Science Has Left Earth

🍏your Sunday read 30th March, 2025

A well-researched original piece to get you thinking.

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Image Credits: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Gift of Thomas Kensett, 1874

Hi Scholar,

First of all, sincere apologies for not sending out this week’s Digest. The Scholarly Letter is the labour of a two-person team, and when both of us run off to see our families, there isn’t anyone to pick up the slack — unlike in a big corporate company where someone else usually steps in.

To make it up to you, we’ll be sending out two long-form Sunday Letters on two consecutive Sundays. Maybe you didn’t miss our writing all that much but we missed writing and thinking. And now we need to get it out of our system.

This Sunday’s Letter (from me, The Critic) follows a train of thought that started after reading two rather unrelated texts. It led me to a set of questions about progress and its somewhat absence. I could have taken the usual route through structural inequality and systemic issues, but to be honest, these terms often feel empty. They explain a lot, but often in a way that folds back on itself.

So instead, I’ve taken a different angle: linking progress to our scientific endeavours, to our pursuit of knowledge, and the growing disconnect of that pursuit from meaning.

So grab a beverage and your reading glasses, let’s get thinking.

Science Has Left Earth

Written by The Critic

Nearly a month ago, I came across a scene in an early 1900s novel that described the living conditions inside a poor fisherman’s hut on the Canadian seaside, as seen through the eyes of the protagonist – a doctor’s daughter – during her visit:

The unsanitary, deprived environment of this home did not take me by surprise: it was after all describing life in the early 1900s. Instead, it evoked a strange, uneasy familiarity in me. I found myself reminded of another scene: this one from around seven months ago, in a news article I’d read.

Published in the aftermath of the 2024 United Kingdom riots, the article described the material realities of a family living in destitution. It is unfortunate that, at the time of reading, I did not save the article and am now unable to cite or quote it directly. But from what I remember, it spoke of families in the UK living in crumbling apartment blocks infested with rats, covered in mould, and susceptible to flooding (and there are other examples). It was heart-wrenching.

The world described in that article was not fiction, unlike the one I had encountered in the novel. More importantly, it was unfolding in our present – 2024 – unlike the early 1900s world on which the fictional scene was based. And yet, the two scenes collided in my mind, and in their coming together, I found myself asking:

How can the material realities depicted in these two works, separated by more than a century, feel so uncannily similar? 

In other words, where is the progress that has been happening for the last 100 years? 

I have found myself returning to this question ever so often; each time my ability to answer this question is stunted by a somewhat broadly accepted fact - that our living standards have improved over the last hundred years. It is in my adherence to this logic and repeatedly recasting myself back to the article that I recalled a particular detail: a photograph of the crumbling apartment in which sat a television.

This object stood out. It was not something I, or the protagonist, encountered in the fisherman’s hut from the early 1900s. An object such as a television signals something new, something that speaks to our modern times. In our modern times, technologies such as televisions, the Internet, and mobile phones are common objects – born from decades of scientific research and innovation. While the living conditions may have been eerily similar in the two scenes, there are things like the television which speak to their difference.

Things have changed over the last hundred years. As our parents often say, ‘back in our day, we didn’t have half the things you do now’. And they’re right. Scientific endeavours have introduced things, tools, technologies which previous generations never imagined. 

In the wake of this realization however my original question was only made more difficult:

For if we have made such advancements through scientific research, why do the material conditions of life in 2024 still mirror those of a world written over a hundred years ago?

It is hard to deny that scientific research has improved our lives. We are able to be treated for diseases, access running water, rely on a steady supply of food, and so on. In addition to helping us meet our basic necessities of life, scientific and technological innovations have also enabled us to communicate instantly, travel easily, search for information with a single click, and other such luxuries of modern life. And now more recently, science has found itself in a renewed space race, as billionaires not only launch themselves into orbit but also increasingly colonise our imagination with visions of colonising other planets. There is a certain sense that science is not only reaching new frontiers but also abandoning old ones.

Science has left Earth, and in many ways, it might be leaving us behind.

Scientific progress today seems to be becoming increasingly uncoupled from the real world of people who inhabit the Earth. In the pursuit of truth and technical advancement, science perhaps risks leaving behind meaning – a sense of connection to the material and moral conditions of our shared world. I’m not saying that finding truths about our universe is not important but only that these truths need to mean something for our lives in the context of our society.   

What was once a tool for improving human life, for contributing to broader societal progress now often seems to float above it, transcending as it were from the lives of those it is meant to serve. In our pursuit of knowing more about the world, we must ask ourselves whether we have stopped thinking about what it means to live well within it and in doing so, stopped conducting research that truly makes a meaningful difference to our lives across the world.

This echoes a concern expressed by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition, written in the aftermath of the 20^th century’s most violent scientific breakthroughs: nuclear weapons, mass surveillance, automation. While Arendt did not reject science outright, she warned that modern science, unlike earlier human crafts, often lacks a clear worldly purpose. That is, while older technologies such as roads, houses, and cities were rooted in necessity and oriented towards creating a common world, modern science tends to abstract away from it. It explains the world but does not necessarily build within it. As Arendt writes:

Modern science, in other words, increasingly justifies itself on the basis of capability alone. We do things because we can, not because they are needed or meaningful. 

When Arendt reflected on the satellite which first left the Earth, she used it as a metaphor for this shift. The satellite wasn’t just a machine that left the planet, it marked the emergence of an entire worldview: one that, by looking at the Earth from above, became severed from the ground of human meaning and experience itself.

In leaving the ground of our existence, science left the realm of human life.

It is in this vein that we must be wary of allowing our pursuit of knowledge to overtake the pursuit of meaning. For if science fully departs from the realm of meaning, we may also begin to witness the disappearance of shared human purpose and broader societal progress. This concern is not merely philosophical, it is unfolding in real time through the kinds of research which is prioritised, funded, and politically permitted. This is most apparent in recent US government policies, where scientific research is increasingly being pulled away from the material conditions of people’s lives.

Under the Trump administration, entire research domains related to gender, race, and regional poverty are being defunded, deprioritised, or outright dismissed. Use of terms like “diversity,” “vulnerable,” and even “evidence-based” in official communications by public health agencies were reported to be discouraged from being used. Programs focused on reproductive health, environmental justice, and socioeconomic inequality stripped of funding. These moves, while guised as attempts to make science neutral, read more as attempts to break science away from real life-worlds. And this disconnection isn’t confined to governments alone. Public figures like Elon Musk, through their companies and cultural influence, promote a vision of science as fast, speculative, and detached from democratic or ethical scrutiny. The result is the same: a vision of progress that abandons the ground of human experience.

A vision which falls short of asking what our research means for broader society, and who, in the end, is left behind. 

But, if science seeks to contribute to progress, it needs to (re)turn to the material conditions of our world, not transcend and abstract away from it. That is, if it is to serve the world, it must return to it, not as conqueror or saviour, but as participant. Scientific progress must be re-embedded in meaning. It is not enough for scientific endeavours to simply achieve knowing; they must also ask what our knowing is for, and what it can do for the conditions of life on Earth. Instead of only answering the question, ‘What can we do?’, science needs to answer,

Who is this for?

What kind of world does this help us build?

When I was reading the description of the fisherman’s hut and remembered the article reporting on the destitute living conditions of people in the UK – one of the most developed nations in the world, I wasn’t thinking about technology or satellites. I was thinking about why some lives feel untouched by progress. Maybe the question isn’t whether science can move us forward, but whether it remembers to look back, and look around, before it does.

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