Fear often overwhelms clear thinking. It did on 9/11. We were told that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction, that he was involved in 9/11, he was bosom buddies with Osama bin Laden, and……he was developing a nuclear bomb that we couldn’t wait for it to appear in the form of a mushroom cloud. That all turned out to be a “pack of lies”.
The Coronovirus, Donald Trump tells us, it originated in Wuhan, China. The Chinese say we brought it there. Who’s right about that? How many of us even know there is this rather serious disagreement?
What is the proof of either side? Does anybody know?
Very few of us are even aware of this. Why? We’re too busy following our government’s directives to stay sheltered inside and not to talk to anyone outside, always maintaining six feet from our fellow citizens when we go to the grocery store. Mmm! Those who do talk to others, what are they talking about through their masks? COVID 19. Nothing more. What are our TV news talking heads talking about? COVID 19. Be afraid, be very afraid. Be terrified and lock step behind the directives of our government.
Is there any questioning going on beyond the exigencies of Fear? You answer that question.
Allow me to digress for a moment. In 2003, the world was terrorized by a virus called SARS. Do you know how many people died from SARS worldwide? A little more than 800. After being told by our Authoritarian Experts that there would be millions of cases, WORLDWIDE, it turned out there were only a little more than 800. How could that be?
And those Experts told us that the virus originated in China around cities like Foshan near Quandong in southern China. Did they tell us that those cities were the centers for the world where all the electronic trash was sent to be disassembled and recycled by poor Chinese workers who did so for $1.50 an hour? Did they tell us that these workers labored around huge vats of acid, breathing in a cacophany of chemicals daily in the pursuit of feeding and caring for their families? Did they tell us that the corporations who profited from this exploitation dumped what they couldn’t salvage into their waterways, so much so that they poisoned the drinking water for the people that lived there? Their local governments ended up having to ship in clean drinking water.
And what did the corporations tell us? These people were the carriers of SARS. That was their “Cover Story” to the world, their covering up of their corporate criminal behavior. And it took our eyes off the ball, didn’t it?
Those Chinese Workers didn’t have a viral infection that caused fear and terror in the world. Their respiratory health problems, etc. were the result of Corporate Crime and the corporations covered it up by directing our attentions away from the Truth.
So in confronting this pandemic, are we asking the right questions or are we, once again, being directed away from deeper questioning? FEAR is a tremendous manipulator and controller. It DIVERTED our eyes and minds after 9/11, didn’t it?
“Only through full awareness of the danger to life can this potential be mobilized for action capable of bringing about drastic changes in our way of organizing society.”
BY MARIA POPOVA (brainpickings.org)
To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.
Hope — and the wise, effective action that can spring from it — is the counterweight to the heavy sense of our own fragility. It is a continual negotiation between optimism and despair, a continual negation of cynicism and naïveté. We hope precisely because we are aware that terrible outcomes are always possible and often probable, but that the choices we make can impact the outcomes.
How to harness that uniquely human paradox in living more empowered lives in even the most vulnerable-making circumstances is what the great humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm (March 23, 1900–March 18, 1980) explores in the 1968 gem The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology (public library), written in an era when both hope and fear were at a global high, by a German Jew who had narrowly escaped a dismal fate by taking refuge first in Switzerland and then in America when the Nazis seized power.
Hope is a decisive element in any attempt to bring about social change in the direction of greater aliveness, awareness, and reason. But the nature of hope is often misunderstood and confused with attitudes that have nothing to do with hope and in fact are the very opposite.
Half a century before the physicist Brian Greene made his poetic case for our sense of mortality as the wellspring of meaning in our ephemeral lives, Fromm argues that our capacity for hope — which has furnished the greatest achievements of our species — is rooted in our vulnerable self-consciousness. Writing well before Ursula K. Le Guin’s brilliant unsexing of the universal pronoun, Fromm (and all of his contemporaries and predecessors, male and female, trapped in the linguistic convention of their time) may be forgiven for using man as shorthand for the generalized human being:
Man, lacking the instinctual equipment of the animal, is not as well equipped for flight or for attack as animals are. He does not “know” infallibly, as the salmon knows where to return to the river in order to spawn its young and as many birds know where to go south in the winter and where to return in the summer. His decisions are not made for him by instinct. He has to make them. He is faced with alternatives and there is a risk of failure in every decision he makes. The price that man pays for consciousness is insecurity. He can stand his insecurity by being aware and accepting the human condition, and by the hope that he will not fail even though he has no guarantee for success. He has no certainty; the only certain prediction he can make is: “I shall die.”
What makes us human is not the fact of that elemental vulnerability, which we share with all other living creatures, but the awareness of that fact — the way existential uncertainty worms the consciousness capable of grasping it. But in that singular fragility lies, also, our singular resilience as thinking, feeling animals capable of foresight and of intelligent, sensitive decision-making along the vectors of that foresight.
Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision making which replace the principles of instinct. He has to have a frame of orientation that permits him to organize a consistent picture of the world as a condition for consistent actions. He has to fight not only against the dangers of dying, starving, and being hurt, but also against another danger that is specifically human: that of becoming insane. In other words, he has to protect himself not only against the danger of losing his life but also against the danger of losing his mind. The human being, born under the conditions described here, would indeed go mad if he did not find a frame of reference which permitted him to feel at home in the world in some form and to escape the experience of utter helplessness, disorientation, and uprootedness. There are many ways in which man can find a solution to the task of staying alive and of remaining sane. Some are better than others and some are worse. By “better” is meant a way conducive to greater strength, clarity, joy, independence; and by “worse” the very opposite. But more important than finding the better solution is finding some solution that is viable.
Art by Pascal Lemaître from Listen by Holly M. McGhee
As we navigate our own uncertain times together, may a thousand flowers of sanity bloom, each valid so long as it is viable in buoying the human spirit it animates. And may we remember the myriad terrors and uncertainties preceding our own, which have served as unexpected awakenings from some of our most perilous civilizational slumbers. Fromm — who devoted his life to illuminating the inner landscape of the individual human being as the tectonic foundation of the political topography of the world — composed this book during the 1968 American Presidential election. He was aglow with hope that the unlikely ascent of an obscure, idealistic, poetically inclined Senator from Minnesota by the name of Eugene McCarthy (not to be confused with the infamous Joseph McCarthy, who stood for just about everything opposite) might steer the country toward precisely such pathways to “greater strength, clarity, joy, independence.”
McCarthy lost — to none other than Nixon — and the country plummeted into more war, more extractionism, more reactionary nationalism and bigotry. But the very rise of that unlikely candidate contoured hopes undared before — hopes some of which have since become reality and others have clarified our most urgent work as a society and a species. Fromm writes:
A man who was hardly known before, one who is the opposite of the typical politician, averse to appealing on the basis of sentimentality or demagoguery, truly opposed to the Vietnam War, succeeded in winning the approval and even the most enthusiastic acclaim of a large segment of the population, reaching from the radical youth, hippies, intellectuals, to liberals of the upper middle classes. This was a crusade without precedent in America, and it was something short of a miracle that this professor-Senator, a devotee of poetry and philosophy, could become a serious contender for the Presidency. It proved that a large segment of the American population is ready and eager for Humanization… indicating that hope and the will for change are alive.
Having given reign to his own hope and will for change in this book “appealing to the love for life (biophilia) that still exists in many of us,” Fromm reflects on a universal motive force of resilience and change:
Only through full awareness of the danger to life can this potential be mobilized for action capable of bringing about drastic changes in our way of organizing society… One cannot think in terms of percentages or probabilities as long as there is a real possibility — even a slight one — that life will prevail.
Russell Brand A clip from the upcoming Under The Skin podcast with philosopher and professor Dr. Brad Evans! We chat about the history of previous pandemics and what revolutionary changes arose from them, we talk about the militarisation of our streets during this Coronavirus crisis, what security means and what community means. You can listen to this entire podcast from Sat 28th March only on Luminary: http://luminary.link/russell Subscribe to my channel here: http://tinyurl.com/opragcg (make sure to hit the BELL icon to be notified of new videos!)
A Half Century Ago, Chemist Gordon Moore Made a Prediction—Or Was It a Challenge?—That Became a Narrative for Our Time
Screenshot of Gordon Moore featured in Scientists You Must Know by the Science History Institute. Courtesy of the Science History Institute.
by RACHEL JONES | MARCH 22, 2020 (zocalopublicsquare.org)
In the last half-century, and especially in the last decade, computers have given us the ability to act and interact in progressively faster and more frictionless ways. Consider the now-ubiquitous smartphone, whose internal processor takes just a millisecond to convert a movement of your finger or thumb to a visual change on your screen. This speed has benefits (in 2020, there’s a virtual library of information online) as well as disadvantages (your gaffe can go viral in seconds).
What made the smartphone—and the rest of our unfolding digital transformation—possible? Many point to a prediction in April 1965, published in a then-little-read article toward the back end of the trade paper Electronics. The piece, written by a young chemist named Gordon Moore, outlined in technical terms how quickly the technology behind computer chips might develop and, by implication, make its way into our lives. It’s been 55 years since the article’s publication, and it’s worth revisiting its original prediction—now known as Moore’s Law.
If you ask people today what Moore’s Law is, they’ll often say it predicts that every 18 months, engineers will be able to come up with ways to double the number of transistors they can squeeze onto a tiny computer chip, thus doubling its processing power. It’s a curious aspect of the law that this is not what Moore actually said, but he did predict consistent improvement in processing technology. Moreover, the world he anticipated did take shape, with his own work as founder of the chipmaker Intel creating much of the momentum necessary to turn his “law” into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Initially, Moore had few notions of changing the world. Early in life, he discovered a love for chemistry—and though he was kept back at school for his inarticulate style, he excelled at practical activities, making bombs and rockets in a home-based laboratory. He went on to study chemistry at UC Berkeley under two Nobel laureates, and earned a Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology in 1954.
Moore’s career trajectory coincided with the rise of the transistor, a device made of semiconductor material that can regulate electrical current flows and act as a switch or gate for electronic signals. As far back as the 1920s, physicists had proposed making transistors as a way to improve on the unreliable, power-hungry vacuum tubes that helped amplify signals on telephone lines, and that would be used in the thousands in computers such as ENIAC and Colossus. In 1939, William Shockley, a young Bell Labs researcher, revived the idea of the transistor and tried to fabricate a device; despite several failures, he continued on and in 1947 he and two colleagues succeeded in making the world’s first working transistor (for which they shared a Nobel Prize in Physics). In 1953, British scientists used transistors to build a computer, and Fortune declared it “The Year of the Transistor.”
In 1955, Shockley moved to Mountain View, California, to be near his mother. He opened a semiconductor laboratory and picked a handful of young scientists to join him, including Moore and his Intel co-founder, Bob Noyce. The launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957 and the escalation of the Cold War created a boom within a boom: Moore and seven colleagues, including Noyce, broke away from Shockley in a group quickly branded “The Traitorous Eight,” forming the seminal start-up Fairchild Semiconductor. They planned to make silicon transistors, which promised greater robustness, miniaturization and lower power usage, so essential for computers guiding missiles and satellites.
“Our curiosity was similar, but not our approach. Noyce liked things that flew. I liked things that blew up,” said Gordon Moore (left) with Robert Noyce. Courtesy of Intel Free Press.
Developing the core manufacturing technology was a seat-of-the-pants adventure in which Moore played a central role. In March 1958, Fairchild received an order from IBM for 100 mesa transistors priced at $150 each. Mesas, made on 1-inch silicon wafers, were so named because their profiles resembled the flat-topped mesa formations of the American Southwest. Moore’s responsibility was figuring out how to fabricate them reliably, which involved a complex chemical ballet and a considerable amount of thrift and improvisation. Unable to buy appropriate furnaces, Moore relied on glass-blowing skills to create gas-handling systems, assembled on cobbled-together aqua blue kitchen cabinets and Formica countertops. (Real lab furniture was “as expensive as heck,” he remarked.) Delivery solutions were similarly no-frills: Fairchild sent mesa transistors to IBM in a Brillo box from a local grocery store.
The mesa transistor was successful, but the company’s new planar transistor (named for its flat topography) was a game-changer, bringing more stability and better performance. Another key development was the step to connect transistors by making all components of a complete circuit within a single piece of silicon, paving the way for the first commercial integrated circuits, or microchips. Everyone wanted miniaturized circuitry—the obstacle to greater computing power was its need for more components and interconnections, which increased the possibilities for failure. Noyce grasped a solution: why not leave transistors together in a wafer and interconnect them there, then detach the set as a single unit? Such “microchips” could be smaller, faster and cheaper than transistors manufactured individually and connected to each other afterward. As early as 1959, Moore proposed that “sets of these components will be able to replace 90 percent of all circuitry” in digital computers.In the 1970s, seeing progress continue, Moore grew bolder, telling audiences that silicon electronics would constitute “a major revolution in the history of mankind, as important as the Industrial Revolution.”
Six years later, in 1965, when he wrote his now-famous article in Electronics—“Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits”—personal computers were still a decade away. Moore, who had seen the number of elements on a chip go from one, to eight, to 60, hinted at how integrated functions would “broaden [electronics’] scope beyond [his] imagination” and at the “major impact” the changes would bring, but saw his analysis as distilling merely a trend in technology that would make everything cheaper. Nevertheless, his analysis was rigorous. Doubling the number of components on an integrated circuit each year would steadily increase performance and decrease cost, which would—as Moore put it 10 years later—“extend the utility of digital electronics more broadly in society.”
As chemical printing continued to evolve, the economics of microchips would continue to improve, and these more complex chips would provide the cheapest electronics. Thus, an electronics-based revolution could depend on existing silicon technology, rather than some new invention. By 1970, Moore asserted, the transistor that could be made most cheaply would be on a microchip 30 times more complex than one of 1965.
In 1968, Moore left Fairchild and joined Noyce to found Intel, with the aim of “putting cleverness back into processing silicon.” In 1975, he reviewed his original extrapolation. Chips introduced until that point had followed the trend he predicted, but engineers were reaching the limits for circuit and device cleverness. Moore now proposed a doubling about every two years.
The analysis in Electronics was becoming known as Moore’s Law. Having correctly observed the potential for exponential growth, Moore overcame his personal dislike of the spotlight by travelling widely to talk about his idea, taking every opportunity to persuade others. After all, the fulfilment of Moore’s Law would be as much social as technical, relying on widespread acceptance: industry needed to invest to develop the technology, manufacturers needed to put microchips into their products, consumers needed to buy and use electronic devices and functions, and researchers and engineers needed to invent advances to extend Moore’s Law.
In the 1970s, seeing progress continue, Moore grew bolder, telling audiences that silicon electronics would constitute “a major revolution in the history of mankind, as important as the Industrial Revolution.” He was so confident in his vision that he told a journalist that students who’d made headlines getting kicked off campuses (“kids with the long hair and beards”) were not the ones to watch: instead, he pronounced, “we are really the revolutionaries in the world today.” In front of a crowd, he pointed out that if the auto industry made progress at the same rate as silicon microelectronics, it would be more expensive to park your car downtown for the night than to buy a new Rolls Royce. “And,” he recalled years later, “one of the members of the audience pointed out, yeah, but it’d only be 2-inches long and a half-inch high; it wouldn’t be much good for your commute.”
The rest is history. “For more than three decades,” the New York Times pointed out in 2003, Moore’s Law “has accurately predicted the accelerating power and plummeting cost of computing. Because of the exponential nature of Moore’s prediction, each change has arrived faster and more furiously.” Its curve, shallow at first (though spawning the birth of the microprocessor, digital calculator, personal computer and internet along the way) has, since 2005, gone almost straight up in “hockey stick” style.
Despite the changes we’ve all witnessed, Moore’s Law is still widely misunderstood, even in tech circles. “[It’s] only 11 words long … but most people manage to mangle it,” said one report. Moore’s 1965 article is a sophisticated piece of analysis but many prefer to interpret it more vaguely: “The definition of ‘Moore’s Law’ has come to refer to almost anything related to the semiconductor industry that when plotted on semi-log paper approximates a straight line,” noted its originator, dryly.
Up to April 2002, Intel’s website noted that “Moore predicted that the number of transistors per integrated circuit would double every 18 months,” even though Moore had pointed out that he “never said 18 months.”
Why did 18 months stick? Perhaps because a projection by an Intel colleague in 1975 led to a conflation of transistor count and doubling of performance; perhaps because this timescale appeared in an influential technology column in 1992, as the modern configuration of Silicon Valley was forming—perhaps because that speed felt more accurate to the semiconductor industry.
During the technology bust of the early 2000s, people began to speculate about the death of Moore’s Law. Others suggested it would peter out because people would drop their computer fixations to spend less time at work and more with their families, or because Silicon Valley’s obsession with it was “unhealthy” for business strategy. In 2007, the year the smartphone launched, Moore pointed out that “we make more transistors per year than the number of printed characters in all the newspapers, magazines, books, photocopies, and computer printouts.” But he recognized exponential growth could not continue forever; he knew the physical and financial constraints on shrinking the size of chip components.
When people in industry circles describe Moore’s Law as a “dictate—the law by which the industry lives or dies,” it is more evidence of the law’s power within Silicon Valley culture rather than its actual predictive accuracy. As the essayist Ilkka Tuomi observed in “The Lives and Death of Moore’s Law,” Moore’s Law became “an increasingly misleading predictor of future developments” that people understood to be something more like a “rule-of-thumb” than a “deterministic natural law.” In fact, Tuomi speculated, the very slipperiness of Moore’s Law might have accounted for its popularity. To an extent, tech people could pick and choose how they interpreted the dictum to suit their business needs.
Today, Moore’s Law continues to thrive in the smartphone space, having put some 8.5 billion transistors into a single phone that can fit in our pockets. The law may now be, in the words of one commentator, “more a challenge to the industry than an axiom for how chipmaking works,” but for what began as a 10-year forecast, it has had an astonishing run. “Once you’ve made a successful prediction, avoid making another one,” Moore quipped in 2015.
Even as technology continues to pervade our lives—with the advent of more specialized chips and materials, better software, cloud computing, and the promise of quantum computing—his law remains the benchmark and overarching narrative, both forecasting and describing our digital evolution.RACHEL JONESis a writer, editor, and biographer, specializing in stories and histories of science, technology, health and innovation. She co-authored Moore’s Law: The Life of Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley’s Quiet Revolutionary.
There’s no squinting in space. Things appear small, sure. From your vantage point, 254 miles above Earth, even the colossal Kapok trees of the Amazon are reduced to a verdant swirl in a cat-eye marble. But in space, as six NASA astronauts tell Inverse, what you see isn’t necessarily what you envision. Up there, where perspective is immeasurably wide, it’s impossible to miss the forest for the trees.
The astronauts — Chris Hadfield, Jerry Linenger, Nicole Stott, Mae Jemison, Leland Melvin, and Mike Massimino — have all had the rare opportunity to view our home planet from space. In doing so, all of them went through a change, not only in how they saw the planet but in their relationship to it. Some refer to that change as the “Overview Effect,” a term coined in 1987 by celebrated space writer Frank White to describe the mental shift astronauts experience when they consider the Earth as part of a larger whole.
The new National Geographic series One Strange Rock, executive produced by Darren Aronofsky and Jane Root of Nutopia, aims to recreate the Overview Effect for everybody else by showing, as best it can, the views that prompted those shifts.
In a series of one-on-one conversations with the astronauts, Inverse asked what exactly each of them saw the moment that everything changed.
Chris Hadfield 166 Days in Space
It sneaks up on you, because you’re busy and you’re doing stuff. Your emotions almost end up somewhere behind you, because things are happening so fast. One of the reasons we take so many pictures is we don’t have time to see what we’re looking at. And you know if you don’t somehow record this right now, you’re going to miss it, and hopefully you’ll have time later to look at it.
So, sometimes when you’re looking back at something you did, you realize what just happened. It was when I took a picture, actually, of Karachi, Pakistan, and I read what I wrote about it the next day, which was: “There are 6 million of us living in Pakistan.” And I realized that that part of the world had become us for me.
Six million of us? When is that no longer “them?” How did that part of the world, which I’ve never even been to, now, suddenly, because of the cumulative effect of where I am, start to feel like us? I think that’s when the world became one place for me.
Jerry Linenger 143 Days in Space
You go through the launch and it’s just chaos — it’s just power. You think, “Wow, mankind built this thing — it’s incredible! This thing’s getting me to 17,500 miles an hour.” All that part is incredible. So you catch up with everything; you do all the things your brain has to do: switches, make sure everything’s correct, make sure the spacecraft’s working.
But it’s when you have that reflective moment, when you just float over the top of a window. In my five months on the Russian Space Station, I had some opportunities where, for 90 minutes, I would just levitate over a window, and I’d see the sun rise, the sun set, the stars come out, and I’d just sort of block the world out. I blocked out science, to some degree. I said: I’m not going to identify the Big Dipper. There’s so much stuff out there; it’s a feeble effort by man to try and put labels on all this stuff.
I took the gestalt of it and said, “Wow, that’s the universe.” And then, on the reverse side, I said, “Wow, that’s Planet Earth, and there’s civilization.” You kind of go back in time with civilization. I said, “Wow, that’s a river, I can see the rivers dotting it, I can see the Ganges River, and the light shining there.” You realize these ancient civilizations are very similar to our civilizations. They needed water in those days, and we still need water. The rivers of the world look like pearl necklaces.
You just have this incredible view of the universe, of Earth, and a little reflection of yourself as a human being, telling yourself, “Wow, I’m in space. What mankind just accomplished is incredible.”
Nicole Scott 104 Days in Space
All I know is I was stunned in a way that was completely unexpected. It was overwhelmingly impressive — beyond anything I’d heard from my colleagues who’ve flown before. We just can’t describe it, you know? When you go to different places here on Earth and experience things that you never thought you would before, it’s difficult to describe it. I think with a lot of those things, you’re seeing it, but you’re feeling it, too. You feel like it’s just getting in you.
The planet just glows. I remember trying to describe to my son, who was seven at the time, what it was looking like to me. I’m like, “Okay, the simplest way I can think is just, take a lightbulb — the brightest lightbulb that you could ever possibly imagine — and just paint it all the colors that you know Earth to be, and turn it on, and be blinded by it.” Because day, night, sunrise, sunset, it is just glowing in all of those colors.
I didn’t expect that. I expected it to be really, really pretty, but I didn’t expect to feel like you could almost reach into it. You immediately cannot deny that it’s a planet. That you live on a planet.
I do remember initially looking out the window the first couple of days and wanting to see my home, wanting to see Florida from space. Finally, we were flying over Florida. I wanted to fly to the window and see it, and then realized somewhere down the line that I wasn’t looking at Florida that same way anymore. I still wanted to see Florida, but Florida had just become this special part of home, which is Earth. I don’t know when that happened. Was that two days after I got there? I mean, it wasn’t like one day I woke up and was like, “Oh yeah, Earth’s my home.”
It’s a feeling of interconnectivity that you sometimes just don’t get when you’re in the middle of something. I think separating ourselves from things that are important to us is good because you then appreciate it in a new way. That definitely happened for me with Earth.
Mae Jemison Eight Days in Space
One of the things that’s really interesting is that you respond to what you took up with you. I didn’t have any, “Aha, everything that belongs to me in life is down here on Earth.” Mine was quite different. Mine was about connecting with the rest of the universe. I never grew up thinking that this was the end-all, be-all. I never thought of boundaries and borders. I always knew they were human-made — that we put them there; they had no relationship to anything. I knew that the clouds carry water over different parts of the world. That wasn’t a big whoop for me.
I tried to make myself afraid. I thought that I would be nervous being up there, but I was just so mellow and cool. I’d done a couple of things: I was exactly where I wanted to be, I’d made my peace with everybody if something happened, so I was very cool and in the moment. But I was like, “This is just feeling a little too good, right?”
I imagined that on the other side of this hatch is an atmosphere and environment that doesn’t support my life form. But I couldn’t make myself nervous. And I tried to imagine myself being on another star system 10,000 light-years away, and I felt fine. I thought it would be important that I was there with a bunch of people, but I was like, “I would have loved to have been up there by myself in a big glass bubble with my cat.”
Because I felt that connected. For me, it wasn’t a connection back down to Earth. It was a connection with the rest of the universe.
For me, it was about outward versus inward. But I think it depends on who you are when you go up.
Leland Melvin 213 Days in Space
Actually, it really happened after we installed the laboratory. Peggy Whitson, who is one of my colleagues on the show, she invited us over to the Russian segment to break bread; basically, to have a meal. And she said, “You guys bring the rehydrated vegetables, we’ll have the meat.”
So, we came over with this bag of vegetables, and we’re floating there, having this meal with people we used to fight against. Russians and Germans are on this mission. It’s almost a Benetton commercial. African-American, Asian-American, French, German, Russian, the first female commander, breaking bread at 17,500 miles per hour, all doing this while listening to Sade’s “Smooth Operator.”
I look out the window, and I see the planet again. We’re going around it so fast and we’re coming over Virginia. I look down and I’m thinking, “My parents are probably having a meal.” Five minutes later, we’re over Paris, where Léo’s from, our French long-duration astronaut. And then Yuri, from Russia, can look over to the side and see his home.
And so, in this one little moment in time, we’re looking at our respective homes, breaking bread, and celebrating like we are in space. And that’s when this shift happened, because I saw so much of the planet in 90 minutes. I saw all these different things happening. And that’s when I think I really got my over-perspective. I thought it would be when I did this task of installing the Columbus laboratory, but that paled in comparison to the human piece of us sharing and breaking bread and seeing the planet in that way. Our respective homes, up in space.
Melvin spoke with Inverse’s James Grebey, at Space Camp.
Mike Massimino 23 Days in Space
It happened during a space walk. At Hubble, we were 100 miles higher than the station, so we could see the curve of the planet from up there. The view is really cool.
If we were in a spaceship now, in this room — say we had windows — we’d see 57th Street. Then, whoop, we blast off into space. And now, through that same window, you see something different. You’re floating around; you’re seeing the Earth. Ah, that’s pretty cool. But you’re still inside.
When you go out, you’re in the backyard, and everything opens up to you. You can see differently. For me, it definitely changed the way I think about things. I really think our planet is a paradise.
I was at the Explorers Club Dinner. Jim Lovell, Apollo 13 guy — I had a conversation with during the day. He said, in his acceptance speech, something to the effect of: He knows what heaven is like because he was born there. Here.
This is a paradise that we live in, I think. I do think of this place as heaven-like.
I think this is a wonderful place to be, but I think seeing it from space, the beauty of it, that was my feeling. This is what heaven must look like, and I can’t imagine anything more beautiful than our planet from space.
Yasmin Tayag is a writer and former biologist living in New York. A Toronto girl at heart, her writing also appears in The Last Magazine and SciArt in America. You might recognize her as a past host of Scientific American’s YouTube series.
This article was originally published on March 27, 2018, by Inverse, and is republished here with permission.
“THIS, TOO, SHALL PASS. WE CAN FIGURE THIS OUT.”BY JON CHRISTIAN / March 23, 2020 (futurism.com)
For many people, the coronavirus pandemic didn’t quite hit home until beloved actor Tom Hanks tested positive.
Now, the Academy Awards-winning Hanks is back with some good news for a tired world: He and wife Rita Wilson, another accomplished actor who also caught the bug, are both on the mend.
“Two weeks after our first symptoms and we feel better,” Hanks tweeted on Sunday.
That’s heartening news for the Hanks/Wilson household, but it’s also a reminder that the vast majority of people who catch the coronavirus make it through and feel much better after a few weeks.
Hanks — “Cast Away” and “Forrest Gump” actor, published author, NPR quiz show guest-host — also used his platform to sing the praises of sheltering in place, which means avoiding unnecessary contact with others in a bid to avoid spreading the coronavirus.
It’s inevitable that COVID-19 will continue to spread at some rate, at least for a while, but the more the public can work together to slow it down, the less strain it will put on the health care system.
“Going to take awhile, but if we take care of each other, help where we can, and give up some comforts… this, too, shall pass,” Hanks wrote. “We can figure this out.”
The Aries New Moon brings a direct, uncomplicated focus to affairs, helping us to move ahead in straight lines. This can be a great boon in many areas of life, but particularly with a situation that has previously felt stuck or too complex. It may be the case that we are motivated to take up fresh activity in an area that has been dormant or lacking in solutions.
The Moon is starting to separate from a sextile to Saturn, which suggests that a serious atmosphere could be softening. This may come about because steps towards greater progress have already been made. Even if not, though, such steps could soon be possible. Perhaps you are about to turn the page on events that have been rather hard-going and drawn out. Either way, a separating aspect that involves the Moon, which is linked with daily changes, can convey the sense of a situation being on the wane.
Where Saturn is concerned, we often have lessons to learn, some of which we can pick up relatively easily, whereas others may just not stick with us. Occasionally, we simply don’t get the message, or at least not right away. Even so, it can turn out that life is intent on ensuring that we do “get it” this time, which may mean that the occasion for learning seems to recur — or the circumstances relating to it do so. There could be a developing theme of history repeating itself.
The planet that rules the Aries Moon is Mars, now in Capricorn, close to where Saturn was located during the previous lunation. According to traditional astrology, Mars is said to be exalted here, giving it strength that relates to its having a natural rapport with Saturn (ruler of Capricorn). We might see that Saturn is an invisible helper, lending support to Mars in this sign. How this may translate for us, in our everyday circumstances, could be through situations going more our way. We may suddenly find the right person on hand to help us meet our needs. Or doors are opened that we thought were closed to us.
Both Mars and Saturn can be linked with a sense of timing. So, a positive development might also relate to swift action, potentially in a place where it is not usually applied. Notably, Mars is also conjunct Pluto and Jupiter, which indicates blessings coming our way, including the gifts of insight. We may have woken up to the inner workings of a situation, for example, and be able to work towards a favorable outcome, instead of being involved in missed opportunities or negative results.
The Pluto energy relates to transformation of some kind. Frequently, when the intensity of Pluto’s presence is obvious, it is because we are witnessing a process of metamorphosis or a desire for change. Managing to keep such energy contained can feel quite difficult. If we have any choice in matters, then we may choose to let go and see where things lead — and be surprised at how much help is available, even when we do not select a specific route. Maybe we realize that we don’t have to make as great an impression as we had imagined. This could be in keeping with a general shift developing around us, which helps us to understand that the times are changing, whether we are doing so or not.
There is a marked theme of healing to this month’s New Moon, because it is conjunct Chiron in Aries. We may well witness an acceleration in a therapeutic process. If we notice any kind of new health problem arising, however, it might be equally wise to take prompt action to nip it in the bud. We could avoid a repeat of a situation we’ve previously experienced, or step away from a matter that will worsen quickly.
This article is from the Mountain Astrologer, written by Diana Collis.
London Real: What are some positive things we can do?
Icke: One of the positive things we can do is to change our self identity. If you identify as your name, your life story, your race, your religion, your background, whatever, you are identifying with a set of labels that are transitory and are incredibly brief. And those set of labels are not you. They are what you are experiencing. I am not David Icke. I am a point of attention which can be myopic or vast within an infinite stream of consciousness. And you are a point of attention in that same consciousness that observes reality from a different point of view. We are all points of attention in that same one consciousness, which is why racism is so ludicrous.
And if you self-identify with your labels as the “I,” as the total “I,” then you see the world in a certain way and it can be very frightening, but when you self-identify as “I am eternal, infinite having this experience” and when I leave the body which is just a way that the body focuses our attention within a tiny band of frequency. And when we leave the body, our attention expands as far as we want it to because that attention is no longer being focused through the body, through the five senses, and we on experiencing and exploring forever, forever.
This is a brief experience for a point of eternal consciousness that we give a name to. And when you observe the world from that perspective, which is where I’ve been coming from for a long time now, it’s not so frightening. And you have the ability to connect dots ’cause you’ll see things from a panorama and not a myopia. From a myopia, it can seem very, very fearful, but from the panorama, it’s just another experience.
Our perceptions, and it can be explained very simply how this works, our perceptions become our experience. And if you fall into fear of something, everything in this reality, even the coronavirus, is a frequency. Every thought is a frequency. Fear is a frequency. It’s a different frequency to love. It’s a different frequency to joy. And we live in this sea of frequency of possibility and probability.
It’s like being a computer this is living in this wi-fi sea, and within that wi-fi sea is everything on the internet. And so potentially you can put anything on the internet on your screen, your experience, but our perceptions are also frequencies. And so if we are in a frequency of fear and we are generating that frequency, that field, that electromagnetic field, we are going to make a symbiotic frequency connection with like frequencies. And what we do is we draw to us, as an experience, what we fear.
And all the time, you know, people say, you know, ‘This is always happening to me. Hey, Ethel, it’s happened again!’ Why? Why do certain things keep repeating in people’s lives but not repeat in others? Because what they’re putting out, this perception, which is a frequency field, is drawing towards them, like a magnetic phenomenon, drawing to them what they’re putting out.
And, so, if you fall into fearing something, the likelihood of that becoming your experience is massively increased. I’ve experimented with this through my life and, you know, I had very serious rheumatoid arthritis. I mean, I remember on one occasion, I was trying to walk through Terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport and literally I was shuffling my feet. I had no shoes on. I was shuffling my feet along towards the plane ’cause I couldn’t even lift my legs.
I don’t have that now. I have no pain. It doesn’t affect my life in any way. And the difference is I changed my perception. You see, why is it that so many people die within the period that the doctor tells they have to live? ‘How long have I got doctor?’ ‘Six months.’ They die in six months over and over again.
And do you know something? People have been told they have a fatal disease. The doctor has given them a prognosis. ‘You have so long to live’ and they die. And when they’ve done the post mortem, they didn’t have the fatal disease. ‘Cause the mind is all powerful. It’s constantly creating our reality. It’s perceptions are constantly becoming our experience.
And so I decided that if my reality was being controlled by my perceptions, then my perception is: this arthritis is not going to trouble me any more. And it’s not going to progress. And it’s not going to have me in a wheelchair and wizened up. And that’s exactly what’s happened. No drugs. No doctor. That’s exactly what’s happened.
And everybody has the power to use their mind to dictate their own reality. Why is it that this cult, this system, is so desperate to control human perception? Because it knows human perception becomes human experience and if we fall into states of fear we are going to manifest reasons to fear all around us. But if we take our minds back, if we take our consciousness back, we can create a different reality.
Because what is human society? It’s the sum total of human perception. Human perception changes. Human society must change, ’cause it’s just a reflection of the sum total of human perception. We love each other. We live in a loving world. We hate each other. We live in a world of hate. We fear. We live in a world of fear.
We are in control. They’ve just persuaded us we’re not.
London Real: And the message you’ve just said, I’ve heard from some of the greatest minds that have ever sat in that chair. Especially ones that have been around for a little while. They come to the same conclusions as you have. That we are what we believe and the energy we put out there is what we get back.
Icke: This book is all about that in a very accessible way because they say the more you know, the more you know there is to know. Well, yeah, on one level that’s right. But there’s another way: The more you know, the more you realize how little there is to actually know to take control of your life and your life experience. And so much of the complexity hides the simple sparkling truths.
Genius. This is the misunderstanding of the academic, intellectual mind. It perceives understanding complexity as intelligence and cleverness when genius is seeing the simple hidden by complexity. And in the end, when you get down to the core, we are what we perceive. Change what you perceive, and you’ll change what you experience.
London Real: And that applies to right now even more.
Icke: Absolutely.
London Real: Because if I’m not in fear, if I’m not worried about this stuff, then I don’t react to it. A friend of mine said, “Brian, I don’t see you running to the store and buying a whole bunch of stuff.” . . .
Icke: When you move your self identity to: I am an infinite point of attention within an infinite state of consciousness, what does that immediately do? It deletes the fear of death. What is death? It’s a withdrawing of our point of attention. That’s all death is. It’s a transfer of our point of attention. So there’s nothing to fear. And once you let go of fear of death, so many things that you are able to be manipulated through that fear of death, go. You can’t manipulate me any more.
Fear of the unknown. Fear of the unknown? Well, I like surprises. [Laughs.] It completely transforms everything when you re self-identify with the “I.” And fear of death is the first one to go. And I’m the same as you. I don’t want to leave here until I’ve done everything I can do to contribute. And I expect I’ll be around for a long time. And in so many ways (I explain this in the book), we can dictate how long we are around.
Again, you know, if the mind can transform rheumatoid arthritis which should have had me in a wheelchair by now and it hasn’t, then it can transform anything including the nature of life. You know, you can think yourself alive and you can think yourself dead. And so I’m going to stay around and make the best contribution I can, but when I go, I will be: “YES!”
Do we want to stay in this myopia band of frequency forever? Are you having a laugh? What a nightmare. So it’s just an experience. And then we move on and experience the infinity of forever. I mean, ‘Oh, I’m terrified. Coronavirus! Oh, God, we’re all going to die!’ I don’t think so.
London Real: Final thoughts on everything we’ve talked about today. The virus, the lockdown, the recession, just anything.
Icke: Well, I would just say what I said earlier in terms of . . . If you want to understand the world, find our where we’re being taken. what the goal is, and then the world just opens up. ‘Oh, so that’s why they’re doing that. Oh, so that’s why that’s happening’ instead of ‘What’s happening? What’s happening? What are they doing that for?’ It becomes so clear.
And what you do is then you take control of your perceptions. Because it’s very difficult, it’s impossible to manipulate people when you understand the game. How does problem/reaction manipulate you when you understand how it works? How does the totalitarian tiptoe manipulate you when you understand how it works? Know the game and you can win the game instead of being a victim of the game which is what’s happened up to this point.
London Real: . . . Just stay calm.
Icke: Yeah, just stay calm. We are an infinite point of eternal consciousness on an eternal journey of exploring all possibility. That’s as bad as it gets. This is just an experience. We can make it a nice experience or we can make it or we can make it an unpleasant experience. We have the power to choose and it’s about time we realized that. Because when enough people do, this cult is history.
London Real: . . . This could be a great catalyst for realization.
Icke: Oh, I think it is, Brian. You know, we need to appreciate the difference between those that control the microphones and so many people, not all by any means, but so many people and gathering in increasing number who don’t get to the microphones. You see the activists, the climate control activists, the coronavirus activists, and the fricking transgender activists, and all that, and the politically correct activists, and . . . And then you talk to the pubic. And you see a completely different perception to that. But because they dominate the microphones, as of course they do, because that’s the agenda, people can get the impression that that’s what the population thinks. It doesn’t. It doesn’t.
My father used to say, ‘The silent majority is silent ’cause it’s got nothing to say.’ It’s time for the silent majority to speak. And when we do, things will change. But not until.
London Real: And that’s something you said in the last episode. You should always say how you feel.
Icke: It simply comes to self respect. I ask people, ‘What are you doing allowing someone else to tell you what to think, to tell you what you can say, to tell you what you an believe . . . What are you doing? Where’s your self-respect?’ We live in a world of psychological fascism where people are constantly seeking to impose their beliefs on other people. We see it with religion all the time. We see it with ‘woke’ mentality all the time. I believe this so you must believe that. And if people acquiesce to that, then tyranny rules. And if we don’t, if we say, ‘You can call me what you like (and people do), I don’t care. Call me this, call me that, call me the other. Oh, thanks for sharing that with me. Have a nice day.’ But you say it anyway. And if enough people say it and refuse to bow to this psychological tyranny, imposing on our lives what we can be, what we can say, what we can think, the number of people being imposed upon is bast compared with the number of people doing the imposing.
I think I see a way out of this. You know, stiffen the backbone. Grow a pair. Say what you believe. Have some self-respect in your own uniqueness. And don’t let anyone take it away. And if we live in a world of multiple uniqueness, where everyone is celebrating their own uniqueness, their own unique . . all part of the same consciousness, yes . . . but their own unique point of attention, then that true, true diversity means tyranny can’t reign.
What does every tyranny want to do? Centralize everything, including perception. The more we celebrate our uniqueness, the more we are withdrawing from the ability of the few at the center to dictate to everybody. ‘You will think this!’ I won’t. ‘You will say that! You won’t say that!’ I will. What they going to do? Why do people acquiesce and self-center? Fear. Get rid of fear. The world changes. Because the world is controlled by fear. Delete fear. Delete control.
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