The New Universe and the Human Future: How a Shared Cosmology Could Transform the World (The Terry Lectures Series) by Nancy Ellen Abrams & Joel R Primack

Author:Nancy Ellen Abrams & Joel R Primack [Abrams, Nancy Ellen]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2011-04-18T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

Cosmic Society Now

Building a cosmic society is not a dream for the distant future, like galactic travel. It’s about today. In fact, the future world is far less likely to achieve a cosmic society if we don’t begin moving in that direction now. Because of the speeding-up nature of current exponential growth, the longer we procrastinate in dealing with the tangle of global problems, the wider the tragedy will be. Right now humanity’s overriding need is for a transculturally shared vision for how to solve global problems, and a cosmic society is the only serious candidate we know for an organizing principle that would allow such a shared vision to flourish. Any program of action not based on the universe as we now understand it is doomed.

History shows that having a shared cosmology, even a wrong one, can unify and inspire a culture, but the very power of a cosmology means that when it gets overturned this event can shake up the most fundamental institutions of society. This is in fact what happened four centuries ago in the last cosmological revolution on the scale of today’s, when the science of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton overthrew the medieval cosmology of the heavenly spheres. The collapse of that cosmology undercut the rigid social and religious hierarchies of medieval society, which had been justified by the supposedly hierarchical order of the heavens. Soon the divine right of kings itself was challenged, and kings of first England and then France lost not only their thrones but also their heads.

It’s indisputable that practical consequences can result from a change in cosmology, but no one can predict what they will be. This is why it matters how scientists, particularly, present the story. No scientist should ever claim that science is the last word in a decision that could shape the larger society. Science is the first word. It’s the foundation. Everything else needs to build on it. Thus the crucial relevant concepts of cosmology and the other historical sciences like geology and evolutionary biology must be made understandable to everyone.

Our species stands at the turning point in a struggle between despoliation of our planet and a big new perspective. As Martin Rees, the leading astrophysicist and cosmologist who is past president of the Royal Society (Britain’s national academy of sciences) has written, “We’ve now entered a unique century, the first in the 45 million centuries of Earth’s history, in which one species—ours—could determine, for good or ill, the entire planet’s future.”1 But unlike the power struggle between dark matter and dark energy, the struggle between despoliation and the new perspective will be determined not by the laws of physics alone but by what human beings believe about ourselves and each other and our collective potential. This is why we need a shared story. The scientific origin story delegitimizes the forces of despoliation by giving us a big new reality in which our dynamic planet, rich with life, is cosmically rare and invaluable. It tells us that there is an immense future ahead of us and our descendants.

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