We have a podcast scheduled for Saturday at 4pm Central. We’re bloggers, so maybe you’re not familiar with what we look like, so here’s a portrait.

You’ll never guess which one is me.

The topic: in preparation for Halloween, we’ll be discussing what it is about scary stuff that we like. We’re partly inspired by this Ologies podcast on “What’s Creepy”, which is better than anything we can do, but we’ll try.

Avi Loeb is playing games with his peculiar interpretation of interstellar object 3I/ATLAS. He keeps suggesting that this interesting, carbon-rich, and very old rock is an artificial construct built by a distant civilization, that it is a probe sent to examine our solar system, and that it could be a “Trojan horse” that will do something, who knows what, when it arrives.

Reading some his justifications for that claim, I am forced to conclude that he is an idiot putting on a display to get attention.

Worse, he’s a bad scientist whoring irrational claims and calculations that he has to know are invalid. I am not an astronomer, but I do understand logic a little bit, and seeing him derive extravagant conclusions from mundane observations hurts, especially since he’s using them to obscure the really interesting (and entirely natural) interpretations of the data.

For instance, he’s on the record for inferring the probability that 3I/ATLAS is an alien space probe on the basis of “anomalies” that turn out to not be anomalous at all, just unique properties of an interstellar comet.

As of now, I assign a 30–40% likelihood that 3I/ATLAS does not have a fully natural origin, based on its seven anomalies that I listed here. This low-probability scenario includes the possibility of a black swan event akin to a Trojan Horse, where a technological object masquerades as a natural comet.

Show your work, Avi. How did you calculate that 30-40% likelihood? I think he got it by fumbling about in his rectum and pulling out a squishy number that he likes because it fits his presuppositions. There is nothing in his list of seven “anomalies” to warrant that degree of estimation. They aren’t even anomalies, he’s just looking at the brute facts of its existence and declaring that the details are improbable. Of course they are! It’s a unique object in space!

I tried looking at his list. I am unimpressed.

Anomalies that could be alleviated or explained away with upcoming data:

1. Size: The diameter of 3I/ATLAS is larger than 5 kilometers, making its minimum mass of 33 billion tons, larger by a factor of a thousand to a million than the mass of the second and first interstellar objects (as derived here).

OK, it has a size. That is not anomalous. Call me when you observe an object that is massless–that would be anomalous. I don’t see how finding that it has a mass of 33 billion tons makes it more likely to be artificial than if it had a mass of 3 billion tons or 333 billion tons.

I also don’t see how more data would explain away the mass.

It’s also a fuzzy blob far away and hard to resolve. The size is subject to revision, so how do you conclude anything from a measurement with so much variability?

Initial estimates suggested 3I/ATLAS might be up 20 kilometers (12 miles) across—very big for a comet—but most astronomers now think it is much smaller. “It’s probably somewhere in the range of one or two kilometers,” says John Noonan at Auburn University in Alabama. That would be somewhat comparable in size to our first two interstellar visitors: 1I/ʻOumuamua, which was discovered in 2017 and was up to about 400 meters (0.25 mile) long, and 2I/Borisov, which was found in 2019 and was about one kilometer (0.6 mile) wide.

It doesn’t matter — any number you attach to it will be used by Loeb to claim it is probably artificial.

2. Jet: The Hubble image of 3I/ATLAS showed a forward jet of scattered sunlight — 10 times longer than it is wide, pointing towards the Sun (as discussed here). A weak tail showed up only at the end of August (as reported here).

Yes? It’s apparently a carbon-rich object, and gasses are sublimating off of it and spewing in the direction of the heat source, the Sun, that is thawing them, making an anti-tail. How does that make it more likely that it is artificial? It has a chemical composition is what that tells me.

3. Unusual chemical composition: the plume of gas around 3I/ATLAS showed much more nickel than iron (as discussed here and here), as in industrial nickel alloys. Unlike solar system comets, the plume contained mostly carbon dioxide and not water (as reported here and here).

Note the dishonest trick he’s pulling here, comparing it to “industrial nickel alloys.” These are estimates of the composition of the comet made from the spectroscopy of the diffuse cloud of gas surrounding it, not a determination that it’s made of metal alloys.

It actually is an interesting difference — its composition differs from more familiar comets found in our solar system. That composition also seems to be changing over time, which is somewhat odd, but explainable.

To make sense of this mystery, scientists turned to chemistry — specifically, to organometallic compounds, which are molecules containing both metal atoms and carbon-based groups.

In particular, they looked at compounds called carbonyls: nickel tetracarbonyl (Ni(CO)₄) and iron pentacarbonyl (Fe(CO)₅). Both can form under cold, low-pressure conditions, like those found in the outer reaches of a protoplanetary disk — the birthplace of comets and planets alike.

These carbonyls are highly volatile, meaning they can sublimate (turn from solid to gas) at relatively low temperatures. Nickel tetracarbonyl is more volatile than its iron counterpart, meaning it will vaporize first as the comet warms up.

This neatly explained what the VLT was seeing. When 3I/ATLAS was still far from the sun, only nickel tetracarbonyl had begun to sublimate, filling the coma with nickel. As the comet drew closer, the temperature crossed the sublimation threshold for iron pentacarbonyl — and suddenly, iron began to appear. The Ni/Fe ratio plummeted, not because the amount of nickel was decreasing, but because iron was finally joining the show.

Now, though, somebody needs to explain to me how being composed of volatile organometallic compounds is a signature of artificial manufacture.

4. Polarization: the light from 3I/ATLAS showed extreme negative polarization (as reported here).

I read the paper, and I must admit, the topic is beyond me. It does say that 3I/ATLAS has distinct, unique polarization properties and that “Its polarimetric characteristics provide novel insights into the dust properties of interstellar objects, suggesting that ISOs may encompass a broader diversity than previously recognised,” but does not even come close to implying that this is a marker of artificiality.

Anomalies that will remain puzzling forever:

5. The trajectory of 3I/ATLAS is aligned with the ecliptic plane of planets around the Sun to within 5 degrees (0.2% likelihood), as discussed here.

It has a trajectory. That is not anomalous. Every object moving through space has one. Yes, this trajectory is roughly similar to the ecliptic plane, but so what? 3I/ATLAS is very old, between 3 and 14 billion years old, is Loeb suggesting that aliens aimed their space probe at a condensing protosystem before the planets existed in order to tour potential planets?

6. The arrival time of 3I/ATLAS was optimized to pass near Mars, Venus and Jupiter (0.005% likelihood), as discussed here.

“optimized”…such misleading language, implying intent behind its trajectory. Here’s what that trajectory looks like:

Ooooh. Does that look like a pre-planned course to you? It does to Avi Loeb.

7. The arrival direction of 3I/ATLAS is aligned to within 9 degrees with the “Wow! Signal” from August 15, 1977 (0.6% likelihood), as discussed here.

The “wow” signal was a brief, unexplained, unrepeated pulse of radio signal noise. It got SETI researchers very excited for a while, but there’s no reason to think it is a message from space aliens, and Loeb is making an exceptionally tenuous connection between it and 3I/ATLAS. A 9 degree difference is an immense difference in location at the astronomical distances we’re talking about.

You know, as an atheist I read far too much nonsense from religious apologists claiming to have proof of their god’s existence — bizarre non sequiturs about physical constants and numerological coincidences, collections of anecdotes that are supposed to add up to evidence, and a tiny set of permutations on the same old arguments that even in their best interpretations don’t make up a justification for their beliefs. Reading Avi Loeb’s work gave me a strong sense of deja vu. It’s the same thing! A good analysis of a phenomenon should lead one to a minimal conclusion, but everything Loeb does ends up supporting the remarkable interpretation that God Aliens exist, and they want to talk to you, and this tiny fragment of data is how they shout at you, Occam’s Razor be damned.

I’m going to say it: Loeb has gone batty, and all this noise he makes is nothing a dedicated (and successful!) effort to get his name in the tabloids. He’s the Percival Lowell of our generation, a scientist who did good work but whose reputation was poisoned by his irrational pursuit of astronomical phantasms, the Martian canals in one case and this alien obsession in Loeb’s.

…one should spend some time with one’s spiders. I know it is numerically the 10th month, but it should be the 8th month by name, if not for some silly Romans who tried to squeeze a couple more emperors into the calendar. It was feeding day anyway, so I spent a little time giving them treats in celebration.

Here’s Blue, who gobbled down her mealworm instantly, and is now dabbling her toes in her water dish.

It’s getting more difficult to photograph Blue, because she’s covering everything with silk — when you look in from the side, it’s a haze of strands everywhere, and I have to remove the lid to the terrarium to lean in and see what she’s up to.

I fed the Steatoda borealis, the Parasteatoda tepidariorum, and the Latrodectus mactans juveniles as well. I’ve isolated about 80 black widow juveniles in individual vials, and am running out of room in the incubator, so there’s about 80-100 more left in a container together, like a giant colony of black widows. It’s a Darwinian world in there — I figure I’ll let the numbers decline and then extract the biggest survivors.

One thing I’ve noticed is that the isolated individuals, in spite of getting a bounty of fruit flies twice a week, are growing more slowly than some of the black widows in the communal container. Most are small, but there’s a few that stand out as growing distinctly larger than their siblings.

(Photos were taken immediately after I dumped a lot of fruit flies into the container, so they’ve all got their faces snout deep in dinner.)

I have to speculate that maybe, just maybe, some of the spiders are eating their siblings.

I suspect most of my readers are not manly, masculine “he-men,” according to this declaration by Edward K. Strong.

Although…how can you trust Dr Strong? He was neither an engineer or farmer, but was a psychologist, a mere academic who wrote books like The Psychology of Selling and Advertisement and The Psychology of Selling Life Insurance. He reeks of “feminine interests.”

Also, he’s dead. The article is from 1936.

Elle Cordova does a rendition of a Halloween classic.

Ordinary People Don’t Carry Machine Guns: Thoughts on War (Seven Stories) by Artem Chapeye

The Accidental Soldier: Dispatches from Quite Near the Front Line (Hodder & Stoughton) by Owain Mulligan

As Artem Chapeye well understands, the title of his book is wholly inaccurate. Ordinary people absolutely do carry machine guns: indeed, ordinary people carrying machine guns is pretty much the story of modern warfare. It is safe to assume that Owain Mulligan would concur with this view, just as Chapeye would recognise the concept of the accidental soldier: he is one himself.

These are two very different war memoirs, which nevertheless have a great deal in common. Chapeye is a prominent Ukrainian author and journalist who joined the Ukrainian army in the days immediately following Russia’s full-scale invasion of his country in February 2022. Mulligan is a British schoolteacher and Territorial Army reservist who does a stint as a troop commander in Basra, Iraq in 2006. Chapeye is serious, ruminative and serving in an existential war for his country’s survival. Mulligan is self-deprecating, funny – a genuinely gifted comic writer – and participating in a misbegotten occupation.

But neither man dons his country’s uniform out of any great martial ardour. For Chapeye, who had previously thought himself a left-wing pacifist, his new vocation descends in a moment of clarity. On 22 February 2022, as Russian forces pour over Ukraine’s borders, he flees Kyiv with his wife and children. Within 48 hours, he decides that he has greater responsibilities elsewhere. He initially feels uncomfortable at the thought that Ukraine will be defended by the people he has spent his career writing about – the poor, the rural, the less educated – while folk like himself, people with options, wait the war out elsewhere. Then the instinct becomes more primal: a question of what a man is, and what kind of man he is. “If I run away now,” he tells his nine-year-old son, “later I won’t be able to look you in the eye, or myself in the mirror when I shave.”

I have not seen Chapeye’s war up close, but I was in Basra about a year before Mulligan, as a journalist embedded with a Welsh Guards company stationed at a disused regional airport. By the time Mulligan deploys, things had gotten a great deal worse. The closest I came to combat in Basra was being woken by gunfire exchanged between two local tribes, the Geramsha and the Halaf, Basra’s answer to the Hatfields and the McCoys. The company commander explained to me that “The Scots Guards went up there once and asked them to put a sock in it, which worked for a bit. Now, we just take the view that as long as nothing comes over the fence, it isn’t really our problem.”

Plenty does come over the fence during Mulligan’s tour. He has a narrow escape from a mortar barrage, while outside the perimeters there are mines, militants and – at least as hazardous – the kind of mishap that can occur anywhere, but which can have much more serious consequences in a warzone. One of the best-told sequences in The Accidental Soldier is one of the least amusing, as Mulligan leads his troop’s vehicles on an ill-advised shortcut into a minefield, and then has to reverse them, slowly and sweatily. “No one wants to go so much as an inch onto the verge, so it’s like playing a hideous game of Land Rover Tetris.”

Crucially, there is little cruelty to Mulligan’s humour, even when he vents exasperation at the ineptitude and corruption of Iraq’s own police and military (of an inspection of one police outpost, he writes, “It’s the usual story. Half the workforce are at their cousin’s funeral in Baghdad, the keys to the evidence locker are with Mahmoud, who’s visiting the outermost ice-water rings of Saturn, and the station itself would make the Marie Celeste look lively”). His attitude to Iraq’s bewildered and brutalised people is altogether sympathetic, his jokes much more often on himself. The Accidental Soldier is a worthy heir to Spike Milligan’s memoirs of the Second World War, or George MacDonald Fraser’s “McAuslan” series – the Flashman author’s lightly fictionalised account of his post-Second World War service with the Gordon Highlanders in the Middle East.

Ordinary People Don’t Carry Machine Guns has perhaps more in common with Fraser’s Quartered Safe Out Here – his account of his time in Burma during the Second World War – or George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, even if Orwell was fighting to save someone else’s country rather than his own. Chapeye – who as of this writing is still in the army – is an acute and astute observer of his fellow citizens in uniform, and not the first to discover that, counter-intuitively, soldiers at war can be the most unabashedly tender and compassionate of people. “Initially,” he writes, “with an impression of war based on anti-war books, I was scared that people would quickly turn feral ... I haven’t seen this at all. In my opinion, soldiers are becoming, I don’t know, somehow gentler or something.”

Though both these authors have displayed considerable physical courage in going to wars they could have avoided, both are at pains to communicate that they do not see themselves, or wish to be seen by others, as remotely heroic. Like most soldiers in most conflicts, they did – or are doing – their best in circumstances all at once wretched and elevated. Chapeye speaks for every ordinary person who has carried a machine gun – or a rifle, a sword, or a spear. “You’re a small part of something greater ... you feel that greatness, as well as the desire at every single moment for all this ‘greatness’ to come to an end right now.”

This article is from New Humanist's Autumn 2025 issue. Subscribe now.

I’ve been covering and correcting misinformation for several decades now, and in that time I’ve definitely had to deal with false statements from high level politicians. I’ve also had to deal with faked media, whether through Photoshop or video editing or “AI.” I have never, ever seen something as ludicrous as what happened this weekend …

Abortion: A History (Hurst Publishers) by Mary Fissell

There is a common perception that abortion in pre-modern times was dangerous, difficult and illegal. Yet, as the American academic Mary Fissell argues in this timely volume, the story of abortion is neither simple nor linear, with both attitudes and levels of repression varying considerably over the centuries. Take the Catholic Church, for example. In the 15th century, it viewed early termination as a relatively minor sin. Attitudes hardened during the Reformation, and in 1588 Pope Sixtus V ordered anyone who had or provided an abortion to be excommunicated. But this policy was partially overturned by his successor. Only in 1869 did the Catholic Church adopt its current stance that abortion is never justified.

Concern about the rights of the unborn child is another recent development; historically, the rights of men were acknowledged to be the real priority. Roman wives who had abortions were condemned for denying their husbands heirs, and centuries later, enslaved women were accused of deliberately depriving their owners of labour and profit. Opposition was also fuelled by a desire to make women behave, with 19th-century anti-abortion campaigners fretting that feminism would encourage middle-class wives to restrict their families, leading to an America populated by “the ignorant, the low lived, and the alien”.

Yet even the strictest restrictions have not eradicated abortion. For more than two millennia, women have used effective, though potentially lethal, herbs such as penny-royal. Early modern women read about reproductive health in respectable publications such as The Ladies Dispensatory (1651), and Victorian newspapers printed discreet adverts for medicines such as “Dr Bond’s Spanish Female Monthly Pills”, which promised “immediate removal of obstructions”. Such knowledge, along with the ministrations of skilled practitioners, allowed unknowable numbers of women to terminate unwanted or unviable pregnancies.

But Fissell is careful not to romanticise pre-modern female solidarity and skill, instead foregrounding the distressing experiences of real women – including an ancient Greek sex slave made to jump until a tiny fragment fell from her vagina; a 17th-century emigrant whose married lover forced a foul-smelling pill down her throat; and an early 20th-century US teenager raped by her own father, who was denied an abortion because her life was not at risk.

In the US, matters came to a head in the mid-20th century, when moral panic made both providers and their patients fair targets for the police. Though some brave medics continued to perform abortions, Fissell describes how many women resorted to backstreet practitioners such as Beatrice J., a Baltimore housewife whose only training was the two procedures she had successfully performed on herself. Consequently, in 1950s New York, over 40 per cent of pregnancy-related deaths resulted from abortion.

By the mid-60s, public opinion was shifting, and in 1973 the Supreme Court’s verdict in Roe vs Wade legalised abortion nationwide. For several decades, it seemed that the battle for reproductive freedom had been won. But since 2022, when the Dobbs ruling overturned this landmark judgement, many states have banned or restricted access to abortion – and the subject has become increasingly politically charged in many other countries, including the UK.

History, Fissell argues, offers hope: attitudes to abortion have changed in the past, and they will surely change again. In the meantime, Abortion: A History offers not just an engaging and thoroughly researched study of a much-contested medical procedure, but a powerful case for the importance of safe, effective and legal abortion.

This article is from New Humanist's Autumn 2025 issue. Subscribe now.

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: I know things are pretty depressing right now in the United States, so I’m going to open today’s video with some good news: Jimmy Kimmel is back! His show was taken off the air …

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: About 3,000 news cycles ago, by which I mean about two weeks ago, a video hit social media, showing a college student at Texas A&M challenging her professor. (Plays video) When I first saw …

The oft-repeated observation that the Labour Party owes “more to Methodism than Marxism” annoys Neil Kinnock, who served as the party’s leader for much of the 1980s and now sits in the House of Lords. “Harold Wilson used it as a way of reassuring the general public that we hadn’t come directly from the work of Soviets, that we were in the British mainstream, and so on,” he says. “And I don’t blame him for doing that at all … But it is a very lazy understanding of where the British Labour Party came from, and crucially the fact that we’ve never been afflicted by religious sectarianism. In the Labour movement we’ve had Marxists and Christian Socialists and liberals and a lot of humanists, right from the beginning.”

Kinnock’s frustration with this historical oversimplification is a perfect starting point for our conversation, which coincides with the 125th anniversary of the Trades Union Congress Conference that led to the formation of today’s Labour Party. And it’s music to my ears. For too long, the story of the Labour movement’s organisational, intellectual and ethical origins has over-emphasised the religious contribution, sidelining a powerful and persistent current of secular, rationalist and humanist thought. And today, when religious propagandists are increasingly putting out the idea that everything in our culture – from democracy to justice to freedom itself – has a Christian origin, that narrative matters.

Of course, Christian and humanist elements often combine, and Kinnock’s own life illustrates this. Growing up in a working-class south Wales community, the chapel was a part of life. “I did quite enjoy going to Sunday school,” he says, recalling a time around the age of 15 when he was “probably more religiously inclined than at any other time in my whole life”, inspired by a “terrific young Methodist minister and his lovely wife, both of whom were members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and fully paid-up Christian Socialists”.

But it was precisely at this moment of potential conversion that his rationalism kicked in. “It was at that time, I thought: wait a minute, what the hell is all this about? And can I really accept … the foundations of faith … And I realised, of course, that simply wasn’t possible for me.” His own family, while embodying values of “honesty, care for others, hard work”, was largely secular. His father wasn’t religious. “He dismissed the whole notion, though not in any strident way.” And his mother, though Christian, hardly ever went to chapel. His uncles, all staunch trade unionists and socialists, “totally dismissed any idea of religion or conformity to religious requirements”.

A movement with many tributaries

This personal history reflects the overlooked secular stream in the Labour Party’s story. The early movement was a confluence of many tributaries: the trade unions, the cooperative societies, the Fabian socialists, and the humanist ethical societies. The party drew inspiration from the Welsh political philosopher and reformer Robert Owen and the socialist communities he founded, as well as from the rationalist presses that provided cheap, enlightening literature to a newly literate working class. This was, as Kinnock puts it, a “generous open house on the left”, and its greatest strength was its determinedly “anti-sectarian” character. He recalls with admiration the trade unionists in Northern Ireland who, “in the dark times” of the Troubles, refused to segregate their branches by religion. “They were very gutsy people,” he says, and their principled stand helped preserve the movement’s integrity. This openness prevented the religious divisions that afflicted other European socialist movements and allowed Labour to build a broad coalition based on a shared commitment to improving the human condition in the here and now.

The glib “Methodism not Marxism” line obscures this richer and more complex reality. Of course there were tactical reasons, historically, to peddle this line – and not just in the Cold War. The pages of this magazine played host in the early 20th century to more than one unsuccessful Labour general election candidate writing that they felt the charge against them of “atheism” had been decisive. Kinnock himself acknowledges attending the party conference Sunday service during his time as leader, “in order to reassure people that Christians were welcome in the Labour Party … to show neighbourliness, comradeship, reassurance”.

But there is another reason for this public amnesia: the influence of humanism in the movement has seldom been explicit. The humanist current is best understood not as an abstract philosophy, but through the lives of individual Labour humanists who embodied it. When you survey them, you find they were often those who drove the party’s most transformative achievements.

Take the late Roy Jenkins, whom Kinnock describes as having “a very strong ethical vein, a definite moral compass … both a child of and a prophet of enlightenment”. While Jenkins’s later career took him away from Labour, his period as home secretary in the 1960s was a high-water mark for humanist-inspired reform. He oversaw or secured the decriminalisation of homosexuality, the legalisation of abortion, the abolition of theatre censorship, the liberalisation of divorce law, and the abolition of corporal punishment in prisons. This was a revolution in personal freedom, dismantling a legal framework built on religious dogma and replacing it with one based on compassion, reason and individual autonomy. Jenkins’s contribution, Kinnock reflects, was to understand that a “tide in the affairs of men” was flowing. The “seismic change in national sentiment” wrought by two world wars, the rise of the welfare state, and a growing public appetite for reform created a moment “ripe for change”. But, he adds crucially, “without people like Jenkins … the change wouldn’t have come … not maybe as early as the 1960s without the commitment and courage.”

Labour's humanist giants

This courage was prefigured by an earlier generation. Ramsay MacDonald, Labour’s first prime minister, was a humanist and president of the Ethical Union (as Humanists UK then was). And then there was Clement Attlee, the quiet architect of the 1945 government. Kinnock delights in recalling Attlee’s famous sentiment, written in a letter to his devout brother, that he didn’t mind the ethics of Christianity but couldn’t “stand the mumbo jumbo”. It was, he laughs, “such a down-to-earth dismissal of this gigantic edifice of religion”. Attlee’s humanism was expressed not in speeches but in deeds: the creation of the NHS, the establishment of the welfare state, the beginning of decolonisation. His socialism was a practical creed for improving human life, rooted in his experiences as a social worker in London’s East End, not in any scripture.

Attlee’s minister for health, the man who brought the NHS into existence, was the Welsh orator Aneurin “Nye” Bevan – another humanist. He was, in Kinnock’s analysis, part of a generation of “socialist rationalists” whose political convictions were forged in the crucible of post-war disillusionment with old certainties. “The slaughter and stupidity of [the First World War],” he explains, “devastated a generation’s belief in religious engagement.” For Bevan’s generation in the Welsh valleys, which saw congregations collapse in the face of such senseless violence, political action through the Labour movement replaced chapel-going as the primary vehicle for community and social change. His vision for the NHS was a profoundly humanist one: that healthcare should be a universal right, available to all based on need, not wealth. It was a declaration of the intrinsic value of every human life.

Bevan’s wife, Jennie Lee, was a humanist and a political force in her own right. As Harold Wilson’s minister for the arts, she fought to establish The Open University – a project derided by her opponents but one that perfectly encapsulated the humanist belief in the transformative power of education and the importance of lifelong learning for all. And then there was Michael Foot, Bevan’s successor in Ebbw Vale and a future Labour leader. Kinnock, who knew him well, describes Foot’s humanism as deeply intellectual, rooted in a scholarly understanding of “political and social free thinking in Britain from the Revolutionary War”. He was, Kinnock says, “intellectually as well as spiritually totally against religion, but not in any draconian way. He was ‘live and let live’.” It was a liberal tolerance so complete that Kinnock could joke, “Some of his best friends were
Christians.”

This same practical, compassionate and secular outlook was shared by so many others, including the former first minister of Wales, Rhodri Morgan, who had the first government-sponsored humanist funeral in the UK, and who it turns out was Kinnock’s flatmate in the 1960s. When I asked Morgan, years ago and in a rather chippy manner, what he planned to do about religious influence in Welsh schools, he told me he would simply “let it wither on the vine”. I asked Kinnock why so many Labour politicians, even the keen humanists, have been rather diffident secularists in practice (although they have often achieved significant changes without fanfare). His response was that it’s pragmatism – trusting in social progress rather than confrontation to solve the structural problem of religious privilege. Wales, he points out, is now the least religious nation in the UK. A testament, perhaps, to the quiet success of that approach?

The next generation

This brings us to the future. If the great humanist and socialist achievements of the past were rooted in the living memory of war on the home front, genocide in Europe, mass unemployment and extreme poverty, how do we sustain them now that memory is fading? How do we inspire new generations to extend those freedoms?

Kinnock believes the answer lies in education and civic engagement. He doesn’t lament the loss of chapels as such, but he does believe one “casualty” is the experience of democratic participation that they and the trade unions gave to people. The Nonconformist chapels in particular, he says, “gave people a real rehearsal in representation, organisation, conducting meetings, chairmanship … having honest [financial] accounts and all the things that maybe would have taken much longer to develop if they had initially been political … That made a hell of a contribution.” He worries that this training ground for democracy has vanished. “Where would people get that now?” he asks. He sees today’s young people as having “all the right instincts about sharing and caring and endurance and responsibility”, but feels they have “not got a clue how to organise.” His advice is characteristically direct: “You find somebody who agrees with you, and one of you becomes chair, and the other one becomes secretary. And you get on with it.”

His proposed solution is a robust and properly resourced citizenship education, a cause championed by another great humanist about whom we reminisce: Bernard Crick. Such education, Kinnock argues, is essential for fostering a “discerning society”. He is furious at the austerity-driven scrapping of initiatives intended to foster greater citizenship and engagement, such as projects designed to teach inner-city children to organise politically for change, and the downgrading of the citizenship curriculum in English schools. “It was such stupidity and counter to any kind of economic sense or productiveness or efficiency,” he says, arguing that sustained citizenship education would have “saved a hell of a lot of money” by creating a more engaged and resilient populace. A proper civic education, woven throughout the curriculum, would give citizens a “sense of agency”, countering the powerlessness and apathy that plague our politics.

What about the political and economic challenges facing a future Labour government? Kinnock speaks with deep concern about the “capture of the government by the Treasury” with its “small ‘c’ conservative… conformity”. He worries this mindset will stifle the change the country needs. “I regret to say that our highly intelligent ministers, and they’re all wonderful people, in the Treasury … have accepted the Treasury nostrums,” he says. His solution is radical: split the Treasury into a department of finance focused on fiscal discipline, and a department for economic development and progress, free to think about investment and growth.

Unmoored from history

This leads him to the great, unresolved issue of our time: Brexit. After leaving frontline politics in Westminster, Kinnock served in the European Commission for a decade, including as vice president. Now, he sees Brexit as the primary obstacle to the nation’s prosperity and influence. The great nightmare, he believes, is being trapped in anaemic growth outside the single market, with the one policy that could genuinely lift the economy remaining a political taboo.

His defence of the European project is passionate and rooted in that same historical consciousness he urges on others. He laments how the recent VE Day commemorations, for all their importance, failed to celebrate the “extraordinary miracle” that followed: the creation of institutions that made war between European neighbours impossible. “They did it with Nato, and they did it with the European Union,” he states with force. “In the part of Europe that is in the European Union … War is unthinkable. Unfightable. And that’s great.” I ask if he thinks Britain will ever rejoin. His reply is a mixture of realism and hope. “Not in my lifetime. I’m 83 … but in my children’s lifetime, hopefully and definitely in my grandchildren’s lifetime.”

Ultimately, Kinnock’s humanist message is one of historical consciousness as a spur to future action. He is alarmed by the sense that “we are unmoored in our times from so much of what has occurred before, to give us the conditions in which we live.” The antidote is not the backward-looking nostalgia of the populists (“they’re a bloody waste of time”) but a clear-eyed understanding of how our freedoms were won. “We are the products, not just of the present time, but of the past … and our self-interest and our duty is to be helping to construct the future,” he says. His final call is for a sustained political and cultural effort to help people be “confidently aware of why they’ve got what they’ve got, and how it could be improved, and then improve it, by being good citizens, discerning citizens making rational judgments.”

That, in essence, is the humanist project. It is the thread that connects the rationalist pioneers of the 19th century to Attlee’s welfare state, from Jenkins’s liberalising reforms to the ongoing struggle for a more just, compassionate and reasonable world. As the Labour Party looks to its future, it should remember and reclaim this vital part of its heritage. The conscience of the party has always been, and must continue to be, profoundly humanist, in the most inclusive meaning of the phrase.

This article is from New Humanist's Autumn 2025 issue. Subscribe now.

Way back before I was living under an actual authoritarian theocracy, I enjoyed making videos about, well, relatively inconsequential bullshit. For those who are new here, I do what I do today because when I was a kid I was a magician and a juggler, and a fan of Penn & Teller. They introduced me …

At 8:15am on the morning of 6 August 1945, 600 metres up and a few metres north of what is now a 7-Eleven convenience store in central Hiroshima, the world changed forever. In the sky a piece of uranium-235 was slammed into another disc of the same element in the barrel of the bomb its designers had christened “Little Boy”. Reaching criticality, it emitted a silent flash and heated the air around it to over 4,000 degrees centigrade in less than half a second. Around 60,000 people were killed instantly, vaporised by the heat. Those further away were thrown to the ground and trapped under their homes as they burned. There had been no warning.

“Every time I walk through the Peace Memorial Park I remember the faces of Hibakusha I have met and their stories,” says Yuna Okajima, a human rights activist and guide who is tasked with preserving the memory of both the victims and survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Hibakusha, or bomb-affected people, is the label given to survivors of this and the second US atomic bombing in Nagasaki a few days later. As the number of atomic bomb survivors dwindles 80 years on from the twin attacks, their descendants have begun to assume the responsibility of showing the horrors of nuclear warfare.

We need to listen to their voices. The Doomsday Clock set up by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists after the Hiroshima bomb dropped is later than it has ever been: now at 89 seconds to midnight. The time is meant to symbolise how close we are to “destroying our world with dangerous technologies of our own making”.

In recent years, the threat of nuclear conflict has resurfaced, non-proliferation movements are faltering, and climate change and technological acceleration have created ever more complex dangers. Russia is threatening to use its nuclear capabilities on the battlefield, rogue states like North Korea are armed, and the future of Iran’s nuclear programme is in the spotlight after the US-Israeli attacks on its nuclear sites.

Meanwhile, Britain stands alongside many other developed countries in committing to new nuclear power stations to meet energy demand and decrease the use of fossil fuels. Nowhere is this nuclear complexity clearer than in Japan, where the memory of nuclear war and the danger of civil nuclear disaster sit firmly in the public consciousness.

Powerful weapons

Okajima and I are sitting on the roof terrace of a high-rise hotel next to the Peace Memorial Park, about as near to the actual point of detonation of the A-bomb as it is possible to get. At the moment the bomb went critical, anything and anyone located under the hypocentre would have been instantly vaporised. At 8.16am, Okajima’s great-grandfather was a few hundred metres away, on a horse on his way to Hiroshima Castle on the north side of town where the local air raid command was located. He was one of the first victims of the new age of the atom. “For me personally, ever since I learned that my great-grandfather died because of the atomic bomb and that my grandparents are survivors, I have felt that the atomic bomb is something deeply connected to me,” she says.

The bomb announced to Japan and the world that the US had the ability to sweep whole cities off the map, far from its home shores, with a single aircraft. After the initial shock of sudden mass death on a scale never seen before, the death rate continued to rise in the days, weeks and months after, as more and more people succumbed to radiation poisoning and burns without understanding why. There have been many more victims of radiation exposure since 1945, including Enrico Fermi, the Italian-American physicist who helped build the Hiroshima bomb and constructed the world’s first functioning reactor at the University of Chicago as part of the Manhattan Project.

Fermi died from stomach cancer nine years after Hiroshima, likely from radiation exposure during his experiments. He lived just long enough to see the US embark on a project that President Eisenhower christened “Atoms for Peace”. Allies around the world were encouraged to build nuclear power stations with American technology, showing that US nuclear development was a force for good, powering the post-war economic booms. Japan was one of the biggest buyers, and at its peak had 54 operable nuclear reactors. Anxiety about nuclear conflict was glossed over with technological utopianism about the limitless energy of the atom.

Mayu Seto is an anti-nuclear weapons campaigner in Hiroshima with Peace Culture Village – an NGO that helps people perpetuate the memory of the nuclear attack through education and peace dialogue. Her grandparents were in Nagasaki when the second bomb hit. She is one of many campaigners and descendants of survivors who fear that rising global tensions are leading us once more to the brink of nuclear attack. “Look what a single bomb was capable of doing 80 years ago. Now there are even more powerful weapons,” she says. “We imagine something like that could not happen again, but the risk of repeating [a nuclear attack] is high.” Activists have begun to talk about Gurobaru Hibakusha – global Hibakusha – extending not just to victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but to all victims of nuclear testing, accidents and contamination.

Nuclear meltdown

These include the victims of civil nuclear disaster. Sixty-five years, seven months, 233 days and six hours after uranium met uranium in the barrel of the Hiroshima bomb, something emerged from the Pacific depths that would re-awaken Japan’s nuclear anxieties. On 11 March 2011, the Great East Japan Earthquake – the fourth most powerful quake ever recorded – struck off the coast of Fukushima prefecture. Peaking at nine on the Richter scale, the shockwaves created a tsunami that raced toward the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant located a few hours north of Tokyo.

At the plant, earthquake sensors triggered an automatic shutdown of the three active nuclear reactors. But even with fission stopped, the reactor was still at operating temperature. Less than an hour after the shutdown, the plant was hit by the first of several tsunami waves, the largest of which was 15 metres. It began a chain of events that resulted in a meltdown, followed by a non-nuclear hydrogen explosion that ripped through the reactor halls, sending plumes of radioactive particles across the countryside and out to sea.

I meet Miyuki Ishii in her hometown of Futaba, near the power station. She was at home when the power plant failed, getting ready to see her grandchildren. “Through the glass I saw buses and people wearing protective [hazmat] suits. I was shocked. I couldn’t imagine it would be a hydrogen explosion or anything like that,” she tells me. We’re having tea at one of the government-sponsored retail spaces that have recently opened in the town, now habitable again after a decade-long restoration operation, involving the demolition of buildings, deep cleaning and topsoil removal.

Whole villages had vanished under the wave that day, while the rescue operation was hampered by the radiation danger. Ishii tells me how her daughter-in-law, a teacher at a primary school on the coast north of the power plant, sprinted a whole kilometre with her class to higher ground, saving their lives. Like thousands of others, Ishii became an internal refugee, moving from place to place as the scale of the contamination became clear. She left Futaba with her mother and sister, but both died of age-related natural causes before they could return. Now she lives in a new house by the rebuilt railway station and town square. “I feel like I’m carrying their feelings and wishes,” she says.

The 20km exclusion zone declared after the disaster has slowly shrunk as the cleanup has progressed. The towns around the old power station are now habitable again, with doses as low as 0.1 microsievert per hour, around the same as background radiation worldwide. The Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), which owns the plant itself, is responsible for cleaning up and decommissioning the reactors. Meanwhile, the Japanese government has poured billions into cleanup and revitalisation efforts, repopulating the area and developing a renewables industry.

The energy challenge

Japan is one of the world’s most energy intensive economies and its huge electricity demand is a big challenge. The loss of the six reactors at Daiichi and the decision to shut down the nearby Fukushima Daiini station (daiichi and daiini are Japanese for one and two) meant that the Tokyo megalopolis had to rely on coal power to keep its trains moving and air conditioning units running. After the disaster, Tokyo suffered rolling blackouts. Japan’s renewables progress is far behind other developed economies, but Fukushima prefecture is now a lab for low-carbon technologies. Abandoned rice paddies have been repurposed as solar farms, and on the ridge behind Fukushima Daiichi, the biggest wind farm in the country has just come online.

In Namie, another of the towns most affected by the evacuation and radioactive contamination, Takatoshi Shiga proudly shows off a recently constructed hydrogen plant that uses solar panels to create zero-carbon hydrogen for use in fuel cells. He is younger than most of the returnees. “The image of Fukushima remains that of the tsunami and the nuclear accident. That hasn’t really changed. But now, as we undertake renewable energy projects, we want the world to see this region in a new light,” he says.

Despite these efforts in solar and wind, today Japan has the lowest renewables share of any of the G7 countries – around 20 per cent, made up largely of hydro schemes. Responding to increasing energy demands, and the need to move away from fossil fuels, the Japanese government announced plans early this year to reopen and extend the lives of nuclear reactors in other areas of the country. Prior to the Fukushima disaster Japan had 54 operable reactors, all of which were taken offline after the disaster for safety checks. By 2025, 14 had been restarted and the Tokyo government has now also committed to building new generation reactors starting from the 2030s. Public opposition has been high, but Japan is the world’s second biggest importer of fossil fuel, and it is keen to change this to combat climate change and reduce reliance on Chinese and Russian sources of energy.

Tomoko Kobayashi is one of the many residents of the Fukushima coast who believe it is important to keep the memory of the disaster alive. In 2016, she reopened a traditional Japanese inn in the town of Odaka, on the northern edge of the former exclusion zone – one of the first tourist sites in the area. Guests are often in town to take guided tours of the Daiichi and its damaged reactor buildings. As you walk into the inn, one of the first things you notice is a Geiger counter strapped to the wall by the door.

“I feel that continuing to observe and learn from this experience is important to me personally,” Kobayashi tells me. “Ideally, I think we don’t need nuclear power. So I’d prefer we find ways not to rely on electricity so much, or pursue other energy options, but that hasn’t really happened [across Japan].” Other residents of Odaka took the compensation packages offered by TEPCO and built lives elsewhere. But Kobayashi, like many elderly returnees, wanted to reclaim her hometown from the disaster and spend her final years there. The corridors of the inn are adorned with pictures of what in Japan has come to be known as the “Triple Disaster” of the earthquake, tsunami and meltdown, as well as posters from Ukraine showing solidarity with victims of the Chernobyl disaster and – more recently – the Russian invasion. Kobayashi herself has made several trips to the site on the Ukraine-Belarus border where a Soviet designed reactor experienced a meltdown in 1986.

Two kinds of threat

Meanwhile, the cleanup in Japan is not over. One of the major challenges is contamination of the coastal farmland. Millions of bags of contaminated earth were collected and buried around the plant. After 30 years they will be dug up and moved again, but the destination is unknown as Japan still has no long-term storage solution for highly radioactive waste. It is one of the reasons some in Japan, like Kobayashi, are against any new nuclear power plants being built at all. Yet, as climate change continues to knock at the door, exacerbating Japan’s vulnerability to climate shocks and natural disaster, the risks of nuclear accidents are – in the eyes of many – still outweighed by the benefits of carbon-free energy.

Eishige Konno has experienced both challenges. He returned home to his farm a few miles from the plant when the soil was declared safe again in 2017. But now he faces another problem, around heatwaves and drought. “We had ‘dead rice’, you know, white centred grains and that kind of thing,” he says, describing how the unusual heat dries out the interior of the rice whilst it is still in the ground, causing it to crack. “It’s something you feel in your skin,” he says. “It doesn’t snow at all anymore … And maybe it’s because of what they call global warming.”

It’s a difficult task, to compare these two kinds of threat. The scientists working on the Manhattan Project had feared there was a small possibility that nuclear fission could ignite the atmosphere. It never came to pass, but climate scientists have calculated that the amount of energy being trapped in the world’s oceans due to global heating is equivalent to the heat produced by five Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs going off, per second, over the past three decades. As the world barrels towards two degrees of global warming the urgency of ending our addiction to coal and oil grows ever stronger.

Futaba once had a sign in the main street saying “Nuclear Energy for a Bright Future”. It was removed by the local mayor after the disaster – he could not bear to see it. The sign now resides in a museum. Before entering the Fukushima Daiichi plant to see the damaged reactor buildings, visitors encounter a very different message: a mea culpa by its operators. “Our confidence was in fact arrogance,” reads the text. Persuading the public that nuclear energy can be safe, and that recovery is possible, is key to the sector’s offer to slash carbon. The utopian refrain of nuclear power for a bright future has been replaced by the new realism of nuclear power for a liveable one. But nobody is under any illusions about how easy it will be to convince the Japanese public, given the nation’s history.

Any moment of supreme human suffering deserves to be commemorated and remembered, but only afterwards do we see them for what they are. Hiroshima and Fukushima are very different tragedies, yet they can both tell us about our common future. Both offer lessons in how to recover without forgetting, of how to renew without obscuring the enormity of what has happened. As we confront the spectre of climate change, and the transformation of our world by our own hands, that is perhaps the most important message to carry with us.

This article is from New Humanist's Autumn 2025 issue. Subscribe now.

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: Today I’d like to pause a moment to revisit one of my most controversial takes from the past. I’m talking, of course, about my video detailing the scientific evidence that Tylenol is dangerous and …

The vast domain of space is easy to ignore. It’s up there, invisible, while our headlines focus on billionaire rocket launches. But every single one of us has a vested interest. We need to act to protect space from becoming a site of warfare and commercial competition.

How do we develop our relationship with space so that it benefits all of humanity? We asked five diverse voices for their thoughts.

Our modern world would not function without space. It touches almost every aspect of our lives. You are connected to it from the moment you wake up and look at your smartphone – just as you are in the supermarket, the hospital, or using the satnav in your car. We need satellites for weather forecasts, but also to know about transport conditions, climate change and crop health. We need them for marine communications and navigation, as well as for the internet and hospital scanners.

Imagine taking all that away. Our lives would be poorer, our lifetimes shorter, our countries less secure. In tens of thousands of years, if human history is still being written, future historians will regard our world wars, international conflicts and economic systems as footnotes. What they will mark is the first human landing on the Moon.

Space is a trillion-dollar industry, and it’s growing. Ultimately, the money spent on space returns to our economy, spent on salaries and in companies that develop useful technology. Those involved in space often take their expertise, and technology, into non-space areas and fertilise the high-end economy from which we all benefit. President George Bush recognised this on the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, praising the Apollo programme as the best return on an investment since Leonardo da Vinci purchased a sketchpad.

For example, studying people who have lived in space benefits us all. When you are weightless your body goes through what is essentially a rapid ageing process. Your bone density and muscles atrophy. In space your microbiome is altered, as well as your eyesight, and immune and endocrine systems. Scientists have developed counter-measures to combat this. Studying these effects on the fit individuals that go into space is giving us valuable insights into the ageing process, as well as degenerative disease.

Medicines can also be produced in weightless conditions that are of a much higher purity than can be achieved on Earth. It’s the same with metal alloys, optical fibres and semiconductors. It will be a long time before we have factories in space, but the information gathered improves manufacturing on our planet.

There are riches to be mined in space, especially the metals and minerals found in asteroids – chunks of rock ranging in size from centimetres to hundreds of miles. In just a small asteroid there is more platinum and rare earth elements than have ever been mined on Earth, and they are much closer to the surface than they are on our planet. Preparatory work is being carried out on mining concepts and technologies. This is a task that will take decades, but it’s possible that the coming century will see the asteroid barons becoming the richest people who have ever lived.

That’s not to say that space is only for the elite. Space inspires, too – especially the young who foster dreams, not only of travelling in space, but also being involved in sending probes to the planets, or in exploring the universe. In the next few years we will walk on the Moon again. Sometime in the next decade a schoolchild will be able to view a science lesson broadcast from the moonbase. They will hear how water-ice is being mined and will become the rocket fuel to drive humans further into outer space. I don’t know who they are, but I do know the first person to walk on Mars is probably in their teens now and has a passion for science.

The return to the Moon and the journey to Mars will focus our minds, but also expand our technologies in ways we cannot predict. The first footprint on the red planet will be a step forward for all.

Much of the world as our ancestors knew it seems to be ending, as a result of multiple crises impacting living ecosystems and the environments they rely on. With widespread crisis fatigue, it is difficult to draw attention to yet another existential challenge: the steady brightening of our night skies, as a result of human-generated light pollution and an orbital space above us that is increasingly overcrowded with reflective satellites. Recent studies have indicated a year-to-year rise in night-sky brightness of almost 10 per cent since 2011.

This shift in the continuum of the Earth-space environment has widespread implications for the planet and life as we know it. Dark and quiet skies free from damaging levels of human-made light pollution and spectrum interference are essential for professional astronomers and many other scientific disciplines, as well as for some military and commercial initiatives. They are also essential for human and ecological health, including the migratory and circadian rhythms of living ecosystems.

Beyond these tangible ways the planet relies on darkness, the skies and space represent our shared intangible heritage. Earlier this year, my colleagues Dana Zartner (University of San Francisco), John Barentine (Dark Sky Consulting) and I published an article in the journal Environs, sharing new legal strategies to protect the night sky, based on the rights of nature, individual rights and community rights. These include the right to health, freedom to engage in cultural traditions, the rights of Indigenous peoples and freedom of religion, as well as the rights of future generations. We also put forward a strategy to protect dark skies through established avenues for Indigenous rights – such as the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples – as part of honouring diverse sky traditions worldwide.

Cultures across the world’s continents and seas rely on the interconnected web of stars and celestial objects for their millenia-old sky traditions, storytelling, timekeeping practices and their very origin story. This includes the wayfinders spanning the many islands and nations of Oceania who travel thousands of miles of ocean using traditional non-instrument navigation of the stars, and wind and ocean currents.

As we expand our presence away from Earth environments, we export not only material payloads but also our legal-policy systems. In a recent article in Nature Astronomy, myself and others called on Nasa to consult with Indigenous communities on how we interact with space environments – including the abandoning of waste on the Moon, and the export of cremated human remains there, which is viewed by many Indigenous nations as an act of cultural desecration. [The ashes of Eugene Shoemaker were interred on the Moon in 1999; a 2024 attempt to inter the ashes of 70 people failed because of a technical fault.]

Whether or not you view the stars as your spiritual ancestors or as the crucible for our very atoms, all humans have a timeless relationship with the skies above us. John Barentine and I recently coined the neologism “Noctalgia” to express “sky grief” for the accelerating loss of the home environment of our shared skies. To our amazement, the term has become the theme of numerous art exhibits worldwide, referenced in dozens of books and podcasts – even appearing in poetry, pop songs and black metal tracks. Many of us experience grief and numbness from numerous global crises, yet this collective peat bog of shared grief has led to renewed gratitude and creativity. Noctalgia is an interdisciplinary global example of this that expresses love of dark skies and humanity’s growing feelings of collective loss of our oldest home.

Physicists are familiar with the seemingly profound contradictions of nature’s laws: that elementary particles live in a rich integrative space of being waves and particles, with only an act of measurement forcing an outcome of either one; or that the physics of the very small (atomic and nuclear laws) determine the physics of the large (how stars shine, the fate of the universe). Paradoxes can apparently coexist while representing the scientific heart of reality; perhaps our relationship with and increasing occupation of the skies and space also contain paradoxes.

Dark skies invite our integrative, most ancient selves – as scientists, storytellers, practitioners of cultural sky traditions, artists and explorers. The experience of the sky is deeply humanising and a sacred aspect of being human. So, perhaps like the electron, we need not choose, but instead develop models of space exploration that honour all ways of knowing our shared, sacred skies: through science and culture, grief and creativity, and respect for the relational and economic potential of the space environment.

You may have come across the idea of “the tragedy of the commons”. It refers to the way individual actors (a person, a country) can harm what is supposed to be a shared resource by appropriating far more than a fair portion of it. Traditional English villages offer a classic example: There is an area of land called a “common”, which all villagers have a right to use for recreation, to graze livestock, cut turf, and the like. If one of them overgrazes the land or takes all the turf, it harms not only the interests of others, but also inevitably the common itself, as the pasture becomes depleted. Both implicitly and explicitly, we hold assumptions about what humanity as a whole is entitled to regard as a common inheritance: implicitly, wildlife; explicitly, the open sea and Antarctica, which are covered by international treaties.

For millennia the inaccessibility of the Moon, asteroids and Mars meant that no question was raised as to whether any person or country owns or has exclusive rights to all or part of them. Instead by default they have been regarded, if anyone thought of the matter, as the common possession of humanity as a whole – if indeed “possession” is the right word; at the very least it is accurate to say that humanity has a commonly held interest in them. But that implicit agreement is increasingly under strain, with the rapid expansion into space of public and private interests.

Can the tragedy of the commons be averted in space? What if resources are found that might trigger new versions of gold rushes, new urgencies of occupation and possession? What will happen when the establishment of bases, and the commencement of commercial operations, mining and more detailed on-site exploration, take place? How important will the Moon and Mars become?

The Outer Space Treaty was signed in 1967 in an effort to avoid conflict in space, and is one of the silver linings of the Cold War. One of its notable features is its constantly iterated focus on peace. By this of course was meant military peace, the absence of hot war, of actual violent conflict. Proponents and drafters of the treaty doubtless believed that observance of it would be a confidence-building measure. For example, if Soviet astronauts rescued endangered US astronauts in outer space, or vice versa, it would help to reduce tensions and foster more fraternal relations. The treaty encourages cooperation and open access to scientific exploration of space and celestial bodies. This is obviously good. And it prohibits putting military bases on the Moon and Mars, or testing weapon systems there. This is also obviously good – although there is no guarantee that one or more parties will not at some point violate the Treaty’s terms.

However, the Treaty does not take the possibilities of commercial conflict into proper consideration. It tries to make the governments of the private agencies’ home nations responsible for their actions. But this seems rather a vain hope in an age of mighty international corporations which, here on Earth, are practically a law unto themselves.

If anything of economic significance is found in space, it will trigger competition, followed by the risk of conflict. This is the nub of everything we know of the human story, almost to the point of being a law of history. Add the thought that it is more, rather than less, probable that there will be things found in space that profit-seekers and governments on Earth will want to claim – the minerals and water-ice already detected on the Moon support this expectation – and we have the ingredients of the anticipated toxic brew.

The task that faces the world is finding the “something” that will avoid this outcome – that will make treaties and agreements effective, and space and Earth itself thereby secure. Whatever it is, it will involve seeing that the self-interest of humanity as a whole requires that partisan self-interest – the self-interest of sections of humanity in opposition to other sections of humanity – has to end. This will take maturity and wisdom, neither of which has evolved to a sufficient degree so far, though the aspirations of the Outer Space Treaty encourage both.

Theodor Adorno memorably said that humankind has “grown cleverer but not wiser” over time, as demonstrated by its development of the spear into the guided missile, using increased technological cleverness to continue the lunacy of war. His remark identifies the key respect in which humanity’s self-management has to improve – to put it bluntly, by growing up. If we fail, the result will be the tragedy of the commons not just in space, but at home on Earth.

Human attitudes towards space have included an element of fear for a very long time. Back in the 1970s, astronomers Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe even argued that viruses were unwelcome space visitors. Illness from above. Components of the (debunked) theory have since made it into Covid-19 scepticism. Meanwhile, one of few known prehistoric myths, from more than 10,000 years ago, concerns the cosmic hunt played out from the Big Dipper across to Orion. It warns that the world may end if the wrong things happen in the heavens.

Many people today believe that this has already happened. They think we are going into space too soon, or in the wrong way, as colonisers. Plus, our space programmes seem to be under the control of billionaire elites: Elon Musk, head of SpaceX, or Jeff Bezos – who caused such a stir recently by sending the singer Katy Perry up in one of his Blue Origin rockets. Back in 2021, the climate activist Greta Thunberg endorsed this brand of critique, helping to produce a satirical advert calling on the 1 per cent to abandon the Earth that they had ruined for a pristine and welcoming Mars.

Shortly after it appeared online, I was asked by an interviewer about the real-life prospects of such a cosmic escape. My first reaction was to think that they had lost the plot. I was wrong. What was emerging was not the belief that the elites were actually planning to leave us all behind. Rather, it was a modern myth, an idea that billionaires love space because they would happily abandon Earth for Mars, if only they could.

This marks an important socio-political shift: the fusion of space scepticism with a populist critique of elites, which has finally propelled the former from the margins. When India achieved its first landing on the Moon in 2023, critics argued that the money would have been better spent on the country’s poor. Sensible questions were asked. But there was also a sense of déjà vu as perennial critics shifted from one complaint to another, seemingly stuck on the idea that space programmes are simply a bad idea.

Anti-elite populism is now routinely used to rationalise a deeper and older human unease. The public have now watched decades of films in which some variant of “The Company” dominates space, while their control of advanced technologies allows them to subvert democracy on Earth – all while risking the lives of space miners off-world in the pursuit of mineral wealth. Often some kind of alien biology is also being weaponised.

The fear of control by The Company has recently been fuelled by real headlines – like President Trump threatening to cancel SpaceX contracts and Musk responding by threatening to cripple Nasa. But this public sound and fury bears little relation to the complex realities unfolding in space. Private companies such as SpaceX may talk up their independence, but in reality they are dependent upon state programmes. And commercially viable asteroid mining will require robotics, rather than a mass proletarian labour force.

But science-fiction-derived ideas still shape public narratives – including the disturbing rise of belief in alien visitation. Around a fifth of UK adults now believe that the Earth has probably been visited. The figures rise to a third in the US, where there is greater proximity to space programmes, up from about a fifth in the 1990s. The recurring theme of recent Congressional inquiries into Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (previously “UFOs”) is that secretive government, commercial and scientific elites know about alien sightings, technology and recovered bodies, but have kept the people in the dark.

There are perfectly sensible criticisms that we can make about space programs. The Space Shuttle was over-engineered and unnecessarily dangerous. Launch sites tend to be slapped down in politically sensitive Indigenous areas. And nobody knows how to set up fair systems for infrastructure and eventual resource extraction at the same time as protecting the unique environments of the Moon and Mars. These are real problems, but they are being marginalised by misplaced scepticisms and political fictions.

There may always be fear-driven narratives about space, just as there may always be populist conspiracy theories about the powerful. Humankind is geared, by evolution, to worry about the unknown. But we have also evolved to extend our reach – and, in doing so, improve human lives in countless and often unanticipated ways. Reaching modestly into space is a way of exercising that capacity. It is not a trap set by anyone. And it is not something that we should fear.

In April, I joined leaders from across Africa in Cairo, Egypt, to celebrate the inauguration of the African Space Agency. The agency is the result of over a decade of policy formulation and continent-wide coordination, convened under the African Union. At the celebratory conference, over 20 representatives from African countries shared updates about their national initiatives in the space sector. I was there as an aerospace engineer and professor at MIT. I design and implement practical projects, in collaboration with leaders from the African space sector, that apply satellite technology to sustainable development.

When people hear the term “space technology”, they tend to picture rocket launches, or maybe missions to the Moon. As a result, some may believe that activity in space is expensive and potentially wasteful.

Other types of space activity with strong social impact tend to get less attention – including communication, positioning and Earth observation (through satellites), microgravity research and human space flight (where researchers on space stations study how the human body, plants and animals change when experiencing freefall while orbiting the Earth), as well as fundamental scientific research and technology transfer (where inventions developed for space exploration, such as water filtration systems, are adapted for use on Earth).

These space activities enable the infrastructure of our society: global communications, energy, transportation, banking, water management, agriculture and disaster response systems. And they are not only used by wealthier countries, but by nations around the world.

There are barriers to the adoption of space technology for countries that have less experience operating and designing it. But as these technologies develop and expand, the space community is becoming increasingly global. In 2010, I visited eight countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East to find out why they started national space programmes and how they trained new engineers to design satellites. For many countries, their space programmes are an integral part of their plans to achieve sustainable development, and specifically in more recent years their strategy to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a set of commitments launched by the United Nations in 2015.

The SDGs aimed to create a global vision for caring for people, advancing prosperity and protecting the planet. I have recently collaborated with the governments of Ghana and Angola on projects that illustrate practical ways that space technology can be used by leaders to support a local vision of sustainability. In both projects, the national space agency worked with the national statistical service, one of the key government offices curating data on SDG progress, to both track and advance elements of the SDGs.

In Angola, I worked with the National Space Programme and the National Institute of Statistics, among other agencies, to design and build a Drought Decision Support System that provides updates every eight days on locations in the country that experience drought. The system uses Nasa satellite data that measures soil moisture, alongside local data about socioeconomic vulnerability. National and local leaders can quickly ask, where is drought happening today? Is it similar to past years? And is it happening in a location that is vulnerable due to economic activity, demographics or other social variables?

In Ghana, I worked on a project with the Ghana Space Science and Technology Institute and the Ghana Statistical Service to build a system to make satellite-based maps that focus on conserving biodiversity. The maps answer key questions for Ghana, including how much land is being used for agriculture, mining, urban expansion and forest conservation. They also allow Ghana to produce satellite-based estimates for several of the SDG reports requested by the United Nations, showing how much land is forested and to what extent biodiversity areas are being protected and conserved.

These are just two examples of the many efforts across Africa and beyond that are bringing the benefits of space technology to the everyday work of governments, companies, nonprofits and universities to support sustainable development. Over the past 20 years, I have seen the global space community expand in geographic participation and the focus on societal impact.

Despite this progress, many people are not aware of these developments. It is time that we dispel the myth that space activity must be expensive, wasteful and led by a few countries, and increase awareness of the innovative uses of space technology in every corner of the world.

This article is from New Humanist's Autumn 2025 issue. Subscribe now.

I am going to perform a new show at the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe Festival called ‘The World’s Most Boring Card Trick.’

The show has its roots in the notion that creativity often comes from doing the opposite to everyone else. Almost every Festival performer strives to create an interesting show, and so I have put together a genuinely dull offering. Because of this, I am urging people not to attend and telling anyone who does turn up that they can leave at any point. Everyone who displays extraordinary willpower and stays until the end receives a rare certificate of completion.  Do you have what it takes to endure the show and earn your certificate?  

I have identified the seven steps that are central to almost every card trick and devised the most boring version of each stage. Along the way, we explore the psychology of boredom, examine why it is such a most powerful emotion, and discover how our need for constant stimulation is destroying the world.

It will seem like the longest show on the Fringe and success is an empty auditorium. There will only be one performance of the show (20^th August, 15.25 in the Voodoo Rooms). If you want to put your willpower to the test and experience a highly unusual show, please come along!

As ever with my Fringe shows, it’s part of PBH’s wonderful Free Fringe, and so seats are allocated on a ‘first come, first served’ basis. I look forward to seeing you there and us facing boredom together.

Around 2010, psychologists started to think about how some of their findings might be the result of several problems with their methods, such as not publishing experiments with chance results, failing to report all of their data, carrying out multiple analyses, and so on.

To help minimise these problems, in 2013 it was proposed that researchers submit their plans for an experiment to a journal before they collected any data. This became known as a Registered Report and it’s a good idea.

At the time, most psychologists didn’t realise that parapsychology was ahead of the curve. In the mid 1970s, two parapsychologists (Martin Johnson and Sybo Schouten from the University of Utrecht) were concerned about the same issues, and ran the same type of scheme for over 15 years in the European Journal of Parapsychology!

I recently teamed up with Professors Caroline Watt and Diana Kornbrot to examine the impact of this early scheme. We discovered that around 28% of unregistered papers in the European Journal of Parapsychology reported positive effects compared to just 8% of registered papers – quite a difference! You can read the full paper here.

On Tuesday I spoke about this work at a University of Hertfordshire conference on Open Research (thanks to Han Newman for the photo). Congratulations to my colleagues (Mike Page, George Georgiou, and Shazia Akhtar) for organising such a great event.

As part of the talk, I wanted to show a photograph of Martin Johnson, but struggled to find one. After several emails to parapsychologists across the world, my colleague Eberhard Bauer (University of Freiburg) found a great photograph of Martin from a meeting of the Parapsychological Association in 1968!

It was nice to finally give Martin the credit he deserves and to put a face to the name. For those of you who are into parapsychology, please let me know if you can identify any of the other faces in the photo!

Oh, and we have also recently written an article about how parapsychology was ahead of mainstream psychology in other areas (including eyewitness testimony) in The Psychologist here.

I am a big fan of magic history and a few years ago I started to investigate the life and work of a remarkable Scottish conjurer called Harry Marvello.

Harry enjoyed an amazing career during the early nineteen hundreds. He staged pioneering seaside shows in Edinburgh’s Portobello and even built a theatre on the promenade (the building survives and now houses a great amusement arcade). Harry then toured Britain with an act called The Silver Hat, which involved him producing a seemingly endless stream of objects from an empty top hat.

The act relied on a novel principle that has since been used by lots of famous magicians. I recently arranged for one of Harry’s old Silver Hat posters to be restored and it looks stunning.

The Porty Light Box is a wonderful art space based in Portobello. Housed in a classic British telephone box, it hosts exhibitions and even lights up at night to illuminate the images. Last week I gave a talk on Harry at Portobello Library and The Porty Light Box staged a special exhibition based around the Silver Hat poster.

Here are some images of the poster the Porty Light Box. Enjoy! The project was a fun way of getting magic history out there and hopefully it will encourage others to create similar events in their own local communities.

My thanks to Peter Lane for the lovely Marvello image and poster, Stephen Wheatley from Porty Light Box for designing and creating the installation, Portobello Library for inviting me to speak and Mark Noble for being a great custodian of Marvello’s old theatre and hotel (he has done wonderful work restoring an historic part of The Tower).

I have recently carried out some detective work into one of my favourite paranormal studies.

It all began with an article that I co-wrote for The Psychologist about how research into the paranormal is sometimes ahead of psychology. In the article, we describe a groundbreaking study into eyewitness testimony that was conducted in the late 1880s by a paranormal researcher and magician named S. J. Davey (1887).

This work involved inviting people to fake séances and then asking them to describe their experience. Davey showed that these accounts were often riddled with errors and so couldn’t be trusted. Modern-day researchers still cite this pioneering work (e.g., Tompkins, 2019) and it was the springboard for my own studies in the area (Wiseman et al., 1999, 2003).

Three years after conducting his study, Davey died from typhoid fever aged just 27. Despite the pioneering and influential nature of Davey’s work, surprisingly little is known about his tragically short life or appearance. I thought that that was a shame and so decided to find out more about Davey.

I started by searching several academic and magic databases but discovered nothing. However, Censuses from 1871 and 1881 proved more informative. His full name was Samuel John Davey, he was born in Bayswater in 1864, and his father was called Samuel Davey. His father published two books, one of which is a huge reference text for autograph collectors that runs to over 400 pages.

I managed to get hold of a copy and discovered that it contained an In Memoriam account of Samuel John Davey’s personality, interests, and life. Perhaps most important of all, it also had a wonderful woodcut of the man himself along with his signature.

I also discovered that Davey was buried in St John the Evangelist in Shirley. I contacted the church, and they kindly send me a photograph of his grave.

Researchers always stand on the shoulders of previous generations and I think it’s important that we celebrate those who conducted this work. Over one hundred years ago, Davey carried out a pioneering study that still inspires modern-day psychologists. Unfortunately, he had become lost to time. Now, we know more information about him and can finally put a face to the name.

I have written up the entire episode, with lots more information, in the latest volume of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. If anyone has more details about Davey then please feel free to contact me!

My thanks to Caroline Watt, David Britland, Wendy Wall and Anne Goulden for their assistance.

References

Davey, S. J. (1887). The possibilities of malobservation, &c., from a practical point of view. JSPR, 36(3), 8-44.

Tompkins, M. L. (2019). The spectacle of illusion: Magic, the paranormal & the complicity of the mind. Thames & Hudson.

Wiseman, R., Jeffreys, C., Smith, M. & Nyman, A. (1999). The psychology of the seance, from experiment to drama. Skeptical Inquirer, 23(2), 30-32.

Wiseman, R., Greening, E., & Smith, M. (2003). Belief in the paranormal and suggestion in the seance room. British Journal of Psychology, 94(3), 285-297.

Delighted to say that tonight at 8pm I will be presenting a 60 min BBC Radio 4 programme on mind magic, focusing on the amazing David Berglas. After being broadcast, it will be available on BBC Sounds.

Here is the full description:

Join psychologist and magician Professor Richard Wiseman on a journey into the strange world of mentalism or mind magic, and meet a group of entertainers who produce the seemingly impossible on demand. Discover “The Amazing” Joseph Dunninger, Britain’s Maurice Fogel (“the World’s Greatest Mind Reader”), husband and wife telepathic duo The Piddingtons, and the self-styled “Psycho-Magician”, Chan Canasta.

These entertainers all set the scene for one man who redefined the genre – the extraordinary David Berglas. This International Man of Mystery astonished the world with incredible stunts – hurtling blindfold down the famous Cresta toboggan run in Switzerland, levitating a table on the streets of Nairobi, and making a piano vanish before hundreds of live concert goers. Berglas was a pioneer of mass media magic, constantly appeared on the BBC radio and TV, captivated audiences the world over and inspired many modern-day marvels, including Derren Brown.

For six decades, Berglas entertained audiences worldwide on stage and television, mentoring hundreds of young acts and helping to establish mentalism or mind magic as one of the most popular forms of magical entertainment, helping to inspire the likes of Derren Brown, Dynamo and David Blaine. The originator of dozens of illusions still performed by celebrated performers worldwide, Berglas is renowned for his version of a classic illusion known as Any Card at Any Number or ACAAN, regarded by many as the ‘holy grail’ of magic tricks and something that still defies explanation.

With the help of some recently unearthed archive recordings, Richard Wiseman, a member of the Inner Magic Circle, and a friend of David Berglas, explores the surreal history of mentalism, its enduring popularity and the life and legacy of the man many regard as Master of the Impossible.

Featuring interviews with Andy Nyman, Derren Brown, Stephen Frayne, Laura London, Teller, Chris Woodward, Martin T Hart and Marvin Berglas.

Image credit: Peter Dyer Photographs

check, 1, 2…is this thing on? hi everyone! it’s been a while.

Someone contacted me hoping to find young atheists who might be interested in being part of a new series. I’m not particularly interested in having my mug on TV, but I would love to have some great personalities represent atheism on the show, so I offered to repost his email on my blog: My name […]

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