Reclaiming the Beauty of the Spheres

Clever people are using computer programs to produce fake humans, say how great they are and push them for money. They are designed to be sexually suggestive or work on other human desires for self-gratification, including that of child abuse, because that is how money can be made. There can be beauty in a picture, partly through the implied care a person took to capture or produce it. Beauty is not skin deep, and seduction is not beauty – more so when it implies an acceptable path to corruption. It uses a shallow image of reality to fool us. We are being asked, by the tech industry, to become very shallow. We don’t have to comply.

As a child I grew up in a rural coastal region, where the town’s streetlights were switched off at 11 pm each night. Some nearby areas had no electrical power at all, and the nearest city was 100 miles away. At night, the Milky Way was just that, stretching across the sky, with the Magellanic Clouds clearly visible half the year and Scorpio, Orion and the Southern Cross part of normal life.

As street lighting improved, this faded a little, but remained bright and clear, and was unchanged from the hills and farms around. The creek had platypus and blackfish. There was 10 miles of empty sand beach on the coast to the southwest broken only by a clear water entrance, and the mountains of the promontory to the south backing the wide inlet and islands where mutton birds returned from a yearlong circumference of the Pacific.

This is the stunning reality that humans have lived in, in various forms in various parts of Earth, for 100,000 years. Watching the vastness of the universe domed above and a land and seascape fading toward a distant vague horizon must inevitably change the way we view the world and each other. The beauty of the spheres.

During my childhood, in the midst of this, I remember listening to a radio interview with a Dutch astronomer. The programme was discussing light pollution in Europe, and the inability of most people in Europe to see stars in the night sky. The astronomer stated that this did not matter, as astronomers like him could travel to Suriname in South America, where it was clear enough to use telescopes. What mattered was that people that matter could still see and document for everyone else. The shallowness of his mind struck me then – there was no understood value in others seeing, as the astronomer had actually lost the ability to see for himself. He had become so blind that he could see no meaning in the universe beyond documenting it.

The astronomer seemed a sad husk of a human. A sense of awe may once have driven him to study astronomy. Perhaps he had loved the patterns of mathematics, or was fascinated by the way light is refracted or carries memories of a distant past. As a child he must have dreamed of doing something great. By the time the radio reporter reached him, he had lost the most important thing he could hold as a human – a sense of wonder and of beauty, and a desire for others to experience the same.

Now, decades later, far more humans live shielded from the skies our ancestors wondered at. We watch screens where daft presenters express surprise that some ancient monument aligns with certain stars or the sunrise at the equinox, as if our ancestors were as ignorant and gormless as we have become. We have shrunk the universe. Given the opportunity to live within the music of the spheres from a spring pasture looking upon the vastness of the jewelled galaxy and beyond, we have shrunken our worlds to screens and forfeited our minds to the narration of others. Now we substitute human narrators for pathetic AI-generated figures that are supposed to resemble a human mind. As we accelerate the ability to fool and imprison ourselves, those who profit from the emptying of our minds strive to convince us that the shallower we can become, the more we progress. The more divorced we become from understanding our own place and limitations within the vastness of time and space, the more we fulfil some strange, empty ambition.

The Tower of Babel was written down in Genesis from ancient oral traditions, but it would be foolish to suggest it is simply a broken historical narrative of an otherwise forgotten time. Whether Nimrod lived or not, the story was written as much for us today. It tells of powerful fools who convinced themselves, yet again, that they had reached the stage of enlightenment and could finally break out from within the spheres, to control them. To do so, they must first empty themselves of humility, of understanding of the human brain within the vastness of the universe, and the ridiculousness of any organic or created being even reaching a place where God, by definition outside of time and space, could be comprehended.

Creating human substitutes with AI is technically clever and somehow deeply pathetic. More so when effort is made to convince us it is better than the real thing. Many will fall for it, as it is an easy path, and in the process degrade humanity itself. The rise of abuse of humans is not disconnected from the builders of the tower and the creed they sow. It does not require bad intent, just a willingness to empty out the human mind’s ability to converse with the natural world and replace it with a substitute cobbled together by an infinitely inferior creator.

We can climb the tower, but there is really no view from there – just an illusion pasted there by another. Or we can aim for far greater things, find again the vastness of the jewelled sky and the light that only shines in another’s eye. It remains incomprehensible, but an unfathomable privilege, to be truly human.

Dr David Bell is a clinical and public health physician with a PhD in population health and background in internal medicine, modelling and epidemiology of infectious disease. Previously, he was programme head for malaria and acute febrile disease at FIND in Geneva and coordinating malaria diagnostics strategy with the World Health Organisation. He is a Senior Scholar at the Brownstone Institute.