“SPONTANEITY THROUGH CONVERSATION”

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Sunday, April 18 at 11 a.m. Pacific time

Here’s the link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/332275676

RELEASING THE HIDDEN SPLENDOUR WORKSHOP

Event on April 18, 2021: Releasing the Hidden Splendour workshop facilitated by Richard Hartnett, H.W., M. and Rick Thomas, H.W., M. will be held on Sunday, April 18 at 3 p.m. Pacific time.  Open to all students of RHS. 

Here’s the link:  https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82448721437?pwd=UGFVQ3dmTitOTW10V3ZSazhwUlViZz09

SUNDAY NIGHT TRANSLATION GROUP

Online via Zoom @ 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Pacific time.  If you are a Translator, please join our meetings from your computer, tablet or smartphone.  Link:  https://us02web.zoom.us/j/816612022

Trial suggests psilocybin combined with psychological therapy is as effective as antidepressant drug

Nicola Davis Science correspondent@NicolaKSDavis

Wed 14 Apr 2021 17.00 EDT (theguardian.com)

Magic mushrooms have a long and rich history. Now scientists say they could play an important role in the future, with their active ingredient a promising treatment for depression.

The results from a small, phase two clinical trial have revealed that two doses of psilocybin appears to be as effective as the common antidepressant escitalopram in treating moderate to severe major depressive disorder, at least when combined with psychological therapy.

“I think it is fair to say that the results signal hope that we may be looking at a promising alternative treatment for depression,” said Dr Robin Carhart-Harris, head of the centre for psychedelic research at Imperial College London and a co-author of the study.

Carhart-Harris said psilocybin was thought to work in a fundamentally different way to escitalopram. While both act on the brain’s serotonin system, he said escitalopram seemed to work by helping people tolerate stress more easily.

“With a psychedelic it is more about a release of thought and feeling that, when guided with psychotherapy, produces positive outcomes,” he said, adding participants given psilocybin had often reported feeling they had got more fully to the root of why they were depressed.

However, Carhart-Harris cautioned against seeking out magic mushrooms – a class A drug in the UK – for DIY treatment.

“That would be an error of judgment,” he said. “We strongly believe that the … psychotherapy component is as important as the drug action.”

The £1m trial builds on previous work by the team exploring how psilocybin affects the brain, and an earlier clinical trial in which the drug helped alleviate treatment-resistant depression in 12 patients.

Over the six-week trial, 30 out of 59 adults with moderate to severe major depressive disorder were randomly allocated to receive two 25mg doses of psilocybin three weeks apart – a dose that Carhart-Harris said was high enough to produce the kind of experiences often described as existential or even “mystical”. The day after the first dose of psilocybin, this group began a daily placebo.

The other 29 participants were given two very low, or “inactive”, doses of psilocybin three weeks apart. This was to ensure any differences in outcomes between the groups would not simply be down to the expectation of being given psilocybin. The day after the first dose of psilocybin, this group began a daily dose of escitalopram, the strength of which increased over time.

Each psilocybin session – which lasted six hours, including a three- to four-hour “trip” for those on the high dose – was supervised by at least two mental health professionals, with the participants lying on their back, propped up by pillows and listening to emotionally evocative neoclassical music.

All participants received psychological therapy the day after a psilocybin session, as well as a phone or video call in the week after the first dose.

The results, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, reveal that after six weeks both groups showed, on average, a decrease in the severity of depressive symptoms, according to scores from a questionnaire completed by the participants. However, this reduction did not differ significantly between the two groups.

“Psilocybin therapy, as we predicted, works more quickly than escitalopram,” said Carhart-Harris.

He added that results from other scales were “tantalisingly suggestive of potential superiority of psilocybin therapy” not only for depression but other aspects of wellbeing. He warned the findings were not conclusive as the team did not take into account the number of comparisons being made.

However, the team noted that 57% of patients in the high-dose psilocybin group were judged to be in remission for their depression by the end of the six weeks, compared with 28% in the escitalopram group, while neither group had serious side-effects.

While the team said the results were promising, others said the study was not big enough to draw firm conclusions. Among other limitations, the majority of participants were white, middle-aged, highly educated and male, while participants may have been able to guess which treatment they received and there was no group given a placebo and therapy alone.

Anthony Cleare, professor of psychopharmacology at King’s College London, said the study provided “some of the most powerful evidence to date that psychedelics may have a role to play in the treatment of depression”.

However, he said far more data was needed before drugs such as psilocybin could be used outside of research, adding they would not replace existing treatments for depression.

• In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org. You can contact the mental health charity Mind by calling 0300 123 3393 or visiting mind.org.uk

The road from Rome

The Course of Empire: Destruction (1836) by Thomas Cole. Courtesy Met Museum, New York/Wikipedia

Walter Scheidel is Dickason Professor in the Humanities, professor of Classics and history, and a Catherine R Kennedy and Daniel L Grossman fellow in human biology, all at Stanford University in California. His recent books include Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity (2019) and The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (2017), and he is co-editor, with Peter Bang and Christopher Bayly, of The Oxford World History of Empire (2021).Listen here

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15 April 2021 (Aeon.co)

For an empire that collapsed more than 1,500 years ago, ancient Rome maintains a powerful presence. About 1 billion people speak languages derived from Latin; Roman law shapes modern norms; and Roman architecture has been widely imitated. Christianity, which the empire embraced in its sunset years, remains the world’s largest religion. Yet all these enduring influences pale against Rome’s most important legacy: its fall. Had its empire not unravelled, or had it been replaced by a similarly overpowering successor, the world wouldn’t have become modern.

This isn’t the way that we ordinarily think about an event that has been lamented pretty much ever since it happened. In the late 18th century, in his monumental work The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788), the British historian Edward Gibbon called it ‘the greatest, perhaps, and most awful scene in the history of mankind’. Tankloads of ink have been expended on explaining it. Back in 1984, the German historian Alexander Demandt patiently compiled no fewer than 210 different reasons for Rome’s demise that had been put forward over time. And the flood of books and papers shows no sign of abating: most recently, disease and climate change have been pressed into service. Wouldn’t only a calamity of the first order warrant this kind of attention?

It’s true that Rome’s collapse reverberated widely, at least in the western – mostly European – half of its empire. (A shrinking portion of the eastern half, later known as Byzantium, survived for another millennium.) Although some regions were harder hit than others, none escaped unscathed. Monumental structures fell into disrepair; previously thriving cities emptied out; Rome itself turned into a shadow of its former grand self, with shepherds tending their flocks among the ruins. Trade and coin use thinned out, and the art of writing retreated. Population numbers plummeted.

But a few benefits were already being felt at the time. Roman power had fostered immense inequality: its collapse brought down the plutocratic ruling class, releasing the labouring masses from oppressive exploitation. The new Germanic rulers operated with lower overheads and proved less adept at collecting rents and taxes. Forensic archaeology reveals that people grew to be taller, likely thanks to reduced inequality, a better diet and lower disease loads. Yet these changes didn’t last.

The real payoff of Rome’s demise took much longer to emerge. When Goths, Vandals, Franks, Lombards and Anglo-Saxons carved up the empire, they broke the imperial order so thoroughly that it never returned. Their 5th-century takeover was only the beginning: in a very real sense, Rome’s decline continued well after its fall – turning Gibbon’s title on its head. When the Germans took charge, they initially relied on Roman institutions of governance to run their new kingdoms. But they did a poor job of maintaining that vital infrastructure. Before long, nobles and warriors made themselves at home on the lands whose yield kings had assigned to them. While this relieved rulers of the onerous need to count and tax the peasantry, it also starved them of revenue and made it harder for them to control their supporters.

When, in the year 800, the Frankish king Charlemagne decided that he was a new Roman emperor, it was already too late. In the following centuries, royal power declined as aristocrats asserted ever greater autonomy and knights set up their own castles. The Holy Roman Empire, established in Germany and northern Italy in 962, never properly functioned as a unified state. For much of the Middle Ages, power was widely dispersed among different groups. Kings claimed political supremacy but often found it hard to exercise control beyond their own domains. Nobles and their armed vassals wielded the bulk of military power. The Catholic Church, increasingly centralised under an ascendant papacy, had a lock on the dominant belief system. Bishops and abbots cooperated with secular authorities, but carefully guarded their prerogatives. Economic power was concentrated among feudal lords and in autonomous cities dominated by assertive associations of artisans and merchants.

The resultant landscape was a patchwork quilt of breathtaking complexity. Not only was Europe divided into numerous states great and small, those states were themselves split into duchies, counties, bishoprics and cities where nobles, warriors, clergy and traders vied for influence and resources. Aristocrats made sure to check royal power: the Magna Carta of 1215 is merely the best-known of a number of similar compacts drawn up all over Europe. In commercial cities, entrepreneurs formed guilds that governed their conduct. In some cases, urban residents took matters into their own hands, establishing independent communes managed by elected officials. In others, cities wrung charters from their overlords to confirm their rights and privileges. So did universities, which were organised as self-governing corporations of scholars.

Councils of royal advisers matured into early parliaments. Bringing together nobles and senior clergymen as well as representatives of cities and entire regions, these bodies came to hold the purse strings, compelling kings to negotiate over tax levies. So many different power structures intersected and overlapped, and fragmentation was so pervasive that no one side could ever claim the upper hand; locked into unceasing competition, all these groups had to bargain and compromise to get anything done. Power became constitutionalised, openly negotiable and formally partible; bargaining took place out in the open and followed established rules. However much kings liked to claim divine favour, their hands were often tied – and if they pushed too hard, neighbouring countries were ready to support disgruntled defectors.

This deeply entrenched pluralism turned out to be crucial once states became more centralised, which happened when population growth and economic growth triggered wars that strengthened kings. Yet different countries followed different trajectories. Some rulers managed to tighten the reins, leading toward the absolutism of the French Sun King Louis XIV; in other cases, the nobility called the shots. Sometimes parliaments held their own against ambitious sovereigns, and sometimes there were no kings at all and republics prevailed. The details hardly matter: what does is that all of this unfolded side by side. The educated knew that there was no single immutable order, and they were able to weigh the upsides and drawbacks of different ways of organising society.

Whenever dynasties failed and the state splintered, new dynasties emerged and rebuilt the empire

Across the continent, stronger states meant fiercer competition among them. Ever costlier warfare became a defining feature of early modern Europe. Religious strife, driven by the Reformation, which broke the papal monopoly, poured fuel on the flames. Conflict also spurred expansion overseas: Europeans grabbed lands and trading posts in the Americas, Asia and Africa, more often than not just to deny access to their rivals. Merchant societies spearheaded many of these ventures, while public debt for funding constant war spawned bond markets. Capitalists advanced on all fronts, lending to governments, investing in colonies and trade, and extracting concessions. The state, in turn, looked after these vital allies, protecting them from rivals foreign and domestic.

Hardened by conflict, the European states became more integrated, slowly morphing into the nation-states of the modern era. Universal empire on a Roman scale was no longer an option. Like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, these rival states had to keep running just to stay in place – and speed up if they wanted to get ahead. Those that did – the Dutch, the British – became pioneers of a global capitalist order, while others laboured to catch up.

Nothing like this happened anywhere else in the world. The resilience of empire as a form of political organisation made sure of that. Wherever geography and ecology allowed large imperial structures to take root, they tended to persist: as empires fell, others took their place. China is the most prominent example. Ever since the first emperor of Qin (he of terracotta-army fame) united the warring states in the late 3rd century BCE, monopoly power became the norm. Whenever dynasties failed and the state splintered, new dynasties emerged and rebuilt the empire. Over time, as such interludes grew shorter, imperial unity came to be seen as ineluctable, as the natural order of things, celebrated by elites and sustained by the ethnic and cultural homogenisation imposed on the populace.

China experienced an unusual degree of imperial continuity. Yet similar patterns of waxing and waning can be observed around the world: in the Middle East, in South and Southeast Asia, in Mexico, Peru and West Africa. After the fall of Rome, Europe west of Russia was the only exception, and remained a unique outlier for more than 1,500 years.

This wasn’t the only way in which western Europe proved uniquely exceptional. It was there that modernity took off – the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, modern science and technology, and representative democracy, coupled with colonialism, stark racism and unprecedented environmental degradation.

Was that a coincidence? Historians, economists and political scientists have long argued about the causes of these transformative developments. Even as some theories have fallen by the wayside, from God’s will to white supremacy, there’s no shortage of competing explanations. The debate has turned into a minefield, as scholars who seek to understand why this particular bundle of changes appeared only in one part of the world wrestle with a heavy baggage of stereotypes and prejudices that threaten to cloud our judgment. But, as it turns out, there’s a shortcut. Almost without fail, all these different arguments have one thing in common. They’re deeply rooted in the fact that, after Rome fell, Europe was intensely fragmented, both between and within different countries. Pluralism is the common denominator.

If you side with those scholars who believe that political and economic institutions were the basis for modernising development, western Europe is the place for you. In an environment where bargaining trumped despotism and exit options were plentiful, rulers had more to gain from protecting entrepreneurs and capitalists than from fleecing them. Size also mattered: only in moderately sized countries could commercial interests hope to hold their own against aristocratic landlords. Smaller polities enjoyed greater capacity for inclusion, not least by means of parliamentary deliberations. The better medieval legacies of pluralism survived, the more such states developed in close engagement with organised representatives of civil society. International competition rewarded cohesion, mobilisation and innovation. The more governments expected from their citizens, the more they had to offer in return. State power, civic rights and economic progress advanced together.

But what if Europeans owed their later preeminence to the ruthless oppression and exploitation of colonial territories and plantation slavery? Those terrors too grew out of fragmentation: competition drove colonisation while commercial capital greased the wheels. Geography as such played second fiddle. It has been said that the Europeans rather than the Chinese reached the Americas first simply because the Pacific is much wider than the Atlantic. Yet successive Chinese empires failed to seize even nearby Taiwan until the Ming finally intervened in the late 17th century, and never showed much of an interest in the Philippines, let alone more distant Pacific islands. That made perfect sense: for an imperial court in charge of countless millions of people, such destinations held little appeal. (The Ming ‘treasure fleets’ that were dispatched into the Indian Ocean didn’t make any sense at all and were soon shut down.)

Large empires were generally indifferent to overseas exploration, and for the same reason. It was small, geographically peripheral cultures – from the ancient Phoenicians and Greeks to the Norse, Polynesians and Portuguese – that had the most to gain from striking out. And so they did. Had Europeans not sailed forth with reckless abandon, there would have been no colonies, no Bolivian silver, no slave trade, no plantations, no abundant cotton for the Lancashire mills. Capitalising on military skills honed by endless war, European powers escaped the perpetual stalemate on their own continent by exporting violence and conquest across the globe. Separated by entire oceans from the imperial heartlands, colonised populations could be squeezed much harder than would have been feasible back in Europe. Over time, much of the world turned into a subordinate periphery that fuelled European capitalism.

Intense competition among rulers, merchants and colonisers fed an insatiable appetite for new techniques

Yet brute force alone would have taken Europe only so far. Useful knowledge also played a vital role. There was no hope of transforming industry and medicine without dramatic advances in science and engineering. That posed a serious challenge: what if new insights and ways of doing things clashed with hallowed tradition or religious doctrine? Innovators had to be able to follow the evidence wherever it led, regardless of how many toes they stepped on in the process. That turned out to be a hard slog in Europe, as incumbents of all stripes – from priests to censors – were determined to defend their turf. However, it was even harder elsewhere. China’s imperial court sponsored the arts and sciences, but only as it saw fit. Caged in a huge empire, dissenters had nowhere else to go. In India and the Middle East, foreign-conquest regimes such as the Mughals and the Ottomans relied on the support of conservative religious authorities to shore up their legitimacy.

Europe’s pluralism provided much-needed space for disruptive innovation. As the powerful jostled for position, they favoured those whom others persecuted. The princes of Saxony shielded the heretic Martin Luther from their own emperor. John Calvin found refuge in Switzerland. Galileo and his ally Tommaso Campanella managed to play off different parties against each other. Paracelsus, Comenius, René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Voltaire headline a veritable who’s who of refugee scholars and thinkers.

Over time, the creation of safe spaces for critical enquiry and experimentation allowed scientists to establish strict standards that cut through the usual thicket of political influence, theological vision and aesthetic preference: the principle that only empirical evidence counts. In addition, intense competition among rulers, merchants and colonisers fed an insatiable appetite for new techniques and gadgets. Thus, while gunpowder, the floating compass and printing were all invented in distant China, they were eagerly embraced and applied by Europeans vying for control over territory, trade and minds.

Paired with commercial expansion, political fragmentation also encouraged a change in societal values. In imperial states, coalitions of large landowners, military men and clerics usually called the shots. Such elite groups eyed merchants, artisans and bankers with suspicion and disdain: after all, weren’t farming, war and prayer much more honourable pursuits than profiting from markups and interest? For bourgeois attitudes to thrive, and for capitalists to enjoy protection from predatory intervention, these traditional snobberies had to lose their grip on the popular imagination. Smaller states that were deeply immersed in commercial operations led the way: first the city-states of Italy and the Hanseatic League, then the Netherlands and Britain.

In the end, once the Italian Renaissance had run its course, it was precisely those parts of western Europe where the legacies of Roman rule had faded most thoroughly, or where Rome had never held sway at all, that spearheaded political, economic and scientific progress: Britain, the Low Countries, northern France and northern Germany. It was there that Germanic traditions of communal decision-making survived the longest and that the Reformation precipitated yet another break from Rome. It was there that social values changed most profoundly, modern commercial capitalism took root, and science and industrial technology flourished. But that was also where the fiercest wars of the era were being hatched and fought.

We might well be forgiven for finding this combination of fracture, violence and growth baffling or even implausible. Wasn’t it preferable to lead peaceful lives in a large and stable empire than on a continent where people were constantly at each other’s throats? Only if we think in the short term. Large-scale empire was indeed an extremely effective way of organising agrarian societies: by providing limited governance, it ensured a degree of peace and order while largely staying out of most people’s lives. Even taxes were generally quite modest. Designed to cater to the needs of a small ruling class and drawing heavily on the services of local elites, empires were relatively easy to build and cheap to maintain. But they came with built-in limitations: on liberties, on innovation, on sustainable growth.

Why was that? Influenced by Orientalising tropes about Asian societies, Western scholars used to think that, in traditional empires, human development was held back by despotism. We now know that this was at best a small part of the story. To be sure, ambitious rulers sometimes contrived to wreak considerable damage; but for the most part they preferred a laissez-faire approach. Empires tended to be quite detached from civil society: notorious for the sporadic exercise of despotic power, the ability to deal with their subjects unconstrained by what we now call the rule of law, they often scored low in terms of infrastructural power – their ability to shape people’s lives.

Faced with the challenges of holding on to huge territories, central authorities prized stability above all. As we saw, their empires reflected this priority by encouraging conservatism and reinforcing the status quo. They also empowered the ruler’s allies to prey on the weak, while sheer scale made the idea of political representation a nonstarter. At the same time, limited managerial capacities exposed such empires to secession and invasion, which threatened to undo the economic growth that had been achieved. China, which was repeatedly laid low by warlords, peasant uprisings and assaults from the steppe, is the best-known but by no means the only example.

In post-Roman Europe, by contrast, the spaces for transformative economic, political, technological and scientific development that had been opened up by the demise of centralised control and the unbundling of political, military, ideological and economic power never closed again. As states consolidated, intracontinental pluralism was guaranteed. When they centralised, they did so by building on the medieval legacies of formalised negotiation and partition of powers. Would-be emperors from Charlemagne to Charles V and Napoleon failed, as did the Inquisition, the Counter-Reformation, censorship, and, at long last, autocracy. That wasn’t for want of trying, of attempts to get Europe back on track, so to speak, to the safety of the status quo and universal rule. But the imperial template, once fashioned by ancient Romans, had been too thoroughly shattered to make this possible.

The benefits of modernity were disseminated around the world, painfully unevenly yet inexorably

This story embraces a grimly Darwinian perspective of progress – that disunion, competition and conflict were the principal selection pressures that shaped the evolution of states, societies and frames of mind; that it was endless war, racist colonialism, crony capitalism and raw intellectual ambition that fostered modern development, rather than peace and harmony. Yet that’s precisely what the historical record shows. Progress was born in the crucible of competitive fragmentation. The price was high. Bled dry by war and ripped off by protectionist policies, it took a long time even for Europeans to reap tangible benefits.

When they finally did, unprecedented inequalities of power, wealth and wellbeing began to divide the world. Racism made Western preeminence seem natural, with toxic consequences to the present day. Fossil fuel industries polluted earth and sky, and industrialised warfare wrecked and killed on a previously unimaginable scale.

At the same time, the benefits of modernity were disseminated around the world, painfully unevenly yet inexorably. Since the late 18th century, global life expectancy at birth has more than doubled, and average per-capita output has risen 15-fold. Poverty and illiteracy are in retreat. Political rights have spread, and our knowledge of nature has grown almost beyond measure. Slowly but surely, the whole world changed.

None of this was bound to happen. Even Europe’s rich diversity need not have produced the winning ticket. By the same token, transformative breakthroughs were even less likely to occur elsewhere. There’s no real sign that analogous developments had begun in other parts of the world before European colonialism disrupted local trends. This raises a dramatic counterfactual. Had the Roman Empire persisted, or had it been succeeded by a similarly overbearing power, we would in all likelihood still be ploughing our fields, mostly living in poverty and often dying young. Our world would be more predictable, more static. We would be spared some of the travails that beset us, from systemic racism and anthropogenic climate change to the threat of thermonuclear war. Then again, we would be stuck with ancient scourges – ignorance, sickness and want, divine kings and chattel slavery. Instead of COVID-19, we would be battling smallpox and plague without modern medicine.

Long before our species existed, we caught a lucky break. If an asteroid hadn’t knocked out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, our tiny rodent-like ancestors would have had a hard time evolving into Homo sapiens. But even once we had gotten that far, our big brains weren’t quite enough to break out of our ancestral way of life: growing, herding and hunting food amid endemic poverty, illiteracy, incurable disease and premature death. It took a second lucky break to escape from all that, a booster shot that arrived a little more than 1,500 years ago: the fall of ancient Rome. Just as the world’s erstwhile apex predators had to bow out to clear the way for us, so the mightiest empire Europe had ever seen had to crash to open up a path to prosperity.Nations and empires

Progress and modernityThe ancient world

We’re on the hunt for life – what do we do when we find it? 

May 11, 2016 (theconversation.com)

Author

1. Kelly C. SmithAssociate Professor of Philosophy & Biological Sciences, Clemson University

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Kelly C. Smith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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NASA’s chief scientist recently announced that “…we’re going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth within a decade, and I think we’re going to have definitive evidence within 20 to 30 years.” Such a discovery would clearly rank as one of the most important in human history and immediately open up a series of complex social and moral questions. One of the most profound concerns is about the moral status of extraterrestrial life forms. Since humanities scholars are only just now beginning to think critically about these kinds of post-contact questions, naïve positions are common.

Take Martian life: we don’t know if there is life on Mars, but if it exists, it’s almost certainly microbial and clinging to a precarious existence in subsurface aquifers. It may or may not represent an independent origin – life could have emerged first on Mars and been exported to Earth. But whatever its exact status, the prospect of life on Mars has tempted some scientists to venture out onto moral limbs. Of particular interest is a position I label “Mariomania.”

Should we quarantine Mars?

Mariomania can be traced back to Carl Sagan, who famously proclaimed

If there is life on Mars, I believe we should do nothing with Mars. Mars then belongs to the Martians, even if the Martians are only microbes.

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Chris McKay, one of NASA’s foremost Mars experts, goes even further to argue that we have an obligation to actively assist Martian life, so that it does not only survives, but flourishes:

…Martian life has rights. It has the right to continue its existence even if its extinction would benefit the biota of Earth. Furthermore, its rights confer upon us the obligation to assist it in obtaining global diversity and stability.

To many people, this position seems noble because it calls for human sacrifice in the service of a moral ideal. But in reality, the Mariomaniac position is far too sweeping to be defensible on either practical or moral grounds.

A moral hierarchy: Earthlings before Martians?

Suppose in the future we find that:

1. There is (only) microbial life on Mars.
2. We have long studied this life, answering our most pressing scientific questions.
3. It has become feasible to intervene on Mars in some way (for instance, by terraforming or strip mining) that would significantly harm or even destroy the microbes, but would also be of major benefit to humanity.

Mariomaniacs would no doubt rally in opposition to any such intervention under their “Mars for the Martians” banners. From a purely practical point of view, this probably means that we should not explore Mars at all, since it is not possible to do so without a real risk of contamination.

Beyond practicality, a theoretical argument can be made that opposition to intervention might itself be immoral:

• Humans beings have an especially high (if not necessarily unique) moral value and thus we have an unambiguous obligation to serve human interests.
• It is unclear if Martian microbes have moral value at all (at least independent of their usefulness to people). Even if they do, it’s certainly much less than that of human beings.
• Interventions on Mars could be of enormous benefit to humankind (for instance, creating a “second Earth”).
• Therefore: we should of course seek compromise where possible, but to the extent that we are forced to choose whose interests to maximize, we are morally obliged to err on the side of humans.

Obviously, there are a great many subtleties I don’t consider here. For example, many ethicists question whether human beings always have higher moral value than other life forms. Animal rights activists argue that we should accord real moral value to other animals because, like human beings, they possess morally relevant characteristics (for instance, the ability to feel pleasure and pain). But very few thoughtful commentators would conclude that, if we are forced to choose between saving an animal and saving a human, we should flip a coin.

Simplistic claims of moral equality are another example of overgeneralizing a moral principle for rhetorical effect. Whatever one thinks about animal rights, the idea that the moral status of humans should trump that of microbes is about as close to a slam dunk as it gets in moral theory.

On the other hand, we need to be careful since my argument merely establishes that there can be excellent moral reasons for overriding the “interests” of Martian microbes in some circumstances. There will always be those who want to use this kind of reasoning to justify all manner of human-serving but immoral actions. The argument I outline does not establish that anyone should be allowed to do anything they want to Mars for any reason. At the very least, Martian microbes would be of immense value to human beings: for example, as an object of scientific study. Thus, we should enforce a strong precautionary principle in our initial dealings with Mars (as a recent debate over planetary protection policies illustrates).

For every complex question, there’s a simple, incorrect answer

Mariomania seems to be the latest example of the idea, common among undergraduates in their first ethics class, that morality is all about establishing highly general rules that admit no exception. But such naïve versions of moral ideals don’t long survive contact with the real world.

By way of example, take the “Prime Directive” from TV’s “Star Trek”:

…no Star Fleet personnel may interfere with the normal and healthy development of alien life and culture…Star Fleet personnel may not violate this Prime Directive, even to save their lives and/or their ship…This directive takes precedence over any and all other considerations, and carries with it the highest moral obligation.

As every good trekkie knows, Federation crew members talk about the importance of obeying the prime directive almost as often as they violate it. Here, art reflects reality, since it’s simply not possible to make a one-size-fits-all rule that identifies the right course of action in every morally complex situation. As a result, Federation crews are constantly forced to choose between unpalatable options. On the one hand, they can obey the directive even when it leads to clearly immoral consequences, as when the Enterprise refuses to cure a plague devastating a planet. On the other hand, they can generate ad hoc reasons to ignore the rule, as when Captain Kirk decides that destroying a supercomputer running an alien society doesn’t violate the spirit of the directive.

Of course, we shouldn’t take Hollywood as a perfect guide to policy. The Prime Directive is merely a familiar example of the universal tension between highly general moral ideals and real-world applications. We will increasingly see the kinds of problems such tension creates in real life as technology opens up vistas beyond Earth for exploration and exploitation. If we insist on declaring unrealistic moral ideals in our guiding documents, we should not be surprised when decision makers are forced to find ways around them. For example, the U.S. Congress’ recent move to allow asteroid mining can be seen as flying in the face of the “collective good of mankind” ideals expressed in the Outer Space Treaty signed by all space-faring nations.

The solution is to do the hard work of formulating the right principles, at the right level of generality, before circumstances render moral debate irrelevant. This requires grappling with the complex trade-offs and hard choices in an intellectually honest fashion, while refusing the temptation to put forward soothing but impractical moral platitudes. We must therefore foster thoughtful exchanges among people with very different conceptions of the moral good in order to find common ground. It’s time for that conversation to begin in earnest.

Beth Daley

Editor and General Manager

14 APRIL 2021 (psyche.co)

Román Baca returned from war a changed man. Struggling with depression and anxiety after a combat tour to Fallujah, Iraq, from 2005 to 2006, Baca took his adversity by storm and created the New York based dance company Exit12.

Eventually, Baca and Exit12 expanded beyond performances by professional dancers to offer workshops to veterans and their loved ones. Devoted to the belief that art heals, the workshops allow a safe place for veterans to communicate often ineffable memories of war, and to process trauma through the language of dance. The choreography of battle is repurposed by Baca and his fellow dancers, who reclaim their military training by liberating it from the strictures of combat. Now, this same training to kill inspires artistic expression, giving the veterans an opportunity to transform their experiences and reconnect with their humanity.

Interweaving the company’s choreography with personal stories of war, the Iranian-American director Mohammad Gorjestani’s film gracefully bridges the two seemingly disparate worlds that Exit12 inhabits. In doing so, the film highlights the surprising synergy between the movements of battle and those of dance, underscoring how both disciplines affect the body and mind.

Working to upend expectations, Exit12: Moved By War offers a surprising portrait of a U.S. Marine. Preconceptions of who or what a war veteran might be are destabilised; there is no ‘one size fits all’ frame for the many faces of war. Baca’s dance workshops are a reminder that our lives can take many courses. A life once dedicated to service can find purpose and a home in dance, proving that the path to self-fulfilment can be embodied many forms.

Written by Olivia Hains

Director: Mohammad Gorjestani

Producers: Erick Kwiecien, Taylor Feltner

Websites: Even/Odd, Square

25 August 2016 (aeon.co)

Travelling across eight different locations, from urban San Jose in California to a desolate stretch of Death Valley, Lost in Light explores the ubiquitous but often overlooked phenomenon of light pollution. As artificial light brightens the night sky, we increasingly lose our view of the stars, planets and constellations, as well as the sense that we’re part of a larger galaxy. Showing eight different ‘levels’ of light pollution throughout California and Oregon, Sriram Murali uses timelapse to dramatic effect, asking what else we lose when we can’t see the stars.

Director: Sriram Murali

Want to fly a rotorcraft on another planet? Here’s what it takes.

BY SUKEE BENNETT

MONDAY, APRIL 12, 2021 (pbs.org)

NASA has delayed the first flight of its Ingenuity Mars helicopter, announcing that it expects to set a new date next week.

The helicopter, which arrived on the red planet tucked inside the Perseverance rover in February, was initially set to fly on Sunday, securing its position as the first rotorcraft to lift off on another world. Late on Friday night, however, a high-speed test of Ingenuity’s rotors ended early: As the helicopter’s command sequence tried to transition the flight computer from “preflight” to “flight” mode, engineers were alerted to a potential problem. The team has decided to update Ingenuity’s flight control software before attempting a maiden flight.

During this first flight, the Ingenuity Mars helicopter will lift off, hover 10 feet above the Martian surface, take pictures, and touch back down—all in a period of about 40 seconds. Meanwhile, some 200 feet away, the Perseverance rover will snap pictures and videos of its companion’s brief voyage.

This first flight will be a modest beginning of a much more ambitious task: In the next 30 days, the Ingenuity team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory will attempt a total of five flights, each longer and more technical than the last.

“Each world only gets one first flight,” Ingenuity Project Manager MiMi Aung said during a press conference on Friday. It’s a “historic moment that has analogues in 1903,” NASA’s Associate Administrator for Science Thomas Zurbuchen added, referring to the year the Wright brothers became the first in the world to fly a motor-operated airplane—after two failed liftoffs.

“History tells us that Orville and Wilbur took this setback like true engineers,” confirming that their fundamental understanding of flight was correct and going back and making subtle changes, Aung said during Friday’s press conference. Aung believes she and her team have become similarly well-versed in the unique challenges of flying a hovercraft on another planet and are aware that despite years of preparation, something could go wrong when it’s time for the first attempt. “I want to be conservative,” Aung said on Friday, adding the Ingenuity team had yet to celebrate the Mars helicopter’s achievements.

Perhaps the greatest challenge the team will face is the Martian atmosphere. Made up of mostly carbon dioxide, Mars’ atmosphere is a mere 1% as thick as our own planet’s, which is primarily nitrogen. Its thinness makes it the equivalent of flying at three times the height of Mount Everest, Ingenuity chamber test engineer Amelia Quon said on Friday.

Rotorcrafts, including helicopters, fly by generating lift. As their blades spin, they push the air and this lifts the craft up, Aung explains. In a thin atmosphere, she says, there are fewer molecules to push, “so you need to spin much faster to get lift,” she says. While the blades of most Earthly helicopters operate at around 450 to 500 revolutions per minute, Ingenuity’s will move at 2,400 rpm.

Ingenuity’s rotors “are not something off the shelf; they’re really fine-tuned to maximize lift in a really thin atmosphere,” Aung said. Weighing in at about 35 grams, the rotors have a foam core for lightweightedness and are covered in carbon fiber, laid out in a grid, for optimal stiffness and strength.

Like its blades, the body of the Mars helicopter is also lightweight, at less than four pounds. “We couldn’t make this happen” with technology that existed 10 or 15 years ago, Aung said.

Mars’ strong winds also pose a challenge. If gusts become too strong before Ingenuity is scheduled to fly, there’s no way of automatically postponing or canceling the flight through Perseverance, Ingenuity Operations Lead Tim Canham explained during Friday’s press conference. This is because the Perseverance rover’s weather-determining system has no connection to Ingenuity. And Ingenuity has no way to right itself; if it fails to land right-side-up during any of its flights, its mission on Mars would end.

But there’s good news: Martian weather is easy to predict. “Weather on Mars tends to stay the same over a period of sols,” Canham explains. (At 24 hours, 39 minutes, and 35 seconds, a Martian sol is slightly longer than a day on Earth.) The Ingenuity team initially chose 12:30 p.m. Martian time Sunday, the equivalent of 11:00 p.m. EDT, for a potential first liftoff because the team calculated that’s when Ingenuity would have the most charged battery and Mars would have the calmest skies.

The team started testing in 2014 whether Ingenuity could successfully fly on another planet. We “made Mars on Earth,” Quon said, referring to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s 25-foot space simulator thermal vacuum chamber, which Voyager 1 and 2 were tested in before making their way into space and out of our solar system.

First, the team used a flight model to illustrate that lift is possible—picture a couple of hops and a crash landing—in a Martian-like environment. Then, in 2018, the team had the model spin up three feet in the air and turn. In 2019, NASA scientists took data from previous tests and applied them to testing the actual Ingenuity Mars helicopter.

If all goes well, during its first sol after taking to the sky, Ingenuity will transmit its black-and-white photos and flight summary data to Perseverance, which will transmit the data to scientists on Earth. In the following days, scientists expect to receive color imagery and more complex data from the flight.

Canham is also eager to hear the sound of Ingenuity’s liftoff: Perseverance is equipped with a microphone specifically designed to survive on Mars—and capture the snaps, crackles and pops of its sizzling stones. It’s possible for the microphone to capture Ingenuity’s liftoff, but given its somewhat significant distance (more than 200 feet) from the helicopter, there are no guarantees. It’s “very touch and go on whether we’ll get anything,” Canham said on Friday. “But who knows.”

What’s more certain is that Perseverance will capture its own photos of Ingenuity’s first flight.

Before, during, and after Ingenuity’s 40-second airtime, Perseverance will snap six to seven photos a second using its onboard Mastcam-Z cameras, one with zoomed-in perspective and the other a zoomed-out perspective. (You can view images as they come in on NASA’s website here.)

The Ingenuity team expects its second flight to happen four days after its initial flight. And if that one goes well—the goal being to have the helicopter fly up to 15 feet—the team will move to an every-three-day flight cadence.

“We want to have fun” with the fourth and fifth flights, Aung said, suggesting that the team may venture at least 150 feet out and back from the helicopter’s takeoff site, possibly into never-before-seen territory. “This is all about the future. This is all about being a pathfinder,” she said, explaining that Ingenuity can inform how future space helicopters, which will be bigger and heavier, should function.

Like NASA’s first Mars rover—the modest 23-pound microwave-sized Sojourner, which touched down on the red planet in 1997—Ingenuity is a “tech demonstration,” explained Zurbuchen, NASA’s Associate Administrator for Science. Similar to Sojourner’s brief mission on Mars, Zurbuchen believes, decades from now, we’ll look back on Ingenuity’s month of flight with awe and fondness.

“Ingenuity’s month will be an aggressive demonstration of what it can possibly do,” he said. And, teammate Elsa Jensen added, “Big Sister”—Perseverance—“will be watching.”

Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz|TED@NAS (ted.com)

We are all connected by the spectacular birth, death and rebirth of stars, says astrophysicist Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz. Journey through the cosmic history of the universe as Ramirez-Ruiz explains how supernovas forged the elements of life to create everything from the air you breathe to the very atoms that make you.

This talk was presented at a TED Institute event given in partnership with The Kavli Foundation, the Simons Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences. TED editors featured it among our selections on the home page. Read more about the TED Institute.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz · Astrophyscist, stellar morticianLooking not at the heavens but at computer models, Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz studies some of the most powerful explosions since the birth of the universe.