The World As I See It

by Albert Einstein

How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people — first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving…

I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves — this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite objects of human efforts — possessions, outward success, luxury — have always seemed to me contemptible.

My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a ‘lone traveler’ and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude…

My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to understand the few ideas to which I have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle. I am quite aware that for any organization to reach its goals, one man must do the thinking and directing and generally bear the responsibility. But the led must not be coerced, they must be able to choose their leader. In my opinion, an autocratic system of coercion soon degenerates; force attracts men of low morality… The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.

This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor… This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism — how passionately I hate them!

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man… I am satisfied with the mystery of life’s eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence — as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.

Food for thought.

In the African jungle, conservationist Damian Aspinall searches for Kwibi, a lowland gorilla he hasn’t seen for 5 years. Kwibi grew up with Damian at his Howletts Wild Animal Park in England. When he was five, he was released into the forests of Gabon, West Africa as part of conservation programme to re-introduce gorillas back into the wild. Now Kwibi’s 10 years old, much bigger and stronger. Will Damian find him? Will Kwibi attack him?

Aww.

via reddit

For most of human history we have searched for our place in the cosmos. Who are we? What are we? We find that we inhabit an insignificant planet of a hum-drum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions, and by the depth of our answers.

– Carl Sagan

Surprisingly, this is the first time I’ve uploaded a video to YouTube. Who better to base the first video on than Carl Sagan:

The video features Carl Sagan talking about the Pale Blue Dot image taken by Voyager 1 as it left our vicinity of the solar system, set to the powerful “The Earth Prelude” by Ludovico Einaudi.

Nevermind the usual, overly idealistic and romantic reasons for wanting to explore the universe. Here’s one that I imagine most people will agree with:

Whenever we discover a new celestial body up there in the sky, we nearly always see the same thing: The surface, if we can see it, shows the signs of torment caused by endless beatings by rogue planetary or stellar fragments:

Some worlds have been torn apart completely: Our own moon was once a part of this planet. When a rock the size of Mars struck the Earth a fragment was propelled a quarter million miles away where it became known as the Moon.

We’re pretty sure that a rock from space effected the end of Cretaceous period.

Saturn, which we like to think of as the protective big brother of our solar system, acts as a giant gravitational slingshot for objects not otherwise headed for Earth, spewing rocks left and right and in and out of our solar system at enormous speeds.

Between Mars and Jupiter is the great asteroid belt which contains more than 550,000 asteroids. The number of objects we detect there increases steadily—we’re nowhere near to tracking them all:

(Be sure to watch this in 1080p fullscreen.)

Only the asteroid belt is seen in the video above—but on the outskirts of our solar system we are enveloped by the Oort cloud, a vast cloud of comets numbering a trillion or more, slowly circling our sun with varying trajectories. In this regard, the gravitional pull of the Sun and our neighboring planets is not our friend.

There is only one defense against this cosmic game of pong: Travelling elsewhere. Only when we inhabit other planets, other moons, giant space vessels, and, eventually, other star systems, will our species be resistant to the constant threat of cataclysmic impacts by space debris.

We inhabit a small, fragile, white and blue water balloon which floats around a cosmic battlefield where the weapons used are stellar machine guns that use small planets as bullets—and we’re naïvely hopeful that our world won’t suddenly… pop.

If we do not decentralize our civilization—if we keep deferring the choice to go beyond the Earth to the next generation, and the next, in favor of feeding the immediate but ephemeral greed of those who already have more than enough—if we let this planet remain our species’ single point of failure, we will have only ourselves and our short-shortsightedness to blame for our eventual demise.

Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring—not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive. And once you’re out there in space for centuries, for millennia, moving little worlds around and engineering planets, your species has been pried loose from its cradle. If they exist, many other civilizations will eventually venture far from home.

– Carl Sagan

We can discover and visit untold wonders in the depths of space, but it will be but a fortunate biproduct of our efforts to stay alive. We will pay the ultimate homage to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Robert Goddard, or we will die.

Very nice inspirational video by NASA:

“What kind of world do you want?” I can’t think of a better time to ask this question — and what an eloquent response to recent events.

Maybe the whale understood what was happening. Maybe it was just asserting dominance or warning other whales afterward. Either way, I feel good. Those are some smacking speedo’s, too.

via reddit

Callum Sutherland is at it again. Just see if you can resist watching this:

A scientific colleague tells me about a recent trip to the New Guinea highlands where she visited a stone age culture hardly contacted by Western civilization. They were ignorant of wristwatches, soft drinks, and frozen food. But they knew about Apollo 11. They knew that humans had walked on the Moon. They knew the names of Armstrong and Aldrin and Collins. They wanted to know who was visiting the Moon these days.

Answering that question had to have been awkward.

Many more at Milky Way Musings!