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July 4 - July 21, 2023
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. This wasn’t always the case, nor will it be so in the distant future. The Moon is spiraling away from Earth at a rate of about 1.5 inches per year. So let’s enjoy this match made in heaven while we can.
Every few years, the Moon passes exactly between Earth and the Sun, precisely covering the Sun, darkening the sky, and briefly laying bare the Sun’s gorgeous outer atmosphere, called the corona. No other planet-moon combination in the Solar System can match it.
Part the curtains of all-out conflict and find the puppeteers of politics and religion. Two topics that, we are warned, should never be discussed in polite company.
Including all casualties among all warring nations across the six-year span of World War II (1939 through 1945), more than one thousand people were killed—per hour. A morbid and inevitable consequence of forcing your personal truths upon others in a world that is fundamentally pluralistic.
A scientist’s entire mission in life is to discover features of nature that are true, even if they conflict with your philosophies. That’s why you’ll never see battalions of astrophysicists storming a hill.
Consider what happens when scientists disagree. We look for one of three outcomes: either I’m right and you’re wrong, you’re right and I’m wrong, or we’re both wrong. That’s an implicit contract we carry into all arguments on the frontier of discovery. Who decides the outcome? Nobody does. Arguing more loudly or strenuously or more articulately than your opponent simply reveals how annoying and obstinate you are. The resolution almost always comes when more or better data arrive.
Routine access to space will turn the Solar System into Earth’s backyard. With that access comes unlimited space-borne resources, rendering an entire category of human conflict obsolete. Access to space may be more than just the next frontier to explore; it could be civilization’s best hope for survival.
I saw conservatives for the first time as something other than a monolith. I also saw liberals for the first time—aided and enabled by this unfamiliar but luminous view from the center. 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?
Keep your identity small
Can scientific rationality embedded in a cosmic perspective make everyone agree on all opinions? No, not likely. Although, it can make everyone disagree less strenuously—not from compromise, but from the inevitable separation of your emotions from your capacity to reason, and the reduced bias in your capacity to think. Sometimes, all you need is more or better data.
some conservative Christians doubt Darwinian evolution because their 3,500-year-old sacred texts lay out a different idea for how all the animals and the rest of life on Earth came to be. These fundamentalists are simply exhibiting their constitutionally protected free expression of religion. They happen to be the minority of Christians,16 and I’m not interested in changing their views unless they try to overthrow the country’s science curriculum or lobby to become head of a government science agency. Plenty of high (and low) paying jobs exist that don’t require you to accept the tenets of
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No matter what a politician says or promises during a campaign or even while in office, the most fundamental measure of political support is how much money from the federal budget gets allocated to the cause.
I suspect (but cannot prove) that the Venn diagram of ComicCon’ers completely contains the circle of every person who has ever been wedgied by high school bullies in the history of the universe. Everyone comes together out of a common love of imagination—arguably something that runs deep in our collective DNA. Yet there are no judgments.
If ComicCon’ers ran the world, the worst geopolitical fights would be fake light-saber battles after a Friday lunch at the United Nations commissary.
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!”
When statistically unlikely events occur—at random—adults commonly draw from a huge reservoir of meanings to account for them. The need to do so, coupled with an overall absence of curiosity for what is true, may have rational evolutionary roots.2 For example, is that a lion rustling the tall grass ahead of you, or just the effects of a gentle wind? Consider the outcomes in a hungry-lion flowchart: You think you see a lion. You are curious and you want to make sure, so you walk closer and discover it’s indeed a lion. The lion then eats you, summarily removing you from the gene pool. You think
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Our ancestors were also highly dependent on assumptions of cause and effect to navigate survival. If you’re eating some berries in one moment and get very sick in the hours that follow, the cause was probably the berries. The coincidence of these two events weighed heavily on our understanding of the world. Those who didn’t make the connection kept getting sick and faded from the gene pool.
If I’m going to hand my money to a casino, I’m going down while doing some math. I typically allocate about $300 and make it last several hours. Upon returning from the casino, when people ask how much I lost, I reply that I gained $300 of entertainment—about the cost of dinner, wine, and opera in my hometown. Curious, then, that nobody asks, when you return from the theater, “How much did you lose?”
If visiting space aliens analyzed what’s going on here, they might wonder what kind of a species would purposefully exploit the frailties of its own kind, creating a systematic transfer of wealth from the gambler to the casino owners, be they in Vegas or in the state capitol. Good evidence for no sign of intelligent life on Earth.
Some say the stock market is the world’s largest casino. I largely agree, except nobody brings you free drinks.
nineteenth-century British essayist Walter Bagehot,18 One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.
Another overlooked dimension of risk is our willingness to embrace studies that tell us our habits or diet may increase our chances of contracting cancer. Often, when such studies are reported, they tell you how much your risk of cancer increases when you engage in one kind of activity or another. Knowing the baseline risk for that particular cancer is paramount, yet we hardly ever pay attention to that statistic.
if you add up the lethal risks to life in the city versus life elsewhere, turns out you’re safer in the city.24 The causes of possible harm are different, but enlightening to compare. In the suburbs, traffic fatalities are much higher than in the city, as are overall accidents (drowning included), suicide, and drug overdoses. All combined, on average, your chance of dying prematurely in the suburbs is 22 percent higher25 than in the big city.
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.
Self-driving cars may ultimately save 36,000 lives per year in the US. What do you do emotionally, legally, societally, if self-driving cars still manage to kill, say, 1,000 people per year? No journalist will profile and celebrate each of the 35,000 random men, women, and children who didn’t die that year from car accidents. Even if they did manage to write such a piece, there’s no solace for the loved ones of those who died.
All I ask is to see accurate and authentic data, analyzed from all directions—free of bias and tunnel vision—before I layer my emotions upon it. In the end, we must live with the consequences of our decisions. After all input of facts and statistical analysis, our emotions may defy reconciliation with data. That’s okay too.
Over the past fifty years, the world population has doubled, yet meat consumption has tripled,4 which tracks closely the rise in wealth among nations that previously had no access to this expensive protein.
When the carnivorous wolf wants to eat the pigs or Little Red Riding Hood or Peter, or in the real world when wolf packs bring down a majestic elk, they’re not being bad wolves. They are just being wolves. They kill with no concern for the pain and suffering of their prey.
The answer to the question “What do fish eat in the ocean?” includes “Other fish.” Apart from the smallest of fish who eat plankton, not a one of them is an herbivore.
Despite the natural state of predator-prey relationships among animals on Earth, the argument remains that animals are sentient and that we, as rational humans, have the smarts and the resources to avoid eating them, thereby respecting their neurological endowments over other life-forms. That’s a potent pretense, even if all the food-slaughtered animals were happy their entire lives.
No matter what you eat, if you source foods locally, you minimize the transportation footprint, which may be better for the environment than a simple vegetarian diet that pays no regard to where the plants were harvested. Although that outcome depends on many factors whose efficiencies are continually in flux: Does the food move by boat, train, truck, or plane? How much food has spoiled along the way? Are the truck engines electric or internal combustion? How does the local electric company generate its power? And how arable does your region of the world happen to be?
Cattle are fully domesticated. There are no wild herds of Holsteins roaming the countryside. There are no feral gangs of Wagyu steer lurking in the hills. Modern cattle were genetically invented by humans via selective breeding of the now-extinct, oxlike Eurasian aurochs. The goal? To exquisitely design a biological machine that turns grass into steak—or into milk, if you prefer.
When you cut a tree, does it not bleed? (What is authentic pancake syrup, if not 30 times concentrated maple tree blood?
A blunt truth of human existence: our three sources of energy—protein, carbohydrates, and fat—all come from killing and eating other forms of life in our ecosystem. We can get some of our necessary minerals, like salt, from the environment, but you can’t live on minerals.
Two foods rise above the “I must kill to survive” way of life: milk and honey. Combined, the two are rich in protein, carbohydrates, and fat and don’t require the death of any living thing for your nourishment. If you don’t otherwise metabolize sunlight, a milk-and-honey diet would be the least violent way you could possibly live on Earth.
Vegetarians and Vegans are mobility bigots. They believe that if a life form doesn’t move, it’s fair game to be killed and eaten.… This hateful philosophy is predicated on the idea that movement equals consciousness, or, if you will, a certain level of sacredness.… Of course when you ask vegetarians and vegans, they say no, they’re only opposed to eating flesh. But what could be more fleshy than a mushroom? Or avocado? Or eggplant? The ugly truth is they are cowards who murder and devour anything that can’t run away.
Mushrooms occupy their own kingdom of life, which split with animals in evolutionary history later than our common ancestor split from green plants. Humans and mushrooms are therefore more genetically alike than either we or mushrooms are to anything that grows in the plant kingdom.
You may have heard, even if not a resident of the Mountain Time Zone in the US, that at high elevation you must increase cooking times to compensate for the lower air pressure there. But hardly anybody ever tells you why. The boiling temperature of a liquid is not some universal constant. It depends on the air pressure pushing down on the liquid’s surface. If you reduce the air pressure on water, it will boil at a lower temperature, forcing you to cook food longer just to compensate.
If you lower the air pressure well below the level where you’d suffocate and die, there exists a pressure and temperature for which water boils as it freezes. Under those magic conditions, the solid, liquid, and gaseous forms of water all happily coexist in what is sensibly called the triple point of water. Large swaths of the Martian surface happen to satisfy these conditions.
To require that objects, things, and ideas fit into neat categories apparently runs deep and derives from an inability to cope with ambiguity. Are you with us or against us? Maybe the answer is somewhere in between—or everywhere in between.
Nature carries no obligation to accommodate our limited capacity to interpret reality.
Note also that the length of our legs carries nearly all height difference between humans. When seated we are all approximately the same height, which is why driver car seats adjust forward and backward with vastly more range than they adjust up and down, if at all.
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.
Many people, who defend our cherished freedoms as citizens of the US, will argue against mandated masks, helmet laws, gun laws, seatbelts, and against anything else that constricts a person from living life the way they want. Odd that many of these same people will maintain or seek laws to restrict another person’s free expression of their gender identity.
Consider that President Barack Obama’s mother was White American with European ancestry. His Kenyan-born father was, of course, African. Obama arrived in this world with a skin color halfway between the two—a light-skinned Black person. In the US, Obama was America’s first Black president. Now imagine Obama as the light-skinned leader of an African country. If we invoke symmetric reasoning, that population could justifiably see him as their first White president.
A study of deeply indigenous populations of the world, communities that have lived in their locations for thousands of years, reveals a strong correspondence between latitude on Earth and skin tone.3 The closer to the equator, where sunlight is most intense, the darker your skin tends to be. The farther from the equator, as you near the poles, the lighter your skin.
Having hailed from sunny Nazareth (latitude 33˚ North), Jesus would likely have been several shades darker than he is persistently portrayed in Renaissance frescoes and Hollywood films.
Legal systems at their best are prerequisites for anything we call civilization, as they protect us from the destabilizing basal urges of our own primal instincts. Ask yourself, how would people behave if no threat of legal action existed in this world? Look at how many people transgress established laws even with a legal system in place. Without it, there’s not much hope for civilization.
In the court of law, if truth and objectivity are neither sought nor desired, then we must admit (confess?) to ourselves that at least some parts of the justice system are the opposite of Aristotle’s edict, and are instead all about feelings and emotions.
Why not let evidence decide? The accusers bring forth evidence to convince the one who judges. Once again, suppose the one who judges doesn’t like you. Suppose you are innocent but nobody argues on your behalf. Evidence only works if the people examining the evidence know how to do it and care about what is true.
1500s—a pre-scientific era. As already noted, hypothesis testing as practiced today did not become a routine thing in science until the 1600s. Before then, natural philosophers—what today we call scientists—were perfectly content declaring things that seemed true, ignorant of a later time when experiments and observations would supplant suppositions.
