DISCOVERERS AND EXPLORERS ALL

GEORGE S. ROBINSON

Computer imagery by Greg Berger, Greg Berger Design. Photos courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution

Behind the criteria for each category of membership in the Cosmos Club lies the need to characterize a candidate's achievements in the context of exploration and discovery, regardless of his or her particular discipline. John Wesley Powell, the Club's principal founding member, in most ways epitomized the traditional understanding of what it is to be an explorer and a discoverer. The front cover of this issue of the Cosmos Journal is a computer-enhanced Smithsonian photograph of Powell, a geologist and a student of Native American cultures, in conversation with a native Paiute during one of his expeditions to the arid lands of the Southwestern United States, superimposed on Robert Hurt's artistic view of Sedna as the hypothesized newest planetoid discovered in our ever-unfolding solar system. The image on the cover suggests there are no limits or boundaries for the Club's constantly exploring and discovering membership.

Each Cosmos Club member, perhaps by definition, investigates, studies, analyzes, experiments, assesses, systematically searches, and examines minutely and creatively in his or her professional pursuit. And, in so doing, each accomplishes that pursuit with distinction and recognition. But beyond this, each member has taken the fruits of exploration to the level of ascertaining the facts deriving from that exploration or investigation, and then assessing those facts. In other words, each exploring member also is a "discoverer" and an educator as well.

What the Club membership explores covers an especially breathless spectrum of disciplines and interest, indeed covering all inquiries motivated by ignorance and uncertainty, and resulting curiousity. Our members range from particle physicists to astrophysicists, theologians and philosophers to astronauts and aquanauts, philanthropists and evolutionary biologists to linguists and cultural anthropologists, political scientists and economists to artists and jurisprudents, and on and on and on. In addition to including recipients of Nobel and Pulitzer prizes, as well as the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian honor, the Club's ranks include a number of members who have been recognized for their various contributions by the fine art of commemorative postal stamps from around the world, as noted in Jack Perlmutter's (CC '62) article "Philately Portraiture: A commemoration of Cosmos Club explorers and discoveres" on page 25.

Inherent in all these accomplishments is the responsibility to use these extraordinary talents, collectively as well as individually, for the benefit of our planet, our only home so far, and the ongoing evolution of its civilizations. Each exploration and discovery is more than knowledge for the sake of knowledge. it is but one component in the odyssey of survival of humankind and its essence.

We shall never cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

—T.S. Eliot

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