Arthur Clarke once wrote,
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Allow me to rephrase that:
Any sufficiently advanced technology will befuddle an individual and make him/her suspect supernatural influence and/or alien presence.
Had I been exposed to the following NASA images very early in my life -- prior to being better educated -- I very well may have been befuddled. And who knows what I would have done in reaction to that befuddlement.
(particle collidor)
(shuttle cockpit)
(unmanned explorer on Mars)
P.S. I am currently still on semi-hiatus, doing a ton of non-writing work and attempting to convert my latest book from one type of code into another type of code suitable to Kindle devices. Again, decades ago I may have suspected that my potential readers and their non-paper 'books' were from out-of-this world. Or at least "out of MY world."
[cartoon thanks to atheistcartoons.com]
[click image to enlarge; cartoon thanks to xkcd.com]
[cartoon thanks to treelobsters.com]
This is the "street view" (no-street view) of one of the many undeveloped areas of . . . Mars. The only development on that planet might be the recent addition of rover tracks. Was that unmanned rover sent by Google?
Where human eyes now go -- it's amazing. Thanks to technology. If anything ought to be praised . . .
[image thanks to NASA]
NASA's unmanned Dawn spacecraft took this picture of the asteroid Vesta. Upon analysis by experts, it seems the asteroid has had landslides on it. A landslide on an asteroid! Holy craters! What a wild and fantastic universe we live in. And thanks to NASA we are discovering more and more about it.
Landslides on Earth, sure I can easily comprehend that. But a landslide on an asteroid?! I don't know about you, but that causes something of an intellectual mind-slide within me.
To wax a bit philosophical here: What is the Earth but a massive asteroid running circles around the sun, completely caught by its gravitational field? Cut the the gravitational tether to the star at the center of our solar system and . . .
Yikes. I've got to sit down. That thought just about blew my mind.
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