Don't tell my heart, my achy breaky heart

I am acutely tuned into the weather.  All the time. It has been that way for many years. 

Maybe because right from my childhood, I was always listening to my great uncles and the people in the villages talk about the rains, water level in the canals, wind storms wiping out what would have been a bumper banana crop, ... So much so that I would get an uneasy feeling if there were reports that the monsoon had failed.  It felt personal.

It continues to be personal.  Acutely so.  There are times when I have had to calm myself down.

I am an environmental nutcase.

I have mentioned in plenty in this blog about what a paradise this part of the world is.  I often worry that climate change is messing up the paradise. 

The effects of a weirding climate are even worse in the old country; I have stopped reading news reports primarily because it aches my heart that we humans have made such a mess of life.

I can, therefore, relate to people writing and talking about climate trauma and eco despair--even though to most outsiders I don't ever come across as an environmental nutcase.

In the Red Hook workshop, which used the pioneering decades-old work of the environmental grief activist Joanna Macy, the facilitator, Jess Serrante, said something that hit me like a thunderclap.
“Our pain for what is happening is the other side of the coin of our love for the world,” she told us. “We feel such depths of despair because we love the planet so much.”  

I do. Which is why many times I have embedded in my posts Carl Sagan's moving, poetic, note about our pale blue dot--"a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

There is always an underlying panic, I think, that the paradise won't be a paradise for long.  The writer says it well for me too:

I found myself paying greedy attention to the rustling trees, the flutter of teeny birds. I felt a visceral thrum of gratitude for what still exists, for what has to be fought for, while it still can be beheld.

If we met those who live out there in deep space ...

Sometimes, I do wonder if atheists like me think about the "big questions" a lot more than do most religious folks!  And even when I am not, well, I run into sentences like this one, which then triggers that thinking:

In a universe where you’re no longer expecting God to provide the order, we are forced to ask: where is the order? Where’s the sense to it all and what are we then a part of?

Or, as we often tend to tell students, it is all about making order out of the chaos out there.

Anyway, that quote is from this interesting interview/essay on the anthropology of searching for aliens. Thanks to my everyday cup of intellectual coffee. Wired interviews Kathryn Denning, who observes:

When did we first start thinking that there might be extraterrestrial life? And my reply is: When did we start thinking that there might not be? The sky has always been very busy, and the default position has always been that it’s populated. That doesn’t mean anything but that ideological substrate has always been there.
Only 200 years ago, we thought there could be people on the moon. Then, we got a good look at the moon and saw, well there’s no Lunarians there. And then there were the Martians — Lowell and all that — and it wasn’t very long ago, less than 100 years ago. As our range of vision keeps on moving outwards, the aliens keep on moving outwards too. And that’s one way you can look at SETI; it’s the logical trajectory of an idea that’s always been around.
And, of course, you can look at it within a religious framework. Our 20th century western culture includes Christianity and beings populating the Heavens. But anthropologically speaking, SETI also could be seen as being a reaction to the collapse of traditional religion.

For all I know, we are being observed by alien anthropologists wondering what the heck we are doing here!

Denning makes wonderful observations throughout the interview.  The one that made me pause and think for a while was this:

NASA renamed the Mars Pathfinder lander the “Carl Sagan Memorial Station.” Any archeologist or anthropologist will tell you that one of the most effective ways of colonizing territory, at least ideologically, is through your dead.

 I hadn't thought about it this way .... really?  Seriously?  Calling it the “Carl Sagan Memorial Station” has such implications?  Are, or we kind of sort of stretching the argument?

I wish we would make contact with aliens within my lifetime.  Will be awesome.  Though, Stephen Hawking thinks not, and Denning has something to say about Hawking's view.  Read the piece to find out what she has to say :)

More on the darkening space, Pongal, and gods in India

Since the earlier post, I have been thinking a lot about physics--a love for the subject that goes all the way back to high school days.  And, about the wonderfully gifted popularizer of science and physics: Carl Sagan.  Of course, growing up in India, and without television, meant that I had no idea about Sagan; I hadn't even completed high school when PBS began airing Cosmos here in the US.  It was much later in life, as a graduate student, that I started reading/watching Sagan.  (One of my greatest regrets was that I missed out on an opportunity to go to a Richard Feynman lecture at Caltech, during my first semester in this country, and a year later he died!!!)

Anyway, thinking more about how lonely we humans are in this universe, which is rapidly expanding, made me go back to Carl Sagan's Cosmos.  What a coincidence it was that I should watch it now, as in during this time of January--"Pongal" that Sagan talks about in this video was two days ago, and I watched this video on "Maattu Pongal"!  Of course, Sagan butchers the pronunciation, but that is ok :)

It is shame that even a series like Cosmos has not been able to rid the creationists who make a caricature of American scientific enterprise.  The pursuit of science and truth is being ridiculed on a daily basis, when it really ought to be the other way around.  This ought to worry us a lot as a metric of the decline of America :(

How much would you pay for the universe?

Earlier this morning, NPR had a segment on the final remaining space shuttle rides.  I recalled how my high school friend, Srikumar, and I were excited to hear about a space shuttle program--yes, we were back in India, in a small town.  It sounded absolutely beyond my imagination that there would be this spacecraft to take astronauts back and forth.  All the more wild it was given that I hadn't seen the inside of an airplane up until then--actually, it was quite a few more years after all this that I actually stepped into an airplane.

Over the last few years, the US has not been able to figure out what its space policy ought to be.  It was bizarre when in the middle of two wars, one day, President Bush jumped up and said that we are going to Mars.  That sounded so hollow.  And now President Obama's comments are far from encouraging when it comes to NASA and space exploration.

I suppose we need a Carl "billions and billions" Sagan to get us all pumped up .... Neil deGrasse Tyson does his part ...