“O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space…”

Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II, scene ii

It’s been at least twenty years since I last looked through the telescope that my grandfather gave to me for my birthday many many years ago. I still have it, and it’s been with me since then; it lived in my parents’ garage for a long time until I finally decided to take it home with me about five years ago. And it lived with me and Jennifer in Woodland, and came with us to Dixon, all without me peering through it even once.

Tonight I took it out from its corner in the garage and set it up. Some of the bolts that hold it together have loosened over the years, and the lenses are all dusty. I used to have a sun filter, a little screw-in filter I could attach to look directly at the Sun through my telescope — I remember doing so when I was young, and staring at sunspots and solar flares and thinking how cool it all was.

I took out my telescope because when Jennifer and I went to the California Academy of Sciences the week before last, we saw a planetarium presentation all about the celestial events coming up in the year 2003, and one of them was the opposition of Jupiter — which means that Jupiter is directly opposite the Sun from Earth. This means that it’s prime Jupiter-viewing time right now.

Our back yard is pretty conducive to stargazing: the streelights are mostly blocked by neighboring houses and trees, and right now Jupiter is very high in the sky. So I took my telescope and found a particularly shaded spot and started focusing. I looked through the viewfinder and found Jupiter, then spent a good forty-five minutes adjusting and focusing. In all the time since I’d last used my telescope, I’d forgotten some of the finer points… like how my back would get sore after having to bend over to peer into the eyepiece.

I finally did find Jupiter. And the sight was worth the fuss with the adjustments and the ache in the back. Not only could I see five of Jupiter’s moons, but I could also see, faintly, some of the lines that mark that planet’s surface, as thin bands of darker color.

It was beautiful.

Tomorrow during the day I’m going to take a few minutes to tighten some of the bolts on my telescope so that tomorrow night I can see Jupiter more easily with less fiddling and adjusting and without worrying that I’ll lose the sight if I accidently breathe on the tripod. And then I’ll look around at some of the other sights of the night sky that I know are out there.

Earlier this evening I was browsing through Space.com, looking up articles about the Columbia investigation, when I found this article about the Challenger explosion. On that page is an audio file of Mission Control’s transmissions through the launch of Challenger to confirmation of its explosion. It’s chilling; from the cool, steady voice stating, “Obviously a major malfunction” to the same cool voice just close to trembling with emotion annoucing, “We have confirmation that the vehicle has exploded.”

I’m heartened by news that NASA is determined to proceed with the manned space program, that even Mr. Bush has recommended an increase to NASA’s budget, and most of all by the joint statement issued by the families of the seven astronauts lost on Saturday morning: that the journey must go on.

I also found this quote from Ilan Ramon, the Israeli astronaut who was also the first Israeli to go into space: “The world looks marvelous from up here, so peaceful, so wonderful, and so fragile.” Down here we squabble and fight and talk about war and destruction, while the view from space can make it all seem insignificant. And that is one of the many reasons why the journey must go on.

The full line from Hamlet is, “O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.” Our physical realities are small — we’re bounded by nutshells, so to speak. Yet in our imaginations we can travel the Universe and explore and discover things that we never dreamed of. Can we let our “bad dreams” — our hatreds, our fears, our prejudices and angers — get in the way of that?

I’ve been traveling about Santa Clara these past couple of weeks, training surly state workers on how to use the software that was developed by the Benthic Creatures parent company. Now, I’ve spent years and years and years — since junior high school, at least, a good twenty years — playing with computers and software and making them pling and plonk and buzz the way I like them to. And the other trainers who work for Benthic Creatures are at more or less the same level of experience. Sure, some of us are more computer literate than I am and others can just about operate their computer but don’t know how to program a website; but on the whole, we’re all pretty familiar with the basic concepts of computers.

You might say, in essence, that I’ve come from a culture where computers are part of everyday existence, and to live without them is pretty much incomprehensible.

But the computerized culture that I come from is not the only culture that’s around. The more I train some of these mollusc handlers, the more I realize that there are lots of people who don’t have that kind of computer experience. Some of them don’t know how to log on to Windows. Some of them have trouble double-clicking on a desktop icon. If I were to tell them that the software runs on a remote server which runs a proprietary operating system independent of Windows or any flavor of Unix, they’d either get a glassy-eyed look on their faces, or they’d run in terror.

It’s so tempting to call them stupid and leave it at that.

But it’d be wrong.

In my first year of college, I lived in the dormitories with about fifty other freshmen. I remember sitting in my friend’s dorm talking about Renaissance Faire when someone else came in and asked my friend what a bodice was. My friend answered her; and when she had left, my friend turned to me and said, “Can you believe she didn’t even know what a bodice was?”

And in one of my very few moments of intelligence I replied, “Well, I didn’t know what a bodice was until you told me a couple of months ago. And you know what? She probably knows a lot more about football than I ever would.”

“Yeah, but who wants to know about football?” my friend said.

I shrugged. “Who wants to know about bodices?”

I guess my point there was just that we all come from different places; and every time we think someone else is being stupid, chances are that they think we’re being stupid as well. The mollusc handlers that we’re training don’t use their computers as often as I do, and would probably be overwhelmed at the thought of building their own website, something which comes pretty naturally to me. On the other hand, I doubt that I could do their job, or that I would want to. It’s not that their job is unimportant; it’s just that I don’t have the skills needed to pull it off (or the patience to learn those skills, probably).

So I try to be very, very patient when I’m conducting the training. If someone else thinks I’m stupid for not being able to handle a mollusc, at least I can take the high road and say that I’m better than to think that they’re stupid for not being able to use a computer as competently as I do. But generally I find they react well to me being patient, and no one thinks I’m stupid — or, at least, no one tells me that to my face.

It’s very easy to go the other way around, too, and think that just because someone comes from a different culture or background, they’re somehow better or more enlightened. I remember when I was in Ireland with a friend of mine. We were in a pub and listening to the radio. A commercial for Guinness beer came on. My friend turned to me and said, “They’re commercials are so much more intelligent here, don’t you think?” I listened closely to this commercial and to some others and finally had to reply, “No, it’s the same crap we get in the US. It’s just done with an Irish accent so it sounds more intelligent.”

This is all just a reminder to myself, really. I’m no better than anyone else; but, then again, they’re not any better than me. I’ve seen people do some amazingly stupid things in my day; but, on the other hand, I’ve done some amazingly stupid things myself. If I hang on to that perspective, not only will my job go easier, but I’ll probably have a less stressful life as well.

On another note: if you haven’t voted yet, get thee hence and do so!

This morning, while walking across the UC Davis campus toward the Hydrology lab (where I’ve been filtering water samples from the Lake Tahoe region), I saw a series of strange fliers. The fliers were obviously in response to the anti-war fliers which I had seen posted on the campus last week. The fliers I saw last week, however, at least had the advantage of appealing to a certain nostalgic mindset: "Come join the anti-war movement!" they proclaimed. At least one flier proclaimed that it was posted by a group calling themselves, "Students for the Truth".

The fliers I saw this morning, though, were completely opposed to the first set of fliers, ideologically. They each addressed a different aspect of the anti-war movement. "Terrorists are evil!" one proclaimed, along with a paragraph explaining why it is the American duty to "Strike back now, and hard!" It supported its thesis with a quote from Adam Smith: "Mercy to the evil is injustice to the weak" (or something like that — I’m afraid I don’t have the flier with me, though I was tempted to take a copy for fun). Another one, espousing the need to hide information about what we’re doing and blasting those folks who think that we ought to know what our government is doing in Afghanistan, quotes Thomas Jefferson: "Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom." There was a third flier, but I didn’t read that one as closely.

The strangest thing about these fliers was the fact that the creator, trying to support their conservative thesis about the value of liberty vs. security, chose to include other quotes on the bottom of the fliers, in huge block letters. On the first, the one about the need to "Strike back", was the phrase, "War is peace". On the flier espousing the need to keep government actions secret, was the phrase, "Ignorance is strength". And on the third, which I unfortunately did not read very carefully, was the quote, "Freedom is slavery".

I don’t know if the author of the fliers caught the irony, or if it was intentional. However, these quotes, which are unattributed on the fliers, are slogans espoused by the tyrannical oligarchical government which rules the world in George Orwell’s 1984. I really hope that the irony was intentional; the other possibilities I can imagine are that the creator of these fliers honestly wants an oligarchical government in place ruled by Big Brother; or they were just too woefully ignorant to know where the quotes had originally come from.

The fliers proclaimed that they were, "Brought to you by the Students for Rational Thought."

It’s this dichotomy of truth vs. reason that I found very intriguing. I’ve been obsessing for some time about the ability of human beings and human civilization to overcome its baser and more emotional and irrational impulses to build a society of wise scholars and true citizens. I’ve known, ever since I started studying philosophy in college, that human reason is generally a slippery and unreliable thing, unless it has some sort of empirical basis to start from. In fact, I think one of the great triumphs of modern human scientific investigation is its understanding that reason itself cannot be thoroughly trusted, and that understanding needs to be supplemented by empirical observations. Of course, even in scientific pursuits, you will still find your thought processes boiling down to certain irreducible assumptions that you just can’t burn away. Modern scientific investigations can do a pretty good job of digging through those irreducible assumptions, but no other endeavor is very good at it.

In non-scientific endeavors, the irreducible assumptions will usually come down to mere value judgements. In the book I’m reading, The Skeptical Environmentalist, for example, a number of arguments which make very good sense from a strictly utilitarian perspective would be considered absolutely horrid from a "deep ecology" perspective which insists on the inherent value of non-human lifeforms. In the clash between the forces of truth and the forces of reason on the UC Davis campus, for example, we find that one group places a higher value on the need for peace in Afghanistan, while the other finds that American withdrawal from Afghanistan is incompatible with the need for homeland security. The fliers also made clear that the forces of reason find security incompatible with the need for maintaining broad civil liberties for all who reside within the borders of the United States. Both can probably reason to their conclusions quite well, but since both start from a different set of assumptions, they will probably never reach any agreement.

So what’s the answer? There have been many attempts in the history of philosophy to boil the questions of ethics down to irreducible facts, and derive an entirely logical set of logical ethics. Such attempts at a logical positivist approach to ethics usually failed, however; and a backlash against the seeming futility of the exercise usually took the form of complete moral relativity and situationalist ethics. But I think that in an increasingly complex and interrelated world, we will find that such situationalist approaches will fail just as surely as the logical positivist approaches did.

For my own part, I remain optimistic about the future of human civilization and the human race. Regardless of whether I side with Students for Truth or Students for Reason, I respect both groups for taking an active involvement and participating actively in the dialogue. I believe that some day we will have our society of wise scholars and involved citizens (although my own estimate is that it will probably take at least a thousand years to reach that level); and I think that the slippery nature of human reason will consistently lead us in new directions and to unexpected surprises. It may be, in fact, that our inability to reduce non-scientific human endeavors to commonly shared irreducible assumptions is what contributes most to our ability to grow and develop as a species.

The other day, I was supposed to meet a graduate student from UC Davis’ Graduate Group in Ecology at Borders in downtown Davis. Unfortunately, the student didn’t show up, but I did get a chance to browse through a book that I found on the shelves. This book is called The Skeptical Environmentalist, by Danish statistician and Greenpeace member Bjørn Lomborg. The thrust of this book is that most of the environmental doomsday scenarios that we encounter are based more on bad statistics and bad reporting than on good science. In fact, most of the statistics that he reviews show that, on the whole, the environmental state of the world is actually getting better, and not worse. Many of the studies he cites are the same studies cited by organizations (such as Greenpeace and the World Wild Fund for Nature), but he reviews the entire study and not just selected elements, and puts them in a broader context.

The Pacific island Easter Island — home of those giant stone heads — is often called upon to serve as an example of how human exuberance can lead to environmental destruction. And it is quite true that the human inhabitants of Easter Island did not manage their resources properly, and the island went from being a lush forested place to a nearly desert island, around about the 1400’s. Lomborg points out that while this is true, only fourteen of the over 10,000 inhabited Pacific islands encountered the same fate; and that the islands that did suffer that fate had local economies based on a very slow-growing type of palm tree which could not produce enough resources to supply even a much smaller human population for more than a couple of generations.

The point of this is not to belittle the tragedy of Easter Island and the inhabitants of the island; the point is that Easter Island serves as a poor model of how human beings are devastating the planet. On the whole, according to Lomborg, the planet’s air is getting cleaner, food is being produced at faster rates, fewer people are starving, water is cleaner, and so on. He even presents statistics from the World Health Organization (WHO), demonstrating that the Earth’s human population is not growing as fast as many environmentalist doomsayers would have us believe. We are not in danger of running out of food, water, or clean air any time soon.

Lomborg is careful to point out that this does not mean that the Earth’s environment is good, nor that human beings have not damaged it badly in our tenure on this planet. What he points out is that the Earth’s environment is getting better, but is still not good enough. Work still needs to be done.

On the whole, Lomborg makes sense to me; his book echoes some of the things I’ve been thinking over the past few years. There is a part of me which would think that the more responsible thing to do would be to promote the doomsday scenariors, in order to get people to act, but a more mature part of me knows that more harm is ultimately done by promulgating bad data and mistruths rather than true numbers and statistics. Mind you, I’m only in Chapter One of his book, and it is a thick book.

I’ve noticed that people seem to like bad news, and the media never gets tired of printing it. I’ve believed for a very long time that there is more good than evil in the world, and that people are, on the whole, good; but, for some reason, evil, or badness, gets better press. When we open the newspaper, we see headlines screaming about murder and chaos and destruction, but, unless we’re in the local news section, we don’t see headlines reading, Chicago Boy Scouts Make Nursing Home Patients Feel Loved. But these things happen all the time; according to the FBI, the number of violent crimes, especially in the schools, is going down; but events like the Columbine shooting two years ago and other similar tales so predominate the news that we think that the number of such incidents is skyrocketing. I’ve lost track of the anthrax scare, but I’m willing to bet that there are still more people dying of leprosy in our country than of anthrax contracted while handling mail.

We all like our mythologies. Mythologies help us cope with the world around us. And it seems to me that mythologies, whether religious or cultural, have some sort of prophecy about the end of the world. In Christianity, the Revelation of St. John portrays in rather hallucinitory detail the end of the world and the coming of Jesus Christ (though the metaphors work best if you interpret them in terms of ancient Rome instead of the modern world); ancient Nordic mythology talked of Ragnarok, the final battle of the gods, and the end of the world; and so on. Our modern society is much more secular than older societies were, but we still have apocalyptic prophecies; they range from the prophecies of Nostradamus to the doomsday scenarios envisioned by die-hard environmentalist groups such as the Earth Liberation Front.

But despite it all, the world has failed to end, and humanity has failed to destroy itself. I remember hearing three predictions of imminent doom in one week when I was in junior high back in the 80’s — one involving nuclear holocaust, the other two involving cataclysmic earthquakes — and none of them came to pass. There was the Jupiter Effect, and, of course, 5/5/2000; both predicted massive tectonic and climatic catastrophes caused by planetary alignments. And, of course, there was Y2K, which many predicted would end civilization on earth, but which ultimately failed to blacken a single light bulb (though one friend of mine told me that Y2K was responsible for his fourteen-cent PG&E bill in February 2000).

I’ve never believed in humanity’s power to destroy the earth. It would take a massive, massive nuclear exchange, which is unlikely to happen at this point (and which I never believed would happen, even at the height of the Cold War) (Carl Sagan’s "Nuclear Winter" hypothesis was interesting, but ultimately proved to be flawed). And I’ve never had much faith in our ability to destroy our own civilization. Apocalyptic scenarios are interesting to speculate on, and some of my favorite science fiction and horror stories are based on apocalyptic themes, but I don’t think they’re realistic. I do believe in catastrophic change; I think human civilization encountered at least two catastrophic changes in the twentieth century alone. And each time, civilization has lived through it, and even advanced because of it.

Which is partly why I’m an optimist when it comes to humanity. I believe that we have advanced morally and societally in the past thousand years or so; we’re more aware than ever of our interconnectedness to each other and to the world around us. While there are still countries which practice horrifying human rights abuses, there is not a single nation left in the world which officially condones the practice of slavery. Despite the work that needs to be done, this is still, in my mind, evidence of progress. There will be world peace, and humanity will reach a point where we will be ruled primarily by wisdom and humble scholarship; it certainly won’t happen in my lifetime, unfortunately, and it probably won’t happen for a thousand years at best, but I believe very firmly that we’re headed in the right direction (Star Trek has the right vision, but is far too optimistic in its timeline).

We’ll get through the current international terrorist crisis, I believe. A bit scarred, a bit worn, but intact. And, I believe, just a bit wiser. It will probably take some time for that new wisdom to manifest, but it will be there.

Who knows? Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps God will let sound the four trumpets and the seven seals will break and the Worm will have his thousand year reign on Earth. But, to paraphrase David Brin (in his essay "Whose Millenium"), why would God bring things to an end now, just when we’re starting to get our act together?

As for me, I’m continuing to continue. I’ve picked up a book or two on ecology and ecosystem modeling, and given myself a project to build a fully functioning ecosystem modeling tool in Java, complete with a web interface and drag-and-drop functionality. This will kill several birds with one stone by allowing me to learn Java and the skills and methods of ecological modeling (including mathematics and statistics and so on), all of which will certainly help me in both my job hunt and in my journey to graduate school in Ecological Systems Engineering.

I’m pretty optmistic about the future of the earth and humanity, but I think that there is a lot of work yet to be done. I’d like to think that I’m doing my part.

For the past couple of days I have been listening almost non-stop to NPR’s coverage of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on my computer through streaming audio from the KQED website. I’ve listened as people have poured out their pain, as denials were proferred by various groups, as politicians have postured, as nations and peoples around the world have condemned the attack and offered their support to the United States and its peoples. I have kept a separate browser window at all times to follow the news on CNN and MSNBC. Finally, at about 2:00 this afternoon, I shut down Real Player and launched Spinner to listen to some Celtic music. Enough was enough. I didn’t want anymore. I wanted to shut out the world and focus on my work and not think about it anymore.

Of course, that isn’t possible. For the past two days at work, things have been quiet and subdued. At the meetings I’ve been to yesterday and today, the other developers and the managers have been subdued and quiet. Almost everyone has kept a window open to CNN or MSNBC or ABCNews. Of course we get work done. The software gets written, the pages get built, the servers get upgraded, the sales team gets their sales. My co-workers are almost always fairly light-hearted, and even sarcastic to the point of obnoxiousness, but that has changed this week.

Last night, Jennifer and I watched Chicken Run, an inane little movie which we both enjoyed. I was grateful when Jennifer suggested renting it, because I’d been needing to get my mind off of the news. But immediately after the movie was over, we both went upstairs to the office to check our e-mail and see what was new in the world.

This afternoon, after spending twenty minutes on a minor graphics project, I went back to CNN and loaded again the video of the second plane being flown right into the second World Trade Center tower. Big mistake; the horror and the surrealism of the entire situation came flooding back in a huge wave.

I think we’re all still getting used to the idea that this is real. It’s not a movie. It’s not a scene from a television show. It’s not fiction, God help us, it’s real. The screams in the background of that video are more haunting and frightening because of that.

Did any of us in our worst imaginings think that something like this would happen? Well, okay, of course novelists like Stephen King and Tom Clancy have imagined stories of the Apocalypse, the world ending in nuclear war or plague, and maybe there have been political or science fiction thrillers which have started with lines like, "It all began on the day of the bombings."

But who knows if any of that ever really prepared us for the reality of what has happened? We’ve been told time and again that there were no contingency plans for an attack of this magnitude, that none of the scenarios imagined by our defense department included such despicably inhuman acts as were demonstrated on Tuesday morning.

I’ve seen some terrible things said and heard of terrible things done over the past few days. People attacking Arab Americans because of their race. Hate mails strewn about the web. Calls for immediate nuclear attacks on Afghanistan. I’m disturbed by e-mails claiming that all Arab Americans are culpable, and frighened by talk of war against an indeterminate enemy.

And what I can’t help but think about every time I see those videos is those telephone calls. The unthinkable calls made at the last minute to husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters. I can’t imagine having to make such a call, and I can’t imagine ever receiving such a call from Jennifer; or, worse, stepping away from my desk one morning which seems like any other morning, and coming back to my desk to find my voice mail light flashing. What must it be like, to know you are going to die soon, to be given the opportunity to say goodbye to those you love and finding that they aren’t available? Or to come back and find that you’ve missed that last opportunity to hear the voice of someone that you cherish and know that you will never see them or hear from them again? I don’t want to think about how the people who had to make those calls must have felt, and I don’t want to think about how it must have felt to take such a call.

The grief we all feel is profound; the grief of those who have lost loved ones, in the planes or in the towers, is beyond imagining.

There have been calls for international unity, there have been offers of aid and support from nations normally hostile to us, there have been thousands upon thousands of people lined up for hours to give blood to help those injured in the attacks, thousands of volunteers helping out, millions of dollars donated to the Red Cross, the United Way, the Salvation Army and other organizations. And there have been the spontaneous expressions of grief and unity and sympathy from all over the world. While they are encouraging and helpful, those who are lost will never return. A destructive war against those who we think might be responsible won’t bring back the lives that have been lost.

So I listen to the beautiful Celtic songs, I read about scientific discoveries being made and about how humanity goes on and about how we struggle to make sense of this tragedy, and express to those directly affected that we share their grief.

And I think about the words spoken by an alien intelligence to Ellie Arroway in the movie Contact, about how puzzling humanity is: "You’re capable of such beautiful dreams… and such terrible nightmares."