Dyer: Humanity is a mixed bag. Don't despair

Last Sunday, a Falcon Heavy rocket delivered the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope onto a direct transit trajectory to its permanent home at the Lagrange Two Point (L2) 1.5 million kilometres from Earth. In 100 days, it will reach its station, power up and start observing the universe. Astronomers will use it to try to understand dark matter, which makes up most of the mass in the universe (but some say may not even exist). It is expected to find as many as 100,000 new exoplanets circling other stars, and may be able to spot ones even smaller than Mars. It will test a new technology, a coronagraph, that may one day be able to detect life on some of those planets by analysing the light reflected from them. It would be nice to have a better answer to scientist Enrico Fermi's famous question, 'Where is everybody?' The Nancy Roman telescope reflects well on the human race and particularly on the U.S., which has spent much money over several generations to find scientific answers to such questions. But it cannot be denied that there is another side to the coin. We are marking a couple of anniversaries this month. It has now been 4 1/2 years since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched an unprovoked surprise invasion of Ukraine, and half a year since U.S. president Donald Trump launched an unprovoked surprise attack on Iran. The anniversary device is a bit shabby, admittedly, but justified because the other parallels between the men are so strong. Both launched attacks in the confident, but utterly ignorant expectation victory would come in a few weeks at most. Both are now trapped in wars they cannot win. Quibbles are always possible about such sweeping statements. Putin certainly would lose power and probably his life if he gave up his war now, but Trump could still 'declare victory' and walk away intact. Only his overweening pride keeps him looking desperately for a 'win' that's not available. History offers hundreds of examples of such behaviour. If you include the numberless little groups of hunter-gatherers of our pre-history, you'd probably find hundreds of thousands of scaled-down examples of the same sort of behaviour. In fact, primatologists are now finding similar behaviours, even the same apparent psychology, in our closest biological relatives, the chimpanzees (who also fight wars). But let's stick with humans, and admit a great deal of our culture still derives from our long hunter-gatherer past. Well, of course it does! How could it ever have been different? It's perfectly legitimate to visualize Trump and Putin as scantily clad warriors with bones in their noses, as long as you remember there's an invisible bone in your nose, too. Moving from tiny bands to big civilizations was probably a good idea, but there was bound to be a lot to sort out. Our own now-almost-global civilization is in a multi-generational transition from what you might call Late Hunter-Gatherer (human sacrifice, slavery, nuclear weapons) to something more appropriate to our current state of knowledge and social skills. It's only natural that almost everything comes as a mixed bag. Like the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, for instance. It began as a U.S. National Reconnaissance Office project for a new spy satellite practically able to read a newspaper from orbit. A number of prototypes were built before the project was cancelled in 2005. Soon after, the NRO told NASA it had some high-resolution optical telescope hardware available for free. NASA said yes, please, and $4 billion and 20 years later, there it is. Everything is mixed. Don't despair. Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist based in London, England and author of a new book about climate change, Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World's Climate Engineers.