By Peter Oldfield, NPD Associate Editor
Recent public debate has rightly and at last asked questions about the formerly sacrosanct realms that drive our scientific and technological pursuits in the realm of astrophysics.
Witness the desire to laser-illumine a point near the center of the Milky Way. This extravagant program, one that happens to be under the aegis of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), supports other international astrophysical consortiums with the same questionable academic prerogatives they’ve all been trotting out for sixty years or more, and now well into the post-modern era.
They appear to be holding an entranced world to ransom, as it were; and it is happening right now in the pristine Atacama Desert of coastal Chile, right in the lap of a deprived local populace.
It is clearly a question of priorities as, contrary to popular sentiment, the ‘wow technologies’ have caused us to lose sight of a more human reality. These costly ventures need to be entirely relegated to their proper place, i.e. of lesser importance than the well-being of every last child in the human family.

You can GoogleEarth the coordinates: 24º 37′ 38″ S, 70º 24′ 15″ W and see this extravagance in broad daylight – and notice the curious structure in the top left hand corner of this picture!
A foot-note:
Why do I use the word ‘enchantment’?
Because it carries that slightly benign implication found in ‘fairyland’, and that, after all, is where we’ve been taken. It prepares us then to contemplate, with kindness toward ourselves, the question “What was our part in this?” And as good an answer as any might be “We fell asleep”.
Now at last we are awakening together to the possibility that our civilizational hubris, a kind of ‘shadow’, in the early Jungian sense, that chose to sacrifice human well-being and our deeper connectedness to the matrix of nature, over the altar of a techno-scientific vision, has not simply faltered but has rather, in Titanic fashion, now hit the ice-berg of complete self-deception.
A desire for transcendence no doubt arises in the hearts and minds of all human collectivities, but we must now ask whether we have confused suitable means for attaining that higher goal.
Confidence in the vision has been building up over centuries of Eurocentric power and expansion. Indeed one can trace it back to that peculiarly western story of Gilgamesh and his doomed empire. It has it’s fullest expression in the current imperial prerogatives assumed by our own leadership.
One cannot help noticing that the most visible and fully constellated image in the American mythos is “The Wizard of Oz”.
Clearly the curtain is about to be drawn on the deceptive techno-wizardry that so completely swept Dorothy and her friends along as they faithfully followed the yellow brick path!