The Sirens of Titan

Credit: European Space Agency

Titan! The mysterious moon, its atmosphere beckoning the curious, has been revealed by the fantastic Euro-American Huygens probe. Go to the site for more photos, sound recordings and other astonishing fruits of man's God-given intelligence and curiosity.

My own draw to Titan is rather pronounced. I once had a pup -- a tick hound I found wild in the Indiana woods, who was stolen from me on the first day of hunting season -- named Chronos, after the chronosynclasitc infindibulum invented by Kurt Vonnegut in his novel, The Sirens of Titan. (Yeah, yeah, we're not crazy about Vonnegut's politics today, but how can you ignore a cover blurb like this: "His best book ... He dares not just to ask the ultimate question about the meaning of life, but to answer it.")

Vonnegut is no fan of the Christian religion, or any organized religion for that matter, and this book shows it. But the chronicles of Winston Niles Rumford and his dog Kazak as they are whipped to Titan, to Earth, to Titan, to Earth every 59 days via the aforementioned chronosynclastic infidibulum is a howl of creativity, fantasy and expose of the human spirit.

So now we can see the surface of Titan and hear its sounds -- alas, no Sirens! What a wonder that the same Man who can spin the stellar fantasies of Vonnegut can also master the complex disciplines to probe such a distant orb. Could there be more proof, my friends, that Man is not a creation of mud, chance and time?