Category Archives: Astronomy

Weathering Climate Change – A Fresh Approach

Review of a book by Hugh Ross

I discovered Hugh Ross recently (see his Wikipedia page), and am very impressed by his ability to explain astronomical phenomena. I am also hugely impressed by his courage and ability to interpret these phenomena from a Christian perspective. He is an “old-earth creationist”. In various speeches and interviews he shows how extremely unlikely the existence of life in the universe is. He explains the long array of unlikely coincidences which have to happen – some of them concurrently – to make life possible (see e.g. here and here). He runs a website called “Reasons to Believe“.

I resolved to find out more and bought a couple of books by him. One of those I have now finished reading: “Weathering Climate Change – A Fresh Approach” (RTB Press, Covina, CA, 2020). This is my review of this book.

We know that over the past few centuries, the Earth’s atmosphere has been warming somewhat. We also are reasonably sure that human activity has had some input into this warming, although we’re not at all sure what exactly and to what extent – despite what politicians and media appear to want us believe in this regard. (See e.g. the content description of this current book by Steven E. Koonin, a former top science advisor to the Obama administration.)

Ross clearly believes that the human contribution to the current climate change is considerable and dangerous to our continued existence. He suggests some measures, about which more later.

I am sceptical of that claim. However, I’m not in a position to contend it. The reason I’m writing this review is that Ross adds a perspective I have rarely seen before. And that is his contention that in the past near 10,000 years, human activity has decisively contributed to preventing the onset of a new glaciation. I say “glaciation”, not “ice age”, because the latter refers to a much longer time, measured in millions of years, in which periodic glaciations take place, which typically last thousands if not tens of thousands of years.

The current ice age started about 2.6 million years ago. It’s still ongoing. At the beginning of that age, glaciation phases happened roughly every 41,000 years. About 800,000 years ago this rhythm changed to about 100,000 years. We’re not sure why. Ross lists 14 currently discussed explanations, one of which is a large meteorite strike. This switch also meant that the interglacial phases lengthened to 2-4,000 years. (p. 140) Another hugely interesting fact he discusses is that another meteorite strike, about 12,000 years ago on the north-west edge of Greenland, stopped the “normal” warming phase that would otherwise have triggered a new glaciation within a couple of thousand years or so. This happened “just in time” so to speak, to allow human civilisation to flourish. (See chapter 14, “The Marvel of [current] Climate Stability”)

If you look at a temperature chart of the past 800,000 years (such as this one using ice cores from Antarctica), a few things stand out: 1. In the past 300,000 years or so, the glaciation phases have become progressively longer and deeper (i.e., colder). 2. While the previous interglacial phases were always very short (just a couple of thousand years at most), shown by sharply upward indicating points of the graph, followed swiftly by an equally sharp decline in temperature), our current interglacial is untypically long. It has lasted almost 10,000 years.

The reason (apart from the above mentioned Greenland meteorite), Ross contends, is human activity. “The human factor . . . has played the predominant role in delaying the onset of the next glacial episode.” He emphasises why this is important: “We need to understand how the fortuitous balance and current imbalance came about – and to gain hope that we can do something to stabilize the temperature, at least for a while.” (p. 199)

He goes into detail: “The dramatic rise in the number of cattle and the breeding of cows to increase milk and meat production that began during the sixth millennium BC substantially augmented the emission of greenhouse gases, specifically methane and carbon dioxide, into Earth’s atmosphere.” In addition, “[t]hroughout Eurasia, deforestation to make room for intensive crop cultivation and pastureland raised atmospheric carbon dioxide levels by replacing trees with photosynthetically less-productive plants.” (p. 199-200).

He continues: “Prior to the industrial revolution, the combination of animal husbandry, rice farming, and transformation of tropical and subtropical forest land to cultivated fields and pasture raised the atmospheric methane level from 450 parts per billion to 700 parts per billion and the atmospheric carbon dioxide level from 245 to 280 parts per million. These three human activities over the past 7,000 years not only helped to delay the onset of the next ice age [!], but they also contributed to maintaining an unprecedented period of extreme global climate stability.” (p.200)

However, “the explosive rise in technological and industrial development, transportation, standard of living, and resource consumption that has occurred in nearly all the world’s nations over the past 70 years has accelerated global warming beyond the global cooling rate from natural causes. As the imbalance continues, it has the potential to hasten the onset of warming disasters, followed by the greater devastation of the next glacial era.” (p.200, my emphasis)

The reason for the latter is, according to Ross, the current distribution of sea and land. Specifically, the fact that at the North Pole, there is no land. That in turn means there is not much ice at the North Pole, compared to Antarctica. So, a relatively small temperature rise will make all that ice disappear. What happens then, according to Ross, is this:

“As Arctic sea ice continues to vanish, the newly opened waters of the Arctic Ocean, with their much lower reflectivity than that of ice and snow, will absorb more heat from the sun. . . . This extra heat absorption increases the temperature and moisture content of the overlying atmosphere, which in turn means more precipitation falling on the landmasses adjoining the Arctic Ocean (primarily Canada and Russia).” (p. 189)

That would explain why previous interglacial phases ended very soon after the temperature spiked at a few degrees above the current global average level and much of the world became covered in immensely thick sheets of ice.

As mentioned, the reason that has not happened yet in the current warm phase is, according to Ross, human activity. However, our activities are tipping the temperature higher, so a new glacial phase might result.

Again, as mentioned, I am in no position to know whether this is true or not. However, I have no reason to doubt the sincerity of Ross as a Christian and a scientist.

So, what to do about this (possible) threat?

Near the end of the book, Ross presents some measures that might prevent the world tipping into a new glaciation. At least, “for a while”. And here, I am in a position to judge, at least to a certain extent, whether these measures are viable and/or wise.

It is laudable that Ross has recognised a very important point. The measures generally suggested nowadays involve economic sacrifices. “This”, he warns, “ignores the fact that humans are inherently selfish. While some individuals and nations may go along with austere governmental restrictions, most will battle them. Cheating is inevitable”, which in turn will “not only make the intended goal unachievable but also sow seeds of political mistrust and animosity.” (p. 200).

He then asks: “What if we could significantly prolong climate stability without resorting to draconian economic sacrifices?”

However, when one surveys his list of suggestions, some of which he himself admits are quite outlandish, one is struck by the fact that he doesn’t seem to realise that they all, too, involve some kind of economic sacrifice, at least from some. I will discuss this fact after I’ve presented Ross’ suggestions.

Here they are. He starts with “geoengineering ideas”: Artificial sun shields (possibly orbiting the sun, placed between earth and sun); solar power generators in space (where no clouds and haze prevent the collection of solar energy – which must then be beamed to earth through microwave radiation); Aerosol injection into the stratosphere (here at least he concedes that this may lead to “unintended consequences”); removal of atmospheric greenhouse gases (current technology only addresses CO2, not however methane, nitrous oxides and hydrofluorocarbons, the removal of which would “likely be 10-10,000 times more expensive than CO2 removal”, thus, “greenhouse gas removal factories will likely fall far short of compensating for emissions”); ocean fertilisation (again, “major concerns surround the potential environmental consequences and economic risk”); rocket earth (pushing earth out to more distant orbits around the sun while the sun continues to get brighter). (p. 203-05)

Ross concludes: “Although the rocket planet proposal seems too far-fetched, the other five proposed geoengineering ideas show some promise”, however, their implementation “in time to solve the current global warming trend seems remote.”(p.205)

So instead, Ross lists some “wise management of life resources” ideas, which he precedes with an important caveat: “If we keep the realities of human nature in view and follow well-established free-market economic principles, we should be able to resolve our environmental problems in ways that enhance both human welfare and the welfare of Earth’s life.” (p.206)

Here they are: Rice Paddy Management. Apparently, “direct seeding of rice into initially dry paddies” reduces “methane emissions by18-90 percent” compared to flooded rice paddies, which emit about “500 million tons of methane” or “20 percent of methane emission form human activity”. (p.206)

Alternative meat source. Ross advocates finding ways to replace beef, lamb and goat with ostrich meat. While texture, taste and colour resemble that of beef, it is much leaner, richer in iron and lower in cholesterol. Ostriches emit “very little greenhouse gas . . . virtually no methane.” They also “need far less water and pastureland”. (p. 208) The problem is: We have yet to discover how to “farm” them because ostriches, compared to cattle, “are far more sensitive and social animals. They tend to mate for life, and they need contact with other ostriches with whom they have developed emotional bonds. They need social contact with their ranchers, too.” (p.209)

Effective lumbering. Here, Ross makes a hugely important point. “Replanted forests grow at a much faster rate than virgin forests and, thus the rate at which carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere is much higher.” (p. 210) This echoes the commandment given by God in Genesis that we should “tend and watch over” creation (chp. 2, v. 15). Ross advocates “reduced-impact logging techniques” instead of “traditional, clear-cut logging” (p. 210)

Smart dams. Dams reduce dependence on fossil fuels for electrical power generation. However, they come with their own environmental challenges. Citing experts, Ross contends that “dams can be designed in such a way that the environmental positives outweigh the negatives.” (p. 211) Here too, we can allude to Genesis 2,15.

Restoring whale populations. Apparently, whales’ faeces fertilise the ocean’s phytoplankton. They in turn remove a lot of CO2 from the atmosphere. Whales contribute to CO2 production, but their presence allows for significantly more CO2 reduction due to their fertilisation of the oceans. (p. 212)

Replanting expanded deserts. Speaks for itself really. (p. 213-14) Unfortunately, Ross doesn’t mention the interesting fact that deserts are currently actually shrinking, without active, direct input by humans. And that is due to the risen CO2 content in the atmosphere.

Multilevel hydroponic farms. This means “growing plants without soil and often without natural light, nourishing them via water and dissolved minerals. . . . Shelves of plants and lights can be stacked on top of one another.” This not only means less use of natural ground, but “photosynthesis [i.e., removal of CO2] per unit of area also multiplies.” (p. 214)

Finally, Ross also advocates the “management of current technology”. He provides three examples: Solar power generating rooftops, bitcoin elimination (because “cryptocurrency consumes vast amounts of electricity” and “alone could push the global mean temperature 2°C above the preindustrial level in less than three decades.” [p. 215]) and wearable thermoelectrics (“wearable devices that can deliver more than 10°C of adjustable cooling or heating effect for up to eight hours” which, were they to become ubiquitously available, “more than 10 percent of the total energy presently being consumed by humans could be eliminated.” [p.216])

What to say about these suggested measures?

The idea of preventing/forbidding cryptocurrency appears nowadays as a non-starter. In fact, it’s amazing that no-one else has picked up on this, considering what Ross says about it. Maybe the reason is that central banks around the world are feverishly working on creating their own cryptocurrency and hoping to herd us all into exclusively using it for money, thereby immensely enhancing the powers of surveillance and behavioural control.

More generally however, when surveying the ideas that Ross promotes, he appears to overlook some basic facts of economics. For one, every measure (every human action, to be precise) involves an “opportunity cost”. We live in a world of scarcity. Using time, effort and material for one thing means they cannot be used for something else. That is the opportunity cost. A more religious term, which means the same thing, is the aforementioned “sacrifice”. What are we sacrificing when we embark on these measures? And then: Who should make the ultimate decision on what to sacrifice? For which purpose exactly? How certain can we be of reaching that goal? And how certain can we be of the scope and volume of the sacrifice? Who, in the meantime, gains from those measures?

These are important questions that may have been beyond the scope of Ross’ book, so will have to be addressed elsewhere.

These questions also bring me to the second basic fact of economics: For every measure, there are unintended consequences. In a free market system supported by the rule of law, unintended consequences are dealt with swiftly and efficiently, and damage is limited. However, when government intervention is involved (and most of Ross’ suggestions require a huge amount of government intervention), unintended consequences are, for unavoidable structural reasons, not dealt with swiftly and efficiently. Therefore, damages are not limited.

The biggest, and sadly largely unrecognised, unintended consequence of allowing large-scale government interventions is a metastasising state. Every unintended consequence is another “reason” for the government to intervene even further, causing more unintended consequences in a downward spiral that ends in societal disaster of one kind or another.

In order to cover/ignore/rationalise the resulting and growing mess, an ideological superstructure is sought that will justify this “mega-sacrifice” everyone (except for the “wise” managerial elite) is expected to endure. The end result is a totalitarian state, which tries to keep the lid on ever growing chaos in the society below. The Bible has a precedent for this development. It is the Tower of Babel. It is ungodly. It is anti-God.

This is an important aspect that Ross has missed out in his book. Christians need to be aware that, in allowing or even supporting unchristian methods, they are paving the way for a catastrophe for themselves and others that is much greater than even the onset of a new glaciation. They might even get the glaciation or some other climate catastrophe on top of totalitarianism, because of the common phenomenon of “government failure”. Bad weather, even very bad weather, can be dealt with when it arrives, by applying new, as yet undreamt-of technologies emerging on the free market – where, as mentioned above, unintended consequences are swiftly dealt with, while resources continue being concentrated on the actual task at hand.

Interview with Astrophysicist Hugh Ross

At Grace Church St. Louis, from 19th May 2024

Starts here.

Includes account of when he visited the Soviet Union. He says scientists there were researching “occult weapons”, because the leadership realised they were falling behind the US and were getting desperate.

He says some of the scientists there were “obviously demon-possessed”, and explained that in terms of their behaviour: Shouting at him during his talk, being very hostile, turning away, going into foetal position etc.

Climate The Movie

Here it is.

Alternatively, here. Under this video on rumble.com we find the following text:

This film exposes the climate alarm as an invented scare without any basis in science. It shows that mainstream studies and official data do not support the claim that we are witnessing an increase in extreme weather events – hurricanes, droughts, heatwaves, wildfires and all the rest. It emphatically counters the claim that current temperatures and levels of atmospheric CO2 are unusually and worryingly high. On the contrary, it is very clearly the case, as can be seen in all mainstream studies, that, compared to the last half billion years of earth’s history, both current temperatures and CO2 levels are extremely and unusually low. We are currently in an ice age. It also shows that there is no evidence that changing levels of CO2 (it has changed many times) has ever ‘driven’ climate change in the past.
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Why then, are we told, again and again, that ‘catastrophic man-made climate-change’ is an irrefutable fact? Why are we told that there is no evidence that contradicts it? Why are we told that anyone who questions ‘climate chaos’ is a ‘flat-earther’ and a ‘science-denier’?
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The film explores the nature of the consensus behind climate change. It describes the origins of the climate funding bandwagon, and the rise of the trillion-dollar climate industry. It describes the hundreds of thousands of jobs that depend on the climate crisis. It explains the enormous pressure on scientists and others not to question the climate alarm: the withdrawal of funds, rejection by science journals, social ostracism.
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But the climate alarm is much more than a funding and jobs bandwagon. The film explores the politics of climate. From the beginning, the climate scare was political. The culprit was free-market industrial capitalism. The solution was higher taxes and more regulation. From the start, the climate alarm appealed to, and has been adopted and promoted by, those groups who favour bigger government.
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This is the unspoken political divide behind the climate alarm. The climate scare appeals especially to all those in the sprawling publicly-funded establishment. This includes the largely publicly-funded Western intelligentsia, for whom climate has become a moral cause. In these circles, to criticise or question the climate alarm has become a breach of social etiquette.
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The film was shot on location in the U.S., Israel, Kenya and UK.
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MARTIN DURKIN

The Mythology of Spaceship Earth

Article by Gary North, written in 1969, the year of the first landing on the moon.

The full article is here.

Excerpts:

The gap between moral wisdom and scientific knowledge has been a problem since the scientific rev­olution of the sixteenth century. Immanuel Kant, writing in the late 1700’s, struggled mightily with this very question: How can man bridge the intellectual chasm between scientific knowledge (the realm of law and necessity) and moral knowledge (the realm of freedom and choice) without sacri­ficing the integrity of one or the other? Hegel, Marx, and the mod­ern moral philosophers have all lived in the shadow of this dilem­ma, and the crisis of modern cul­ture reflects man’s failure to re­solve it. The responses to this dilemma, as a rule, take one or the other of two forms, symbolized by Arthur Koestler as the Com­missar on the one hand, and the Yogi on the other.

The Commissar is enraptured with science and technology; he is confident that scientific planning in proper hands can so alter man’s environment as to bring about a new earth and a new mankind. The Yogi takes the opposite tack of disengagement from “the world,” laying stress on each man cultivating his own garden. Find inner peace, he urges, and the ex­ternal world will take care of it­self. His assumption is that sci­ence and technology are neutral, that developing from their inner imperatives they will eventually find their own benevolent level.

[. . .]

Mr. Wicker, unfortunately, made a great leap of faith when he be­gan to compare our heavenly achievement with our supposed capabilities for solving more earthly tasks. He was not alone in this leap. Editorial after edi­torial echoed it, and I single him out only because he is widely read and generally regarded as one of the superior liberal pundits. He makes the leap seem so plausible: “So the conclusion that enlight­ened men might draw is that if the same concentration of effort and control could be applied to some useful earthly project, a similar success might be ob­tained.” He recommends a vast program of publicly-owned hous­ing construction, say, some 26 million new units by 1980.

Flora Lewis’ column was far more optimistic; her horizons for mankind’s planning capabilities are apparently much wider. “If the moon can be grasped, why not the end of hunger, of greed, of warfare, of cruelty?” She admits that there are problems: “They seem provocatively within our new capacities and yet maddeningly distant. We are told it is only lack of will that frustrates these achievements, too.” Nature is boundless, apparently; only our “lack of will” prevents us from unlocking the secrets of paradise and ending the human condition as we know it. This is the mes­sianism of technological planning. It is basic to the thinking of a large segment of our intellectuals, and the success of the Apollo flights has brought it out into the open.

Mr. Wicker wisely set for our government a limited goal. Miss Lewis does not necessarily limit the task to government planning alone, but it is obvious that she is basing her hopes on a technological feat that was essentially a statist project. At this point, several questions should be raised. First, should the state have used some $25 billions of coerced taxes in order to send two men to the moon’s surface? Would men act­ing in a voluntary fashion have expended such a sum in this gen­eration? In short, was it worth the forfeiting of $25 billions worth of alternative uses for the money? Second, given Mr. Wick­er’s plans, could we not ask the same question? Is the construction of public housing, and the use of scarce resources involved in such construction, on a priority scale that high in the minds of the American public? Would a non­inflationary tax cut not be pref­erable?3 It is typical of socialistic thinkers to point to emergency spending (e.g., a war) or some statist rocket program and rec­ommend a transfer of funds from one branch of the state’s planning bureaucracy to another. I have never heard them recommend a reduction of spending by the state. Spending precedents set in war time, like “temporary” taxes, seem to become permanent. Finally, in Miss Lewis’ example, is the mere application of the techniques of applied science sufficient to end warfare and cruelty? Or could it be, as the Apostle James put it, that our wars come from the hearts of men? Conversion, in and of itself, may not redeem tech­nology, but can Miss Lewis be so certain that technology can redeem mankind?

[. . .]

A LEAP OF FAITH

Therefore, to take a leap of faith from some particular in­stance of a “successful” govern­ment project—success defined as the operationally satisfactory com­pletion of a certain unquestioned goal—to the realm of economic planning involves a faith far greater than anything imagined by the medieval scholastics. Yet Dr. Irving Bengelsdorf, a staff writer with the Los Angeles Times, thinks that “there may be hope” along this line of thinking, in spite of the difficulties inherent in any computerized quantification of qualitative personal prefer­ences. He states the problem well; he cannot show how his answer is linked operationally with the prob­lem he states:

In contrast to the novel and un­cluttered venture of getting to the moon, [an] uninhabited, non-social, non-political moon, the problems of society are exceedingly complex to solve because any solution demands that, people have to change their daily ways of life, their interactions with other people. This is difficult to do. For, from birth, people already come overlaid with traditional prejudices, encrusted with hoary cultures, and swaddled in ancient customs. And these are hard to change.

But, there may be hope. Both the Apollo 11 flight and the Manhattan Project of World War II show that once a clear goal has been set, a vast, complex project involving large num­bers of people with different training and skills working together can achieve a solution.

Between the first paragraph and the second lies a social revolution. Also present in the gap is the un­stated assumption that we can re­duce the complexities of society to “a clear goal,” which is pre­cisely the problem governments have not learned to solve. I am at a loss to see how a wartime bomb project or a trip to the moon in­dicate anything except the amaz­ing capacity for spending that gov­ernments possess.

SPACESHIP EARTH

Barbara Ward, one of the most respected Establishment thinkers in Britain, and former editor of The Economist, has taken Buck­minster Fuller’s spaceship analogy and has turned it into an effective neo-Fabian propaganda device: “The most rational way of con­sidering the whole race today is to see it as the ship’s crew of a single spaceship on which all of us, with a remarkable combination of security and vulnerability, are making our pilgrimage through infinity.” [. . .]

[. . .]

The problem with all of this “spaceship reasoning” is that it assumes as solved those funda­mental problems that need solving in order to make possible the spaceship analogy. The thing which strikes me as ironic is that the language of the spaceship involves a chain of command approach to the solution of human problems. Those humanitarian intellectuals who decry the petty military dicta­torships in underdeveloped nations want to impose a massive system of command over the whole earth. That is what the call to world gov­ernment implies. The spaceship analogy necessarily views society as a vast army. Yet for some reason, Hayek’s identical conclusion about the implications of socialist planning is invariably rejected as absurd. It is the mentality of the militarist. Miss Ward even is will­ing to admit that our experiences in wartime helped to create the foundation of modern economic policy:

Thus, not by theory or dogma but largely by war-induced experience, the Western market economies have come to accept the effectiveness and usefulness of a partnership between public and private activity. . . . but there is now no question of exclusive reliance on any one instrument or any one method. The pragmatic market economies have worked out their own evolving conceptions of public and private responsibility and the result is the dynamic but surprisingly stable mixed economy of the Western world.

THE CHAOS OF NONECONOMICS

I would have put it a different way. I would have pointed to the signs of our contemporary sys­tem’s increasing inefficiency, cor­ruption, and extralegal practices which we more usually associate with those warfare economies from which she says we borrowed our planning techniques. What we have created is non-economics, and Miss Ward proclaims the ben­efits of such a system:

But, on the whole, in economics the Western world can move from posi­tion to position with little sense of contradiction and incompatibility. We had no very fixed views before so we do not have to bother too much about what we believe now. It is a consider­able source of strength.

This, then, is “reason, spaceship style.” It is the triumph of intel­lectual chaos, and it is inevitably recreating the economy in its own image.

GROUNDING THE SHIP

Dr. William G. Pollard, a physi­cist who was a part of the Man­hattan Project, has written a little book which tries to undergird the spaceship analogy with a theolog­ical framework. His theology is radical, but he is honest in seeing the purpose of the Apollo flights as being ultimately religious. He thinks it marks the end of the era of science-worship. Diminishing marginal returns are about to set in:

Sending men to the moon and bringing them back in 1969 may prove to be from the perspective of the twentieth century the central symbol of the golden age of science in the twenty-first. Like the great pyramids of Egypt or the lofty cathedrals of medieval Europe, this feat will stand out as a peak expression of the spirit of the golden age; the maximum economic investment which a great civili­zation could make in a feat which served no useful purpose other than making manifest the lofty height to which the spirit of an age could rise. It will not be worth repeating except perhaps by Russia for the purpose of sharing in its glory. Thereafter, even more massive applications of science and technology to basic human needs will have become so urgently neces­sary that no further diversion of available talent and resources to manned space flights can be per­mitted.

We can hope that he is correct, but who knows for certain? The government was so successful, as it usually is, in achieving a feat “which served no useful purpose” other than its own glory, that we may have more of the same. But this much should be clear: the analogy of spaceship earth is more than an analogy; it is a call to religious commitment. The call is to faith in centralized planning.

At the beginning of this essay, I pointed to the dual theories of regeneration, symbolized by the Yogi and the Commissar. They feed on each other, take in each other’s intellectual washing, so to speak. If we are to confront the mythology of spaceship earth, it must be in terms of a rival moral philosophy, one which has social and economic implications, as well as technological implications. We must deny the validity of any vision of man as central planner, a little god who would arrange in an omniscient fashion the lives of all men in all the spheres of their existence, as if we were some per­manent military crew. We must acknowledge the validity of the late C. S. Lewis’ warning in The Abolition of Man that when we hear men speaking of “man’s tak­ing control of man,” we should understand that it implies certain men taking control of all the others.

When men seek to divinize the state, they succeed merely in cre­ating hell on earth. The Christian church fought this point out with the Roman Emperors, both pagan and Arian. The state may not claim to be God’s exclusive or even chief representative on earth.”’ The the­ology of spaceship earth would have us return to the religious political theory of the ancient world, all in the name of progres­sive technology and planning.

The astronauts are back on earth. We must seek to keep them here. It is time to ground our spaceship programs, both interplanetary and domestic. Let the captains go down with their ideological ship. There are better ways of allocating our scarce resources than in construct­ing spaceship earth.

The Star of Bethlehem

The likely truth behind it, and what it means for us today

Due to technological progress it is now possible to see more or less exactly what our ancestors saw in the night sky at any time of any year from any vantage point on earth. Computer programs allow us to see this in real time animation, or sped up, or slowed down. We can “zoom in” and “out” to individual stars, planets or constellations, as if we were looking through a telescope.

This has for some years now opened up the exiting possibility of studying in minute detail what was happening in the heavens in the years and months just prior to the birth of Christ. Was there something extraordinary happening that could have prompted “wise men” to go looking for a “new-born king of the Jews” (see the Gospel of Matthew 2:1-2)?

It turns out, indeed there was.

Before I explain further, some relevant personal background.

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