More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
include the founding of the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders on the supposition that without a view of Earth from space, the very concept of “without borders” might not have arisen,
In my understandably biased view, the I-care-about-Earth movement could have, in principle, happened in 1950 or 1960. The environment was no less a problem then. For example, air pollution in the Los Angeles basin, from the rise of cars combined with unfortunate thermal inversions due to local geography, made LA during the 1940s and 1950s one of the most polluted cities on Earth.
Still, we were all distracted by other things. Mass environmental awareness could have waited until 1975, after the end of the Vietnam War. Or until 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. No. It all happened smack in the middle of our Apollo missions to the Moon—while a starry message was gently descending from space, infusing us all with a veritable firmware upgrade of our collective capacity to care.
Holding aside the biological and physiological implausibility of this claim, did you know that moonlight is just reflected sunlight? Obtain a spectrum of the Moon’s light and it’s identical to that of the Sun.
The Moon affects the waters of Earth, with especially high oceanic tides during full Moon. Biologists tell us we are mostly water, as are the oceans. Surely then, the full Moon’s tidal forces affect us in some way, if not to turn us into lunatics. In the Earth-Moon system, the side of Earth facing the Moon is closer, so it feels a slightly stronger force of gravity than the side facing away. This creates a stretching force across Earth’s diameter, most visible in our oceanic tides, but the solid earth experiences it too.
Full Moons get the highest tides not because of the Moon but because of the Sun. The Sun’s tides on Earth are about one-third the strength of the Moon’s tides, yet hardly anybody talks about them. During full Moon, high Sun tides add directly to high Moon tides, giving the false impression that the full Moon imparts extra gravitational influence.
One of the rewards for doing well in the moon lottery is that the Sun is four hundred times wider than the Moon, and it happens to be four hundred times farther away. This pure coincidence renders the Sun and Moon about the same size in the sky, allowing for spectacular solar eclipses.
Eclipses lead a long list of sky phenomena that irresistibly attract and entangle us. The idea that the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars affect us personally is called astrology and goes way back. Some call it the second-oldest profession. How could any of us think any different as we watched the sky revolve around us daily. For example, certain constellations rise before dawn every autumn, just when your crops are ready for harvest. Clear evidence that the entire dome of the sky, day and night, lovingly looks after your needs and wants. With this mindset, the sky also portends events you, your
...more
Honest Abe, a self-educated, lifelong learner, dutifully went outside to look up at the night sky. Invoking his knowledge of astronomy, he noticed that all the grand constellations were still there, intact—Ursa Major, Leo, Taurus, Orion. Whatever was falling, it wasn’t the stars, and so he rationally concluded that a biblical prophecy of doom was not underway,13 and promptly went back to bed.
In all these scenarios, the cosmic perspective will have morphed from the universe reminding us to take better care of our own fate to the universe declaring we’re playthings for high-level life forms. A terrifying prospect, perhaps. 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?
Holding aside that nearly all mass shootings in schools happen in the suburbs,23 if you add up the lethal risks to life in the city versus life elsewhere, turns out you’re safer in the city.
All combined, on average, your chance of dying prematurely in the suburbs is 22 percent higher25 than in the big city. This analysis simply required that you step back from assumed truths, gain a wider perspective, and query the data in different ways, none of which is possible in the tunnel vision of bias.
abate until we do something about it. Every year we continue to lose upwards of 35,000 people on our roads, yet the US military has spent $2 trillion on our post–9/11 war on terror,27 mostly in Iraq, precipitated by the singular deaths of September 11. America was angry and did not want to live in a state of terror. This wasn’t a cost-benefit calculation about saving lives. It was a cost-benefit calculation about how we feel.
If the societal priority is to save lives, but the interpersonal priority is to value our emotions, then how do we balance these factors in our daily lives?
