Nuggets from Cosmos, Creator, and Human Destiny

Of course, attempting to satisfy our irrepressible curiosity about the cosmos can be a fascinating and even addicting pursuit—and being absorbed in it, oddly enough, can restore that “vanity” of which Dawkins says it should have cured us. The universe has been opened to amateur astronomers as never before. There is

“. . . a growing online community that sifts through mountains of data collected by professional scientists in search of other worlds. Professionals are increasingly enlisting the aid of novices with personal computers to help pore through images and data—all in pursuit of the next great breakthrough. . . . Thanks to technology, novices are effectively turning from lonely skywatchers into research assistants. . . . One of the earliest online citizen scientist projects was SETI [Search for Extraterrestrials] (at) home, which distributed software that created a virtual supercomputer by harnessing idle, Web-connected PCs to search for alien radio transmissions. . . . Since 2001, the National Science Foundation has funded a $10 million project to create a “national virtual observatory” that compiles data from ground and space-based telescopes—including dazzling images from the Hubble Space Telescope and X-ray data from the Chandra Observatory. The project, which is still under development is primarily used by professionals who want to go to one source to mine archival images. High school and college students are increasingly tapping into the Web site as well. . . .”