The Situation

Browsing around the internet, It has come to my attention numerous times that the vast majority of people in my culture (I’m reluctant to say Muslims or Arabs) do not believe a single thing about topics that hover around the theme of space exploration. Even if most of the things that fail to satisfy these people’s immense sense of selective skepticism is well established, common scientific knowledge everywhere else in the world. At first, I have to say, it mildly annoyed me how the educational system of our countries has failed these poor people who usually don’t seem to have the scientific baggage necessary to debate or even discuss such advanced topics as celestial mechanics, orbital dynamics and astronomy and rocketry. One might say that It is a mild case of isolated, localised mass ignorance that affects people with no decisional capacity, no power, no influence over important political agendas and therefore it is to be dismissed without a second thought. That was my first opinion when I came across the rampant levels of wide-spread ignorance on social media about the topic. After all, social media has always been a haven for idiots, nothing new about that, right? I changed my mind as I actively thought about the problem, in light of many factors that I shall put forward to you in this article. I will explain why It’s a massive and dangerous problem to have the majority of the population be blind to reality itself. Educated or not, with some who hold PhDs, some in positions that allow them to make highly influential decisions in sensitive areas such as national defence, science funding and foreign policy. To do so, I’ll have to talk about pseudo-science, the scientific method, and a little bit about how skepticism actually works. I’ll be talking about the psychology of rigid beliefs and what I call collective schizotypal disorder.

Straight to the point.

Let’s take the example of a nation that dismisses everything space related, the earth is flat as a lesbian’s chest, space is fake and actually does not exist, nothing can penetrate the sky ( Including hypersonic missiles btw), the moon landing is fake and was fabricated in a Hollywood studio. It’s pretty common to find these views online, most people I know In fact passionately adhere to them. What’s the danger in not “believing” the enemy? These lying heretics and kufar always want to subject us to their propaganda. NASA (a 25$ billion per year organization) was solely created to fuck with our beliefs.

Well, the danger in negating scientific knowledge is that you get left behind, denying reality because it clashes with your beliefs will just drive you backwards into extreme dark-ages levels of ignorance. The universe does not simply care about what you believe, those who seek to unravel its secrets and harness its laws will always be first to the party, those who close their eyes, ears and dismiss what it has to offer will always lose, always. Practically, If you don’t believe space, gravity exist you will not invest in things like rocket technology, defence systems, you will be the backward savage who gets served ballistic missiles up his ass instead and you will blame the other party for being merciless and more powerful and you will dump your lack of responsibility on the “imperialism” who supposedly subjected you to ignorance, which is such an old fashioned and stupid excuse for our current hopeless situation. You won’t be investing in satellite technology, because it’s a freemason’s propaganda lie, and again, you will find yourself hopelessly backwards in communication technology, defence technology and basic infrastructure. The enemy you were skeptical about, the enemy you thought you were hurting or even ideologically beating by your willful ignorance is suddenly benefitting from you actions, he’s well ahead in the most important technologies, while you cry in the corner either blaming imperialism or resorting to other psychologically calming tricks to shift the pain of realizing that you might’ve been a massive idiot all along. Have you ever noticed NASA, ESA, or any other respected space agency reply to the Arab world that denies everything they do? No of course, they quite enjoy our lack of competition, they are perfectly fine with us drowning in our shit, they benefit everyday from our pre-historic view of the world, It’s easier to get ahead when your competition does not exist. It’s insulting for an agency that currently does exo-planet hunting, that discovered the cosmic background radiation, that built and deployed the JWST and put men on the moon to reply to peasants who think the earth is flat, and I can’t in any sense blame them.

The example can be extended to any field really. It’s just that our Arab world doesn’t really read or care about scientific matters in general, it would be the same in every field if that weren’t the case, take genetic engineering for example. I’ve talked to multiple people who think it’s bullshit, you can’t edit god’s creation they say. Well, keep holding that belief (which is unsubstantiated anywhere in religious texts) and build policies based on it and soon you’ll discover how hard it is to be the victim of bio-engineered virus, bacteria. You’ll discover how hard it is to beat genetic disease while your enemies eradicate them in the matter of years. There is a deep deep lack in our understanding of the scientific method and how we appreciate evidence. The least educated among us use emotional arguments ( which is a bit of an oxymoron since arguments should in theory be purely rational) to dismiss hard evidence rooted in reality. While our most educated think that evidence is a p value they calculate, or a scientific article that’s published in some ass journal.

Pseudo-Science

I don’t know about you, but I live in a society that worries about witchcraft on a daily basis, I’m not even joking or trying to be charming. We hunt witches now, AI? Fuck that, we got that under control, our national security is fully dependent on a piece of furniture of a doll buried in some grave. Future archaeologists will have a hard time trying to find out why some people have pieces of plastic toys or ceramic plates, or other random bullshit buried around them. God help them in that quest, I’d love to hear the many intricate theories in the next, say, 500-1000 years about the topic just for a few laughs. No one can deny that we are very very far away from the edge of knowledge, we are still at a very rudimentary stage of civilization, one could say that we’re not even in the race if it weren’t for the increased globalisation and international trade, we’d practically be like isolated central african tribes who kill children so that rain may fall or some shit.

Enough cheeky babbling, why is pseudo-science a pain in the ass that impedes scientific real-world progress? It’s simple, pseudo-science clashes directly with how the universe really is. If you believe in “X” and the universe is actually “Y”, then you’re bound to fuck everything up that you make based on “X” simply because you’re wrong. Truth seeking can only be done by meticulous attention to our own capacity to mislead ourselves and others, we are emotional creatures, we aren’t perfect, some of us lie to score petty benefits, some cheat, and fabricate evidence for their own momentary gains, all of which hurts and blocks the quests for finding out what the truth really is, the only solution we found out is to subject what people say to tests, not philosophical tests, not articles (like this one) and certainly not authority no matter what that human authority is, if your theory, idea, model clashes with real-world measurements and data, it’s wrong.

Pseudo-science, like astrology for example, fail every test they get subject to, yet millions and millions still believe in them. That’s a clear net negative for global civilization, it’s something that pulls us backwards rather than forwards. Same goes for flat-earthers who drag us back to dealing with matters that were settled 3000 years ago.

Pseudo-science is not harmless, it’s a giant barrier to actual progress. If people still believed in bronze-age bullshit about epilepsy for example as someone being possessed rather than a neural dysfunction we wouldn’t have researched, understood and treated epileptics, same thing with schizophrenia, It’s easy to jump to bullshit explanations about psychological phenomenon/diseases, and people usually did, schizophrenics were seen as being possessed by devils and were subjected to bullshit pseudo-scientific treatments that did nothing to them or even made their condition worse. Until brave, open-minded scientists took the task at hand and slowly but consistently unraveled the mysteries of the neuropathology of schizophrenia, chemists, pharmacologists developed dopamine antagonists that treat almost 100% of cases effectively. And the examples are endless, we still have to battle the wave of idiots who block any attempt to understand the word through an objective lens just because it clashes or threatens their fragile beliefs.

Truth Always Rises

A theory, if it stays solid against every test, that agrees with every measurement, that stands the most aggressive attempts of dismissal, is by force, a representation of reality, no matter how much it hurts your snowflake feelings. The theory of relativity, for example, successfully gets it right every time it is subjected to a test, people opposed to it at first, tried to disprove it, every single attempt failed. Not only does it explain the universe with 100% accuracy and no exceptions, It does predict the future, you can use it to predict the next solar eclipse, the position of mercury 5000 years from now relative to earth’s. You can use it to explain gravitational lensing; it had even made astonishing predictions well ahead of its time that were only proven 100 years after (See LIGO experiments 2015). Anyone who says it’s false has the tough task ahead of him to find one, just one exception where its laws fail, those are the rules. If you can’t do so, than I’m sorry to tell you that you’re simply wrong. Build on this example as you may. If one single person could prove the earth is flat, or that gravity isn’t real, I promise they’d have won multiple Nobel Prizes and got recognition from every truth seeking scientist in the world. I’ve looked around every respectable scientific publication house and found no research done on a theory that comes close to doing so. While on the other hand, every single piece of evidence verifies and confirms the validity of gravity as one of the major forces of nature. It deeply saddens me to see the particular culture I was born in and belong to delve into stupid discussion like this one while others are playing around with string theory and quantum field theory, while they harnessed decades ago the most intricate and sophisticated laws of nature to their benefits we still regress like infants into the corner afraid for own, again, beliefs.

The happy things about reality is, It always finds its way up no matter how much it gets dismissed, the catholic church used everything in its power and influence to suppress the sun-centered model of the solar system, it failed and lately in 94 apologized about the torture and pain it subjected people to for simply putting the idea forward. People laughed about the germ-theory, about quantum mechanics. Things we take for granted today, so I’m hopeful about the future in a way, I’m sure that no matter how much enforced dissociation there is today about the world, It will slowly fuck off with time, because unlike a call, you can’t keep ignoring reality forever.

On Matters of Space

If you’re a member of the skeptical NASA deniers club I’d strongly suggest you get two things, a book on introductory astronomy and a fucking telescope. And before that maybe some basic math and trigonometry book so that you won’t risk asking stupid questions such as “how did they measure the distance to the moon? there’s not a long enough tape measure”
Also, hating on NASA is old fashioned, try hating on ESA instead they’re doing cooler, more unbelievable shit these days.

Final Words

We are moving towards an incredibly fast paced world that has absolutely no place for stupidity and backward beliefs, it’s astonishing how fast we’ll get left behind if we keep (and we seem to do so) this mentality. Not educating people, building stupid information retention based education systems and not funding scientific research is a death sentence for any nation these days, there are wise nations who are dumping every penny they have on infrastructure as a long term investment to hedge against their demise in the world of the future, and in contrast there are nations dumping every penny they have either to control people and make them more and more ignorant of the most critical existential issues that face them, or to reinforce ideologies and local fucking power hungry war dynamics. I personally have no hope that we’ll outgrow this, I think we’ll be the next backward savages of the world who are dependent on a more powerful nation for our food, energy, tele-communication, healthcare, defence, and even entertainment, if we’re not already them.