For a few hundred years now, western civilization has been splitting into two camps -- the people who dissect and explain the world with a hyper-rational, mathematical approach versus the people inclined to rely on metaphors, music, pictures. This conflict is what the writer CP Snow famously called The Two Cultures -- science on one side, the arts and humanities on the other.

Take numbers -- the very currency of science. From the 1960s on, storytellers have used numbers as icons of sinister scientific modernity. It probably began with Joseph Heller's Catch-22. It was a great novel. But it was also a great title, a number -- Catch 22 -- that perfectly conveyed the bureaucratic Orwellian mad-scientist insanity depicted in the book. And so numbers became the way for authors to suggest futuristic impersonality and menace. Five years after Catch-22 Thomas Pynchon published The Crying of Lot 49, about a vast corporate conspiracy.

But I think the nature of the art-and-entertainment fetish for numbers is changing. I think that for artists today, numbers are a token of modernistic pop cool more than any kind of futuristic menace. How otherwise to explain the name of the popular bands Matchbox 20, Sum 41 and Blink 182?

Maybe it's because we now inhabit the future. And here in the era of laser pens and Palm Pilots and cell phones, the separate cultures of art and science are fraternizing. The scientific establishment is now run by scientists immersed since birth in a pop-culture stew of TV and movies and pop music.

Which is why the International Astronomical Union has named two newly discovered asteroids after the Beatles and Bruce Springsteen. And at the other end of the rock icon spectrum, it's why Lance Bass of the boy band N'Sync keeps talking the Russian space agency into letting him participate in its cosmonaut training program.

These stirrings of a reunion between culture and science are about to get really interesting. Next year, the European Space Agency's Mars mission will touch down. One of its probes is a device created by British scientists called the Beagle 2. The Beagle will signal that it has landed by beaming to earth a special five-note piece of music. No, not that piece of music. A five-note piece of music specially composed for the mission by the British pop band Blur.

Then the Beagle, sitting on the Martian surface, will unfold a flap containing an etching of colored dots by the English artist Damien Hirst. The Beagle's cameras will use these dots to adjust their focus, and then transmit the TV picture of Hirst's dots on Mars 250 million miles back to us.

In other words, thanks to science, we'll be sitting here at home looking at art, live from another planet.

This is Kurt Andersen in Studio 360.

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