To Pluto – And Beyond!

On March 13^th, 1781, musician and amateur astronomer William Herschel saw a green blob through his telescope. He cleaned the lenses, but the blob was still there. He had discovered a new planet – Uranus!

But Uranus did not behave quite as astronomers calculated it should. Was there another planet pulling it out of line? They searched for another one, further out, and found Neptune in 1846. It was the same story again – was yet another planet, even further out, pulling Neptune off course slightly?

So began the search for Pluto. At a special observatory set up for the purpose, Clyde Tombaugh compared photos of the night sky taken a few days apart. If one tiny speck of light had changed position, perhaps it was a planet, and not a star. Sure enough, after looking at about “thirteen million” specks (according to him!!), he found a speck that had moved. It was given the name Pluto, but it turned out to be smaller than expected, and was eventually downgraded to a “minor planet”, even though it has moons of its own.

And now a spacecraft has flown past it and started to send back pictures of it (“Wish you were here…”). We are now learning that every planet, and every moon, is different – unique. The universe seems to be designed that way: endless variety. As a Bahá’í I find this very exciting. In the 19^th century Bahá’u’lláh stated that other stars have their own inhabited planets and that each such planet has “its own creatures, whose number no man can compute”. In 1913, Abdu’l-Bahá, His son, urged that the technology should be developed to enable space exploration to begin, starting by visiting other planets.

Scientists are now starting to find likely candidates for inhabited planets at vast distances from Earth. If we are ever to consider travelling beyond our own solar system, either by probe or in person, there are a lot of technical problems to consider; but we are probably not ready in other ways, either. We need to develop a united planet, with a world civilisation, before we have a worthwhile contribution to make to anyone beyond Pluto!