NASA is inviting you to participate in a project that will send a poem, and millions of earthling's names in essentially a message in a bottle to a planet that is 1.8 million miles away. You can submit your name for inclusion here.
I'm not kidding. It's all true. Look it up.
"Join the mission and have your name engraved on NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft as it travels 1.8 billion miles to explore Europa, an ocean world that may support life. Sign your name today to the… Message in a Bottle." reads the website's text.
"Message in a Bottle" is a far-reaching collaborative project hosted by NASA, the U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón and the U.S. Library of Congress that aims to connect science and art in a space mission that will explore a moon of Jupiter known as "Europa," way out there in space.
Why Europa? ... Well, turns out both Europa and earth share large oceans that cover their surfaces, and so "what makes Europa such a promising place to better understand the astrobiological potential for habitable worlds beyond Earth," says the mission's website.
I like the idea that several functions of our government are trying to raise the awareness of both science and art ... because frankly we haven't cared much about space travel in 40 years or more. And sadly, we've never much cared about art at all. So there seems to only be an upside!
Maybe by dreaming about one's name falling into the hands of a previously unknown European being will produce our next brilliant NASA engineer or astronaut! ... Or just maybe the exposure to Limon's original poem for this project might just reassure a budding artist that their passion is a worthwhile pursuit. Both would be lovely outcomes!
But to me, the project also gives us the opportunity to discuss the potential of discovering other life out there somewhere through our faith lens.
Wait, what? ... Where you going with this, Pastor?
Well, it's no secret that humans have been fasincated with the possiblity of whether we share the universe with other lifeforms going back to ancient times. And the leaps in science, technology and media over the last 100 years seems to have fueled the search for aliens on a hyperbolic pace.
But I have to wonder how truly ready we are for such a quest?
I mean, we humans are a pretty narcissistic creature. After all, look at how we feel that we must dominate and subjugate the natural world all around us, and thus create this evolutionary hiearchary that arbitrarily places us at the top of the heap.
Our own Bible convinces us of this very fact: "26 Then God said, “Let us make humans[ in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over the cattle and over all the wild animals of the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” (Genesis 1:26)
Read through the Bible and it's hard to find room for the potential that somewhere else in this infinite galaxy there might be another "God's chosen people." (Deuteronomy 7:6) ... The Old Testament is pretty clear that God held the most special place in his heart for the Israelites, and then later, as the Apostle Paul tells us, the rest of us were grafted into the divine vine. (Romans 11:11-31)
But again, that only pertains to the rest of us humans, presumably here on earth. We don't share this invitation to be among the divine's chosen with any other creature here on earth. So, what gives us the idea that we are ready to discover whether there might be another intelligent and sentient being out there in the vast universe that transcends our evolutionary progression? ... Our track record suggests we won't take the news well as a species.
For myself, I'm excited at the prospect that our infinite God may have created other beings who are distributed throughout his beautiful creation! Why not! ... God certainly has the ability to do so!
And I think that such a discovery would help us to understand just how unlimited our God really is, and it might be good for our earthly ego to know that we aren't alone in this universe.
Maybe, the result would even improve international relations because if we knew that we were no longer fighting for dominance on just this little piece of rock in a far-flung corner of the universe, maybe it would have a unifying effect. ... Look everyone! There's bigger issues at play here! We might not be the apex creature in the universe after all!
One can always hope, right!
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