To the Pluto Jerk

A couple of weeks ago, when the New Horizons team was releasing some of the images of Pluto’s surface taken during the flyby, I was scrolling through the articles about it on the Facebook news part of facebook, and I see this comment:

In case it’s hard to read, it says: 

“oh.. I see lines… obviously aliens live there… we dont know what caused it.. so we shall just make sh** up….. thats what we do right.. just make sh** up for that which we dont understand??? Oh.. wait.. thats religion.”

Now, I’m not sure what this person is responding to. It might be that there were people who believe in alien life advocating for their cause earlier in the comment thread. I didn’t care to scroll up and see that. But I had a very visceral reaction to this comment. What I want to do now is sit down with this commenter and engage him in a thoughtful discussion about the nature of scientific discovery and purpose of religious beliefs and maybe casually mention that that’s not how you use ellipses. What I wanted to do at the time was smash all of his fingers and rip out his tongue so that he could no longer be a part of this conversation. 

Let me explain why. Let me say what I would have said to this commentator, given the opportunity and the space. 

We sent a probe four billion miles away to take pictures of an object that, prior to this mission, had been at best a pixelated blur. We, tiny little humans on a tiny little rock floating in vast emptiness of space, endeavored to send a tiny little machine to explore for us. The trip alone took nine years to complete- can you imagine the work hours that went into dreaming up this project, getting it funded, planning, designing, redesigning, building, engineering, and testing the project, all before launch? Do you have an idea of the amount of work it’ll take to process these images, all the data this probe is sending back to us? We are doing things generations before us wouldn’t have even been able to dream of. More than any other generation, we are able to delight and wonder and reap the benefits of scientific exploration. 

The New Horizons team did not do all that work so that you could use it to make a cheap jab at religion, dear Internet Commentator. We have not dared to dream about the distant reaches of our solar system so that jerks like you could jump up on a soapbox to tear humanity apart. Your punctuation-challenged words speak nothing of the good that has been achieved in this world. They only serve as an example of the useless rhetoric that has been bandied around for centuries that deepens divides between people. You are not saying anything new, you are not saying anything useful, and you articulate your ideas poorly. 

Here was a moment where we could all come together and marvel at the human experience. Think about it. Kids even a year from now in school who are learning about Pluto for the first time will experience it as that one dwarf planet with the heart on it, just like they’ll learn about Saturn as that one planet with rings around it or Jupiter as that one planet with the big spot on it. They’ll learn about its mountains and formations on its surface. They'll have a discussion about classification systems and make decisions for themselves as to whether it should be a planet or a dwarf planet. Third graders will be more educated about the universe they live in than you ever were when you went through school. That is the power of scientific discovery and the information-sharing that the internet provides. The next generation gets a leg up, starts out a step ahead on our species’ path to knowledge.

Image Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

And you chose to ruin that with partisan fighting. You chose to mock others for what they believe. Yes, it has to be acknowledged that religious belief has the ability to shut out logical explanations for belief, but so does every other belief system. As you rightly point out, the people who believe that aliens are the best explanation for the lines on the surface of a dwarf planet are more than likely incorrect and are using a thought process built on faulty logic to come to their conclusions. Religion does not have the market cornered on “making things up.”

Allow me to let you in on a little secret: scientists aren’t always logical when it comes to their belief systems either. Though science sets out at the beginning with the purpose of understanding the world through empirical facts and reason, you can make data say a lot of things and the conclusions drawn from data can be just as unreasonable as you would deem faith in God to be. Science can get explanations wrong in its endeavor to understand. Scientists can draw misguided conclusions, same as everyone else. Science only grants superhuman understanding in comic books.

Be careful in your selection of your deities, my friend, and in your moderation of your beliefs. Do not assume that you know better than somebody else because of your belief in empiricism and induction. It may well be that there are instances in life in which science fails us and we are left without the explanatory power we think we have built on our own. I would implore you to act with a modicum of humility and basic human empathy, rather than demonizing a substantial percentage of humanity. Your inability to find value in a particular human construct is not indicative of the lack of value in that construct. I would submit that it shows only that you aren't capable of imagining people complexly. 

You, good Internet Commentator, are part of the problem, not the solution. The solution lies in the our struggle reconcile the truth that we have known with the truths that we are coming to know and removing someone else's truth from the discussion because it clashes with your own is not the mark of free-thinking. It's prejudice and it's just as damaging as the "religion" you decry.

Or, in the parlance of modern electronic communication: Check your life and your choices, asshat.