Q: You call them The Great Demotions, all of these thoughts which we have so cherished. Well, guess what? The universe doesn't revolve around the Earth. And guess what? The Earth isn't the only world out there. Are we still clinging to any conceits? Such as those which led to the Great Demotions over the past centuries?

Carl Sagan: Well, you would think we should be over it. But we still are battling, at least in the United States, the conceit that humans are separate from the rest of nature. That an unbridgeable gap separates humans from the other plants and animals. That we are the particular beneficiaries of the concern of the creator of the universe, more than any of the 10 million other species of plants and animals on the Earth. When, in fact, all of our vaunted uniqueness turns out to be shared. with other animals, especially with chimpanzees, our closest relatives with whom we share 99.6% of our hereditary material.

Another area in which the demotion is being fought is the idea that there are no other planets beyond those in our own solar system. But in the last 15 years, the most marvelous set of findings has occurred in which it now appears that planets are an ordinary, probably inevitable accompaniment of star formation, and that almost every young star, like the Sun in the early stages of formation, is surrounded by this flat disc of gas and dust over which the planets were formed. And we now have the first bona fide real planetary system around a very unlikely object, a particular pulsar called 1257 plus 12. And the technology is just about to reach out and find whatever planetary systems there are nearby.

[ Note: As of September 2023, there are 5514 confirmed exoplanets in 4107 planetary systems. ]

And a third one is the idea that even if there are an enormous number of planets, only ours has life and intelligence. And there the story is open. We send spacecraft to other planets like Mars to see if there are any simple forms of life. We use radio telescopes to see if messages are being sent to us by civilizations on planets of other stars. So far, although there've been some very curious, tantalizing findings in both of those approaches, we have found nothing definitive, unambiguous evidence for extraterrestrial life. And the debate is still open.

In our ignorance, the geocentrists still find hope.

==

When their methods are so unreliable, hope is all they have.

July 24, 1954 — see The Complete Peanuts 1950-1954

Thursday Thoughts: What Makes Us Human

Seven years ago, I entered a video to a contest with the Big History Project, answering the question, “What makes us human?” The answer I came up with, then (and you can still find the video here, though I haven’t used that YouTube channel in a very long time), is that a human attaches emotional value to something that another human would reasonably see as junk. Any animal can demonstrate that it values things that help it to live - food, territory, and other creatures - but only humans develop subjective emotional attachment to things that do not provide any concrete benefit.

But can I really prove that no non-human animal has ever developed an attachment to something that another animal did not want? I can easily imagine a dog ripping up a toy to the point where no other dog would want to play with it, but still refusing to allow its owner to throw the toy away. Does this mean that the dog is human?

Not only am I second-guessing my own argument, now, but I’m also second-guessing the question itself. IS there something that all humans have but other species do not? IS there something that “makes us human?”

I don’t think there is. I think there are a lot of things that a human COULD have, but none of them are exclusively human, and none of them apply to all humans.

You know those videos of dogs and cats using buttons to communicate with their owners? Sometimes I see people commenting on these videos that this is a sign that the animal has a soul. I don’t necessarily want to make a theological point here, or a sci-fi point for that matter, but saying that something has a “soul” is basically the same thing as saying that it is equal to a human. I don’t look at these videos and see proof that a dog or a cat is in any way equal to a human. Instead, I see proof that communication - the ability to equate sound X with meaning Y - is a basic animal ability. Communication or even the use of words isn’t something that elevates humans or separates us from the rest of the natural world. And not all humans communicate in this way, either. Are nonverbal humans not human? Are humans who are incapable of using assistive communication devices not human? This is a dangerously ableist line of thought.

Frankly, claiming that any one thing “makes us human” is always going to dehumanize someone. Asexual and aromantic people both deal with this and sometimes perpetuate it ourselves. It goes something like this:

Aphobes: “Sexual attraction is what makes us human! If you don’t want sex, you must not be human!”

Sex-positive asexuals: “Okay, but even though I don’t experience sexual attraction, I can still want to have sex, so, I’m still human.”

Alloromantic asexuals: “And even if I don’t want sex, I can still feel romantic love. Sex isn’t what makes us human. Love is what makes us human.”

Aromantic asexuals: “The thing is, I don’t experience romantic attraction. BUT I still feel platonic love for my family and friends, so, I’m still human!”

Loveless aro-aces: “Okay but I wouldn’t describe anything that I feel as ‘love.’ I honestly don’t experience that at all. Does that mean I’m not human?”

We want there to be something that all humans have, and only humans have. We want humans to be special and to be easily united by a single trait. But there isn’t, we aren’t, and we can’t be. And I think that’s a good thing.

I like that there’s no good reason, ever, to point at a human being and say, “You’re not human and therefore I have a right to mistreat you.” It opens the door to treating more people humanely than we currently do. And if there is such a thing as objective progress in the world, it’s developing society in a way that leads to treating more people humanely.

THE CROSSBOW CANNIBAL (Living with a Serial Killer, Season 2 Episode 2)

THE CROSSBOW CANNIBAL (Living with a Serial Killer, Season 2 Episode 2)

Oxygen True Crime is a program brand within the NBCUniversal stable, and is rather oddly described as: “a multi-platform high quality crime destination brand for women” I guess because most of the murderers reported by the show are men? Anyway, the show we are reviewing here is part of the 2022 second season of an Oxygen series called Living with a Serial Killer, the first season of which…

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Had the Martians aimed only at destruction, they might on Monday have annihilated the entire population of London, as it spread itself slowly through the home counties.  If one could have hung that June morning in a balloon in the blazing blue above London every northward and eastward road running out of the tangled maze of streets would have seemed stippled black with the streaming fugitives, each dot a human agony of terror and physical distress. I have set forth at length in the last chapter my brother’s account of the road through Chipping Barnet, in order that my readers may realise how that swarming of black dots appeared to one of those concerned.

Never before in the history of the world had such a mass of human beings moved and suffered together. The legendary hosts of Goths and Huns, the hugest armies Asia has ever seen, would have been but a drop in that current. And this was no disciplined march; it was a stampede—a stampede gigantic and terrible—without order and without a goal, six million people unarmed and unprovisioned, driving headlong. It was the beginning of the rout of civilisation, of the massacre of mankind.

The War of the Worlds — H. G. Wells (1898)

It’s not (this is what I would say anyway) that we need to deny human uniqueness—we are by any measure a very strange animal indeed, and with a distinctive role in God’s economy—but rather that we don’t seem to be able to talk about our uniqueness in ways that help us to live more wisely with one another or with the rest of Creation. And that’s a reminder that some things can be true and yet not always edifying to dwell on.

Alan Jacobs

I definitely think there's Something (TM) to say about the portrayal of "off-human" characters in modern media adaptations as having (particularly facial) deformities and/or learning disabilities.

Robert Louis Stevenson was fully like "this is my OC, Hyde, who represents the impact of a complete apathy toward your fellow man. There is nothing extraordinary about him except that his rancid vibes make people uncomfortable which adds to the core theme of the role of morality in humanity, so its really important that he's physically normal so the audience can recognise that it's what's inside that's most important," and every film adaptation was like "mmkay. Yeah, no, I've got it. We can show that he's evil by using prosthetics and making him non/semi-verbal, which, as we all know, are the True Measures of Evil."

I need someone to explain the Banana Discourse on Twitter in small words. I might be wrong, but far it looks like an argument between

Western communists deciding the economic reorganization of South America towards "self-sufficiency" by taking away the USAmerican demand for bananas, and

White liberals insisting that South America is better off with the US buying bananas from them because collapsing the industry (somehow) would take away jobs.

Because boycotts totally work, nobody else eats bananas, those are the only two options, and South American people don't have any opinions about their own economy. Pick your imperialist.

Edit: Just found out the discourse is because "we must give up bananas for the good of South American socialism" lady brought up her cocaine habit as evidence that she wasn't moralizing pleasure. On being told that the cocaine trade fuels violent crime by drug cartels across South America, she tweeted:

The nightmares of bananas and cocaine production have nothing on the take industry by the hell nexus between white women and Tankies.

Aro-culture is trying to understand why society created the most ridiculous rituals and signs for romance and not finding a single answer/or that makes sense.

(No seriously, all the explanations I find are dumb. Send help)

.

the "big picture" - whether that refers to some detached, calculated greater good; ruthless ambition and progress for the sake of progress; or even the dear listeners' cosmic indifference - as an antagonistic force in wolf 359 is so fascinating to me because of the way eiffel as a protagonist is set up to oppose it, just by nature of who he is. eiffel retains his humanity even under the most inhumane circumstances. his strength is in connection, and with that he's able to reach others who share his core values, but he's operating under a fundamentally different framework from the show's antagonists. he can never understand where they're coming from or be swayed by their points of view because, for better or worse, he can only see the world through a close personal lens.

it's an ideological conflict he has with all of them, but notably with hilbert: "you talk about helping people, but what about the real, live people around you? [...] that's your problem. you're so zoomed out." eiffel will never, ever see that "big picture" because he is so zoomed in. at his best, he puts things into perspective and grounds the people around him. at his worst, his perspective narrows so drastically inwards that he becomes blind to everyone and everything else. his failings are deeply, tragically human - they're personal, they're impulsive, they're self-destructive. they're selfish. no matter how much he might try to narrativize or escape from himself, he's still left with doug eiffel: "it's taken me this long to realize that running from everyone else means that you're alone with yourself." eiffel could never be convinced to harm others on purpose, but he has hurt people, and it's never been because he didn't care. the very fact that he cares so much, that he's incapable of reconciling the hurt he's caused with the things he values, is what keeps him from real growth for so long. where many of the other characters in wolf 359 will justify their cruelty in service of something they consider more important, eiffel is so caught up in vilifying himself and the fear that he's always going to harm the people he cares for without meaning to that he shuts himself off from the people who care about him and perpetuates his own self-fulfilling prophecy.

The thing about TNG is that the space aliens and moral quandaries are always like, the least insane part of the episode

-Sweden criticizes Qatar for human rights abuses-

Also Sweden:

i feel a little bad for making fun of aya because she's actually a solid 8/10 journalist. the problem is what she's interested in isn't what other tengu are interested in. still she's popular enough

my souheki warriors kill this gacha video now

Two things my 15-year-old cat did just now:

Put her paw directly into my hand

Start biting me ten (10) seconds later because she was mad that I was holding her paw