SECOND THOUGHTS
ISSUE NO.5 APRIL 2022 ISSN 2719-6739
CHIEF EDITOR Dominika Front EDITING & PROOFREADING (alphabetically) Aleksandra Socha Dominika Front Helena Żegnałek Jagoda Szmytkowska Jan Ziętara Katarzyna Szyszka Maria Sawicka Patrycja Sanecka Piotr Miszczuk Sanaz Nouri Yousif Al-Naddaf ILLUSTRATORS (alphabetically): Jan Bodzioch (on pages: 1, 2, 3, 5, 9, 12, 13, 16, 17) Modesta Gorol (on pages: 10, 11, 18, 19, 25) Sanaz Nouri (on pages: 4, 6, 7 ,15, 21, 22, 23) COVER DESIGN Jan Bodzioch DESIGN AND LAYOUT Jan Bodzioch
Welcome back to Second Thoughts!
We started creating this issue in a different world. One in which we could go to sleep without fear, wake up without instantly checking the news, and in which we could anticipate the blooming freshness of Spring. While this outlook has been dramatically
means a harmonious universe. The cosmic perspective promises order but also complexity; it makes us ponder philosophical questions and inquisitively look for patterns in our daily lives. Within this boundless theme, we have found some
ruined by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we hope that reading our articles will help you find at least temporary refuge from the harsh reality. Acknowledging the gravity of the situation, we encourage you to a moment of self-care with us and embark on our space expedition.
space for everything: movies and astrology, newest technologies, and politics. You will learn what Mars rovers have to do with poetry, who stays behind the world’s most otherworldly films, and whether you should trust your horoscope. We’ve had our taste of spring on Earth, now let us see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars!
For our new issue, we chose the theme of “Cosmos”. The word, as originally used by Pythagoras in 6th Century BC, 1
Contents: 4
“My battery is low and it’s getting dark”
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Is it heaven yet?
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Cosmos: a fearful symmetry?
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An Unusual Bethlehem Star
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Don’t look up reviews of Don’t Look Up
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The Fault Is In Your Stars, or how Gen Z became obsessed with astrology
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The right wing is wrong
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He who controls the spice controls the universe
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Why it’s not your fault you’re late
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3 3
I can’t finish thi-
“My battery is low and it’s getting dark” “I am safe on Mars” is not something you’d expect to see on your Twitter feed without thinking it was a brand-new trend or a meme. And yet it was the update posted by the account for NASA’s Perseverance rover (@NASAPersevere) after it made its final descent to the Red Planet on 18th Feb 2021. Thousands of people were glued to their screens watching the countdown broadcast or reading the live c om m e n t a r y i n anticipation of a successful landing. Up until today, Perseverance tweets in the firstperson, keeping people updated with its exploits: photography, collecting rocks, and off-roading, which are even listed as its “hobbies” in its Twitter bio. But how did we get here – or more precisely – there? Since the 1970s, scientists have been sending spacecraft to Mars, all of which have different specialties. For example, orbiters fly around Mars collecting data on the weather and mapping; landers would perform experiments as far as their robotic arms would allow; and rovers have wheels and specialise in moving around. The
Natallia Valadzko
goals of NASA’s Mars Exploration program have been determining whether life ever arose on Mars, characterising the planet’s climate and geology, and preparing for human exploration. Perseverance is the fifth rover on Mars. But perhaps Opportunity, or Oppy, has proved to be the most renowned so far. Opportunity and Spirit, often referred to as brothers or twins, were launched in 2003 to land on Mars to traverse the Red Planet in search of signs of past life. The mission was planned to last 90 days. To everybody’s enormous surprise, the rover’s activity has far outlasted this period, reaching 14 years of operating on Mars. The Opportunity rover stopped communicating with Earth when a severe Mars-wide dust storm blanketed its location in June 2018. After more than a thousand commands to restore contact, engineers made their last attempt to revive Opportunity in February, 2019, but to no avail. One journalist tweeted his translation of the last data transmission sent by Opportunity in June 2018, as “My battery is low and it’s getting dark”. The 4
phrase struck a chord with the public, inspiring a period of mourning, artwork, and tributes to the memory of Opportunity. Among such poetic tributes are odes, elegies, an anonymous “eulogy”, and lyric poems – either addressed to Opportunity or written from its perspective. While reading these pieces, one is inevitably bound to experience a mix of emotions ranging from guilt to empathy and wonder about the relationship between humanity and a highly personified unmanned spacecraft. In these texts, the Mars rover is often described to be feeling frail, faint and cold. The sensory (and emotional) experience of a human gets attributed to Opportunity. It makes one think if we are even able to come up with the vocabulary to describe the experience of a machine but do so not in a human-centric way. John Updike’s poem “Duet on Mars” is written from the rover’s point of view. Opportunity’s utterance “They send me to see / These dreary rocks” is an example of this anthropomorphic language to talk of the rover’s 23 cameras, which serve a myriad of purposes – from navigation and hazard avoidance to identification of chemical elements. Not only does it “see” but it also speaks about seeing, which makes the image of a Mars rover even more humanlike. Similarly, an elegy by Courtney Tala alludes to Opportunity’s hearing in the lines “Did you hear? / Did you recognize each clever lyric?” The lyric mentioned actually refers to the last message NASA sent to Opportunity, which was Billie Holiday’s song “I’ll Be Seeing You”, as a tribute to the “dead” rover. Whatever the rover is receiving or sending cannot be easily called seeing, hearing or recognizing, as in fact we are
taking a conceptual shortcut to what is truly happening with raw data. “Because we could not go for them, they went for us” reads the eulogy, which calls Mars rovers “our eyes and hands” as they extend our reach to the Martian surface. The eulogy imagines a time when humans will be able to travel to Mars and offers an apology for not having come sooner. This sense of sentimental urgency makes one think of a human-machine entanglement, where leaving a part of oneself alone, deserted on an empty planet seems to require an apology. Another curious description is that of rovers as “our children”. The eulogy’s opening goes, “We sent our children up into the sky without expecting to see them again and gave them the most beautiful names.” And yet, who would send vulnerable children ahead, towards apparent danger and hostility? Does this mean that we project attributes selectively? Then why children? One might argue that it would only come as close as the relationship of the creator-creation: we built them, so they are our “children”. Looking ahead, we can only imagine what will happen to the bodies of numerous “dead” rovers when humans are finally sent to Mars. With Oppy in mind, will they perhaps be pronounced dead and buried, thus making us rethink what really counts as “death”? And if so, should we start treating a box of our old mobiles as a techno-cemetery? Or will they become historical monuments as “explorers”, be avoided as garbage piles on the outskirts of human life or perhaps harvested to build new objects? As for now, all eyes are on Perseverance.
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Right Now, Wrong Then
Is it heaven yet?
Jan Lubaczewski
Many called it one of the most beautiful films shot in the 20th century. During the production, the cinematographer was gradually going blind and couldn’t finish the film. Its director was so dissatisfied with the shooting that at some point he threw the script away and decided to improvise his way through the film. After its making, he did not appear in public for over 40 years. There is not a single interview with him and merely a couple of photos are to be found online. The filmmaker in question is Terrence Malick, the film Days of Heaven.
Malick consciously starts his film in an extremely industrial setting; that way, the transition and contrast between the worlds in which main characters exist is striking. Malick’s fascination with nature is apparent in that sense - he juxtaposes the ugly, uninviting world of machines and cities, with the pastoral village, where everyone feels at home. They say that you can recognize an artistic voice in a film from the very first frame you see, and Days of Heaven is a radical example of that claim. Each shot causes you to gasp, each frame so exquisitely designed that you feel as though you could never look away.
The story, set in 1916, begins in a factory. The main character, Bill (Richard Gere), gets in a row with his employer and kills him. He has to escape, so together with his sister Linda (Linda Manz) and his lover Abby (Brooke Adams), they find a job as farmhands in the estate of a nameless rich Farmer (Sam Shepard). To increase their chance of finding a job, Bill and Abby pretend to be siblings. Linda is the narrator and we can hear her voice throughout the film. Malick uses voiceover, a crucial element of nearly all his films, to tell a story from a character’s perspective. Here, it’s the perspective of a child - slightly naive, but at the same time honest and effortlessly profound. When they move to the farm, it seems that, after searching for quite some time, they have finally found their place on Earth,
Malick’s two biggest thematic interests in Days of Heaven, as well as in most of his films, are nature and metaphysics. From the first moments on the farm, it is clear that a spiritual element is present in the environment. It feels like a place where everything is as it should be, where the characters can finally be at peace. And then cracks begin to appear in this ideal picture. Firstly, a minor fight between Bill and a co-worker who claims that Abby is not really his sister. Then, Bill and Abby hatch a scheme that destroys the peaceful scenery. Malick paints an idyllic picture of a deeply American landscape only to wreck it a few scenes later. In a film so rooted in Biblical tradition, it’s only natural to expect the plagues to ravish the peaceful land, but 6
Malick goes a step further - he comments on the material situation of the characters, painting a picture of America dismantled by the economic boom, generating more injustice than income. As Linda notices, when she talks about the situation of the main characters on the farm, “(...) they don’t need ya. They can always get somebody else.” It’s the world of both growing bliss and immorality.
music. It’s a film you experience with your senses. Terrence Malick annoys many moviegoers. His tendency to overuse voiceover, to give in too much to a dream-like quality of the moviemaking process can cause many to look away. He has always created outside of the Hollywood s y s t e m , consciously deciding not to appear in public for many years now. He finds inspiration in nature, almost every one of his films captures the nature of its characters through the lens of the natural world. He has made only 10 films throughout his 50-year-long career, with a break of 20 years in the middle - no one really knows why he stopped working for such a long time. For me, Days of Heaven is, by far, his best film. I hope you’ll watch it, I hope you’ll submerge yourself in Malick’s beautiful mind for a second.
The story reads a little bit like a parable. It ponders questions of greed, human nature, time, and God. It does so effortlessly, without ever crossing the invisible line of “too much”. Malick portrays a world in which the stars, the sun, and the harvest convey the characters’ feelings, in which man and nature are inseparable. Each character lives on their own marvellous planet. It’s a place where the things you see, hear, and feel are of greater importance than the uttered words. When I think of Days of Heaven, I see the vivid images and I hear Ennio Morricone’s
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Cosmos: a fearful symmetry? Adam Michał Ostrowski
Many of us view the cosmic realms and iconography from the Renaissance as filled with harmony, ordered and simply beautiful. The incessant movement of the heavenly spheres, the silence of the void where no one can hear any screams or tragic wallowing; finally, the eternal peace of the endless night illumined by the solitary, stationary stars. Indeed, the aestheticization of space is somewhat of a naïve tendency to make sense of that which could not possibly make any sense, because it is all just too big. Let us, therefore, briefly dive into all that vastness by taking a small step outside of the principle of beauty, into the sublime.
at that time, is that of the shaking walls of the house. A construction destined to hold, embody the essence of safety and stability, now as light as a house of cards, ready to crumble and swallow us under its shattered walls. And then we begin to consider the Earth, a water-laden rock hurtling through space, inhabited by life, ourselves included. The fear of oceans and depths, commonly known as thalassophobia is precisely the terror of the vast unknown that dwells below. In our quest for discovery, we have reached a by far better understanding of the far edges of the cosmos, a space measured in light-years, than our own oceanic depths, populated by species we still know very little about.
It was Immanuel Kant and consequently Edmund Burke who led the modern, romantic aesthetic thought into the primary dualism between the beautiful and the sublime: the simple yet harmonious, almost Hellenic forms of ideality, proportion and soothing, contrasted by the great, aweinspiring and dynamic powers which inhabit the earthly elements. There is something fearful, even terrifying in nature, which the human spirit simply cannot capture, and can only contemplate in awe, perhaps giving a testimony that only falls short of the true thing.
Looking up, let us try to reexamine the space above as the very same abyss we may encounter when we sail a little too far offshore. The history of religions gives us a plethora of the so-called uranic deities, those whose domain is the sky, the heavens, all of that which is above the mortal plane. It is not only a matter of vertical power and hierarchy that these very gods were conceptualized as monarchs and rulers in their own respective pantheons. The sky, especially on an unclouded starry night, is the first countenance of the transcendent. Silent and unchanging, overwhelming the horizon from East to West, it had always been there, the most certain element of the natural, divine scenery. It was in the face of the Above that we first began to feel small and insignificant – it was while that very Above would give us meaning, at the onset of monotheisms.
The terror is real. When we witness the cataclysms befalling the planet, the mythical storms and deluges sweeping through entire towns, as well as wildfires, cyclones and earthquakes of unimaginable magnitudes, we understand how small and fragile we really are. My recollection of the L’Aquila earthquake in 2009, hundreds of kilometers away from Rome, where I was 8
Contrary to the positive treatment of the religious imagination, H. P. Lovecraft was the one to construct the imagery and terror of the Great Old Ones, including the most well-known among them, Cthulhu, fathering the theme of cosmic horror. Eldritch, not shape-less, but rather shapeabundant, ancient deities whose vastness causes human minds to concave and give into madness, capable of devouring suns and ending realities solely by their uncanny presence. Escaping visualization and sanity, these entities inhabit the distant abyss of space, dormant and indifferent to the fact of our existence. Should they one day awaken, the repercussions are inconceivable. The very thought of the possibility of their existence out there is enough to keep us sleepless and manic.
astronomers, yet the powers-that-be and the media try their very best to muffle any possibility of averting the catastrophe and the capitalist status quo triumphs in
Not without reason does the human imagination find itself crippled at the notion of a possible asteroid, comet or meteorite heading towards us. The tradition of catastrophic film and art pictures it as a top-shelf kind of doom – total, immediate and imminent. The end from above, an unwelcome visitor, a planet killer. As children we watched in terror and fascination how one such cosmic rock ended the dinosaurs, the great reptiles we love and cherish. It was then that we began to consider ourselves, the Earth and all its inhabitants, to be a tragic whole, hurtling through space together, unaware of the brevity and frailty of our undisturbed condition.
its survival. In short, it all ends badly – or does it? The imminence and gravity of an apocalyptic finale urge us to rethink our priorities. What more can we do when we have given our best than sit down together at dinner and cherish those we feel at home with? At times like these, it is indeed safer not to look up – the heavens, it should not be forgotten, pose a threat far surpassing our cataclysmic fantasies.
In this, Netflix’s latest star-studded blockbuster, if that term still applies in the times of the pandemic, Don’t Look Up offers a fresh take on the total cataclysm scenario. A planet-killing meteorite is indeed spotted heading towards the planet by a pair of
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An unusual Bethlehem star Barbara Podstawczyńska
25th of December, 2021. Christmas Day, my father, wide-eyed in front of the TV. I am not able to share his excitement. In the 90s, when the idea of the James Webb Space Telescope first emerged, I wasn’t even born. Yet my dad read about it when it was just a little bud – an idea of a telescope most advanced, ready to uncover the spatial secrets. Now, a live YouTube transmission, the telescope in its full flowering, ready to penetrate the atmosphere. The reason why my father is almost biting his nails at the sight of NASA engineers (wearing masks, a true sign of the times) in front of their computers, impatiently awaiting the launch, is that just a tiny slip-up during the journey of the telescope can ruin decades of diligent planning and building.
able to see in infrared light, the one which is most faint and best discernible in the unimaginably low space temperatures. One side of the shield makes the machine immune to up to -233 degrees Celsius, while the other will not yield to even 85 degrees, stopping the sun rays from blurring its image. Space has never yet seen a telescope which could operate in such conditions. It’s only the first of the firsts; the telescope has more up its sleeve. For instance, Webb’s equipment will see as far as the exoplanets – planets existing out of our solar system. Consequently, it might even answer the most important space question of all, maybe the only question: is there life in space? Where there is water, there may be life, so if we do get an image of some spacelings, we have Webb to thank. Scientists will be able to observe the atmosphere of such planets and find water traces there. Not only is that possible, but the telescope will most likely succeed in discovering galaxies formed not long after the Big Bang. Back to the Future would be an accurate name for this kind of venture, providing humanity with new info about the billion years of cosmos formation. Unfortunately, it seems as though this one is already taken.
A telescope in space is not a rarity, the first one launched almost fifty years ago and plans for sending more of them extend all the way to the year 2037! This said, this particular telescope has a unique opportunity to enrich our knowledge about space. One of the most anticipated phases of Webb’s telescope’s launch was the deployment of the sun shield, which, thankfully, went according to plan. Like a monstrous reversed origami, the five levels of the huge construction unfolded smoothly. Thanks to this element, the telescope is
The name of the telescope, however, is as
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i n contrast, could observe about 6 times less of the cosmos landscape in its vicinity, and in much worse quality at that. Not to mention, Hubble could be assisted or repaired quite easily as it was only orbiting the Earth. Webb, on the other hand, is orbiting the Sun 1.5 million kilometers away from our planet so its launch had to be perfect, allowing no room for any servicing.
fitting as ever, given in memory of James Edwin Webb, responsible for getting the first humans to the M o o n . Secrets unraveled by the telescope will commemorate this man, not void of mystery himself, being a member of the Masonry.
The current mission of Webb’s is to a star in the constellations.
explore Ursa Major Scientists estimate that the telescope can be active for even a whole decade. Who knows what secrets it will unravel? Even prior to its launch, Nature magazine dubbed it a telescope that “ate astronomy”. And the world will definitely witness it devouring new interesting space facts. We can only imagine what it can discover for humankind, or the non-human, for that matter.
The images of the unknown will be provided in good quality, too. When setting out on a road trip to the mountains, an average tourist will be satisfied with their 12-megapixel camera, for instance. Webb’s telescope will be much better at sightseeing, of course, with its infrared light detectors which reach 4 million megapixels each. The telescope’s well-known little brother, Hubble, 11
Don’t look up reviews of Don’t Look Up Michalina Czerwońska
Don’t Look Up is a film that garnered enormous attention at the end of last year and as of now is Netflix’s second most viewed film of all time. This isn’t particularly surprising, considering the film’s star-studded cast, the well-established reputation of its director (Adam McKay), and an intense marketing campaign founded by the picture’s giant distributor. Yet, the reception of the film has not been entirely favourable. The critics’ reviews have been rather harsh. In fact, Don’t Look Up is the first Leonardo DiCaprio film in years to have received a ‘rotten’ rating on the popular site Rotten Tomatoes. Still, the general public’s response tends to be a lot more approving; for instance, the audience score at Rotten Tomatoes has racked up 78%, while that of the critics is only 56%. Moreover, there is a particular group of viewers who seem to strongly oppose the negative reviews, e.g. some climate scientists and activists. So, what is it about the film that the critics hate? And why do the audiences disagree?
Riddled with stock footage, strange pace, tacky editing techniques and stale wannabe memes, the picture made me wonder how this experienced and talented creator could allow for such shortcomings. There are some original and hilarious moments in the film (Jennifer Lawrence’s character’s constant confusion about the Air Force general who makes the main protagonists pay for free snacks was my personal favourite), but those are rather few and scattered throughout the picture in a way that does not really salvage its overall image. The problem is that the most criticised aspect of Don’t Look Up is not its disappointing style. What the critics are most displeased with has more to do with the bluntness of the film’s message. While the picture is clearly blunt, I believe it is not necessarily a reason for such harsh treatment. In my mind, the way the critics approach the film is rather irrelevant and unproductive. As I have been looking through various negative reviews, the word that seemed to always reappear was “smug”, and I do understand why someone would describe it in such a manner. The political satire is unbelievably obvious and rather banal – it is even more true in the film’s portrayal of the media. Some moments appear to have been taken straight out of a high-school moralising talk for students, for instance in the scene with DiCaprio’s sentimental and cliché “how
If the primary target of the film’s popular critiques were its lack of taste and general clumsiness, I would not dare object. Even though Don’t Look Up shares its director, writer and even editor with the stylish and thrilling hit, The Big Short, it achieves nothing near the flair of its 2015 predecessor. 12
come we can no longer talk to one another?” speech. Yet, the critics do not reject the film solely for its simplicity and the overtly moralistic tone. It boils down to this: Don’t Look Up’s biggest issue is that the film is insulting to the viewers’ intelligence. In fact, the critics see it as full of “lofty superiority” (Charles Bramesco, The Guardian) or call its execution “condescending” (Louis Chilton, The Independent). This looks as if the critics were personally offended that the film is not as complex as they would like it to be. Viewing such a straightforward and unnuanced piece makes them feel patronised, and that is why they slam it. It is no longer about the film’s lack of merit, but rather about some imagined ego battle between the creator and the critic. Consequently, this perspective is irrelevant to most people. The dispute around Don’t Look Up is an issue of disagreement about how and on what grounds we should judge films in general. David Vetter in his Forbes article titled “Why Sneering Critics Dislike Netflix’s ‘Don’t Look Up,’ But Climate Scientists Love It” aims to defend the film by questioning the critics’ authority. It seems that the article was an expression of a belief circulating among the public: the critics don’t like Don’t Look Up because they are snobs, and the film should be praised because its topic is important. This standpoint is in accordance with my previous idea; the critics have a characteristic (whether described as snobbish or educated is a matter of perspective) approach to films, and to most people it is unrelatable or insignificant. On the other hand, the idea Vetter was expressing has also been raised by others, for instance, abovementioned Louis Chilton in his Independent article. They argue that we should be able to call a bad film a bad film, even when its message is noble.
In their view, films are either “good” or “bad”, and all we have to do is classify it and rate it accordingly. But perhaps there is another way of looking at it. Maybe the fact that a film is “bad”, technically, aesthetically, or in any other way, does not necessarily mean that we should completely discredit it. If we do so, we could be disregarding the picture’s potential to influence wide audiences. What I am trying to say is really simple – a film can be “good” and “bad” at the same time – it just depends on our categories of judgement. Most people are not film critics. If casual audiences are to notice the style of a film at all, it is bound to be more an impression or intuition rather than a consciously formed thought to the extent: “Oh, I hate the way the lighting is too sharp in that sequence”. Consequently, all the previously mentioned formal problems of Don’t Look Up can easily escape the attention of lay audiences. On the other hand, with such a casual viewing culture, films with as straightforward a message as McKay’s latest piece have a substantial advantage – they are more likely to be understood and seen for what they really are. At its core, Don’t Look Up is a metaphor for climate change. It focuses on portraying how the current global socio-political situation prevents us from acting on what is most probably the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced. The film explicitly shows some of the obstacles in the battle to mitigate global warming: extreme short-sightedness of our political systems, and the issues of public communication which cause disagreement on even the most basic facts. In short, the picture voices the urgency of the climate crisis and breaks down the social structures
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that impede our ability to counteract the issue. As I believe, there is merit in Don’t Look Up. It seems to be a clear example of a movie which can be both “bad”, and have a “good” impact on our reality. The question of how much a film can in fact influence people is a whole other story. However bad Don’t Look Up may be, the least it does is try to capture the anticipatory anxiety of a planetary catastrophe, while feeling that too few care. Whether the film succeeds is a matter of dispute. I can only say that Don’t Look Up at times made me feel the helpless frustration and desperate
anger of its characters. It might have been caused by the fact that an individual is often faced with such feelings in the face of the current political climate and the general global situation. These emotions are simply very relatable. The affinity I have for the issues the film is trying to address makes me almost forgive its clumsiness and inelegance. And while the cinema I tend to appreciate most has a lot more subtlety, nuance and beauty, I think there is space for films such as McKay’s latest picture. So, is Don’t Look Up a great film? Not really. But am I glad it exists? By all means.
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The fault is in your stars,
or how Gen Z became obsessed with astrology Maria Łusakowska
You’ve probably heard somewhere that Cancers are sensitive, Tauruses stubborn and Pisces always have their heads in the clouds. You’ve maybe even heard that your zodiac sign is compatible with other signs of your element (for the newbies, there are four: earth, fire, water and air). If you were curious, you might have even checked your whole chart. If you’ve been paying attention, you might even know what a Mercury Retrograde is and that it affects your travel plans and temporarily creates a general chaos in your life. And chances are, you take all this astrological information with not a grain, but a handful of salt, turning a blind eye at all the coincidentally accurate descriptions of your personality according to your sign. Or, perhaps, you have no clue what I am talking about and in that case I will happily direct you to my favorite Instagram astrology gurus who very passionately and patiently explain what aspects and houses are, and how they affect your finances and love life.
of the planets, stars and other heavenly bodies may have on our lives.” Contrary to popular belief, it is not a religion, but a study of life cycles, more precisely, planetary and star cycles. From ancient times, people observed the sky, the movement of the planets and the moon through the zodiac constellations, thereby creating elaborate
It seems that astrology is experiencing its heyday, and that it is impossible to go online without some kind of astrology-based articles popping right where you wouldn’t expect them to. Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and other lifestyle magazines participate in this new culture by publishing articles like “What style should you choose based on your zodiac sign” or “Here’s a list of things that you shouldn’t do during this Capricorn season”.
mathematical systems that were to explain human affairs, the past and the future. Though the original forms of astrology were created in 3000 B.C. by the Chaldeans of Babylon (now Iraq), some experts trace that date back even to 5800 B.C. Developed simultaneously on multiple continents, it gained the most ground in Central America, as well as on the other side of the globe, in China. Yet, modern astrology, developed by a Greek mathematician and astronomer
The word astrology comes from Greek astron, which means “star”, and according to Astrology Zone, one of the biggest astrology websites, “Astrology is the ancient science of interpreting what influence the movements 15
Ptolemy around 180 A.D, became very popular in Europe in the Middle Ages.
very soothing to validate that knowledge. It’s way cheaper than therapy, and doesn’t require you to change, it just declares: “you are like this because Neptune was in this particular place when you were born, and that’s who you are.” So don’t worry that you’re a little toxic towards your loved ones, that’s just what Scorpios do!
However, by the end of the 17th century, new scientific theories undermined the theoretical basis of astrology. The new humanistic era of reason would reject anything non-empirical. In consequence, astrology lost its academic privilege and has been dubbed a pseudoscience several times ever since. Failing to deal with critical scientific studies, astrology has been lambasted repeatedly – for instance, by a philosopher of science Paul Thagard, who in 1978 claimed that even if astrology is supposed to be only a tool for introspection, problems in its logic arise because its practitioners declare that “astrology may not always give quantifiable results but it works nonetheless.” Despite that, astrology never fully lost its appeal to society. For instance, we have seen a rise of its popularity during the pandemic, studies say. People in lockdown have learned to live with a high level of incertitude, which according to psychology leads to long-term stress. One thing that the human psyche cannot bear is instability and uncertainty. With religion well past its best days, there is a need to find a better explanation for life, a purpose, a reason – anything of a higher power that would allow us to escape the existential dread and leaping to the conclusion that breathing on the planet Earth as humanity is kind of pointless, and always has been. It is astrology then, that became a sort of a “secular theology”, and a very secure one, too, because it is supposed to function as an unperfected reflection of ourselves, so it can never be actually wrong. I would also claim that this turn of interest among young people is rather egocentric, but it inscribes itself perfectly into the collective narcissism of social media. Some may reach for astrology to confirm beliefs that they have about themselves – it can be 16
Of course, there are less and more harmful ways to use astrology. One of the most lighthearted forms that doesn’t treat itself too seriously, are the astrological meme accounts that use vines, videos, pictures of celebrities and popular memes to create astrological content. Its main platform is Instagram, known for notoriously perpetuating the culture of narcissism, and I would argue that with the astrology memes, we witness just another form of selfindulgence. In the past two years I have been bombarded every day with this type of content from my friends and Internet acquaintances, who usually post about their own zodiac sign, or send me a funny meme about mine. Because they are entertaining, I have followed quite a few of these accounts, and, after a couple of years of immersing myself into this world of Internet astrology, I can confidently say: I know nothing about all the other eleven signs except my own. I have been only seeking content that applies to me (not telling you what my sign is!), because this is how social media is built: it is meant to be a reflection of the perfect vision of you, not only in the content you post, but also in the one you consume. Another form of astrological entertainment that you might have heard of are the astrology apps, such as The Pattern, Sanctuary, Nebula, and the infamous Co-Star: the most controversial one, since its creators admitted to have been trolling its own users and purposely sending uncomfortable, “dark humor” push notifications. All you have to
do in all these apps is to type in your date, hour and place of birth, and voilà! Your chart is created. From there on, you can find evssential information about your identity, how you are perceived in the world, what struggles you might expect in your love life or in your career. You can find your friends and see if your planetary aspects are compatible (and if not, it’s clearly time to stop being friends). You will also receive daily notifications about the movement of the planets, and how they will affect your daily life. You might find out when is a good time to travel or switch careers or fall in love or get your nails done.
exploitative economic system seems to be unable to provide a secure future to Millennials and Gen Z. It is easier to blame vthe current position of Jupiter for our empty bank account, rather than admit the economy is collapsing and we are drowning in debt. Putting responsibility on Mercury in retrograde for the chaos in our life is safer than the realization of living in an unstable political system. Astrologers state that their pseudoscience does not predict the future because man has free will and – yes, I do have the free will to unfollow all the astrology accounts on Instagram and to delete all the astrology apps from my phone (I will shamelessly admit I had three). Without me even realizing it, astrology creeped into my everyday life, and became a tool for me to cope with reality, to understand my relationships, and explain my failures. And although it created a sense of online community and an easy topic for a small talk with my fellow Gen Zers, I had to admit that I came to rely on it way too heavily when making decisions.
I won’t say that there is something inherently wrong with seeking pseudoscientific information to discover “who you really are”, like I would never condemn taking “What type of pizza are you?” Buzzfeed tests, despite how irrational they are. However, too many times I have seen people relying too much on what their daily horoscope app said. I have seen women cancel dates because of sign incompatibility with their potential date. I have seen people artificially change their perception of themselves to match their personality with what astrology said about it. I have heard friends starting talking trash about other friends because they just found out that someone “had a Taurus moon”. I cannot say I wasn’t guilty of this, and because of that I can state that this kind of astrological knowledge doesn’t make anyone a better person. It just makes us feel self-righteous and safe in our comfort zone, and, on top of that, just vain and reckless.
A while ago, I had a semiprofessional astrologer to tell me if a crush of mine would develop into something more serious. Their advice was completely inadequate, and after a couple of months have passed, I realized how completely wrong they were, and how, even with my best intentions, there was no possibility of interpreting their prophecy as truthful. On an astrological detox, this awareness has brought a relief, and I’d rather accept the unpredictability of my life than make its paths depend on wishful interpretation of celestial bodies movements.
And, well, it might give a false sense of control – in a world on fire, an unstable,
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The right wing is wrong Why the Confederation party lives on another planet Piotr Miszczuk
‘A free market will liberate us all’, reads a slogan that is almost religiously recanted by the Confederation Liberty and Independence party, a far-right grouping that entered the Polish Parliament three years ago. Although their eleven seats in the lower house are, to say the least, not the power they’re after, their marginal political influence can tip the balance in the tight parliamentary majority, amidst the on-and-off turbulences within the ruling party.
Confederation reach beyond world views, as the grouping is mistaken when it comes to its very foundation – their most cherished economy. Even though most people are at odds with Confederation’s views on abortion, minorities or access to guns, some could be tricked by their populist economic programme. Under the guise of liberal and modern views on the economy, they advocate a state that doesn’t care about the less well-todo ones who were born into poorer families, or those who have found themselves in the throes of life-altering problems, either of which can severely cripple a person’s ‘marketability’.
T h e Co n fe d e r a t i o n party got into Parliament once they finally relegated Formed of several their controversial groupings, including and misogynistic leader, the less obvious Party Janusz Korwin-Mikke, of Drivers, the and started to promote their Confederation party younger and less prone to blunders is far from being activists. Their stronghold has always unanimous within. been the Internet, where they They agree to have been ‘destroying’ the disagree on ‘benighted’ and where whether people their edgy statements should be obliged to have not infrequently been wear face coverings in going viral. Every now and public or what the Polish then, the comments section on judiciary should be like. YouTube abounds in the party’s But they seem to see eye to eye about sympathisers simmering with anger public finance at the show hosts for not asking politicians their outlook on the taxes, the about the economy but focusing on ‘futile’ – the lower better. In t h i s , they’re right, but ideological disputes. only if you s t i l l believe that the And yet, Confederation’s ludicrous s o - c a l l e d ‘invisible hand’, a concept pseudo-scientific views don’t matter to coined as early as 1759 by economics their supporters. Denying the human forefather Adam Smith, still holds true. factor in climate change – the backbone of It doesn’t mean, however, that the market most European right-wing populists – is economy doesn’t work at all. The ‘invisible irrelevant. And so are the abominable antihand’ is a term for all the forces underlying LGBT+ inclinations or the party’s pandering the economic demand-supply interplay. to anti-vaxxers and the pandemic-sceptical. But the trade-offs of those siding with Being part and parcel of the laissez-faire philosophy, it is the idea that self-oriented 18
choices of individuals are the best for the economy as a whole. Demand, which is consumers’ willingness to purchase products, and supply, i.e. how many goods are dangled before them, interact with each other, pushing towards equilibrium. The only snag being that the resources, predominantly including money (in economic theory referred to as ‘capital’), workforce (‘labour’) and natural resources (‘land’), are limited.
one only realises the true magnitude of Jeff Bezos’ wealth when they keep scrolling and scrolling to see the end of an extremely long rectangle symbolising the Amazon owner’s fortune. Trying to reach the end, one comes across the annual pay of an average Amazon worker looking like an ant seen from space, or the annual cost of chemotherapy for all US cancer patients being equal to only a modest part of Bezos’ opulence. Nevertheless, the undisturbed demand-supply self-regulation mechanism, often hailed by Confederation sympathisers as the perfect solution to all market limitations, had been the prevailing concept until the 1929 Great Depression hit the global economy. For the first time, free markets failed on such a scale. They d i d n ’ t provide t h e
And this capital-based income has been blown out of all proportion. The world has witnessed a drop in the share of labour in the so-called ‘functional income distribution’, thus in particular the developed countries were faced with too many employers in relation to employees. Another issue here is that the owners take advantage of every opportunity to cut
corners, by fair means or foul – the Economic Policy Institute’s data shows that funds obtained from wage theft amount to more than the money lost to robberies. And with so few having so much, the disparities are widening. Several meta-analyses of how discrepancies influence society have concluded that those income differences have a negative impact on people’s mental health. The promises of capitalism brought about a whole host of woes; most notably excessive control in the hands of private enterprises and the failure of political institutions to represent every citizen, amping up global disparities. A US software developer, Matt Korostoff, created an interactive chart to show the full extent of how much the world’s richest people possess. With the human inability to deal with large numbers,
economy with full employment even though workers were flexible about their pay demands. Joblessness went rampant worldwide, peaking at its all-time high of nearly 25%. Back then, John Maynard Keynes, one of the most influential economists in history, was the one to recognise and address the issue of inadequate demand. As a result, most capitalist economies implemented his breakthrough recommendations – the use of taxes and monetary policies to alleviate the markets’ adverse effects. As time passed by, some of his theories turned out to be outdated, but some have continued to be an inspiration for nonmainstream economists. In 1969, the Nobel Prize in Economics was established, helping 19
the entire field gain its momentum. New theories were springing up, and economists were constantly in the midst of developing and disproving the already-existing concepts, or propounding fresh ones. In 1972, Kenneth Arrow was given the Nobel Prize for his contribution to general equilibrium theory. Together with Gerard Debreu, who won the same award in 1983, he validated the hypothesis that total demand will match total supply in the economy, obtaining a perfect economic balance through people’s selfish choices. That, however, was confirmed only under very strong assumptions: no company having a big share in the market, people being rational about their buying preferences, and demand for different products being independent, none of which occurs in reality. Arrow and Debreu’s theory aside, the market also doesn’t work well for one more reason – information asymmetry, i.e. the difference in the knowledge between the buyer and the seller. It usually poses a barrier in fair trade and might lead to negative outcomes, such as an iniquitous advantage of worse products over better ones. Truth be told, the Confederation Party is not completely in favour of a non-interventionist policy. Au contraire! They do desire to intervene as they please. Magnanimously, they want to allow entrepreneurs to be able to refuse service based on some homophobic or xenophobic views, but at the same time they are in favour of the Sunday trading ban, so that families can spend more time together. Such transgressions and logical
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inaccuracies are the bread and butter of their political agenda, by means of which they wish to pamper both Catholic nationalists and free-market economy zealots. But the most detrimental of Confederation’s stances is the one concerning the EU. Before the 2019 European Parliament election, they vowed to ‘destroy’ the Union, joining dispersed forces under one name of Confederation. They’re still unwilling to acknowledge that, as part of the European single market, Poland could double its yearly GDP growth. EU funds, automation in agriculture, job creation, new roads and railways, an influx of foreign investors, higher quality of people’s life, better public governance, and an improvement of the environment are impossible to have escaped the notice of anyone in Poland. Bringing global environmental issues to the member states’ attention is the EU’s great merit, too, again unappreciated by Confederation politicians. It looks like the time has come to reconsider capitalism. Its transformation might be painful and will require a joint effort of all actors. But with a looming environmental disaster and democracy crisis, we should do anything but think about ourselves only, like the Confederation party encourages us to do. A simplified image of the world they offer might be enticing, albeit the down-to-earth idea of the economy goes off at a tangent to the complex texture of the modern world.
He who controls the spice controls the universe Sarah Kowalski
Today, in the second decade of the 21st century, it is hard to find someone who has not heard of Dune. This is interesting to me because I remember that no more than 5 years ago when I, an avid fan of the series, mentioned the novel to people, I was met with one of two common replies. One being “Oh, what’s that?”; the other, a simple “Isn’t that ancient?” So, you can understand my excitement when Denis Villeneuve announced he will be making his own movie rendition of Herbert’s 1965 novel with non-other than the audience’s beloved Timothée Chalamet cast as his project’s centerpiece. The series has since experienced a revival of interest with millions of people wanting to prepare for experiencing Villeneuve’s film on the big screen. Upon its release in 2021, the movie gained significant and well-deserved recognition among both cinema enthusiasts and previous fans of the series. The movie fulfilled a great deal of fan expectations while managing to interest and secure a newly formed fan base. But, is this really due to the admittedly well picked cast and Timothée’s beautiful face? Or is there a truth that lies in Herbert’s story that ensures the story’s timeless nature?
study of Dune, I am equally enamored with another fascinating phenomenon. People of the present love to incorporate many lessons of ‘the now’ in future settings. It is almost as if we somehow needed to see a pressing
problem played out in a different setting, one non-related to us, to be able to think about the illustrated issue in our present life on our home planet.
There are many fascinated by the cosmos. The topics of space, interplanetary travel, and human contact with ‘alien’ life has been a topic of interest for centuries – one that will no doubt stay a hot conversation starter for decades to come. But, despite my subscription to the science fiction genre and my adoration of space-core, in the case
Herbert introduced his science fiction story in a moment of societal shift – the 1960s. This era is known well as the time when technology started becoming a more present staple in humans’ everyday life. Televisions 21
began entering homes and telephones started being a reliable form of inter-human communication. Technology started to come into the spheres of life that were considered to be very personal before – one’s family home and their personal relationships. It is no surprise that speculation as to technology began to fluctuate then – people even started to wonder whether there is something to fear in rapid technological expansion and its integration into everyday life. This movement is, of course, still familiar to us these days. The majority of us probably remember hearing our parents or grandparents discuss how “modern kids have no life” or how “we will always be dependent on technology,” and although many of us do find it hard to live on a daily basis without our daily technological appliances, and – most importantly – the Internet, I would argue that this is portrayed as much less of a threat than it used to be. Coming back to the 60s, this discourse of the danger of technological expansion reached its peak then also due to the rising interest in the topics of human ethics brought to light because of the many present-at-the-time wars taking place around the world. The combination of the discourse of human nature alongside the rising debate around technology led to cultivating the perfect audience for Herbert’s world of Dune.
of our 19th century were afraid of – humans being replaced by machines. But, going further, this ban on improving “human technology” in Herbert’s world pushed humans to evolve on their own – “with nature.” The author describes that these people of our far future expanded their biological abilities in an unexpected way, forcing some to become the equivalent of biological machines. Such individuals can be compared to psychics, witches, or prophets – individuals with excelled abilities of the human mind. They are an organic form of a human computer. These super-human abilities rely on the same resource – spice. Also essential for space transit, spice is the pivotal element of the future cosmos’ economy, politics, and travel. It is what enables human life in space. The catch and motivator of the story is that this precious spice can only be taken from one planet – the desert sphere, Arrakis – commonly referenced as Dune. We follow the journey of the royal family of the Imperial House Atreides as they are sent to Arrakis to manage the spice trade from the planet. It is quickly revealed that this was a diabolical trap set by the other houses of the Galactic Padishah Empire to get rid of the Atreides family.
Following a war with robots centuries before, the action of Dune takes place in the year 10191 AD when humanity has forbidden the construction of any machines that resemble humans. In this world it was unthinkable and punishable by law to construct machines which have a likeness of the human mind. Coincidently, it is exactly what people from the second half
The idea of a natural resource being the reason for all fighting and disputes in the galaxy is not a new concept to us, but, paired alone with Herbert’s openly pro-nature philosophy, it is evident that the author wanted to provide double meaning in his spice. Herbert, as an avid environmentalist, famously said that he spent around 5 years constructing the ecosystem of Arrakis in itself. Moreover, he presented spice as such a pivotal aspect of future life to highlight that even in 8000 years, humans will have to solely rely on natural materials, not machines. Today, I’d say the majority of the population
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is less freaked out about technology the natives use advanced technologies as interfering with human life, some would well, and they are highlighted to be pivotal argue that maybe even a bit too little. There in their survival. However, the Fremen is mostly some residual skepticism towards technologies shown revolve mostly around technology among individuals from the meticulously crafted equipment for people “older generation” who avoid self-check-out to be able to manage in the habitat of Arrakis cashiers and smartphones. Today, we have a – the technology allows characters to interact more pressing issue in focus – fear of climate with nature, to be in nature, not turn them change, of losing our planet. Presently, away from it. Additionally, their equipment there is a greater need for nature than for is shown to be slick and non-invasive in technology. This need is easily detectable contrast to the overpowering cold, metallic, when watching 2021’s Dune. Before and overwhelming machines used by the Villeneuve’s version, there was, of course, Empire. the infamous 1984 adaptation of the story Upon conclusion, I would like to created by David Lynch, which is entirely recommend Herbert’s series to anyone who a sign of its times. loves pondering This adaptation about ethics, was created mostly environmentalism, for the purpose of and simply what showing the appeal it is to be human. of science fiction Thankfully, the – introducing 2021 adaptation of exciting new Dune does their technologies and original source presenting the material justice in viewer with a look these aspects and into the future. This touches upon all movie was mainly these topics in a created not with the truly 21st centuryintention of being esque way. I hope a reflective drama that from now on, of human nature when you hear but a showcase of someone talk about 80s science fiction Dune you will – flashy, gloomy, remember that the and mechanical. modern success of Today’s Dune is this phenomenal clearly made with story cannot be a different lens – attributed solely to the cast and director. nothing is more spectacular in this movie than the natural environment of Arrakis. They simply had a beautiful and discourseThe beauty and magnificence of the desert wise thick story to work with from the the characters go through is overpowering start. There is, of course, much more to be on screen, and the director makes an effort to found in Dune than I was able to discuss emphasize that the members of the Empire here: partially, to entice the readers to seek should learn some ways of life from the out this movie and book for themselves Fremen – the natives of Arrakis. Of course and, partially, to respect the holy rule of no spoilers.
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Why it’s not your fault you’re late Zofia Nowaczyk If someone asked you to define time, what would you say? We can draw a straight line on a piece of paper with three points determining past, present, and future; or explain the workings of a watch and different time zones, but there is still something bigger and complex missing. It seems that time flies differently for us. Think of this – we all have that friend who always shows up late saying, “Sorry guys, I thought I could make it on time,” or maybe that’s you? Naturally, some of us are better, some worse at organizing our schedule and, luckily (for latecomers), there is a scientific reason for it. As I fall into the always-late category as well, this text is a compendium of science-based excuses for not being on time. Once, when I visited my brother in his apartment, it turned out he was living three blocks away from my friend from university. It was only a five-minute walk so we decided to drop by. Due to reasons I do not recall, and most probably as a result of my thereis-always-time approach, we were late by around half an hour or so. Later that night, as this topic was raised and we had a laugh about it, my answer to why we could not come on time was “because of the gravity!”. My brother and friend did not want me to elaborate since it seemed like an obvious lie, but there was a grain of truth there. Let me explain why. The theory of relativity says that time is highly dependent upon the observer’s standpoint. Yet, there is one law we live by – the stronger the gravity is, the slower the time goes by. For instance, time on Earth goes slower compared to that on the Moon, as the latter’s gravity is weaker. The same applies to when we go further away from the Earth’s surface - gravity yet again gets weaker. GPS satellites that send the signals to the ships on Earth also need to have their clocks slowed down in order to even out the time differences. If we didn’t take them into account, the satellites in space would not give the exact position of the ship and there would be a gap of even a few kilometres! 24
Knowing what we know now, my defence for being late because of gravity starts to make more sense as my brother lived on the 3rd floor and my friend on the 7th. Gravity worked stronger on me and my brother in his apartment because we were closer to the Earth’s surface. That means time seemed slower to us and faster to my friend. Clever, one would think. Of course, it was a blunt exaggeration and the time difference would not be even noticeable at such a small distance but the idea was somewhat correct and true to reality, in a way. That’s not all! We still have one, more downto-earth rationalization on tap. A lesson taught by Albert Einstein was: everything might be relative, meaning that all you can see, touch or feel, and how you experience the world is highly subjective and someone else may have a different perspective. Even your basic cognitive functions like memory can mislead you. On the other hand, how many times have you said “I’ll finish writing my essay in 2 days” and it took you 4, or “I’ll be there in 5 minutes” when you were there in 15? Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who won a Nobel Prize in Economics, dubbed this phenomenon a “planning fallacy”. It can be described as an overly optimistic approach when arranging tasks. In other words, we tend to underestimate the time we need to do something. The reason for it may be that, when planning, we think of a single task instead of a wider set of background information, the so-called “distributional information”. So let’s imagine that the bus from one place to another may take five minutes, but we fail to consider the distributional information part, such as the average time it takes to get to your friend’s apartment, find the proper door or go three floors up. Therefore, the crux of the problem here is that this distributional information usually escapes our thinking process. We are also usually in denial about the past failure in doing something on time, so
we overestimate ourselves the next time we are about to do the same task. Even if you did not manage to make it on time in the past, a new better you will most definitely do it quicker THIS time. For sure. You will get up in the morning, drink your coffee, exercise, go to work, go running, cook a meal, meet with friends, do laundry and read some book before going to sleep – how many days like this have you planned and how many of them ended up on coming back from work and going to sleep? There you go. It happens as we may be thinking about each of these tasks separately but we forget about the time in between and how much it takes to switch between these activities. We also appear to be measuring time based on how we feel and what emotions accompany us in some specific moment. Think of how you are in the middle of a boring conversation – time stands still. Or the other way around, when you are on a long-awaited date with your crush, time flies by in a split second. It seems that both of these rely on how much information is reaching our brains – the more data about a given time period we have to process, the more we feel that the time drags. For that reason, if you experience a dangerous situation like a car accident, when you are exposed to some novelty like exploring a new route to
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work, or simply when you are in shock, you will most likely feel like time goes slower. And vice versa – the less stimulus we need to store, the quicker the time passes. This includes all the routine situations, as less attention is required from your side because you already know all the details, e.g. when choosing your standard route to work. So our saying “Sorry I’m late, I lost track of time” is on point – experiencing something new or stressful may cause losing awareness of how much time has passed. So how accurate can we be at measuring time when so many factors can influence our temporal perception? We do not u s u a l l y take into consideration distributional information w h e n planning the future schedule. We often forget how much time something took in the past, we think of the activities as separate, instead of counting all the time inbetween and, finally, our emotions can significantly influence the duration of a task as felt. Considering both, the fact that time in space passes at a different rate to all of us and that also our memory plays a trick on us, it may come as a shock that some are on time at all!
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