Image Courtesy Enrique Cornejo

Night after night the stars etch their way through the darkness and for what? People sky watch for a number of reasons, from the vague and aesthetic to the specific and scientific. Ultimately, all the reasons stem from an attempt at understanding, a shot at improving our personal intelligence.

The word intelligence is derived from Latin intelligere, “to understand.”  Beyond this vague notion the term intelligence is exceedingly ill defined upon scrutiny. The Creationist camp has readily adopted the pseudoscientific notion of intelligent design in opposition of Charles Darwins’ scientific theory of evolution. I don’t want to break anyone’s mind but the first theory of general intelligence was put forth by Francis Galton who was heavily influenced by his half-cousin, Charles Darwin. Even still, specific definition of intelligence remains a chimerical entity.

One deep thinker on the notion of intelligence was the great popularizer of astronomy Dr. Carl Sagan. Monday, November 9 marked what would have been his 75^th birthday had he not deceased in 1996.  Dr. Sagan was a heavily awarded pioneer in the field of exobiology and engineered the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, better known as SETI, back in the 1970’s. Carl wrote a book called the Dragons of Eden, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, wherein he attempted an outline of the evolution of human intelligence. It was a remarkable task because if you search hard enough through all of the fields of science and knowledge you will discover that there is no universal theory of mind. There are many theories of the mind of course, but none that have received scientific validation. I repeat, none. This is a gaping abyss of scientific ignorance that has been unaddressed for far too long in the world. Despite all of our glorious technical, scientific and medical advances, we do not fundamentally understand our selves.

Our individual human minds are everywhere we go every second of our lives, but apparently our understanding of it, our intelligence, is nowhere. Who is to say whose theories are right or wrong in such a world?

Is there undetected intelligence around far away stars? Is there intelligence around our own star? One has to wonder, and look to the sky.

Look to the southern night skies of Crested Butte these days to see Jupiter burning over the West Elks in the evenings, like a belated birthday candle for the pioneering astrochemist genius Dr. Carl Sagan.