The Real Tragedy of 2012

No, I am not predicting a Palin Presidency in the last year of the Mayan calendar.

Nor am I predicting that the tetrahedral energy fields inside the earth must realign in a couple of years, yanking as it were the tablecloth from underneath every living thing and every building and every mountain on the surface. And I'm not suggesting, either, the way a show called "2012: Shocking Secrets" (Syfy Channel) did, that there just may be an ancient archive beneath a certain random patch of sand in Egypt that would contain an Atlantean-inspired labyrinth structured in a manner to help us understand how to survive cataclysms--if only we could just find any evidence of it!

What I am saying is that if there's ever a time when the cranks and simpletons turn out to be right, and that if it ever comes in the form of any sort of Armageddon that will prevent these paranoid, doom-obsessed oafs from ever having to go to those stupid jobs of theirs ever again, and if these oafs have succeeded in surviving the worldwide catastrophe by hunkering down inside an old missile silo (growing food and raising animals down there), then the tragedy for us all is that the genetic material passed on to the next round of human unfortunates will be of suspect quality indeed.

And perhaps this is why humanity has never progressed all that far in certain respects: because all the smart people are too busy studying the genome or writing great plays or building clever code bases for gaming devices while the very dumbest and most paranoid members of humanity are obsessed with locating bunkers where they might survive when the comet hits. And perhaps this has happened a few times over the course of the last few hundred thousand years (roughly as far back as when the first homos erectus apparently daubed paint on the walls of caves and made nightstands out of bear-skulls).

Perhaps the myths about prior golden ages are true--Atlantis, Mu, Lemuria, Middle Earth, the American 1950s--and what happened was that each was struck down by catastrophe but that all the musicians and teachers were killed in their conservatories while just a few cranks and oafs and ancient-text-thumpers were dumb enough to have spent their lives building underground shelters and also far too dumb to have recognized they ought to have preserved a few books for the edification of the new races of man that would succeed them.

It certainly seems possible today that the half-literate yoyos stockpiling generators, fuel and generic canned goods may, if they are lucky, survive the imminent flipping of the magnetic poles, or the arrival of Planet X (that will tear away large portions of the Earth); but they will have forgotten to preserve Mozart or Lou Reed or Thomas Mann or McSweeney's and certainly not the means to create microchips, and so in a hundred thousand years when the great cities are rebuilt, those future humans will look back and wonder how those dopey men and women of eons past could have gotten along for so very many centuries without having developed any meaningful culture at all.

Isn't that what we wonder today? Do we not try to puzzle out how men and women lived for two hundred and ninety-thousand years before anyone bothered to write anything down, and how culture seemed to arrive already in full flower? Is it possible that, say, a hundred thousand years ago there were some yobs building an underground haven to protect themselves from tetrahedral realignment, and that they alone survived but were kind of like the vapid cranks doing the same thing today and therefore would have been too stupid to have gotten access to and protected the magic crystals that provided free energy to all ancient races?

That prospect is the looming tragedy of 2012. Unless by some cruel twist of fate we get stuck with Sarah Palin as President, in which case all bets will be off.

I Love Science for its Mistakes (Moonbomb)

The other day--the same day, in fact, that our President controversially won the Nobel Peace Prize--NASA bombed the moon.

The poet in me--and many others, from what I can gather--was wounded. How could you want to bomb that mystical night-rider, puller of tides, mysterious mover of hearts? How to bomb that pale smiling disk for which wolves howl and that once shone a ghostly gleam on the polished sides of the Great Pyramids at Gizeh? It was one thing to gently land, take some rocks, romp in big funny suits, and depart in a flash. Quite another to hit the soft body of the moon with a missile, expecting to "throw up a six-mile high plume" of debris, and then with a second projectile, take measurements. It seemed in a way ignominious and certainly disrespectful to--and I think we can all agree--a lady.

But the rationalist in me could barely squelch a cheer. It sure sounded exciting! And anyway, the moon, a celestial body like any other, is bombarded by projectiles hundreds of times a year. Look at those craters! They didn't get there because poets were worrying about the moon's complexion. Then there was the whole "looking for water" gambit, which also held promise. Does anyone really hate the idea of a sustainable moonbase? Are we supposed to be stuck here on this stinky old Earth forever, or what?

The best part of the whole thing, and my point in this post, was that it certainly appears that the moonbombing was a very public, much over-hyped flop. There was no visible plume. Who knows what happened? It made no sense. And that is what I love about science.

Unlike the more vulnerable constructions of the universe (for instance that of, say, the literal Christian religion), science (should I capitalize it?) can withstand repeated failures and still not fail as a system of inquiry. For as we all know, science is based on hypothesis, discovery, and inference. Science never claims to "know" anything--only to have observed what appears to be, and can be demonstrated again to be, cause and effect.

This ice-veined method has given us much in the way of sustenance and comfort. Rampant, it has also threatened our very existence. Clearly the scientific method holds awesome power and only the simplest or most obstinate would deny its benefits (or its potential for harm). But it is the ability to fail--this fearlessness of failure; in fact this self-invitation to failure such that one can learn from the failure--that is the heart and soul of the discipline.

While I am certain there were a few red faces around the table at NASA after the expected result(a big, visible plume of dust) failed to materialize (though they claim to have caused enough disturbance to make a study in any case), the event certainly did not, despite not having lived up to expectations, deter a single scientist from belief in the usefulness of the discipline or even the mission itself.

And unlike the baseless, harebrained claims made by adherents to other belief systems (the world will end in 2012, the world was going to end in 1999, the world will end when the righteous are pulled up to heaven in the Rapture), science can continue to make considered predictions, have them fail, dust itself off, and try again. It does not claim to have "known" anything. It just keeps trying, and trying, and trying. And eventually, by all evidence, it will somehow succeed.

And as opposed to the spurious certitudes of seers and priests, how can you not love that about science?