Pale Blue Dot

I discovered over at Mike Brotherton’s blog that today, 11/7/9, is Carl Sagan Day, and Mike makes some interesting observations about Sagan and Richard Dawkins and the public’s attitude towards their atheism.  For awhile, Carl Sagan was the face of science to the general public, sort of like Stephen Hawking is today.  Any second rate pop/rock/movie/sports star is more famous than these scientists, but they have great influence on millions of Earthlings.  I think Sagan’s Cosmos book and TV documentary series introduced cosmology and science to a generation of people and it’s impossible to judge his impact.

Mike Brotherton’s blog is a favorite of mine because he and I share a similar fascination with science and constantly wonder why science isn’t more widely accepted by the public.  Read his recent essay “Smarts, Spontaneity, Science, and Science Fiction.”  It explores just how hard it is to teach science, or even just express scientific ideas.  That’s why Carl Sagan was so admired, he could communicate scientific ideas.  And I agree with Mike, Sagan wasn’t as successful as his popularity, too often Carl Sagan was ridiculed on SNL other LCD comedy shows as being a geeky guy, too overly enthusiastic about billions of stars.

The people of our planet focus too narrowly on their own personal immediate reality, and all too often they believe silly theories about ontology.  Carl Sagan tried to show people we live in a vast Cosmos and reality can’t be explained by just what we see in front of our noses.  Look at this photo:

Pale-blue-dot

If you look close you’ll see a little pale blue dot in the center, a bit bigger than all the other dots in this grainy photograph.  That’s Earth as seen from Voyager 1 on the way out of the solar system.  By astronomy standards, this is an extreme close-up.  We’re use to seeing high-powered electron-microscope photos of our planet in comparison. If a photograph could be taken of the universe as a whole, our galaxy wouldn’t even be visible.  It’s hard to take our silly ideas about the meaning of life seriously when we see the relative perspective of our existence in relationship to all of space and time. 

That’s why I call existence the foam of reality.  From most perspectives, whether 10 to the +25 or 10 to the -25 magnitude vantage points, reality looks like a homogenous foam or fuzzy collection of points of reflected light.  We only see details at magnitude 0. 

The universe is so vast in scope and dimensions, that it’s hard to imagine a deity even noticing us.  One of the major lessons that Carl Sagan taught us, is we are insignificant in relation to the rest of the universe.  That little dot is home to seven billion people, and from their perspective their lives are the center of the universe, but we must remember that’s an illusion. 

Carl Sagan is most famous for his book Cosmos, but he wrote a sequel that is less famous, based on this photograph, and also called, The Pale Blue Dot.  Any philosophy or theology that tries to explain the meaning of reality must incorporate our true position in the universe, anything less will be delusional.  Science is hard to teach because you have to get little minds to think big, and Carl Sagan could do that.

JWH – 11/7/9

NOVA – Becoming Human

The PBS show NOVA began a three part series called Becoming Human that is an excellent roundup on the science exploring the evolution of humans.  The show aired on Tuesday night but most PBS stations repeats NOVA throughout the week, and you can also watch the episode online.

Evolution is a controversial topic in this country, and a good portion of the population refuse to accept the concept, especially regarding the ascent of man from earlier species.  From the time of Darwin through the Scopes trial, attackers of evolution have claimed that anthropologists have never found the missing link between man and monkey.  Well this show covers a range of fossils that provide a succession of missing links.  Not only that, but the show covers many new theories that go well beyond anything Darwin imagined in the 19th century.  The time range and scope of human evolution is expanding as we gain more evidence.  This is a very rich in ideas documentary.

I doubt this show will change anybody’s mind about evolution, but it does summarize the current knowledge in an excellent manner and provides terrific graphics to help imagine the immensity of the topic.  I do believe that most of the people who refuse to believe in evolution do so because of their religion.  I also believe those religions will die off in the future if they refuse to incorporate scientific knowledge and evolve.

JWH – 11/5/9

Prayers for Atheists 1

Why would atheists want to pray if they don’t believe in God?  Let’s make a theoretical assumption that tomorrow we all wake up and it’s obvious to everyone that God doesn’t exist.  Do we just throw away all the sacred books, bulldoze the churches and forget religion completely?  Or would we recycle the components of worship for practical secular use?  For thousands of years the best and brightest of the human race applied their minds to understanding reality through the eyes of God.  What if we step back, and say God was not the inspiration to these spiritual seers, but their own seeking minds, then all sacred knowledge discovered by our ancestors in the name of the all-powerful was really created by the minds of men.  Religion serves homo sapiens whether God exists or not.

What if religion has a purpose even if God doesn’t exist.  Take for instance the “Serenity Prayer” made famous by Alcoholics Anonymous.

God grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.

The prayer begins by petitioning God, but is God’s assistance really necessary for the prayer to succeed?  We could begin, “Let the universe grant me the serenity,” to imply that all of reality offers help, or we can pray to ourselves by saying “If I can find the serenity,” which affirms that we are pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps.  The goal really doesn’t change, we want to grasp a philosophical concept that is extremely useful that’s embedded within the words of the prayer.

People often see God in the role of the father, but can you imagine being a father to 7,000,000,000 children all pleading for attention?  And since we’ve discovered how big the universe is, it could mean that God’s children runs to a 7 with pages and pages of zeroes.  Even if God does exist, don’t you think it’s time we stand on our own feet and give the old Eternal One a breather? 

In the prayer above, the petitioner is asking for a kind of serenity that comes with special wisdom.  Is that wisdom something we can learn on our own, or teach one another?  The serenity prayer is a fantastic prayer, one of my favorites, that gets to the absolute core of religion.  From the dawn of the conscious mind we have all wanted to understand reality, and on the surface this prayer requests the wisdom to understand reality in a very fundamental way.

The serenity prayer is very subtle and has onion-like layers.  On first reading we think it’s asking for the ability to look around ourselves, at reality outside our body, and see what’s possible and impossible to change.  It implies we want an answer every time we attempt to alter reality as to whether we have to strength to make the change.  But at a much deeper level, at the spiritual level, it’s asking for the knowledge to see how our minds work, or our souls, if you wish, so we can program our perception of the world. 

Do people and events around us encourage us to drink, or do  motivations within pour another shot?  Do we hate our jobs because of the people we work with or because we can’t control our emotions?  Did we fail to write that novel because life never gave us the time or because we never made the time?  What does it take to beat cancer, and when must I accept death?

This is why AA loves this prayer – to stop drinking requires the power to change our inner programming, but the prayer works just as well on any negative or even positive addiction, whether you want to give up heroin or become an artist.  Of course everyone assumes they can find the power to change, and that might not be true.  That’s why the prayer requests serenity as the primary subject of the prayer.

Eastern and Western religions break down along two lines of force:  acceptance and change, so the Serenity Prayer meets the two in the middle.  The force of the Western mind has been to adapt reality to our desires, while Eastern philosophies has been to teach the gentle path of acceptance.  The Western path has always been about the will of God and obedience.  To the faithful, that will came from a higher power, but to the secular mind, the will of God has always been the desire of the leaders, the men who wanted to build a nation or cathedral and worked their people like the Great and Wondrous Oz, pulling strings and levers behind the alter.

The Serenity Prayer can work without an all powerful creator, or even without a powerful leader wearing religious robes, or even without a mundane individual called a psychiatrist, because it does work when the petitioner gains their own self-wisdom.  That person can get outside help, as soon as they see how to accept it, but the help can come from anywhere or anyone.  If you want to credit an unseen force, and call it God, that works too, but the real success belongs to the individual who can make the prayer come true with enlightenment.

The actual purpose of religion has always been to build stronger souls, to create civilization by evolving the minds of men and women.  If you look at the Serenity Prayer it’s about change, and if the Force of Evolution had a conscious mind, the Serenity Prayer would guide it.  The Serenity Prayer is amazing because it doesn’t just beg, “God give me power to change the world.” 

The prayer asks for serenity, a state of being that comes from meditation and wisdom.  It asks for acceptance for what we can’t change – a power that lets us avoid frustration and living a life of quiet desperation.  Then it asks for courage to change what we can, implying that we need to move full speed ahead when we can and not live with comfort of the status quo.  Finally the prayer asks to tell the difference between what we can and cannot change, because that’s real wisdom.

Any atheist, agnostic or theist who meditates on The Serenity Prayer each morning will benefit from its inspirational power.  What I’d like to do is create a book of prayers for the atheists, but for now I’ll create a series of blog posts about my favorite prayers.  I tend to believe that my atheist friends in their hast to free themselves of the illusions of theism might have overlooked hardcore religious wisdom that works well with the reality of science.  We might not have an eternal soul watched over by a guardian angel, but we do have a soulful mind that is evolving.  And we might not have a God that shapes our lives, but we do have the collective wisdom of the ages that inspires us to keep trying, to keep evolving.

JWH – 11/4/9 

Ringworld in Oz

When I was a dumbass kid of 10 I acquired a reading addiction by discovering the Oz books by L. Frank Baum.  When I was a dumbass kid of nineteen, I dropped out of college for the first time and bought the fourteen Oz books and reread them.  At nineteen I felt like a grownup and wondered if rereading my favorite kid’s books would tell me something about how I was programmed.  Between 10 and 19 I read whole libraries of science fiction books, and rereading the Oz books taught me that science fiction was often just Oz books for adults. 

It was around this time, 1970, that I read Ringworld by Larry Niven for the first time.  Now, almost forty years later, I’ve come back to Ringworld again, like my return to Oz.  The whole time while listening to Ringworld on my Zune I kept thinking that Larry Niven had practically copied the structure and sense of wonder of an Oz book.  Now, this can be seen as both praise or a curse.  Oz books are like giving rug rats wordy psychedelics – the stories are so goddamn vivid that they put their tiny tyke imaginations into an overdrive that no Ritalin could ever break.  I also think these books produce unrealistic expectations about reality.  Yeah, I know, I sound a Puritan.

Our society underestimates the power of children’s minds.  From an early age we have a desperate need to make sense of reality, and almost any input can be shaped into a belief system.  I loved being a kid shooting up stories, but now that I’m older and examining some of my most ancient subroutines from my mental programming code, I have to wonder about the dangers of children’s books.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to campaign against giving kids fantastic fiction, but I want to explore the idea of fantastic fiction on evolving minds.  

I once read a shocking article in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction about how libraries banned the Oz books.  I’d love to find that article again, because librarians believed the Oz books gave children unrealistic ideas about life.  At that time, I felt their protests were complete bullshit.  Banning the Oz books didn’t work, because writers like Robert A. Heinlein, who also grew up reading Oz books, went on to write even more books that gave kids unrealistic expectations about life.  Fantasy and science fiction have become universal fictional addictions in our modern society.  Does anyone worry about that?

Rereading Ringworld, I noticed it had the same structure as an Oz book.  Oz books would introduce a handful of weird characters, quickly get them on a quest, and along their journey these characters would experience mind-blowing sights and meet far-out magical creatures.  Then when enough pages were filled to equal a book, the story would be wrapped up.  Oz books had little character development, and practically no rising plot action, definitely no climax or falling action, and very minimal resolution. 

The Ringworld of Niven’s novel is his Oz, a magical place equal in scope to the Land of Oz.  Like Oz, Niven barely scratched the surface of the Ringworld, leaving room for endless sequels.  Nessus, the Pierson’s Puppeteer and the Kzinti, Speaker to Animals, are as colorful as any magical Oz character created by L. Frank Baum.  Children reading the Oz books starting with the The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which appeared in the year 1900, through Glinda of Oz in 1920, wanted to believe that Oz existed.  I know in 1962 when I discovered the books I somehow wanted Oz to exist.  I knew it didn’t, but wished it did.  If I had found these books sooner, when I was seven or eight, I might not have been able to tell Oz from reality.

By age eleven I switched from fantasy books to science fiction, and even though I knew science fiction was also make-believe, I developed a life-long belief system based on science fictional ideas.  Rereading Ringworld only reminded me that believing in science fiction is no different from a kid of ten believing in the Land of Oz.  All fiction is fantasy.  Even realistic books like those by Edith Wharton or James Joyce, still only produce fantasies of life in 19th century New York, or early 20th century Ireland, no more real than Oz or Ringworld.

Like I said, I have no intention of giving up fiction, it’s the vice that defines me, and an army of deprogrammers could never make a dent in my delusional addiction.  When I’m alert and concentrating, I can face reality directly.  I know my life would be more real if I spent my time hiking in the mountains, woodworking, or studying astronomy – or just washing dishes and changing the cat box.  I’ve always felt sorry for Christians who hated this world and dreamed of Heaven, but is dreaming of Paradise any different from dreaming of Oz or Ringworld? 

I guess those librarians who wanted to ban Oz books were right.  I can see I used fiction as a drug to avoid life and living in reality.  I understand that, and accept it, but it doesn’t invalidate that I love fiction more than reality.

If I had never gotten hooked on fiction would I have been a better person?  Would I have been disciplined and realistic?  Would I have been hard working and productive?  Gee, I don’t know, maybe if I was lucky.  There are billions of people living with their faces shoved into reality that have no happiness or escape, so I can’t complain about my fiction habit, because my life could suck and I might never have discovered the magic of make believe.

All I know at the moment, is tonight I want to read my paperback copy of Cosmic Engineers by Clifford Simak or go watch Heroes or Firefly on DVD and eat Phish Food ice cream from Ben & Jerry’s and Fresh Market chocolate chip cookies.  I could do something real, I just choose not to.

JWH – 10/27/09

This essay was written fueled by playing “Wagon Wheel” by Old Crow Medicine Show thirty or forty times.  Music, the other addiction.  Be sure and read “The Man Who Made Oz” over at Slate.

The Purpose of Science Fiction

Why do you read science fiction?  Do you read science fiction purely for entertainment, or do you want something more from science fiction? I’ve always expected a lot more from science fiction then maybe I should have, and that might be unfair to the genre. I never wanted SF to be merely escapism, although I’m afraid that I spent most of my adolescence avoiding reality by reading science fiction. I always told people I thought science fiction’s #1 purpose was to promote manned space exploration. I thought it’s #2 purpose was to inspire the creation of AI robots. It’s #3 job was to warn us of dangerous futures. In other words I thought science fiction should be a kind of cheerleading to build new technologies and an oracle to warn society about paths we shouldn’t take.

Reading science fiction did inspire me as a kid to think scientifically and made me want to be a scientist, but I didn’t have the academic discipline to succeed with that dream. The failure to become a scientist has always been a major regret of mine. I often wonder if I’m wrong about science fiction and that it’s nothing more than good clean reading fun. Because if that’s not true I might have to grade science fiction rather harshly.