New Years Report - fighting gloom in order to thrive

My friend Martin Rees — The British Astronomer Royal — has long offered insightful views upon not only the sciences, but also the dangers we face rushing into an uncertain future. His new book On the Future: Prospects for Humanity gives even-handed criticism of both cynical denialism and hand-wringing despair, leading you toward the one thing that might save us all and help our children thrive… clearheaded pragmatism, laced with the idealism to believe we can be better. Solutions exist, but they depend upon an openminded willingness to question assumptions and learn from one another.

  

== The Abundance Report ==

Indeed, the worst plague in the world is gloom. It infests large portions of the “left” and lobotomizes almost the entire “right,” undermining the confident,  can-do spirit that has propelled nearly all progress. Know this, only a people who are confident that they can change the world stand any chance of actually changing anything. And "can" only arises when you admit "we already have."

To that end, read an interview with Stephen Pinker about how we are surrounded by good news, leading not to complacency, but a spirit of “I think we can!”

“It’s no contradiction to say that we’re extending human life and there are threats: threats of climate change, threats of authoritarian politicians. You can appreciate the threats, worry about the threats, try to fight back against the threats at the same time that you appreciate the progress that we have made.

“I would say that it’s appreciating the progress that gives us the courage and conviction to try to strive for more progress. History tells us that attempts to make the world better tend to succeed. We’ll never achieve a utopia, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make things a little bit better.”

Want some anecdotal evidence?

Inspired in part by the “Tricorder XPrize, a new set of $1 test screens for the presence of a number of diseases like malaria, flu and dengue fever, various types of cancers, and genetic diseases will appreciably contribute to health. And Jimmy Carter's campaign to end the Guinea Worm parasite may reach completion this year..  

The Internet will soon be accessible from all areas of the planet, including rural locations with poor or no network connectivity. The FCC unanimously approved SpaceX’s ambitious plan to launch 7,518 satellites into low-Earth orbit. These satellites, along with 4,425 previously approved satellites, will serve as the backbone for the company’s proposed Starlink broadband network. These new SpaceX satellites will increase the number of active satellites six-fold in less than a decade. And my friends at ViaSat are taking an entirely different approach (massive geosynchronous sats) toward similar ends. Yes, they'll have more latency in voice coms, but most traffic is surfing and you'll never notice the difference. 

And yes, most of these links are brought to you by the Abundance Insider report from Peter Diamandis’s XPrize Foundation (I’m on the Advisory Council.) Get his book Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think! And realize that we have tons of hard work to do, to save the world… but good news is all over the place… suggesting we should be up to the task.

And now something cool. California-based startup Hoversurf is training one of its first customers, the Dubai Police Force, on the 2019 S3 Hoverbike. The vehicle, which can operate with or without a human pilot, weighs 253 lbs, costs $150,000, flies for up to 25 minutes, and can safely fly at an altitude of 16 ft.

== Oh, but the enemies of enlightenment abound ==

“Under the tenure of  Texas Republican Lamar Smith, the House of Representatives Science Committee has held hearing after hearing casting doubt on mainstream climate science, used its subpoena power to harass and intimidate climate scientists, entertained the conspiracy theory that sea level rise is caused by rocks falling into the ocean, and used its Twitter account to blast links to climate change-denying Breitbart articles. Smith, who is not a scientist, has used the veil of authority that chairmanship offers to pen articles imploring the public not to buy into the “hysteria over carbon dioxide” while railing against “climate alarmists” at pro-fossil fuel get-togethers. (He has also accepted hundreds of thousands in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry.)  In short, the House Science Committee has been a dark place for rational discourse on climate change. Sitting on it has been a lonely and frustrating experience for Bill Foster, Congress’s lone scientist (until last night).” - reports Maddie Stone in Gizmodo. These jibbering morons are a cancer on your children's future. Part of a campaign to discredit all fact-using professions. 

Incoming Committee Chair Texas Democrat Eddie Bernice Johnson promises relief  from this monstrous lobotomization of the world’s “greatest deliberative legislature.”   And maybe… after 2020?  A  rebirth for the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) banished by Newt Gingrich for occasionally daring (as faithful-neutral public servants) to say “um, sir, that’s not really true.”

But it’s a long road. The Denialist Cult keeps moving the goal posts. And one way they keep your confed neighbor nodding and hypnotized is by offering dollops of “science” that he learned in Junior High in incantations that let them neutralize any input from actual science. 

Take the fact that plants consume carbon dioxide in order to grow. That means (according to their latest capering incantation) that nature will flourish if we don’t interfere with coal barons, petro-princes and carbon lords raking in billions from their legacy-corrupt extraction rights!  Never mind that paleontology shows high-CO2 eras featured warm arctic zones… (yay? Ask the US Navy viz the Russians what each one thinks of that)… but also vastly bigger swathes of desert, across the globe.  

You think tundra zones with max one growing season will replace lost temperate zones that had two?  Not for the 10,000 years that it will take, to grow topsoil up there.  Fools.

== It gets worse ==

Oh, my, the depths of crazy have yet to be plumbed. Example: “Autohoaxers” are a movement that reflexively declares every significant event a hoax, sometimes just for argument’s sake. Kind of like Vernor Vinge’s fictional “Friends of Privacy,” who auto-generate more ersatz personas and fake items than can ever be refuted, hence making your “that wasn’t me!” denials seem plausible.

Read about this and other pyrotechnically loony modern manias now orbiting a growing *Flat-Earth Movement*. Yes you read that right. And this is just one caked, pimply crust-symptom of the disease being crammed on us by the spreading War Against Smart People. (Including every single fact-centered profession, from science, teaching and journalism to intel and military and FBI officers.)

One of you suggested “Tell the flat earthers to go to Wal Mart and get a goPro and order a weather balloon and GPS tracker. You don't have to build a rocket to see for yourself. If the Earth were flat, then you'd be able to see the Great Lakes, Atlantic and Pacific from 30 miles above Colorado."

Here’s another truly devastating one: “Soundly Proving the Curvature of the Earth at Lake Pontchartrain.”

Of course my own answer is: “How many people do you think can keep secret a conspiracy? At most fifty? Your premise is that ALL the smart people… hundreds of millions of us… are in on this globe-pushing cabal? Woof!"

Liberals are fools, if they think this is rooted in “economic decay of the white middle class.” That’s happened and needs addressing, as does the nastiest pustule on the right — racism. But those are lipstick on a pig.

Scratch the surface. This is all about an inherent American spite toward authorities or “elites.” We all think one elite or another is conniving against us. Liberals (rightfully) point at those who oppressed us across 99% of 6000 years… owner-feudal lords.

Those oligarchs - uniting in a world-mafia putsch - need a distraction to keep populist masses from recognizing them as the ancient enemy. They have a great one, leveraging and weaponizing hatred toward another elite… smart people who know stuff. And make no mistake, we are the ones confederates truly hate, for “looking down on them.”

Think about it. The knowledge elites are our immune system against errors of the past, like feudalism. And errors of the future, like climate change. They are the people who can see — and prevent — the machinations of those seeking a New Feudalism. (I portrayed this in EXISTENCE.) Hence there is a feral agenda behind the War on All Facts — removing the only obstacle standing in oligarchy’s way. 

And gleefully spitting gas on a fire, now Russian space officials talk about ‘investigating’ whether the Apollo landings actually happened. See a link below. Anything to keep us attacking each other. The chief failure mode of our brilliant enlightenment civilization is auto-immune disease.

== And so... back to saving the world ==

See the “Five Phases of  Climate Denialism.” In fact, you can often hear all five uttered during the same hour, at Fox, even though they are mutually contradictory. “Climate Change is a hoax!” and “Glaciers are advancing!” will be chanted – sometimes in the same hour as “It’s changing but no worries and humans didn’t cause it,” all the way to “It’s a calamity and we caused it, but that doesn’t disqualify our credibility; it just means it’s hopeless to try solving the problem! So leave our parasite moguls alone!”

Now “Trump Administration To Polluters: Earth Is Doomed, So Go Hog Wild.” Yes, one branch of the administration issued a 500 page report admitting what every fact-using or “deep state” professional knows, that human-generated greenhouse gases have us on course for a climate precipice of rising acid seas and catastrophically spreading deserts and vast waves of refugees. 

The monsters' conclusion? That nothing can be done to prevent this now, so why try? – is rightly ridiculed by the appalled-educated half of the nation. (Answer – “You who were wrong about every single statement and forecast up to now… why should we heed you any longer?”)

All of this is deliberate. There is no unified conservative position on anything anymore. Not deficits, or trade, or morality… nor old anchor-standards like divorce or gambling or sexual deviancy or “family values.” Certainly not regarding the health of flat-fair-open entrepreneurial market capitalism. What we have now instead are talking points aimed at various constituencies with one purpose, to keep enough of them inside the fraying Big Tent  for one more election.

== Links galore ==

One of you (Anthony T.) offered up a raft of NYT articles… “on topics Brin has written about.”  A bunch of riffs on our interesting times.

American Capitalism isn't working

News Networks Fall Short on Climate Story as Dolphins Die on beach

The race to dam rivers in the Himalayas

NASA's Osiris-Rex Arrives at Asteroid Bennu after a two-year journey

A treatment for Sickle Cell disease in Africa

The Insect Apocalypse is Here: What does it mean for life on earth?