The world is an orange, not metaphorically speaking, I mean planet earth and the popular orange citrus fruit are quite literally the same thing, and in this post truth world, you simply have to accept that.
Whilst that glib, dripping in sarcasm statement might seem overly emotional and deliberately obtuse, it's not, because this is the world we live in today.
It is a world whereby each and every theory is given equal credence regardless of who said it or how it came about. In a world striving for human equality it seems that the fight to have an opinion heard and respected, has been put on the same step of the equality ladder as race and gender.
Most reasonable people believe that a person shouldn't be discriminated against because of their race, religion or sex, now it seems we are to put opinions into that sentence. Or to put it more (in fact less) accurately, every theory is valid and deserves to be heard.
This is clearly madness, yet where does this madness end? Why should you care that there are millions of people who believe the earth is flat? Should you lose any sleep over a parent saying that they'd rather risk blindness or death, rather than expose their child to a completely disproved link between autism and vaccines?
I mean, why should you care if Tom doesn't believe the moon landings were real? It's no skin off your nose, let him go on believing that, and if Ann wants to believe that homeopathy can cure her cancer, or that President
The Donald believes wind causes cancer, so what?
Well perhaps you should care because if Tom, Ann and Donald's thinking spreads to more than 50% of the population, then the human race as we know it, is doomed.
Consensus Explained
Imagine you have an opinion that humans descended from aliens that visited the planet one hundred thousand years ago.
In the days before the internet, your opinion would have been treated as just that, an opinion. However in the post truth era your opinion is now thought of as a theory, and it can be spread via Youtube, Facebook and many, many more websites.
Regardless of this fact, you decide that you actually want to be scientific about it, so you articulate your theory in a way that can be studied.
First you make predictions about DNA, fossils and many more connected features and events. Then one day a genetic scientist discovers an RNA sequence in our DNA that is not present in any other organism on the planet.
Your opinion, or as scientist say hypothesis, just got a little more valid.
A few years later an archaeologist discovers a metal alloy buried at the level of the middle paleolithic era.
Later still a scientist gets hold of the metal alloy and studies it, he realises that there are trace organic elements and he manages to somehow date it to 100,000 years ago.
In this rather simple thought experiment, we can see how your opinion can start to turn into a bonafide theory, because you made an assumption, and then some predictions and other scientists working on their own projects made observations which verified your theory.
So if you made fifty predictions based on your we all descended from aliens theory, and out of those fifty predictions forty five of them came true, at that point you may hear a scientist saying we know we descended from aliens.
This is the essence of scientific consensus, an assumption is made, then a model is derived from that assumption, and predictions are made from the model. If others are able to use that model to make accurate predictions about the state of reality, and the original predictions are observed, then that assumption becomes a fully fledged theory, in other words, a working model of reality.
A real world example of this can be seen in circa 1915 when Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves, which came about from his theory of General Relativity. Around one hundred years later, we finally obtained powerful enough computers, and equipment sensitive enough to detect those gravitational waves, and thus relativity was proved that bit more.
Killing Stupid
The Italian physicist Enrico Fermi postulated an idea, which later became known as Fermi's Paradox and it goes a little something like this:
There are between 200-400 billion stars in the Milky Way alone. Out of these stars there are many tens of millions that are like our own, yet older.
Out of those tens of millions of stars, at least hundreds of thousands of them will have orbiting planets very similar to the ones found in our solar system, including the earth itself.
Yet we see absolutely no evidence of life, no space ships, no distant space wars and crucially no radio or non-naturally occurring signals.
Nothing.
Nada.
Nathan.
Zip.
Many have tried to answer Fermi's Paradox, from Carl Sagan to Neal DeGrasse Tyson, however now I would like to add my own humble voice to the debate.
The reason we don't see any aliens, is because even though, just as we suspect they discover the electromagnetic spectrum and how to manipulate its properties. They then come up with their own version of the internet, and just like us become siloed into small pockets of ignorance.
Once this happens, conditions are ripe for a post truth environment whereby science and scientific discovery are viewed with distrust and even disdain.
Before long any and every opinion is as valid as another, scientific progress and therefore space exploration comes to a grinding halt and the species eats itself from within.
So that's it, our post truth fate. Flat earthers are the poster boys and girls for post truth thinking, and many find them amusing. However these people have children, and they are teaching their children to mistrust their teachers and what they're being told.
They are not substituting what their kids are being taught with alternative theories that can properly explain the world around them, rather they are filling their heads with complete and utter nonsense.
What is worse is the nonsense these kids are ingesting, is stopping them from engaging in reasoned thought, which increases the chances that they too will spread their ill-informed opinions whilst espousing them to be theories that they don't want you to know about.
This was illustrated beautifully in the Behind The Curve documentary, whereby a speaker read out a letter from a parent.
The parent proudly declared that when her eighth grade (about 12-13 years old) son was in his class and the teacher told them that the earth is a spinning globe that orbits the sun once every 365.25 days. A third, yes you read that right, A THIRD!!! of the class jumped up and shouted NO IT'S NOT!!
Solution Resolution
So how do we save ourselves from this post truth nightmare? Is there anything we can do to save ourselves from regressing to a pre-technology era?
Reason and logic are all we have, if you don't know how to argue using these two tools, then I strongly urge you to learn.
Maybe it's too late, perhaps the idiots have already taken over the asylum and we're all doomed.
The irony doesn't escape me that when religion tried to keep everyone stupid via their barbaric crusades, burning books was considered the most efficient way to stop knowledge spreading, yet now we have the internet to do that for us.
Perhaps one of the greatest tools mankind has ever seen, the font of all human knowledge available to all at the click of a button, will in fact be our downfall.
T.S. Elliot warned us that the world would end with a whimper and not a bang. For a while the modern threat of global thermonuclear war suggested that perhaps he was wrong. However now it is clearer to us that the whimper of stupid could easily end us all.
Post Truthisms from Donald J. Trump 45th President of the United States of America
Carbon dioxide is the building block of life.
Wind turbine noise causes cancer.
I know science.