Every time I think I've seen the pinnacle of mankind's arrogance, something like this shows up to astound me again.
I mean, really. When are we going to learn that everything is alive in some form or other? Just because a thing, a person or even a planet doesn't fit our arbitrary assumptions of what a living, aware--and maybe even intelligent--being should be, doesn't mean we have the right to interfere with it or change it to suit us. Yet we do so continually with only the shallowest thought given to what the consequences might be, if any.
I'm no scientist, so I really don't know if igniting Saturn is actually possible. If it's not, then we're tampering with and damaging another whole planet just to entertain our curiosity, which is childish and foolish.
But if it is possible... The article at http://www.rinf.com/news/nov05/lucifer-project.html listed above noted some of the scenarios that NASA and others had considered to be fallout from the mission, including a rain of material ejected from Saturn when the plutonium on Cassini implodes. This will wreak havoc with the atmosphere and a large number of people won't survive it. (Well, duh. Run for the bunkers, Illuminati, run!) Yet as dire as this is on the surface, it seems far too simplistic to me--it's just a little piece of a much bigger picture.
Turning Saturn into a sun is supposed to warm Titan up so that we can terraform it with the intention of future colonization. This is another very simplistic and naive assumption, that this is all that would occur. Yet how can anybody reasonably predict what the real effects of such an ignition would be?
It seems to my unscientific eyes that suddenly gaining a star where Saturn used to be would change the entire solar system forever, with ramifications we can't begin to consider. Doesn't a star mean heat and light? Isn't Saturn is a lot closer to us than the sun? We're at the optimal distance from the sun we already have to continue life as we know it. Put another one in Saturn's place--albeit a much smaller one--and that means another source of heat, light and electromagnetism. Wouldn't that throw off not just our own path of orbit but those of the rest of the planets nearby? How do we know our little neighborhood (the solar system) wouldn't be largely incinerated, or changed so much that none of us would recognize it?
I know it sounds like I'm Chicken Little screaming "The sky is falling!" I'm sorry about that, and my intention isn't to instill any more fear in people, but I just wish TPTB would have a responsible and unselfish thought once in a while.
We know that there are many extraterrestrial civilizations watching us right now, as Marshall Summers says, to see what is about to happen. We know that mystics throughout the ages and in all of our own civilizations have spoken of "the end times" and cataclysms and points of ascenson or bifurcation of realities.
Maybe this Lucifer Project is the big show, the trigger point. I don't know, but it makes me wonder...
Cheers
Look... Wonder... Remember... Know
