking which spurred on the development and construction of ALMA, is the same kind of thinking behind other space exploration programs.
These are the kind of questions that warrant the billions spent year after year by the more affluent nations of our dear planet,
Where did we come from?
How did we get here?
When did we get here?
I’m not even going to pretend to be an astrophysicist, but in my little pea brain, something seems amiss. Something doesn’t make sense. When I pick up any public school science text, I am told that the answers to these questions are already known. I am told over and over that the universe is billions of years old, that it came from nothing, and it just evolved into everything that we have here today. Any discussion outside of that framework is said to be archaic and uninformed. We’re told that these are ‘established truths.’
If what we teach our children really is established science, then there is no further need to make a bigger/better camera. But we still look, year after year into the cosmos for answers to the questions which we already claim to know. Why is that? Why spend the effort? Why spend the money and the time? Also; why look there? Why are we looking into space for those answers? What is it in our conscience that would indicate we could ever unravel life’s easy questions by going there in the first place?
Why Such Effort?