Chapter 2: Entering the Era of Space Travel for the General Public
Copernican turn in the brain
The following is an excerpt from the introduction to “Takashi Tachibana’s Last Lecture” (Bunshun Shinsho Publishers). What is Takashi Tachibana trying to say here? This book seems to have been written based on a lecture he gave to students at the University of Tokyo. It seems to be concerned with the question of whether each human being should be expressed in the Cartesian coordinate system or in the polar coordinate system when each person is expressed in terms of coordinate points.
For example, let P denote the position of the point (1,1) in the Cartesian coordinate system on a two-dimensional graph. In the polar coordinate system, it can be expressed as (\(\sqrt{2}\),\(\dfrac{\pi }{4}\)). In the Cartesian coordinate system, the x and y values of the point (1,1) are both 1. This one point is me or you. In other words, it is one person. Let me explain in detail. (Angles are shown in radian method)
Cartesian coordinate system, (1,1) = polar coordinate system, (\(\sqrt{2}\),\(\dfrac{\pi }{4}\))
In polar coordinates, (\(\sqrt{2}\),\(\dfrac{\pi }{4}\)) means that the length from the origin is (\(\sqrt{2}\)) and the angle with the x-axis is (\(\dfrac{\pi }{4}\)).
In a polar coordinate system, the point (1,1) is represented only by the objective element of the x-axis and its own element using the x-axis; the element of the y-axis is not used for the display element of the point. In the Cartesian coordinate system, the point (1,1) is represented by two objective elements, the x-axis and the y-axis.
Tachibana recommends expressing oneself in terms of the elements of the Cartesian coordinate system. I am saying that there are various advantages to having one person, me, composed of elements on the x- and y-axis. On the other hand, when you express yourself in a polar coordinate system, you express yourself in terms of the angle between your own value (distance from the origin) and the x-axis. The distance from the origin is considered to be one’s innate nature, and the “angle formed” between the x-axis and one’s own line represents one’s relationship with the x-axis. Tachibana says that it is better to substitute the Cartesian coordinate system for the polar coordinate system, which is a component of the innate self.
The following text has been excerpted and edited from the text.
There is one important thing I want to say first. That is to wipe out the celestial motion theory from your minds. Switch from polar coordinate-centered thinking to Cartesian coordinate-centered thinking.
Let me explain what that means. The first important fact that must be pointed out is that the innate coordinate system in your mind is in polar coordinates. You can think of polar coordinates as if you had cut a sphere in half and put the location number on a three-dimensional drawing. In short, it is a composition that places you at the center of the world and views the world from an egocentric point of view. This is not because your brains are particularly poorly made, but because the brains of all living creatures are made that way. The most important decision that all living things have to make when encountering others is “fight or flight. The brains of all living creatures, not just humans, use simple calculations in polar coordinate space to formulate answers and react quickly and reflexively. All instinctive behaviors of animals are such immediate reflexive behaviors, and there is no deliberative behavioral element at all.
From the perspective of human history, humans have been able to maximize short-term gains by mastering polar-spatial thinking, but have often failed in terms of gaining long-term gains. Then, humans realized the limitations of “animal instinctive immediate decision-making behavior” and changed their brain’s operating pattern to “think things over carefully before acting.” Since it was found that more long-term benefits could be gained by doing so, humans have given rise to new cultures by switching their brain’s operating patterns entirely to the latter by making full use of their acquired learning and memory abilities.
As a result, we have been able to build an advanced civilized world that overwhelms all lower life forms. This is a brief summary of human history. The central principle of the transformation was to free the human brain from its fixation on polar coordinate space and to induce it into a Cartesian coordinate system that would allow us to grasp the world more objectively.
The new coordinate system is Cartesian coordinates. Cartesian coordinates are coordinate planes constructed on the Cartesian coordinate axes of the x- and y-axes that we have been forced to learn since middle school. In the language of middle school mathematics, the idea of analytical geometry developed on the Cartesian plane is that “equations can be solved graphically.” That is the greatest gift Descartes gave to mankind. Almost every mathematical problem one encounters can be solved as a first- or second-order algebraic problem on the Cartesian plane. What is important here, however, is to understand the fact that Cartesian coordinates freed mankind from its instinctive polar thinking style, and what this means.
Through this, humankind was able to rebuild society on the new principle of calmly analyzing oneself and one’s natural environment, oneself and one’s social environment, and determining one’s actions based on an objective view of everything. The result is that mankind is now able to have a scientific and civilized society. Another advantage that Descartes’ analytical geometry gave was that it freed man from the “instant decision-making” principle that did not make him think like a reflective-action type of animal. He transformed man into a “deliberative behavior type” animal that thinks things through and analyzes them carefully. It is analytic geometry that always adds a term of analysis between the premise and the conclusion, and this is the key to the analytic geometry style of thinking.
This is fundamentally different from the animal instinctive thinking style (short-circuit thinking), in which the neural circuits of the reflexive bow connect the premise and the conclusion in a linear fashion. In the world of astronomy, the Geocentrism is the polar coordinate worldview itself. And the Heliocentrism is the Cartesian coordinate world.
In human history, both theory and observation have led to the abandonment of the Geocentrism. The new era of human history, modernity, began with the acceptance of the Heliocentrism. The brain will not modernize, or rather, mature, unless each individual in his or her own history also abandons the Geocentrism and converts to the Heliocentrism.
Entering the era of space travel by the general public
Soon civilians will be able to experience a stay in space. When we are able to experience a stay in space, we will be able to see the earth directly with the naked eye. In other words, the brain will be able to directly recognize that the earth is a sphere. What should we do in this modern age?
Although not well known in Japan, there are people in the world who preach the “world plane theory. Those who preach the flat-earth theory describe the earth only in terms of the information directly obtained from physical vision. The world as seen from the earth is shaped like a dome. The earth is an immovable circle, and the sun and stars revolve around the earth. They reject indirect scientific means as creating fakes. They believe only in the world they see directly with the naked eye.
Man acquired the means of science at the invitation of Jesus Christ. Those who preach the flat-earth theory do not acknowledge that the tools of science are add-ons to the human senses far beyond the level of normal human evolution. The five senses that humans have acquired are sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste. These five senses have far expanded and also greatly extended their original functions.
Certainly, with ordinary bodily functions, we cannot look down on the earth and recognize it as round. Even if you were to fly in an airplane, you would not be able to admit that it is round. In order to accept that the earth is round, we have to use the method of science. The fact that the earth is round is a result of the scientific method. Without science, it is not possible to directly see that the earth is a sphere.
Human vision has a stereoscopic function. It is the ability of human vision to find the dimension of depth of an object or landscape that it sees. When the viewpoint changes, the same object appears to have a different shape. When the viewpoint changes, the shape of the depth dimension changes. It is not that the shape of the object has changed, but that the shape appears to change because it is obscured by an overlap or shadow. The change in shape by perspective is the discovery that there are dimensions in the depth direction as well as left to right and up and down. The cognitive function of the human brain has discovered this. If we cannot accept that the earth is round without this “stereoscopic function,” then there is no other way but for humans to go to outer space by rocket and see it directly with the naked eye.
If the scenery on the earth is the front stage, space is the back stage. There are two types of backstage worlds: macro and micro. The micro world can only be viewed objectively, but in the macro world, human beings can enter and experience the real world, in other words, have a mystical experience. It means that humans can now go directly into what used to be the world of the gods. From the perspective of the earth, the universe was the behind-the-scenes world, the world of the gods. Now, the general public can go to space, although it will cost a lot of money. Space travel businesses are starting up, such as those planned by SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, Space Adventures, and Venus Aerospace.
Return from Space (Takashi Tachibana, Chuko Bunko, Publisher)
Astronauts have a lot to study. They spend dozens of hours studying each of these subjects: astronomy, aeronautical engineering, aerodynamics, rocket propulsion, computers, communications engineering, guidance and control, space navigation, mathematics, geography, upper atmosphere physics, space physics, environmental control, and more. In addition, there are subjects such as medicine, meteorology, geology, petrology, and mineralogy.
Now, not only cosmic experiences, but all experiences mature over time. At the very moment when we are experiencing something, we have no time and no room for consciousness other than to surrender ourselves to the flow of the experience. Therefore, it is only after reflection and rumination that we can grasp the inner meaning of the experience. Of course, this is only the perception of the awakened consciousness, but in the subconscious mind, some kind of change has already begun from the moment of the experience. The value of an experience is a subjective judgment, so what may be an insignificant experience for one person may become a life-changing experience for another, and vice versa. What specific changes did the astronauts, who had the most unique space experience in human history, undergo as a result of their experience? We do not know how the experiencers themselves were aware of this unique experience of being outside the earth’s environment, with which they had been familiar for 1.7 million years. However, it must have had a deep internal impact on the structure of the experiencer’s consciousness.
As soon as the astronauts return home, NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) conducts a thorough debriefing. The debriefing is a detailed, step-by-step report of everything experienced during the flight, with experts in various fields taking turns interviewing and answering questions. NASA is not interested in the mind, consciousness, or spirit of individual astronauts. NASA is a group of engineers and scientists.
When I met Dr. E. C. Ezell, the historian assigned to compile NASA’s history at the Space Center in Houston, he said, “I must be the only humanities major here. That is how much NASA is an engineer-centered society. And even the astronauts were selected from among military test pilots in the early days, and later on, from among jet pilots (military and civilian) and scientists, all of whom were technical people.
In the words of Jim Irwin, the Apollo 15 lunar module pilot, the astronauts were a “bolt and nut type” group. In the words of Jim Irwin, the Apollo 15 lunar module pilot, the astronauts were a “bolt and nut type” group. Mike Collins (Apollo 11) spoke of his impressions as follows. “If we had a poet or a philosopher as an astronaut, I don’t think the spaceship would have made it to space. And if it did, I don’t think it would have made it back to Earth.”
Many people may remember that the first impression of Yuri Gagarin of the Soviet Union, the first person in human history to go into space, was that “the earth was blue. According to the cosmonauts, the blue of the Earth is incomparably beautiful. It is this beauty that shocks them the most. They say that photographs can never capture that beauty. Just as the sky looks blue when you look up at a clear sky from the ground, the atmosphere looks blue when you look at the Earth from space. In other words, the blueness of the Earth is the blueness of the biosphere, which consists of the hydrosphere and the aerosphere. It looked beautiful because the perception that the biosphere was in its most beautiful part was largely unconsciously at work.
As you may know, Apollo 13 had an accident and failed to complete its mission to land on the moon. After a life-and-death struggle, the Apollo 13 astronauts made it safely to Earth. Captain Jim Lovell’s first impression upon returning to Earth was this. When you actually leave Earth, you get a better idea of what we humans have here on Earth.” LaBelle had a special, life-threatening experience in space. This perception was not because they were astronauts who had a special life-threatening experience. All astronauts who have completed a spaceflight and returned have had similar feelings. The impression is not as simple as understanding how essential the global environment is to human life support, but rather an awareness of the total relationship between the earth and human beings. The earth in front of us carries the entire human race, and all human activities are developing on it. This is a special perception that only a person who has experienced directly seeing the entire earth floating in space can have.
The beauty of the earth probably comes from the fact that there is life only there. I am staying here (in outer space). The earth exists in the distance. There is no other life anywhere else. My life and the life of the earth are connected by a single thin thread, which may break at any moment. The earth and I are both very weak. I was able to directly see with my own eyes how helpless and weak beings live in the universe. This was an undeniable fact, not a fiction.
Here is what one astronaut (A) commented. What did you feel when you left Earth orbit and headed for the Moon?
“The view was exceptional. I was able to see the earth in a way that no human being had ever seen it before. It is truly seeing the world with God’s eyes. I am a human being, but I thought I was experiencing the eyes of God. And as I move away from the earth, the earth becomes more and more beautiful. Its colors are so beautiful that words cannot describe it. I will never forget that beauty for the rest of my life.”
“We know its beauty from pictures, but what exactly does that mean?”
“The Earth as seen with the naked eye and the Earth as seen in a photograph are two very different things. First, there is the difference between a two-dimensional photograph and a three-dimensional reality. Photographs lack the sense of reality and immediacy of being able to reach out and touch the earth. This is another difference between two-dimensional and three-dimensional reality. When we look at the earth from space, we see the darkness on the other side of the earth at the same time. The other side of the earth is nothing but darkness. It is true darkness. That blackness. The depth of that darkness can never be imagined by anyone who has not seen it. The beauty of the sun shining in the eternal darkness, and the earth, colored blue and white, shining in the light of that sun. This cannot be expressed by a photograph”.
Here is what one astronaut (B) commented.
Looking at space from Earth is a completely different experience from looking at space from outer space. People on Earth think they understand the universe, but in reality they only have a conceptual understanding of it. For example, everyone knows the structure of the solar system. When we step out into space, we see the Earth and the Sun in front of us. We can understand not only the solar system, but the entire universe, not as an idea, but as a real experience.
Since ancient times, there was a time when people believed in various curious arguments about cosmic images, such as the Geocentrism and the flat-earth theory. I brought people who created strange images of the universe here and want to say to them, “Open your eyes and look closely. This is the real Earth. This is what the universe really looks like.” I don’t need to explain anything else.
There was a time when I was working outside the spacecraft at night due to some procedural difference, and I had to float alone outside the ship. It was so dark in the night part of space that it was truly pitch black and I could not see anything. It was as if I had fallen into a deep abyss and could see nothing. And I am floating there all alone. At that moment, I was struck by an indescribable feeling of eeriness.
If you think about it, if we lose this world called Earth and are thrown out into outer space, this universe is that weirdness itself for human beings. When you think about it, you realize how important and unique this planet Earth is to human beings.
Encounter with God
Using the length of human history as a measure, until just recently, mankind, regardless of its religion, thought that God (though different religions have different names) was up there in the heavens watching human activity. It is only recently that we have come to think of God’s acts in abstract terms. The heavens have always been the seat of God. In pre-modern Western paintings, we can see any number of images of God in heaven, looking down on earth. Modern people might interpret it as a figurative representation, but at that time, both the painter and the viewer thought it was a depiction of reality.
Yuri Gagarin, who first circled the heavens, stated. I looked around hard, but I still couldn’t find God. I looked around in circles as hard as I could, but I still couldn’t see God. Gagarin’s line shocked the American public. In the United States, more people remember this line said by Gagarin than “The earth was blue”. The United States is a Christian country, and the majority of Americans are Christians. For such Americans, Gagarin’s lines were, first of all, blasphemous. Second, it was a provocative statement of pride in the superiority of the Soviet Union, an atheistic communism, over American Christian culture.
Here is what one astronaut (C) commented.
There is no direct answer when you pray to God. You have no choice but to make your own decision. Later, he learned that it was the best decision he could have made. I later learned that it was the best decision I could have made, and that the decision I thought I had made at the time was actually God’s guidance. I think this kind of thing happens often. But in space, it is qualitatively different from such so-called divine guidance. It is more direct guidance from God. It is guidance without any distance between you and God. In short, it is a revelation. It is generally called mystical experience, and those who emphasize mystical experience are called mystics. In the world of religion and philosophy, mysticism has continued uninterruptedly since ancient times in both East and West. In short, it is about feeling, not reason.
“I want to ask you about your inner workings of that mind, what was the biggest thing you got out of it?”
“It is the recognition of God’s existence. The name of God differs from religion to religion. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Shintoism, all give different names to God. But whatever the name, there will be some identical supreme being to which it refers. That is the realization of existence. All religions are man-made. That is why God was given different names. The names are different, but the object is the same. When I look at the earth from space, I am struck by its sheer beauty. Something so beautiful could not have been created by chance. It is absolutely inconceivable that such a thing could have been created by chance, by the accidental merging of elementary particle that happened to collide with each other at a certain time. The earth is that beautiful. It is impossible for something so beautiful to be formed solely by chance, without any purpose or intention. I became convinced when I saw the earth from space that such a thing is logically impossible. Today, this beauty cannot be shown to the public. It seemed a terribly selfish act for us to be the only ones seeing it.”
Here is what one astronaut (D) commented.
“In your case, would you say you are closer to having a religious mind than a religion?”
“Yes, I believe more in knowledge from one’s own experience and intuition than in the teachings of established religions.”
“By the way, you are a professional scientist. How do you keep your religious beliefs compatible with your science?”
All science can do is explain how things happen. And explanation is really just replacing one level of ignorance with another level of ignorance. For example, one explains why a phenomenon occurs at the material level. Further, when the question is asked how, an explanation at the molecular level emerges. Further questions lead to explanations at the atomic level, and then to explanations at the elementary particle. Beyond that, no one has yet been able to explain it. Modern physics is ignorance at this level. Science has always replaced the question “why” with “how” and come up with explanations. Science cannot answer the fundamental “why” or the ontological “why. Science claims to have discovered various laws. But it cannot explain why those laws are valid. Science cannot answer why the universe exists. Why does the law of the immortality of energy hold? How did energy come to exist in the first place? What is material? Science cannot answer any of these questions. All science can do is define things better. Herein lies the fundamental limitation of science.
Another limitation is the problem of perception. How does man know the external world? Directly, he knows through his sensory organs, the sensors that he possesses. If there is an external sensor that can perceive something that does not touch the senses of the self, it can be known indirectly by reading that external sensor with the senses. And anything that is not caught by either the internal sensor or the external sensor is considered to not exist. However, I believe that there are still many entities that exist but are not perceived by humans simply because there are no appropriate sensors yet. Such beings would be placed outside the purview of science. It is as if man were shut up in a hut, looking at the outside world through the eyes of several television cameras set up outside. It is arrogant to think that we know everything about the outside world. There are many things that science cannot answer and cannot understand, and that is why I think there is room for religion to exist.
“But isn’t it also the arrogance of religion to say that it knows what science does not? Rather than believing in religion in your case, are you agnostic?”
“Yes, it is. It is a kind of agnosticism. But it is not an agnosticism that throws out that we don’t know such things, but a positive agnosticism that assumes that it is right to not know. And I think there is real religiosity in this agnosticism. I don’t know why, but our universe is a tremendously good thing. It is before us as such. Isn’t that good enough? My basic position is that we should start from that way of thinking.”
Here is what one astronaut (E) commented.
In some cases, astronauts who were originally nonreligious remained nonreligious after returning from space. I asked him, “You do not believe in the existence of God?” He replied, “You mean the bearded old man in the heavens above? Then no, I don’t believe in God. I left Christianity in the late 1950s. I think I was still quite religious at that point, but then I moved further away. I became more philosophical than religious. One of my major influences was J. E. Lovelock, who wrote Gaia: The Science of Gaia (Kousakusha Publishing Co., Ltd.). Gaia is the idea that the earth itself is a living organism. The earth has such an amazing self-regulating function that it is impossible to understand the earth without thinking of it as a living organism in itself. The earth itself can be considered alive.”
Opinion of those who believe in the flat-earth theory
People who believe in the world flat-earth theory are called Flat-Earthers. Flat-Earthers are basically positivists with observation supremacy. They place the greatest importance on what they can confirm directly with their own eyes and hands. The next most important thing is to think theoretically and without preconceptions as much as possible. Since childhood, we have been imprinted by all kinds of media on a daily basis that the earth is a sphere. I want you to think about it carefully. Have you ever seen the earth from a bird’s eye view?
Why do you believe that the earth is round when you do not check? Is it not simply because you were taught that the earth is round in school and you have seen images of a round earth on TV? People today, who have been stuffed with textbook knowledge from childhood, ignore their own intuition when they sense a discrepancy between reality and their own knowledge and experience. They also do not check to see what the facts actually are.
One such statement is that “the earth is flat.” Many people have never thought about how curved the horizon of the earth is. They have never felt the earth move at all. They think one-sidedly that “the textbooks are more correct than their intuition” or “the earth is a sphere because the textbooks say so. I believe that “intuition” and “gut feeling” are highly reliable things that are determined by solid experience.
Why does the world plane theory cause “cognitive dissonance” in people who generally believe that the “earth is a sphere?”
Before the brainwashing by images created by NASA and Walt Disney (1901-1966), flat earth maps were commonly found in the Encyclopedia Britannica and the Bible published in the 1950s. This fact suggests that the full penetration of the “earth is a sphere” may have been more recent than thought.
“If the earth is flat, how do you explain the existence of satellites in space?”
That’s a fallacy. It is more radio-friendly for satellites if the earth is flat,” a logical argument that I will leave aside here. Flat-Earthers claims that the universe does not exist. So the logical conclusion is that satellites do not exist either. All satellites are suspended in the atmosphere on large balloons.
All the so called satellites in space are imaginary objects created by computer graphics. I want you to notice that it was Arthur C. Clarke, a famous English novelist who was active long before NASA and others, who popularized the imaginary concept of satellites in space.
The space satellite is an imaginary scientific invention that began as a proposal by a novelist. In school, we are taught that the earth is a sphere orbiting a sun shining in the middle of a huge universe. If you zoom out on a map search application, a round Earth appears. By going to the movie theater to see Hollywood movies that “visualize” the earth as seen from space, we come to have a false common understanding that the “earth is a sphere.” And unconsciously, they have become “earth is a sphere” as a matter of course.
References Flat Earth Super Introduction (Hikaruland Publishing Co., Ltd.), Flat Earth World (Hikaruland Publishing Co., Ltd.), Flat Earth REAL FACTS (Hikaruland Publishing Co., Ltd.)