Table of contents:

Hello world! —

“Tripping over the Truth” allegory — Ethical questions of tactics on a certain messy, smelly, but quite natural and widespread problem.

What is Eclectic Spacewalk? — A broad and diverse range of Earth philosophies viewed from outer space

But How? — Change the world by updating humanity’s value system(s).

Why? — Issues such as Artificial Intelligence, Genetic Engineering, Climate Change, and other existential threats to Earth go beyond any one political, economic, or social system.

Two book excerpts from a “subscriber’s only” post - Down to Earth by Bruno Latour and Team Human by Douglass Rushkoff

10 audio podcasts of direct influence

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“Tripping over the Truth” allegory

Before we begin on our Eclectic Spacewalk journey, I would like to share an allegory about “Tripping over the Truth.”-- a blatant literary device to draw in readers. Let us commence with the curiosity!

In 2000, the Indian-born agriculturalist Kamal Kar pioneered a behavior change strategy called Community Led Total Sanitation(CLTS), that was being used for the first time in Bangladesh. The new approach was to combat the sanitation issue of open human defecation. The focus was using shame and disgust as the driving forces for improvement, but the approach was questioned by critics, rightfully or not. (As the people being “shamed” were usually without resources and poor.) Amanda Glassman, Director of Global Health Policy at the Center for Global Development, says the research shows "that lives are saved, that disease is prevented, that kids are healthier and live through childhood. That we know for sure, and then the question is, are the tactics worth it." Glassman says there are definite ethical questions, but "it's unethical to let children die too."

“The "walk of shame" — a tour through a neighborhood guided by a Community Led Total Sanitation facilitator — draws on the powerful force of social pressure in tight-knit communities. Other CLTS methods include visceral demonstrations of bacterial contamination. One strategy is to show how flies in contact with open feces invisibly contaminate drinking water by touching a piece of human hair — representing a fly's leg — to a pile of stool, dunking the hair in a cup of water and asking someone to drink from the clean-looking but obviously contaminated water.”

This is such a great story for numerous reasons, but the big takeaway is that biases are sometimes so ingrained in the human psyche that the person literally does not know what they are doing or why they are doing it.

The villagers “tripped over the truth,” and the fact that flies were contaminating their food after coming into contact with their and others’ feces. Yikes! That must have been a heavy moment for all involved, but arguably needed to be done for a better community of humans. Or did it? Think on that as we continue.

I want to take the above story, change it a bit, and use it as a catalyst for humanity’s future moral growth through changing its value systems. I want to help people, and humanity as a whole, trip over their own truths by using awe, education, and connection to their fellow humans as the driving forces. And notice the “water.” That is exactly what I want Eclectic Spacewalk to be for each of you!

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“Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems.” ― Epictetus

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Tripping over the Truth with Eclectic Spacewalk

Whether you are a generalist, or a specialist, or one who likes to put on both caps - as I do - there is something for everyone to learn. We live in the greatest time in the history of humanity; let’s start acting like it!

Eclectic Spacewalk = A broad and diverse range of Earth philosophies viewed from outer space

Asking poignant questions, following the brightest minds in every field, compiling the information from a totality mindset (to better help all decision-making processes and those that make them), and continually learning from the causal connections of mind/the environment and their understanding of each other - has become my WHY.

The bottom line is that we have to work together in our collective humanity to make this experience better for anyone and everyone. Yes, even those not here right now. I am trying to do this through my curiosity about how the world works. Eclectic as an adjective means “deriving ideas, style, or taste from a broad and diverse range of sources,” and when you add Spacewalk, then you have a Point of View deriving from at least Near Earth Orbit looking down - or even better from the Moon - looking at Earth.

But, I like the philosophical definition most! It is a perfect distillation of my goal as a human being: “denoting or belonging to a class of ancient philosophers who did not belong to or found any recognized school of thought but selected doctrines from various schools of thought.” I am constantly learning and updating my way of thinking, as Eclectic Spacewalk is the mechanism from which I draw everything together. I hope you join in with your own way of Eclectic Spacewalking!

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But how?

How should Earthly society be organized to increase happiness and fulfillment, and to continue the betterment of the lives of all humans AND other life on Earth?

Change the world by updating humanity’s value system(s). Through an ever-increasing adherence to objectively getting at the truth (cause-and-effect answers to why anything does anything), we can begin to see our value system(s)’ scaffolding structure(s) developing. At the very least they need to be based on our present reality. The late, great physicist Richard Feynman said, “by seeing anew or from a different point of view - such as a Martian” you can see that things are related and where your and humanity’s thought modality biases are. Earth has to update its narrative to one that is concurrent with our present place as a space-faring civilization during the Anthropocene epoch, along with the consilience of ALL knowledge that we have amassed since the beginning of history. That information includes - where our literal location in the cosmos is to the progression of technology toward more productive capacities and everywhere in between.

The “overview effect” is a psychological phenomenon that astronauts have mentioned as almost a transcendence, seeing the Earth from the International Space Station orbital height, or even when we reached the moon and looked back at our blue marble. Almost all, if not moved by the sheer grandeur of our ball of rock, recognize the preciousness of our oasis in the death grip of space, that no human borders exist - only geographic, and finally the compelling need to help EVERY Earthling. Race, gender, class, background, life form go right out the window when the sheer awe of our situation becomes apparent. This should be our starting point for any discussion on any subject moving forward. How does this affect Earth and the Earthlings (yes, not just humans) on it?

Humanity, through our uncanny evolution in thinking, has devised technology that places us in the cosmos of space & time. Through the Hubble Ultra Deep Field photo we see that one small patch of darkness has actually ~10,000 galaxies that are visible only with sensitive instruments. We must also remember the fact that the light we see is actually millions of years old.

We time travel through the universes’ past, and can deduce some, hopefully, viable options on how it will act in the future. Living in the Future’s past. With our species proclivity to be innovative, we have also looked deeper and deeper INTO the universe to show the inner workings of the architecture of our environment. The below is an absolute astonishing photo of a single atom. The scale between Hubble’s photo and the atom photo is almost incomprehensible…Almost…

Alas, if two images sum up the goal of what Eclectic Spacewalk is trying to convey, it would be these (side by side) after the recent release of the first-ever photo of a black hole.

“One day after #EventHorizon announced their picture of a #BlackHole, we finally managed to image a #protein ring using #AFM yesterday - there is a factor of ten sextillion (10^22) between the scalebars of those two images.” - @StefanALWeber

That’s a factor of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

We know the following about our reality:

· An unknown beginning (before 380,000 years at least)

· A solar system formed from a dead star’s gas clouds with the addition of heavier elements

· A planet that formed in the habitable zone with a satellite (Moon) that stabilizes its wobble and thus establishes a climate

· Life that still had not replicated Nature’s single cell becoming multi-cell experiment until now

· A creature that was a little smaller than a shrew when the dinosaurs were around

· Could barely put speech together tens of thousands of years ago

· Has had civilization for only thousands of years

· Just recently put all this knowledge together within the last 100 years (50 really, since “space race” days)

· Our entire viewpoint of reality is through our “human senses” that are hardly objective.

· Literally no one has any idea of what to do with Humanity’s pooled knowledge.

· Not one person, one group, one geographic region, one religion, no one has the answers, and I would philosophically argue we can never really know “the truth.”

We are incredibly curious and resourceful creatures, but we forget the belittled notion that we are still “animals.” We fail to recognize our animalistic nature because we are conscious and have unveiled so many of nature’s hidden intricacies. But at what cost? To ourselves? Our Future? The above photos don’t really matter if the photo below is still something that can happen in modernity. How conscious can we be if this is the reality for some and not others? The world has more than enough for all, but not enough for the sum total of individuals’ greed.

We choose to not act because somehow the incentives to help are less than at least the status quo. Or worse, they are less than the incentives for hurting people. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but that is reality. I am no saint, and am absolutely part of the problem along with all of Humanity as a whole. Help me try to make a positive difference!

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Why is this the most pressing issue and how do we confront it?

Issues such as Artificial Intelligence, Genetic Engineering, Climate Change, and other existential threats to Earth go beyond any one political, economic, or social system. We have reached an age where things, objects, systems have leapfrogged our understanding of how to effectively deal with the problems that arise from them. Marshall McLuhan said: “World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.”

Some might say this is doom-and-gloom talk, but it again is our present reality. (Individuals losing some freedom/power along with gaining some freedom/power, the same is true for the community as a whole. This is nothing new, and I doubt will change anytime soon). The good part is that it is absolutely possible to change! Furthermore, we should change for the betterment of all life on Earth. If we effectively made the problem, then we can effectively solve it. One of my idols growing up, Robin Williams said: “No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world.”

With issues progressing at a more exponential rate - especially the freedom of individuals using ubiquitous technology - the morals/values/ethics we put into the solutions and embed into the technology are ever more important. We also know that inertia is a bitch. Once something is set, it is increasingly more difficult and requires more work to change it than the status quo to continue. Initial conditions matter a great deal. They could be the only thing that really matters.

As the late great Buckminster Fuller said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

This is my way of making new models. By getting info out there to people to build the better world of tomorrow.

We are currently operating using a zero-sum game theory toward societies, we MUST switch to operating from a non-zero sum game point of view or we will become a vaguely interesting “lost potential” doorstop in the annals of the cosmos. Join me in becoming an Eclectic Spacewalker to help make sure that doesn’t happen!

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10 audio podcasts of direct influence--