by Shane L. Larson
A friend of mine, who shall remain nameless, was grousing about last month’s enormously successful “Wave at Saturn” campaign. “WTF? It’s not like Cassini will see any of us in the picture! People can’t even see Saturn when they’re out waving because the Sun is up! Why are you going out to wave? You know better!” Perhaps in a less grumpy-old-man but more conversation-and-education fashion, Sky & Telescope even did a simple analysis to find out if any light from your waving hand actually would have made it onto Cassini’s imaging system (Will Cassini See You?). I follow this little mathematical exercise perfectly well, and I had made a similar estimate myself. But I still went outside and waved at Saturn!
I don’t think my friend (or other Grumpy Old Scientists, “GOSes”) understood the point at all, so we had to have a long conversation. Let’s do the easy one first. Why did I go out and wave? Because when I’m a stooped old man who has to have a nurse feed him his Slurpee’s, I didn’t want to look back on my life and regret not going out to wave at Saturn with the rest of humanity. I went out and waved!
Now when I’m 107, I’ll say to my nurse “Did I ever tell you when I was young like you I went out and waved at Saturn?” He’ll smile at me, pat my arm, and say, “Here Mr. Larson, have another sip of your blue Slurpee.” I made sure I went and got my certificate from NASA too! I hope they hang it over my bed in the old folks home. 🙂
My Wave at Saturn certificate. I waved at Saturn!
To address the question of what’s the point, I like to ask a slightly different question: why did people bother to go out and wave at all? All over the country, people took their kids outside after dinner, or took 15 minutes out of their workday and went out and stood on the sidewalk to wave at a planet 898 million miles away. Why?
Because it is an AWESOME idea. It sparks a little bit of wonder in the back of your brain to contemplate that the light from every rock, cloud, puddle, car windshield, tree, rooftop, discarded box of macaroni, and waving human hand would travel almost 80 minutes before it arrived at Saturn to be captured by the camera on a robot from another world. The simple fact that this could even be true should inspire a little bit of pride in every one of us, and make us stand up a little taller. Only a little more than a century ago, we didn’t even know how to make an airplane fly under its own power. But today, barely three generations later, our species quite reliably demonstrates the ability to fly beyond the confines of our small world, to send ships sailing the vastness of interplanetary space and send back to us tales of its adventures.
Titan’s surface.
Cryovolcanic Enceladus.
That is AWESOME. Cassini is only the latest is a long series of emissaries that have been exploring the homeworlds of our solar system, and it has sent us enormous numbers of improbable pictures, not the least of which include pictures from the surface of Titan; images of a blue and white wonderland of the enigmatic moon Enceladus, studded with cryovolcanoes; and of course Saturn itself, bejeweled with its mesmerizing ring system.
Saturn from Cassini.
Saturn hurricane.
For thousands of human generations, Saturn was little more than a point of light in the sky. Galileo’s telescope was so crappy he couldn’t even tell Saturn had a ring; “Saturn has ears,” he wrote. But today, we can build a self-sufficient robot capable of flying high above Saturn, where it can take pictures of a hurricane large enough to cover half of North America, locked onto the north pole of Saturn inside a mysterious six sided cloud formation called “The Hexagon” (you can’t make this stuff up!).
That is AWESOME. I think all of us know it is awesome too; that’s why a million people went outside and waved at Saturn. They were waving at Cassini, our little robot friend who tirelessly circles a world that most of us will never see with our own eyes, uncovering its mysteries and teaching us not just about Saturn, but about ourselves. Deep down, people understand this, and they want to feel connected to it. That’s why they all tore themselves away from their Excel spreadsheets, paused in their marketing meetings, left three of the tires off and the oil unchanged in the AMC Pacer, and went outside to join their fellow humans in waving.
The crowd at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, waving at Saturn (photo by NASA).
People were so engaged with the activity, they took pictures of themselves waving and posted them to twitter, facebook and instagram. I get the feeling that they didn’t really care whether Cassini got some light from their furiously waving appendages, but their iPhones did, and they basked in the coolness factor as a result. Yep, for whatever reason, this geeky, crazy idea to participate in something related to science had some serious street cred. It was an adventure, and they all participated!
I think every one of us who engages in the profession of science should pay attention to that fact, especially all the GOSes (many of whom aren’t all that old, they’ve just become old in their thought patterns — they probably don’t read blogs, so you should spend some time talking them through this!). People freely engaged in something related to science. People in vast numbers freely engaged in something related to science. They had fun, they probably learned a little bit (like Saturn is up in the sky, even during the daytime), and walked away with a positive and optimistic view of something that isn’t related to reality TV or Hollywood celebrities.
As scientists, we like to bemoan the state of science literacy in the world today, a malaise that is driven by the very vocal anti-science rhetoric that has become inextricably entwined with politics. There are climate-change deniers and anti-vaxxers to be sure, but when I see a million people standing out on a sunny Earth afternoon waving at a camera improbably far away, I have a little hope.
And to top it all off, we’re still getting payback from the event! NASA released Casssini’s snapshot of us all to great fanfare. Here it is.
The Earth, seen from Saturn.
See that little dot, lost in the blackness below the majestic arc of Saturn’s ring? That’s us; that’s home. You’re in that picture, waving. Your mother is in that picture, waving. I’m in that picture, waving. Every human being, waving or not, is in that picture. At the moment this picture was snapped, we were all paying attention. An improbable moment, captured for all time by a little robot with an improbable mission: seek out new things, learn all you can, and return that information to your creators.
That is AWESOME.
Take some time tonight, and before you fold up your laptop, take a moment to sift through some of the pictures from Cassini. Take a look at the pictures you snapped during Wave at Saturn, and the ones that Cassini sent back, and remember how engaged the world was with this activity. Improbable pictures, improbable engagement, but a stunning success.
Well played, NASA. Well played. Now let’s do it again.
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