Daily Times

While we thought of curiosity as the cat killer and missed the train of the Renaissance, the west reckoned it to be the mother of all inventions. In just four centuries, we realised our mistake and found out that our reasons to disapprove curiosity were both myopic and bigoted. As curiosity challenged our old and established beliefs, it brought scepticism on the table and questioned the judgment of ‘the untouchables’. We never considered it as an essential instrument for our development and totally ignored it. The rationale of the west, on the other hand, to embrace curiosity was pragmatic, realistic and logical. They slowly took the faith out of their scientific pursuits; they reasoned their morality and analysed their social values. Consequently, western civilisation made tremendous progress in many aspects — education, research and intellect — of their lives and accepted to pay the price in the form of moral deterioration and the absence of religious motivation from society. On the contrary, we stood right there, untouched like a broken clock whose time never changes.

Generally, curiosity is a great virtue and a commendable characteristic. On the one hand, it can take us miles deep in the Pacific Ocean to the bottom of the Mariana Trench to look at the darkest areas of the earth and on the other, it sends us high to navigate space, encourages us to land on the moon, and urges us to discover the universe way beyond our own planet. In the form of NASA’s most sophisticated and technologically advanced Rover mission Curiosity, it also helps us to explore Mars, and look for the conditions that could have sustained life on the Red Planet.

In that respect, Curiosity represents our collective wisdom to expand our horizon beyond the boundaries of the earth, millions and millions of miles away, to seek life on other planets in order to understand our own existence in this world. Curiosity, therefore, has set a tremendously challenging task for itself that requires extraordinary scientific research, implacable intellectual commitment and unrestrained financial support. We glimpsed at its first success in1997 when a small robot weighing only 23 pounds successfully landed on Mars for the first time. After that, technology has improved considerably and NASA has sent multiple rover missions to Mars, including ‘Spirit’ and ‘Opportunity’. Its latest masterpiece is a fully equipped Rover with a sophisticated Mars Science Laboratory in it, which was launched on November 26, 2011 and plans to cover an area of almost 12 miles in the next two years. As a completely independent laboratory, it not only drills and obtains samples itself through its robotic arms, it is also able to analyse their composition for the presence of any organic compounds or biologic processes.

Under ideal circumstances, these advances should encourage everyone to further educate themselves and contribute to the collective acumen of human beings. But unfortunately, as soon as the news about these missions arrives in Pakistan, they lose their credibility. Their claims about success do not sound realistic; the picture of their achievements does not look transparent; the outcomes of their endeavours do not appear to be promising and sometimes, the whole story seems to be fake and concocted. For us, they become entirely unreliable, completely unbelievable and untrustworthy.

We believe that although the west reserves the right to investigate any planet, examine its environment, ‘waste’ their resources on research and publish it in peer-reviewed scientific journals, it does not mean that they can snatch our imaginations away from us. We have to look at the ‘other side’ of the picture too and are obliged to find out what is ‘not’ being disclosed in these so-called scientific research papers. We have to independently find their hidden agendas, their ugly, dark and contemptuous motivations and be mindful of the power of their disinformation. To fulfil that responsibility, we invariably have to search for an equally strong, yet an incredibly simple replacement for curiosity in Pakistan. Our alternative has to be inexpensive, should not require hard work, has to be mostly speculative and should be perfectly aligned with our pre-conceived ideas. In other words, we have to devise a continuous flow of fantastic stories and provide an unrealistic twist to every event to stay ‘completely’ informed. We also understand that a vacuum is created by curiosity when it kills the cat, the owner of the cat, and everything related to research, science and technology. That space has to be filled by fairytales also known as conspiracy theories, to put things in the ‘true’ perspective and to reduce the ambiguity from the ‘opaque’ reality.

Lately, these theories have become ubiquitous in our society; they cover every story, provide the necessary information and fill all the gaps. In this way, these conjectural stories have essentially replaced the need for any scientific, evidence-based investigation and have, unfortunately, become the Achilles heel for our society.

The writer is a US-based freelance columnist and can be reached at skamranhashmi@gmail.com