Why Science?

  Carl Sagan said it best: The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us- there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.
  And science will explain it.
  For all of the accomplishments and breakthroughs, for all of the achievements and feats of genius, for all that we have thought and wrought and learned due to science; it is, itself, merely a by-product of our insatiable curiosity and stubbornness. We not only must ask why- we have the indomitable will to find the answer, the will to satisfy that curiosity if it takes a thousand generations. All that we have, all of civilization, everything that we take for granted in our world, is a legacy of the curiosity and stubbornness of untold generations.
  Isaac Newton said, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
  We all stand on those shoulders.
  But now the entire world is in danger of being tripped up by dwarves.
  Alone among the nations of the world, the United States has an entire political party dedicated to the muzzling of science and the enthronement of mythology and irrational argument.
  That party is now in power.
  By preventing action by the most influential and powerful nation on earth; by muddying the waters of rational argument; by using all of the vast resources at their disposal to slow the response to climate change, they may doom all of humanity to oblivion.
  Sea-level rise, if unchecked, will cause mass-migrations on a scale never before seen in human history. Rising populations, (an additional two billion people are expected to be born by 2050) will be fighting for less land and scarcer resources as drought and warming affect food production. Nations will be struggling against nature for their very existence.
  Nations will be struggling against each other for their very existence.
  There's the rub.
  Mass migrations in Europe and Asia, over several centuries, helped to topple the Roman Empire. European civilization took centuries to recover from the interregnum. And no one back then had nukes.
  The competition for dominance among the world's great powers has long threatened the annihilation of our species through nuclear war. Climate change, all by itself, has the potential to end civilization as we know it; add politics and nuclear weapons, and we may very well see the wars that will end the human race.
  Climate change isn't coming. Climate change is here. Everything on earth depends on how we react, right now. Maybe we can even do it. Maybe, just maybe, we can find a solution. If, that is, we still have the will and the stubbornness that got us this far. If, that is, we use science.
 
  This post is dedicated to everyone, all over the world, who marched for science and for the awareness of climate change over the last two Saturdays of April, This post is especially dedicated to my colleagues in the Sarasota, Florida March for Science. It was an honor working with you.

 The quote is, of course, from the book Cosmos by Carl Sagan
 

Vive La France!

  Tonight, Emmanuel Macron has won the French election. He beat the fascist, Marine Le Pen, by a good margin, in spite of a last minute hacking attempt by the Russians. So tonight, thanks to the French People, Vladimir Putin is as isolated on the world stage as he was yesterday.
   Unfortunately, he still has that cock-holster in the White House on his side.
  We have to fix that.

Still a Dream

On this day in 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis.
On this day in 2017, a racist is President of the United States.
We still have much further to go.
We will get there.

Quote of the Post

"A laid up steamer was a dead thing and no mistake; a sailing-ship somehow seems always ready to spring into life with the breath of the incorruptible heaven; but a steamer, thought Captain Whalley, with her fires out, without the warm whiffs from below meeting you on her decks, without the hiss of steam, the clangs of iron in her breast- lies there as cold and pulseless as a corpse."
Joseph Conrad, The end of the Tether, novel

Quote of the Post

"It has always been the fate of republics to be destroyed by faction."
Abraham Lincoln

We managed to squeak one by in Abe's day. Let's hope our luck still holds.

Quote of the Post

"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers."
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, novel

Quote of the Post

"There is the courage of the sword, and the courage of the word, and the courage of the word is rarer."
Ursula K. LeGuin, Voices, novel