Mark Bullock
In this class, we are going to study the other worlds with which mankind is familiar. For 200,000 years, human beings have had an intense, powerful relationship with the skies above them. We all evolved within societies for which the sky was a pervasive source of magic, awe, religion, and art. For EVERY human being, for 99.9% of the history of mankind, there was a personal relationship with the sky. In the last 200 years, industrialized society has totally, profoundly changed our eons-long relationship with the heavens. For the first time, the sky became lost to most of us through the obscuring light and haze that our cities produced. In the last 40 years, after 8 generations who had lost the sky, we forged a new relationship with special celestial entities that the ancients called, "the wanderers". Society is today a machine driven by the forces of technology and global economic power, fueled by science. We have the ability to rip materials from the Earth, shape and figure them, and apply the laws of physics to make Nature do our bidding. Among other things, our bidding was to fling our robots, our electronic extended senses, to the ancient wanderers, and show us what was there.
These robotic spacecraft have explored the nearest celestial objects for 34 years, photographing, listening, and measuring every corner of our solar system. For a few, the scientists engaged in this adventure, the feelings of exploration and insight, hope and wonder, are felt deeply, perhaps in some way similar to the awe the sky inspired for all of mankind for so long. For the rest of us, the images and sounds, words and ideas have faded into the massive multi-media background that chugs noisily along with our technological society. A picture of Jupiter with its diaphanous, turbulent clouds occupies the same mental address as Madonna's new music video. We can study the planets as they are revealed to us through our telescopes, spacecraft and theories. Or we can explore the sky and the worlds it contains from the perspective of the meaning it has for our lives today. For 10,000 generations, the sky had personal meaning to people, figuring in much of they did and how they behaved, how they moralized and how they loved. We were born with humanity's relationship to the sky in our genes.
So the focus of this course is to learn about the sky and planets and to try and discover what this means to us as individuals and as a society. Planets represent whole worlds, the fabric of fantasy, the stuff of adventure. These are fundamental aspects of human consciousness; in its unique way, the study of the planets is a study of ourselves.