Want to feel young? Stand beside an old redwood. At two to three millennia old, the towering trees are among the oldest living organisms on the planet. Want to feel even younger, stand beside a bristlecone pine. Possibly four to five millennia old, they were alive before the current redwoods were saplings by about the same amount of time that separates you from the first Christmas. To feel your youngest, stand beside the oldest baobab. It was a sapling a millennium before the oldest bristlecone pine or about the same amount of time that separates you from the Vikings.
 
That there are such old trees is remarkable, given the penchant of humans to destroy on a whim, for utility, or ideology.* When you consider how ancient architecture that was itself once a hope for a brighter future now lies in ruins, you might ask yourself how or why some human structures vie with those trees for the title “Oldest.” Truth is, if the pyramids and stone structures of Egypt, South America, and Central America weren’t so massive, they, too, would be reduced to rubble by someone or some group. Those Mayan and Incan walls had the added protection of hard-to-penetrate, isolating tropical forest or treacherous location. Consider, also, how ancient cave-wall graffiti of Lascaux that had survived in isolation for more than 17 millennia had to be re-isolated because thousands of curious visitors introduced destructive humidity and mold.  
 
Size and isolation appear to be the only mechanisms that guarantee survival. Sorry. That might seem pessimistic. Redwoods and baobabs are big; bristlecone pines on tall mountains and Upper Paleolithic cave-wall paintings are isolated. The former two are the Egyptian pyramids of plants; the latter two are the analogs of Mayan cities hidden for centuries in inaccessible places. Those ancient redwoods, bristlecones, and baobabs have endured many threats, from changing climates to destructive animals. But all the threats of past humanity pale by comparison with the threats posed by you and your contemporaries armed with chainsaws. Keep in mind that just the visitors’ breath was enough to threaten those paintings at Lascaux.
 
Go to a redwood forest. You will probably take a selfie by a standing tree because as you pose in awe. You will also, on a summer’s day, take a selfie with a group gathered around the redwood picnic table on the redwood deck attached to the redwood house. One of the best ironic encapsulations that juxtaposes awe and destruction is a cartoon by Gary Larson: Two characters stand at the base of a giant tree they felled with a two-man tree saw. One of them ironically points to a tree ring that demonstrates how the downed tree had once survived a fire.  
 
There’s no way of knowing how long redwoods, bristlecones, and baobabs will survive over the next two to six millennia. Sure, they managed to escape destruction from a time we call “ancient,” but we have really improved our ability to destroy, to change places according to our will, as slash-and-burn has demonstrated in Brazil, where vast tracks of virgin forests have been turned to smoke and ash.**
 
Awe and destruction: Look at the gawking that accompanies the destruction of a stadium, bridge, or building that was once considered “magnificent” and useful. Look at the delight people take in constructing dominoes just to knock them down. Come on, admit it: Like most people, you just can’t resist pushing over the end domino to watch the mesmerizing cascade.
 
Anyway, you can always reset the dominoes, right? So, what’s the big deal about the potential loss of a redwood, a bristlecone pine, or an ancient baobab? What’s the big deal about a loss of ancient art or architecture? What’s the big deal about introducing light and people, and thus, algae and mold, into a place where only darkness and isolation had preserved ancient drawings?
 
When I was a child, the US government allowed the televising of nuclear blasts in Nevada. Not understanding what the consequences of having atomic bombs meant for all that life, both plant and animal, had ever grown or built, I was eager to sit in front of the black-and-white, small-screen TV to watch a fuzzy picture of the explosion. Adults gathered in Las Vegas and elsewhere, supposedly at a safe distance—without realizing the effects of gamma rays—to watch. Since that time, the world’s nuclear powers have added thousands of such bombs to their arsenals. To what end?*** Will some future generation look in awe as skyscrapers fall like redwoods? New term: Destructive Awe.
 
So, that brings me to the famous words of Robert Oppenheimer about the world’s entry into the age of atomic destruction. “We knew the world would not be the same. Some people laughed; some people cried; most people were silent…I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. Vishnu was trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”****
 
Awe? Destruction? Awe and destruction? Our choice.
 
 
*Think of ISIS’s destruction of Syria’s ancient city of Palmyra or of the Taliban’s destruction of ancient Buddha statues.
** Vast tracks of forests have disappeared under saws and axes. In tropical lands, most of the nutrients lie in living matter and not in the rather barren soils. As many Brazilian subsistence farmers and ranchers have learned, once they cut and burn to alter the landscape for their use, they get only a few years of growth from those nutrient-depleted soils. And then, they move to slash and burn more forest.
***Mutually assured destruction would mean the end of the government that uses such weapons. Think of the absurdity of the current Iranian leadership threatening Israel, supposedly doing so in support of the Palestinians. If Iran were to acquire and use nuclear weapons, they would almost certainly destroy the very people they currently support (in addition to bringing on their own destruction). Nevertheless, no one can ever predict whether or not a pathological individual or group would invariably refrain from using those weapons. Precedent suggests that such individuals or groups of destroyers will continue to plague every generation.
****Oppenheimer’s version of the passage.

I suppose you’ve been wondering whether or not this writer is an actual human being. In this era of budding AI systems like GPT-2, I might be just a machine. How would you know? After all, OpenAI, which in February, 2019, said it was holding the release of its text-generating algorithm, is releasing it (Or, should I say, “me”?).*
 
The initial concerns about releasing the algorithm centered on the manufacturing of “fake news.” For example, if a “real” human writer generated a sentence like “Aliens landed in New Jersey this morning,” the AI would generate an entire, supposedly believable, story that would generate panic ALA Mercury Theatre’s “War of the Worlds” episode in October, 1938.
 
Putting its fear of fake news aside, the company stated its reason for changing its policy and for releasing GPT-2: “We’ve seen no strong evidence of misuse so far.” That’s reassuring, isn’t it? So, how is one to know whether or not this essay, written after the release of that justification, isn’t the first among many as-yet-to-be-generated paragraphs written by AI and not a human?
 
You really don’t have any guarantees, do you? You have to rely on assumption and trust that I exist unless you know me personally, and even then, you don’t have a guarantee that I haven’t, like Darth Vader, “gone over to the Dark Side” to rely on a writing algorithm because, for example, I might be just too lazy to type and too dumb to come up with the more than 1,200 essays I’ve posted on this site so far. What’s a modern reader to do with all these websites, all these blogs? What’s a modern reader to do with all the headlines on all those “news” websites?
 
Although I want to assure you that I do exist, I’m sure you have now at least toyed with the thought that I might not be real (or sane). But that’s okay on this website because my stated purpose is to offer points of departure for your thoughts, which, I think I’m safe in assuming, you, and not some artificial intelligence algorithm, are thinking. You can trust yourself, right?
 
Say you believe your thoughts have not been somehow manipulated and that what you think is the product of your own mind. Then what role has cultural inculcation played in fashioning what and how you now think?
 
 
*Cohen, Nancy. Fake news via OpenAI: Eloquently incoherent? Tech Xplore. 9 Nov 2019. https://techxplore.com/news/2019-11-fake-news-openai-eloquently-incoherent.html
Accessed November 11, 2019. 

Remember that Montreal Protocol, the one that made anathema using CFCs to propel your deodorant? It apparently worked in a relatively short time. Now there is a record of the smallest ozone hole in years. Get out there to sunbathe. Forget the 100 SPF tanning lotion. You’re free to wander the planet partially naked without the risk of skin cancer.
 
Well, not quite. But the juxtaposition of two stories on ozone makes a point I’ve made before: Whenever we mess something up and then try to fix our mess, we almost always mess up something else. Anyway, this is a story of partially good news vs. partially bad news. You want the partially good news first?
 
NASA and NOAA reported in October, 2019, that the ozone hole was the smallest such “hole” (actually, a lessening of O3) since 1982. That’s only partially good news because the increase in ozone appears to be related to warmer stratospheric temperatures, and not to human efforts. In raising Earth's temperature (a supposedly bad thing), we seem to have decreased the ozone hole. Nevertheless, since ozone protects us from UV rays, let’s take the news as mostly positive.*
 
Juxtaposed against this “partially good news” is a story of partially bad news about China’s air pollution. Ozone, which is good for us when it lies in the stratosphere, isn’t good for us when it lies in the troposphere. You don’t want to breathe the stuff if you can avoid it. And it so happens that as China attempts to reduce its fine particulate matter pollution, it’s increasing its ozone pollution.**
 
Try to do one thing, and you end up with another. There always seems to be that unintended consequence or some unintended actor. The very thing that we must supposedly guard against, that is, a rise in temperature, appears to be the primary actor in the diminution of stratospheric ozone. And the attempt to reduce harmful particulates seems to have generated a mechanism for increasing surface ozone.
 
I am tempted to say…Oh! What the heck! I’m going to say it: What we anticipate is rarely a problem.
 
The problem lies in our inability to anticipate all the consequences of our actions. But what choice to we have? Rather than simply tossing purpose to the winds of chance, we’re probably better off when we act purposely, and that seems to work for us individually and socially. Will we ever avoid bad consequences? No. But we will probably get some “partially good news” more often than we will hear wholly bad news. Messing up is human, but so is recovering.
 
* https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/145747/2019-ozone-hole-is-the-smallest-on-record  and https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/2019-ozone-hole-is-the-smallest-on-record-since-its-discovery
 
 
** https://www.caixinglobal.com/2019-08-22/ozone-pollution-is-becoming-a-bigger-threat-to-chinas-air-101453900.html

In one of his fragments, Heraclitus says the sun is the size of a human foot. I understand how he might have thought that 2,500 years ago. With respect to Heraclitus and probably to his contemporaries, I want to acknowledge that the Sun, regardless of its almost million-mile diameter, does seem to be quite small. And in a strange coincidence brought about by time and tide, the Sun also appears to be about the size of the moon, our 2,000 mile-diameter satellite.* Let’s not fault Heraclitus for his misperception. There are probably people alive today who think both of these celestial bodies have identical diameters. Not that such misperceptions have anything to do with our too-frequent utilitarian search for bread, milk, and eggs: If appearances are knowledge enough for matters on the periphery of daily existence, so what? Thus, all of us probably hold similar misconceptions. Truth is that appearances are sufficient for most of us most of the time, so much so that we act on what we perceive to be reality.
 
In many ways, we find ourselves in the midst of apparent equivalences like the sizes of the Sun and moon. As long as such apparent equivalences do not affect our daily lives, we have no need to pursue their underlying realities. Apparent equivalences, like those of Sun and moon, become the bases for perspectives, and nowadays, for perspectives on moral equivalence as seen by agenda-driven media.
 
Let’s look at an example from the Washington Post. After U.S. special forces killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the paper ran an obituary entitled “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State, dies at 48,” a title that underwent a change in response to reader outrage. Al-Baghdadi was, after all, responsible personally for rapes and deaths and both indirectly and directly responsible for torture and genocidal massacres, not to mention the displacement of hundreds of thousands who fled from their homelands and the brutality of al-Baghdadi’s savage fighters.
 
But in an age when appearances are more important than substance, should we not expect such moral equivalences? We do live in an age when many expect trophies just for participating, when some won’t acknowledge differences in skill or intelligence, and when some (or many?) in the media believe that appearance is a reality equivalent to reality?  Calling al-Baghdadi an “austere religious scholar” means that the writer or editor saw his “scholarship” as equivalent to or greater than his depravity. And to what end?
 
The same acceptance of appearance as equivalent to realities has recently surfaced in another media platform, as ABC seems to have buried the story of Jeffrey Epstein because of his associations with those who “appear” as ABC executives think people should appear. Thus, exposing Epstein’s association with American politicians and newsmen and with British royalty would alter the appearances media moguls have become accustomed not only to hold onto, but also to protect.
 
So, again, let’s not fault Heraclitus, an otherwise bright guy, for believing the Sun was the size of a human foot. And let’s not fault our twenty-first century co-habitants for their ignorance of Sun and moon. In today’s mode of thinking, all that appears equivalent IS equivalent. In fact, let’s just accept that the Sun is equivalent to a human foot. Why does it matter, anyway?
 
 
*Because the moon continuously moves farther from Earth (about 3.8 cm/yr, or 1.5 in/yr), this similarity in size will eventually fade—but not in your lifetime.

What? Did I just read what I read? Apparently, as the news item runs, hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods are twenty-first century phenomena. At least that is what the Governor of New York thinks. I guess the 265 Spanish sailors who lost their lives when their ship the Atocha went down to Davy Jones’s locker in 1622 were killed by the Bermuda Triangle’s UFOs. Storms in the 15th and 16th centuries? Nah! Just listen to the Governor.
 
So, here’s what the Governor said. “Anyone who questions extreme weather and climate change is just delusional at this point. We have seen in the state of New York what everyone has seen. We see these weather patterns that we never had before. We didn’t have hurricanes. We didn’t have superstorms. We didn’t have tornadoes. This is a storm that came up just overnight, dropped about five inches of rain, and it was literally a matter of life or death for people.” * I guess the rich, famous, and politically connected get to say whatever they want to say without a reporter’s questioning the veracity of what they say.

I wonder whether or not the 1938 hurricane that hit Long Island was mythical. Let’s see. What are we to do with those other weather events? In September, 1821, a storm now called the Great Norfolk and Long Island Hurricane (aka the Long Island Hurricane and The Great September Gale of 1821) hit New York and New England. The storm surge of 13 feet inundated not only the wharves, but also lower Manhattan.
 
Manhattan also had severe storms in 1667, 1693 (The Great Storm of 1693), 1785, and 1788. This last storm pretty much destroyed the Battery with its severe flooding. Then there was the October 9, 1804 “snow hurricane,” an extratropical Nor’easter that dumped close to three feet of snow on eastern New York. Want more? September 24, 1815 and September 24 the same year. The next year another, and the year after that heavy rainfall from a tropical storm. And on and on through that century: 1825, 1827, 1830, 1941, 1846, 1849, 1850: This last one a doozy, and that Great Havana Hurricane of 1846 mentioned above caused damage to NYC.
 
Not a single question from a reporter on the scene. And why? Fear of contradicting? Ignorance of history? Worry over ramifications of calling into question the statement by the powerful governor?
 
Go ahead. You have my permission. Change history as you wish. Revise, rewrite, and remake history as you see fit. Make up whatever you want. No one will probably question you, at least, no reporters will question you—unless you happen to be opposed to the dogma of the day.
 
W?
 
*Davis, William. Andrew Cuomo: ‘We Didn’t Have Hurricanes’ Before Climate Change. The Daily Caller. Politics. https://dailycaller.com/2019/11/01/andrew-cuomo-hurricanes-climate-change/   Accessed November 3, 2019.

“I’m not sure whether or not you’ve been paying attention to the news nowadays, but there seems to be great political turmoil, mostly carried out on social media and broadcast media, but also carried out sometimes by violence against others.”
 
“Yeah, I noticed.”
 
“Have you also noticed that there seems to be no end to the turmoil?”
 
“Yeah, I noticed.”
 
“Would you like to know why?”
 
“Yeah, I would.”
 
“It’s a matter of infinite regress. Take any side of a politically hot debate and try to trace the arguments of that side to their roots. And what do you find?”

“What?”
 
“There are no definitive roots. Say you want to argue, for example, that the economic sluggishness of the Obama presidency was simply a continuation of the downturn at the end of the Bush II presidency. The counter would be that the roots of that downturn started during the final years of the Clinton administration. But that would then lead to the argument that Bush I was involved somehow, and before him, the Reagan group. But Reagan was straddled with whatever economic condition he inherited from Carter who had inherited from Ford who was locked into Nixon who had dealt with Johnson and the war economy that derived from decisions that Kennedy had made after Eisenhower let things get out of hand when he inherited a world in shambles from the end of the Truman-Roosevelt era, and they, in turn, had to deal with a Hoover-age depression. See what I mean?”

“Maybe, keep talkin’.”
 
“Look, we have this need to find a cause that supports our position. And the cause of that need? I can’t name an ultimate cause, but I can postulate that it’s a leftover cultural thing, a way of thinking that we might have acquired through centuries of inculcation. It could derive from the historical influence of Aquinas and Leibniz who argued for contingencies, namely, one specific  Cause-of-It-All. For both of those philosophers, the ultimate cause of the universe was God, the First Cause. In tracing the existence of the universe to God, both guys laid the groundwork for arguing that the current world depends on something that existed before, something that is not part of what now exists, something that was itself not contingent on anything else, that is, God. We seem to apply that mode of argument to our debates. We certainly don’t want to stop on some political figure whom we might favor. If I’m a Democrat, I’d argue that the root of any political problem harks back to the last Republican president; if I’m a Republican, I’d argue that the root of any political problem harks back to the last Democrat president. Yes, I realize that this can’t be an infinite regress because Americans have had fewer that fifty presidents. But, truthfully, if you try to use the arguments as they become regressions, you will go back to Andrew Jackson, to J.Q. Adams, Monroe, Madison, Jefferson, Adams, and, Washington. For argument’s sake, every administration’s failures seem to be contingent on all previous administrations’ failures.
 
“The result is that no one is ever going to win one of these political arguments because everyone can point to a contingency. Everyone can use, if not an infinite regress, an indefinite regress. The turmoil will continue because no opponent will want to stop at ‘his guy.’ No one will claim First Cause, but everyone will claim an earlier Cause.”
 
“Makes some sense.”
 
“Pay attention to the politics—without getting emotional—and look at every debate. The debaters will reach into history for contingencies. ‘Well, we wouldn’t be in this circumstance if your guy hadn’t done such-n-such.’ That’s the argument you hear pundits make. It won’t change during your lifetime, I’m sorry to say. Two decades from now the arguments will point to today; forty years from now the arguments will point to two decades from this moment, and so on, seemingly ad infinitum, an ad infinitum of regressions.
 
“But it makes sense to the debaters and pundits to do so. How can anyone lose such an argument? Since every era is complex and has multiple contingencies of its own, debaters will always find it easy to pick and choose the contingency that favors an argument, always easy to find blame in some set of past details. It will always be easy to build a tree of connections whose roots go back to George Washington, and before him, to the Continental Congress or King George III. We’re apparently doomed to an endless regression in political debates.”
 
“So, you’re sayin’ that if I trace all these arguments about who caused today’s problems, I’ll ultimately blame God?”
 
“Something like that.”

As NASA, SpaceX, and Blue Moon plan habitats for life outside the confines of Earth, the agency and companies toy with alternatives. One of those is an inflatable living space labeled B330 that is designed to provide some comfort and protection for the astronauts. That means a kitchen, beds in sleep stations and toilets to accommodate a half dozen travelers to—or future residents of—the moon or Mars. And included in the design of the B330 habitat, according to Robert Bigelow of Bigelow Aerospace, will be “entertainment in the form of virtual-reality Earth simulations for astronauts to feel at home when they are orbiting Mars."*
 
All right. We’re going to a distant world to experience a simulation of Earth. Go figure. And here I was thinking I’ll just go outside my house and look around.
 
*Roulette, Joey. NASA eyeing inflatable space lodges for moon, Mars and beyond. Reuters. 17 Oct 2019.    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-space-exploration-habitat/nasa-eyeing-inflatable-space-lodges-for-moon-mars-and-beyond-idUSKBN1WW1H2   Accessed November 1, 2019.

The elephant in the room is human interference with Nature. First, we screw up some ecology or landscape, and second, we botch our attempt to “fix” it. Apparently, it’s built into our nature to change Nature. Strange, though, that in all those attempts to live harmoniously without overly exploiting some place, we compose and impose a new dissonance.
 
And now we know that the elephant in the room is also an elephant. In an attempt to enhance elephant populations and restore the natural setting of Malawi, the government moved hundreds of elephants into their wildlife preserve. Unfortunately, the unintended consequence followed: Tsetse flies and sleeping sickness.*
 
Wait! I was wrong. The elephant in the room is a forest. Although California has been the site of forest fires for as long as there have been forests, the presence of human habitation makes fires more newsworthy today than, say, 10,000 years ago. Maybe I should rephrase my “elephant in the room” here. The elephant is really the state of California’s effort to maintain a natural setting for more than 30 million people, many of them very, very rich and famous, rich enough to live in exclusive communes of multi-million-dollar homes. So, as the fires rage and tragically threaten communities, we see, in October, 2019, the governor of the state cast blame on the power company for not updating its power transmission system—even though the government refused to grant money for updating that the power company asked for years ago. But, it’s a complicated issue, right? Shouldn’t the power company simply charge its customers more for the power they desire? Yes, but who did the complicating? Californians seem to want electricity, even the more expensive “green” electricity, but all such power has to travel through wires and across landscapes with trees. The state decided that logging was evil or unnecessary or just plain harmful to Nature because a powerful cadre of environmentalists convinced the politicians to limit logging. The result, of course, was more forest to burn in fires started on purpose, by accident, by old wires felled by falling branches or trees,** or by Nature’s natural sparking mechanism, lightning.
 
The elephant in the room is definitely human interference. We cause a problem, and then, in solving that problem, we create another problem. The process occurs because we cannot, with a large population demanding all modern conveniences in every landscape and ecology, live harmoniously with Nature. Sustainability is largely a myth. The duet we want to sing with Nature is dissonant.
 
And the elephant in the room is scapegoating. During every fire season, when the seasonal Santa Ana winds flow down mountain slopes to fan fires in California, someone from the self-proclaimed elite class inevitably cries “climate change,” seemingly unaware of the natural cycle of high- and low-pressure systems that control weather in the American West. So, the rains will fall during the California winter, causing floods, and the droughts will persist in the California summer, causing conditions for fires. No amount of human “correcting” will change that natural cycle.
 
Tsetse flies will follow the elephants into Malawi. And around Lake Malawi, other flies will proliferate because the people there overfish the cichlid population, the fish that feed on those lake flies whose swarms look like dark clouds.*** Everything we do to sustain ourselves has a consequence. We exacerbate consequences when we selectively choose a part of Nature we want to use or save. Save the forests in California? Expect the fires. Save the elephants in Malawi? Expect the tsetse flies. Overfish to feed a population? Expect a negative consequence. Build a multi-million-dollar home in a wooded area with uncleared aging biomass and supply that home with electricity? Expect destruction.

For Malawi, apparently, the elephant in the room is actually an elephant.  
 
*Jali, Kenneth. Malawi fights tsetse flies, disease after wildlife relocated. Phys.org. 30 Oct 2019.
https://phys.org/news/2019-10-malawi-tsetse-flies-disease-wildlife.html   Accessed October 30, 2019.
 
**Or, as a Getty, California, official said in a press conference shown on Fox news: By “an act of God.” Apparently, for the devastating fire started when a tree branch fell onto a wire.
 
***YouTube has a video of the flies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qs33k1b6N_A
 Accessed October 30, 2019. The problem of overfishing cichlids in Lake Malawi is reported in
Masina, Lameck. Malawi Works to Contain Overfishing on Lake Malawi. Online at https://www.voanews.com/africa/malawi-works-contain-overfishing-lake-malawi  Accessed October 30, 2019. The film does not make the connection between overfishing and the proliferating fly population, but that connection does, in fact, exist. Cichlids feed on flies. 

Okay, I’m not asking everyone to be a scientist, but something in the news makes me think of a line from a Seinfeld episode. I’m probably paraphrasing here, but the essence is this. When a woman tells Jerry that she uses email, he says, “What are you, some kind of scientist?”
 
That I would think of this today, October 29, 2019, on the fiftieth birthday of the Internet, is a happy coincidence. I’m sure that like Jerry, there was a time when I knew little about email. I do, after all, remember when my university department acquired its first tabletop computer, a Commodore 64 and how I thought, in connecting it to a weather station, that it was remarkable for its speed. Ah! Those giddy days of high-speed computing and interconnectivity. We thought we had become the epitome of expansiveness. We knew how the Wright brothers felt.
 
But back to that something in the news that reminded me of the Seinfeld scene. StudyFinds (online*) reports that in a survey of 3,000 British adults, 17% of them think “Earth” is the name of our galaxy, about 20% think the Sun is a planet, and 10% think the Solar System has 12 planets. No doubt, for the surveyed Brits, someone who knows that the galaxy is called the Milky Way and that the Sun is a star is probably some kind of scientist.
 
Apparently, for many the extent of place is a difficult concept, and that means, also, the extent of space. It’s as though some, if not all, people live in a small parish. I’ll give you an example. Say, you argue that there is a difference between matriculating at a large university and at a small college, that the larger institution provides greater access to a model of the world as a whole. True, there are more people in the large university, but what is the size of the circle of friends and acquaintances for any student? Does that circle extend much beyond the chance meetings of people outside the discipline of choice, outside the dorm floor or the dorm itself, outside a team or Greek environment? I’m guessing 300 friends and acquaintances at most for students of both large and small institutions. But my guess is, according to some studies, wrong. That circle is closer to 150. At least, that seems to be the estimate according to the Social Brain Hypothesis (formerly the Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis). Robin Dunbar tied brain size to social unit size and found that 150 is the number for a circle of casual friends, though it could extend to 250 for the most social among us. Fifty of those in the circle of 150 would be “close friends.” Fifteen is the number of people one relies on for sympathy in times of need or for confidentiality. Five is the size of the immediate support group.**
 
“Come on, now. We have email; we have social media. We’re interconnected. Why, I have friends I don’t even know,” you say.  
 
No, bottom line: We ain’t as cosmopolitan as we think we are just because we have social media and email. Living in a large group, be it university or city, doesn’t for anyone extend that group to the 300 I might have postulated. Dunbar even suggests that those modern connections might make us less social in the long run, a thought you probably have every time you witness two teens walking side-by-side but texting others rather than talking to each other.   
 
Let me, in a violation of good writing practice, repeat, lest you think I’ve run into a different subject. I’m not asking everyone to be a scientist. Instead, I am pointing out the cosmopolitanism of parochialism. Yes, everywhere we look, from the largest cities to the isolated farmlands, we can find some form of parochialism. “But, you say, “surely, you’re not including me, an urbanized educated city- or suburb-dweller in that category?”
 
“Yes, in a way, I am. But don’t consider it an insult. Consider, instead, that those Brits who don’t understand Earth’s place in the Solar System or the Solar System’s place in the galaxy, or, much less, the Milky Way’s place in the universe, aren’t dumb. They are just limited both by how much they can know and by how much they need to know because it is relevant to their personal lives.
 
Looks as though all of us live in a local church parish, attend parochial school, and have concepts limited by a brain of finite size and computing power. We all have those I-know-that-face-but-can’t-remember-the-name moments. We all have misconceptions about the nature of Nature, and none of us, no matter how sophisticated we deem ourselves, can conceptualize a universe that might be infinite and that has probably more than the two trillion galaxies of recent estimates. Little Earth is, in fact and for all practical purposes, the whole universe. And more than that, even our local “parish” society is a Milky Way that we cannot fully know.
 
And now, it’s Judgment Time: The next time you see anyone on TV cast aspersions on someone or some group because he, she, or they are “unsophisticated,” think of that little parish of like-minded people with whom anyone typically associates. Everyone lives in a rather small universe; everyone’s “planet” is a whole galaxy to him or her. Those who claim cosmopolitanism are probably among the most parochial among us. And it doesn’t take a scientist to understand that.
 
*Renner, Ben. Spced Out: 1 in 6 Adults Believes The Entire Galaxy Is Called ‘Earth.’ ahttps://www.studyfinds.org/spaced-out-1-in-6-adults-believes-entire-galaxy-called-earth/
Renner reports that the survey was sponsored by Google Pixel 4. Accessed October 29, 2019.  
 
**Konnikova, Maria. The Limits of Friendship. The New Yorker. 7 Oct 2014. Online at https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/social-media-affect-math-dunbar-number-friendships   Accessed October 29, 2019. I recommend the article and  
a YouTube video on the Dunbar number: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2qjRG6iV8M