Who’s Afraid of the Dark?

Or, What the Dark Universe Reveals About Us

We’ve come a long way in understanding our world, often by letting go of our own sense of importance. Humanity is not separate from nature. The Earth is not at the center of the universe. The universe is not fixed, but rapidly expanding. Now we’re faced with a similar challenge: atoms make up only 4.6% of the universe, and they’re shaped by forces we can’t see or feel. Dark matter and dark energy are what we call the rest, whose pushing and pulling are thought to give structure to the entire cosmos.

The problem is, as the labels suggest, we don’t know much about them yet. Dark matter might be made of a different type of particle, or possibly black holes. Dark energy might be a property of space itself, or a sort of energetic fluid, or the reason time moves forward. Dark energy might even be eating dark matter. But just as the precise nature of these forces could determine the ultimate fate of the universe, our attitudes towards the unknown point to a deep psychological difference that could determine whether humans endure long enough to solve the mystery.

Finding Our Limits

We’ve evolved to make sense of the world in a very specific way: we see only a tiny fraction of wavelengths as visible light; we live and die too quickly to perceive many changes in our environment; and we mistakenly imagine that our conscious minds control our decisions. Most of what happens in the universe, on our planet, and even in our own heads, lies beyond our direct experience.

Faced with evidence of these limitations, we often respond with fear and distraction, allowing us to temporarily escape the burden of truth. But some of us, some of the time, have managed to sustain our attention long enough to ask big questions. How old is the universe, and what is its fate? How did life begin, and is it unique to this planet? And who are we exactly, that we can entertain such thoughts?

In the past, those who asked questions like these were marginalized or attacked for disrupting an established order. It’s tempting to think we’ve moved beyond that, but have we? Each new scientific discovery or insight seems accompanied by voices of mistrust, and each time the LHC fires up we hear warnings of doom. So the question I’d like to explore here is perhaps the most fundamental: how can we transform fear into curiosity?

Crossing Over

I’ve long been interested in crossing intellectual boundaries. While in college I took a class about eschatology, literally “the study of the end of things”. It was led by two professors, a philosopher and a physicist.

Through philosophy we examined millenarian movements throughout history, identifying common themes across different groups who believed that the end of the world was near, and how they reacted when the world didn’t end as expected. Together we found that disenfranchised people are easily radicalized and maintain their beliefs even in the face of overwhelming evidence against them. This is seen in small groups like the Branch Davidians and Aum Shinrikyo as well as in the apocalyptic visions of major religions and environmental alarmists, and it is rooted in a profound sense of injustice.

We need not look far to find the sort of injustice that leads to radicalization. The legacy of exploitation from colonialism and imperialism lurks beneath the surface of today’s urgent issues, from immigration to climate change. The culture of individualism in America can prevent us from recognizing the systemic nature of these problems, and blind us to opportunities to address them before they explode into view.

In the physics sessions, we considered the fact that in about 5 billion years our sun will expand and either engulf or scorch the Earth. If life as we know it is to continue, it must leave this planet well before then. Given that the universe is only about 13.8 billion years old and might last another 100 trillion years, we have the opportunity — and perhaps the responsibility — to cultivate life in the cosmos.

While it’s statistically likely that microbial life is common in the universe, it’s unclear how often multi-cellular organisms arise in evolution. We now know that our own planet harbored single-celled life for billions of years before complex life emerged, and as sentient beings we may be premature cosmically-speaking. Our newfound knowledge of genetics along with the impending deadline on our home planet suggests that we might play an active role in the development of intelligent life elsewhere.

The cognitive dissonance created by this dual approach shattered my worldview and thrilled me with its possibilities. It revealed to me the incredible fallibility and resilience of human belief systems and the fragile but awesome potential of life in the universe. I’ve spent much of my time trying to understand and reconcile that duality. That we might paint with life upon the stars but could easily fail because of our differing beliefs seemed a grand tragedy, but not a sealed fate. If only we could overcome our fears of the future, we might find our way.

Into the Dark

Why do we fear the unknown? Perhaps it’s because we thirst for certainty. Driven by a desire for control of our lives, we think our certainty about the world will provide a predictable future for which we can plan. But control can be an illusion, and we are generally awful at predicting our future happiness. So why apprehension and not curiosity? The answer may lie in the nature of perception.

In The Believing Brain, Michael Shermer describes how our perceptions are filtered by our beliefs. We literally don’t see something that doesn’t correspond with our mindset. We have evolved to make quick judgments based on little information, and then look for evidence to support them.

Imagine you are a human ancestor looking into a dark cave. If you think there’s a monster in there and you’re wrong, no harm done. If instead you think there’s nothing to worry about and you’re wrong, you’re dead. We have no evolutionary feedback mechanism for regulating beliefs. And once we believe something, we will do almost anything — ignore evidence, silence dissent, even kill — to reinforce it, because a belief in how something works gives us the sense of control over it.

So if our perceptions are filtered by beliefs and our beliefs are often arbitrary, based on a desire for control, can we trust anything at all?

The Way Out

This is where science comes in. The scientific approach — testable hypotheses, experimental evidence, and open analysis — is the only tool we have to guard against personal bias, intellectual errors, and superstition. Science can teach us to trust, if not ourselves, then each other, and to re-evaluate our beliefs when they don’t fit the evidence.

To transform fear into curiosity, let us first recognize the limits of our perception without succumbing to fatalism, then work together to integrate our perceptions into a coherent but flexible explanation of the world, and use that understanding to achieve environmental and social justice — thus reducing the number of disenfranchised people who seek certainty and control. This is precisely what science can deliver.

But science itself has a trust problem. From unrepeatable results to publishing scandals, we seem to be bombarded by stories of scientific disagreement and misconduct. How can we learn to trust science?

I’d like to suggest four ways:

1. Journalists and artists can help by creating and sharing stories about science that highlight the humanity and curiosity of the people driving it.
2. Officials and activists can help by using science-based policy to better allocate resources and direct investment, in order to end the physical insecurity of people across the world.
3. Institutional administrators can help by restructuring the incentives in academic and professional science to prioritize high quality research in the public domain over “breakthrough” papers in exclusive journals.
4. We all can help each other to embrace uncertainty, encourage risk, and learn from failure in the pursuit of knowledge: that is, by practicing scientific thinking ourselves.

I’ll explore these strategies further in the next article.

This is the second article in a series about science and storytelling. Read the first article here, and follow me on Medium or Twitter for more.