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:

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