Late in 2008, NASA launched a competition for students across the U.S. The prize: to name their latest Mars rover. This rover — far larger than its predecessors, at around the size of a small SUV — was to determine whether Mars’ atmosphere had once been capable of supporting life. It had a mission, now it just needed a name. There were more than 9,000 entries, each accompanied by an essay. A few months later, the winner was announced. The new rover was to be called Curiosity.
The name — chosen by then 12-year-old Clara Ma — is a perfect fit. In retrospect, it seems entirely obvious. In fact, the only real question to NASA is: what took you so long? As Ma wrote in her winning essay:
‘Curiosity is the passion that drives us through our everyday lives. We have become explorers and scientists with our need to ask questions and to wonder. Sure, there are many risks and dangers, but despite that, we still continue to wonder and dream and create and hope.’
Curiosity — the noun, rather than the roving laboratory — is a valuable attribute. Walter Isaacson, biographer of Leonardo da Vinci, describes curiosity as da Vinci’s secret sauce: “He made lists of questions every week, from ‘Why is the sky blue?’ to ‘Ask [a friend of his] about how to do a measurement of the sun,’ to things like ‘Describe the tongue of a woodpecker’ — something you’d want to know only out of pure curiosity.”
Many of us — including myself — think of ourselves as curious people. But therein lies a problem: if you pride yourself on your curiosity, what happens when it reaches a limit?
Programming — like many fields — is filled with curiosities and the curious alike. Programmers are, in a sense, professional inquisitors. We poke, we prod, we have to know ‘why?’. Alan Cooper, in his classic book The Inmates Are Running The Asylum, coins a term for this type of person, who is “driven by an irresistable desire to understand how things work”: Homo Logicus.
To illustrate the term, Cooper throws a thought experiment at the reader. Imagine yourself boarding a plane, he says. As you get to the aisle, you are given two choices: turn left, towards the cockpit, where you get to play with the “kaleidoscope of complex controls and gauges”; or turn right, towards your seat, where you will be whisked off to your destination, in blissful ignorance. Programmers, Cooper says, will always turn left.
This resonated with me, for one simple reason: I would turn right.
I would pick the tiny reclining seats, the scramble for baggage space, and in-flight entertainment consisting of nothing but Cars 3. As it turns out, my curiosity ends way before I reach the controls of a plane.
What does that make me — and anyone else who would turn to the right? (and it’s not often I say that about myself.) According to Inmates, it makes us simple every-day Homo Sapiens, just trying to go about our lives. For most people that’s great. If, however, you’re a programmer, that suggests one thing: you are a fraud.
Now, I don’t actually believe that (and, I suspect, nor does Alan Cooper). Still, it’s interesting to consider. Assuming a divide does exist, then it’s easy to see how people feel out of place in the technology industry. It is an industry based on ideas, and filled with enthusiasts. Knowledge, and curiosity, are badges of honour. A lack of knowledge — a lack of curiosity — can sometimes be pounced upon.
It’s funny — I can’t help wonder about my own limited curiosity. Did it prevent me from building a nuclear fusion device at the age of 14? Probably. Truth be told, I doubt that I — unlike da Vinci or Clara Ma — have even asked the classic question: Why is the sky blue? Fancy, a programmer not having asked that!
And yet I’m okay with it. You see, I have a problem with curiosity: it’s exhausting. (It’s also a tricky word to type, as my spellchecker will testify.) I only have so much curiosity to go around, before it wears thin. The same is true for most people, even Leonardo da Vinci.
I’ll go a step further than that — there’s real value in accepting the limits of your curiosity. It actually has plenty to offer. In the right hands, limited curiosity is focused curiosity. Otherwise it can be hard to get a damned thing done. Combined with other people’s limited — but different — curiosity … well, that’s a powerful thing.
Which brings us back to the Curiosity rover. It is the combination of so many different focuses — engineering, electronics, geology, biology. Even marketing, which was able to inspire 9,000 students into voluntarily writing an essay. With every focus, there is an end to the curiosity. Perhaps all these NASA employees walk around feeling inadequate about what they don’t know. For the rest of us, their joint achievements are remarkable.
Curiosity is a wonderful thing, which should be given every chance to flourish. But rather than worry about the curiosity we should have, let’s celebrate the curiosity we do have. “Limited Curiosity” may not be on the side of a NASA mission any time soon, but without it we might be stuck on this rock, rather than exploring the next.