History’s scribes documented the world’s unmitigated terror at the seemingly random appearance of these frightful “apparitions” (a term they often used), from the reigns of the ancient Greeks through the Dark Ages. They shone with the red light of blood, yellow or livid, like that of which the historian Josephus speaks, which showed itself during the terrible siege of Jerusalem. They were javelins, sabres, swords of fire, horses’ manes, dragons’ mouths, bleeding crosses, flaming daggers or decapitated heads with hair and bristling beard.
In 1921 the American Catholic Quarterly Review summed up the collective disquiet around comets from a deep reading of past poets, playwrights and historians: Reaching back more than 2,000 years, our historical record crackles with the palpable fear of these celestial bodies. Some of the first foreign invaders to infect humanity’s attention on a global scale were comets. And that remains its role now, as thousands of researchers join forces in a collective mission: to better know SARS-CoV-2 and to rend that virus’s complexities into a blueprint to plan its containment and control.īut if we follow science’s trajectory backward in time, we can see that our first attempts to decode and classify natural phenomena came not from the study of our illnesses but from the movements of the heavens. It is an organized attempt to move us beyond simply reacting to the marvels (and terrors) we perceive and experience. Throughout history, science has been our species’ hedge against the uncertainties of our world. And now a worldwide pandemic rages as humanity races to protect itself against a virus that has already claimed millions of lives. We have recently experienced rising global temperatures, melting glaciers, floods, wildfires and record-breaking hurricanes.
Our world appears to be in a perpetual state of it. This seems like a good moment to speak to the idea of uncertainty.
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