How healthy you are is dependent on where you live. Americans suffer more cancers, heart disease, mental illness, and other chronic diseases than those who live in other wealthy nations, despite having the most expensive healthcare system in the world. Why? Embark on a journey to unravel the profound impact of public policies on American health from before birth in Born Sick in the Improving the Health of a Nation. Delve into the intricate web where economic inequality weaves a tapestry of sickness stemming from a highly stressed society. This compelling read illuminates the need for transformative change in social safety nets and public policies to uplift national health and well-being. Through vivid storytelling, the book unveils the symptoms, diagnosis, and ‘medicine’ required to steer the nation toward a healthier future. Join the movement for a healthier America by embracing the insightful revelations and empowering calls to action presented within the pages of this eye-opening book.
Stephen Bezruchka began his journey as a Harvard mathematics graduate who fell in love with the mountains of Nepal. There, he wrote the country’s first trekking guidebook before returning to the U.S. to study medicine at Stanford University. In the mid-1970s, he went back to the Himalayas to establish a community health project in a remote valley, far from any roads. This experience shaped a unique career where he alternated between working as an emergency physician in the U.S. and teaching medicine to local doctors in the most isolated regions of Nepal.
Through his travels, Stephen noticed a puzzling gap between America’s vast wealth and its actual health outcomes. This realization led him to earn a Master of Public Health from Johns Hopkins University to study the social and political factors that drive health. Today, he views the country itself as a “patient” in need of treatment. He focuses on educating the public about the root causes of health through the Population Health Forum, which he founded in 1998, and his leadership roles with organizations like Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility.
Currently, Stephen is an Associate Teaching Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington, where he has received numerous awards for his teaching and community service. As an author, his works include popular titles such as A Guide to Trekking in Nepal, The Pocket Doctor, and Altitude Illness, many of which have been translated into multiple languages. When he isn’t busy as an academic or economic inequality activist, he continues to pursue his passion for mountaineering, having explored the highest peaks of North America, Pakistan, and China.
This article is about the absence of clear evidence of extraterrestrial life. For a type of estimation problem, see Fermi problem.
The Fermi paradox is the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence.[1][2][3]
The paradox is named after physicist Enrico Fermi, who informally posed the question—remembered by Emil Konopinski as “But where is everybody?”—during a 1950 conversation at Los Alamos with colleagues Konopinski, Edward Teller, and Herbert York. The paradox first appeared in print in a 1963 paper by Carl Sagan and the paradox has since been fully characterized by scientists. Early formulations of the paradox have also been identified in writings by Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (1686) and Jules Verne (1865), and by Soviet rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1933).
There have been many attempts to resolve the Fermi paradox,[4][5] such as suggesting that intelligent extraterrestrial beings are extremely rare, that the lifetime of such civilizations is short, or that they exist but (for various reasons) humans see no evidence.
Chain of reasoning
Some of the facts and hypotheses that together serve to highlight the apparent contradiction:
With high probability, some of these stars have Earth-like planets orbiting in the habitable zone.[8]
Many of these stars, and hence their planets, are much older than the Sun.[9][10] If Earth-like planets are typical, some may have developed intelligent life long ago.
Even at the slow pace of envisioned interstellar travel, the Milky Way galaxy could be completely traversed in a few million years.[12]
Since many of the Sun-like stars are billions of years older than the Sun, the Earth should have already been visited by extraterrestrial civilizations, or at least their probes.[13]
However, there is no convincing evidence that this has happened.[12]
In 1950,[note 1] Fermi visited Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and, while walking to the Fuller Lodge for lunch, conversed with fellow physicists Emil Konopinski, Edward Teller, and Herbert York about reports of flying saucers and the feasibility of faster-than-light travel.[18] When the conversation shifted to unrelated topics at the lodge, Fermi blurted a question variously recalled as: “Where is everybody?” (Teller), “Don’t you ever wonder where everybody is?” (York), or “But where is everybody?” (Konopinski).[19] According to Teller, “The result of his question was general laughter because of the strange fact that, in spite of Fermi’s question coming out of the blue, everybody around the table seemed to understand at once that he was talking about extraterrestrial life.”[20]
According to York, Fermi “followed up with a series of calculations on the probability of earthlike planets, the probability of life given an earth, the probability of humans given life, the likely rise and duration of high technology, and so on. He concluded on the basis of such calculations that we ought to have been visited long ago and many times over.”[21] However, Teller recalled that Fermi did not elaborate on his question beyond “perhaps a statement that the distances to the next location of living beings may be very great and that, indeed, as far as our galaxy is concerned, we are living somewhere in the sticks, far removed from the metropolitan area of the galactic center.”[20][note 2]
Fermi was not the first to note the paradox. In his 1686 book Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle—later the secretary of the French Academy of Sciences—constructs a dialogue in which Fontenelle’s claims of “intelligent beings exist in other worlds, for instance the Moon” are refuted by a character who notes that “If this were the case, the Moon’s inhabitants would already have come to us before now.”[24] This may have inspired a similar discussion in Jules Verne‘s 1865 novel Around the Moon, which has also been identified as an early conceptualization of the Fermi paradox.[25]
Another early formulation Fermi paradox was presented and dissected in the 1930s writings of Russian rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.[26] Although his rocketry work was embraced by the materialistSoviets, his philosophical writings were suppressed and unknown for most of the 20th century.[27] Tsiolkovsky noted that critics refute the existence of advanced extraterrestrial life as such civilizations would have visited humanity or left some detectable evidence.[28] He posed a solution to the paradox: humanity is quarantined by aliens to protect its independent cultural development, which resembles the zoo hypothesis proposed by John Ball.[29]
The Fermi question first appeared in print in a footnote of a 1963 paper by Carl Sagan.[30] Two years later, Stephen Dole noted the dilemma at a symposium—”If there are so many advanced forms of life around, where is everybody?”—but did not attribute it to Fermi.[31] A chapter of Intelligent Life in the Universe, co-authored by Sagan and Iosif Shklovsky, was headlined with the Fermi-attributed “Where are they?”[31] The Fermi question also appeared in NASA‘s 1970 Project Cyclops report, a 1973 book by Sagan, and a 1975 article in JBIS Interstellar Studies by David Viewing that first described it as a paradox.[32][31]
Later that year, Michael Hart published a detailed examination of the paradox in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society.[28] Hart, who concluded that “we are the first civilization in our Galaxy”, proposed four broad categories of solutions to the paradox: those that are physical (a space travel limitation), sociological (aliens choose not to visit Earth), temporal (aliens have not had time to travel to Earth), or that extraterrestrials have already visited.[28][33] His paper sparked significant interest in the paradox among academics and even politicians, with a discussion held in the House of Lords.[34] A seminal response—”Extraterrestrial intelligent beings do not exist”—was written by Frank Tipler, who argued that, if an advanced extraterrestrial civilization existed, their self-replicating spacecraft should have already been detected in the Solar System.[35] The term “Fermi paradox” was coined in a 1977 article by David Stephenson and was widely adopted.[30]
The popularization of the Fermi paradox damaged search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) efforts, and Senator William Proxmire cited Tipler when he spurred the termination of the federally funded NASA SETI program in 1981.[33] According to Robert Gray, the paradox may contribute to a “de facto prohibition on government support for research in a branch of astrobiology”.[30]
Criticism
Fermi did not publish anything regarding the paradox, with Sagan once suggesting the quote to be apocryphal.[33][28][note 3] Scientists like Robert Gray have criticized its attribution to Fermi, and alternative terms like the “Hart–Tipler argument” or “Tsiolkovsky–Fermi–Viewing–Hart paradox” have been proposed.[37][38] According to Gray, the current understanding of the paradox misinterprets Fermi’s question and subsequent discussion, which was challenging the feasibility of interstellar travel rather than the existence of advanced extraterrestrial life.[39]
The Fermi paradox is a conflict between the argument that scale and probability seem to favor intelligent life being common in the universe, and the total lack of evidence of intelligent life having ever arisen anywhere other than on Earth.
The first aspect of the Fermi paradox is a function of the scale or the large numbers involved: there are an estimated 200–400 billion stars in the Milky Way[40] (2–4 × 1011) and 70 sextillion (7×1022) in the observable universe.[41] Even if intelligent life occurs on only a minuscule percentage of planets around these stars, there might still be a great number of extant civilizations, and if the percentage were high enough it would produce a significant number of extant civilizations in the Milky Way. This assumes the mediocrity principle, by which Earth is a typical planet.
The second aspect of the Fermi paradox is the argument of probability: given intelligent life’s ability to overcome scarcity, and its tendency to colonize new habitats, it seems possible that at least some civilizations would be technologically advanced, seek out new resources in space, and colonize their star system and, subsequently, surrounding star systems. Since there is no known evidence on Earth, or elsewhere in the known universe, of other intelligent life after 13.8 billion years of the universe’s history, there is a conflict requiring a resolution. Some examples of possible resolutions are that intelligent life is rarer than is thought, that assumptions about the general development or behavior of intelligent species are flawed, or, more radically, that the scientific understanding of the nature of the universe is quite incomplete.
The Fermi paradox can be asked in two ways.[note 4] The first is, “Why are no aliens or their artifacts found on Earth, or in the Solar System?”. If interstellar travel is possible, even the “slow” kind nearly within the reach of Earth technology, then it would only take from 5 million to 50 million years to colonize the galaxy.[42] This is relatively brief on a geological scale, let alone a cosmological one. Since there are many stars older than the Sun, and since intelligent life might have evolved earlier elsewhere, the question then becomes why the galaxy has not been colonized already. Even if colonization is impractical or undesirable to all alien civilizations, large-scale exploration of the galaxy could be possible by probes. These might leave detectable artifacts in the Solar System, such as old probes or evidence of mining activity, but none of these have been observed.
The second form of the question is “Why are there no signs of intelligence elsewhere in the universe?”. This version does not assume interstellar travel, but includes other galaxies as well. For distant galaxies, travel times may well explain the lack of alien visits to Earth, but a sufficiently advanced civilization could potentially be observable over a significant fraction of the size of the observable universe.[43] Even if such civilizations are rare, the scale argument indicates they should exist somewhere at some point during the history of the universe, and since they could be detected from far away over a considerable period of time, many more potential sites for their origin are within range of human observation. It is unknown whether the paradox is stronger for the Milky Way galaxy or for the universe as a whole.[44]
Buddha points to the earth Zen master points to the moon Arjuna points to the target Mary points to her child Jesus points to the heart Rumi points to Shams We all look until we see
Ellen Grace O’Brian US contemporary poet; Yoga Teacher
AN OPPORTUNITY FOR DAILY REFLECTION BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE SCHOOL OF PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY
Of course I knew that Charles Dickens had what was arguably the most brutal and public marital separation in literary history. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know that in 1858 he left his wife Catherine, to whom he had married for two decades and who had borne him ten children. The dissolution occurred partly because the marriage had essentially been arranged and had never been happy, and partly because Dickens—then in his late forties—had fallen obsessively in love with an eighteen-year-old actress, Ellen Ternan.
When I decided that I would try to write a novel—eventually entitled Five Weeks in the Country—about the visit that Hans Christian Andersen paid to Dickens in 1857 and during which Andersen overstayed his welcome and made the family (and himself) miserable, I knew that the dissolution of the Dickens marriage—or at least the lead-up to the separation—would have to be part of the narrative.
I decided to end the novel before Dickens left Catherine, before he told anyone who would listen that she belonged in a mental hospital, before he forbid their children to see or speak to their mother. (Of the nine surviving Dickens children, only Charles, the oldest, disobeyed his father’s wishes and remained in contact with his mother). And I changed the ordering of events, so that Dickens’s attraction to Ellen Ternan began when Andersen was staying with him, when in fact it started shortly after Andersen left.
For one thing, I’d known about the disturbing facts of the case for so long that they could hardly surprise me into a new reading of the novels.
The events that surrounded the break-up would have overshadowed everything that came before and would have made it impossible to feel any sympathy for Dickens at all. As it happens, most early readers of my novel have found Dickens less sympathetic than I do. I realize that many people are understandably disturbed by the spectacle of a middle-aged man falling for a very young woman, but what had resonated with me (and not, apparently, with others) was the idea that even the most devoted, loving and deeply committed family member may experience a moment when they have seriously burned out on the pressures and demands of family life—especially, I imagined, a family as large as the Dickens household.
At this point, I should also note that I am a huge Dickens fan. Perhaps my love for his work began when, as a child, I saw on TV the early, black-and-white John Mills film of Great Expectations; certainly it began when I read Bleak House for a college survey course. I made a pilgrimage to see the Dickens memorabilia in the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection, which owns the writer’s “performance” copy of A Christmas Carol, marked up with prompts for the gestures he planned to make during public readings, as well as the letter opener he commissioned a taxidermist to fashion from the paw of his much adored dead cat, Bob. (Sentimental taxidermy was popular during the Victorian era.) I’ve read all his novels, some once, some several times. I visited his house in London.
Perhaps my passion for Dickens’s novels will help to explain why I was so taken aback—shocked, really—when Kerri Miller, the smart, thoughtful, humorous person who interviewed me for Minnesota Public Radio, asked if knowing about Dickens’s bad behavior, about his loathsome treatment of his hapless wife, has affected my feelings about his work.
I suppose the main reason I was so startled was that I had never actually thought about the question. It simply hadn’t occurred to me. For one thing, I’d known about the disturbing facts of the case for so long that they could hardly surprise me into a new reading of the novels. For another, I am one of those people who believe that my feelings about an author’s misdeeds, crimes, failings are ultimately unrelated to my opinion about, and the pleasure I get from, their work.
Through the writing of much of it, I felt that I was taking a hard and (yes) sympathetic look at the way that we become someone else when we write.
I know that not everyone will agree, but Alice Munro’s books have stayed on my shelves and my respect for her work has remained unchanged despite the deeply disturbing revelations about the blind eye she turned on the fact that her second husband was molesting her daughter. I wrote a brief biography of Caravaggio, who is supposed to have killed someone over a fight about a bet on a tennis game, and I don’t think that I ever fully internalized the fact that my idol was a murderer.
Perhaps one reason that I find it so easy to separate the art from the artist is that I believe that the person and the work are two separate entities. That is, once I’ve written something, I feel that it takes on a life of its own, that is no more “mine” than are my children and grandchildren.
Even when I have written autobiographically—especially when I’ve written autobiographically—I’ve often felt as if I was writing about someone else, someone who lived during the time about which I was writing, someone who did many of the same things I did and shared many of the same feelings. The characters in my novels aren’t me, though the books may contain elements of my personal history, my daily life, my sense of the world. Once I’ve finished them, they’re on their own, sent out into the world to reach the people who want and need to read them, out in the world to do whatever they’re going to do.
In theory, the contradictions should have been greater, the divide between the life and the work should have been stronger and deeper in the case of someone like Dickens, whose fiction was so thoroughly suffused with empathy for humanity, so full of the compassion that he seems to have lacked for his own family.
But that was one of the things I was writing about—one of the aspects that interested and engaged me when I was working on Five Weeks in the Country. Through the writing of much of it, I felt that I was taking a hard and (yes) sympathetic look at the way that we become someone else when we write, someone wiser and deeper and maybe kinder than we are when we do the grocery shopping and cook a meal and call the family in for dinner.
The history of art is full of monsters. Is there more cruelty and criminality among artists than in the general population? I have no idea. And books can indeed have a profoundly and disastrously evil effect on their readers. But by and large, few paintings and novels are in themselves monstrous, and they continue to enlighten, to hearten us and to give us great pleasure, regardless of the moral failings of the flawed humans who created them.
Francine Prose is the author of twenty-two works of fiction including the highly acclaimed The Vixen; Mister Monkey; the New York Times bestseller Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932; A Changed Man, which won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; and Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her works of nonfiction include the highly praised Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer, which has become a classic. The recipient of numerous grants and honors, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, a Director’s Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Prose is a former president of PEN American Center, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.
The revolutionary James Webb Space Telescope and next-gen radio telescopes are probing what’s known as the epoch of reionization. It holds clues to the first stars and galaxies, and perhaps the nature of dark matter.
For millions of years following the Big Bang, after the universe’s roiling soup of particles had cooled, the cosmos was a dark and boring place. There were no stars to make light. No familiar swirls of galaxies. Certainly no planets. And the entire universe was shrouded in neutral hydrogen gas.
Then, perhaps 100 million years or so in, everything started to change. Over the next billion-odd years, the universe went from a bland, unimpressive landscape to a rich and dynamic one. This profound shift began when the first stars lit up. As they burned, generating heat and forging new matter, their intense light began tearing apart the hydrogen that pervaded the universe. Everywhere electrons were ripped from these atoms, leaving the bulk of hydrogen — the most abundant element in the universe — in the ionized state it remains in today.
The Big Bang created a hot, ionized soup of subatomic particles. Hundreds of thousands of years in, in an event known as recombination, neutral atoms formed. The period known as the dark ages followed; the universe was suffused with neutral hydrogen gas. But when the first stars turned on, sometime more than 100 million years after the Big Bang, they ripped electrons from the hydrogen, gradually reionizing the cosmos.CREDIT: NAOJ
This pivotal period — when all that hydrogen went from one form to another — is known as the epoch of reionization. It began with our cosmic dawn and ushered in the modern era with all its marvelous textures and features. It serves as the backdrop for when the universe grew up.
“It’s the last major shift that happens to our universe,” says theoretical astrophysicist Julian Muñoz of the University of Texas at Austin. Everything changed over that billion years or so and nothing much has changed in the billions of years since.
While there are models that describe how this great transition might have happened, giant gaps in our picture remain. When did the first stars form and when did light, escaping their host galaxies, kick off reionization? What kinds of galaxies were most responsible and what was the role of black holes? How did reionization proceed across time and space? And what clues might it hold to other cosmic mysteries, like the nature of dark matter?
“We don’t understand how the universe came to be what it is today,” Muñoz says.
Some answers are now within reach, thanks to new tools that allow scientists to look back deep into the universe’s first billion years. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), launched in 2021, is peering at the galaxies that existed only hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang and is already turning up surprises. At the same time, next-generation radio telescopes are focusing not on the galaxies but on the neutral hydrogen that once pervaded all of space. That hydrogen provides clues to how the epoch of reionization unfolded, and other characteristics of the cosmos.
“The tools that we can bring to bear now on studying this epoch of cosmic history are unlike anything we’ve had before,” says astrophysicist Rob Simcoe of MIT.
Light galore
Our current understanding of the early universe’s development goes something like this: After the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago, the cosmos expanded and the primordial soup of subatomic particles cooled. Within the first second, protons and neutrons formed. Within the first few minutes, they joined up into atomic nuclei. About 380,000 years in, those nuclei began capturing electrons to form the first atoms. This milestone, in which the ionized soup became neutral atoms, is known as recombination (a misnomer, since nuclei and electrons had never combined before).
Until they were captured into atoms, the unfettered electrons scattered light like a dense fog in a car’s headlights. But with electrons reined in, photons could shoot out through the cosmos. Today, those particles of light arrive to us in the form of a faint glow known as the cosmic microwave background.
Then the universe entered what are known as the dark ages. With hydrogen and some helium gas pervading the cosmos, there was nothing much around to make light. Yet blobs of dark matter were busy pulling in the surrounding gas, some of it condensing enough to set off nuclear fusion. A hundred million years or more after the Big Bang, the first stars lit up in our cosmic dawn. As these early stars burned, their ionizing ultraviolet light began escaping from their galaxies. This created bubbles of ionized hydrogen that grew until they merged, eventually filling the cosmos.
JWST is poised to answer many questions about early galaxies and how their light drove the process of reionization. For now, though, the telescope is turning up more questions than answers. There were many more galaxies in early times than scientists had thought — and these galaxies were producing far more than enough of the type of light needed to reionize the universe.
Early images released by the telescope were overflowing with galaxies that dated to less than 600 million years after the Big Bang. Then, in late 2022, came confirmation of the earliest galaxy yet; it existed just 350 million years after the Big Bang. That record was then busted when UC Santa Cruz astrophysicist Brant Robertson and colleagues announced a galaxy that dated to just 290 million years after the Big Bang.
Many of these galaxies are brighter and more massive than expected: In 2023, six galaxies dating to within 700 million years of the Big Bang made headlines for how mature they already appeared. Despite the early epoch, their stellar masses rival that of today’s Milky Way, which has 60 billion solar masses worth of stars.
Standard theory can’t explain so much star formation so early, so these galaxies were dubbed the “universe breakers.”
“It’s just absolutely wild,” says astrophysicist Erica Nelson of the University of Colorado Boulder, a coauthor on the paper. “It implies an early universe that is either more chaotic and bursty than we thought, or a universe in which things can evolve more quickly.”
The galaxy in this James Webb Space Telescope image, dubbed JADES-GS-z14-0, broke the record for the most distant known galaxy. It dates to 290 million years after the Big Bang.CREDIT: NASA, ESA, CSA, STSCI, B. ROBERTSON (UC SANTA CRUZ), B. JOHNSON (CFA), S. TACCHELLA (CAMBRIDGE), P. CARGILE (CFA)
The discoveries may force a reexamination of galaxy evolution. And they raise big questions about reionization.
Even the faintest early galaxies that JWST has spotted are producing loads of reionizing light, four times as much as expected, astrophysicist Hakim Atek of the Institut Astrophysique de Paris and colleagues have found. Despite their dimness, there are enough of these galaxies to reionize the universe mostly on their own.
And JWST is also turning up hints that supermassive black holes formed much earlier in cosmic history than thought; the high-energy emissions they generate as they feed on surrounding matter would also have contributed to reionization.
It’s not really a crisis, Muñoz says. Existing research has established that reionization ended 1.1 billion years after the Big Bang. But the seeming overabundance of reionizing light is a clear sign that something is missing in our picture of the early universe. “We don’t know all the pieces of the puzzle,” he says.
Seeking clues in hydrogen
Other efforts hope to track reionization by using next-generation radio telescopes to see how much neutral hydrogen existed across time in the early universe.
Scientists have probed this hydrogen in other ways. The scattering of the light of the cosmic microwave background, for example, offers clues to the total amount of reionization since that light was emitted, roughly 380,000 years after the Big Bang. Quasars, the bright beacons of radiation produced by massive, feeding black holes, offer another probe. Neutral hydrogen absorbs specific wavelengths of light from quasars on its path to an observer, providing a sign of the hydrogen’s presence. But as you approach earlier epochs, there are fewer quasars.
In this simulation of the epoch of reionization, regions of ionized hydrogen gas (blue and translucent) expand over time, overtaking regions of neutral hydrogen (dark and opaque).
So scientists now aim to detect a radio signal from the neutral hydrogen itself, before it was ionized, back through cosmic dawn and even into the dark ages. This signal, known as the 21 cm line, has been detected since the 1950s and is used widely in astronomy, but it hasn’t been definitively spotted from the early universe.
The radio signal arises because of a quantum transition in neutral hydrogen’s electron. The transition, which emits a bit of electromagnetic radiation at a wavelength of 21 centimeters, doesn’t happen often. But when neutral hydrogen is abundant, it’s possible to spot.
And the signal can do more than track neutral hydrogen’s whereabouts. It also serves as a sort of thermometer. Scientists can use it to better understand the cosmic temperature, including clues to when energy is injected into the intergalactic medium in the form of light or heat.
Such blasts of energy could come from the first stars and feeding black holes. Or the energy could hint at something more exotic: interactions between dark matter and itself, or unknown interactions between dark matter and more familiar matter. Such interactions, Muñoz notes, could heat up or cool down the intergalactic medium. The 21cm line offers a way to probe the processes at play, including any spurred by unexpected physics. “It can give you information you won’t otherwise get,” he says.
One telescope looking for this fingerprint is known as the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array, or HERA. If JWST is known for its complexity and cost, HERA is more off-the-shelf. It’s “made of PVC pipe and wire mesh and telephone poles,” says astrophysicist Josh Dillon of the University of California, Berkeley.
HERA consists of 350 radio antennas spread across 5 percent of a square kilometer in the Northern Cape province of South Africa. While the telescope itself is low-tech, its observations require the most advanced signal processing and data analysis available. That’s because the inherently faint signal has to be spotted amid booming radio noise from our galaxy and others.
Dillon compares spotting the 21 cm signal to listening for the treble at a concert when the bass is 100,000 times stronger. “That is why it hasn’t been done yet,” he says.
The HERA telescope, an array of 350 radio antennas in South Africa, aims to detect fluctuations in a signal from the neutral hydrogen that pervaded the early universe.CREDIT: SOUTH AFRICAN RADIO ASTRONOMY OBSERVATORY (SARAO)
HERA seeks a statistical measure of the spatial fluctuations in the 21 cm signal. Those fluctuations arise from variations in the distribution of neutral hydrogen across the sky and so offer a sense of how the gas, as well as the stars and galaxies, were arranged. Other teams instead aim to make a bulk measurement that captures an average signal across the sky. Since the techniques differ, one could help verify the other.
Dark matter has already been invoked to explain one claimed detection. In 2018, researchers with the Experiment to Detect the Global Epoch of Reionization Signature, or EDGES, reported a detection of the averaged 21 cm signal that corresponds to when the light from the first stars started interacting with the surrounding hydrogen.
The signal is stronger than expected, suggesting colder than predicted hydrogen gas, which has fueled a lot of skepticism around the claim. Some researchers have pointed to interactions between the hydrogen gas and dark matter as a possible explanation, but such an explanation would require unexpected physics.
“There are a lot of fanciful theories,” says observational cosmologist Sarah Bosman of Heidelberg University in Germany. “It has to be fanciful,” she notes, because no ordinary physics would give the strength that EDGES saw.
Bosman admits to being one of the few people enthusiastic about the claim, which she says has motivated researchers working on other experiments that might confirm or refute it. “It’s given the field a really good boost,” she says.
HERA and other telescopes are forerunners of the Square Kilometer Array, which will attempt to map the 21 cm signal across the entire sky. This array will connect radio antennas in South Africa and Australia into the largest radio telescope ever built. Though still under construction, the telescope connected two of its stations to take its first data in 2024.
Better tools, deeper knowledge
No one really knows what to expect from the 21 cm signal, Bosman notes. It could demand only minor tweaks to the existing picture of cosmic evolution, or it might uncover new physics that rewrite our understanding entirely. It’s just too soon to tell.
But Dillon says that the 21 cm line could one day offer “the biggest possible dataset.” The ultimate aim is to probe the time frame from roughly 100 million years after the Big Bang to a billion years after. That time frame represents less than 10 percent of the total life of the universe, but because of the continued expansion of the universe, the time frame covers roughly half the volume of the visible universe.
Future instruments will help reach all the way back. There are various proposals for new radio telescopes in space and even on the Moon, where they would be free from Earth-based interference. The most ancient 21 cm signal would arrive to us at wavelengths that are reflected off Earth’s ionosphere, notes Anastasia Fialkov, a cosmologist and astrophysicist at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, England. Telescopes in space, or on the Moon, could get around that problem.
Any 21 cm clues would be studied alongside JWST’s observations of early galaxies, as well as observations from its successor, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, and future ground-based observatories like the European Extremely Large Telescope currently under construction in Chile.
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Studies of quasars also have plenty more to say, notes Simcoe of MIT, who wrote with colleagues about quasars in the early universe in the 2023 Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics.
Quasars are particularly useful, Simcoe says, for identifying “the last regions of the universe that are still holding on to their neutral hydrogen gas.” It’s within these pockets that the youngest stars and galaxies — or the material that birthed them — must reside.
These early stars could be producing trace elements different from what we see produced by today’s stars. If light from quasars reveals those trace elements in an ancient cloud of gas, it’s a clue that we’re reaching an ancient population — perhaps the first stars.
“It will mean we have finally gotten there,” Simcoe says. “And that’s really what the quest is: To find out, when did complexity emerge in the universe? When did the universe really start to look the way it does today?”
No one knows when we’ll know, but Simcoe thinks the present tools, or perhaps the next ones on deck, are capable: “We’re knocking at the door.”
Elizabeth Quill is a science writer and editor based near Washington, DC. She’s fascinated by how complexity — in our cosmos, societies and ourselves — emerges out of almost nothing.
Author and Sufi teacher Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee cautions against stumbling into a future where artificial intelligence only further distances us from what we can feel with our senses and our soul.
Recently I was invited to be part of a gathering bringing together philosophers, ethicists, contemplative teachers, and Indigenous leaders with AI evaluation experts, to help steer AI models towards wisdom, compassion, and human flourishing. I was grateful for the invitation, although I kindly declined, as it made me consider whether artificial intelligence and spiritual life can really intersect, or if their primary orientations are too divergent.
Today a growing number of people are using AI for spiritual guidance, and there are even AI spiritual guru avatars, providing personalized on-demand meditations, counsel, and self-initiation or spiritual blessings. The question we need to ask is, do AI and spiritual growth really have common ground, or is this another illusion distracting us from inner life and real change?
AI works by learning patterns from vast amounts of data, largely sourced from the internet, to make predictions or generate content. It belongs to the mental/informational plane of consciousness and comes from an accumulation of past thoughts/ideas/images/patterns, to which it can give us access. It can organize these thoughts, rearrange them, and appear to give us insight, but it always comes from the past.
Spiritual life, however, is about going beyond the mind and its constant stream of thoughts, either into a state of pure awareness, the now, or into the divine love that can be experienced through the heart. It returns us from the ego’s illusory sense of a separate self to the unity of true nature. The spiritual path can even take us beyond, into the primal emptiness that underlies creation, the Absence experienced through an empty mind, or love’s infinite ocean in which our individual self and all thoughts dissolve.
Spiritual life offers us the direct experience of stillness, emptiness, love, rather than the constant chatter of the mind and its distractions. And through this inner experience we become open to change, real change that comes from within, from a higher dimension, rather than the accumulated information of the mind and the conditioned patterns of the ego. Real change only comes from within, and from a spiritual perspective this means from the Divine, the Self, soul, or atman—the eternal dimension of our being. Meditation, stilling the mind, watching the breath, or focus on the heart give us access to this inner dimension. In contrast, AI belongs to the past, to an accumulation of past thoughts, images, and ideas, and as such is a distraction from real change and the inner work required.
AI may be described as “faster than the human brain,” but this comes from a limited understanding of our human potential and our ability to access the higher mind. The higher mind is the consciousness of the Self, which functions on the plane of unity and is therefore much quicker than the rational mind, which functions on the plane of duality (the separation of subject and object). Referred to as bodhichitta, or “awakened mind” in Buddhism, the higher mind recognizes the inherent unity and interconnections in all things and is not limited by the constrictions of past and future. Essentially it functions outside of time.AI reflects a civilization that is increasingly disconnected from its inner life, without the roots that are needed to nourish or sustain us.
In Sufism this awakened mind is described as the consciousness of the heart, which is the locus of our divine nature. The heart both sees and knows the truth inherent in all things, the unity of being to which we belong, and the patterns of transformation which are part of our true nature. Through the consciousness of the heart we are able to access our divine Self, and live from this center of our being, guided from within.
The question then is, how much is AI a distraction in our world today? We live in a time of deep uncertainty, cultural and ecological crisis. What may be most needed is not more technology, but more love, care, and responsibility—for one another and for the Earth. These qualities are central to spiritual life, yet they sit uneasily alongside technologies that require vast amounts of energy and water and expanding data centers. And while the hype around AI says that it will bring transformational change, reshaping our world, it does not introduce a new quality of consciousness, which is what is vitally needed at this time. In this sense it is a distraction from the need for real change, the change that will help bring our civilization back into balance with the natural world that sustains us. It promises a technological future, while anyone who has seen through the cracks in our present civilization knows that technology cannot save us, but rather is at the root of much of the polycrisis that confronts us.
AI reflects a civilization that is increasingly disconnected from its inner life, without the roots that are needed to nourish or sustain us. There are few signs that AI is leading us back to what is simple, essential, and deeply human. To state it simply: AI has neither heart nor soul—qualities that belong to the essence of our human nature, and give true meaning and purpose to life.
For thousands of years we walked in two worlds: the outer physical world of the senses and the inner world, experienced in dreams and visions. In the land where I live, Coyote is the primary creator god for the Coast Miwok people, as well as a trickster god. O-let’-te, Coyote-man, formed the Earth and made people out of feathers or twigs. Seen and unseen were woven together in such stories and myths, with symbols and sacred images forming a bridge between the two, linking the soul and the senses. Through these symbols the numinous inner world flowed into the outer, giving daily life a depth of meaning as we lived as part of the great tapestry of the sacred. And then centuries ago in the West we began the story of separation, until science convinced us that only the physical, tangible world was real, and the inner worlds faded from our collective consciousness. Without our noticing, the outer world became more and more barren, without sacred meaning. It lost its numinosity, and instead became a resource to be exploited, a commodity to sustain our civilization.
Is this how we are to stumble into the future? First, we lost connection to the soul and world soul, the anima mundi, the spiritual intelligence within nature. And now our screens seem more important than our senses, information encoded in ones and zeros rather than through touch, taste, sound, sight, and smell. As a result, for example, many relationships have lost the primary quality of touch and have instead become distorted by the algorithms of social media, creating an imitation of intimacy that results in alienation rather than the simple human bonding we need, the lived companionship that really nourishes us.
Yet we appear so entranced by this technology, addicted to its constant stream of images and endless information, that we do not seem to care what is happening, what world we are creating. Is this the “brave new world” that we want to leave to our children and grandchildren? Is its environment of growing distortion and deceit really our collective destiny?
There is another story waiting to be born, one that comes from the depths of the soul and the world soul, that speaks of oneness and an interconnectedness that belongs to the natural world, rather than computers. This is a story that is part of our DNA, the unity of being to which we all belong. A story in the way trees speak to each other through fungal networks, how birds migrate along ancient patterns. It is visible in a murmuration of starlings, the spiral of a sunflower and a galaxy. It is present in the music of creation if we are able to be silent and listen. But it needs our attention if we are to hear this story and weave it back into our human experience, to recognize the real nature of the ground under our feet.
We need to return our awareness to the living Earth, what I have called “a deep ecology of consciousness,” so that we can create a sustainable future seven generations or more. AI by its very nature can only recreate past patterns and thus encourages us to overidentify with a way of thinking that has become globally self-destructive. AI may enable us to gather information, but it cannot help us to make the changes that are so desperately needed. In fact, it may seduce us into avoiding looking deeper, while the vast sums of money and attention being poured into its development could be much better spent on the social and environmental polycrisis that confronts us. If we can stop distancing ourselves from what we can see and touch, feel with our senses and soul, we may recognize the living oneness which is our heritage, and help birth its story back into our everyday life.
Rather than focusing on our screens there is a vital need to turn from the mind to the heart, from the ego to the soul or Self. And through this inner change we can learn to be of service in the outer world. This is a real quality of our divine nature, the compassion and selfless service of bodhichitta, also known as the servanthood of the Sufi; and a contribution we each can make if we take the radical step back to what is natural and true, to what resonates with our senses and our soul. As Thich Nhat Hanh beautifully said, “Real change will only happen when we fall in love with the planet.” No machine can do that for us. That work remains deeply, quietly human.
Margaret J. Wheatley is one of my heroes. She began caring about the world’s peoples in 1966 as a Peace Corps volunteer in postwar Korea. Since then, as a consultant, senior-level advisor, teacher, and healer, she has helped millions to better understand ourselves and our world. In her book, Who Do We Choose to Be? Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity, she says,
“My aspiration is for you to see clearly so that you may act wisely. If we don’t know where we are, if we don’t know what to prepare for, then any path we choose will keep us wandering in the wilderness, increasingly desperate, increasingly lost.”
“At a time when many people are afraid of the truth, she tells it like it is. At a time when many people want to run away and hide, she invites us to step into our true warrior spirit in the tradition of Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa.”
In my book, The Warrior’s Journey Home: Healing Men, Healing the Planet, I quoted Trungpa:
“Warriorship here does not refer to making war on others. Aggression is the source of our problems, not the solution. Here the word ‘warrior’ is taken from the Tibetan pawo which literally means ‘one who is brave.’ Warriorship in this context is the tradition of human bravery, or the tradition of fearlessness. Warriorship is not being afraid of who you are.”
I received my own awakening to the warrior spirit in 1993 at a Men’s Leaders’ Conference in Indianapolis, Indiana, sponsored by Wingspan Magazine. As part of the conference offerings, we were invited to participate in a traditional Native American sweat lodge ceremony. In the 4th round when things got so hot in the lodge that many people had to get out, I was transported into a vision where I saw the sinking of the Ship of Civilization and the launching of Lifeboats For Humanity.
Most of those on the Ship of Civilization wouldn’t believe the ship could sink, denied the truth, and went under. A few people, who believed the truth of their senses rather than the propaganda of the ship captain, escaped in lifeboats, banded together, and created a new, more sustainable, world.
Over the last thirty years this vision has guided my life. Here are a few of the things I’ve learned:
“Civilization” is a misnomer. Its proper name is the “Dominator culture.”
As long as we believe the myth that “civilization” is the best humans can aspire to achieve, we are doomed to go down with the ship. In The Chalice & the Blade: Our History Our Future first published in 1987, internationally acclaimed scholar and futurist, Riane Eisler first introduced us to our long, ancient heritage as a Partnership Culture and our more recent Dominator Culture, which has come to be called “Civilization.” In her book, Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future, written with peace activist Douglas P. Fry, they offer real guidance for creating a world based on partnership.
There is a better world, beyond civilization.
When I was given the book Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn, I got a clear sense of the two worlds that are competing for our attention: A world where hierarchy and dominance rule (Quinn calls it the world of the Takers) and a world where equality and connection rule (Quinn calls it the world of the Leavers). In his book, Beyond Civilization: Humanity’s Next Great Adventure, Quinn asks,
“What does saving the world mean? Saving the world can only mean one thing: saving the world as a human habitat. Accomplishing this will mean (must mean) saving the world as a habitat for as many other species as possible. We can only save the world as a human habitat if we stop our catastrophic onslaught on the community of life, for we depend on that community for our very lives.”
The Pattern of Collapse of Complex Civilizations
In her book, Who Do We Choose to Be?, Margaret Wheatley says,
“The only thing evident from the study of history is that we humans fail to learn from history. Yet those who do study the history of civilizations have illuminated the pattern of the rise and fall of complex human societies. The pattern of collapse is remarkably consistent.”
In her book, The Watchman’s Rattle: A Radical New Theory of Collapse, world-renowned futurist Rebecca D. Costa shares what scholars have learned over the years about the signs of impending collapse:
“The first sign is gridlock,” says Costa. “Gridlock occurs when civilizations become unable to comprehend or resolve large, complex problems, despite acknowledging beforehand that these issues may lead to their demise.”
She goes on to say,
“Then, as conditions grow more desperate, the second sign is the substitution of beliefs for knowledge.”
Costa says these conditions are present in all complex societies that expand to the level we call empires. Drawing on the work of historians such as Dr. Joseph Tainter, in his book The Collapse of Complex Societies, she says,
“Tainter believes that war, crop failures, disease, and political unrest appear to have caused the fall of the Roman Empire, but in truth ‘diminishing returns on investments in social complexity’ was the root cause. As systems for commerce, governance, and defense grew more complex, the ‘energy’ needed to manage them simply exceeded the capabilities of the Roman people.”
Margaret Wheatley draws on the work of Joseph Tainter, Sir John Glubb, and others who have studies the collapse of empires and notes that whether it is the Roman, Arab, Ottoman, Spanish, or British Empires, they all fall after approximately ten generations or 250 years. It is clear to many that as we celebrate the 250 years from 1776 to 2026, the United States is no exception.
Wheatley says,
“This is the Age of Threat, when everything we encounter intensifies fear and anger. In survival mode, we flee from one another, abandon values that held us together, withdraw from ideas and practices that encouraged inclusion and created trust in leaders. And most harmfully, we stop believing in one another.”
It is time we stopped blaming ourselves and others for our predicament. No political party or administration can save us and none is ultimately to blame.
“We are walking the well-trodden path of collapse documented in the history of all complex civilizations,” says Wheatley, “so we must find a new path of contribution.”
The Future of Our Country, the World, and Ourselves
Many of us who have been working to make the world a better place have broken our minds, hearts, and souls trying to fix what is unfixable. With wisdom (and age — I turned eighty-two this year) some of us have concluded that there are some things that humans have done in our woundedness and ignorance that cannot be fixed.
Many of the changes that we have brought about, including the destabilization of the climate, are not reversible. We will have to live with the consequences. But that does not mean there is nothing we can do. Here’s what Meg Wheatley says to those who are ready to hear the truth and feel called to do something constructive:
“The perfect storm is here, created by the coalescence of climate and human-created catastrophes, insatiable greed, fear-based self-protection, escalating aggression and conflict, indifference for the well-being of others, and continuing uncertainty. As leaders dedicated to serving the causes and people we treasure, confronted by this unrelenting tsunami, what are we to do? My answer to this is also stated with full confidence: We need to restore sanity by awakening the human spirit. We can onlyachieve this if we undertake the most challenging and meaningful work of our leader lives: creating Islands of Sanity.”
This is what I’ve been doing since 1993 when I had the experience in the sweat lodge where was given both the vision of collapse as well as the potential future of the “life-boats for humanity.” One of my other heroes is a woman named Clarissa Pinkola Estes. She wrote the book, Women Who Run With the Wolves. She also offered this heart-felt call to action:
“Mis estimados queridos, My Esteemed Ones: Do not lose heart. It is hard to say which one of the current egregious matters has rocked people’s worlds and beliefs more. Ours is a time of almost daily jaw-dropping astonishment and often righteous rage over the latest degradations of what matters most to civilized, visionary people. “You are right in your assessments. The luster and hubris some have aspired to while endorsing acts so heinous against children, elders, everyday people, the poor, the unguarded, the helpless, is breathtaking. “Yet, I urge you, ask you, gentle you, to please not spend your spirit dry by bewailing these difficult times. Especially do not lose hope. Most particularly because, the fact is – we were made for these times…”
Margaret Wheatley says that,
“An Island of Sanity is a gift of possibility and refuge created by people’s commitment to form healthy community to do meaningful work. It requires sane leaders with unshakable faith in people’s innate generosity, creativity, and kindness.”
In June I will be sharing some new opportunities for our MenAlive community. I wrote about them in a recent article, “Becoming Rebels in Our Own Time.” I hope you will join us. Come visit me at MenAlive and sign up for our free weekly newsletter.
Best Wishes,
Jed Diamond
Founder and VHS (Visionary Healer Scholar) of MenAlive
I used to struggle with my finances. Every month I’d stress out about how I was going to make rent, pay the bills, and still have something to set aside for my future. I must have read every article and watched every webinar looking for advice on how to get ahead, but the most important thing I learned didn’t come from any expert. It was a lesson I had to teach myself—that the key to financial success lies in taking advantage of others.
Trust me, screwing people over is the best thing that ever happened to my bank account.
Many of us fall into the habit of treating those around us—friends, family, coworkers—with respect. Unfortunately, this all-too-common practice can be devastating to our financial wellness. The good news is that our prospects improve dramatically as soon as we learn to see other people as nothing but tools for our personal gain. It really is that simple. In my case, the moment I started following a basic plan of always manipulating everyone around me, I was on the road to prosperity.
Everyone knows it’s important to establish trust in a business relationship. What fewer people recognize is that you need to abuse the hell out of that trust. I used to own a pizzeria with a friend of mine, and when we were starting out, money was tight. I almost certainly would have given up if I hadn’t discovered two quick and easy ways to boost my income: I withheld wages from my employees by not paying their overtime, and I skimmed cash off the top anytime my co-owner wasn’t around. I did this for a couple years, and by the time anyone caught on, I had already diversified into exploiting other people I knew.
That’s all it takes to achieve economic well-being: It’s not about sticking to a household budget or paying down credit card debt. It’s about fucking people over, again and again.
Luckily, there’s no shortage of ways to do this. Did you know you can borrow money from somebody and just never pay it back? The benefits of this approach are seemingly endless. Back when I was married, I used to take out loans from my father-in-law all the time, and I never dreamed of repaying him. I mean, what was he going to do about it? Sue his own daughter’s family? After a while he started asking to see receipts to prove I was spending the money on his grandchildren, like I’d promised, but by then I’d already enriched myself to the tune of $15,000. It’s all about taking opportunities where you find them.
That’s not to say it’s always easy. I don’t come from a privileged family where there are rich, elderly relatives suffering from dementia and just begging for someone to forge their power of attorney and siphon off their life savings. But I have been able to maintain a decent lifestyle through modest, reliable strategies like refusing to pay child support. That’s an extra $450 in my pocket each month, which isn’t too bad. Sure, I can no longer enter the state of Ohio, where there’s an outstanding warrant for my arrest, but who cares? I wouldn’t want to go there anyway. That’s where my ex-wife lives.
I know some of you out there are thinking this all sounds too good to be true. You ask: How can this be? How can taking advantage of everyone you meet possibly be the secret to long-term financial security? I’ll answer your question with a question: How the fuck do you think billionaires do it?
Bart Ehrman is a New Testament scholar focusing on textual criticism of the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the origins and development of early Christianity. His courses are available for study here: https://www.bartehrman.com/alex
TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Substack 0:07 Who Was Judas Iscariot? 04:32 Why Did Judas Betray Jesus? 12:01 Is Judas in Hell? 19:05 The Historical Judas 21:28 What is the Gospel of Judas? 23:09 Explaining Gnosticism 29:38 How Gnosticism Describes the Material Realm 37:05 The Gnostic Role of Jesus 42:32 The Beginning of Judas’s Gospel 48:38 Jesus’s Teachings to Judas 54:16 Why This Gospel is So Confusing 59:15 Judas Being Called the 13th Spirit 1:02:45 Jesus Appearing as a Child 1:04:50 The Person Who Carries Jesus Around 1:06:57 How This Gospel Explains Adam & Eve 1:11:24 Destiny of the Cosmos 1:14:33 Evidence That Judas Was Saved 1:18:42 Judas’s Motivation to Betray Jesus 1:21:34 How Ancient is This Text? 1:24:10 Where Was it First Rediscovered? 1:33:50 How Old is the Coptic Version? 1:38:33 Bart’s Reaction to the Gospel of Judas 1:48:26 Publishing the Gospel of Judas
CircleofAtonement Nov 24, 2023*To learn more about A Course in Miracles, please visit circleofa.org/start.* Have you ever wanted a quick but comprehensive overview of the teachings of A Course in Miracles? Have you wanted someone to just sit down and tell you what this path is all about? In this video, Course teachers Robert and Emily Perry do just that. With over sixty years of Course study between them, Robert and Emily will take you through the whole sweep of the Course’s thought system. In less than one hour, you’ll learn what the Course says through 15 of its essential teachings, from our pristine beginning in God to our eventual return: Introduction: (0:00) God: (2:05) Creation: (5:50) The Son of God: (9:27) The separation: (13:17) The world: (16:55) The Holy Spirit: (20:13) Jesus: (22:52) The ego: (26:18) Sin, guilt, fear: (29:26) Perception: (32:57) Forgiveness: (36:15) Relationships: (40:14) Your function as a miracle worker: (43:32) Vision: (47:05) The final step: (50:09) Conclusion: (53:51) We all search for answers to life’s biggest questions, and finding these answers can unlock our lives like nothing else can. A Course in Miracles offers new answers to the biggest questions of our existence, ones you will not hear in church, in school, or in spirituality. It has new and brilliant perspectives on each of the items listed above, which can give you a new lens through which to look at yourself and your world. This video is meant to be used for anyone who want to learn more about A Course in Miracles, for those who want to share the Course with others, also for study group leaders who want to help members understand the Course’s big picture. For more, please visit circleofa.org/start. We are here to help you with both the theory and application of what A Course In Miracles (ACIM) offers. Since 1993, the Circle’s purpose has been to bring to students and the world the profound and unparalleled wisdom of A Course in Miracles. We are the publisher of the Complete and Annotated Edition of the Course (what we call the “CE”). Our work grows out of our commitment to be as faithful as possible to what A Course in Miracles says, our years of dedication to walking this path ourselves, and our desire to see the Course’s purpose realized in the lives of students and in the world.
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