Rumi Nations

Commemorating the lunar landing from 46 years ago, here are some wonderful photographs published on The Atlantic website. Some goods ones are there that I hadn't come across before. Really. Go check them. Let me paste just one here. Those tiny workers are perched some 110 meters or 360 feet above the ground. And more photos of Apollo 11 are here .

Today I saw the list of all the stuff left behind on the Moon by humanity! It's quite an impressive smorgasbord of stuff for sure! And you know what? I want humans to pollute the 'heavens' more! After all, there are billions of planets out there for humans to populate.

Think of the spectacular imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope. I continue to marvel at all the wonders of the universe this single scientific instrument has revealed. And I think of the tiny number of humans who work at the Space Telescope Science Institute who’re responsible for this. A few hundreds of men and women whose work reveals to all seven billion of us humans on this planet the true splendors of the universe far surpassing anything contained in any mythological tales. The world owes a great deal to the Hubble Space Telescope … for opening our eyes, for expanding our horizons, for showing and proving again and again that the zaniest predictions of theoretical astrophysics are commonplace occurrences out there in the cosmos. And Hubble has also revealed phenomena that have left the theorists stunned before they started to contemplate about it and could barely believe that such stuff was really happening.

Prof. Henry Markram of the Brain Science Institute in Switzerland says that it's possible to replicate the functions of the human brain on a supercomputer in the next ten year. This has many interesting possibilities. For neuroscientistss grappling with the mysteries of the human brain and the many diseases that afflict the brain, the modelling of the brain might offer insights into its workings that in turn will help to develop treatments. On a more subtle level, understanding the neuronal mechanisms might offer some clues to understanding complex human emotions and "higer order" skills that only humans have. Might we someday understand the physiological basis of such uniquely human attributes such as fear, anger, love, envy, anxiety, hatred and many others? And how does one allocate scare financial resources to such a project with uncertain benefits? We live in times when communities and nations have to choose between conflicting priorities: some priorities seem obvious...