• Approx. 1,500 Live Ladybugs
• A 17 Pound Bone-In Ham w/ Hoof
• Body Armor (In Tools and Home Improvement, no less.)
• Industrial Harddrive Punch

Disclosure Notice

As I see it, Gott makes two fatal errors in his skepticism of human space flight. The first is in his application of cosmic-scale principles to social-scale phenomena, and the second is in embracing ungrounded Rationalism over Empiricism.

The Copernican Principle makes a great deal of sense in cosmic scale systems and on cosmic scales of time. The universe is unspeakably vast and we are adrift somewhere within it. The age of the cosmos is mind-bogglingly long and, in comparison, our species has only been around for a very brief moment.

There’s no reason to think our place in this vastness is unusual. Nor any reason to believe that our few hundred thousand years is better or more preferable to the next few hundred thousand.

But we, as a species, don’t act or live on cosmic scales. We are, to paraphrase Richard Dawkins, “medium-sized objects moving at medium-sized speeds through a medium-sized world”. To apply cosmic-sized principles to us is to commit a Fallacy of Composition. Roughly: “Our place in the cosmos seems to obey principle X, therefore our place in human history must obey principle X.” Human history is a vanishingly small part of cosmic history and just because a principle applies to the whole doesn’t mean it applies to every fragment of it.¹

On the second score, Gott embraces the sort of mystical Rationalism that Hume and Kant should have put in the ground hundreds of years ago. Hume is my homeboy, so I’ll focus on his critiques.

Hume accurately pointed out that pure Rationalism has little to no explanatory power. It is essentially the quest for internally-consistent worlds unmoored from the real one. Reason alone cannot accurately predict, for instance, how two billiard balls will behave when they collide. Instead, one needs to have seen billiard balls collide before and used reason to understand the principles involved. Reason, in other words, must serve empirical observation. This was one of the greatest results of the Enlightenment.

Gott commits the sin of pure reason by discarding his observation and saying, well, there’s no purely logical reason why space flight has to move forward. It’s logically self-consistent that we might scrap all our rockets, turn our noses back to Earth, and never seek space again.

Yes. That’s true. But it’s completely unhelpful and as likely to be wrong as it is to be right. That’s because it throws out everything we know about human ingenuity, curiosity, desire, and acquisitiveness. I mean, hell, as we speak there are people seriously trying to solve the problem of mining asteroids. But sure, it’s possible that we’re at the end of the era of human space flight. Just as it’s logically possible that when two billiard balls strike each other at whatever speeds and from whatever angles that they should stop entirely. We only know that’s not true because of our observations of how billiard balls behave in the real world.

In essence, Gott is asking the wrong question. He’s asking: “What reason do I have for believing that we are at the start, rather than the end, of human space flight, and is that reason consistently defensible?” In a post-Enlightenment world, the correct question to be asking is: “Where’s the evidence that we’re at the end of human space flight?” Personally, I see tons of evidence that we’re at the beginning, but none at all that we’re at the end. Therefore the only reasonable conclusion that I can make is that we as a species still have a bright future in space.

UPDATE: I strongly encourage you to read the Centauri Dreams post linked above. My post focuses only on a very narrow part of it, and there is much more to Gott’s argument and Gilster’s commentary than I address here.

¹ This argument is isomorphic to the one presented in response to anti-evolution types who falsely invoke the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Entropy must increase on a cosmic scale and in any closed system, true. But our planet is not the cosmos, nor is it a closed system. It’s just a part of the whole. The system obeys the law and so we, at least for a little while, can get a pass and the law still holds.

So imagine you’re working on a low-dpi device. In order to select a drawable, you’re using a basic selector called “my_image.xml”. This is in res/drawable. For whatever reason, on medium-dpi devices, you just want a static image, so you make a “my_image.png” and drop it in /drawable-mdpi:

/res
    /drawable
        my_image.xml
    /drawable-mdpi
        my_image.png

On your low-dpi device, layout references in XML to (“@drawable/my_image”) will actually reference the medium-dpi PNG, instead of the selector in the drawable folder. In other words, Android’s resourcing system prefers PNGs to XML selectors, even if the PNG is for devices with the wrong dpi.

Moral(s) of the story?

• Avoid naming collisions where possible.
• Avoid mixing generic drawables with drawable-xdpi whenever possible.
• Android will pick images over selectors if there is a conflict.

New statistics show that the rate of child death across sub-Saharan Africa is not just in decline—but that decline has massively accelerated, just in the last few years. From the middle to the end of the last decade, rates of child mortality across the continent plummeted much faster than they ever had before.

The rates are decreasing by as much as 10% per year in some countries. These improvements are thanks in large part to technical advancements, human empathy and charity, and (yes) globalization. Three of the many great trends of the modern era and three of the reasons why things are better than you think.

Oh wait, I can.

The whole thing is streaming for free on SSPU’s website and I strongly encourage you to go check it out. SSPU are one of the greatest bands of our era and Neck of the Woods is strong evidence that they’ve got every bit of their old magic and then some. Absolutely brilliant stuff.

Need some evidence? Check out this track, “Make Believe”:

Killer, no? Now go listen to the rest of the album. You owe it to your ears.

Yesterday hooligans attacked the city I love. They smashed windows and impeded the life of the polis that I call home. The threw firebombs, smashed shop windows, and tried their best to derail and destroy civilization.

I’m happy to report that they failed once again.

Government, as it always does, responded with hollow threats, and empty proclamations.

Not all of the demonstrators on Tuesday were violent, of course. The vast majority were peaceful and took to the streets not with sledgehammers and masks, but with signs and slogans. These protesters are, in a way, evidence of the antidote to barbarism. I strongly disagree with most of their messages, but they tried to reason with me rather than coerce me. They were civilized in the truest sense of the word, and in stark contrast to the barbarians who sought to cow us rather than convince us.

Through it all, normal people went about their business. They worked, played, and enjoyed their lives, voluntarily pursuing their own aims and desires. They were, for the most part, heedless to the two groups, one that wanted to destroy the things they built, and the other than want to control them.

My girlfriend and I recently hired a cleaner. This may seem like a non sequitor, but it relates completely. We voluntarily paid a couple of enterprising people to come clean our apartment because we have projects to which we’d rather devote our time. Voluntary exchange in which both parties benefit. This is anathema to both the riotous barbarians who would smash everything we have built and the fascists who would seek to control it. Value freely exchanged for value. My girlfriend and I come home to a sparklingly clean apartment and two hard working, entrepreneurial individuals leave with the price they command for their labor. We engaged in neither violence, nor coercion. Goods freely exchanged for labor, and both better off for the trade.

The day following the riots my friend Chris and I walked through downtown on our lunch hour. Just 24 hours after the demonstrations and unrest, the city looked as if nothing ever happened. Many of the smashed windows had already been replaced. Much of the graffiti was either gone or in the process of being washed away. Seattle, after a brief, low-grade fever, was quickly on the mend.

I have a theory that there’s a sort of civilization-level LD-50 for for barbarism. The higher the concentration of people in society who get what they want by violence, coercion, and extortion, the more likely it is that the civilization will fall apart. Various institutions (like free market capitalism, institutional transparency, and good governance) can drastically increase a society’s tolerance, but it’s ultimately heightened concentrations of thugs and parasites that brings down a civilization.

I have no strong evidence this theory, but it helps me explain some of what I’ve seen in the world. Fortunately, Tuesday’s demonstrations and the orderly cleanup thereof tells me that our society is still very healthy. That we’re still well below the levels of social corruption that begin to truly threaten the system. Most of the people aired their grievances the way civilized human beings do: peacefully trying to convince one another. And the few that chose violence did no noticeable long-term damage to either my beautiful city, or our civilization.

So take heart. There were riots on Tuesday, but all evidence of them was gone by Wednesday. And even during the thick of it, there wasn’t much to fear anyway. Our civilization is healthy, and it can easily withstand a few adolescent thugs smashing windows.

I like this video’s focus on the social aspects that make Sweden’s economy work. Cultural differences often don’t get nearly enough credit when it comes to differences in performance between nations. We tend to over-estimate the (admittedly considerable) role of governance and economics and vastly under-estimate the (also considerable) influence of culture.