The COVID-19 pandemic that turned the world upside down in early 2020 also gave rise to an “infodemic” of misinformation and conspiracy theories. This chapter tackles three issues. We first explore the political and ideological underpinnings of the COVID-19 infodemic and its organizational, rhetorical, and ideological links to climate denial. We then highlight the legitimacy of political grievances in light of government pandemic policies. We conclude by proposing a sketch of the boundary between politically-motivated denial of science on the one hand and legitimate political arguments on the other.

Congress has previously passed environmental and administrative laws that tethered the regulatory process to scientific evidence. Federal agencies were obliged to weigh scientific data, as well as dispassionate economic and legal analyses, as they developed and implemented regulations. The Trump administration sought to untether the rulemaking process from science and other forms of hard evidence and expert analysis by putting contrarian scientists in charge of science advisory boards and by sidelining the views of career scientists at federal agencies and academic scientists. That strategy paved the way for oil and gas insiders at the helm of these agencies to make decisions aligned with positions advocated by the oil and gas industry, which had shared its wish-list on deregulatory actions with the Trump administration. The administration sought to undermine the scientific basis of environmental regulations by promulgating the deceptively named Science Transparency Rule that would block federal agencies' consideration of epidemiological studies that had linked pollution to adverse public health impacts. That rule was built of the decades-long views advocated by oil- and gas-funded think tanks and pro-oil members of Congress. Fortunately for the scientific integrity of rulemaking, in January 2021 a federal court ruled that the EPA had exceeded its powers in promulgating that regulation and subsequently vacated the rule.

Here, I use the phrase ‘intelligent universe’ to refer to all intelligent entities everywhere. Whether the set of all such entities overlaps with, or is a subset of, the biological universe depends on whether we include artificial intelligence in it. I focus here on biological intelligence. On Earth, evolution to high intelligence has proceeded via a series of milestones. These include: multicellularity, bilaterality, brain, and dexterity. To what extent does evolution towards high intelligence elsewhere proceed via the same milestones? I suggest that similar steps would often be found to characterize evolution on other inhabited planets, providing it can continue for long enough. I put forward the hypothesis that there are at least a trillion radio-level intelligences in the observable universe right now. Then I consider the possible implications of ‘first contact’ between humans and one of them. Such contact could pose a threat for human survival. Finally, I look at home-grown threats, including the fixed mind-sets that underlie religious fundamentalism and science denial. I end by urging a robust defence of both science and humanity against such unthinking views.