Rocket Summer

Rocket summer. The words passed among the people in the open, airing houses. Rocket summer. The warm desert air changing the frost patterns on the windows, erasing the art work. The skis and sleds suddenly useless. The snow, falling from the cold sky upon the town, turned to a hot rain before it touched the ground.

Rocket summer…

Ray Bradbury, “Rocket Summer,” The Martian Chronicles

 

Last night, despite being exhausted from work, I stayed up to watch the Falcon 9 launch. It was beautiful and amazing, despite the webcast dropping frames like crazy as people piled on to watch in the final minutes before launch.

I love me some rockets. Scoff if you will, make your smug penis jokes as you sip your no-fat latte and contemplate the meaninglessness of the Cosmos, but I love me some rockets.

Rockets are the vehicles of dreams.

Goddard wasn’t just some guy who thought up a crazy idea of riding explosions into outer space. He was a guy with a vision, and that vision was Mars. The rest was just the question of how to get there. Look at the whole history of rocketry and you’ll see that pattern — crazy dreamers building crazy, implausible seeming vehicles to fulfill those dreams. And they dreamed us right into Earth orbit, right to the damn Moon itself. They dreamed our robots to Venus and Mercury and Mars, to Jupiter and Saturn and Uranus and Neptune, to asteroids and comets, and soon to even the Dwarf planets Ceres and Pluto. They dreamed the Voyager probes to the very edge of interstellar space.

Rockets aren’t just neat because they are incredible technology, hugely complex machines that showcase so much human ingenuity that it takes your breath away. They’re neat because they are the perfect representations of our better selves. Our crazy dreaming selves.

This one seemed special, the Falcon 9 and its Dragon capsule that it sent to Earth orbit for a date with a space station. Such a mundane task, really, just a cargo run to the station, another yawner in low Earth orbit, gosh haven’t we seen this before? But it is new, because it is a private company, and one with a visionary leader who sees way beyond making some money doing milk runs for NASA and other companies. Like Goddard, Elon Musk dreams of Mars, and has boldly promised it in a decade.  So this launch felt like the start of something, as the private space race gathers steam and we stand, maybe, just perhaps, if we are daring enough, and let ourselves be those crazy dreamers, on the cusp of a new era.

I keep thinking of Heinlein and other classic SF authors. Like maybe, at last, we can claim their future, the one where humanity strides out into space and to the stars. Grabs ahold of adventure and possibility and exploration. I look at my country in particular, this U.S. of A, and well, one can be forgiven if it sometimes seems as if we’re a bit jaded, a bit tired, a bit under-motivated, content to sit on a crumbling empire and talk about how great we are while we fiddle with our iphones. But this stuff — immigrant driven , in the best American fashion! — gives me hope. Like maybe we have something in us yet, some crazy dreaming. Maybe we can stop being the cranky old empire trying to hold onto its ill-gotten gains, and become starry-eyed explorers and dreamers and makers. Like we can be our best, and not our worst.

[And yes, I went silent again. End of semester stress. Now over, so hopefully some kind of real blogging routine will come into being...]

My body’s now a begging bowl

It was a good day, actually. School, good. Social interactions, good. Work, even, pretty good. Productive, with lots of Calculus homework done that I really got into and felt that rush of Math Geek enthusiasm. And yet I can sit here, now, a bit moody.

Everything, it feels like, is a fight. Fixing this life, making a life, learning to be a real boy. Learning to live in passion, learning to connect to people in real ways.

Yuri’s Night: ignorance is bliss

Yuri Gagarin

There aren’t many points in history where you can point and say “this was new. After this, something fundamental had changed.”

One of those few times happened 51 years ago when, on April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space. Something new had happened, and humanity forever after is the species that has touched the sky.

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You look back at the early space race, and you realize how reckless it was. Everything had to be discovered, everything had to invented. Everything was the first time, shiny and new and unknown. Men hurdled into the heavens in metal cans knowing full well there was a good chance they’d die doing so. There was no prior experience, really, to guide their actions and decisions. At best they had roughly analogous experiences from which they could extrapolate.

Mostly, it was all new, all seat of the pants, all fake it till you make it. Before Gagarin got to experience the free fall of space first hand, everyone involved had been in free fall, no ground beneath their feet. To steal a line from Ray Bradbury, they had jumped off a cliff and then got frantically busy building a parachute.

There’s really no better metaphor for the modern human condition than the space race. Technology and science have brought so much new into the world, changed the rules so much, that we are always in free fall, trying to find our feet, trying to learn and understand this new world.

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A metaphor for my life at the moment, too, in so many ways. This going back to school thing, studying science, has been a lesson in ignorance. I am learning how much I don’t know. As the months go by the sum of new and unknown is increasing, and I never feel on top of it, never feel a master of it. I’m doing well but never feel like an expert or a natural. It’s all hard, and I always feel like I’m on the cusp of failure.

It’s weirdly, oddly glorious. I’m in free fall, the ground ripped from underneath me, and I feel more ignorant than ever. I spend a good part of my time feeling like I could faceplant at any second. Panic attacks are not infrequent.

And I’ve never been happier. This may, he says with a touch of dark humor, have something to do with how little happiness I’ve experienced in life up to now, thanks to depression and anxiety. But it has a lot to do with the simple fact that I actually feel alive. I’m smarter now because I am so ignorant, if that makes sense, and rather than scaring me, that ignorance makes me happy. It is a challenge to face, and holds the promise of tons of amazing things to learn. Ignorance, it turns out, is truly bliss, because it demands exploration.

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That constant sense of falling, of imminent possible failure, reminds me of an interesting thing about space travel: why do we call it free fall? It isn’t that there isn’t gravity — there’s actually quite a bit of it in low Earth orbit, a significant fraction of the gravity you and I feel on the surface of the Earth. So why do they feel weightless? Because they are falling. An orbiting craft pulls off a marvelous trick to stay aloft — it falls towards Earth but misses (shades of Douglas Adams there, eh?).

Fall in just the right way, and you can fly higher than any bird ever dreamed possible. You may throw up, too. But that’s okay.

Where there is doubt…

The more bored among you may have noticed that the slow and continuing rebirth of this blog has resulted in a new name: ubi dubium. That’s Latin for “where there is doubt,” and is the first part of a famous Latin proverb: Ubi dubium ibi libertas. Where there is doubt, there is freedom.

Given my interest in skepticism and science, I think you can see where this might seem like a good title for my blog. But there’s another reason, rather more ironical:

I’m really good at doubting myself.

I mean, really, really good. Frighteningly good. I had an attack of that this week — hell, it’s been going on a few weeks. Sudden deep, dark thoughts, all centered on the idea that I’m completely insane to think that I can do this school thing, turn my life around, do something in science. I’m too old, I’m too stupid, I’m too much of an idiot. All the usual self-bashing, ugly and nasty thoughts keeping me up late so that I’ve been walking around in a bit of a daze. So when I had my Calculus exam this week, which was, um — warning! understatement alert! — difficult, I walked away feeling like hell. I was sure I blew it, sure I was about to get the proof of just how much I suck, and…

Well, apparently I don’t, because I got a 99. That was a 93 plus a 6 point bonus, but, well, even the 93 would be pretty frickin’ awesome. I did all the hard stuff, and only lost those 7 points before the bonus because of little mistakes of no particular importance. Apparently, I get how to do integration.

Which, let me tell you, is not something I would have told you earlier this week.

So bad was my self-bashing mode that even when I saw my score online, after a friend texted me saying the prof had posted our exam scores, I didn’t believe it fully. I was sure it was a mistake. Our professor miswrites a lot of stuff in class, all the time, that’s probably what happened. She probably meant to type 66. It wasn’t until I actually had the test in my hand that I actually could let myself believe it.

See, I know we all go through this to some extent — those moments of doubt, especially when faced with things like tests or big projects at work or whatever. My problem, though, is that I LIVE that. All the time.

Doubt is a good thing, but Gregory the Skeptic has to remind himself that he’s after Skepticism, which is something more than doubt. Just doubting is as stupid as just believing.

To be a skeptic, to truly live it, I have to question my doubt as much as my beliefs. Because, really, when it comes to my doubts about myself, it’s really just beliefs anyway: ugly, ugly beliefs that, if I let them gain ground, can destroy me.

And that’s the kind of crap I’m done with. Where there is doubt, there is freedom — as long as you take the next step.

We celebrate the wrong things

Next weekend is Easter, when some dead or possibly completely mythical dude gets celebrated for something or another. To say that Easter is, to me, the least interesting of Christian holidays would be an understatement, and given its central place in Christianity this might lead to some conclusions about my feelings towards Christianity. But we all know about that, yeah?

So, yeah, Angry Birds. I know, what? What the hell kind of transition is that? Bear with me, or bare for me, or whatever amuses you. Anyway, I should say Angry Bird Seasons. There’s a connection, see, because this year Seasons has been doing some different stuff. And the latest addition (sadly not on the desktop Mac version yet, come on, Roxio!) is Cherry Blossoms! In the U.S., of course, there are a variety of Cherry Blossom festivals, all descendants of the Washington D.C. Cherry Blossom Festival. Which, of course, by way of a gift from the Japanese in 1912, is descended from a wonderful Japanese tradition, namely hanami, the viewing of flowers. Or, to give a more accurate view of what actually goes on, lots of eating and drinking and merry making while viewing flowers.

Now that’s a reason for a party.

There’s a lot of beauty in a flower. You can contemplate the colors and shape and scent. You can ponder the weird and wonderful mathematical beauty of Fibonacci numbers. This is worth a party. Especially if there’s sake.

Really, in our holidays, we do so little with Nature. I guess you could say we have Earth Day, which has become a sort of big thing, but that’s mostly a didactic holiday. I mean more like just days dedicated to taking a moment to goshwow about some aspect of the amazing world around us. Moments of contemplation, moments of joy. Moments to enjoy an ephemeral part of the world and remember that we are all ephemeral, and be grateful for the people we temporarily share our journey with.

So me, I’ll take Cherry Blossoms anytime. Though I guess in Tucson it would be more of a Palo Verde Festival, perhaps, which would be like a Cherry Blossom Festival, only yellow and with more sneezing.

Even with the sneezing, it would beat Easter.

Living Naturalism

So I’m reading Richard Carrier’s Sense and Goodness Without God right now, and it’s an interesting and challenging philosophical slog. It is, in large part, a defense of Naturalism as a worldview — not just Methodological Naturalism, but of Metaphysical Naturalism.

If that distinction confuses you, here’s the quick version: Methodological Naturalism is just that, a method — you work with the assumption that the universe, all that matter and energy, is all that exists, and base explanations on that assumption. It is, in short, the method of science. A scientist is free, in hers or his personal thoughts, to think there’s a God — but you don’t base your scientific explanations on that. You stick to what can be “seen” and measured.

Metaphysical Naturalism, as you might guess, is simply the next step — namely, the claim that the universe as we have it is, in fact, all there is. There is no recourse to the supernatural for explanation because, well, there ain’t no supernatural.

My leanings, you might further guess, are pretty much aligned with Carrier’s — if you need a philosophical label for me, “Metaphysical Naturalist” does nicely. I don’t have much in the way of elaborate defenses of that (hint: the Carrier book does an excellent job of that). It mostly boils down to the simple feeling, a very sciencey feeling at that, that there’s a reason Methodological Naturalism works, and by works I mean has delivered the most extensive increase in human knowledge in history. Call it the “If it quacks like a duck” argument.

But while the careful thinking and framing of arguments is important, let’s face it — personal philosophy and worldview is about our feelings, too, and this part interests me. It interests me because people can feel so very differently about the same thing. Some people freak out before the size of the universe, talking in hush whispers that it makes they feel vanishingly small and insignificant. Neil DeGrasse Tyson has talked, though, about a feeling I understand — it makes him feel bigger! Like, yeah, sure, I’m one small being on a small planet around a small star in a small galaxy among billions, but dang, you look up and see those stars, and realize that you come from there, the bits and pieces of you, all of them forged in those huge furnaces, and…

Wow. Just wow. As Sagan so poetically put it, deep down we know that is where we come from, and we long to return to the stars.

We aren’t just in the Cosmos –we’re part of it, completely bound up. To borrow another Sagan line, we are the Cosmos trying to know itself. That is a goose pimple sort of feeling right there.

Which brings me to that feeling part of my Naturalism. I have to draw on Sagan here again, from something he said about the idea of the afterlife in The Demon Haunted World. Sure, there might be one — unlikely, but heck, let’s go with the possibility for a moment. So what? Sagan’s idea was basically that he’ll deal with it when it comes — right now, he’s busy! There’s so much to do here, right now, in this life, this universe, that, well, the afterlife can wait.

My Google Calendar is filled up with appointments with the here and now, with this huge, overwhelming, entrancing Cosmos. If there is something more than the natural world as we know it (and leaving aside the incoherence lurking in such an idea for the moment), well, I’m busy, dammit.

Or, to put it another way, it’s simply that this is enough for me (imagine me waving my arm vaguely in an all encompassing way).  It is an awful lot. You want beauty? Holy cow, has the Cosmos got it! You want Mystery? It is the ultimate mystery! You want meaning? What, in this beautiful amazing Cosmos you can’t find something to give yourself meaning and purpose? Learn about it, come to know it a little better, help reveal its beauty a little more.

For a short time, I’m part of this. I’m a thinking, feeling part of the Cosmos, able to witness its beauty and splendor. That’s a pretty full plate of awesome to deal with. All the Google Rescheduler magic in the world won’t save the supernatural from the fact that I simply don’t have time for it.

(ps. I can’t help but wonder if I’m the first person to use Google Calendar features metaphorically…)

Thinking about thinking

So I’m thinking about thinking. So, lest I sit alone at the precipice of the MetaVoid, I thought I’d share it with you all.

I’m deeply interested in the ways we think, mostly because it goes so wrong so much of the time, and yet we get it right often enough to do some pretty amazing things. That second part is really amazing, actually, because golly, when it comes to thinking, an uncharitable person might be forgiven for saying we humans suck.

We mistake our feelings about things for facts about things. We mistake cause and effect, causation and correlation. We assume knowledge we can’t possibly have. We live, quite frankly, in a fantasy world most of the time.

The last week and a half has brought this home to me.

Vividly.

To wit: one of my great failures in thinking is my almost insane ability to construct Worst Case Scenarios. So having an exam, say, the last class before Spring Break was, well, troublesome. It was a Physics exam, and more importantly the exam on Newton’s Laws, the one we can’t drop, and I studied pretty hard for it, and went in feeling like I had a decent grasp on the material. I took the exam, and it was tough, but I went away that day feeling like I probably, all told, did pretty decent.

Then I had a week and a half to ponder and think and let my thinking go into insanely negative territory as I awaited the return to class and finally getting back the exam to find out, no doubt, that I had flunked it completely and totally, demonstrated the most appalling lack of grasp of Newton ever in the history of everything period, and what the hell had made me think I could do this science shit, and Jesus, Gregory, you’re just a stupid dumbass who should just accept that he’s a failure failure FAILURE.

I got an A, in case you’re wondering.

So there you go. Thinking gone horribly wrong. It’s weird, it’s interesting, it’s infuriating, and the struggle against it — the attempt to learn to think MORE BETTER — well, damn it, it never frickin’ ends, and every time you think you’ve taken a few steps you suddenly realize you’re sliding down a slope.

Really, it’s a wonder I can get dressed in the morning. That any of us can. I mean, I know I’m not unique in this stuff, this creation of whole fantasy realms of crap.

The aside to all this is that this kind of thing makes me realize one of the important reasons for Skepticism. When people talk about Skepticism they think so much in terms of debunking of alien visitations and psychics and and whatever latest crap Oprah is peddling, but it’s so much more. And one of the best answers to the “What’s the harm?” question is to focus away from specific things and more to the big stage. It’s not necessarily about any particular topic, but instead about modes of thinking. Because the way we think day to day, caught in misconceptions and fantasies divorced from the test of reality, well, just looks where it gets us. Oh, the places we can go with that kind of thinking!

Like, you know, driving oneself to haunted distraction and self-loathing for a week and a half.