Tuesday, July 21, 2009

More lunar comments, and why humanity should expand

* Last night I saw some of the 2007 doco (previously noted on this blog) "In the Shadow of the Moon" about the Apollo program. (It's currently showing on a Foxtel movie channel.) It is very, very good. I see that the DVD version has lots of worthwhile extras. Go on - some reader finally reward me, you cheap freeloaders. :-P

* How come it's now that everyone thinks it's all interesting and heroic? Is it because of a realisation that the manned space program being stuck in orbit for the last few decades is kind of dull by comparison? You fickle public - I've been wanting NASA to go back to the Moon for 30 years, so my retirement cave could be built by now. But no, you wanted to twiddle around on earth, waiting for the next asteroid to take out civilisation.

* Warning: religious speculation and sentiment follows: Actually, I do want to talk more about that last point. It seems to me that to a significant extent, some versions of Christian (and probably Islamic, or even Buddhist) faith act as something of a hindrance to the idea of humanity expanding beyond earth. I don't share the view, and want to explain why.

As far as general anti-science sentiment is concerned, I find it hard to understand why conservative Christians seem to be strongly associated with disbelief of Anthropogenic Global Warming (or ocean acidification): do they just have faith that the Second Coming will happen before people can really stuff up the planet?

Actually, a lot of them resist AGW because of their perception of the environmentalist movement as a replacement religion for the one true religion. I used to pretty much agree with that assessment, and it annoyed me that the Greenies were against space programs and tended to be anti-science and development generally. (The Deep Greens are just anti-people.) But now, I don't see how anyone can plausibly claim that climate scientists as a group are motivated by such quasi-religious views. There are too many who have come to the same opinion; some may have a prior philosophical bent towards being "treehuggers", but it's more plausible to believe that most are actually quite fond of technology, people, and high living standards. Even if they are recommending big changes to the way we use resources, I doubt that many are motivated by valuing nature more than humanity.

On the other hand, environmentalists have seemingly become a bit more sanguine about the practically implausible idea of ever being able to eradicate poverty in every corner of the Earth before you can justify doing something off it.

If anything, the threat of AGW is turning sensible environmentalists into technology fans - especially when it comes to nuclear power. Is it too much to hope that we might also see soon environmentalists warming to the idea of lunar colonies as a lifeboat for the survival of humanity and its knowledge? This function of space exploration is, in my view, actually quite a sound immediate justification. It's also why I think it is rather a waste to go to Mars in the short term, especially if you can find ice on the Moon. Nothing's ever going to be able to come back from the Red Planet in a hurry.

Christian religious ideas can intrude into other scientifically plausible plans for humanity's protection. Once, I was talking to someone about the merits of asteroid watch programs, so that plans could be made to push them out of the way before they can hit the earth. The response (from a not overly devote Catholic) was "But maybe it's God's plan that the earth be hit."

Of course, sensible people don't say that any more about a deadly disease that we can vaccinate against, but when it comes to space projects, I think the sentiment is not that uncommon. It just seems that when the scale of a project becomes very large, it's easy to slip into fatalist mode. If the person is religious, that may entail the idea of not resisting a divine plan.

As for some Christian views about the colonization of space, I suspect there is also skepticism that this is where the future lies due to a limited imagination for the Second Coming. This may be a particular issue for evangelical Protestants, but I also suspect conservative Catholics have this influence.

The thing is, some believers feel that it must only be a earth-bound event. It's been painted that way in popular fictional works in American Protestanism in particular. But even so, my sister made speculative comments to me years ago that maybe it would only involve the earth, and that the rest of the universe would continue. (Indeed, she said that maybe heaven was on another planet. The Mormons are inclined to think that way, but I was surprised to hear it from a Catholic.)

Well, for my part, I have always assumed that the Christian view of the end of the world involves the entire universe. The very fabric of reality would change entirely, not just a single planet. Maybe if you believe in a "steady state" universe, the idea of being able to live for eternity as a resurrected person within the universe we see is half-way plausible. But if you believe (as everyone virtually does now) in an evolving universe that will end in either fire or ice, I don't see how you can believe in just a local transformation.

(By the way, a change to the quantum vacuum energy state does to allow for a possible way for the entire universe to flip into something very different. I like to speculate that a resurrected body in a universe with very different physics may have a chance of avoiding the decay and calamities of normal matter in this universe. But really, I tend much more towards the idea of eternal heaven being extra-dimensional, or in a divine cyber realm, rather than involving any form of dumb matter at all.)

So - maybe it's because I have never believed in a purely planetary Second Coming that I have never had any religious motivation for doubting that God does not care if humanity moves off planet.

Furthermore, there is not a lot of evidence that God takes particular care to preserve humanity from death by natural disaster.

It's one of the odd aspects of faith that believers can realise that the idea of effective prayer raises all sort of philosophical conundrums, yet engage in it anyway as a fundamental part of their faith. (CS Lewis writes well about this.) Similarly, I don't see it as especially problematic that we should indeed hope that it is not within any divine countenance that humanity could be snuffed out by planetary catastrophe, but at the same time take our own collective steps to make sure it doesn't happen.

If you take the Old Testament as a guide, people used to believe that God was not necessarily adverse to instigating widespread destruction, albeit with the possibility of humanity starting afresh. While I would never promote that the idea of the Flood as fact, perhaps it's something of a pity that modern Christians have lost the belief that the entire world could be pretty much destroyed by nature, and instead view God as always being our foolproof protector.

If only all believers could accept that God helps those who help themselves, as the old saying goes, even on the planetary scale. It seems to me to be the sensible way to act, and I don't see the risk of any offence to God. Presumably, He's quite happy to see us out of caves and not being smitten by disease and disaster on as regular a basis as before. Yet He didn't build our cities, hospitals and houses for us, I don't see why it would worry Him if we did it off planet.

It also seems to me that, 60 years ago, at the dawn of the space age, religious figures did not express the type of expansionist skepticism that seems to be around now. CS Lewis, for example, while deeply conservative, read and wrote science fiction, and never to my knowledge expressed views that it would be wrong to explore or live off planet. A few priests in the 1960's might have had sermons about government priorities in spending, but it was not a big feature in my experience. I think there was just an assumption at that time that humans would move outward, and faith would follow. (Ray Bradbury had priests on Mars, and many other writers of the Golden Age of science fiction saw that religion would still be around in the future. I find it an annoying feature of a lot of recent science fiction that so many of its authors have cannot imagine our present religions playing such a role.)

So, it is unfortunate that religion, to some degree at least, can play into the hands of anti-expansionist sentiment that is still strong in some branches of environmentalism. It does not have to be that way.

18 comments:

TimT said...

The 'belief in global warming is a religious belief' argument is an analogy that is perhaps taken a little too seriously by those who use it, but it's quite acute for a few reasons.

- We talk a lot about 'believing in' or 'not believing in/being sceptical of' global warming. Other scientific theories or hypothesis don't attract the same language.

- Politicians, activists, and/or media pundits often ascribe an irrational and unjustifiable connection between individual actions and climate change. (Examples too numerous to mention, but there are plenty of suggested policies in recent years that imply this sort of connection - for example, the spurious connection drawn between individual energy output and global warming.)

- Global warming is blamed for any number of physical events. (Earthquakes is one that comes to mind.)

So often when people refer to global warming, they don't do so in scientific terms, but rather as an imagined boogeyman. This may be the fault of a mainstream media addicted to scare stories, or ambitious politicians, but there it is.

TimT said...

These are excellent thoughts about outer space exploration. If you haven't read it yet, you should read C S Lewis's essay 'Religion and Rocketry', which is a seminal work in SF literary criticism - musing, as it does, on the ethical and religious implications of outer space travel and exploration.

Aside from the works of Lewis and maybe one or two other authors, to this day the concepts outlined in that essay remain largely unexplored.

In fact most golden age SF writers rejected the terms of the Lewis essay since, a) they wrote from an atheist perspective, or sometimes a kind of quasi-gnosticism adopted for satirical purposes* b) they were usually unaware of their fantastic/science-fictional antecedents, in particular the works of authors like Milton and others, who saw the universe in terms that were ethical, spiritual, AS WELL AS physical.

*The old sf scenario about Jesus going from planet to planet sacrificing himself again, or other re-imaginings of Christian/Jewish concepts in the terms of current-day physics/fantastic fiction.

TimT said...

The old sf scenario about Jesus going from planet to planet sacrificing himself again, or other re-imaginings of Christian/Jewish concepts in the terms of current-day physics/fantastic fiction.

Interestingly this was a concept that Lewis kind-of-sort-of used in his Narnia chronicles - ie, if the resurrection of Aslan in that book is to be seen in purely allegorical terms, why is Lewis so determined to establish Narnia as a discrete place, separate from earth, with its own time and space and laws?

Steve said...

Thanks for the comments Tim. I have actually fiddled with the post several times since it first went up, as I am sometimes wont to do, but I don't think my changes detract from anything you said.

I have read Religion and Rocketry, but a long time ago. I should go re-read it tonight.

I agree that the Golden Age science fiction authors were personally not religious, but they still could see that religion would be around (well, except for Asimov, I think, but I never read much of him anyway.) A lot of recent science fiction writers kind of write as if they are Dawkin's disciples and see religion as non-existent in the future. They also show an enthusiasm for transhumanism that is unpleasantly Nietzschean, I think.

TimT said...

In the Golden Age examples that come to mind, in fact, religion is typically satirised. I can't remember the plot of James Blish's 'A Case for Conscience', but I think it involves a Jesuit priest who has gone to convert the natives of another planet, and instead finds himself faced with a fact that seems to contradict the Christian religion - the 'case', it turns out, is for his own conscience. Does he turn against the church, or does he hide the fact up in order to ensure the ongoing life of the church?

In 'Childhood's End' earth is essentially de-converted from religion by a race of aliens with an uncanny (though coincidental) resemblance to demons.

The golden age sf writers probably saw religion in the same terms as they saw culture - something unecessary, a relic of humanities tribal, non-scientific past. (Kingsley Amis describes this viewpoint in his SF criticism, 'New Maps of Hell'.) It's true, religion seems to have been something of a sore point with them, given their fondness for rewriting religious stories; but typically they came down against religious stories, and in favour of scientific, or sometimes psuedo-scientific, explanations.

Religion for them was something to be frequently denied; and sometimes taken seriously, though satirically. Science, on the other hand, is always taken seriously, and never satirised. And I think this is the attitude they've handed down to modern writers.

What we've seen over the past 70 years since the golden age writers is not so much a case of development of ideas or views relating to religion or science, as the ongoing commitment to a particular attitude about religion and science.

TimT said...

Gawd I've got a lot to say about this. Maybe I should just whack it all up on my own blog.

Anyway...

There are some interesting examples of differing approaches to religion in pre-golden age sf. Chesterton (in 'The Man Who Was Thursday') is obviously working out his pre-conversion anxieties. Olaf Stapleton ('Nebula Maker') fantasises about a god-like being who makes galaxies, though it's a gnostic conception. (The god is a demiurge, an imperfect entity). 'Voyage to Arcturus' by David Lindsay is a vision of the universe by a practising theosophist/occultist. Same is probably true for Lovecraft and William Hope Hodgson ('The House on the Border'), though of course in a few of these authors Jungian/scientific concepts about archetypes are one of the influences/ideas being worked out.

Steve said...

For a recent, unexpectedly profound, science fiction-y take on divinity, have you ever seen the episode of Futurama where Bender gets lost in space and becomes a deity of two competing civilizations on his body? That's before he meets the real God.

It's really very good.

Steve said...

Gosh, I just looked up that episode on Wikipedia, and it's quality is widely recognized by many. (It won a Writers Guild prize, etc.)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godfellas

Steve said...

Damn, I added a superfluous apostrophe in that last comment. Happen's from time to time.

TimT said...

It's these little imperfections that demonstrate that, despite contrary appearances, you're not God. ;)

I like Futurama, but I don't think I've seen that one. Thanks for the tip off.

BwcaBrownie said...

"Futurama it's really very good"

and why wouldn't it be?
It is often brilliant, as is The Simpsons. Matt Groening is a genius and several of his writers are too.

back on topic (I hope) - my personal mantra, copyright me:

we are ALL hurtling through outer space clinging to a revolving ball of molten rock, and there is absolutely no reason why it cannot all end in a second. that's why my credit card is maxed-out.

Plus, Stalin's thing on religion being the opiate of the proles.

Geoff said...

Tim mentions a novel about a Jesuit converting beings from another planet. Mary D Russell's book "The Sparrow" has a similar premise - I suppose there are only so many plot premises around.

Caz said...

The bible is Earth centric Steve, with no suggestion that the beginning or end of times relates to anything other than Earth and its inhabitants.

Certainly any notion of Armageddon refers only to the end of humans (or the bad 'uns) on Earth not to the end of the universe, the latter of which is not required in order to wipe away non-believers.

I'm intrigued at the religious slant, as I don't ever recall hearing anyone or any religious persuasion speaking out against space exploration.

From time to time I have heard religious people being quite chuffed about space exploration as it provides, for their way of thinking, ever more evidence of the wonders of god's hand in creating the universe.

Tim - scientists are very much to blame for "faith based" environmentalism, primarily for capitulating to this newly discovered notion of "consensus science", which is, if not the antithesis of the scientific method, the gold standard of science, then at the very least, an opportunistic bastardization of science.

Steve said...

Caz: it's not that religious leaders spend time talking against space exploration, but its more that those believers who think the Second Coming is about to happen don't have any incentive to support stuff that has very long term goals or incentives. (The same argument can be made to explain a care-free attitude to environmental issues amongst some sections of the American population.)

As for "consensus science", it might merely be a shorthand way of describing how you make political policy decisions which are a response to science research. Given that you always have some scientists with their own pet theory (HIV does not cause AIDS, for example), the community always has to engage in some sort of assessment of the where the main weight of scientific opinion is at.

Climate science is complicated, no one is denying that. But there is also the issue that if wait another 30 years before deciding if the AGW proponents are right, it's too late to do anything effective about the
problem.

And as I've said many times, I don't see that it matters much what some engineer, physicist or chemist thinks about the issue if they haven't worked in the field. "Denialists" like to quote any scientist who expresses skepticism as showing that there is no "consensus", and that is just a furphy.

Caz said...

Yes, indeed, particularly in the US, but little shards of it here, within the right / Christian fundamentalist cohort, there is that shoulder shrug of "who cares" or "it doesn't matter", because it's all in god's hands and all will be fine.

I like space exploration, but I think the barrier for human outposts is impossibly high. There's not much point in finding a "new home" for humans since it's a doomed effort. Besides if we bugger up this one, we're not going to be much use in far more challenging environments.

The environmentalists have buggered the agenda from the outset, firstly by not having a firm grasp on defining the problem, let alone the solution.

The metaphors are all wrong, including "consensus science", which, contrary to your suggestion is never applied to any other area of science, only CO2s. In science, something is either proven or disproven, or requires more research to establish correlation and causation - there are no exceptions, except this one.

Appropriation of post Nazi Germany metaphors are never a good idea, and that's the other intellectually sloppy mistake being made.

There are a thousand good reasons to do no end of innovative things, not least being peak oil, peak gas, aging populations, the never ending imperative to stop the obscenity of hundreds of millions of people dying each year from a lack of cheap and utterly basic human requirements like clean water and nutritious food.

Introducing a 100 year time frame, with no concrete goals, with the idea being that the greatest human imperative is to influence weather patterns, combined with a multitude of inappropriate metaphors was never going to come to any good.

For all that, the world gets stuck with a costly and pointless emissions trading scheme, and the biggest generators of C02s are given billions in subsidies.

Not even a little bit smart. That's what happens when the problem is defined poorly from the get-go and when the metaphors are all wrong.

Steve said...

Caz, what I was saying that a policy response by the community as a whole to a complicated issue like climate change might properly be called "working out what's the science consensus on the issue". It's something the community as a whole does, not the scientists. In that respect, it can be said that "science" is not done by consensus, but it is a reasonable exercise for the community as a whole to engage in to decide how to respond to a danger that a significant number of scientists are warning us about.

Like I said, there is a specific reason to not wait until you can confirm whether or not the "consensus" view is right.

That all said, as you would know, I am deeply skeptical of the ETS approach to the problem as being at all worthwhile.

Caz said...

Whoa!

Now you're conflating who has done the framing and who has put the metaphors out there Steve, not to mention who gets to debate and decide appropriate actions!

Bad!

Al Gore put the qualifying "consensus" in front of "science", and we can see what a dumb arsed decision that was. Unfortunately, scientists took his lead, either unthinkingly, or so as to shore up their funding.

"Consensus" in the extreme weather condition debate has never been about the public reaching a consensus! Twisting logic there.

For truly big problems or big goals, the public is pretty useless at contributing or offering up a crowd created consensus opinion. Rather, these things are lead by politicians and subject matter experts.

Remember way back when pollution was the biggest environmental problem in town? Hard to believe (at least in developed countries), that the skys and the water ways and rubbish dumps, etc were simply left to fester with the refuse of human industry and existence.

No consensus was declared on pollution, it didn't need to be. The public certainly weren't involved in devising solutions (thank goodness!).

As with pollution, so with survival of our way of life, small changes will make no difference, only big changes, big innovations, by the big industries, the rest of us can't do anything - and "consensus", whether from pollies, the public or scientists isn't going to help.

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