Some thoughts about Tuesday. (THE POPULAR CONDITION).

It's September 13, 2001. For the past few days the skies have been overcast, rainy, and downright gloomy here in the southern New Mexico mountains. The astronomer in me would normally find this rather frustrating, but right now I don't really seem to care, since it matches my mood almost exactly.

Like most Americans, and I suspect --and hope--most people around the planet, I was shocked and horrified by the events of this past Tuesday. I've seen the televised images countless times--the passenger jetliners crashing into the towers of the World Trade Center, the subsequent crumbling of those structures to the ground--and I'm still not sure that the fact that these aren't glitzy special effects in some adventure movie but rather are stone cold reality has sunk into my brain. I cannot even begin to imagine the horror that must have been experienced by those aboard the four hijacked airliners, those in and near the World Trade Center, and those at the Pentagon during those moments when their lives were snatched from them. As I contemplate the thousands of innocent people who lost their lives in such senseless slaughter, I search for answers to the same questions I'm sure haunt everyone who has seen these images: who could have done this? And why?

As horrible as these scenes are, what sinks me into the deepest despair is the fact that this is nothing new. We've seen this thing before, countless times. We see it all the time in the land that some people call Palestine and others call Israel: the seemingly neverending stream of young Palestinian suicide bombers in supermarkets and shopping malls, and the continuing shelling of Palestinians and demolition of their homes by Israeli tanks and bulldozers. We saw it in the frightened face of twelve-year-old Mohammed al-Durrah before he was cut down by gunfire at Netzarim and in the bloodied bodies of Israeli soldiers dangling from the window of the police station at Ramallah, Saudi Arabia.

We've seen it elsewhere, too. We've seen slaughter in the streets of Northern Ireland and in the jungles of East Timor. We saw it during the Nazi regime, when six million Jews were sent to unspeakable deaths during the Holocaust, and in the killing fields of Cambodia during the rule of the Khmer Rouge, and in the ethnic cleansing that has gone on in the Balkans. We saw it in all the burnings-at-the-stake during the Inquisition, in the streets running blood during the Crusades, and in the bloodbath upon bloodbath upon bloodbath that has marked almost every era of human history.

And before we Americans start to feel too smug, we've seen it in the United States, too--and by our own hands. We're seeing it right now in hate-filled attacks against U.S. citizens simply because they are of Arab origin or of Islamic faith. We saw it in the beating death of Matthew Shepard and the dragging murder of James Byrd. We saw it in the destruction of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. We've seen it in faraway places like My Lai and No Gun Ri and closer to home in the death squads of Honduras and El Salvador. We saw it in the slave ships that came from Africa and on the slave plantations of the nineteenth century and in the lynchings of the twentieth century. We saw it in the way our ancestors took this land from those who were here first.

And, lest we forget, the death toll in Japan at Hiroshima and Nagasaki--cities full of unarmed civilians--numbered in the tens of thousands. Let's also remember that these were only a small fraction of the tens of millions of lives--military and civilian, and on all sides--that were lost during World War II.

Of course, we humans have accomplished many wonderful things as well. We've landed people on the moon and brought them safely back to Earth, and we've made extraordinary progress against the many diseases that have afflicted us throughout our history. We've gleaned secrets from the farthest galaxies in the universe and from the cells within our bodies that tell us who we are. And we've made progress on other fronts, too; we often talk through our disagreements, both as individuals and as nations and don't always find it necessary to sink to fisticuffs or to war.

My heart sings when I think of the heroism of the rescue workers in New York City and Washington, D.C.--many of whom have risked and sacrificed their lives for their fellow human beings--and of the people around the country and around the world who have donated their blood to the victims of Tuesday's tragedy. I rejoice as I continue to receive messages of sympathy and shock from friends and colleagues all over the world (including, I add for the benefit of those who might want to engage in stereotyping, my scientific colleagues in Iran). When I contemplate these types of actions, I begin to believe that perhaps there is hope for us humans.

There are parts of me that want to wreak the vilest vengeance upon the perpetrators of Tuesday's atrocities, and that, of course, is a sentiment I see in many places now. I hear talk of declaring and preparing for a state of war. But against who? And, ultimately, what good would it do? You can't intimidate with threats of death someone who considers it the highest honor to be killed for a cause. And even if it were possible to wage war against and kill those who were responsible, aren't we just going to provide incentive for many more individuals who want to follow in the terrorists' footsteps?

And if we do engage in war, aren't we far more likely to kill unarmed civilians than to kill the responsible perpetrators? What good does that do? The passions this would inflame would almost certainly provide recruitment incentives for our adversaries. Perhaps more importantly, it would simply bring us down to their level. I would like to believe that we can be better than that--that we can rise above our darkest impulses. Will we?

The United States' response to this past week's attacks represents one of the severest challenges we have ever faced as a nation--and as the human race as a whole. I have to admit that I don't have much in the way of answers here. I'd like to think--with every part of my being--that there is some way to bring the perpetrators of Tuesday's nightmare to appropriate justice and still retain the humanity that we've struggled so hard to achieve. But maybe there isn't. As much as this might go against everything I'd like to say I believe in, perhaps the only way to prevent recurrences of events like last Tuesday's is indeed to engage in an all-out, no-holds-barred, civilians-be-damned, total state of war.

If that's really the case, then I do have a couple of suggestions. After we've made the world safe from terrorism--or whatever it is we'd be trying to do--let's take a good, hard look at all the carnage we'll have left around us. That is, if there are any of us left to look around, of course. And let's drop any pretense we might have that we're somehow "noble" or "righteous." We should also forget for awhile about exploring space or researching stem cells or trying to figure out the mysteries of the universe or other such pursuits. Those are activities for a mature species, and it'll be all too clear that we will still have a lot of growing up left to do.

Alan Hale is founder and director of the nonprofit Southwest Institute for Space Research in Cloudcroft, New Mexico, and was codiscoverer of Comet Hale-Bopp in 1995. During the past two years he has led two delegations of American scientists, students, and educators on "scientific diplomacy" visits to Iran.