I want to preface this essay I wrote this morning with something personal—something I feel I need to say before you read the words that follow. I hope that's all right. Because as much as my writing often stirs up emotion in me, this one struck a deeper chord. It hurt to write. Seriously. It still hurts to think about.
For as long as I can remember—even before preschool, if memory serves—I've always been curious. I grew up in a home that revered books, ideas, learning, science, mathematics—the raw pursuit of understanding. Curiosity was not just encouraged; it was sacred. Naturally, I wanted to be a scientist. Over the years, what kind of scientist I wanted to be changed again and again—not because I lost interest, but because I wanted to know everything. I wanted to understand all of this: the beautiful, intricate reality we inhabit. Every field of study, every unanswered question, every glimmer of the unknown beckoned to me.
My childhood was filled with that wonder. Family road trips across the American West—national parks, red rock deserts, fossil beds, ancient forests. Hours in the car spent debating everything under the sun (and occasionally fighting with siblings, as siblings do, lol). I begged for microscopes and telescopes, for books, scientific equipment, and field guides. I spent days wading through local swamps and forests searching for amphibians, insects, and anything else that moved. I dissected a squid on my grandparents' kitchen table—to their amusement and encouragement. I loved libraries and bookstores, always wandering straight to the nonfiction aisles.
My shelves were (and still are) filled with little collections—circuit boards salvaged from broken toys, polished stones, fossils, microscope slides I made myself or begged my parents to order. I dreamed, and still do, constantly of discovery—of exploring the wild world, of venturing into space, of creating something new. Science, in all its forms, was my first and greatest love. It shaped me then, and it shapes me still, deeply.
Dreams evolve, and life does what it does—it bends us, it redirects us, sometimes gently, sometimes not. In a world that rewards specialization, I stretched myself too wide. I could never choose one corner of the universe to devote myself to. I didn't have the discipline to pick one thing and focus. So I never became the scientist I always imagined I'd be. I work in programming now. I build, I create, I problem-solve. But I do not do the science I dreamed of doing. And that absence haunts me, every day.
Instead, I now write about science—and about the world that surrounds and endangers it. I write in the hope that one day I might still find a way back to that first love: to explore, to understand, to contribute something meaningful to this vast and beautiful universe—and to humanity. Even now, as a grown man raising his own child, that desire burns quietly beneath everything I do.
I share all of this with you because what follows—the essay you're about to read—comes from that same place in me: the place where wonder and heartbreak meet. It is hard enough to live with the knowledge that I didn't become the scientist I always dreamed of being. But it is far harder to watch the very culture I grew up in—the one that once tried in ways to celebrate knowledge, discovery, and progress—turn its back on the light that once guided it.
I see the destructive and cynical thread of anti-intellectualism coiling itself around everything I hold dear: education, research, curiosity, truth. I see it tightening its grip around the country I call home, the place I wanted my son to grow up believing in—a place where reason and exploration were once seen as noble, not suspect. Now that light flickers. And it breaks my heart. It truly does.
Please know: I don't write this for pity or sympathy. I write it because I absolutely need to. Because I feel suffocated by the weight of ignorance and hate that grows louder in this country every day. Writing, for me, is a way to breathe—a gasp of air in an atmosphere that's becoming uncomfortably thin, one that feels like it is beginning to choke us all.
Written from grief, from love, and from the small, stubborn hope that maybe—just maybe—enough others out there still believe that curiosity and courage are worth fighting for and saving.
I hate to say this—I hope I'm wrong—but even when this chaos ends, a certain light will not return. The brilliant machinery of American science and discovery, that restless, idealistic drive which once made this country a beacon of human progress, has been dimmed. It will survive in fragments; projects will resume, students will publish, grants will be awarded. But the throbbing pulse of it—the sustained momentum that carried generations toward the unknown—has been seriously fractured. What remains may take decades, perhaps a century, to rebuild.
A quiet erosion is already visible. Publicly funded laboratories that brought us everything from polio vaccines, the mapped human genome, to semiconductors and integrated circuits, GPS, and the internet are now severely underfunded, public trust is increasingly threadbare, and brilliant young researchers are leaving in droves—drifting toward Europe, Japan, Australia, and China—anywhere curiosity and scientific inquiry is still treated as the virtue it truly is instead of a waste or an extravagance. The United States once exported its optimism and idealism through scientific exchange; now it exports disillusionment and fascism. The brain drain has begun, matched by a funding drain just as severe.
This pattern is not new. It mirrors very much what happened to Soviet science after the collapse of the USSR. Once upon a time, places like Akademgorodok near Novosibirsk, the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, the nuclear and space research centers of Obninsk, Sarov (Arzamas-16), Zelenograd, and Chernogolovka were engines of scientific inquiry. They produced top-notch physicists, chemists, biologists, and mathematicians who rivaled the best in the West. Then the Soviet state fell, and those proud academies became mausoleums of great intellect—cold corridors now with peeling paint and underpaid or straight-up unpaid staff, surviving on mere crumbs thrown down by the rotten state ruled over by Putin, and the vanity projects of oligarchs, like Skolkovo. What once served the future of humanity, brought forth by a very flawed regime, became nothing more than an annex of private ambition and research reoriented toward profit, not fundamental understanding, discovery, and exploration.
This is America's trajectory now—a slow conversion from public science and exploration to privatized spectacle. Funding now unstable and institutions politicized, inquiry will not only falter—but migrate. Knowledge, like capital, always seeks safe harbor. As Washington DC turns inward, dismantling the infrastructure of discovery in favor of partisan theater, kleptocracy, and Christofascist hate, others are quietly but gracefully taking America's place.
Whether by incompetence or design, this hollowing out serves those who would prefer an America too weak to compete. Or worse, gone. Perhaps Trump and Russ Vought are not agents of any hostile foreign power; perhaps they are simply too arrogant and too ignorant to see that their scorched-earth ideology of hate and destruction does more to empower rivals of all free and open democratic societies than any spy network or military could—but the outcome is, sadly, the same. Nations once considered America's adversaries—especially China—are now poised to dominate the twenty-first century in science, technology, and economics.
I can't help but see a brutal irony in this unfolding of events. For decades, Americans celebrated the Soviet Union's collapse as proof of their own permanence—proof that the American way was the only way—rarely pausing to consider the human wreckage that followed: millions plunged into poverty, institutions gutted overnight, the birth of a kleptocratic autocracy that now laughs and claps at the faltering American empire which decades ago (and still does) mocked the Soviet fall. The United States cheered the implosion, then abandoned Russia and the rest of the former Soviet Republics to the economic, social, and political chaos that ensued. Now the Russian state, and others of the former USSR, are themselves hollowed out and cynical, some watching with grim satisfaction as America's own institutions wobble and erode under the same forces of greed and decay that devoured the Soviet experiment, and with it, Soviet scientific exploration.
There, of course, will be islands of resilience. Western Europe, the Baltics, Japan, and Oceania still nurture some form of liberal democracy—imperfect but alive, even flourishing in some places. They may yet become sanctuaries for displaced minds, havens for research untainted by ideology, theology, and the rot of hate and greed. Perhaps they will carry the torch forward, preserving at least a remnant of the humanistic ideals that once defined Western science: open inquiry, collaboration, the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, and a sense of responsibility towards humanity and our Mother Earth.
Even if they do, something irreplaceable will be lost. American hegemony in scientific exploration was more than just a geopolitical force; it was psychological fuel. It made young people, both at home and around the world, believe that their curiosity could change their homes and the world for the better, that their country was capable of more than just profit or war. That myth, for all its contradictions, sustained generations. Its death leaves a vacuum no superpower can fill.
As I write this, I can hear Carl Sagan's warm and welcoming voice—that calm and reassuring cosmic cadence from The Demon-Haunted World—echoing somewhere in the back of my mind. And I can't help but sink into a quiet, heavy sadness with a choke on my throat. To think how disappointed he would be—he, and so many of the brilliant minds no longer with us, either born here or who came here in search of a better life—to see how willingly we've let the candle of reason gutter, how easily we've traded natural wonder for rage and aggression, and curiosity for certainty. How we traded what made us truly great for cheap feel-good measures backed by short-sighted hate. This thought hangs there, like the last light of a dying star approaching supernova.
To be honest, I can't quite extinguish the last ember of hope. Maybe, as I said at the start, I will be wrong. I hope I am, truly. I hope I'm just in a bad headspace today. And that maybe these wonderful institutions, monuments to human ingenuity and curiosity, can and will be repaired. Maybe the hopeful and courageous, the many brilliant minds who will undoubtedly stay and fight rather than flee, will usher in a new era of American scientific exceptionalism. Maybe a new public of this country will emerge that values the common good over partisan gain, greed, and hate. But even if recovery comes, it will be slow and haunted, fraught with challenges, speed bumps, and roadblocks—a century's work to rebuild what was squandered in little less than a year. And as a 31 year-old father to a beautiful little boy just as curious as his mom and dad, I can't shake the fear that I'll be long gone—dust and memory—and that my son will be an old man before that lost era of America ever returns.
The irony, the tragedy, is that this collapse need not have happened at all. This decline was not ordained; it was chosen. Chosen by those who were manipulated into believing that cynicism was realism, profit must mean progress, and ideology and theology are what sustain life and progress. They willingly, with smiles, dismantled the scaffolding of a democracy and of scientific discovery for a toxic, short-term, feel-good opiate. Now, as the light fades, they will call the ensuing darkness marked by cruelty and regression that swallows America whole, "sovereignty" and "greatness".
When future historians undoubtedly sift through the ruins, they will find the same pattern repeating from Moscow to Washington. A slow starvation of intellect, the privatization of wonder, the commercialization of humanity, and the exile of human curiosity. They will note how both empires—one red, one red-white-and-blue—in their unshakeable arrogance, took their stability for granted and architected their own demise. They will write, with clinical detachment and precision, that both fell not from some foreign invasion, but from the indifference of their own people, and the ideological and theological rot that spread from within.
Friends, fellow Homo sapiens—people whom I don't know but wish I could meet, sit down with, and enjoy tea, coffees and a heartfelt conversation with—I really hope I'm wrong. However, I just cannot ignore the evidence that points otherwise. The great laboratories are quieting. The best minds are packing their bags. The light that once burned from these beautiful shores is now flickering, running low on wick and wax—and somewhere far away, another sky is beginning to glow for humanity.
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