Henrietta Hay's Column

We can all relax now for a thousand years or so. I got worried several months ago when scientists told us that a huge comet would collide with the earth in 2126. They have recalculated and now say that we'll be safe for the next millennium. That's good news, although I hadn't been wasting a lot of sleep over the threat. The risk seemed somewhere below the possibility that California will fall into the Pacific.

It was an interesting story, though. Comet Swift-Tuttle is a six mile-wide hunk of dirt and ice traveling through space at 37 miles a second. If it ever hits us, whether during its next orbit in 134 years or a thousand years from now, it will kick up quite a dust storm. In fact, it will create a global pall of dust blocking the sunlight, disrupting the climate and, according to the scientists, ending civilization. Also, it will put quite a hole in the ground if anyone is around to see it.

I realize that scientists have a compulsive urge to know. They spend their lives hunting for answers to questions, and then finding new questions to answer. I find their single-minded passion fascinating, even though I don't understand it.

I have always had this mental picture of Archimedes, who while bathing discovered the principle of specific gravity. He jumped from his tub and ran naked through the streets of Athens shouting, "Eureka -- I have found it." I named my first computer "Eureka" because that's what I shouted whenever I discovered something new that worked. Another early scientist, Galileo, was forced by the Church to recant his belief that the earth rotates around the sun. But as he knelt he is said to have muttered under his breath the Italian equivalent of, "It really does."

Modern science has taken us great distances in both directions -- into the outer reaches of space and into minute analysis of matter. And although I have tremendous respect for the scientists, some of their projects seem pretty odd to the rest of us.

Recently I read that researchers think they can re-create a dinosaur although I can't imagine why they want to. It is widely believed that a collision between an object from outer space and Earth some 65 million years ago caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. Now some scientists have come up with what the New York Times calls a "Recipe for a Dinosaur." You find a bead of amber that contains a blood-sucking insect from the age of dinosaurs. Then extract genetic material from blood cells of a bitten dinosaur and amplify the DNA with "the PCR technique." Then you process and inject the material into the embryo of an alligator and wait to see what happens. I haven't seen a report of any baby brontosauri running around, but Michael Crichton wrote a best-selling novel about reconstituted dinosaurs that made my hair stand on end.

There is one nagging little question about all this. Are we as human beings ready for all this knowledge? Can we handle it? A lot of people, including me, believe that science has outrun ethics.

The more facts we learn about the universe, the deeper the mystery. Some days I think I'd be happier to leave a few mysteries. Fifty years ago I didn't have to wonder whether a meteor was going to hit me on the head or a chunk of blue ice crash through the roof of my house. Now I know just enough to keep one wary eye on the sky. And in those days I knew for sure I would not meet a dinosaur on Main Street.

In any case, scientific research into our universe will continue. There will never be a time when there is nothing to look for, when all the mysteries are solved. The scientists have real job security.

Meanwhile, it wouldn't hurt to keep one eye on the sky, just in case.