Piers Sellers

Thanks for the tips, Don.

Piers Sellers, former astronaut and climate change scientist, passed away on December 23, 2016, from pancreatic cancer at the age of 61. Before his death, though, he recorded this short video message, reaching out to the global community as a scientist concerned about these changes and their largest cause: humanity.

Throughout his career, Sellers focused on characterizing and understanding changes in the Earth’s climate system. He was particularly interested in interactions between the Earth’s biosphere — its life — and the atmosphere.

In his message, Sellers describes Earth as a “beautiful planet” and speaks about how the planet and the life it supports have evolved “to fit each other perfectly.” However, humanity’s clear and measurable impact on the climate has the potential to wreak “potentially disastrous” results. He calls for groups such as scientists, policymakers, and industrialists to work together towards the common goal of maintaining the Earth as “a planet that can continue to support life — including all of us.” astronomy.com

Piers Sellers appears in this film:

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How Social Media Shapes Our Identity
The Internet constantly confronts us with evidence of our past. Are we losing the chance to remake ourselves?By Nausicaa Renner

New technology—especially the smartphone—allows us to produce a narrative of our lives, to choose what to remember and what to contribute to our own mythos. For Eichhorn, this is the latest instance of a long-held, if mysterious, practice. “Long before children were able to create, edit, and curate images of their lives,” she writes, “they were already doing so on a psychic level.” Freud called these images “screen memories”—no pun intended—and he thought that we used them to soften or obscure painful experiences. Humans have always tried to cope with the difficulty of memory, to turn it “from an intolerable horror to something which is reassuringly innocuous and familiar.” Social media just makes us more adept at it.

On the other hand, Eichhorn writes, such media can prevent those who wish to break with their past from doing so cleanly. We’re not the only ones posting; our friends and family chronicle our lives, usually without our consent. Growing up online, Eichhorn worries, might impede our ability to edit memories, cull what needs to be culled, and move on. “The potential danger is no longer childhood’s disappearance, but rather the possibility of a perpetual childhood,” she writes. We may, in short, have traded “screen memories for screens.”

This is of particular import for those who yearn to establish new identities.... (NY'er, continues)
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Why Do Americans Feel That There’s No One to Help Us?
By Robin Wright
August 7, 2019

The corrosion of public faith in leadership and institutions now consumes Americans of both parties. And it seems to be getting worse.

On Monday, Barack Obama posted a pained statement on Facebook, one of his few public comments since leaving the White House. He grieved for all who suffered in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio—and for America generally. Without naming names, he admonished leaders who “demonize those who don’t look like us, or suggest that other people, including immigrants, threaten our way of life, or refer to other people as sub-human, or imply that America belongs to just one certain type of people.” The same language has produced atrocities like the Holocaust and groups like isis, he wrote. “It has no place in our politics and our public life.” Within twenty-four hours, his post was shared nearly a quarter of a million times.

Yet Obama’s words may do little to assuage a deepening sense across the United States that the unique American experience is in real trouble—more than at any time in at least a half century—and that there’s no one out there to help us. Reflecting on the former President’s Facebook comment, Paul Waldman, of the Washington Post, wrote, “This country is not in the mood for reconciliation and healing, and hasn’t been for some time.”

The unsettling sense that America is going wrong, even unwinding, is reflected in a poll released two weeks ago by the Pew Research Center: seventy-five per cent of Americans now say that trust in the federal government is shrinking. The numbers reflect both frustration with the nation’s polarization and anger over Washington’s dysfunction. But something bigger is happening. Even more striking in the Pew poll: two-thirds of Americans have significantly less trust in one another, too.

More than twenty-five thousand people responded to Pew’s open-ended invitation to explain their answers. They were “full of worries about American decline, the collapse of community, heightened wariness of fellow citizens and a general sense that the anchors of communal life in past generations had been lost,” Lee Rainie, the poll’s director, said in an e-mail. Some described waking up after the 2016 election and “having the feeling they’d completely lost touch with their country.” Many said that the decimation of trust—in government and in one another—has made resolving America’s major problems much harder.

Donald Trump, and the inflammatory language that he invokes about minorities, immigrants, and others, is certainly part of the problem, but it’s also a symptom of the broader existential challenge facing a nation founded on “life, liberty and happiness for all.” “We are now, and have been in the last fifty years, plunging deeper and deeper into individualism of a very malignant sort,” Robert Putnam, a political scientist at Harvard University, told me this week. Putnam first wrote about the increasing disconnect between Americans and family, friends, communities, and democratic institutions two decades ago in his classic book “Bowling Alone.” He’s writing a sequel that is due next year. “We are much more isolated in ways—culturally, politically, economically, and socially—than we have been in a hundred and twenty years,” he said. “The whole idea that ‘We’re all in this together’ is now out of fashion. We’d like to be connected, but we’re not.”

America’s fabric has frayed partly because there are fewer and fewer experiences that bind its people, Richard Haass, the author of “A World in Disarray” and the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. Public schools no longer teach civics. Americans coming of age have not been exposed to a common national narrative about our historic political DNA—or “what makes us us,” he said. The age of broadcasting has been replaced by a world of “narrow-casting” that feeds fears, biases, and lies, with fewer gatekeepers insuring a neutral or balanced perspective.

There are fewer purple states; most are distinctly red or blue—leading to compromise being interpreted as betrayal. The elimination of the military draft following the end of the Vietnam War, nearly a half century ago, has limited the sense of duty or commitment to protecting one another. Only a tiny percentage of Americans served in Afghanistan and Iraq, two of America’s longest wars. Many who did serve were deployed again and again in repeated tours.

The idea of America as a melting pot is being replaced by the idea of Americans in separate pots. “The pattern is one of weakening social and national bonds,” Haass said. “That makes it harder to feel a shared identity or community—and to do anything collectively.”

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