We Earthlings have our own way of looking at things. Perspective is determined by what lies at our center. Conditioned by values and environment, we see what we want to see. Just how true that is was evident when a NASA scientist briefed the media on Voyager 2’s mission to the planet Uranus.

"Uranus," he said, "has many more moons than previously thought - fifteen, not five. Furthermore, they have more radically sculpted surfaces than anything seen to date. The rings of Uranus are also different from what we had expected. There are not only a much larger number of them (instead of nine, upwards on one hundred), but they contain boulders and chunks of material. Most intriguing is the nature of the magnetic field, which wobbles from the axis of the planet, which itself has been tipped."

At…