First of all, we must become conscious of the fact that humankind can only survive if it is able to live ethically.
Everyone knows that “ethics” signifies a responsible and correct relationship. But what are the criteria for such a relationship? Today it is indispensable to define it in a scientific vision.
Our mission is peace on Earth. We are convinced that peace depends not only on political decisions and economic circumstances. Today scientists and engineers hold a key position, not only in the development of knowledge and technology, but also regarding the possibility of war.
Any discovery can be a contribution to the happiness and evolution of humanity or to its self-destruction, but the point is not the research, neither the discovery. Crucial is the ethical position which is the motivation of scientific research and its technical application.
However, it is not enough to say “We want to be ethical.” We must understand the deeper meaning of ethics.
What does “ethics” mean?
Everyone knows that “ethics” signifies a responsible and correct relationship. But what are the criteria for such a relationship? Today it is indispensable to define it in a scientific vision.
Think of the personality of the Hiroshima B29-Commander: A highly educated engineer with profound knowledge of the natural sciences. He has a family and he loves his children. Naturally he knows, that the Christian religion teaches to respect and to love your fellow man. Nevertheless, he obeys the inhuman military order and bombs a city, knowing full well that he cremates thousands of harmless people, also children and infants. In his consciousness he did his job as a soldier, and he was awarded and became a national hero. This fact is absurd, but it is very important to understand, why it could happen, otherwise this dark side of humanity’s civilization will never end.
The main question is, why are highly educated individuals, scientists and engineers able to violate basic humanistic principles? Surely, the patriotic American pilot would not be able to bomb his own house, killing his own family. Why, then, was he able to drop the bomb to kill thousands of Japanese children?
The cause of this terrible ability is a profound limitation in the scale of one’s ethical consciousness. The current vision of the human being sees everybody as an individual and does not go beyond the system of moral rules that have been created to control people. Power neither knows ethics nor morality.
Beginning in the spring of 1945, John von Neumann, mathematician and physicist, inventor and polyglot, was included in the Target Selection Committee responsible for choosing the Japanese cities of Hiroshima, Kokura and Nagasaki as the first targets of the atomic bomb. Von Neumann and other scientists and engineers oversaw computations related to the expected size of the bomb blasts, estimated death tolls, and the distance above the ground at which the bombs should be detonated for optimum shock wave propagation and thus maximum effect of destruction and mortality.
Indeed, Hiroshima and Nagasaki became military scientific research objects in the interest of political and economic power. On August 6, 1945, an American B-29 aircraft carrying a nuclear bomb was accompanied by two other B-29s. One of them carried instrumentation for measurements of the effects of the explosion, and the other was the photographer’s aircraft.
The history of the war did not end in 1945, but it continued in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yugoslavia and today in Syria where the international power players test modern weapon systems killing thousands of innocent men, women and children. This practice is an outrageous violation of the United Nations Charter that prohibits the use of force in international relations.
How can we maintain peace on Earth and develop relationships of responsibility and respect? What can we do? What is the solution?
First of all, we must become conscious of the fact that humankind can only survive if it is able to live ethically. Only then will our humanity reach cosmic consciousness and become an integral member of the galactic life space. For this reason, we must develop a scientific vision of ethics which is based on the laws of the universe.
Hartmut Müller
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