Combustible Mixture of Ignorance & Power
What would Carl Sagan be saying now?
SOS #116 J. Morris Hicks (7-27-21)
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The world desperately needs the Carl-Sagan inspired information contained in this SOS Memo. Please read it carefully, watch the two videos and share them with others. In so doing, let's all declare war on ignorance. |
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Cornell Professor Carl Sagan died prematurely in 1996 at the age of 62. The world needs his voice now in a big way.
Not familiar with Sagan? Read these...
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Why Carl Sagan is Truly Irreplaceable?
No one will ever match his talent
as the gatekeeper of scientific credibility
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We live in Carl Sagan's universe -- awesomely vast, deeply humbling. It's a universe that, as Sagan reminded us again and again, isn't about us. We're a granular element. Our presence may even be ephemeral -- a flash of luminescence in a great dark ocean. Or perhaps we are here to stay, somehow finding a way to transcend our worst instincts and ancient hatreds, and eventually become a galactic species. |
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He led a feverish existence, with multiple careers tumbling over one another, as if he knew he wouldn't live to an old age. Among other things, he served as an astronomy professor at Cornell, wrote more than a dozen books, worked on NASA robotic missions, edited the scientific journal Icarus and somehow found time to park himself, repeatedly, arguably compulsively, in front of TV cameras.
He was the house astronomer, basically, on Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show." Then, in an astonishing burst of energy in his mid-40s, he co-created and hosted a 13-part PBS television series, "Cosmos." It aired in the fall of 1980 and ultimately reached hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Sagan was the most famous scientist in America-the face of science itself.
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Long before his death, he often talked about the deadly combination of ignorance and power. As for ignorance, here are a few of his quotes: |
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We start out a million years ago in a small community on some grassy plain; we hunt animals, have children, and develop a rich social, sexual, and intellectual life, but we know almost nothing about our surroundings.
We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. We're in very bad trouble if we don't understand the planet we're trying to save.
We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
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Take just 4-min to watch this timely video. Two weeks ago, on July 13, Brian Williams of MSNBC states that Carl Sagan could not have predicted the mess of 2021 but he did see it coming. Click this image to watch:
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In this brief video,Williams quotes from Dr. Sagan's last published work in 1995, just ten months before his death. |
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I have a foreboding of an America in my children or grandchildren's time, when the USA is a service and information economy, when nearly all manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries, when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues.
The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of the enormously influential media, the 30-second soundbites down to ten seconds or less...but, especially, a kind of celebration of ignorance.
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In this "Planet of the Idiots" 4-minute video, Sagan made his feelings crystal clear about the combustible mixture of ignorance and power. In the 25 years since his death, things have only gotten worse.
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During that time, we've added another two billion people, ignorance is running rampant in the most powerful nations and climate change is actively threatening our very existence as a species. And that brings up: |
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World Population Day
Dr. Rees is a population ecologist, ecological economist and is known as the father of ecological accounting. He's Professor Emeritus and former Director of the University of British Columbia's School of Community and Regional Planning and is a founding member and former president of the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics.
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As for ignorance, the amazing presentation below by Dr. Rees -- on the most important topic in the history of humanity -- had only been seen by 500 people (in the entire world) as of July 21, after being posted on YouTube seven days prior.
This is exactly what Dr. Sagan was talking about before he died. The deadly combination of ignorance and power. As cited earlier in this memo:
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We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
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Everyone in the world needs the crucial information in this 22-minute video
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World Population Day Presentation
by Dr. William Rees
In one of the slides in the above video, Dr. Rees talks about our meta-problem -- and it's not just over-population. It is how all eight billion of us are living and what we are consuming. He calls it overshoot.
Like the case we made in the book, OUTCRY, he talks about the fact that we must change our entire "system" of living. He begins his powerful presentation as follows:
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What do I mean by overshoot? |
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As he says, "climate change is not the greatest existential problem facing humankind. It is a mere symptom of the greatest existential threat, which I submit is overshoot."
- Overshoot is the result of too many people consuming way too much energy and material resources.
- Fixing climate change will not fix overshoot. However,
- Fixing overshoot would reverse climate change and address all other significant symptoms (the ones in the list below from a slide in his talk).
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Dr. Rees is one of the few scientists on the planet who has truly captured in his work -- the "big picture" of our dilemma. It is exactly what we talked about in OUTCRY, while making the case, as he does, for totally re-inventing our entire "system" of living.
Earlier this month, I made the case for taking a hard look at our overall way of life on this planet in an effort to avoid the willy-nilly replacement of trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure that will move us no closer to living in harmony with nature. Here is a link to that memo:
At the end of the day, we need to determine what kind of human lifestyle Mother Nature would permit longterm on her planet
As stated in the slide below, I suggest that we strive to err on the side of living even "greener" than Mother Nature demands.
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The Bottom Line. We are living in an era of almost complete ignorance when it comes to what we must do to survive. And, as many great scientists have concluded, we've waited far too long to get started on making things right.
Dr. James Lovelock concluded long ago that we had passed the tipping point with climate change and that it was not reversible. But, perhaps we can slow it down and/or limit it to a level that will permit the survival of our species.
But none of that will happen as long as ignorance prevails among the leadership of the most powerful countries in the world. Since that is not likely to change anytime soon, I have concluded that Dr. Lovelock's prediction is probably as good as anyone's -- that, at best, only one billion humans will survive.
Do you have a plan for your loved ones to be among the survivors? I wrote about my plan last month:
One more thing. A Carl Sagan gift for you. The last book he ever wrote was entitled Pale Blue Dot, and just before he died, he recorded that book in his own voice. With the link below, you can listen to all ten and a half hours of that book at your leisure. Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan.
So far, I have listened to the first 84 minutes and, all of it is in his own voice. Later chapters may be read by others.
Want to send a link of this SOS Memo to a friend? It is #116 on this list of SOS Memos. Finally, contact me directly with any questions you may have.
What can you do? Invite me to conduct a free Zoom session (from 30 minutes to one hour) with your group. This is the latest title slide that I am currently using for those kinds of sessions:
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The image above is a clue regarding the essence of my "family game plan" that is revealed near the end of my talk.
Finally, please do whatever you can to help spark the global "conversation" about our need to urgently transform our way of living into one that has a much better chance of keeping us alive indefinitely.
The billions of innocent children
of the world deserve no less!
I am confident that if a few million people carefully read and digested OUTCRY, that there might there at least be a more robust conversation taking place, a conversation about our grossly unsustainable way of living in the developed world -- and what it will take to get us focused on maximizing our chances for survival.
To be sure, we must do a lot more than change what we eat -- and OUTCRY helps explain the "why" and the "how" of that proposition.
To my knowledge, OUTCRY remains the only book ever published that features an envisioned, totally-green, ultra-sustainable, super-desirable, future way of living for humans -- along with ideas for how we might get there as quickly as possible.
J. Morris (Jim) Hicks
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PS: Free Zoom Conferences. In the interest of jump-starting the urgently-needed global "conversation" about the dilemma we are in, I am now offering to conduct private Zoom conferences free of charge to groups of almost any size. I look forward to ZOOM-ing with you and your group sometime soon.
In preparation for those Zoom visits, I have developed a one-hour format consisting of an opening statement followed by a 20-minute slide show and then ending with a discussion and Q&A with the attendees. The sessions you organize will be far more interesting and productive if attendees have read OUTCRY in advance.
Our book, for a host of environmental reasons, is only available as an e-book on Amazon. As such, it contains hyperlinks to hundreds of references and videos, is less expensive, does not kill any trees and does not have to be manufactured and delivered.
Here are a few of them where you can see how my vision has evolved since that first "creative idea" on 9-21-18:
As always, I am just trying to help spark the all-important "conversation" about what is needed. By sharing a vision of what I believe is possible, I hope to influence others to think bigger, faster, better and bolder.
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What else can you do to help? Two things:
1. Live as greenly as possible while doing all that you can to raise the awareness of "big picture" solutions that are crucially necessary for saving our civilization.
2. Share this BSB and my "Mama Ain't Happy" BSB with prominent journalists, thought leaders and/or elected officials whom you respect. They need to learn a lot more about the many reasons why Mama ain't happy.
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