Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization

Or maybe arguing with people you disagree with takes less effort than exploring why they think differently from you.

Objective truths of science are not founded in belief systems. They are not established by the authority of leaders or the power of persuasion. Nor are they learned from repetition or gleaned from magical thinking. To deny objective truths is to be scientifically illiterate, not to be ideologically principled.

I came to resent labels of all kinds. What are they, if not intellectually lazy ways of asserting you know everything about a person you've never met?

Differences in opinion enrich the diversity of a nation, and ought to be cherished and respected in any free society, provided everyone remains free to disagree with one another and, most importantly, everyone remains open to rational arguments that could change your mind.

To deny objective truths is to be scientifically illiterate, not to be ideologically principled.

Do whatever it takes to avoid fooling yourself into believing that something is true when it is false, or that something is false when it is true. This approach to knowing enjoys taproots in the eleventh century, as expressed by the Arabic scholar Ibn al-Haytham (AD 965–1040), also known as Alhazen. In particular, he cautioned the scientist against bias: “He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency.”2 Centuries later, during the European Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci would be in full agreement: “The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinion.

On the whole, I don't fear death. Instead, I fear a life where I could have accomplished more.

You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the Moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, “Look at that, you son of a bitch.” —Edgar D. Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut

It's no secret that people will give their lives, or take the lives of others, in support of what they believe. Often the less actual evidence that exists in support of an ideology, the more likely a person is willing to die for the cause.

I beseech you to treasure up in your hearts these my parting words. Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.

In the universe, two or more seemingly contradictory facts can be simultaneously true. How about on Earth? Can you be both male and female? Can you be neither? Can you move fluidly between being a man and a woman? Is your sexual preference fluid too? Maybe we're all male-female qubits. Such questions are hard for some people to grasp, embedded in a culture that sees the world as a landscape of rigid categories, where things must be one or the other, and not fall on a continuum.

Why classify by skin color at all, unless you plan to invoke it in some way. If one group oppresses another, inadvertently or on purpose, you’d want good data on who’s oppressing whom so that you can redress the problem. With the same data, however, nefarious people in power might want to magnify inequality, which is just what happened in apartheid South Africa. The 1950 Population Registration Act codified skin color into White and Black, with multiple subcategories of Coloured, which included mixed race and Asian, enabling the White minority in power to establish laws that prescribed and stratified the social, political, educational, and economic freedoms of each population differently.

Daily life in 1960 would be unrecognizable to anyone transported from the year 1930. From 1960 to 1990, a Cold War nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union threatens the survival of civilization. Though begun in the 1950s, the US stockpile of nuclear warheads peaks in the 1960s, with the Soviets’ stockpile peaking in the 1980s.11 The Berlin Wall, erected in 1962, becomes the greatest symbol of Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain,” separating Eastern from Western Europe. Yet it’s dismantled by 1989, as peace breaks out in Europe. The commercialization of the transistor allows consumer electronics to miniaturize, transforming audiovisual equipment from heavy, floor-mounted living room furniture to what you carry in your pocket.

The beauty we've created is not even skin-deep. It washes off in the shower. That which is objectively true or honestly authentic—especially on Earth or in the heavens—tends to possess a beauty of its own that transcends time, place, and culture. Sunsets remain mesmerizing, even though you get one every day. Beautiful as they are, we also know all about the thermonuclear energy sources in the Sun's core. We know about the tortuous journey of its photons as they climb out of the Sun. We know of their swift journey across space, until they refract through Earth's atmosphere, en route to my eye's retina. The brain then processes and "sees" the image of a sunset. These added facts—these scientific truths—have the power to deepen whatever meaning we may otherwise ascribe to nature's beauty.

Instead of the White House, why not take our visiting space alien to ComicCon. We’d have legitimate concerns that nobody would notice an actual alien camouflaged among those pretending to be one. The upside? Our alien visitor phones home and instead reports—“They’re just like us!

The successful ideas survive scrutiny. The bad ideas get discarded. Conformity is also laughable to scientists attempting to advance their careers. The best way to get famous in your own lifetime is to pose an idea that counters prevailing research and that earns a consistency of observations and experiment. Healthy disagreement is a natural state on the bleeding edge of discovery.

Starry Messenger is a wake-up call to civilization. People no longer know who or what to trust. We sow hatred of others fueled by what we think is true, or what we want to be true, without regard to what is true. Cultural and political factions battle for the souls of communities and of nations. We’ve lost all sight of what distinguishes facts from opinions. We’re quick with acts of aggression and slow with acts of kindness.

All this leaves me wondering what it means to be aligned with a political party at all. Do they do your thinking for you? Do they define your attitudes toward issues that confront the country? If so, then you are a pawn of those in power. But in a representative republic, those in power should be a pawn of you.

Knowledge of your mortality may also be a force unto itself— the urge to achieve, and the need to express love and affection now, not later.

We are more likely to be swayed by a single person who testifies with passion than by a bar chart containing data compiled from thousands of people.

If you travel beyond the cave door, you may just discover things that help solve your cave problems.

In that first of nine such [Project Apollo] missions, our goal was to explore the moon, but while doing so, we looked back over our shoulders and discovered Earth for the first time.

But we take better care of our cats and dogs than we do of homeless humans in the street. If we serve as pets to aliens, might they take better care of us than we ever will of ourselves?

Not until 1987 is homosexuality removed entirely from the formal list of mental “disorders” compiled by the American Psychiatric Association.12 Computers

We don't know how to communicate meaningfully with chimpanzees. Assessing the effort we invest in trying to get big brained mammals to do what we say, we tend to measure their intelligence by an ability to understand us, rather than measure our intelligence by an ability to understand them. Since we can't meaningfully communicate with any other species on earth, not even those genetically closest to us, how audacious of us to think we can converse at all with intelligent alien life upon first meeting them?

If we instead back away from all that divides us, you might find common, unifying perspectives on the world. If so, watch where you step.

While there, I came to resent labels of all kinds. What are they, if not intellectually lazy ways of asserting you know everything about a person you've never met?

Believe it or not, Santa’s reindeer exemplify the problem. Unlike other deer species, both male and female reindeer grow antlers. So at a glance they all look the same. But zoologically all male reindeer lose their antlers in the late fall, well before Christmas.9 In spite of their names, only some of which are feminine,10 all Santa’s reindeer sport antlers. So they’re all female. Which means Rudolph has been misgendered.