Perspectives: Does the final frontier exist? What are the possibilities for it?
JK: I don’t think there is a final frontier. Albert Einstein liked to believe there was. It’s a comforting thought to think the universe is finite. We’ll fly out there and run into the wall. But it would be in our nature to ask, “What’s behind that wall?”
DB: What’s the size of space? It’s unknown. You hit your final frontier when you cease to explore. By nature we’re creative and we’re going to continue to explore and we’re going to continue to do things that haven’t been done before because that’s our nature.
Perspectives: What does that tell us about ourselves?
DB: What comes to mind is the story of Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss. It’s about a tiny universe on a clover. We’re very small in the big world of creation.
JK: If you do mental gymnastics and you think about all this—when the sun blows up it’s all going to be lost. So what we’re doing it for is us now and forseeable generations to come, but eventually all of our knowledge will be lost unless we can figure out a way to translate it into a universal scale. But by that time, whoever or whatever could look at our knowledge and say, “So what?”
Perspectives: How will further exploration impact our lives?
JK: The more we know about the oceans, the more we’re going to gain a better understanding of why we shot ourselves in the foot and the reasons why we are where we are in 50 to 100 years. And we’ll be mad.
DB: It could help us make better medicines. There’s a lot happening now in pushing for the use of biologics in medicine for therapies. These new discoveries might lead us to better take care of ourselves.
JRC: There’s an author who said: “We’ve always been confident we know something about the history of the novel.” But if you were to read every novel published in the English language during the 19th century, you’d have to read one novel a day for 125 years. How can you look at that totality of the novel or the totality of all the periodicals that have been published in the U.S. since the founding? It’s an undigestible, unreadable group of things. The problem that these oceanographers are dealing with is the same problem a lot of other people are dealing with. You have to get a handle on the volume of information that’s there and work with a lot of people to get through it.
Meet our panel
Diane Beatty, Ph.D. ’94, B.S. ’87
Diane is the Vice president of pharmaceutical sciences at Beckloff Associates, a pharmaceutical research and development consulting company in Overland Park, Kan.
John Kuhns, B.S. ’69
John is the owner of H.M.S. Beagle, a retail store in Parkville, Mo., that sells scientific and science-related goods and educational toys.
Jeff Rydberg-Cox
Jeff chairs the Department of English and is the director of the classical studies program at UMKC. He is also a Greek and Latin classicist.