Sometime between the years 127 and 141 CE, Claudius Ptolemy,
the most influential Greek astronomer and geographer of his time, published
a thirteen volume masterwork, entitled the Almagest, the Latin form of
the Arabic al-kitabu-l-mijisti, i.e. "The Great Book," which would rule
as the foremost Western cosmological primer for the next 1400 years.
Building on the philosophy of Aristotle, the Almagest describes the Earth
as a fixed, stationary sphere sitting at the center of the Universe, with
the Sun, the Moon and the five known planets of the time tracing complex
circles around it. Ptolemy's stars number around a thousand, and
are uniformly embedded in an outermost, crystalline sphere of the Universe
that never changes. Beyond that celestial boundary lies Aristotle's
godlike "Prime Mover" which, without itself being moved, keeps all the
interlocking cosmic spheres and circles turning in their proper courses.
In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus published De Revolutionibus
Orbium Coelestium – "On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres" – in which
he became the first person in history to create a complete and general
scientific cosmological system, combining mathematics, physics, and observational
astronomy to produce a mostly-accurate working model of planetary motion
in which the Sun takes center stage, demoting the Earth to the status of
one planet among many concentrically circling its radiant hub.
The Renaissance saw Galileo significantly improve upon
the design of the telescope, allowing the discovery that the Moon and planets
are worlds much like our own, with mountains, ice caps, craters, clouds,
and even, as in the case of Jupiter, whole systems of moons that orbit
their planetary hosts just as the Earth and all the planets circle the
Sun. Johannes Kepler proved that the orbits of the planets trace
long ellipses in their circumsolar journeys, and not the perfect circles
so central to the aesthetic “interlocking sphere” cosmologies of philosophy
and religion.
In 1687, Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural
Philosophy, better known as the Principia, demon-strated that the movements
of stars, planets and even falling objects right here on Earth can be accounted
for by the workings of a single force – gravity. Galileo had been
the first to note that falling objects pull toward the center of the Earth,
but Newton showed mathematically how the observed motion of every object
in the solar system can be explained by the mutual mechanical push and
pull of natural gravitational forces. No supernatural “Prime Mover”
is required.
Since Newton, we have discovered that the our Sun is
a single star amongst approximately 100 billion that make up the Milky
Way Galaxy, a vast conglomeration of suns within which our little solar
system makes its home some 30,000 light years (176,238,050,202,219,008
miles, or 283,627,648,664,640,000 kilometers) distant from the galaxy’s
center. At the time of this writing (2006), scientists have discovered
157 planets circling 99 of those stars, and extrapolate based on these
observations that the existence of planets in orbit around distant suns
is more likely to be a rule than an exception – worlds much like those
making up our own Solar System may number in the hundreds of billions,
just in our galaxy alone! Our Milky Way Galaxy is but one of billions,
and likely, hundreds of billions of similar galaxies that fill the Universe
in every direction. The Universe is 12 to 20 billion years old, while
the Earth has existed for only 4.5 billion years – for better than two-thirds
of the time a physical universe has existed, the Earth was not a part of
it. Life on Earth began about 3.5 billion years ago, but we humans
have only been on the scene, in our earliest forms (Homo habilis and Homo
erectus), for about 2 million years, and in our present form (Homo sapiens)
for less than 150,000. We are extreme newcomers to a very large,
very old, and even, potentially, very crowded, Universe.
It is a sad truth about life in the early 21st Century
that the vast majority of human beings now inhabiting Planet Earth share
a psychological and spiritual orientation toward reality that has yet to
catch up to Galileo, and in all too many cases, to Ptolemy. Sadder
still is that this egregious deficit in our ability or willingness to take
into account and relate to the Universe as it has been objectively demonstrated
to actually be is far less a product of ignorance than it is of simple
disinterest on our part. If we live in nations wealthy enough to
provide comprehensive compulsory education, we almost cer-tainly encountered
the basics of Newtonian cosmology, Darwinian Evolution, Paleontology and
the human fossil record etc. in school (we won’t even get into the post-Newtonian
realm of Relativity, quantum mechanics, superstring theory, supergravity,
etc. here) – but how many of us live our lives or make choices in the present
moment as if we take the picture of reality revealed by these scientific
disciplines to be real? The great majority of rich and poor in every
country, followers and leaders within every religion, commoners, monarchs,
despots, revolutionaries and freely-elected Heads of State alike, everywhere
on Earth, operate, instead – even if, intellectually, they know, or should
know, better – as if the Earth sits as still as a stone at the unmoving
center of Creation.
We fall far behind Ptolemy and Aristotle when, regardless
of what we understand intellectually to be true, we live our daily lives
as though the Earth and the Universe were synonymous terms, using expressions
like "the world" to mean, not the geological planet we live on, or even
the plants and animals and bugs and human beings sharing Earth’s biosphere,
but rather, simply, what friends, celebrities, governments or corporations
are up to, what everybody's talking about, current events, gross conflicts
between nations, what's on TV, our jobs, families, homes – that tiny fraction
of human reality that finds its way into our personal meme-dream because
it appears to directly impact us or those we care about. What doesn't
meet that criterion, we filter out. As our tiny and wondrously life-encrusted
pearl of a planet hugs one of a hundred billion suns, in one galaxy amongst
billions spread like slow-spiraling jewels across the vast and ever-expanding
ocean of space, we 21st Century humans feel no shame in gazing at our shoes,
kicking up dust and muttering, "The world is so screwed up…"
What?
It's all about ME, our delusional, meme-rooted personal
paradigms assure us. Our meme-driven religions almost universally
put Humankind, if no longer at the physical center of Creation, at least
spiritually center-stage in the Great Cosmic Drama, seducing us with echoes
of our personal fantasies – See? Even God thinks it's all about ME...
Our economies are so constructed that every ounce of our available personal
energy – that small part memes leave us to physically operate with each
day – must be invested in near-continuous work with our noses to the grindstone,
wholly devoted to the tasks of getting and spending, just to keep ourselves
and our families fed, clothed and sheltered – a milieu in which, in a deeply
negative and stressful way, every moment of every day becomes quite pointedly
all about me. How much have I got? How much more can I get?
I want to win! I can't afford to lose! I'm trying to make a
living here! I… I… I… I… Caught between our
desperate fear of sinking beneath the economic waves and the enormous ego-flattery
of memes, reality is simply not that appealing. The astonishing physical
size and grandeur of the Universe as revealed by science can't compete
for our attention because, while such a vision of reality might momentarily
inspire us or even strike genuine awe into our hearts, in the long run,
its implication that there's really nothing special about our species,
our planet, or the galactic speck of cosmic realty our world is but a grain
of sand within so injures our inflated sense of self-importance that, in
order to remain who we think we are – the all-important, god-like centers
of everything – we reflexively turn away and re-embrace our self-congratulatory,
small-world dreams.
That choice carries a heavy price. Here is a short
list of celestial resources we could, with present-day or, at most, very-near-future
technologies, apply toward the resol-ution of the many global challenges
facing our species, if only we could find the courage to awaken to and
embrace a Cosmic Perspective:
For every watt of energy humans generate in every kind of power plant on Earth, burning oil, coal or natural gas in the process, or generating dangerous nuclear waste, etc., 10,000 watts of solar energy falls to the ground, unused, around us. And that's just what hits the surface. Solar collection satellites in geostationary orbit around the Earth could gather thousands of terawatts of energy annually, one terawatt being one trillion watts. Assuming only 10% efficiency at transporting that energy to Earth-based distribution centers, that's still many, many times predicted global energy needs in the coming decades. Total global energy usage in 2005 was just 15 terawatts. Hundreds of terawatts could be made available on an annual basis, with no pollution, no greenhouse gas emissions, and no hazardous waste.
The whole Universe is composed of the same elements we find, and make use of – and all too often fight bloody wars over access to – right here on Earth. Over 4,000 asteroids, meteors, comets and other Near-Earth Objects have been cataloged in recent years, circling close enough to the Earth that mining them for natural resources has become both a realistic and economically attractive possibility. 834 of these NEOs are asteroids with a diameter of approximately 1 kilometer or larger. A single cubic kilometer of a nickel-iron asteroid is estimated to contain seven billion tons of iron, one billion tons of nickel, and sufficient cobalt to fill demand on Earth for 3,000 years.
Comets are composed of mostly frozen water ice which, if harvested, could supply the Earth with vast supplies of desperately-needed fresh water. They could also supply future human inter-planetary homesteaders with both fresh water for drinking and large quantities of liquid hydrogen and oxygen, two principle ingredients in rocket fuel.
Take a moment to imagine a near-future human civilization
in which just these two “baby-steps” – orbital solar energy collection
and the mining of Near Earth Objects – have been achieved. When access
to limitless, dirt-cheap, non-polluting energy, plentiful fresh water,
and, for all practical purposes, unlimited supplies of metals and other
building materials for use on Earth and in space are added to the equation,
how does our view of that list of global challenges facing Humanity with
which this book began change? Oil depletion? Good riddance!
Global warming? Stopped dead in its tracks, because we’re not burning
fossil fuels. The total mineral wealth of the main belt asteroids
alone is estimated to exceed one hundred billion dollars for every man,
woman and child living on Earth today, an economic factor sure to profoundly
transform the very concepts of war, famine and pestilence, not to mention
economics! As for time running out, the clock will have been reset.
Earth need no longer be stripped of her precious resources. The human
ecological footprint will have reversed its step, not only ceasing to gouge
deep furrows into our planet’s ability to support human life in the future,
but freed to turn to the restoration of the path, investing ample clean
energy, plentiful resources and bountiful wealth into the task of undoing
the environmental damage wrought by reckless centuries of human self-indulgence.
Sound like science fiction? It’s not. We’ve
had the basic technology required to realize both of these “baby-steps”
for decades. With just a little internationally coordinated effort
and investment, both steps could be made operational, resulting in a profound
transformation of human society, in spectacularly short order. What’s
missing is the will to try.
Why would that be? Why would we resist pursuing
such a promising and practical two-step solution to the very nearly all
the woes that plague our beleaguered species?
Let’s return to our list of present-day global challenges.
The one pervasive contemporary human difficulty not resolved by even minor
forays into space-based technolo-gies is ideology – extremism, terrorism,
and militarism, to which list we can rightly add nationalism, racism, sexism,
“religionism” and on and on and on, all the sad “isms” that keep our lives,
on both the personal and planetary scales, ineffectively churning in continual
cycles of conflict and turmoil.
We have reached, once again, the crux of our human dilemma.
“Isms” are memes. They are the large and small scale viral memes
and memeplexes actively enslaving individual humans and collective Humanity,
and whose continued existence and propagation depends entirely upon maintaining
uninterrupted access to large supplies of the human psychic energy on which
they feed. Until we throw off our memetic oppressors by way of The
Simplest Path or some equally effective anti-meme system, we will remain
ensnared by a meme-dream in which the straightforward solutions to our
easily-soluble real world problems appear impossibly complex and impractical
– not because they are so in reality, but because our flawed paradigms
identify them that way, for their own benefit, as a means to the end of
keeping us perpetually stymied, impotent, set upon each other in lieu of
working toward our own freedom and the fulfillment of our true human potential,
and conveniently available for psychic exploitation. The moment we
break the chains of memetic slavery, every other human quandary falls away.
Sure, real difficulties await our awakening from the stupor of meme-sleep,
but resolutions to those issues, and the real-world “baby,” “toddler” and
eventual “grown up” steps required to practically implement them in short,
effective order, are obvious to an awakened mind.
The price we must pay for this psychic clarity, for freedom
from memetic enslavement, and for the power to effectively overcome our
global human challenges and move forward toward a new collective vision
of the future is the surrender of our belief in our own godhood.
We must exchange It’s all about ME! in its personal, familial, cultural,
nationalistic, racial, religious, economic and every other form this memetic
“hook” takes in order to snare our swollen egos for energetic exploitation
for the empirical truth of the Cosmic Perspective – we humans are
not, in any objective way, special in, or to, the Universe. We do
not inhabit the center of the Universe, the center of our galaxy, or even
the center of our own little solar system. None of us, personally,
inhabits the center of the Earth or even of society. Our time is
not likely to be the center of human history. The infinite cosmos
was not created on our behalf, and nothing that happens on our tiny, life-encrusted
pearl of a planet has any bearing whatsoever on the ultimate fate of the
vast, starry void. We are not gods, potential gods, or the “Chosen
Ones” of anyone’s supernatural deity. There is no Cosmic Drama playing
out amongst us, and all such religious, philosophical or political schemas
are meme-driven delusions leading our species to ruin. The success
or failure of human evolution on Planet Earth matters not a lick to the
larger Universe, or, very likely, to the Earth, where no matter what we
do to the natural environment in our sleeping ignorance, should the human
story end with our self-destruction, the untiring march of life will almost
certainly swiftly replace us with whatever species next arises bearing
the qualities best geared toward survival in the environmental aftermath
of our demise. The biggest tantrum sleeping Humanity can throw in
defiance of our cosmic dethronement, if that’s the path we choose to follow,
will go unnoticed by 99.99999% of the Universe, and will be forgotten here
on Earth within a few thousand years of its occurrence – a scant “blip”
on the timeline of Earth’s 4.5 billion years-long geologic calendar so
far.
The ultimate fate of Humanity is utterly insignificant
to anyone, anywhere – except to us.
That's worth repeating – whether we tap the Sun's energy,
mine the solar system, restore our Earthly environment and spread to the
stars, or choose, instead, to simply die smothering beneath a blanket of
self-produced poison matters, objectively, to no one in all the Universe
but us. But what happens to us does matter to us – and rightly so.
Awakening to the Cosmic Perspective frees us to accept
responsibility for the real-time direction of our species’ destiny, liberated
from the wildly egotistical spiritual ballast of believing that everything
we do must matter to, pass muster with, or take center-stage in the "Divine
Plan" of some invisible cosmic super-deity before we consider it worthy
of our precious human time or attention. Embracing the Cosmic Perspective
enables us to take into account and relate to the Universe as it actually
is, rather than how our inflated egos would prefer it to be, and to stop
waiting for God to save us, or even to reveal clear instructions for saving
ourselves. The Cosmic Perspective frees us from the chains of all
dream-inspired prophecy and “God-given” teleology, empowers us to choose
the next chapter of the human story for ourselves with impunity, dignity,
courage and grace, and grants us physical as well as psychological and
spiritual entry into the real greater Universe stretching infinitely beyond
Earth’s atmospheric boundaries – not as the conquering gods or kings or
Cosmic Conquistadors we may once have imagined ourselves to be, but, more
appropriately, as the Cosmic Kindergarteners we truly are, nervously releasing
our mother’s hand as we tentatively surrender, with butterflies in our
stomachs and lumps in our throats, to the experience of our first day of
school.
Is Earth the center of the Universe? Building on
the cumulative human genius of Aristotle, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo,
Kepler, Newton, Einstein, and many, many others along the way, every schoolchild
today learns to answer that question "No," at least in words. But,
as adults, what response can be read in the language of our lives, our
deeds, our priorities and paradigms? When remaining secure in our
self-centered dreams and awakening to cosmic reality both come at high
cost –possible extinction VS sure "cosmic dethronement" – the real question
becomes which price can we afford – or not afford – to pay?
_________________________________
KEY QUESTION EXERCISE #9
“At Home in the Cosmos"
Everything I have tried to convey in this chapter is explored
in greater depth and with far more eloquence by the late Carl Sagan in
his 1995 bestseller Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space,
so your first assign-ment is to acquire a copy of that classic treatise
and read it – twice!
Next, gain access to a really good telescope. If
you can't afford to purchase one, sign up for a backyard astronomy class
at a local university, junior college, science museum, observatory, etc.
The goal is to be able to put your physical eye to a real telescopic lens
on a regular basis, and to see the Moon, planets and stars for yourself.
Reading about space in books, even the oversized coffee-table variety,
filled with big color pictures, watching documentaries on TV, or exploring
deep space photographs on the Internet won't cut it. When spinning
sense impressions and memes into our personal 3-D life-dreams, our brains
process images received via media like TV/computer screens or two-dimensional
photographs differently than those directly perceived by our sense organs.
What our eyes see firsthand is automatically accepted as real. On
impressions reaching us secondarily, we reserve judgment – which in the
millisecond-speed environment of our internal reality simulations means
we never get around to actually experiencing them as existing beyond the
specific realm of the media rendering them. We may recognize, intellectually,
that a given image represents an aspect of reality we could, with effort,
verify for ourselves, but most of the time we don't do so, and so the image
remains, in our internal reality simulation, just that – a picture in a
book, an image on TV, a computer GIF or JPG, two-dimensionally real in
that sense only. In order to genuinely and personally experience
the Cosmos, Earth's place in it, and, by proxy, Humanity's cosmic non-centrality
as real, we must touch space with our senses. We must see Saturn's
rings, count Jupiter's moons, track the changing Martian seasons for ourselves.
We must learn to recognize the Orion Nebula and Andromeda Galaxy by sight
as surely as we would a Blue Jay stealing strawberries from our garden
or a Cardinal in the branches of a tree. Books, documentaries and
Internet image databases can be helpful aids in our quest to understand
what we see through the telescopic glass or mirror, but they must not be
exchanged for direct observation. Just as a new neighborhood remains
strange to us until we explore it, driving its streets, visiting its shops
and restaurants, if we wish to feel at home in the Cosmos, we must earn
our familiarity by personally exploring the "cosmic neighborhood" for ourselves.
This may, at first blush, seem an over-simple approach, but as surely as
the cosmic observations of Copernicus and Galileo redirected human history,
so personal, firsthand familiarity with the real Cosmos around us has the
power to rewire human brains. Just try it and see what happens!
None of which should be taken to mean, "Don't read science
books," or watch TV documentaries or peruse Internet scientific databases.
Imbibe them all, in every field of study – astronomy, physics, biology,
chemistry, geology, meteorology, as broad a range as you can manage.
But resolve to settle as little as possible for mere secondhand knowledge.
You probably can't build a backyard particle accelerator, if for no other
reason than that they're very, very big, but you can buy a microscope and
a children's chemistry set to personally explore the cellular and molecular
worlds. You can erect a backyard weather station to take your own
readings of rainfall and barometric pressure. You can stalk the flora
and fauna of the region where you live with a camera, a notebook and a
good field guide. You can collect and learn to identify rocks and
fossils, or your area's wild edible and medicinal plants. Let media
and personal exploration work together – read first, then look for ways
to put your eyes and ears and nose and tongue and skin on real world examples
of what you've studied. Study the world around you with all the power
of your keenly-tuned senses, then turn to books/TV/the Internet to supplement
your understand-ing.
Whether we are counting craters on the Moon, seasonal
rings in a tree trunk, or paramecia flagellating through a drop of pond
water, the simple discipline of actively pursuing a personal experience
of Nature, in all its many Earthly and cosmic dimensions, can transform
our lives on every level. For most of us, such a hands-on stance
toward physical reality represents a fundamental renegotiation of our relationship
with the world around us. With our attention on Nature, which does
not change in deference to our whims and dream-delusions, our obsessive
concern with those things that do shift and change – our memes, our ideologies,
our belief in Humanity's limiting and inescapable earthbound state – weakens,
and eventually falls away. Nature does not lie to us, and in the
face of such unequivocal truth, our sad ego-fantasies cannot stand.
In Key Question Community groups, advocate for sane,
demilitarized governmental and private development of space technology,
especially in the areas of orbital solar energy collection and the mining
of Near Earth Objects. Learn everything you can about these topics,
and share what you have learned with the community where you live, with
your local, state and federal legislators, with interested business executives,
etc. Join and raise money for the many worthy organizations already
out there working to make Humanity’s future in space a reality, such as
the National Space Society, the Space Studies Institute, and the world’s
largest space interest group, Carl Sagan’s own Planetary Society.
Links to all these groups and more can be found in the Recommended Reading
section of the The Simplest Path website at www.thesimplestpath.com.