Our Incredibly Poor Sense of Time and History

The new version of Cosmos debuted last week on Fox TV on Sunday nights. The original version premiered on PBS in 1978 and was hosted by Carl Sagan. The new series is hosted by Neil Tyson and is a lot of fun to watch. We have seen over the last twenty years an incredible erosion in the country's attitude towards science at the same time we have seen an incredible explosion of new technology.   

Distractify.com has this amazing picture of an ad for Radio Shack from 1991:  

 

followed by "Everything in this Radio Shack ad from 1991 can now be found on a single smartphone." Go back and take a look at the ad. In the 80's and 90's, these were many of the things we had on our Christmas list: camcorder, clock radio, and a (CD) music player. Even the computer in the ad was probably less powerful than the computer on our smartphones. The guidance computer for the Apollo moon landing in 1969 had 1/6 of the processing power of a 10 year old TI-83 calculator.  

In spite of the love of technology we have, we have lost our interest in science as a nation. The representatives on the House Science Committee are often the most anti-science people in Wahington.   

From the National Memo's 2013 article about Paul Broun, representative from Georgia:  

Broun, who has served on the Science Committee since 2007, appears to believe that scientists are literally tools of the devil. In an October speech at the Liberty Baptist Church Sportsman’s Banquet, Broun declared “All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell,” Broun said.

So it's no wonder that the funding for science has gone backward for some time. I understand the stance against the idea of global warming. Many of the congressmen are kept in office through the good graces of big oil and traditional energy sources, like coal, that would lose out big time if alternative energies are funded and subsidized. If you need an example close to home for me, keep in mind that the great state of Wisconsin is now considered by some (see Charles Pierce of Esquire magazine) to be a wholly owned subsidiary of Koch Industries, with a governor and state legislature who get their marching orders directly from the Koch brothers.  

Today, radio astronomers announced new evidence that corroborates the idea of "inflation", the idea that for the obervations of the expanding universe to be as they are, there had to be a brief moment at the time of the Big Bang when the universe expanded faster than the speed of light. If so, there should be gravitational waves predicted by Einstein that should appear in the energy left over from the early universe. According to the New York Times today:  

Reaching back across 13.8 billion years to the first sliver of cosmic time with telescopes at the South Pole, a team of astronomers led by John M. Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics detected ripples in the fabric of space-time — so-called gravitational waves — the signature of a universe being wrenched violently apart when it was roughly a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old.

I don't think it's even possible for us to get our heads around the amazing science that is described in that paragraph. 

In both the original Cosmos and the new version, the first show in the series ends with the Cosmic Calendar, a tool to help us understand our place in the Cosmos. It takes the roughly 14 billion years since the Big Bang occurred and marks it on one calendar year. If the Big Bang occurred on January 1, then the Milky Way Galaxy formed on March 15 and our sun formed on August 31. Think of the time span here - the year is almost exactly 2/3 done and the cosmos is just getting around to forming our sun. On December 14th, the first animals appear. The first mammals show up on December 20. And the first primitive humans show up on December 31 at 10:24 PM. The first use of writing appears on December 31 at 11:59 and 47 seconds PM. Sagan went on to make the comparison that if the entire Cosmic Calendar were scaled to the size of a football field, all of human history would occupy a space the size of your hand.    

Humans have been the dominant species on earth for less than a million years. Dinosaurs, on the other hand were the dominant terrestrial vertebrates for 135 million years. We have quite a ways to go to catch up.    

Note: I first started writing this almost two months ago and never quite finished it until now. The Cosmos show has been on for two months now and is a fascinating look at the universe. I would urge you to watch it if you get a chance.