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So NASA found water on the moon. This, of course, is a huge breakthrough. Now we are closer than ever to achieving something mankind has dreamed of since we first peered at the stars: the ability to buy bottled Moon Water at Circle K.
OK, seriously, it's a big deal. NASA crashed a satellite into the moon on purpose a month ago to see what kind of debris it might kick up. After analyzing the video, scientists announced Friday that the satellite threw up a plume of at least 24 gallons of water. (How to make a great scientific discovery: Run the car into the ditch.)
Finding water on the moon gives a hint of hope to the idea that people might someday live there. It also backs up the theory that ice - on the moon and maybe on other planets - might be encasing clues to the history of the universe.
More than that, though, it's a tiny piece of evidence that someone else might be Out There.
That's what we really care about - finding some little thread that links us to life in another place. If water is necessary for life, and there's water on the moon, then there might have been life on the moon. And if there was life on the moon, maybe there was on Mars. And so on, one step at a time, out into the deep vast blackness until we find not just the light of a dying sun, but a beacon that somebody switched on in hopes that we might find it.
If you believe the universe happened by accident, all this boils down to a question of odds. There are so many galaxies, with so many planets just the right distance from their suns, that life on another world becomes almost a given. For us to be the only life in the universe - our little planet, a dust mite in Concord Mills - seems mathematically impossible. It might take a million years, but we'll find them or they'll find us.
But what if you don't believe it's an accident? What if you believe God put us here? Then you can go back to the last paragraph - God put somebody else Out There, too, and we'll find them eventually. Or you can consider the possibility that in this limitless universe, beyond the bounds of our minds, he put us here alone.
Then the question becomes why.
You've probably heard the old mind-bender: Can God make a rock so big that he can't lift it? But I've always wondered something else. Let's say that this year the Super Bowl is really great - Brett Favre vs. Peyton Manning, spectacular plays all over the field. It's tied going into the fourth quarter. So here's the question: Can God watch the game without knowing how it ends?
If he can't - if he's destined to know because of who he is - then human beings have one small advantage over God. We get to discover. Every tick of the clock is a turn of the page in a book we've never read.
So wouldn't the greatest gift of all be a book so big we'll never get to the end?
Just think - after all this human history, we've just now been able to say for sure that there's water on the moon. All that we know - all the information we've accumulated over all these years of conscious thought - is just a tiny stack next to the humongous pile of what we don't know yet.
Maybe we'll find someone else. Or maybe we're it, and what we're meant to do is keep searching, out in the desert, crawling toward the water.
