Tommy Denton

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On this 36th installment of Earth Day, most recent attention to the science relating to the planet has concerned the consequences of climate change and which options, if any, the inhabitants intend to exercise about it.

As important to making those relatively immediate decisions, personal and collective, will be staying focused on the why of preserving a livable environment as part of a greater web of life.

I've always pretty much assumed that a place as vast as the universe was probably capable of producing more than one tiny speck of a planet to foster "life."

Those comic books about space invaders that I read in the '50s reinforced images I'd conjured when I listened to rebroadcasts of Orson Welles' radio delivery of "War of the Worlds." Science fiction, as Jules Verne demonstrated a century ago, has this interesting tendency to be prophetic. Michael Crichton's "The Andromeda Strain" may have been fiction, but his fertile mind and scientific expertise make the tale eerily plausible.

So the science that revealed the possibility of a fossil record of primitive life on Mars millions of years ago now may be only the intellectual affirmation of some intuitive sense that has been embedded by nature in the human essence. Maybe "life" is in some cosmic state of trying to reveal itself -- or be revealed by a higher power -- even across galactic distances.

Science is the best measure yet developed by the human mind to test intuition, which through the ages the imagination has expressed in myths, tales and eventually hypotheses. We've been making some progress toward understanding why things are as they are, although the state of our little corner of the universe suggests that we've still got a lot to learn.

Even learned scientists are at odds over the physical evidence of primordial life gleaned from meteors and interplanetary travel, so we mere commoners will busy ourselves with more immediate matters of daily life while the scientific search for "the truth" moves forward.

Daily life has a way of blunting the appreciation for even great scientific advances. Some of the most astounding scientific feats proceed beyond the awareness of most ordinary folk, such as genetic manipulation of crops; all manner of medical cures; improved means of generating energy; and astonishing systems of interactive communications.

Most scientists, except those few wrestling with the darker impulses of professional jealousy after being left out of the research on some critical project, are excited about evidence suggesting the presence of microfossils contained in celestial debris that survived penetration of Earth's atmosphere.

Laser technology has exposed certain carbon compounds that could indicate microbial life, but skeptics still want to examine ever more precise data. The fact that the best scientific guess dates the formation of one particular meteor at about 16 million years ago, with arrival on Earth 13,000 years ago, leaves most people staring blankly and trying to comprehend such a time line. For most of us, a 30-year mortgage is about the longest time line conceivable.

So while ordinary citizens go about trying to pay the bills, get the kids to school, worry about the cost of energy and hold down the cholesterol level, great minds are trying to find the connections between that life force that defines our beings and the crusty traces of what may be the residue of a similar animating spark struck in the dark reaches across time and space.

This may be a troubling, perhaps heretical, search to those convinced that creation was a six-day project, but just as Copernicus and Galileo dared to challenge the settled wisdom of their time, the search of the cosmos appears destined to continue, as it should.

For those willing to give the Creator the benefit of the doubt as to sources, methods and timetables, the quest toward the outer reaches of knowledge is an interesting curiosity that is not likely to be resolved before we get to burn the mortgage.

In the meantime, back down to Earth, there is this business of laughing and crying, consoling and chastening, fearing and hoping -- the daily stuff, not simply of being a life form but of finding meaning in being alive, one day at a time.

Denton's column appears in the Sundays and Tuesday editions of The Roanoke Times.