Okay, so this is several dozen kinds of cool: Scientists have snapped the first photographs of a planet orbiting a star other than our own. Brothers and Sisters, can I get a “hells yeah”?! For anyone who still somehow doubts that we’re living in the future, we just gathered photographic evidence of planets around stars over 100 trillion miles from Earth.
SpaceX’s Falcon One reached orbit today, making it the first privately-funded space craft ever to do so. Welcome one and all to the era of private space flight.
I know that science is all about rational progress and embracing the best theory available to fit observed evidence, but man, I’m really hoping the Rare Earth Hypothesis is wrong. Both because aliens are cool and because if we can’t SOME day get off this rock to another habitable world, then our species is well-screwed.
On the plus side, the Tau Zero Foundation finally has their website up and it’s a swanky one. (Also: a .aero TLD? Who knew? I certainly didn’t…) So, you know, if we ever do find any places in the galaxy interesting enough for an up-close visit, there are some smart people already laying the groundwork for getting us there.
The person you are trying to stop is smarter than you. Corollary: yes, even if they’re not yet old enough to smoke.
Long story short: age-verification cameras on cigarette machines in Japan can be fooled by showing the camera a picture of an older person. Seriously, did no one on the design team for that camera think “huh, let’s show it a PICTURE of an old person and see what it does . . .”?
The always geek-love-inducing Centauri Dreams has an short, interesting post up on the possibility of large lunar telescopes. How cool would that be? No atmosphere to interfere with the signal, low gravity to make large-scale construction easier and more cost effective, and plus, it’d be a permanent human installation on the moon, which definitely excites the technophilic and Humanist parts of me. (N.B: These parts compose approximately 98% of me, by volume.)
You’re stuck on the ISS, falling around the Earth in cramped quarters with assorted colleagues and the toilet, the ONLY toilet for at least 211(+/- 2.4) miles, is broken.
Image: An orangutan attempts to spear a passing fish. (Credit: The Daily Mail)
That’s pretty awesome. Human beings are far from the only tool-using species on the planet, but this, for some reason, strikes me as a very particular sort of tool use. This is the kind of tool use that is intended to solve a very general and pressing problem: “I’m hungry and want to catch something to eat. How do I do that?” And the solution seems, to me, to be a delightfully “human” one: a handy perch and nice, sharp stick.
This video struck me teary and absolutely speechless.
Video: Jacob Bronowski talks about the human side of science.
It always boggles my mind whenever anyone says that science will “dehumanize” in the same way it does when they say it will “take the mystery” out of life. We get to be all the more human because of science. Just as science adds wonder and mystery to our world, so too does it allow us to further pursue other quitessentially human pursuits.
The human mind is a funny, questing thing. It is never satisfied with what it knows but, when healthy, it constantly seeks to learn more about the context in which it finds itself. I have always felt that curiosity is one of the most fundamentally human emotions and, as such, science is one of the most fundamentally human acts. To say that scientific pursuits might make us less human, to me, sounds equally as strange as saying that excessive dam building will de-beaver a beaver.
Admittedly, the results of science and of dam-building are very different. (Though it took a great deal of the former for humans to be able to engage in the latter.) Dam building did not produce the gas that Dr. Bronowski mentioned in the video. Then again, nor did it create penicillin. And yet both have aided in pursuits that human beings have been engaged in since pre-history.
Both allowed human beings to do exactly what they were already doing, only better. For eons human beings had fought each other and had, in many cases, engaged in complete genocide. The harnessing of poison gases made this genocide easier and more efficient. For similar stretches of time, people have cared for the sick. The creation of anti-bacterial drugs and the wide-spread use thereof made such medical care easier and more effective.
Science and technology allow is to be more human. They help us to do those things to which we are inclined much more easily, efficiently, and effectively and they open up new avenues of thought and action for us to pursue. And we traipse down those proverbial avenues with glee and abandon, because it is human for us to do so. Such explorations are one of the most human of all pursuits.
To say that science dehumanizes us is, to my mind, not only wrong. It is entirely antithetical to truth of human nature.
(Hat tip to PZ Myers over at Pharyngula for posting that video.)
