It has been a long time since science captivated most of us with a sense of nature's power and possibilities. Scientists complain from time to time that that subject is not attracting the interest in schools they think it deserves. I have a theory about that.
I remember the science class in my last year of school, 1969, when the teacher introduced us to a new concept called ecology. Her eyes lit up with excitement as she described the scale of damage that human activity was believed to be doing to the world. She was excited because it meant that science would become socially and politically "relevant", a powerful word in 1969.
I remember my heart sank, not so much that the world was being damaged but that it was being diminished. Suddenly we were no longer a puny lifeform amid nature's grandeur, we were monsters and nature was at our mercy.
Since then, this idea has been so embedded in our consciousness that to question it invites ridicule. Yet every time I'm close to an ocean or flying above continents I still feel minuscule. The lights of great cities from the sky at night look like lonely settlements in the dark.
Perhaps if I went as far as astronauts began to go in the 1960s and looked back at the planet as they did, I would have shared their new-found sense of its fragility. But their celebrated photographs didn't give me that impression. Mother Earth didn't look vulnerable to me, she looked large, fertile and magnificent.
When the astronauts looked back, science changed far more profoundly than it would from any discovery they made on the moon. Science decided we were giants.
It takes an earthquake or a volcano to restore a sense of scale. The quake that rattled the lower North Island this week was reported to be centred 230km below the seabed off Taranaki. Ponder 230km. That is the distance from the Bay of Islands to Auckland, straight down.
And that is just the crust of the planet, the skin on the porridge. The whole boiling pot is simmering down there regardless of the ants on the surface. It is hard to believe our industrial emissions matter beside the planet's natural eruptions. The deepest oil drilling we can do is a pinprick in its sediments.
If science had not succumbed to environmental hubris, a generation of New Zealanders might have gained a geological view of this country.
They would see it as not just the islands of the familiar map but as a submerged continent 20 times larger, stretched from New Caledonia to the sub-Antarctic zone, surrounded by deeper ocean.
It is a distinct crustal mass ridged and pitted with mountain ranges and basins and over eons of geological time a constant rain of organic matter, mostly dead plankton, will have settled in the basins. There it would have been buried by mud erosion from the mountains and fossilised into oil or gas trapped in layers of rock.
Geology says we should let oil prospectors go looking for it, environmentalism says we should not. Greens see a threat to rare sea life at that depth and a risk of ocean pollution if an accident happens.
If it happened I dare say the Southern Ocean would deal with it much as oceans deal with undersea volcanoes and material constantly vented from the cauldron below.
Science has been dominated by environmentalism for too long. What it gained in political attention and research grants has come at a cost to its power to excite us. If a subatomic particle has opened a door to phenomena we can barely comprehend, science will be wonderful again.
