Tag Archives: science

Government for Dummies

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by Environment, politics • Tags: , , , , , , ,

It is not just the media which aims at the lowest common denominator these days, and not just politicians (notably Abbott), but government itself.

The stupidity and ignorance of the limits placed on wind farms by the new Victorian and NSW governments is only exceeded by the stupidity and ignorance of the people whose “opinions” they are responding to. Both in turn exceeded by the cynicism and viciousness of the people manipulating the useful idiots.

Whether it’s water in the Murray, prescribed forest burning, smart meters, speed cameras, cattle in high country, phone towers, sharks, and now wind farms, whatever the complex issue requiring research, analysis, specialist scientific knowledge, and a modicum of common sense, governments instead rely on the yobbo in the street informed only by shock jocks, think tanks, religious nutters, and astroturfers, working on behalf of vested interests.

The planet is in great peril, we need great wisdom to stave off disaster. At a time like this why would political leaders seek the advice of the most stupid in society?

Government of the dummies, by the dummies, for the dummies.

Miracle climate cure!

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by Climate Change, Media • Tags: , , , , , , ,

A comparison between public perception (and I use the term loosely) of climate science and other sciences has been made in various ways from time to time, but is worth making again.

You are sitting in on a case management conference in the oncology area of a hospital, with all the specialists, nurses, medical technicians present. They are discussing your case, going through the various cycles of chemotherapy and the results of tests. Just then a janitor wanders in, listens for a moment, then says to you “you don’t want to listen to all that crap, these people don’t know what they are talking about, my granny swore by deadly nightshade, rubbed on the legs. Did it all her life and never developed lymphoma.” Do you say (a) “that sounds really interesting, do you have some, I will give it a try”, or (b) “go away you idiot, what the hell would you, or your granny, know about it”?

Or say you have wandered in to a lecture by Australia’s latest Nobel Prize winner. You listen to him talk about galaxies, and the size and age of the universe, and dark matter, and red shift, and expansion and when he asks if there are any questions you put up your hand. “This is rubbish Professor Schmidt” you say “I was listening to Ray Jones on the radio the other day and he said the universe is much smaller than you say, and is contracting not expanding. Said it was common sense because it looked just the same as it did when he was a boy. Said you scientists got paid more money, got prizes and stuff, if you made the universe seem bigger than it is. That true Professor?”

Or perhaps you visit a farmer friend. She explains how she has been developing her pasture. Careful analyses of soil and grasses for trace elements; analysis of soil structure, organic content, invertebrate species; study of which plant varieties will do best; reintroduction of native plant species; provision of structures to encourage birds; computer models developed for efficient grazing regimes. When she has finished you say (a) that sounds great I assume you are working with the CSIRO and the local pasture people or (b) you shouldn’t bother with any of that rubbish, I read somewhere all you have to do is fill an old cow horn with manure and bury it on a full moon and your pastures will be fine?

Well, I don’t need to go on do I. Anyone who has read any blog or newspaper article related to climate change will recognise the analogies in some of the responses above. Indeed just the other night leading Australian denialist Alan Jones used number 2. I make the analogy here not just to point out the idiocy of climate change denier – that is like shooting fish in a barrel – but to make a more general point.

The examples given are not chosen to be crazy things that people would never say in contexts other than climate science, although there is certainly some truth in that. People seem happy to live in a modern world created by science, accept that scientific experts know far more than they do. Except in the areas of climate science and evolution (this is not a coincidence – areas where those implacable things called facts come up against ideologies held in an iron grip).

Rather I have chosen examples where people can and do make such remarks in other areas of science. The nutters with “cancer cures” are well known (and have caused many deaths when they fool people). The nutters who believe the world is 6 thousand years old because the bible says so (it doesn’t of course, but even if it did …). The people who bury cow’s horns or dowse for water. All well known.

But unlike the nutters in the climate change blogs and letters and demonstrating outside parliament or the bureau of meteorology, the nutters in other fields of scientific endeavour are recognised to be nutters and are treated as such by the media. They are generally scorned, laughed at, treated as little humorous fillers in between cute babies and piano-playing cats, although every so often a tv network will pick up on a “miracle cancer cure” story when ratings are flagging.

But the media, and the public in general distinguish between the body of scientific knowledge which has propelled us out of the Dark Ages and into the Knowledge Ages of the 21st century, and the occasional wing nut with delusions of grandeur, and, well, delusions in general. No one, least of all the media, thinks that any of this rubbish, as entertaining as it might be, actually overturns any of the individual scientific disciplines, let alone the whole glorious superstructure of science that these disciplines combine to form (strengthening each other in the process).

Except when it comes to climate science. Then every shock jock, retired engineer, Joe the truckdriver, old surfer, who “thinks it a scam” or says “it’s the Sun” or observes that “plants use CO2″, or says the sea looks the same to him, is given the status of a second coming of Galileo. Any piece of mindless opinion based on the self-interested meme of the day from oil company fronts is treated as overturning the results of the measurement and analysis by tens of thousands of scientists in virtually every scientific discipline (climate science is a multi-disciplinary effort). Not just overturning some particular piece of analysis, but overturning physics, chemistry, palaeontology, astronomy, ecology, oceanography, and the rest. Overturning in fact, Science itself.

Day after day Frank the shock jock and Joe the truckdriver manage to negate 500 years of scientific research with unfounded opinions. According to the media.

Now why would that be, do you think?

Sure and certain knowledge

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by Atheism, Climate Change, Environment, Evolution • Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

It’s an odd little misunderstanding, just a minor difference in the way of looking at the world, but it has played a disproportionately huge part in making seven billion people content to allow a few energy companies turn off the world’s support systems and let them all die.

So, what is it, this misunderstanding that has the people who know what’s happening talking past the people who need to know what’s happening? Well it is just a different use of words like certainty and probability – a scientific use and a common use.

The general public thinks that things for which they have little or no evidence, just anecdote or faith, are certainties. Scientists think that nothing is certain, that all we have is the probability that something is true based on amount of evidence.

The public will use all kinds of language based on nothing but gut feeling and personal ideology to express their belief that something is true “exactly right” “certainly true” “absolutely no doubt” “no doubt” “probably” “possibly” “don’t think so” “nah, don’t believe that” “c’mon, pull the other one, that one has bells on it”.

Scientists, recognising that the presence or absence of bells is a bit hard to define precisely have by contrast developed an exact measurement for the likelihood of truth based on assessment of number of observations. It is a mathematical concept in which you can approach (by repeating an experiment over and over) more and more closely to 100% certainty but never quite reach it. For practical purposes though a probability somewhere in the 90% plus level is thought of as being a pretty sure thing (although it depends on the discipline and particular kind of experiment, physics for example demands much higher certainty than, say, the social sciences).

As well as the mathematical component though, the idea of scientific probability represents the scientific mindset – no result can be certain because the very next experiment may overturn it in whole or in part. If a writer is only as good as his last novel, then a scientific theory is, in a sense, only as good as its last experiment.

For the public though lots of things are certain, have to be otherwise you wouldn’t get up in the morning. These certainties are based on religion, ideology, common sense, authority, repetitive observations. Sun rises in East, there is a “god” or two, capitalism is the end of history, some people have psychic powers, the Liberal Party is there for the battlers, vitamin C cures colds. Then there are uncertainties where the outcome is merely probable – will my football team win next week, am I having a drink with friends on Friday night, are UFOs real, can acupuncture cure cancer, is Kevin Rudd challenging for leadership or is it a media invention.

So, the stage is set. When scientists are asked about climate change in general or particular aspects of it, they reply, as good scientists do “well there is a high probability that X is the case”. When asked “are you certain?” they reply “well, no nothing in science is ‘certain’”. They mean by this that certainty can never, mathematically, reach 100%, and they are obliged to repeat this fundamental tenet of science endlessly, thinking to themselves “well, of course there is no such thing as 100% certainty in science, don’t these idiots know anything?” Or they formalise this the way the IPCC does, saying that the chances of Y event happening in Z time have a probability of “90%” or “95%”.

Now in both cases the scientists are also thinking, and assuming the listeners are familiar with the concept, that for all practical purposes the projected outcome is certain. Will almost certainly in fact (because the scientists are sick of being called alarmist) be much more likely than the probability being quoted which will have been deliberately set on the low side.

The scientist leans back and relaxes at this point, happy in the conviction that he has merely restated the bleeding obvious about the scientific method and that everyone will totally understand what he means – and get on with saving the planet which he knows with absolute certainty is under its greatest threat in millions of years.

The listener or reader however, Joe Public, hears something quite different. They hear that things aren’t certain, just probable, and they interpret the “probable” as their own version of that prediction. Climate change becomes, in their own minds, no more likely than, say, the reality of UFOs. And you wouldn’t want to spend billions of dollars defending against UFOs now, would you.

This continues on to the details. Is this particular massive storm; record-breaking drought; record high temperature; record flood, the result of climate change? “Oh, we couldn’t say that with certainty”, says the scientist. Joe Public hears this as “No”.

Now while the scientists are maintaining scientific purity on the questions of certainty and probability, there are people, with vested interests in the short-term outcome (we all have a vested interest in the long term outcome, but most of us don’t know that), who have absolutely no scruples in pretending that scientific “uncertainty” is real uncertainty and therefore no one would want to do anything when everything is uncertain. So they add in bits and pieces of questions and comments on the siting of thermometers, melting of glaciers, troposphere temperatures, mediaeval warming periods, the north west passage, deep sea temperatures, climate sensitivity, snowfall in Chicago, cosmic rays and the like. None of them mean anything much in themselves, none of them have the slightest relevance in general to the overall pattern of rising CO2 levels causing global warming and consequent climate change.

The scientific community, realising (in some cases very belatedly) the con trick being played on them and on the community at large, and seeing the consequent failure of politicians to take any meaningful action to pull back on CO2 production, have at last begun to fight back a little. Oh they still talk about uncertainty and probability, but a few brave souls have begun to say “the science is settled”.

To see what they mean by this it is worth exploring an analogy. The theory that explains how evolution occurs (involving variation, natural selection, and geographic isolation) was extensively debated in the years after 1859 (when it had been simultaneously proposed by Darwin and Wallace after they arrived at it from different data). Some scientists (like Thomas Huxley “why didn’t I think of that”) instantly recognised its validity. Others were more cautious, looking for contradictions, wondering about mechanisms for the variation (in the years before either genes or DNA were discovered), debating the religious implications and so on. But over the next few decades the science became settled. That is the truth of the theory was clear, and now research was mopping up the details (again genes and DNA in particular) relating to the exact mechanisms. And also investigating both the comparisons and relationships between living species and their fossil records with new eyes that greatly fleshed out the actual path that the evolution of living organisms had taken on this planet.

The science of evolution is settled. There remain arguments over details of particular evolutionary sequences, whether there are other speciation mechanisms apart from the dominant allopatric one, exactly how genes interact during development and so on. But the science is settled and forms the basis, directly or indirectly, of all the sciences to do with life on the planet, and conversely is supported by all the other sciences (notably geology, chemistry, physics). Oh there are one or two scientists, brains addled by religion, who purport to believe that there is evidence for god in bacterial flagellae. But their argument (that some feature is too complex to have evolved) was one that Darwin was familiar with, and has been demolished thousands of times in the subsequent 150 years. It is amazing how otherwise apparently smart people can have their brains addled by religion.

In exactly the same way the science of climate change is settled. The fundamental elements (Milankovitch cycles, greenhouse gases, sun activity, geography) have been known for decades (in the case of greenhouse gas not much less than evolution). The science forms the basis for all the other sciences to do with the surface and atmosphere of this planet, and in turn is supported by all the other relevant sciences. Scientists argue over details of exact time frames, precisely how some mechanisms interact, likely impacts on ecology, historical sequences, and so on, but none of that has any effect on the fundamental science. Oh there are one or two scientists, brains addled by libertarian and neocon ideology, who purport to believe that climate sensitivity is a bit lower, or that clouds are going to roll in to our rescue, or that there is nothing new in the astonishing warming of the planet over the last 3 decades, but their arguments have been demolished thousands of times. Amazing how otherwise apparently smart people can have their brains addled by libertarian and neoconservative nonsense.

Look I am a scientist, OK? I understand the need to maintain the fundamental core of the scientific process, that nothing is ever 100% certain. I get that, ok? And I know that scientists are naturally shy and reticent (me too) and reluctant to involve themselves in public slanging matches and political debates, wanting to remain pure and above all that. But listen, this is the time for all good men and women to come to the aid of the planet. Cast aside your Clark Kent clothes in a handy phone box. Start speaking out. There will be death threats. The last thing the ideologues and the energy companies want is for scientists to discover they have a voice – they have already been trying to discredit science as a whole in case you ever did start to speak out, but you are still just in time if you hurry. Make it clear that the science is, sadly, settled, the data in, the planet in really big trouble. You wouldn’t say “oh, nothing certain about evolution” so don’t do it about climate change. Whatever the fine details that remain to be sorted it is absolutely irrefutable that adding more and more CO to the atmosphere is warming the planet rapidly, changing the climate, buggering up the ecology, causing damaging weather events, and it is going to get so bad that we are, not to put too fine a point on it, stuffed as a species. Nothing more certain.

Say so.

Cry me a river

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by Environment, politics • Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

When all the sound and fury erupted over efforts to save the Murray-Darling River system and Craig Knowles was appointed to settle things down there were comments from the government that there needed to be a political solution to find a compromise between the “demands” of the scientists and the demands of the irrigators. This political response was not surprising. The irrigators had simply behaved in the way that a number of other groups have been behaving – miners, alcohol industry, clubs, tobacco industry – when there is any attempt to change their activities for the benefit of society. The formula is simple. Gather together a small number of people in a public place, give them signs to hold up, tell them to make a lot of noise when the tv cameras are rolling, arrange for a “stunt” to happen (burning books for example), accompany it with a well funded tv advertising campaign in which small children, little old ladies and honest small businessmen will be ruined. Ruined. In short, make a lot of noise.

Governments, like people with babies, don’t like a lot of noise. Will do anything to make it stop, get a bit of peace. Will sack one minister, appoint a new one, sack a public servant or two, announce to the media that you have directed that compromise will be found. Win-win solution found. Small children rescued from starvation. Everyone happy. Government re-elected.

Now while that approach may work in situations (site of a new school for example) where political compromise is appropriate, the case of the river (and other ecological issues) is different. The “compromise” for the river is somewhere between taking no water from the river, and therefore letting it at least partially return to its original good health, and taking as much water as the irrigators are already taking and therefore destroying the river as an ecosystem. Fine. Except that in this case the scientists had already worked out that compromise. So what was being said was that a new compromise was going to be reached between the figure that was needed to maintain a minimally functioning river and a totally damaged one, with the emphasis, it was said, on the needs of the irrigators. That is, this compromise was pushed even further down towards the business as usual situation that has so badly damaged the ecology of the river in the last 50 years or so.

Political compromises don’t work in the environment, you can’t make bargains with mother nature. If you want to maintain at least some ecological functions (and believe me, you do) while continuing to exploit some aspect of the environment then ask the scientists for a figure. Don’t ask the politicians. Or the irrigators.

Care of the North Pole

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by Climate Change • Tags: , , , , ,

When you were young did you send letters to Santa care of the North Pole? Do your children? Your grandchildren? Grand old tradition isn’t it, a bit of our cultural history, but it is going to be hard to keep it going more than a few years. “How can Santa live at the North Pole when there is no ice there in the Summer? He would drown.” Heading that way inexorably and fast. About to break another record for least Summer ice, even lower than 2007, down and down it goes. An alien watching from one of those new planets we keep discovering would be stunned that a massive ice cap could be disappearing in a few decades, might wipe the lens of his telescope thinking there was something mucky on it.

This is crazy stuff. We have been behaving like a bunch of workmen holding spades. “Wanna start Fred?” “After you Tom” “Nah, Bob first” “I’m not starting until Jim does” and so on. Eventually Charlie sighs, leans forward and digs the first spadeful of dirt out. “Oh, that’s how you do it” “Well, if he’s digging I’ll join in” “Ok, many hands make light work”. That’s really what putting a price on carbon in Australia is about – one small spadeful for a man, one giant leap for mankind. And it is a small step, couldn’t be smaller. Painless too. A few big companies will pay a price on the CO2 they produce. Will look for ways to decrease the price they pay and increase their profits – their competitors will be. If they pass on the cost you might have to pay a tiny amount more on some goods – you’ll get more back in compensation. If you reduce your use of high CO2 goods you’ll make even more profit. That’s it. In spite of what you might have heard you won’t be paying “carbon tax”, you will be making money through the various compensation mechanisms, sort of like Santa Claus bringing little presents. No tax. So what that small group of protesters was on about the other day I don’t know, got me beat. Or were they holding signs up saying “No thanks, don’t want money”? “Go away Santa Claus”? Might have missed them.

Look there are people with a vested interest in this. We have to reduce fossil fuel use over the coming years. No question about it. If you are a fossil fuel producer this is certainly not a case of all your christmases coming at once. On the contrary, you don’t have too many christmases left. Time you diversified your business interests. Stop frightening people into thinking they’re going to be taxed. Stop getting Tony Abbott to do your dirty work for you in trying to block this tiny first move – you live on this planet too.

And I bet your grandchildren will want to write to Santa at the North Pole. What are you going to tell them? “Oh that’s just history”? or “Yes, we had to give Santa a bit of a hand there, his feet were getting wet, fixed now though. Have you got an envelope?”

You give me fever

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by Media, politics • Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

When you have a fever your perception of the world gets distorted, your brain cells manipulated by virus and high temperature to see all kinds of things that are not there.

Chemotherapy is similar. After you have it you are left not knowing what changes to your body are the result of the illness, which are the result of the treatment, which are just ordinary everyday ailments that you normally would have ignored.

The media is having the effect of fever or vencristin on the body politic. Reading, seeing, hearing the news now I have no idea whether the events being described are real or fake, meaningful or meaningless, deserving of outrage or approbation. Video and photographic images may (or may not) be faked; descriptions of events true or false; reporters may (or more likely may not) be anywhere near the scene they are apparently describing; both witnesses and reporters may (or may not) have a vested interest (or an ideological purpose) in presenting a story in a certain way; politicians and soldiers and economists may be telling the truth or lying.

Bodies may or may not have been buried, shots may or may not have been fired, money may or may not have been stolen, people may or may not be terrorists or freedom fighters, heroes or villains. Conversely the Earth is warming, the poor are getting poorer, religion is damaging society, taxes are too low, science is essential to society, in spite of narratives that pretend these things are debatable.

The media were once meant to fling open the curtains of the sick room, let the light in, diagnose the symptoms of society, treat ills. Now they bring new and virulent diseases, raise temperatures, manipulate our brains, create illusions, prevent us perceiving the real world.

How do we cure that?

Oiling the wheels

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by politics • Tags: , , , ,

Did you see the results of a study the other day from a Victorian Road Safety group that found that speed cameras had made a significant reduction in road toll? The TV interviewer I saw had to struggle with the story because her channel (and all the others) had been constantly running the line that speed cameras were just “revenue raisers” and here was someone giving all the wrong answers, based on actual research instead of crass populism. Furthermore the result of the campaign by a small number of people, outraged “victims” of speed cameras, amplified by the media who just love “outraged victims” who put ministers on the spot, has been that among the very first, most urgent actions of the O’Farrell government in NSW (beaten only by reducing protection for the marine environment, and hammering unions) was to get rid of a whole lot of speed cameras in Sydney.

Once upon a time politicians would try to deal with the interests of the community as a whole. There was praise from the likes of conservative John Howard for the “silent majority”, contempt for the “noisy minority” who were seen as long haired greenie radicals. Now the position has totally reversed and conservative oppositions make all kinds of promises to noisy minorities of the far right, conservative governments fulfil those promises. The squeaky wheel gets oiled. The recent “convoy” to Canberra was a visible reminder of who these small noisy groups are, as was the noisy and shameful protest, led apparently by Ms Mirabella, where Anthony Albanese was screamed at and jostled because he had dared to say that a noisy demonstration by a few hundred people was “inconsequential”. He should have referred to the silent majority and the wheel would have turned full circle.

Of course people have a right to protest, have their say, try to influence the political process. But governments have to weigh up what those people represent on a particular issue, and where the interests of the whole community rest. Getting rid of speed cameras, putting chaplains in schools, blocking wind farm development, supporting poker machines, reducing marine parks, dropping the mining tax, bringing back live animal trade, mandatory sentencing, cattle in high country, offshore processing of refugees, native vegetation clearing, late closing hours for pubs and clubs, changes to family law, are all the result of governments not looking at evidence and not considering the general interests of the community. They are also the results of small groups with a bee in the bonnet, or a financial interest to protect, generating sufficient noise, amplified by the media, to scare a government into racing to do their bidding. The long term effects of these knee jerk reactions are of no concern – before they become too evident the politician concerned will be long gone (as is the case with John Howard and the Pacific mess he created).

Could we please have a premier, some ministers, who when faced with a small group of people holding posters, or a barrage of form letters, or a radio shock jock holding forth, has the courage to say – “thank you for your opinion, I will take it into account alongside all the opposing opinions, and the relevant scientific evidence, you will see my decision in due course”. And then to make a considered decision and stick by it. Call Mr Squeaky Wheel in and say “No, it is clear speed cameras save lives when the evidence is considered. May save your life or the lives of your family members. I won’t be getting rid of speed cameras, in fact I have asked for suggestions as to where new ones could be added. Good day to you.”

Firing ahead

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by Environment • Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

A short piece for you to go on with while I get the next longer post written. I know quite a few of you are interested in the topic of Aboriginal economy and fire and the Australian environment, one of my major research interests “back in the day” (oh what a horrible phrase that is, who would use it?).

One of the great friends of Watermelon sent me this link to a talk on fire by Dr Arn Tolsma who I hadn’t come across before. He explores very nicely the themes I have been following since the late 1970s – that Australian habitats are not “adapted to fire”; that there is no evidence that Aboriginal use of fire affected the environment; and that use of prescribed burning in fire prevention activities damages the environment.

These issues are also explored in the following recent publications:

Vital Importance of Habitat S. Don Bradshaw Australasian Science November-December 2009

Mooney, S.D., et al., Late Quaternary fire regimes of Australasia, Quaternary Science Reviews (2010) doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2010.10.010

Little evidence for fire-adapted plant traits in Mediterranean climate regions S. Don Bradshaw, Kingsley W. Dixon, Stephen D. Hopper, Hans Lambers and Shane R.Turner Trends in Plant Science February 2011

Good to see the ideas I have been exploring over more than 30 years (see tabs above – “History” and “Fire”), and been alternately criticised or ignored for doing so, being developed with firm evidence by other brave researchers.

Never on a Sunday

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by Atheism • Tags: , , , , , , ,

The big advantage of having an atheist prime minister is that she can give the country seven days a week hard work instead of spending Sundays in the company of imaginary beings and people who believe in imaginary beings. You get 14% more work out of an atheist prime minister than a god-botherer.

But in recent times the Prime Minister has made it more and more clear that her atheism is only skin deep. In an interview the other day she suggested that many great literary works owed their existence to the Bible. She is following a well-worn path of religious apologists here. Whenever the chant of “God. What is he good for?” rises skyward yet again, religious apologists will pour out of the woodwork to suggest all kinds of benefits that religion has brought to the human race. They will talk about art works, and cathedrals, and music (and now our PM adds “literary works” to the list), and suggest that the world would be a much poorer place in the absence of the inspiration that religion has bought to artists and musicians and architects. Poppycock.

Economists talk about “opportunity costs”, that is the cost not only of taking the actual course decided upon, but the cost of not taking a different course. Religion has been the ultimate opportunity cost for the human race over thousands of years, perhaps only approached in its negative effects, its lost opportunities, by wars (many also the result of religion). An obvious case is in schools. Picture a fundamentalist religious school of any flavour, picture the children rote learning scriptures – in some cases that is all they learn, in others they spend considerable time on religious “studies”. But even where they only have limited religion activities, any at all is taking time away from productive educational activities, the kind that, as a society, we profess to want children undertaking. If a parent was to demand that a child spend several school hours a week watching cartoons, or playing video games, or chatting on facebook, or engaging in some hobby, would we be happy with that as a useful way to enhance education? Yet we turn a blind eye to the hobby of religion.

On a larger scale whole societies have sacrificed considerable opportunity costs as huge proportions of their population, often over generations, laboured to build christian cathedrals and monasteries, or stonehenge, or giant buddhist statues and temples, or Easter Island statues, or large numbers of mosques in a town, or the Egyptian pyramids; and then staffed many of these structures with people who could also have been gainfully employed in the economic, cultural or social activities of their society. Huge amounts of money have also been withdrawn from the labour of the population and frozen beyond recovery in such religious architectural assets, as well as the accumulated wealth in gold and other art objects held by religious hierarchies. Just think what the genius of the Egyptians could have achieved if not dragged down by the pyramid building cancer.

But did not the demand for religious art and music and architecture drive artistic development, produce works of great beauty and inspiration? Well, perhaps it did, but they are no more substantial than sand castles, or ice sculptures, or decorations on coffee foam – it is endeavour based on an imaginary being with imaginary characteristics and imaginary activities. Oh I guess there can be beauty in mythology, in fairy stories, in tall tales, but we generally think of them as being for children, thinking as children. Its existence as apparently being for adults again imposes an opportunity cost, replacing the potential of works related to real human beings and their aspirations,  their triumphs and tragedies, hopes and fears, loves and hates; the beauties of the natural world; the wonders of the universe.

But, oh, wait, we have been getting those works, haven’t we, since the churches lost much of their power over human minds, at least in the West, and artists and musicians, yes, and writers, started celebrating real beings instead of imaginary ones. So using art production as an excuse for literature is no more valid than suggesting we need religion to produce values. I will set my literary endeavours, and values, against those of the religiously inspired any day of the week. Including Sunday.

I can see clearly now

by Uncategorized • Tags: , , , , ,

Sad to see the last shuttle flight recently. Seems to have been around forever, though it was only 30 years. But over those years it had begun to look increasingly dated, more like a Model T Ford than a Prius, and the time had obviously come to retire it. Space exploration will continue, and indeed the shuttle was increasingly irrelevant to that. The Hubble telescope (which the shuttle did launch and repair) continues its amazing work in mapping the universe, and is soon to be replaced (hopefully) by the even more astonishing James Webb telescope. Small unmanned space ships continue their work of exploring the inner parts of the solar system (Mercury currently) and the outer (Pluto next) and even way beyond to the beginnings of far outer space. More exploring vehicles will land on Mars and continue mapping and analysing that planet, others may soon reach the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

What’s it all about? Is it of any interest at all as we struggle to pay the rent, raise children, care for parents? Once upon a time, and not that long ago really, people in the small farming and mining villages of England and Australia rarely strayed outside the village boundaries. May never have seen the next town. Married others they had grown up with, their children likewise. No awareness of what was going on in other parts of the country. No sense of a larger society of which they were also a part. No sense of the wider environment. Still something we see even today in Australia, where people will say “Oh, plenty of trees around here” and assume that means plenty everywhere, or “plenty of water here” and assume this means that people downstream can look after themselves. We need a wider perspective. Aborigines in the past, by the way, got this from the big ceremonial meetings where many tribes would gather to compare notes on climate and animal numbers (oh and have a good time and find a wife) across whole regions.

Once upon a time people thought Earth was the centre of the universe, and the sky at night was a roof with holes through which lights shone. That distorted view of the universe and our place in it has gradually given way, through hundreds of years of observation, and decades of space exploration, to a realistic one of where we are and how it all came about and evolved. Knowing the reality of what is out there may well have some direct benefits, as we better understand how the Sun behaves, how the Earth is constructed, what dangers we may face from asteroids; but more important is just a sense of the reality of the size and structure of the universe as we stare up into the clear night skies of the Yass Valley and see the billions of stars and galaxies spread out before us.

So, goodbye Shuttle, well done.Thank you to the brave people who flew on it and the 14 poor astronauts who lost their lives to let us see the world more clearly.

But the journey to knowledge will continue – down here and up there.

Photograph shows the Necklace Nebula, located 15,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagitta (the Arrow). In this composite image, taken on July 2, 2011, Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 captured the glow of hydrogen (blue), oxygen (green), and nitrogen (red). (Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA))