Posts tagged science
“ The population of the United States is more than 300 million and it includes some of the best and brightest that the human species has to offer, probably more so than any other country in the world. There is surely something wrong with a system for choosing a leader when, given a pool of such talent and a process that occupies more than a year and consumes billions of dollars, what rises to the top of the heap is George W Bush. Or when the likes of Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin can be mentioned as even remote possibilities.”
Attention Governor Perry: Evolution is a fact - On Faith - The Washington Post
When people ask me why I don’t see myself ever moving back to America, usually I say something like I prefer the European lifestyle - living centrally in an apartment, not having to drive, having seasons, living in a place with a lively city center, bars that never close (no 2 am cutoff here!) and a slower drinking pace, a culture that’s not as focused on materialism and keeping-up-with the-Jonesitis, better news sources, affordable health care and university, and in general, more freedom. But actually, most of those things can be found in some American cities (though they’re all certainly much more expensive to live in), and when taken on their own might not justify my decision to stay here. It’s my goto answer, though, because the truth is much harder to explain over a beer.
The truth goes something like this: in all of the places I’ve lived in, all of the places I’ve travelled to (and statistically, that’s a lot), America is the only place where I’ve experienced such blatant anti-intellectualism (and this coming from someone who spent part of their childhood in communist Poland). Sure, Europe has its share of idiots, extremists and radical parties, but for the most part, the democratic process works here because most people want the best person for the job of leading the country. They might disagree on the specifics of how to do this, but leaders are not selected because of their lack of credentials. Ignorance is not a qualification, it is a problem to be addressed with education before one can pursue a significant office. There is no mainstream pride in ignorance like there is in much of American society.
As someone who loves learning, who is constantly striving to gain knowledge and decrease ignorance, I can’t imagine living in a society whose views are so antithetical to my own. Sadly, I don’t see this changing in my lifetime; if anything, it’s gotten worse in recent memory.
Anyway, Dawkins’ article is quite insightful and worth reading.
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EDIT: Right after posting this, I found two articles on this topic, also worth reading: Republicans Against Science and The increasingly antiscience Republican candidates (the latter by one of my favorite people on the Internets, Bad Astronomer Phil Plait).
SETI Institute: DONATE
I know that between earthquakes and tornados there are plenty of worthy causes out there right now, but for what it’s worth, this is where I put my money.
BBC News - Space is the final frontier for evolution, study claims
As someone who has often been solely motivated by a desire to get the hell away from other people, I can say that this study makes perfect sense to me.
But seriously, one fascinating thought as a result of this study is what will happen when man moves to other planets, or at least to the moon and space stations? Will we evolve too?
SAD experiment update
As I wrote last month, I am conducting an experiment on myself to determine whether a simple lack of vitamin D due to insufficient exposure to sunlight in this miserable Polish winter is causing the Seasonal Affective Disorder that has been a pain in my ass since I moved here.
I began the experiment over two weeks ago, on the 4th of January. I have been taking one dose of HASCO Vitaminium A-2000+D3-400, which was the only vitamin D supplement I could find in the local pharmacy. However, the box of this vitamin A and D cocktail reads that it’s “for people lacking sufficient exposure to sunlight”, so it actually seems to be perfect for my purposes.
So far, I have not noticed an actual improvement in my mood, but there has been a pleasant lack of depression as well, with one exception: this past weekend, I went out of town for 24 hours and forgot to take the vitamins with me, so on Saturday and Sunday I went without the supplements. Upon returning on Sunday afternoon, I felt a feeling of uselessness and lack of desire to be productive, which stretched into Monday. Now, it’s still unclear whether this is a result of lack of vitamins or a result of wanting to enjoy a lazy Sunday afternoon after a good weekend and the usual Monday blues at the start of the workweek - for that I’ll just have to continue the experiment for at least another month.
The good news is, I’ve had no side affects and am perfectly healthy, so at the very least, we know that taking vitamin A+D supplements has not turned me purple or made my head explode. Yet.
$3 billion to save humanity
Or, it’s all about resources.
A 10-person panel released a report for NASA today, titled “Seeking a Human Spaceflight Program Worthy of a Great Nation”. In it, they basically suggested scrapping current plans for a space shuttle replacement in favor of a cheaper, simpler option, and sticking to shuffling astronauts to and fro the ISS rather than launching grand plans of lunar or Martian colonization - that is, if current funding continues on the same path. More importantly, they said this:
“About $3 billion a year more would be needed to have a robust exploration program, and even more than that to keep the existing program essentially on schedule, according to the report.”
The future of humanity is worth just $3 billion a year. That’s less than two bucks per human being. That’s about one percent of what we spent on unemployment and welfare in 2008. It’s HALF of one percent of what we spent on social security. That piece of shit film called Titanic grossed two-thirds of that. TITANIC!
But because we’re fighting wars and saving our economy and wasting money on unnecessary medical procedures, it’s more than we can spare. And really, it seems so insignificant now - what good does going to Mars do for us, when we probably wouldn’t even get there for at least a decade or two. By that time, those in power today will be far more worried about the future of their own ageing organs to care about the future of the human race. In fact, no viable colony is likely to be possible in my lifetime. So why should I care? It’s so much easier to just be short-sighted.
Because I’m sick of living on a planet where my species is perpetually fighting over resources. Every conflict comes down to the fact that we live on a planet with limited surface area and limited materials and our evolutionary imperative drives us to accumulate those materials for our own kind - our family, our race, our ethnicity, our religion. Any time you hear that someone is fighting in the name of their god, they’re lying, and usually to themselves. They may hide behind a façade of religious fervor, but at some stage the conflict they’re so passionately maintaining is really about resources.
The only way to solve this is to let the scientists do their jobs and find a way to get some of us off of this rock. The resources on our planet are finite, and as long as we stay here we’re doomed as a species to keep fighting over them and eventually destroy ourselves. Only with improving our technology can we break this destructive cycle.
But don’t listen to me, listen to Stephen Hawking:
“I think the human race doesn’t have a future if it doesn’t go into space.”
And why do I care? Because I don’t want to be forgotten. I don’t want all of my achievements, whatever I leave behind me when I’m dead and buried, to go to waste if my species fails. I want my legacy, whether tangible or genetic*, to continue as long as possible.
So what can one do in this situation? Write your congressman, write to Obama? Encourage private sector innovation to fill in the gaps in NASA’s capabilities? Wait for the Chinese space program to get to Mars first? I’m all ears.
*By genetic legacy I mean the genetic legacy all of humanity shares from our common ancestors
