The triumph of ignorance. How does dark-age thinking threaten our existence?

“Dark-age thinking” lacks imagination. It is anti-science, anti-art, and anti-exploration. It assures a lack of human progress because it can’t imagine what human progress looks like.

A hundred years ago, it would not have imagined the Internet, smart watches, smart phones, jet planes, GPS, supercomputers, 3-D printing, robotic surgery, antibiotics, genome editing, CRISPR, transistors, solar panels, and DNA structure.

A hundred years ago, Albert Einstein, using “useless” pure mathematics changed science. No one could have predicted what he discovered.

Today, our species faces many dangers to our survival: lack of food, lack of fresh water, air pollution, global warming, ocean rise, nuclear radiation, and new diseases.

Only science, preparedness, and our vision and will can protect us, or like so many species before us, we will disappear from the earth.

When schoolchildren ask, “Why do I have to learn math, art, history, or philosophy?” they exhibit the ignorance of youth. When adults ask, “Why do we spend money on pure science?” they exhibit dark-age thinking.

It is the fatal belief that learning must have an immediate, practical purpose, or it’s useless.

Here is just one example of dark-age thinking by our government:

Dreams of exploring the cosmos have crashed up against the harsh reality of budget cuts in the United States.

Congressional approval of the 2024 federal budget earlier this year left NASA with roughly half a billion dollars less than the agency had in 2023 — and Mars science has taken the biggest hit.

Engineers are scrambling to figure out how a long-planned mission to bring samples back from the Red Planet might still be accomplished.

The dark-age thinker objects, “Who needs samples from Mars? Why waste the money?”

Probes intended for other planets and moons are delayed, and the venerable Chandra X-ray Observatory, which launched in 1999 and has transformed our view of energetic phenomena in the universe, is potentially on the chopping block.

Between 2014 and 2023, funding had increased more than 3 percent on average compared with the previous year.

Three percent is less than inflation, so the real NASA budget has been falling. Now, not just the real, but the numerical budget will fall more rapidly.

NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission had intended to bring rock and soil samples to Earth. The mission is on hold as NASA tries to determine if it can be done at all.

The rocks and soil could answer fundamental questions about the formation of the inner solar system and the history of water on Mars, and perhaps reveal signs of past life on the planet.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, largely responsible for designing and building the components of sample return, lost hundreds of millions of dollars functionally overnight.

Uncertainty over the budget had already prompted the center to dismiss 530 employees.

Scientific exploration and progress beget employment and economic growth. The dark-age thinker can’t see that.

A dedicated orbiter to explore the ice giant Uranus has seen its timeline pushed back. Because ice giants are among the most common types of exoplanets being discovered around other stars, researchers are keen to understand those in our own solar system. 

DaVinci and Veritas, two missions to explore Venus, are also being delayed, and there’s now more uncertainty about which, if any, other probes on the drawing board — those intending to bring back samples from a comet or fly through the plumes of Saturn’s moon Enceladus — will go forward.

All this will mean less near-term research on the formation and dynamics of planets and their moons.

“We forget how little we’ve explored the solar system we live in,” Dreier says.

Scientists are crying out to explore it, he adds, and that’s all being pushed back.

The budget for this year and expectations for next year have prompted NASA to conduct a review of its existing flagship telescopes, the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope, to see if either can be wound down.

NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory remains healthy but constrained funding at the agency could see it shut down.

Both were launched as part of the first generation of Great Observatories in the 1990s and early 2000s, and they’ve already seen their companions, the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory and Spitzer Space Telescope, shut off.

The dark-age thinkers ask, “What good is all this Mars, Venus, and Uranus exploration? What has Hubble really done for us? Why spend the money?”

There are three answers. First, the money is free. The U.S. federal government, being Monetarily Sovereign, has the infinite ability to create money without collecting a penny in taxes.

The U.S. government never can run short of dollars.

Second, the dollars grow the economy. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) = Federal Spending + Non-federal Spending + Net Exports. The more money the government and NASA spend, the more the economy grows.

Even totally “wasted” dollars, grow the economy, and cost taxpayers nothing.

The third, most important answer is that scientific research brings many benefits we can’t even imagine. It’s why they call it “research” and not just “development.”

Research breeds discovery which breeds more discovery. No one can foresee what useful things will evolve from research. Everything in our current world evolved from earlier discoveries, beginning with the creation of the wheel, flint tools, and the use of fire.

Stop reading now and skim this partial list of NASA’s practical benefits to America and humankind.

Then, consider the International Space Station alone, only a third of NASA’s budget:

20 Breakthroughs from 20 Years
Fundamental disease research:Alzheimer’s Disease. Parkinson’s Disease. Cancer. Asthma. Heart Disease. If any of these conditions has affected your life, so has space station research.

New water purification systems:Unfortunately, many people around the world lack access to clean water. At-risk areas can gain access to advanced filtration and purification systems through technology that was developed for the space station, enabling the astronauts living aboard to recycle 93% of their water.

Drug development using protein crystals: Protein crystal growth experiments conducted aboard the space station have provided insights into numerous disease treatments, from cancer to gum disease to Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy.

Methods to combat muscle atrophy and bone loss: Space studies have contributed greatly to our knowledge of bone and muscle loss in astronauts – and how to mitigate those effects. The knowledge gained also applies to people on Earth dealing with diseases such as osteoporosis.

Exploring the fifth state of matter: 25 years ago, scientists first produced a fifth state of matter, called a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), on Earth. In 2018, NASA’s Cold Atom Lab became the first facility to produce that state of matter in space. This achievement may provide insight into fundamental laws of quantum mechanics.

Understanding how our bodies change in microgravity: When humans head to Mars, we need to know what challenges we face. Long-term stays aboard the space station have uncovered unexpected ways that the human body changes in microgravity.

Testing tissue chips in space: Tissue chips are roughly thumb-drive-sized devices that contain human cells in a 3D matrix, representing functions of an organ. Chips have been sent to station, seeking to better understand the impact of microgravity on human health and to translate that understanding to improved health on Earth.

Stimulating the low-Earth orbit economy: From satellite deployment to in-space research, a vibrant commercial space economy has developed, with a value that now exceeds $345 billion. The space station has been a key part of supporting that growth.

Growing food in microgravity: The ability to grow supplemental food can help humans explore farther from Earth. Many techniques for growing plants have been explored aboard the space station to prepare for these missions. On August 10, 2015, astronauts sampled their first space-grown salad, and astronauts now are growing radishes in space.

Deployment of CubeSats from station: CubeSats are one of the smallest types of satellites and provide a cheaper way to perform science and technology demonstrations in space. More than 250 CubeSats have now been deployed from the space station, jumpstarting research and satellite companies.

Monitoring our planet from a unique perspective: The capacity to host varying complements of instruments, both internal and external, has evolved the station into a robust platform for researchers studying Earth’s water, air, land masses, vegetation, and more while providing them additional views beyond those of NASA’s typical Earth remote-sensing satellites.

Collecting data on more than 100 billion cosmic particles: The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer – 02 has provided researchers around the globe with data that can help determine what the universe is made of and how it began.

Discovery of steadily burning cool flames: When scientists burned fuel droplets in the Flame Extinguishing Experiment (FLEX) study, something unexpected occurred. A heptane fuel droplet appeared to extinguish, but actually continued to burn without a visible flame at temperatures two-and-a-half times cooler than a typical candle.

A better understanding of pulsars and black holes: Two tools installed on the outside of the space station, NICER and MAXI, have worked in tandem to advance our knowledge of pulsars and black holes.

Student access to an orbiting laboratory: Companies and professors are not the only ones using the space station for microgravity research. Station has given elementary- to college-aged students access to science in space and the opportunity to study microgravity’s effects.

Capability to identify unknown microbes in space: Having the ability to identify microbes in real time in space without the need to send them back to Earth for identification would be revolutionary for the world of microbiology and space exploration. The Genes in Space-3 team turned that possibility into reality in 2017.

Opening up the field of colloid research: Toothpaste, 3D printing, pharmaceuticals, and detecting shifting sands on Mars may not seem related to each other at all, yet each stands to benefit from improvements made thanks to research on colloids aboard the space station.

The evolution of fluid physics research: Fluids cover our planet, but sending them to space can help us better understand how they flow. The study of fluids in space has progressed from fundamental research into the testing of technology applications ranging from advanced medical devices to heat transfer systems.

3D printing in microgravity:The first item was 3D printed on the space station in 2014. Since then, we have explored 3D printing using recycled materials and even printing human tissue.

Responding to natural disasters: With crew handheld camera imagery as a core component, the station has become an active participant in orbital data collection to support disaster response activities both within the U.S. and abroad.

Dark-age thinking cannot anticipate the seemingly “useless” discoveries that later have great value to humankind.

Dark-age thinking is why our public schools are underfunded, our teachers are underpaid, and millions of our children are poorly educated. All that brainpower is wasted.

It’s why we have hunger, homelessness, and poverty while our government has the infinite ability to fund food production and distribution, home-building and anti-poverty measures.

It’s why millions don’t have clean drinking water while governments have the infinite ability to fund water purification research, development, and installation.

It’s why people can’t afford healthcare, the aged live untended, and many diseases don’t have treatments.

In so many ways, we have little progressed from cave-dwelling savages, worshipping gods while belittling science.

There are those who give their limited funds to religion but oppose the government giving its unlimited funds to research.

It makes no sense. It’s blind. And that is the very definition of dark-age thinking.

It’s blind.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

Twitter: @rodgermitchell Search #monetarysovereignty
Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

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The Sole Purpose of Government Is to Improve and Protect the Lives of the People.

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