SETI public: Why we need to worry about science ignorance

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'But you do not! You are not even masters of this planet. What about Eurasia
and Eastasia? You have not conquered them yet.'

'Unimportant. We shall conquer them when it suits us. And if we did not,
what difference would it make? We can shut them out of existence. Oceania is
the world.'

'But the world itself is only a speck of dust. And man is tiny helpless! How
long has he been in existence? For millions of years the earth was
uninhabited.'

'Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older?
Nothing exists except through human consciousness.'

'But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals -- mammoths and
mastodons and enormous reptiles which lived here long before man was ever
heard of.'

'Have you ever seen those bones, Winston? Of course not. Nineteenth-century
biologists invented them. Before man there was nothing. After man, if he
could come to an end, there would be nothing. Outside man there is nothing.'

'But the whole universe is outside us. Look at the stars! Some of them are a
million light-years away. They are out of our reach for ever.'

'What are the stars?' said O'Brien indifferently. 'They are bits of fire a
few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot
them out. The earth is the centre of the universe. The sun and the stars go
round it.'

Winston made another convulsive movement. This time he did not say anything.
O'Brien continued as though answering a spoken objection:

'For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When we navigate the
ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume
that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions upon
millions of kilometres away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us
to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant,
according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to
that? Have you forgotten doublethink?'

Winston shrank back upon the bed. Whatever he said, the swift answer crushed
him like a bludgeon. And yet he knew, he knew, that he was in the right. The
belief that nothing exists outside your own mind -- surely there must be
some way of demonstrating that it was false? Had it not been exposed long
ago as a fallacy? There was even a name for it, which he had forgotten. A
faint smile twitched the corners of O'Brien's mouth as he looked down at
him.

'I told you, Winston,' he said, 'that metaphysics is not your strong point.
The word you are trying to think of is solipsism. But you are mistaken. This
is not solipsism. Collective solipsism, if you like. But that is a different
thing: in fact, the opposite thing. All this is a digression,' he added in a
different tone. 'The real power, the power we have to fight for night and
day, is not power over things, but over men.'

The entire novel is online here:

http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/1984/

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