Why is mankind here

But human rights are a fiction, just like God and Heaven. In reality, humans have no rights, just as chimps or wolves have no rights. The only place where human rights exist is in the stories we invent and tell one another. Human rights may be a very attractive story, but it is only a story. The same mechanism is at work in politics. Like gods and human rights, nations are fictions.

A mountain is something real. You can see it, touch it, smell it. But the United States or Israel are not a physical reality. You cannot see them, touch them or smell them. They are just stories that humans invented and then became extremely attached to. It is the same with economic networks of cooperation. Take a dollar bill, for example. It has no value in itself. You cannot eat it, drink it or wear it. But now come along some master storytellers like the Chair of the Federal Reserve and the President of the United States, and convince us to believe that this green piece of paper is worth five bananas.

As long as millions of people believe this story, that green piece of paper really is worth five bananas. I can now go to the supermarket, hand a worthless piece of paper to a complete stranger whom I have never met before, and get real bananas in return. Try doing that with a chimpanzee. Indeed, money is probably the most successful fiction ever invented by humans. Not all people believe in God, or in human rights, or in the United States of America.

But everybody believes in money, and everybody believes in the dollar bill. Even Osama bin Laden. He hated American religion, American politics and American culture — but he was quite fond of American dollars. Meanwhile, rich philanthropists poured cash into instruments of discovery, and from the new giant telescopes emerged a sequence of consciousness-raising discoveries.

Among them was the immense size of the Milky Way, far beyond anything dreamed of by Herschel. Then came the realization that the Milky Way was but one of myriad galaxies stretching beyond by millions and even billions of light years, rushing away from each other as if from a cataclysmic explosion billions of years ago.

This vast increase in the size and age of the perceived cosmos set the stage for an angst as deep as that caused by the displacement of the ancient human-centred cosmology: what significance do rational, observing mortals have in the wilderness of a near-infinite space-time continuum? This existential question has been simmering for decades and undoubtedly drives our willingness to invest taxpayers' money in further cosmic explorations. Today, the electronic revolution has provided charge-coupled devices to replace photographic plates that have nearly 50 times their efficiency; has made feasible the collection and handling of data in the trillions of bits; and has enabled high-speed adaptive optics to compensate for atmospheric variations, allowing astronomers to take full advantage of large-aperture Earth-based telescopes.

The stellar and galactic denizens of the Universe can now be catalogued as never before. That has included, in recent years, the discovery and cataloguing of exoplanets — those beyond our Solar System. NASA's Kepler mission, scheduled for launch in March , is the first craft designed explicitly to look for Earth-like exoplanets. Don't expect radio communications from intelligent life to come from one of those planets. But other exciting signals could surely be found. Today, spectroscopy can be used to spy on the atmospheres of far-away planets, and look for chemical traces that may hint at signs of life — even an extremely basic form of life could produce an oxygen signal in a planet's atmosphere.

Such studies may help in answering the next psyche-shifting question: are we alone? The International Year of Astronomy might well launch the next intellectual revolution in our understanding of our place in the Universe.

Could this have as much of an impact on society as Galileo and Kepler's entrenchment of the heliocentric view? Only time will tell. Gingerich, O. Van Helden, A. Galilei, G. Sidereus nuncius, or Sidereal Messenger , translated with introduction by A. Van Helden Chicago, Owen Gingerich is professor emeritus of astronomy and history of science at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and author of God's Universe.

You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar. Reprints and Permissions. Mankind's place in the Universe. Nature , 28—29 Download citation. Published : 31 December Issue Date : 01 January Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:.

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article. Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative. Foundations of Science Advanced search. Could we one day replace all of the tissues in the human body through engineering? Vacanti; Scientific American, September ]. All of these are coming to pass, either as real products or in clinical trials.

Over the next few centuries it is quite possible that nearly every tissue in the body may be able to be replaced by such approaches. Creating or regenerating tissues such as those found in the brain, which is extremely complex and poorly understood, will take an enormous amount of research.

The greatest cause of species extinction is loss of habitat. Overall, an extension of environmental science to include the living world should be, and I believe will be, a major initiative of science during the remainder of this century. Can we feed the planet without destroying it? Will we ever colonize outer space? Even some limited degree of reproduction might be feasible, recognizing that primates will be primates.

We currently have a very inadequate understanding of how to build closed ecosystems that are robust to perturbation by introduced organisms or nonbiological events Biosphere 2 , for example , and I suspect that the contained ecosystem problem will turn out to be much more challenging than the vast majority of space colonization advocates realize.

There are a wide range of technical problems to solve, another being air handling. Conley, NASA planetary protection officer. Will we discover a twin Earth? We just have to look for them. We have now started prevention trials that are testing biological interventions even before people show clinical symptoms of the disease.

Estimates show that a five-year delay in the terrible and expensive dementia stage of the disease would reduce Medicare dementia costs by nearly 50 percent. Most important, that would mean that many older people could die while out ballroom dancing rather than in nursing homes.

Will we use wearable technologies to detect our emotions? Wearable technologies let us quantify the patterns in these signals over long periods of time.

Over the next 20 years, wearables, and analytics derived from them, can dramatically reduce psychiatric and neurological disease. Media Lab. Will we ever figure out what dark matter is?

Some forms of dark matter allow detection through small interactions with ordinary matter that have so far evaded detection.

Others might be detectable through their influence on structures such as galaxies. Baird, Jr. Will we get control of intractable brain diseases like schizophrenia or autism? Some interpret this to mean future answers lie purely in biochemistry, not neural circuits. Others argue the key is for the neuroscientist to start to think in terms of overall brain architecture—not specific neural failures. Will technology eliminate the need for animal testing in drug development?

That will eventually lead to significant reductions in use of animal testing. Importantly, these devices also will open up new approaches to drug development not possible with animal models today, such as personalized medicines and development of therapeutics for specific genetic subpopulations using chips created using cells from particular patients.

Will gender equality be achieved in the sciences?