Discovering Planet Earth

           When the words ‘scientific discovery’ or ‘scientific exploration’ are mentioned, many people assume that the speaker is talking about space travel. Of course, this would  be an obvious conclusion to jump to. After all, we’ve already figured everything out about our planet, right? Therefore, the next obvious step must be to explore other planets. Wrong. There is much to still be discovered about our beloved planet Earth, and the fact that many people seem to have it ‘all figured out’ is kind of sad.

            Take the oceans, for example. Much of the deepest parts of the oceans remains unexplored, and even the majority of oceanographers and marine biologists are unsure as to what exists down there. The fact is, it is extremely difficult, and potentially dangerous, to send research teams down to the deepest crevices of our world. Much sophisticated technology would be required for such a venture, and a lot of time and money. Nevertheless, the results are breathtaking. Scientists have recently discovered many creatures lurking at the bottom of the ocean that we didn’t even know existed beforehand. Despite the fact that these creatures border on extremely weird, there is something beautiful about their weirdness. For example, polychaetes are a marine class of worms that have recently been discovered by scientists. They are found worldwide, from the White Sea to the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. They form such a new class in the animal kingdom that many of the individual species of polychaetes remain to be defined, meaning more study of these animals would be required. I wouldn’t necessarily call worms amazing animals, but one cannot deny the beauty of the images taken of these marine worms. Polychaetes are simply one example of the many different things left to be discovered on Earth.

            I understand that these sort of discoveries are difficult to make and costly to boot. However, I don’t think that they are any less difficult or costly than space travel, and yet we can justify spending time and money in that department. I think it’s very important to explore our own planet, or else we may go on forever not knowing Earth’s true contents. 

Light Pollution

            

           Nowadays, everyone knows about global climate change. Everyone you talk to is aware of relatively what causes it, and everyone has heard what experts speculate will result of the world if global warming continues to manifest itself in our lives and get increasingly worse. However, a lot of people don’t realize what urbanization and overpopulation in major cities has already taken away from us.

            There are many different kinds of pollution; air pollution, water pollution, and light pollution being only a few examples. Light pollution in particular is perhaps one of the least known categories of pollution, as light does not seem to be as poisonous to the planet as carbon dioxide (CO₂) and other pollutants. Light pollution has already impacted our lives in a way that perhaps goes unnoticed by the majority of people, particularly those who have lived their entire lives in a major city: light pollution has taken the stars away from us.

            Light pollution causes us to not be able to view the stars and planets in big cities as well as they can be viewed in less-populated areas. For example, at my parents’ home in the countryside town of Melbourne, I am able to see the stars on any clear night, whereas they are not always so noticeable from my apartment in Lennoxville, and barely perceptible from my best friend’s apartment in Montreal. Light pollution is removing a beautiful part of our universe from our sights, which is really quite a shame. The world naturally has two major parts of a given 24 hour period: day and night. Human beings have made the world so artificially bright that night practically no longer exists, and this lack of darkness basically means that the stars, planets, and constellations are no longer within our views.

            This situation is a problem and will become increasingly problematic for astronomers. With this difficulty to accurately view the stars from cities, where most laboratories are located, there is an increased need for new observatories to be built in more remote areas in order for the field of astronomy to progress at all. If this physical move of observatories from cities to countryside towns does not occur, new astronomical discoveries would be nearly impossible to come by, and theories in this field would remain untested.

            The problem that astronomers are encountering concerning moving their observatories is that this would provide further environmental damage and disturbances to these remote areas. Much of these remote areas are also Native American territory, so both environmental and political issues would ensue if observatories were built in these places. There is therefore only one solution: to cut down light pollution. It may not seem like such a big deal now, what with telescopes like the Hubble and satellite images that are capable of documenting the universe for us, but these technologies are extremely expensive, and there is not likely to be a budget for them much longer. The problem must be addressed and regulated now, otherwise it will only continue to worsen as big cities undergo expansion. People need to get reacquainted with the beauty of the stars, otherwise we may lose their extraordinary images forever, and further generations of human beings may not know what stars look like at all.  

Science vs Parapsychology

            In our day and age, the words ‘science’ and ‘supernatural’ are not usually grouped together in the same sentence, or even in the same universe. Science is a field of study and experimentation that deals with a body of facts, things that we know are true, as well as things that are falsifiable and testable. Supernatural, on the other hand, means beyond the natural world, therefore unexplainable. It would appear that science and all things supernatural are indeed very different, since science contains facts that everyone universally knows and agrees with, whereas a person’s supernatural beliefs will be individual to that person, since they can never be fully proven.

            Even though we would tend to think that no link exists between science and the supernatural world, we would be wrong. In the times of some of the world’s most renowned physicists, Isaac Newton, Niels Bohr, Galileo Galilei, Albert Einstein, and James Clerk Maxwell, scientific discoveries were often made while scientists were actually attempting to explore supernatural realms. Similarly, if  scientists proposed a theory that either went against a previous theory made by the Aristotle or went against a viewpoint of the Catholic Church, these people would be tried in the same type of trial as a ‘witch’ would undergo, being burnt at the stake. The supernatural world was one of great interest to people of those time periods (and still is today, to some extent), so a lot of questions were being asked about parapsychology, and the world’s greatest minds were putting their heads together to come up with answers. In the process, a lot of extremely beneficial scientific discoveries were made, such as x-rays and the electron. These two things were ultimately discovered because scientists were looking for ‘radiant matter’. Radiant matter, they claimed, was the dark spaces between the ‘material’ world and the ‘light’ world, between the ‘known’ and the ‘unknown’. Such speculation proved to be the result of overactive imaginations, but the associated research and experimentation was nonetheless fruitful, as it produced a key invention in the x-ray and sparked the discovery of the electron, which ultimately opened hundreds of doors for further research in physics.

            Many more things were invented as a result of a scientist searching for supernatural answers, such as the television, where it was thought the faces of the dead could come forth and communicate with the living. Despite these claims being obviously false, it nevertheless produced an invention that is used by millions of people every day. In short, despite the fact that science and parapsychology appear to be unrelated fields, both can serve as footholds for the other. Science can prove to be a means of potentially answering parapsychological questions, and parapsychology can serve as inspiration for further scientific work. As long as the actual science is not using parapsychology to back up its facts, then a scientist-parapsychologist relationship is beneficial to both fields.