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The image from Lowell Observatory (above) clearly illustrates that the launch of Starlink’s first 60 satellites is in breach of points 2 and 3 Space belongs to all humankind, not to any single government or country and is not the province of some petulant billionaire with an overactive imagination, ostensibly to provide broadband service to underserved regions of the globe. The AAS will support and facilitate the work by relevant parties to understand fully and minimize the impact of large satellite constellations on ground- and space-based astronomy. In addition to altering the visual and aesthetic character of the night sky, the proposed frequency bands Starlink would employ have potential impacts to radio astronomy, to the future detriment of such worldwide collaborative projects as the recent imaging of a Black Hole’s Event Horizon 55 million light years away! For decades, the U. S. National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and the Green Bank Observatory (GBO), in cooperation with the National Science Foundation, have worked to ensure that innovations in communications can advance while still preserving our ability to explore the Universe from Earth and conduct essential fundamental research through radio astronomy.

As an example and as a self-described pacifist, Einstein pleaded with Roosevelt (then Truman) to abandon development of atomic weapons when he realized their awesome potential for destruction (you are literally unleashing the energy from a supernova on a human population – the Uranium and other fissile materials used to manufacture a nuclear weapon can only be created in a supernova), when he was so instrumental in developing it as a response to a Nazi first-strike threat. The Trump administration, after having abandoned the JCPOA (a.k.a. the “Iran Nuclear Deal”) five months earlier, in a ruse, lured top Iranian stem cell scientist Dr. Masoud Soleimani to participate in a research program at the Mayo Clinic then had him summarily arrested and detained without cause, then claimed in a contrived public statement, that he tried “to transfer some ‘growth hormone vials’ via two students to Iran“. An excerpt from the story sets the stage for what happens next Top Iranian stem cell scientist Dr. Masoud Soleimani, a professor and biomedical researcher at the Tarbiat Modares University (TMU) in Tehran, was one of numerous Iranian scientists who freely cooperated with their US counterparts. Edicts and decrees such as a king would make (euphemistically referred to as “Executive Orders“), disregard for the First Amendment and our collective right to free speech and redress, the undue link to and untoward sway of Right-Wing Religious groups and their corrosive influence on this administration specifically and in a free and open democracy generally, suggest that Donald Trump is looking more and more like a dictator or a king and less like the president of a modern republic.

At the turn of the 19th century, working in a Swiss Patent office and fascinated with time, Albert Einstein published in 1905 his seminal work entitled “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” or more colloquially the “Special Theory of Relativity“, his thesis on the laws of motion governing bodies that are traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of light in an inertial or non-accelerating frame of reference. Einstein tackled the seeming contradiction that, as a physical object approaches the speed of light, the relative velocities of light -and the object- don’t add; that is, the measured velocity of light, if its source is located in the frame of reference of the object, is the same as if the object was stationary, in other words, the speed of light is invariant. Remember the seemingly logical contradiction that as an object approaches the speed of light, the speed of light remains invariant if that speed were measured by an observer at any location, i.e., the invariance of the speed of light? Constancy of the speed of light: the speed of light is constant, C, regardless of the speed of the source and the speed of the observer no information, signal or object can travel at speeds greater than this, that light is the Universal Speed limit.

From a purely agnostic and neutral point of view and contrary to popular misconceptions, the United States was never, nor is it now, a “Christian Nation”; the actions of this country’s leaders over the previous century have borne this out. What we have today is a small, influential group of religious and political leaders in this country who have the ear of the current and many previous administrations; these people are, defacto, setting US foreign policy, from the crushing sanctions being imposed on Venezuela and then blaming that country’s president for the problems they’ve caused, to US policy in the middle east, one that is propping up an apartheid, right-wing hegemonistic government in the hopes that country will be the catalyst who brings about the “End Times”. In addition to members of the so-called 700-Club, a wealthy, conservative and ostensibly “christian” group, many administration officials as well as current cabinet-level positions are held by members of this group; they openly admit that “their christian faith informs their decisions”. Are we citizens of a modern, progressive society, educated in science, allowing our actions to be governed by science and reason or are we to remain slaves to the mythical demons from John’s Armageddon, haunting and governing our lives and decisions through mindless adherence to an ancient religious myth, making national policy decisions based on this religious myth, one of many hundreds from the pantheon of world religions.