I found this over at the blog of Bro. Guy Consolmangno, co-author of the book Turn Left at Orion that many may be familiar with. Anyway, I really like the notion he brings up about one reason why some are doing things for IYA and beyond. Just thought a few might enjoy it. Recently (Oct. 2006 to Oct 2007) he served as Chair of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society and is the curator of the Vatican Meteorite collection and astronomer to the Vatican Observatory. He has a BA and MA from MIT and a PH.D. from Univ. of Arizona in Planetary Sciences. Enjoy. "Many years ago, long before I joined the Jesuits, I had been a postdoctoral fellow at MIT working on computer models to predict the internal evolution of the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn. But I would go home at night, and lie awake in my bed at 3 am, wondering if this wasn’t just an enormous waste of time. Why should anyone care about the moons of Saturn when there were people starving in the world? How could I find making these computer models, which only a handful of people would ever study, a worthwhile center of my life? I had no answer. And so I quit my life as an astronomer, cleaned out my office, and went to join the US Peace Corps. I would go anywhere they sent me, I told them; I’d do whatever they asked me to do. I was there to serve people, not some inhuman computer screen. They happily took me in, taught me some Swahili, and within three months I was in Kenya… at the University of Nairobi, teaching graduate students astronomy. There was a certain logic to that job. I learned in Kenya that there is a word to describe people who lived “close to nature”: starving. People were indeed hungry in Kenya at that time, suffering through one of its periodic droughts. And I realized that, for all the ills of a technological society — pollution, alienation, the greed that comes with affluence — nonetheless in the course of human history it’s only the technologically sophisticated societies that have been able to feed their populace on a regular basis. A technologically sophisticated society needs an educated populace. That means schools. And schools need teachers. The students I was training in physics and astronomy all had jobs waiting for them at the Kenya Science Teacher’s College, to teach the teachers who would teach the students who (we hoped) would one day make the power grid in Kenya just a little more reliable. Astronomy was an easy way to teach the physics. But that wasn’t why they wanted me to teach them astronomy. I spent a good amount of my time in Kenya out of the city, up country, visiting the schools where my fellow Peace Corps volunteers were working… schools with no windows in the windows, no black on the blackboards. I would show my slides of spacecraft images (did you know there are slide projectors that can run off automobile batteries?) and at night I would set up my little telescope. Everyone in the village would line up to look at the craters on the Moon, the rings of Saturn, the moons of Jupiter. The enthusiasm, the awe, the sheer joy in their faces was very familiar. It was the same look I would see when I set up the telescope to look at those very same objects back home in America. Of course, the skies in Kenya were much darker, free of factory and light pollution. The improved conditions left me in awe, as well. Then it finally occurred to me… no well-fed cow bothers to look through a telescope. No cat or dog, no matter how clever, is interested in seeing the images that spacecraft have sent us. People are interested in astronomy precisely because they are people. It is a human response to a human urge. Feeding that urge feeds our humanity. The people in Iten, Kenya, were as hungry for this as the people of Lexington, Michigan. It is a hunger for more than food. It is literally true: a human being does not live by bread alone. And to deny someone the chance to share in what the human race has found out about this universe, just because they happened to be born on the wrong continent or to the wrong socio-economic group, is a crime against their humanity. That, ultimately, is what the International Year of Astronomy is all about. That is why we are reaching out around the world, with low-cost telescopes and podcasts and books and lectures."