It was almost fourteen years ago today... (I)‏ by AC

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Excerpts from January 1998, 

Time Magazine Special Issue

The New Age of Discovery

A celebration of mankind's

exploration of the unknown

_____________________________

Discovery is a state of mind

by Diane Ackerman

Adventure is not something 

you must travel to find,

it's something you take with you...  

We forget that the world is always

more stranger than we guess...

Just as we're addicted 

to rules, home-truths and slogans,

we're addicted to certain ways

of explaining things...

There's bound to be 

a simple answer for everything, we insist.

Maybe not. Maybe complexity frightens us.

Maybe we fear becoming as plural as all we survey.

Maybe we still tacitly believe that 

the universe was created for our pleasure...

Then something like pandora turns up,

a minute being with a sex life

even stranger than our own,

a creature that breaks all the rules

and gives biologists a jolt...

Because we have 

swarmed across the world

with our curious and agile minds,

we sometimes think that nature

has been fully explored...

But that's far from true.

Plants and animals are going extinct

at an appalling rate -some estimates

are as high as 300 species per day-

and many of them are vanishing mysteries...

The riches of the natural world

are slipping through our fingers

before we can even call them by name...

Variety is the pledge that matter makes to living things...

Think of a niche and life will fill it,

think of a shape and life will explore it,

think of a drama and life will extravagantly stage it...

I personally find pampa grass

an unlikely predicament for matter

to get itself into, but no stranger

than we human beings,

the lonely bipeds with the giant dreams...

The word "discovery" literally means:

unocovering something that's hidden from view.

But what really happens is a change in the viewer...

The familiar offer comfort few can resist,

and fewer still want to disturb...

But as relatively recent inventions

such as the telescope and microscope

have taught us, the unknown has many layers...

Every truth has a geological strata,

and you cannot have an orthodoxy without a heresy...

The moment a newborn opens its eyes, discovery begins...

Discoverers keep some of that initial 

sense of surprise lifelong,

and yearn to behold even more marvels...

Trapped in the palatial rut of our senses,

we invent mechanical extensions for them,

and with each new attachment

more of the universe becomes available...

Some of the richest moments

in people's lives have come from

playing with a mental box

full of numbers or ideas,

rotating it, shaking it, 

while the hours slip by,

until at last the box

begin to rattle

and a revelation spills out...

And then there are those

awkward psychological mysteries...

I suspect human nature will always 

be like mercury, a puzzle to grasp...

No matter how much

of the physical universe we fathom,

what makes us quintessentially  human 

eludes us to some degree,

because it's impossible for a system

to observe itself with much objectivity...

When it comes 

to powerful emotions

such as love, for instance,

each couples rediscovers it,

each generation redefines it...

Of course, that makes

studying human nature

all the more sporting...

I like knowing the world

will never be small enough

to exhaust in one lifetime...

No matter how hard or where we look,

even under our own nose, surprise awaits us...

There will always be 

plenty of nature's secrets

waiting to be told...

This is one of those tidy,

simple-sounding truths I mentioned,

the sort of thing humans crave...