Aubrey Lieberman Selected Poems and Essays

  Praying for time Often unintentionally  we invent or assume causal explanations  as components of our mental maps or models of the world meaning our worlds  and will often  continue to rely on them despite contradictory evidence Memes in this category are propagated far more rapidly than genetic information is by genes with a much higher  mutational propensity  and more likely for better or worse to be disseminated asexually in a relatively unconstrained manner Checks and balances of remarkable complexity  have evolved in biology  to enable survival and procreation  and play a similar role in civilizations  where they are far more mundane In the twenty first century  of the common era literacy and education  and access to information  are widespread and so is belief in mythology  Very few of us are physicists mathematicians molecular biologists  astronomers  cosmologists geologists evolutionary biolog...

  The simplicity of rockets Imagine a vehicle that could launch people  on a journey to the moon or to Mars standing tall and pointing at the stars a device constructed by thousands of people and thousands of machines Imagine a tree standing tall in a valley  carved by water cascading from the mountains from glaciers and melting snow gathering energy from the sun thousands of leaves gathering carbon and returning water and oxygen  to the air that so many creatures breathe  Imagine the thousands of rockets thousands of years from now long abandoned except as a relics of forgotten civilizations gradually decaying  in their silos or on their  crumbling launching pads Imagine a thousand million trees the ancestors of which populated that valley  where the river flowed now the basis of a remarkably complex ecosystem  supporting a cornucopia of life above and below the soil trees evolving from a process which began more than three billion years ago...