Pale Blue Dot

Awesome Carl Sagan Quotes

I bought a small eBook recently chock-a-block full of Sagan’s best quotes. I wanted to highlight some of my favourites. I haven’t read all of Sagan’s books (some 30-odd) but I haven’t yet met a Sagan book that I didn’t like… a lot! If anyone was ever going to be my hero, Carl Sagan would be one of them:

On argumentation:

(1) – “The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.” 

On history:

(2) – “You have to know the past to understand the present.”

On evolution:

(3) – “Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.”

On drugs:

(4) – “The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.”

Misc:

(5) – “You are worth about 3 dollars in chemicals.“

(6) – “We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers.“

(7) – “The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard, who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by ‘God,’ one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying…it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.“

(8) – “The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support libraries.“

I man-love Carl Sagan…

Favourites? Mine are (1) and (6). Has anyone read more than one Sagan book? If so, which one of those are your favourites? I can’t decide between Broca’s Brain and Pale Blue Dot. Both marvelous insights in science, skepticism, and astronomy with the added delight of them being beautifully written english.

Favourite Quotations from the Anti-Christ

I recently finished reading Nietzsche’s Anti-Christ, and my, oh-my, was it a great book! Granted, I only understood about half the book, and to top that embarrassment of,  had to look at the dictionary for half the words he used (thank god — sic — Kindle has a built-in dictionary), yet it was still a riveting read. I can’t remember the last time an atheist’s words were this memorable, beautiful, and powerful. Let me tell you, Nietzsche can throw a verbal barrage unlike no one I’ve ever read before. Below are some of my favourite quotes from the book in order:

1 – “The histories of saints present the most dubious variety of literature in existence; to examine them by the scientific method, in the entire absence of corroborative documents, seems to me to condemn the whole inquiry from the start – it is simply learned idling.“

2 – “The ‘salvation of the soul’ in plain English: the world revolves around me.”

3 – “If any one were to show us this Christian God, we’d be still less inclined to believe in him.”

4 – “Such a religion as Christianity, which does not touch reality at a single point and which goes to pieces the moment reality asserts its rights at any point, must be inevitably the deadly enemy of the “wisdom of the world,” which is to say, of science — and it will give the name of good to whatever means serves to poison, calumniate and cry down all intellectual discipline, all lucidity and strictness in matters of intellectual conscience, and all noble coolness and freedom of mind.”

5 – “Man has had to fight for every atom of the truth, and has had to pay for it almost everything that the heart, that humans love, that human trust cling to.”

6 – “The fact that faith, under certain circumstances, may work for blessedness, but that this blessedness produced by an idee fixe by no means makes the idea itself true, and the fact that faith actually moves no mountains, but instead raises them up where there were none before: all this is made sufficiently clear by a walk through a mental asylum.”

7 – “Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.”

8 – “Faith means the will to avoid knowing what is true.”

9 – “I condemn Christianity; I bring against the Christian church the most terrible of all accusations that an accuser has ever had in his mouth. It is, to me, the greatest of all imaginable corruptions; it seeks to work the ultimate corruption, the worst possible corruption. The Christian church has left nothing untouched by its depravity; it has turned every value into worthlessness, and every truth into a lie, and every integrity into baseness of soul.”

What’s your favourite quote? I can’t decide between 4 and 8.

What do the Creationist & Anti-GMO Platform Have in Common?

Creationists and the Anti-GMO crowd (hereafter referred to as anti’s) crowd share a foundational base; one amusing to explore, no less. Creationism, or Intelligent Design (ID) as it is known in some circles where they pretend to themselves it is a scientific theory, has been notorious at setting up evolutionary straw men that they can then easily knock them down to the delight of other believers. (A straw man argument is where you intentionally misrepresent an argument so that you can take down the ‘straw man’ argument without taking on the actual argument to the benefit of your ego and ignorance of your audience.)

The ‘Appeal to Nature’ Fallacy

There is this notion that has been bugging me lately: the notion that nature is all-knowing, all-wise, acts as a mother to us, and that we should abide her infinite wisdom and abundance. It is otherwise known, to scientists and philosophers, as the appeal to nature fallacy. This notion, which is more of a feeling really, has serious shortcomings. One—and really the only one I need, and want, to address—is that it can only express itself through being lucky enough to be born at the top of the food chain, and it must then, by definition, in being expressed, fail to acknowledge the grim, short, and painful subsistence lives of almost every other member of every other species on this planet, even that of pre-civilized humans.*

This fallacy is, to repurpose to my own ends, a quote from comedian Bill Maher, ignorance masquerading as wisdom, which would, in any other age but this, be punished by nature itself with astonishing brutality and swiftness.

As the singer Gary Numan put it: “If nature is proof of God’s amazing creation then I have truly seen the light, and the light is black. Nature is genus at its most cruel and savage. No benevolent God could have come up with such an outrage.” Rob Hart put it another way: “Nature is not on our side. Most of it is trying to kill us. Nature abounds with neurotoxins, carcinogens, starvation, violence, and death. It is technology that makes our lives so comfortable.” He neglects though to mention virus’, bacteria, and genetic disorders. (I’m sure I’ve missed a few too.)

One of the few benevolent acts of nature toward us was, albeit unwillingly, the gift of intelligence, which has allowed us the opportunity to wrest ourselves free one step at a time from her invidious grasp. That intelligence, after 250,000 long, brutal subsistence-lived years, has recently born such fruits as GM food, medicine, and sheltered lives free from her (it’s) wrath, yet is being met with scorn and ridicule by those who adhere to the “nature rocks” mantra.

I’m not saying that just because appealing to nature is bunk—it is—that therefore synthetic things are automatically better. That would be guilty of the same fallacy, reversed. No, rather it is to say that we must take everything on a case-by-case basis. Sometimes natural stuff is better, sometimes it’s not; but to presume that just because something is natural that it is better is to arrive at that conclusion devoid of reason, logic, or evidence, regardless of how prevalent it is in society. As Vasil Deniador said (well, Isaac Asimov really said it, as it is his fiction book) in Foundation and Earth: “Common belief, even universal belief, is not, itself, evidence.”

The appeal to nature fallacy will help us with nothing and take us nowhere, and should be confined, for once and all, to the dustbin of history. Of course, it won’t be; at least not yet, but it should be.

With that, I’d like to conclude with a quote from Science Based Life: “Surely, if we have learned anything about our advances in other areas like medicine, agriculture, and public health measures, the way forward is with science, not backwards with an assumed beneficence of Mother Nature. The “unnatural” advances of humanity are some of its greatest achievements. Surgery, vaccination, conventional agriculture, electronics, and engineering (genetic or otherwise) have us living longer, healthier lives. If organic foods really aren’t as nutritious, if natural can also mean dangerous, if genetically modified foods have no scientific reason to be labeled differently, we simply cannot afford to continue making the naturalistic fallacy. What is best for us, what is healthier or safer or more nutritious, is something that falls out of proper research, not common sense.”

* – It was only 200 years ago that a day old baby had a life expectancy of 37 years. Go back 400 years, 2/3s of all children in Britain died before the age of 4, but it’s natural, so who needs vaccines, hygiene, and plentiful food, right? Go back 2000 years, and the average life expectancy drops to 25 years.

P.S. Recall that average life expectancy indicates that 50% of the population died before that age, and the other 50% after, not that everyone dropped dead at said age. Once one hit 15 years of age so, average life expectancy usually increased to between 45 to 60 years. But that is little consolation to the half who died young, and the majority of them who died as children.

P.P.S. I think this is the shortest post I’ve ever written. I guess that shows how few words are needed to show the appeal to nature fallacy for what it is. (That’s my theory and I’m sticking with it!)

The Bible & Science

Not at variance with any proven scientific fact. Not one I tell you, not even one. And, did you hear? They knew things they could’ve only known by divine revelation. Such examples surely include the following: insects have four legs (Leviticus 11:20-23), donkeys can talk (Numbers 22:28), and men can live in fish (not whales mind you, a fish) for three days. (Now, you can laugh.)

Q&A – The Lowdown on GMOs with a Scientist

Last year, as those who’ve read the first edition of my book will know, I was anti-GMO. Why? Well, I thought I had the evidence on my ‘side’. But I can now honestly say it was because I had no idea what I was talking about. (Need further proof I’m an idiot?) My knowledge of the subject was inadequate; much of that knowledge I got from biased sources; and I’m sure there was some social conformity bias somewhere in there. (I’m sure there were many more biases; but honestly, listing my own biases is depressing. I’d rather much do it to others. That’s where the fun is at!) I’ve just released a 2nd edition of my book, Random Rationality, and that stance has been rectified.

In the meantime, I’ve delved into some of the literature and involved myself in a debate with friends on the nature of GMO on the safety issue. In doing that, I also reached out to Dr. Kevin Folta last week (his profile and academic history here, and check out his highly informative blog here) to confirm what I had learned, and find out why GMO’s are so misunderstood. Dr. Folta is a plant geneticist who works at the University of Florida. He’s a scientist who specializes in plant molecular biology and he was kind enough to share his thoughts with me on his area of expertise. Our exchange is below, you’ll find it brief, but extremely informative. I’ve bolded some of his statements, those that I consider important.

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The Lowdown on GMOs with a Scientist

Fourat (Me) – What is the main thing (or is it general) about GMO’s that the public routinely confuse, or get wrong, when discussing and debating their impact?

Kevin Folta –  There are so many misconceptions. The first is a fundamental one, that being that there is a debate at all.  There is no debate among scientists in the discipline of plant molecular biology and crop science. Sure you can find someone here and there that disagrees, but there is no active debate in the literature driven by data. There are no hard reproducible data that indicate that transgenics are dangerous or more potentially dangerous than traditionally bred plant products.

If I had to nail down the most annoying misconceptions they would include that all scientists are just dupes of big multinational ag companies. Anyone that presents the consensus of scientific interpretation of the literature is immediately discounted as some corporate pawn. There’s nothing further from the truth. Most of us are hanging on by a thread in the days of dwinding federal, state and local support for research. The attacks on the credibility of good scientists hurts our chances to stay in academic labs and consider the cushy salaries and job security with the big ag corporate monstrosities we chose not to work for when we took jobs working for the public good. That’s pretty sad.

There is this allegation that we hide data or don’t publish work that is inconsistent with corporate desires. They need to get one thing straight. We’re not in the public sector because we are excited about listening to some corporate mandates. No thanks.  We’re here for scientific freedom and to discover the exceptions to the rules and define new paradigms.

If my lab had a slight hint that GMOs were dangerous, I’d do my best to repeat that study, get a collaborator to repeat it independently, and then publish the data on the covers of Science, Nature and every news outlet that would take it. It would rock the world. Showing that 70-some percent of our food was poisonous? That would be a HUGE story — we’re talking Nobel Prize and free Amy’s Organic Pot Pies for life! Finding the rule breakers is what we’re in it for, but to break rules takes massive, rigorous data. So far, we don’t even have a good thread of evidence to start with.

The other huge misconception is that you can “prove something is safe”. Nothing can be proven safe. We can only test a hypothesis and show no evidence of harm. You can’t test all variables — nobody could. We can ask if there is a plausible mechanism for harm. If there is, we can test it. If there isn’t, we can do broad survey studies. A scientist can search for evidence of harm — a scientist can never prove something is safe.

2 –  In what ways might GMO’s be most beneficial to our biosphere, and why might organic’s not be as good as to get us there?

Kevin Folta – There is no doubt that transgenic plants can be designed to limit pest damage with lower pesticide applications. That is well documented by the National Academies of Science, the best unbiased brains in our nation. Most data is for cotton and maize, and show substantial reductions (like 60%). Transgenic potatoes were amazingly successful in Romania until they joined the EU and had to go back to insecticide-intensive agriculture.  Even glyphosate resistance traits, for all of their drawbacks in creating new resistant weeds, replace toxic alternatives.

Conventional farming takes fuel, labor, fungicides, pesticides, nematicides and many other inputs. Water and fertilizer are in there too.  There are genes out there in the literature that address most of these issues. Scientists in academic labs discover these genes and define their function in lab-based GMOs that never are used outside the lab. The regulatory hoops are too difficult and expensive. Only the big companies can play in that space. Even little companies like Okanagan Specialty Fruits have to deal with the nonsense from those that hate the technology. Opposition to the science keeps the big guys in business, because nobody else can compete.

Who loses? The farmer, the consumer, the environment, the academic scientist and most of all the people around the world that don’t get enough food and nutrition. Who gains? Big ag.

3 – What do you consider the most important aspect of differentiating the good from the bad when it comes to considering science? i.e., what is the first thing you look for after reading a study

Kevin Folta – In the short-term I consider the system studied.  Was it an animal system or cells in a dish? Most of the anti-GMO work is done on cells, especially cell lines that sound scary (like ovary, testis or fetal cells) but have little relevance to the complexities of animal systems. If done in animals, was the experiment properly controlled? Do the researchers SHOW the controls (like they conveniently omitted from Seralini’s 2012 rat-cancer work in Figure 3). Many studies that look good compare a GMO to an unrelated plant type. It is just not a valid comparison. Plants produce toxins and allergens, so you need to test the same exact plant without the added gene. If they do the rest of this properly then they need to run sufficient numbers and use good, common statistics. If they do all of this the work is publishable after peer review and should go into a decent journal, not some low-impact journal that publishes incomplete work or work that oversteps the data.

A lot of junk escapes peer review. Reviewers and editors are overstressed and overburdened these days. We do the work as service for the field. Occasionally a paper slips by in a lower-impact journal. You’ll find most of the anti-GMO papers there.

Another important attribute of good work is demonstrating a mechanism. For instance, just don’t tell me that you found some evidence of GMO harming cells. Tell me how. How does it happen? If the phenomenon is real the mechanism should be dissected out in a year’s time.  Omics tools are incredibly sensitive and we can detect small differences in gene expression and metabolic profiles. If GMO harm was real, the authors would define that mechanism, then collect their Nobel Prize and Amy’s Pot Pies.

The ultimate test is reproducibility. You’ll see that the best “evidence” for harm from GMOs comes from obscure journals, aging references that were published and heavily refuted by the scientific community (Puztasi, Seralini, etc), and work that was never repeated by outside labs. These are flash-in-the-pan works that never are expanded beyond the seminal study. The best sign of real science, good science, in an edgy area is that it grows. You see more scientists pile on, more research, more funding and bigger ideas. Models expand, mechanisms grow.

That just does not happen in the anti-GMO literature. The same authors publish a paper and then it goes on the anti-GMO websites and gains attention — while it dies in the scientific literature with no follow-up.

4 – Is there any split in the scientific community as to the safety of GMOs? If so, where does the split lay?

Kevin Folta – There are splits in the scientific community like there are splits for climate change and evolution. You have scientists like NIH Director Francis Collins that support creationist leanings. You have a small set of meteorologists and atmosphere scientists that claim that climate change is not real. There’s always room for a dissenting opinion out there, but they usually don’t have good evidence, just belief.

The same is true in biology and plant science.  There are a few out there that let philosophy rule over evidence, but they are not at the edge of research. In the circles I work with there is consensus about the safety and efficacy of the technology. Even those that study organic and other low-input production systems support biotech as a way to do their jobs even better. That’s a strange relationship many don’t expect. You’ll not see anti-GMO writing from too many tenure-track scientists at leading universities.

There is confusion on this. The Union of Concerned Scientists is frequently used as evidence that scientists are against this technology. When you read who they are and what they do, they are activists. They don’t do research or publish in the area of biotech. There are also others that claim to be experts or exploit some tenuous university affiliation to gain credibility. They should be looked at as deceitful, but they are accepted and believed with great credibility. People like Mercola, Smith and others sure sound like they know what they are talking about but they are not experts. Even Benbrook, a guy with a great career and a wonderful CV, goes off the deep end on the topic.

Readers need to apply all of the filters we discussed here today.  What the data really say, who did the work, and if it was reproduced independently are the most important criteria in separating reality from fiction in the GMO topic.

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If you stand for scientific integrity, and going where the facts take you, then please share this Q&A so it may reach a wider audience. Almost every factoid from the Anti-GMO crowd has been thoroughly refuted, debunked, and repudiated by the scientific community. Millions of lives depend on the future of our food production, that means they depend on scientific experimentation and information untainted by ideology. The science is settled, and has been for some time. And as Dr. Folta above, and others, have elucidated, the intense opposition to the GMO technology has only intensified Monsanto’s grip upon the market. Facebook it, tweet it, re-blog it, or Google Plus it. Give my blog credit, don’t give it credit; I don’t really care. Good science matters more than pageviews (though pageviews are still nice), and more scientists like Dr. Folta should have their voices heard instead of the fear-based, fake-facts groups out there shouting from the rooftops who don’t know the first thing about genomics, evolution, or reality. (If you enjoyed this article, you may enjoy my last one on science in general, read it here.)

Ready. Set. Share!

[UPDATE: Part 2 and 3 in this series; Lowdown on GMOs with a Family Farmer and Lowdown on GMOs with a Biotech Firm can be found here and here.]

The Three Choices of Creation

Out there on the interwebs, there is a war going on for the soul of something, and it is known as the fine-tuning argument. It’s essentially an argument that stipulates that the constants that govern the Universe as we know it were fine-tuned by an external creator to allow intelligent life—as are we—to flourish. If any one of these constants were changed just a smidgen, then life (as we know it) couldn’t exist.

There are three ways to look at this:

1. There is an external designer (God) who fine-tuned these constants to allow for our existence
2. It was sheer, blind luck that our universe had these constants and not some others—assuming that is, they could be anything else
3. These values are what they are because we live in a multiverse in which all possible values of the constants are instantiated and we find ourselves here simply because here is one of the few places we can be (the weak antropic principle)

(1) is obviously what the religiously inclined would choose. (3) is what many scientists and the scientifically inclined would choose, though of course, not all. There are many debates and discussions out there taking sides, giving evidence and reasoning for this and that, but I see very few people discussing (2). So I want to get some skin into the game, but with a different angle—I’m sure there are others out there who do see it this way. I just haven’t found them. The internet is a big place, or so I’ve been told.

Lets assume (1) to be true. How could we ever rule out (2)? The answer is, as far as I can tell, you cannot. Sure, we could say if we received a sign, we’d be sure: one night, we see the stars rearrange to spell the words “I Am That I Am”, or a book is beamed down from the heavens that explicitly details the spookiness of quantum entanglement or some such equally advanced knowledge we have not arrived at. But then, we couldn’t rule out an advanced alien species playing a practical joke on us, or giving us advanced physics we are not yet aware of, so we’re back at square one. There is no way to definitively rule out chance—or aliens. Theologians often make this statement against scientists (they call it scientism), insinuating that we can never be sure of what our scientific theories tell us, and in the next breath invoking God (the irony is lost on them).

Now, lets assume (3) to be true. How do you rule out (2)? The answer is, you don’t need to. It is part and parcel of the same package. Essentially both are down to chance. We might not might be able to say definitively we live in a singular universe or multiverse—although there are ways we might get observational proof of a multiverse. But we should be able to say with confidence that (1) could, in principle, be ruled out definitively and either (2) or (3) be true without fear of going awry.

One way or the other, something has to be infinite and eternal into the past. Either God or some other entity for (1) to hold true or the universe/multiverse of (2)/(3). The latter two have one less assumption (being that the wider reality of which we may be a part of has no complicated attributes; such as intelligence, creativity, and/or emotion that God is seemingly endowed with. We don’t need to explain why that wider reality, if indeed it exists, is simple, non-material, and non-sentient, though we would if a God was involved). Anyone else have an opinion? To me, this seems too easy. I feel like I’m missing something.

RE: A Terse Explanation for the Finite Nature of Religion

Both Heathen Heart and R.L. Culpeper have written a few posts between themselves discussing, and respectfully disagreeing on the endgame of religion. So now I’m turning it into a chain-mail of posts by adding my two cents (and that’s probably all it’s worth) in response to Culpeper’s post, linked here. It’s written as a comment, but I’m adding it here because I needed to insert links as references  and it’s also quite long (for a comment at least).

So you’ve made some great points in your post, and I’m inclined to agree with all of them. However, and forgive me for being blunt, I think they are rooted in the application of your considerable intellect only to the short-history humanity has had. The assumptions (or fundamentals) that have thus far, underwritten our societies, are changing and will soon no longer be relevant. To elucidate this, let me use an example of a friend who took a similar position but related to GMO foods.

She said that science (read: genetic engineering) has never produced a healthier food than what we can produce organically. In this, she is not wrong. But what was also implied was scientists will never ever produce a healthier food than nature, and this is false (if we set our minds to it, we’ll do it; history is replete with such examples: flight, telepathy (cellphone), space travel, breaking the sound barrier, and so on). Producing a healthier apple than nature merely requires the requisite knowledge and tools, both of which are coming online ever increasingly in abundance with each passing year. It’s just a matter of time, because if nature can do it, it means that it’s possible, and since evolution never produces perfect organisms, there is always a better way to make it. Ergo, one day, provided that research into GM food continues, then GM food will one day trump nature’s food.

So to relate that back to your example. Religion will never release its hold upon humanity. I’d like to modify your statement if I may. I think it should be written as “religion will never release its hold upon humanity while people remain uneducated, mis-educated, disease-prone, conflict-prone, and death providing the existential threat.”

So let’s tackle them one by one.

Global literacy is on its way down, thanks to the Internet, cell-phones, and increasing wealth (this trend is slow but progressing. Global literacy is 84%, while in 1990, it was 76%). Mis-education is a problem, but again, this is also getting better and you need only look to the western countries to see that as economic growth increases, societal dysfunction goes down, more kids are sent to school as a result, instead of having to help the family get food and income, and religious fervour drops as a result. (There was a recent comprehensive study that showed that religion, social stratification, and societal dysfunction are inherently linked, but which causes which is as yet unknown. Does society-wide religion cause economic inequalities, or does economic inequality increase religious fervor?  I think it’s the latter, but there is no way to conclusively show it is one over the other.) This somewhat tackles mis-education indirectly. A prosperous society is more likely to be a freer society. And a freer society is more likely to have criticism, debates, discussions, opposing and dissenting opinions, and this makes its way into the hearts and minds of its citizens.

Disease-prone: This is somewhat self-explanatory. 100 years ago, life expectancy was 47 years. It’s 78.5 today in the west, 89 in Monaco, and 83 in Japan. Chad has the lowest at 48.69, but that is higher than the entire global average of one century ago. More and more diseases are being combatted now (Hans Rosling has an excellent four-minute video of the rising life expectancy as a result of increasing wealth). But medicine, up until now, has been a hit and miss process. As Kurzweil says, we just found stuff that worked and kept doing it with very little understanding of the underlying biological processes at work. With genetic medicine increasing in cost-to-performance ratio ten-fold per year (5 times the pace of Moore’s Law in computers), it is getting cheaper to sequence DNA, understand the information processes that underly biology, and start implementing preventive medicine instead of reactive medicine, which is resulting in Lab on a Chip technology. (Soon, your cellphone will become your doctor and analyze your body on the spot. Pandemics will cease, health will increase, people will have more time to satisfy their own desires and study, and quality of life will increase. This tech is coming online this year. I wrote a post on the future of medicine and health here, and here is a short youtube video to show it in action.) Historically, life expectancy has increased 1-2 years per decade. But because biology is now an information technology, it will (and indeed does) increase exponentially (since 2003 when the genome was mapped), and within 10-20 years, life expectancy will be increased at one year per year. (Note, this requires no new technology, only the technology and understanding we currently have to continue along at a pace equal to, or greater, than Moore’s Law, and this is indeed happening and shows no sign of abating.)

Tackling conflict. According to Steven Pinker (everyone owes it to themselves to watch his 18-min TED talk titled: The Myth of Violence), violence has declined since the Industrial Revolution. In fact, the 20th century was the most peaceful century in existence, even accounting for WW1 and WW2. War is becoming less and less common the more the information about the conflict travels. We need only look at Vietnam here. The first war to bring the reality of death and destruction back to the general population. Needless to say, it was the most unpopular war in history, and look at the conflicts since then, unwaveringly smaller, and more sensitive to collateral damage. (I am not saying it has been roses and happiness since then, but there is a clear downgrade in the severity of conflicts in regions of the world where communication and information are abundant.)

Death is the big one and will undoubtedly remain the biggest motivator, but we must realize that even if no progress is made, progress against religion can be made. Just look at the Scandinavian countries, Australia, several other European nations, China, and Japan which are majority (or close to) agnostic/atheist. But be that as it may, progress towards the dissolution of death is well underway, and even starting to appear in the mainstream press. But for now, we must take it as an assumption that death will be forever removed as the inevitable curse it is. The other examples I have shown are in progress, so is death, but until global death rates hit zero (natural deaths, that is), the jury will be out.

You also mention political and economic inequality. I could write thousands of words on this, but to try to keep it brief. Technology is changing the human landscape and bringing people out of poverty. The book Abundance is a great read to really understand the dynamics. (And Rational Optimist so I’m told, though I haven’t read it yet but I will soon.) But, in the last century: per-capita average income has tripled (adjusted for inflation), food has come down in cost a factor of 10, shelter a factor of 20, transportation a factor of 100, and communication a 1000-fold. And in the last forty years, global poverty has halved while the population has doubled. So we are earning three times more, spending less on the necessities and learning/enjoying more than ever. These trends are actually accelerating (The Law of Accelerating Returns). While we are not out of the woods yet, the trends are clearly in one direction, and short of some calamity, should continue.

Concordantly, global religiosity is on its way down (59% are now religious, 23% are now a-religious, and 13% are atheists, with the none’s being the fastest growing, with the youth leading the way). (Who ever said young people were useless? It is only they that do reliably change the world. Of course, the logical conclusion is that if death is kept at bay, might things never change? The answer, for me, is no, as we tinker with our brains and augment our intelligence becoming in the process more wed to truth than to our cognitive biases as it stands now.)

So in answer to your questions. I do foresee a world of equal economic opportunity. (I think politics is obsolete and will go the way of the Dodo in the age of Big Data we are entering into. It’s even said that the metric system will run out of numbers to quantify the amount of data we will have by 2020.) Equal opportunity for education? Yes, Massively Online Open Courses (MOOC) are ballooning in size. Needing only internet connections to take courses at MIT and Stanford, as well as whole new schools opening up such as udacity.com and coursera that offer the information and teaching content of degrees, and they are starting to become recognized by universities and applicable for course credit. (It’s early days yet, but the trends are there and heading in the right direction. Soon, only an internet connection will be required. Two billion people have internet today; by 2020, it will be five billion, and soon thereafter, close to everyone.) A time when people will want to learn? This one is harder to be so confident on, but my gut realization is yes, and allow me to explain my gut (and subjective) reasoning for such an answer. The more I learn, the more I want to learn. I’m not content in not knowing, and though I have always been like this, I often never had the leisure or time or requisite knowledge to go out there and gather more knowledge. I get better at this every year, and continuously want to continue. Now, with a sample size of just one, I cannot confidently extrapolate this out to anyone else (though I’m sure I can to you), but I do think this is part of human nature; this innate curiosity. It requires we adequately provide for one’s basic needs, then education and wants, then the potential for self-actualization (Nietzsche’s will to power: superman). As we move forward into the future, we are becoming smarter (and the lag-time between the have’s and have-nots is halving every decade [Source: The Singularity is Near]), so it is only a matter of time before inequality becomes insignificant. Here, I’ll use the world ‘believe’. I believe that once the needs of most people have been provided, and they have been educated properly, and become more prosperous, religiosity will decline, and people will want to know more, and thus wed themselves to truth. Big Data will also elucidate the many mysterious workings of the Earth and our societies, as well as making it accessible to the public.

I recently read an article on the explosion of Big Data and the death of the theorist. Historically, when we wanted to find out more about the world; we proposed a theory, computed the results, and went to gather data by experimentation/observation to confirm or falsify that theory. This process is reversing. We are now generating so much data; science and scientific studies, tweets, facebook, blogs and webpages, planes, trains, and automobiles along with everything else that our computers programs can find, and pull out the theories and do science after the fact. This is great for two reasons. Firstly, less and less will get missed as a result. Before, if somebody wasn’t thinking about or trying to find out something, then the theory was missed, lost forever, or delayed, or when found often suppressed (we lost the knowledge to make aluminum for 1800 years because of Tiberius if I recall correctly, the Emperor of Rome). Now, with an army of AI’s whose sole job it is to pull it out the world’s information, we will learn that much more about the world. Pandemics will be a thing a past, resource depletion will be foreseen well in advance, known troublemakers will be spotted beforehand and terrorist attacks possibly stopped. (If you read the article, which I recommend you do, you will see that Bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad could have been derived from publicly available information on the internet before hand to within 200km. Imagine the possibilities of stopping future attacks instead, which should do away with the politics of fear, and perhaps, even the CIA and military industrial complex.)

So, I think the future is bright (provided we can move fast enough on climate change and other vexing problems of urgent immediacy), and we can do away with religion, or at least, and perhaps more likely, relegate it to irrelevance, much as flat-earthism is today. There are also other interesting aspects which I do not have time to explore; such as the merging of humanity into a global mind, the technological potential of a universal fact checker (I recently had an idea to create a script that scours what you read on the net and highlights dubious/false claims. We don’t all have time to fact-check every claim we read, we are modified skeptics in that regard, but this is what we use technology for, to alleviate our shortcomings. Kind of like a modified Watson who will soon start informing and helping doctors in their diagnosis’ because the amount of info is expanding exponentially and a doctor can’t hold all that info in his head, so we’ll be using AI to augment their powers of diagnosis, and I see no reason why it will stop at just medicine. It will subsume all fields where knowledge is definitively known, and most likely provide probabilistic answers for other fields). But, I’m in a rush so I’m skimming. (If you watch any YouTube lecture by Kurzweil in the range of 45-60 minutess, you will immediately see where I’m coming from and I recommend that.)

Anyway, I don’t disagree with anything you said. In fact, I learn lots every time I read one of your posts. It’s only that the dynamics of our society, which still allow religious belief to be insulated from facts, truth, reason, and humanism are finite, and now that we are above the knee of the exponential curve, greater change will occur in ever-decreasing amounts of time. Lastly, I do not mean to make it seem so easy or underplay the consequences of any conflicts, local or global, of humanity. Merely, that it is becoming easier to understand, communicate, and tackle them, and this trend is becoming ever more pervasive, understood, and the means of production ever cheaper democratizing them in the process. There is a lot of work still to be done, a lot of people still needlessly die, and many more are unable to enjoy the comforts that many of us now enjoy. However, these problems are being more and more understood, tackled, and it will only become easier in the future.

This is, believe it or not, brief, and I have only explored them rather inadequately and quickly. But I’d love to hear what you think, so feel free to write a counter-post; disagreeing or agreeing for whatever reason, and if need be, I can explain in more detail, any point I’ve inadequately expressed. Looking forward to hearing from you.

Resetting Time and Redefining Human History

Dear secular friends, it’s time to change Time.

Reset the Gregorian calendar free of Christian references

Let’s be brutally honest: A.D 2013 is not only an entirely meaningless date to 6 out of 7 people on the planet, it is also a demonstrably erroneous one. The Common Era did not begin 2013 years ago. Nothing in fact took place in or around this period to mark even some minor shift in human civilisation, let alone a paradigmatic event worthy of partitioning epochs. 1B.C (Before Christ) and1A.D (Anno Domini: In the year of the Lord) are hollow markers and we are petitioning Sir Paul Nurse of the Royal Society to open a global debate on resetting the Gregorian calendar free of these religious waypoints. It is our express objective that science, not Christian imagination, be the rightful commencement date of the Common Era in a truly representative, international, secular calendar.

 Why Sir Paul Nurse?

261 years ago members of the Royal Society made a frightful error which we believe the current president, Sir Paul, has a duty to now help set right. At the stroke of midnight on Wednesday the 2^nd of September, 1752, the Governing Council of the academy adopted the Gregorian calendar for the British Empire, and through that the world at large. It was and remains a measure of time unquestionably superior to the Julian calendar, albeit with one catastrophic, obnoxious flaw: 1A.D does not, in any way, represent the dawn of the Common Era.

What is the proposition?

To better honour our species, to better express the finer elements of who we are and what we’re capable of, to better represent our innate curiosity and drive to improve the societies we build, science, not Christian imagination, should mark the commencement of the Common Era. Through this online petition we at Reset the Calendar are urging Sir Paul to open a global debate calling upon experts from such diverse fields as palaeontology, anthropology, archaeology, astronomy, linguistics, art, mathematics and even philosophy to canvass human history in a way never before attempted and locate that point in time which will stand as the new date for the commencement of the Common Era.

What is an alternative date?

As a suggestion only, the inscribed 12,000 to 15,000 year old Thaïs bone might be considered a strong contender for this new date. Credited by UNESCO as “the most complex and elaborate time-factored sequence currently known within the corpus of Palaeolithic mobile art” the Thaïs bone is evidence someone (a nameless ancestor of yours and mine) was looking up and over a 3½ year period systematically wrestling some order from the celestial chaos passing overhead. Alone it is an astonishing moment in human history, a planted flag heralding the beginning of the end of 1.5 million years of natural anarchy and the first stirrings of scientific order. It is a moment manifestly more deserving of celebration than the essentially meaningless 1B.C/1A.D, and although just a suggestion it would mean this year not in fact 2013, rather 15013.

Click here to sign the petition.

For campaign updates join us at the Reset Facebook page or contact us directly at reset.the.calendar@outlook.com