Fully Rounded Man

 

Rev. Minot Savage (1841-1918) may be distinctly religious. But he’s also distinctly wise. And he’s still a liberal intellectual. Here’s an excerpt from his first book, Christianity -- The Science of Manhood (1873, p. 9-16):

"Body, mind, heart, spirit, -- we have found that these all are factors of man as he actually exists. Or, to give it such expression as no one can deny, man sustains physical, mental, affectional, and [spiritual] relations. The faculties which make up his fitness for these relations constitute him what he is. But unless rightly combined and proportioned, they cannot make a true manhood, any more than roots and trunk and boughs and leaves make a tree, when the roots are in the air, and one of the boughs is larger than the trunk. Relation and proportion have as much to do with making men, as do the essential elements themselves...

"The true manhood then is not found in the dominion of any one of these to the ignoring or degrading of another. It is in the right development and ranking of them all. Man should be a pyramid, having his body for the base, and his [spiritual] faculty for the apex, with heart and brain between.

"The body must be governed by the reason. The reason also must check and guide the action of heart and spirit, though they both are superior to it in their highest range and uses. A whole body, a clear, strong, quick intellect, a heart that loves the best, and an upward looking of the whole being to the absolute right and true, -- these make a man all that it is possible for him to become."

New Space Probes

 

It's long past time for humans to launch new interstellar space probes. The American government's NASA space company launched Voyager 2 in August, 1977; and Voyager 1 in September, 1977. Voyager 2 travels at about 9.6 miles per second and is 12.9 million miles away; Voyager 1 travels at about 10.6 miles per second, and is 15.5 million miles out. Both are an awesome seven to eight times further away from the sun than the last planet Uranus, which is 1.7 million miles distant from Earth. Both crafts still partially function, which is impressive. But both use grossly out-of-date, 48-year-old technology!

New private spaceships would have vastly superior cameras and sensing equipment to gather far more knowledge of the distant planets, Kuiper Belt, and outer space. And these probes could travel at at least three times the Voyager speeds, at over 30 miles per second, by using gravity assist from Jupiter. NASA's 2018 Parker Solar Probe, using gravity assist from the sun (getting within a dangerous 3.8 million miles), travels at a stunning 110 miles per second; so possibly new Voyager-type space exploration craft could get close to that. SpaceX, Firefly Aerospace, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Relativity Space, Sierra Space, and Intuitive Machines – all successful capitalist space companies based in America – need to get to work! Since this would largely be a quest for general knowledge, possibly several of these private companies could collaborate. By firing the public imagination, it might be easy for them to get funding from other large corporations and the general public for this magnifcent venture!