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President Barack Obama has unveiled his new budget for fiscal year 2011 at $3.8 trillion dollars. Staggeringly huge. Brobdingnagianly big. Almost inconceivable. Just how much is a trillion dollars? Here are some comparisons.

The brain consists of about a hundred billion neurons, which is about the same as the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. A hundred billion is 10¹¹, or a 1 following by 11 zeros: 100,000,000,000. That’s about what Obama plans to spend on Veterans Affairs ($57 billion) and Homeland Security ($43 billion) combined. It’s a huge number. It is literally an astronomical number. But that’s nothing. A trillion is a thousand billion. How much is a trillion?

Start counting seconds as “one one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand…” and when you get to 86,400 that’s the number of seconds in a day. When you reach 31,546,000 that’s the number of seconds in a year. When you get to 315,460,000 you will have been counting for ten years, but you are still not even close. Add another 0 to get to 100 billion, and another 0 still to get to 1,000 billion, and you will have finally reached one trillion seconds. If you make it that long you will have been counting for about 30,000 years. Now, do that 3.8 times and you will have counted out the number of dollars that the Federal government plans to spend in just one year.

To count in seconds the number of dollars in the 2011 Federal budget, you will have to count “one one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand…” for 114,000 years, which if you were counting backward in time would thrust you back to the time when humans first migrated out of Africa and began to spread across the globe, still living as hunter-gatherers with fairly crude stone tools, competing with Neanderthals and other hominids for survival, and just beginning to show signs of symbolic communication.

If ever there was a symbol to communicate that has no corresponding link to a tangible asset in the real world (such as gold or other precious metals), it is money. That’s why it is called “fiat money.” The government just declares money to be legal tender, based on the good faith of the federal government itself.

If that doesn’t jolt us all back in our chairs, consider the fact that at this rate of spending, in ten years the country will be $8.5 trillion in debt more than it already is, which amounts to $34,018 for every man, woman, and child in the country.

All this almost makes me hope that the 2012 doomsday predictions come true.

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Like unsinkable rubber duckies, everytime you push down the fatuous arguments of the 9/11 “truthers,” who believe that the U.S. government was complicit in the attacks on that fateful day in September, they just pop back up. In response to my blog here, 9/11 Truthers Foiled by 12/25 Attack, the “truthers” have fired back with a series of questions for me, not about Al Qaeda and bin Laden taking credit for the Xmas day underwear bomber, or for 7/7, or Lisbon, or the attack on the World Trade Center buildings in the early 1990s, but on specific “anomalies” in the collapse of the WTC buildings, in the mistaken belief that if I cannot address each and every anomaly they believe they have found, then this is proof positive that Bush, Chaney, Rumsfeld, and company are guilty. Here is their challenge to me: http://911debunkers.blogspot.com/2010/01/response-to-michael-shermer.html

The belief that a handful of unexplained anomalies can undermine a well-established theory lies at the heart of all conspiratorial thinking (that includes, in addition to Holocaust denial, creationism and crank theories of physics), and is easily refuted by noting that beliefs and theories are not built on single facts alone, but on a convergence of evidence from multiple lines of inquiry. All of the “evidence” for a 9/11 conspiracy falls under the rubric of this fallacy.

For example, on the issue of the melting temperature of steel, according to 911research.wtc7.net, steel melts at a temperature of 2,777 degrees Fahrenheit, but jet fuel burns at only 1,517 degrees Fahrenheit. No melted steel, no collapsed towers. (This claim is made by Jim Hoffman,in his book Waking Up From Our Nightmare and on his web page http://911research.wtc7.net/talks/towers/text/index.html.) Wrong. In an article in the Journal of the Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society, M.I.T. engineering professor Dr. Thomas Eager explains why: steel loses 50 percent of its strength at 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit; 90,000 liters of jet fuel ignited other combustible materials such as rugs, curtains, furniture, and paper, which continued burning after the jet fuel was exhausted, raising temperatures above 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit and spreading the fire throughout the building; temperature differentials of hundreds of degrees across single steel horizontal trusses caused them to sag, straining and then breaking the angle clips that held them to the vertical columns; once one truss failed, others failed, and when one floor collapsed (along with the ten stories above it) onto the next floor below, that floor then gave way, creating a pancaking effect that triggered the 500,000-ton building to collapse.

Conspiricists also argue that if the buildings had collapsed due to the impact of the planes, they should have fallen over on their sides. This is also wrong. With 95 percent of each building consisting of empty space (these were office buildings after all), they could only have collapsed straight down—there simply isn’t enough structural support integrity to take an entire building down in one piece.

Conspiracy theory buffs—in direct contradiction of the above claim—also believe that the buildings fell straight down into their own footprint, which, they say, could only have happened if they had been deliberately brought down by explosive charges carefully and deliberately set ahead of time. Not true. The buildings did not fall down perfectly straight. Their collapse began on the side where the planes impacted, and so were tilted slightly toward that weakened collapse point.

Another conspiracy claim is that the buildings fell from the top down, precisely in the manner that controlled demolition buildings collapse. False. Controlled demolitions are done from the bottom up, not the top down. If you search “building demolition” on YouTube you will find hundreds of video clips of buildings collapsing by controlled demolition from the bottom up.

For our special 9/11 issue of Skeptic (https://www.skeptic.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Session_ID=c87b04f1741b6411293eee53ccfedc39&Screen=PROD&Store_Code=SS&Product_Code=magv12n4&Category_Code=BI) we consulted a demolition expert named Brent Blanchard, who is Director of Field Operations for Protec Documentation Services, a company that documents the work of building demolition contractors. Since the rise in popularity of 9/11 conspiracy theories, he too has been inundated with requests to explain why the buildings appeared to have “collapsed as if by a controlled demolition.” (Blanchard’s entire analysis may be found on the Website he edits: www.implosionworld.com) Blanchard and his team of experts at Protec have worked with all major American demolition companies and many foreign ones to study the controlled demolition of over 1,000 of some of the largest and tallest buildings around the world. Their duties include engineering studies, structural analysis, vibration/air overpressure monitoring and photographic services. On September 11, 2001, Protec had portable field seismic monitoring systems operating at other sites in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Demolition specialists were hired to clean up Ground Zero and remove the remaining damaged structures, and these experts called on Blanchard’s company to document both the deconstruction and the debris removal. Here are nine of the best arguments made by 9/11 conspiracy theorists and their rebuttal by Protec:

Claim #1: The collapse of the towers looked exactly like controlled demolitions.

Protec: No they did not. The key to any demolition investigation is in finding out the “where”—the actual point at which the building failed. All photographic evidence shows World Trade Center buildings 1 and 2 failed at the point of impact. Actual implosion demolitions always start with the bottom floors. Photo evidence shows the lower floors of WTC 1 and 2 were intact until destroyed from above.

Claim #2: But they fell right down into their own footprint.

Protec: They did not. They followed the path of least resistance and there was a lot of resistance. Buildings of 20 stories or more do not topple over like trees or reinforced towers or smokestacks. Imploding demolitions fall into a footprint because lower stories are removed first. WTC debris was forced out away from the building as the falling mass encountered intact floors.

Claim #3: Explosive charges are seen shooting from several floors just prior to collapse.

Protec: No, air and debris can be seen being violently ejected from the building—a natural and predictable effect of rapid structure collapse.

Claim #4: Witnesses heard explosions.

Protec: All Seismic evidence from many independent sources on 9/11 showed none of the sudden vibration spikes that result from explosive detonations.

Claim #5: A heat generating explosive (thermite?) melted steel at ground Zero.

Protec: To a man, demolition workers do not report encountering molten steel, cut beams or any evidence of explosions. Claims of detected traces of thermite are at this time inconclusive.

Claim #6: Ground Zero debris—particularly the large steel columns from towers 1 and 2—were quickly shipped overseas to prevent scrutiny.

Protec: Not according to those who handled the steel. The chain of procession is clearly documented, first at ground Zero by Protec and later at the Fresh Kills site by Yannuzzi Demolition. The time frame (months) before it was shipped to China was normal.

Claim #7: WTC7 was intentionally “pulled down” with explosives. The building owner himself was quoted as saying he decided to “pull it.”

Protec: Building owners do not have authority over emergency personal at a disaster scene. We have never heard “pull it” used to refer to an explosive demolition. Demolition explosive experts anticipated the collapse of WTC7, and also witnessed it from a few hundred feet away and no one heard detonations.

Claim #8: Steel-frame buildings do not collapse due to fire.

Protec: Many steel-framed buildings have collapsed due to fire.

Claim #9: Anyone who denies that explosives were used is ignoring evidence.

Protec: Most of our comments apply to the differences between what people actually saw on 9/11 and what they should have seen had explosives been present. The hundreds of men and women who worked to remove debris from ground zero were some of the countries most experienced and respected demolition veterans. They of all people processed the experience and expertise to recognize evidence of controlled demolition if it existed. None of these people has come forward with suspicions that explosives were used.

I began this mini-series of blogessays on morality and terrorism with the neuron bomb of planting the idea of absolute morality based on belief in a God who provides a supernatural transcendent source for determining right and wrong. We can do better than this. In addition to asking the moral receiver how he or she might respond to a moral action, and considering how that action might lead to your own and the moral receiver’s happiness or unhappiness, there is an even higher moral level toward which we can strive, and that is the freedom and autonomy of yourself and the moral receiver, or what we shall simply refer to here as liberty.

Liberty is the freedom to pursue happiness and the autonomy to make decisions and act on them in order to achieve that happiness. The liberty principle states that it is a higher moral principle to always seek liberty with someone else’s liberty in mind, and never seek liberty when it leads to someone else’s loss of liberty. The liberty principle is grounded in history and anchored in modern enlightenment values.

In pre-historic bands and tribes, liberty was limited to the actions and interactions of individuals within their families, extended families, and tiny communities. Liberty as a political concept was nonexistent, because there was no politics. Society, such as it was, was mostly a loose confederation of individuals representing their families and extended families to the community at large. The primary purpose of these communities was to resolve conflicts within the band or tribe, to secure food and natural resources, and to protect against other bands and tribes. As bands and tribes coalesced into chiefdoms and states, and populations grew from hundreds to thousands and tens of thousands, political organizations were needed because the informal methods of conflict resolution that worked so well in smaller populations broke down among the much larger populations, and the small skirmishes between bands and tribes grew into much larger and costlier wars between chiefdoms and states.

As chiefdoms and states require revenue to support a bureaucratic infrastructure, and bureaucracies are not designed to be revenue-generating organizations, the individual members of the chiefdom or state must relinquish some percentage of their productive labor. Today this is done through taxes, duties, levies, tolls, excises, and various other financial assessments. Where there is no money, or a limited supply of cash flow, the barter system may be employed, such as in feudalism, where peasants gave over a portion of their agricultural products to the land-owning lord, and/or a fraction of their time to military service in defense of the castle, manor, or realm. Here, and elsewhere, some freedom and autonomy is exchanged for security and resources, and this may lead to an increase in overall liberty and the general good of the chiefdom or state.

It is at this point—roughly three to five thousand years ago when bands and tribes evolved into chiefdoms and states—that the concept of civil and political liberty was born. Here we can turn to the Bio-Cultural Evolutionary Pyramid from Chapter 7 in The Science of Good and Evil (see below), to see where and how that transition was made. It is at the bio-cultural transitional boundary between the community and the society, where social status and recognition lead to social justice and security, and where the drive of reciprocal altruism gives rise to indirect and blind altruism, that liberty emerges—the principle that when individual members of the community exchange freedom and autonomy for resources and security, in the long run their overall liberty increases. For example, exchanging a portion of my earnings for food that someone else produces, allows me the freedom to pursue non-food producing activities. Ideally, the exchange of some freedom and autonomy for resources and security leads to other forms of freedom and autonomy. Unfortunately, that is not always the case.

For many millennia the concept of liberty for all members of the state lie dormant, suppressed by the selfish and competitive drives of the political and religious leaders who held the reigns of power. Even the occasional enlightened societies that set up quasi-representative bodies to protect the interests of the citizens at large, restricted liberty to a narrow class of land-owning or power-wielding white males. Only in the last couple of centuries have we witnessed the worldwide spread of liberty as a concept that applies to all peoples everywhere, regardless of their rank or social and political status in the power hierarchy. Liberty has yet to achieve worldwide status, particularly among those states dominated by theocracies that encourage intolerance, and dictate that only some people deserve liberty, but the overall trend since the Enlightenment has been to grant greater liberty, for more people, everywhere. Although there are setbacks still, and periodically violations of liberties disrupt the overall historical flow from less to more liberty for all, the general trajectory of increasing liberty for all humans continues.

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A review of Creation: The True Story of Charles Darwin. Starring Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly. Jon Amiel Director, Jeremy Thomas Producer, John Collee writer. New Market Films. Based on Randal Keynes’s book Annie’s Box. In general release January 22, 2010.

Creation is one of the most beautifully produced, artfully directed, factually accurate, and powerfully acted biopic films ever made. Full stop. It stars Paul Bettany as the Charles Darwin almost no one knows (and looking almost eerily similar if you match him to portraits of Darwin at that time), and Jennifer Connelly as the Emma Darwin almost invisible to history (and whose stunning Hollywood beauty is forgotten as she morphs into a realistic portrayal of a 19^th century Englishwoman). The script is based on Randal Keynes’s biographical work, Annie’s Box, a moving portrait of the middle-aged Darwin—after the five-year voyage of the Beagle and before the white-bearded sage of Down basked in scientific triumph—as he struggled intellectually and emotionally to put the pieces of natural history together into a cogent theory. It is also about Charles Darwin the man, husband and father, besieged by health problems that curtailed his work days to only a few hours, stressed by the normal strains of marriage, and agonizing over the death of his beloved 10-year old daughter’s death from a mysterious disease.

The film opens with the capture and return of indigenous natives of Tierra del Fuego, in the hopes that such “savages” could be saved by culture (British of course) and seeded to their native lands to spread the Queen’s English (and manners) and save their souls for God and country. (Of course, the Fuegians promptly ripped their clothes off and returned to the lifestyle appropriate for their culture.) Thankfully, the film wisely steers wide of the myth that Darwin discovered natural selection in the Galapagos Islands, and instead reveals what really happened (and what almost always happens in science) in Darwin’s halting and desultory steps to putting all the pieces of his theory together over many years after his return to England.

The hindsight bias that dictates so much of historical reconstruction—where every step along the way is pregnant with meaning for what we know is coming—is mercifully absent in Creation. Instead we find a Darwin unsure of himself. He doesn’t know what we know, and the films takes us on the intellectual journey of discovery with Darwin, as he also tries to balance work with family life and his incessant physical problems that finds him on regular visits to the town of Malvern to undergo James Manby Gully’s water cure therapy—what we would today call quack science—involving a naked Darwin standing in a shower-like stall being bombarded by waves of water. Presumably the shock to the system would shake up his innards enough to cure him. It didn’t.

The leitmotif of Creation, however, is not evolution so much as it is life and death and love. The love of a man and a woman, the love of a father and a child, and the life and death of an idea (God) and a child (Annie). Darwin has many children (almost everyone did in his time), but he was especially fond of his eldest daughter Annie, and one part of the leitmotif is Darwin’s recounting to her of the story of the death of Jenny, a young orangutan captured in Borneo and transported to the London Zoo, where it subsequently died of pneumonia in the arms of her caretaker. It’s a metaphor, of course, for Annie dying in the arms of her father, in a hotel room in Malvern when Darwin took her there for a worthless water cure therapy treatment. Since I have a daughter about whom I feel the same way Darwin did for his beloved Annie, the scene where Darwin subsequently returns to the Malvern hotel room and sobs uncontrollably on the bed where Annie died was so empathically painful that I could barely sit through it. And the portrayal of the strain Annie’s death puts the Darwin marriage through is surely not an exaggeration.

The other stress in Darwin’s marriage was his science and Emma’s religion. Darwin knew that people would think that his theory, in Thomas Huxley’s words, “killed god,” and he also knew that this fact would pain his wife, who worried for her husband’s soul to the point that she wrote him letters to that effect. It is, in fact, the likeliest reason why Darwin avoided the growing conflict between science and religion. Toward the end of his life he received many letters querying him on his religious attitudes. Darwin’s long-silence gave way to a few revelations. In one letter penned in 1879, just three years before he died, Darwin explained: “In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an Atheist in the sense of denying the existence of God. I think that generally (and more and more as I grow older), but not always, that an Agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind.”

A year later, in 1880, Darwin clarified his reasoning to the British socialist Edward Aveling, who solicited Darwin’s endorsement of a group of radical atheists. Darwin declined the offer, elaborating his reason: “It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against christianity & theism produce hardly any effect on the public; & freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follow[s] from the advance of science. It has, therefore, been always my object to avoid writing on religion, & I have confined myself to science. I may, however, have been unduly biased by the pain which it would give some members of my family, if I aided in any way direct attacks on religion.” Emma was a deeply religious woman, so out of love and respect for her, Darwin kept the public side of his religious skepticism in check, an admirable feat of self-discipline by a man of high moral character.

Go see this beautiful film about such an estimable man, an honorable woman, and an enduring love.

On Friday, January 15, I received in email from Richard Dawkins explaining that his Executive Director Elizabeth Cornwell has organized a campaign to raise money on behalf of the victims of the Haitian earthquake-induced tragedy, and he wanted to know if the Skeptics Society would like to participate, which of course I unhesitatingly agreed.

The campaign is called Non-Believers Giving Aid and is set up through PayPal. Richard Dawkins has generously offered to cover all the PayPal fees (up to $10,000) and the Skeptics Society got things started off with a bang with a $1000 donation. Within minutes of it’s launch on Saturday morning, tens of thousands of dollars started pouring in as members of the other participating groups (Sam Harris’ The Reason Project, The James Randi Educational Foundation, Atheist United, Atheist Alliance International, and many others) jumped in without hesitation. (All monies go to Doctors without Borders and the International Red Cross—you choose.)

In less than half a day we passed the $50,000 mark, $100,000 in less than 24 hours, $175,000 by Sunday morning, and over a quarter of a million dollars by sunup Monday morning, and still climbing as I post this commentary. We’ll easily surpass a million dollars within days. Not a bad showing! But beyond the aid needed by the Haitians, why does this matter? Why do I need to brag about our generosity? Because people tend to believe that religious people are more generous than nonreligious people, and so it is important that we show our true colors now. As I noted for the press release issued by Dawkins’ foundation: “It’s all well and good to say that we nonbelievers are just as moral as believers (we are, but that’s a philosophical point)—actions count more than words and real donations are where the theoretical rubber meets the practical road. This is our time to pony up and show the world our true character.” And pony up nonbelievers did, in spades.

Where do people get this idea that nonbelievers are not as generous? In 2006 the Syracuse University professor and conservative commentator Arthur C. Brooks published Who Really Cares, in which he claimed that when it comes to charitable giving and volunteering, numerous quantitative measures debunk the myth of “bleeding heart liberals” and “heartless conservatives.” Conservatives donate 30 percent more money than liberals (even when controlled for income), give more blood and log more volunteer hours. He also presented data showing that religious people are four times more generous than secularists to all charities, 10 percent more munificent to non-religious charities, and 57 percent more likely than a secularist to help a homeless person. Those raised in intact and religious families are more charitable than those who are not.

Why such a striking difference? One answer may be found in the theory of “social capital,” defined by Robert Putnam in his 2000 book Bowling Alone as “connections among individuals—social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them.” In their analysis of data from the World Values Survey, for example, Harvard University professor Pippa Norris and University of Michigan professor Ronald Inglehart (in their 2004 book Sacred and Secular), found a positive correlation between “religious participation” and membership in “non-religious community associations,” including women’s, youth, peace, social welfare, human rights, and environmental conservation groups (and, apparently, bowling leagues). “By providing community meeting places, linking neighbors together, and fostering altruism, in many (but not all) faiths, religious institutions seem to bolster the ties of belonging to civic life.”

In other words, we all have the capacity to be generous and giving, as long as we belong to social groups who encourage the better angels of our natures. That is social capital that generates economic capital, and nonbelievers are just as generous as believers. Call it bowling for atheists!