"DENIER science" aims for the stars : but sometimes hits London instead...

To Stars..or LONDON

A whole lot of Denier-Watchers themselves deny that DENIERS even have have "a science" - mostly because they insist that deniers deny and disbelieve the basic tenets of "Science".


Well obviously I strongly disagree with my good pals or this blog would have no purpose!

Not C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures" but rather "Two Sciences"

Let me begin my friendly disagreement with them, by myself denying there is any one thing called "Science" .

Instead, I see ( per Canadian Allan Schnaiberg's famous distinction) two main types of science : Production science aka science of the first law of thermodynamics (wildly optimistic skygod science) versus Impact science of the second law of thermodynamics (cautiously grounded earthling science.)

Production science is very good at building rockets but is very indifferent as to the tragic consequences when they fall on London and Brussels rather than ascend to the stars ( to re-use an old, old gag about Nazi-American patriot Wernher Von Braun !)

Denier science is indeed "building" our human civilization but it is also killing our human civilization and our planet, in the process.

My job - as I see it it - is to stop them and I hope you will consider  starting up efforts to stop them as well.....

Are there any limits to human efforts to control Nature ? Blue Sky scientists don't see any...

think tank "boiler room"

But today's Grounded scientist disagrees strongly. Perhaps they are simply tired of seeing this "there are no limits" line pushed endlessly by politicians, think tanks and retired scientists like some old fashioned high pressure "boiler room" scam.

I deliberately chose the metaphors of Skygods vs earthlings (rather than entitle my book and blog something like "Blue Sky Science vs Grounded Science") because I dreaded how few people would choose to read a book with an academic snoozer of a title.

Blue Skys and Sky Gods

But Skygods would indeed tend to be "high" up in the blue sky as much as earth-lings would tend to indeed be ground-ed individuals, so I hope no one is misled by my title as to my serious objectives in researching and writing the book and blog.

My wish is that you find the book a real page turner, a character-driven "narrative non fiction"  and an all around barn burner of a good read.....

Allan Schnaiberg's 1980 nightmare : pollution-producing SkyGods vs impacted-upon earthlings

SkyGod Machine in earthling Garden

In the1970s, the Canadian-born sociologist of environmentalism, Allan Schnaiberg , was the first to detect the emerging split in popular Science that this blog (also Canadian-born) is devoted to exploring ; so a man well worth honouring.


But as I have written in an earlier post in SVE, I didn't stumble upon Schnaiberg's seminal concept until I chanced upon the work of Myanna Lahsen --- thanks to the wonders of Google search.

She casually mentioned the concept of earlier-dominant production science versus the contested rise of today's impact science, as if all her readers would know what it meant.

But I didn't --- or rather I did.

It sounds an awful lot like my concept of earlier (pre-war) SkyGod scientists versus later (post-war) earthling scientists.

I eventually traced the meme back to Schnaiberg and a time period almost 40 years ago.

Long past overdue, then,  for the concept to be a commonplace and a cliche in the vocabulary of every warmist earthling environmentalist green.

Basically it can be seen as a variant of my beloved contrast between the fundamental second law of thermodynamics (matter and energy gets less and less useful to humanity (aka more and more of it becomes useless  particulate pollution and heat pollution) and the derivative first law of thermodynamics.

The sciences of half-truthfulness...

The first law says (as a half truth) that matter and energy can't ever be destroyed but only changed into alternative forms.

A half truth because converting the concentrated energy in the gasoline that powers your Piper Cub into ever so slightly heating the entire Universe does not destroy that energy --- but it certainly ruins for all time its further usefulness for humanity.

 In fact, if that waste heat in the air helps heat up the entire atmosphere --- en route to the frozen reaches of the universe --- it is likely to ruin all of humanity as well.

Similarly, impact science is fundamental science while production science is but a half truth science derived from it.

Production science produces a machine which makes lots of widgets, very cheaply and profitably - apparently the end of story.

Impact science visits that once-successful widget machine cum factory in the town of Anywhereville Quebec and discovers that the factory is throwing off deadly pollution that is ever so slowly poisoning the employees at the widget factory. As a result, they are producing less widgets per hour.

It is this, not unfair competition from the Japanese, that is the real cause of the factory owner's declining profits.

Production science is about The Machine, Impact Science is about The Machine in the Garden, with both garden and machine complexly interacting with each other in unpredictable ways.

(Hat tip to Leo Marx for re-applying his famous meme!)

Deniers cum skeptics who deny change in geology, biology, climate and physics  still only see science in the simplistic terms and certitudes of production science.

Warmists accept that changes happens and happens unpredictably and are much less sanguine about our ability to correct our own mistakes in time to prevent real harm.

Climate deniers - I steadfastly affirm in the face of zillions of scientist-bloogers who argue to the contrary - do believe in Science.

But it is the older, out-dated, hubristic SkyGod science - not current earthling science .....

On Nov 6 ,vote the SkyGod ticket : Ayn Ryan and Paul Rand

GREED is GOD !

Richard M Salsman , the well known Gauleiter of Greed, has a long article in America's most read business publication, FORBES,  advocating the Gekko mantra that "GREED IS GOD" and welcoming the GOP ticket of Ayn Ryan and Paul Rand for espousing it.

Out with religion's Gods ; In with Man as the only true SkyGod ...

Truly a balanced ticket, the Libertarian couple consists of a devout Catholic and a devout Atheist both swearing eternal fidelity to each other and to the view that Man is Superman over all the undermen-like creatures of of Nature.

No better example could exist of  the continuing strength of  pre-war views of scientific Man in nature (Man as a SkyGod) than the widespread media support for Paul Ryan (and Ayn Rand's) entry into the 2012 contest for the leadership of the free world......

Popular science is the 99.99% of us who DON'T read the journal NATURE

unread by 99.99% !

The world's most important science journal is read by.... almost nobody.

 The British weekly publication NATURE , the most influential science journal by far in the world, sells only about 50,000 copies but its publisher says around 400,000 read it one way or another. So by its own count, less than .01% of the world reads it.

But NATURE is considered required weekly browsing for all professional scientists, in part to to maintain a credible claim that they are professional scientists.

So indirectly, via NATURE's readership, we have some gauge of just how few professional scientists there are in the world.

About the widest possible definition of a scientist says they regularly do scientific research that gets published in credible peer-reviewed journals in their field of endeavour.

It doesn't say they must be paid for doing so, and it does allow for those who could successfully publish their research, if military or commercial powers didn't prevent it, if only temporarily.

It admits that those who write about, administer or teach science may have once been active research scientists and could be so again, so that while not currently professional research scientists, they are at least highly credible critics of published research.

They must number in the range of millions.

Next are those science-trained professionals who only do "hands on" production science or impact science in government or industry but who can read and evaluate articles in their own area of expertise : again they must number in the range of millions, even tens of millions.

Then there are the students in university level science courses   who are able to usefully assess a published journal article in their own field of interest : they number in the tens of millions.

All together, perhaps 70 million out of a total world population of 7 billion can make some sense of some of the back page articles in the journal NATURE : the scientific "1% " .

But for the rest of us, the 99 % of us , we need the raw data of those dense and turgid articles filtered and translated by science populariziers.

The editors of NATURE, in the front pages of the journal, do a pretty good job of rendering their back page articles into lay language and assessing why these highly specialized reports of research in obscure areas of science nevertheless matter for the 7 billion "rest of us".

Other science journalists and science book writers also try to render - second hand - what NATURE's articles really mean for the non-professional 99% of humanity.

Among the "us" in the 99% or the 99.99% are the most powerful people in the world : presidents of countries or of corporations, generals, publishers of newspapers , activist movie and rock stars .

We , by our power, our money or (for most of us) by our votes and buying dollars will decide most of the big science issues : not NATURE.

This is hard - in fact impossible - for most lifers in professional science to believe.

"Let us bring forth the real-world facts, as predicted by a successful lab-theory, and what more needs be done ?" they cry.

Maybe, once. Maybe once, most of the science-besotted middle and upper classes in the world would have automatically accepted anything NATURE reported at face value (the religious and the peasantry might have scoffed, but who cares about their opinions ?)

But that was before 1945, and 1965, and 1995 . The popular image of Science has undergone two - opposing - and profound changes.

For about one half of the world, the old, pre-1945 image of the scientist remains the same - only today's real-life scientists don't live up to that image.

For the other one half of the world, the old style scientist has been rejected completely and they rather like the new post-war style of scientist.

All this matters, because both sides do not accept or reject new scientific articles based on their own internal scientific evidence, but rather more based on how they feel about the sort of person who delivers them.

In other words, "if they don't like the messenger, they shoot down the message".

The three filters of Science

This blog is concerned about how science evidence is thrice-filtered, rather like Gaul or Saint Peter's Rooster.

First by the multi-person filter of the scientist, his or her employer-superiors and the journal editor cum referees.

Successfully passing through this filter, private science is now public ( published) science.

Next up on the filter machine are the popular Science gatekeepers : the editors and journalists who decide whether this new research gets splashed, downplayed or even ignored in popular science periodicals and in newspapers and on TV.

Finally past this second filter, how do we, the remaining 98% of humanity, assess it ?

If it is first only widely reported in the UK Guardian newspaper that Tasmania is now seeing tropical fish thanks to human climate change, and then this news item is re-published in a hacked up and mocking manner by the Wall Street Journal , the readers of that latter newspaper are likely to deny its truthfulness as mere "warmist claptrap science".

We are the third and final filter ---the biggest one of them all.

How, and why, do we assess this particular - specialized - bit of new scientific research the way we do ?

We don't - we have a few vivid, semi-permanent, images of "Science" in each of our heads and we simply run every new bit of data against those few rigid memes : and then we award a simple pass or fail.

Fundamentally, whether we prefer our scientists to be pre-war SkyGods or post-war earthlings is the only filter we have to assess all the immense amount of science-related news items that hits us weekly.

This is why, in science as in economics , this blog is focussed on the 99%  , not the 1% .....

why earthlings should leave Think Tanks to the libertarian SkyGods

Helping others murder our planet - with our own tax dollars !

For every one dollar in annual income that earthling oriented (aka green,steady state, perhaps a few of the left) think tanks have, the SkyGod libertarians have $1000.

There are about 10,000 think tanks world wide and most of the ones we could even begin to call earthling (and Earth) friendly are small in income, small in numbers, in uncertain health or already effectively moribund.

The vast number that are both very rich and very active in their strident advocacy are the libertarian denier tankers.

We earthlings only add our considerable credibility ( precious and scarce) to the alleged legitimacy of the thousands of denier tanks by supporting the idea of think tanks in general.

If instead, we steered totally clear of them - instead of trying to feebly compete within their world - we could then strongly denounce them and all of their works as that of the Devil.

This is because all advocacy think tanks are but a money laundering scheme.

Albeit the sort of money laundering Yale and Oxfords grads would get into : morally dubious but perfectly legal (who writes the laws after all ?) and highly profitable for all concerned.

Life was so much more straight forward in the 1940s.

Just before election day, the boss put a little piece of paper in your pay packet, telling you that if you voted for Party X on Tuesday, you could kiss your job good bye on Friday - and then he signed it.

He ran ads in the newspaper saying the same thing - and he signed it.

Flash forward to today.

Now the super rich 1% have their tax free family foundations donate to tax free charities called strident advocacy libertarian think tanks.

The think tank then pays an unknown denier with just enough degrees to be called "a scientist" or "an academic" to "author" a "book" and then do a "book tour" of the world denying climate change at think tank sponsored "seminars".

Since the super rich own or control all the big media, they ensure their employees "cover" these meetings like the dew, and then splash the contents on their front pages and TV screens for all of us to endure.

Just imagine how ineffective a denial would be that insists burning coal does not cause smoke pollution , if delivered by a coal mining heiress  in all of her newspaper chain ?

Even Stephen Harper might see through that gauze !

Now imagine if our obese heiress choose instead to launder her money through foundations to think tanks and tame publishing firms and tame newspapers.

So now it appears that a 'disinterested, objective' academic had delivered this 'balanced review' of the evidence for and against coal's atmospheric effects and rendered a reasonable verdict in favour of the innocent coal mines.

All are opinions but not all opinions are EQUAL

Look there is already a place for people who claim to be either (or both) academics and scientists : it is called inside peer-reviewed papers.

The best science and academic journals demand so much transparency on your data, funding and conflict of interest that 99.999999999999999% of advocacy think tank research would never make it past this first hurdle.

Next your toughest critics are asked to tear your actual data apart and if the editor doesn't feel you answered them effectively, you're dead.

Pass these two stages and the hardest by far still remains : "is what you are saying truly new and if so is it global enough in IMPACT to make other people outside your narrow field waste their time to read it ?"

Getting a paper into NATURE or SCIENCE or about 10 to 20 others is rather like how a Patent Office should work - but rarely does - patents then would only be issued for truly new and workable processes.

The advantage of a paper in NATURE for over-busy  journalists is obvious : it has been pre-vetted, you don't have to read it or think about it, merely act as a public steno and paraphrase its abstract to your readers.

Journalists who are over-busy and under-intellectualized dig themselves even deeper into the quicksand : they don't bother to check to see if the paper they are being pitched has seen a peer-review, they don't read the paper.

They read the author's CV , if it is more impressive than the journalist's, then they are regarded as an expert and even an academic and a scientist.

So an economist whose life work has been Iowa pork belly futures is allowed to spout off opinions about climate changes effects on the ocean currents of the  South Pacific.

I spout off opinions - all the time, I am a blogger - but I never claim to be an expert/scientist or an academic on the subject : just a blogger with an opinion.

And, by design, I have no CV full of  expert credentials .

Most journalists trying to assess the value of my opinion need both time and the ability to contrast it with the widely held scientific or academic consensus on the subject, before they could tell if it is worth them passing on to their readers.

My blog opinion then is in the same position as a big think tank's new policy paper : it is merely a bucket of spit until conventional peer review or a bunch of smart competitive journalists or perhaps the entire blog-o-sphere has assessed it thoroughly.

All this takes much time, thinking , researching, reflecting , re-reading and reflecting again.

It is a process, not an event ; it is ongoing and never stops.

It is all just opinions or hunches.

Sometime those hunches come in fancy dress : theories or hypotheses.

But all - from dashed-off blogger rant to cover article in NATURE - are just opinions.

But some opinions, like reports from NATURE or SCIENCE or LANCET or the IPPC have a much bigger and deeper consensus around them than others : thoroughly peer-reviewed articles from the biggest journals and the biggest international panels.

Think tank funders - the greedy libertarians - crave that sort of prestige and credibility.

But being lazy as well as greedy, libertarians want all of that  without going through all the rigour and dreaded transparency of peer-review.

Libertarianism ( and think tanks) is the natural home of the hard-to-get-along-with academics who tank in the world of collegiality.

the poet Longfellow had great advice

If we earthlings let them, they will fall back on the pseudo academic halo of the think tanks.

But we shouldn't let them ; we should abandon all of our side's feeble think tanks and denounce the entire concept of think tanks as intellectual money laundering.

To paraphrase the poet Longfellow:  if Gina loves Priscilla of the Desert, great - but she should tell Priscilla herself - not pay some john inside Canberra's The Triangle to do it for her.

Gina, go pimp your own opinions ......

'Tankers' have the money , bloggers have the brains

Asymmetrical journalism : bloggers besting 'tankers'

A red broadband and three cords , located somewhere in a bedroom in the hinterland backwaters , may not seem equal to all the corporate firepower concentrated in the Think Tank phalanxes of  Washington, London, Canberra and Ottawa.

But didn't Mr Bono also evoke having "The Truth" in his definition of asymmetrical "punk" journalism ?

I am sure he did.

The battle ground is Climate Change, the stakes (a big cliche, but still true) "The Fate of the Earth" .

Libertarian Think Tanks

There are hundreds of wealthy libertarian Think Tanks world wide that deny that "Man"  has caused potentially irreversible Climate Change, indeed deny any limits on "Man's" ability to quickly get out any jam He or nature might have... temporarily ...created.

It will probably take tens of thousands of part-time bloggers, in tens of thousands of bedrooms,  to successfully combat this Life-killing philosophy -- but I am sure we can do it.

They have the money true ; but after all , we have the beauty and the brains....

Worldwide re-alignment of parties and voters underway

Successful parties with no membership to speak of.

Many of today's most successful parties - like the Australian Labour Party -  are a mile wide and an inch deep.

This party is but a house of cards - many of its branches have almost no members but still collectively elect a Labour member, as they have unbrokenly for over a hundred years.

Read Rodney Cavalier's POWER CRISIS  read it , and if you are still part of the same-old-same-old left wing (why?) ---- weep.

It and its equally ancient rival, the Liberals, pretend to exchange blows on issues fought over since before the start of the 20th century, but when it gets down to it both are quite content to advise their voters to vote for each other, rather than for their dreaded common enemy - the GREENS.

Meme of the Day : Human Exceptionalism

I can easily foresee a new political alignment in Australia over the issue : for or against Human Exceptionalism --- indeed, in all the world's democracies.

We all know that Americans like to claim that they are an exception to every restraint that afflicts other human societies.

Now, in an inflationary move, many people on both the outdated right and the outdated left, are claiming that every bit of humanity is an exception to the material and biological restraints that limit all other life on Earth.

The human mind and will triumphing over mere matter - or lack there of.

Call these people yesterday's skygods -- I doubt they ever will.

Their opponents do see that human life faces the same restraints that all other life has always faced - our brains give us a double-edged sword - the smarts to do things better than plants or animals - and the greed that never lets us stop when we should.

These are today's earthlings: committed to seeing humanity as deeply embedded within the web of life, dining at a common table ( aka global commensalists) on the only lifeboat life has in this universe.

I see every election in twenty years coming down to a referendum on Human Exceptionalism, disguised or overtly.....

Opinion divides on our troubled "Lifeboat Earth" : Bail It or Bail Out ?

Earthlings say that Lifeboat Earth is sadly afflicted --- by Climate Change above all, but also by all sorts of other rapes against our Earth's biosphere.

 But if we but start right now to change our ways, there is still time to gradually bring our planet back from the point of no return.

Bail it ; bail it for all your worth !

It is the only lifeboat that we know of in the Near Universe (or beyond) that sustains Life, all life, from the biggest human civilization right down to the smallest bacteria.

Skygods will say, in sequence, a number of things:

Our world is robust, not troubled, this is just a blip in Nature and the Earth will right itself, if left alone (particularly if left alone by the Left.)

Then : yes we have few - minor - problems caused by human technology but new human technology can just as easily solve it.

Relax !  Go back to drinking the Kool Aid, its fine, we're just stopping to pick up some more ice.

Next, as conditions hit a crisis that even reaches inside their 'gated world' : The investment 'climate' on Earth 1.0 has worsened - time to de-invest and time to re-invest in Earth 2.0 on Mars --- but only if government creates the right 'investment climate' for private capital to save Humanity.

 Time to bail out !  ...... but if only if the taxpayer bails out the carbon companies, first .....

This century's battle between Webster and the Devil is for the soul of all humanity

    Forget Republican versus Democrat, Liberal versus Conservative, Socialist versus Capitalist ---- they are all yesterday's news, yesterday's papers - throw 'em in the trash, we won't be needing them again.
    Today's battle royal, between a latter day Daniel Webster and a latter day Devil is the battle between the Libertarians versus the commensalists.

    And this time, they are fighting for the highest possible stakes: for the soul of all humanity and for the lives of all Life on Earth - which may just be all the life there is, in the entire Universe.
   Hard to get any more elemental and cosmic than that .
    The old debate, yesterday's debate was how do we - do we - share the wealth of the Earth between humans.
    The new debate, a variant on killing the goose that lays the golden egg, is over how do we - should we,must we - share the wealth of the Earth with the lifeforms that actually produce it.
   Or do we 'slash & burn and move on', treat the earth like the way Libertarians treat their women: "Find 'em, Frack 'em and Forget 'em".
  Do we toss the depleted Earth aside, like a used-up trophy wive, a used condom or  a no-longer-wanted Christmas puppy?
  Do we bugger off to gate ourselves a new community on Mars, the new Earth 1.0% --- leaving those who can't afford to go - the 99% - to bake and broil under greenhouse skies?
   These are the new political questions that will dominate our elections, consume our financial markets and transfix our public intellectuals in the years ahead....

SKYGODS discover 'intelligent life' : now what and so what.....

     The fastest human-made (physical object) ever is Helios Two which travels at about .02% the speed of light. It takes 5000 years to travel the distance that man-made light signals would travel in one year.
   The next nearest star (with any sort of planets) would take Helios Two 40,000 years to travel to and back.
    But the first star with a planet very very very close to Earth in features (and thus supporting intelligent life) could easily be 100 light years away - taking Helios Two a million years to travel to and back to visit our closest relatives.

   So we decide to 'can' the holiday vacation to this particular paradise -pity because Jill Tarter's fund-raising SETI brochure looked so nice : no summer vacation is that long - not even for Canadian MPs.
   But since we got a signal from Planet X's beings (but we can't figure anything about the language it is in), we decide to type out a brief texting message back in English (hey it works with foreign waiters, doesn't it ?).
   And we wait and wait and wait (100 years) for the reply.
   Rather we don't - our great-great-grandchildren wait for the reply.
   Long distance ping-pong.
   And since the Chinese also invented water torture as well as ping pong, call it the slow drip,drip version ping pong.
    Yawn --- or maybe, SCREAM !!!!!!......

VICTORIA's CHILDREN : skygods versus earthlings

      Queen Victoria's long reign is frequently divided into two periods.
       The Early Victorian Age was from 1837 when she became Queen until 1870 and the end of her 10 years of mourning over the death of her husband Albert.
       1870 is generally regarded as both  the low point - and turning point - of her popularity.

      Because in the second period, Victoria I became uniquely popular world wide.
      So while this period from 1870 to her death in 1901, is usually labelled as The Late Victorian Age, it doesn't represent a diminishment of the age.
      Rather - and rather ironically - it came to represent what we think of today as characteristic of the most exuberant form of Victorianism.
    Part of the reasons for that characteristic exuberant flavour was the astonishing technological breakthroughs made in the 1870s and 1880s in many different areas of daily life.
    It was Queen Victoria's unfailing optimism and unflagging interest in new inventions that made these potentially-disturbing new machines socially respectable in this extremely carefully cosseted age.
   SVE is particularly interested in the scientists and technologists of this late victorian period, the generation born between 1870 and 1901, Victoria's children :  *skygod technology versus earthling science* .
    As I like to say, SVE is all about those scientists born after the birth of the dynamo and dead before the birth of disco : the men and a few women who ran our world between 1939-1945, if not before that, and who dominated intellectually until the mid-1960s ...

Bugger-off Hippies ! - it was crewcutted NASA types what killed Modernity

    High Modernity was animated by a single generation of scientists,  children born after the invention of the Dynamo and who died before the invention of Disco: roughly after 1870 and before 1970.
   Alfred Newton (Newt) Richards, medical strong man of the famous wartime OSRD R&D outfit, whose dates (1876-1966) span the age almost perfectly, is an example of one such scientist who was influential when young and who continued to be highly influential up to the year he died.
   A lot of important scientific discoveries and technological inventions happened in the 1870s, but there were a few highly influential bloopers as well.

   None more infamous than what followed an announcement in 1877, when Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli (yes his niece Elsa was later even better known than Giovanni - but for her high fashion clothing) thought he found water-filled canals across the face of Mars.
   Mars was a planet seen by most academic scientists as very much like Earth, albeit much more arid but with clearly visible polar caps.
   Proposals to build canals to move water and goods from the wet to the dry areas of Earth were the flavour of the month in the 1870s, so his idea took off in popular science, if not really in academic science.
  It fuelled a slew of fiction and quasi-popular quasi-factual popular science books/films/comics about life on Mars - the literal wet dreams of  High Modernity's cosmic cowboys.
  The idea wasn't firmly quashed for good until July 1965, when Mariner 4 beamed back some actual close up images of Mar's surface -showing it as dead as the Moon.
   Venus's clouds were pierced about the same time by NASA and its Russian counterpart, by flyby space probes, revealing a planet so harsh it made the Moon or Mars look benign by contrast.
   Only by contrast - nothing in our Solar System looked remotely attractive to human life.
    Now SF (Science Fiction) and the wild-eyed utopian end of academic science had to switch to PLAN B - interstellar travel to distant stars with Earth-like planets.
   Stars so far away we were basically imagining their planets to be Earth-like - if our visions of relatively nearby Mars were off base - the attractiveness of these new distant planets could be off by a factor of a million to one or more.
   In addition, Mars et al were at least reachable by our current technology - based upon upgraded technology and science from the late 19th century.
   But the speeds we'd need to obtain, to get to distant planets before the human cargo inside the tin cans died from cosmic radiation poisoning, was simply not in the pipeline yet, so here academic science had to lean hard on the ravings of hardcore SF in its  most Kool-Aid-drinking mode, to sustain the dream.
   (Insert here a big shout out to Freeman Dyson....)
   The original Skygod generation has sustained their vision of being above the Earth's woes by deluding themselves they could always start anew on a nearby human-friendly planet like Venus or Mars.
   NASA's crewcutted pipe-smoking set killed that dream, even before the hippies and students got going on Modernity, in May 1968.
   Ironic isn't it ???