OnlySky
Rational thought for irrational times. Shape a future based on reality, compassion, and secular courage
One cosmic incarnation or (very, very) many?
Would there be an alien Jesus? What would it look like?
A dry run to save the planet: NASA DART probe closing in on asteroid impact
Reading Time: 6 minutes NASA’s DART spacecraft will crash into an asteroid on September 26, the first real-life test of planetary defense techniques.
The end of the world is not what you think
Reading Time: 3 minutes Every year of the calendar, for ages and ages, up to and including this year, religious people have believed the end of the world is coming soon. But the end never comes. I would evince a high degree of vanity to think the end of the world will occur in my life span. The whol
My favorite contradiction: Nail polish and femininity, feminism, and men’s liberation
Reading Time: 6 minutes When the world is suffering from a deadly pandemic, losses of fundamental human rights, and climate change caused by a capitalistic and Christian nationalist ethnostate, sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself is look forward to the little things and engage in self-c
Entropy, time, and the arrow of adolescence
Is there an inherent link between entropy and the momentum of time?
AI is getting scarily good
Reading Time: 7 minutes Technological advances have made it possible for computers to hold conversations, perform surgery, create art, and more. What room is left for humans?
The night I called Code Lavender
July 1995. It was my first night of internship, the next step after medical school. I’d already admitted a half dozen patients to the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit from the emergency room under the watch of a third-year resident. The CCU was the scariest first-night internship assignment there was.
The fellowship of the living
As humanists, we should completely reject age as an artificial segregation of humanity. A deep future view can help.
10 eye-opening secular books for a new perspective
Reading Time: 5 minutes Our world, and our minds, are always changing. Secular people often claim to be freethinkers, which is great. But part of being a freethinker is keeping your mind open to new ideas, new stories, and new perspectives. The good part is that the solution is remarkably simple: re
Study: How most of the 5 billion would die in a US/Russia nuclear exchange
Reading Time: 2 minutes A new study found that a nuclear war between the US and Russia could be the worst catastrophe in world history. But most people wouldn’t die from the exchange itself; 5 billion would perish from the hunger that follows. The study, published in Nature, found that the soot prod
Maybe religion isn’t dying, but it’s definitely not well
Reading Time: 6 minutes In their recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Byron R. Johnson and Jeff Levin, referring to a paper they recently published in the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion (IJRR), argue that religiosity is not declining in the US but rather, “Americans are becoming more
‘The Great Replacement’: How New Atheists legitimized and spread a white nationalist conspiracy theory
Reading Time: 17 minutes A string of deadly far-right attacks across the globe in the past decade or so had one thing in common: a white nationalist conspiracy theory known as The Great Replacement. From Utoya, Norway in 2011 to the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, El Paso, Texas and Chri
