What Does It Mean for Religion If There Is Life on other Planets?

Hi, I’m Rabbi Geoff Mitelman, founding director of Sinai and Synapses. Sinai and Synapses bridges the worlds of religion and science, offering people a worldview that is both scientifically grounded and spiritually uplifting. It is incubated at Clal, the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership.  The following podcast is a project of our Sinai and Synapses Fellowship, a select interfaith group of clergy, scientists and writers who are committed to elevating the discourse surrounding religion and science. To find out more about the fellowship and our other programs, or to help support our work, please visit us online at sinaiandsynapses.org, or follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Thank you very much.

Kat Robison: Hello and welcome to a special edition of the Sinai and Synapses fellowship podcast. My name is Kat Robison and I am a doctoral student at the University of Alabama studying space policy, and a member of this Fellowship, where we seek to personalize the relationship around religion and science. The fellows are models for a productive conversation surrounding these areas. They are dedicated to exploring their own stories, their own commitments, their own doubts, and are dedicated to learning about and from other people’s journeys as well.

For this conversation, I am joined by several colleagues from the Fellowship. I’d like to welcome Megan Cuzzolino, a doctoral student studying human development at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Welcome, Megan.

Megan Cuzzolino: Hi.

Kat Robison: And we have John ZuHone, an astronomer at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. John, welcome.

John ZuHone: Hello.

Kat Robison: And finally Rabbi Dan Ain, founder and spiritual leader at Because Jewish. Dan, Welcome.

Dan Ain: Thanks so much.

Kat Robison: And we welcome you all into this conversation.

At our last fellowship meeting in May, we were discussing space, religion and spirituality, and we wanted to bring that conversation to our podcast. Now Dan, you recently held an event called “Do aliens exist, does it matter?”. Will you tell us a little bit about it?

Dan Ain: (laughs) Sure thing, thanks for having me. For the past few years, I’ve been developing a relationship with astrophysicist David W. Hogg of NYU. And we’ve had public conversations at the 92nd Street Y and other locations on the nature of truth and existence, and how – very much in the Sinai and Synapses model, of how do we, as an astrophysicist and me being a rabbi, communicate around some of the deeper issues in life – the nature of truths, and how we find our place in the world.

This past Friday night, we held one on the nature of aliens and extraterrestrial life, and what I and the crowd there wanted to get into a little bit was, first of all, do we think that there is extraterrestrial life to be found? How do we know that to be the case? And then if we do believe that there is life to be found elsewhere in the universe, how does that impact our sense of self? How does that impact our relationship to God? Does that make us feel more awed by God’s presence, or does that make us feel more distant and less special?

Just briefly, the overriding purpose, I guess, that I have for wanting to get into this conversation stems from a teaching of a Hasidic rabbi named Simcha Bunim, who said that you should always walk around with two pieces of paper in your pocket. In one pocket it should say “the world was created for me,” and in the other pocket, it should say “I am nothing but dust and ashes.” It has been my belief that the belief, the thinking, that there is certainly, probabilistically, to be found extraterrestrial life elsewhere in the universe makes us feel as if [we were] nothing but stardust and ashes, and we lose a sense of the world being created exclusively for us. It makes us feel less special.

What Professor Hogg says, although that we have not found, as of yet, evidence of intelligent life in the universe, he says that just by virtue of the vast numbers of “good planets,” he holds to a meta-Copernician belief that we just simply can’t be that special, in light of all the sheer number of potential good planets that can be found that can sustain life. And I, sort of playing off of that, am feeling that that is exactly that belief system that makes us feel not special, that removes us from a sense that God cares intimately about our lives and about how we treat each other.

Kat Robison: That’s really interesting to me, and this sort of makes me think somewhat of the work you do, Megan, looking at awe, because when you say “are we nothing but stars and dust, or stardust and stuff?” And for me, I think personally, when I think I am made of stardust, that’s a very spiritual and special connection that actually makes me feel more significant in some way. So it’s a very interesting – I don’t know, Megan, if you have some comments on any of what Dan has just been saying.

Megan Cuzzolino: Yeah, well I think that for me, what this brings to mind is some of the recent research, as you mention, Kat, about awe and the effects that seems to have on our perspective in the world, around the universe, and our behaviors within it. So there’s some recent research that Paul Piff and others have conducted that suggests that experiencing awe actually leads to greater pro-social or altruistic behaviors and intentions. And the mechanism for this they refer to as “small self.” So it’s this idea that the smaller you feel, or the more that you attend to the broader context that you’re a part of, the more you have concern for that context.

And so they have found, in lab studies, that cueing people to experience awe actually increases people’s intentions to donate money to a cause, for instance, or to help somebody who’s dropped things on the floor, or to spend their time volunteering. Now, we don’t know a whole lot about whether those behaviors actually carry on when people are out of the labs, so whether it’s a momentary experience that leads to a temporary shift in behavior, or whether it’s something more long lasting, I think, remains to be seen. I think we need some more research to determine that. But it does seem to me that there could be something that’s in line with this research to suggest that feeling that you are part of something greater, which may include additional life, is actually sort of an incentive to participate in that broader system, rather than feeling diminished by it.

Dan Ain: If I could step in here, yeah, that’s fascinating. One of the things that we have found was that in the context of the discussion, did the notion that people – that there is extraterrestrial life to be found – make people feel smaller, or make them feel as if God was more removed? What we heard back, in the course of the conversation, was the analogy that it was like a parent who has three children. You can love each of those children in a very powerful and same way. The fact that a parent has more than one child wouldn’t necessarily diminish the love from parent to child. And for the most part, people were not on board, they were much more comfortable with, as you describe, the sense of awe in the universe, and the sense that God certainly has the capacity to create more planets than this planet alone.

But my concern remains, because I think much of society, culture, technology, is removing us, digitizing us. It is taking us, turning us into quantifiables, or to metrics and to numbers, and that is losing a sense of intimacy that I think the Bible speaks to. An intimacy with God – a personal relationship with our Creator.

And I think the more that we focus in on the 500 million good planets to be found in the universe, the farther removed we feel from having an intimate relationship with a God who is capable of working with us. That’s where I come from, you know. When we think about what about myths with which we view the world, the Jewish myth provides – my professor Neil Gillman of [Jewish Theological Seminary] used to say, “if you don’t know where you came from, and you don’t know where you’re going, then you can’t know where you are.” And that creating a myth, a worldview, that provides a lens to first understand what we’re doing here, in the here and now, is essential. And the Jewish myth has creation, God created the world in seven days, rested on the seventh day, and at the end of time, you know, we’ll be risen from the dead and judged for our actions. And in the middle of that, we understand that God creates us and birthed us into existence, and that our everyday actions are of universal and ultimate consequence. That’s a distinct point of view that’s different from a scientific worldview that imagines, perhaps, a random Big Bang going on infinity in complete entropy, which really minimizes our roles in our personal actions. I suppose that would be different from what that study you just cited has to say, but that’s often my impression.

Kat Robison: I wonder how much our views on issues like this are affected on our conceptualization of God – whether we think that God is intimately involved in the details of our lives, as is quite common in some denominations, or whether we may see God as sort of a watchmaker God, who is further away from our daily lives. And I wonder what any of your thoughts all are, that how a conception of the spiritual or our conception of God, whether that’s Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, you know, how could that affect our experience of something like awe, well as our experience of our place in the universe?

John ZuHone: I think I’ll just jump in here to answer that question. So I’m an Anglican Christian. I suspect that, based on some things that Dan has said, that him and I would have broad agreement on a lot of big ideas concerning who God is, although inevitably some differences in the details.

I guess what I’m sort of really rattling around here is that there are scientific facts that I believe that we can be fairly confident of: the idea that the universe is very large, that there are hundreds of billions of stars, hundreds of billions of galaxies, with, you know, hundreds of billions of stars in them, and that many of these stars contain planets, and as Dan just mentioned, that there was, in fact, you know, a beginning to the universe, the Big Bang billions of years ago, and all those things are on relatively sound scientific footing.

But what often goes sort of unmentioned in a lot of the discussions that astrophysicists have is that there’s definitely philosophical undercurrents in science, and there’s ideas that scientists have, which are not necessarily properly scientific. So when scientists, as they sometimes do, talk about the Big Bang as being an accident, that’s not necessarily a scientific point of view. It’s a philosophical one, and in fact, from my point of view, as an astrophysicist, it’s kind of a strange one, actually, because the Big Bang as we know it had to be an explosion of exceedingly low entropy, so it’s actually a very ordered explosion that seemed very far from accidental.

And you know, another aspect of this, going back to the question of extraterrestrial life, is that I’m a bit suspicious of this claim of many, many good planets. So I suppose this is where you can get, you know, astrophysicists disagreeing on the interpretation of the data. But it seems that as the years have gone by, we have learned, actually, how difficult it is to form life-bearing planets. Now, the requirements are a lot less stringent for something like bacterial life, but for advanced life, the requirements on the galaxy, the stars, other planets, in fact the existence of a moon orbiting the planet, even, are actually quite important.

And so, I guess that I think that we ought to be careful when we’re talking about the science aspect of it – to sort of recognize what’s settled science, what’s scientific fact. What’s supported by experiment – part of good, thought-out scientific theories – and what parts are kind of more philosophical interpretations of that data, and then just to be careful sort of sift those things out.

Kat Robison: Megan or Dan, anything that you two would like to add, sort of on this idea of either how we talk about science as scientists, or how, perhaps, our spiritual background influences the way we talk about science, or the way we think about life?

Megan Cuzzolino: Yeah, I guess my perspective – so I tend to describe my own spiritual inclination as “hopeful agnostic,” and I think that’s part of where my own research interests come from, in terms of being really fascinated with the ways in which people interact with the universe, and that this sense of awe is an emotion that is shared by both science and religion, is something that’s really interesting to me. And I experience this sense of awe in my own life through science, and through gazing up at the stars, or standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, or something like that, that fulfills my spiritual side and makes me think about big questions, without necessarily tying that to the existence of a creator.

But I think that this also relates to the point that was made earlier, that Dan was talking about, in terms of the implications of the existence of other life. That makes me wonder whether the issue is really with whether or not there is life elsewhere, and what the science says, versus how we attend to that. So this idea of – we’re really focused on these millions of other entities out there that hold the potential for life, and what does that mean for us? Is the point about that being the wrong place to direct our attention, because we should be focused more inward on our own relationships – whether that’s our relationship with God, relationship with our own world, and that it doesn’t really matter?

I know the title of your event, Dan –  the second part was “does it matter?”, right, so is that the question that it doesn’t really affect us, or it shouldn’t affect us, or the search for extraterrestrial life is a distraction from the issues we feel which we should be attending to, or is it really about the science, and that there are implications that exist if there is life elsewhere, whether or not we are aware of it, or looking for it, or attending to it.

Dan Ain: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. For example, if I could read from Psalm 8, that says “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established, what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals you care for them?” and I think you’re exactly right, I think that it’s not even necessarily about “is there life on other planets?”. I think it’s about how are we – John spoke about this as well, philosophically – entering into this conversation? What are the assumptions and spiritual backgrounds that we bring to it?

One of the things that I have experienced in my community, certainly in Brooklyn and in New York – I think people are feeling pulled into a technological society, which is served by social media, by new technologies, and by a scientific worldview, in addition to a lot of media out there, which serves the purpose, I think, quite frequently, of making people feel small, and removing them from that other piece of paper that Rabbi Bonam talked about, in our pockets, that this world was created for us, or for me, for the individual. And what I try to do as a rabbi is, I guess, balance that out a little bit, because my philosophical inclination is to push forward with the concept and try to connect people to a sense of a real living God, a God that isn’t a watchmaker God that is aloof and distant, but rather a God that is intimately involved in, you know, our everyday.

John ZuHone: If I could also make a comment here – I would be interested especially to get Dan’s take on this – is that it also seems that one of the reasons why – you know, I can only speak from the Christian perspective – but why a lot of people from a religious perspective sometimes become unsettled about the potential existence of extraterrestrial life, is that the Bible imbues certain people groups as having, like, redemptive significance, not just for themselves, but for the entire world.

So you know, in the beginning of the Bible, you have the book of Genesis, but then you have the Call of Abraham, and then you have the people of Israel. And they are people chosen by God, but they are people chosen by God to have redemptive significance for the world, and for Christians, at least later on, that becomes the story of Jesus and the Church also having – being wired into that broader story of having redemptive significance for the world.

And so once we start talking about having intelligent beings, potentially intelligent spiritual beings, on other worlds, then all of a sudden, the question becomes “OK, do we have redemptive significance just for this world, or do we have redemptive significance for the universe?” That seems hard to imagine how that could be possible, given the limitations on communication by the speed of light. It does sort of open to those broader questions of, maybe God has plans for every world that might have redemptive significance.

You want to talk about a sense of awe, I guess that’s where I would definitely get it, is to say, “wow, there is this potential, there is this real – at least in my view – significance of God’s people for this world, but there might be that for other planets as well, provided that there are beings elsewhere.” And after that this is kind of where I just stop and have the same sort of awe that Megan is talking about, and have the same sort of awe that the Psalmist is talking about.

Dan Ain: Can I just throw that back at you for a second? Which is, as an astrophysicist and a Christian, if one were to take the Christian position that, you know, one can only go to the Father through Jesus, what would that make of the other 300 million planets or whatever it might be, who would not have had the opportunity to be on this earth and come to hear the gospel? How would one reconcile that?

John ZuHone: That’s a very good question, and I’m not sure that any Christian believer could actually give you a satisfactory answer. I think I would just – I would be sort of in the fallback position that I kind of mentioned earlier, is that God’s purposes are always much bigger than I imagine. And while I believe I have access to God the Father through the work of Jesus, if he’s got other dealings on other planets, or maybe other dealings in other universes, then, I mean, I hate to be so crude about it, but I suppose that’s his business. I guess I don’t have a satisfactory answer for that. It’s a very mysterious thing. And I guess from the perspective of my faith, the way I deal with such questions is that at least the way I believe my faith enjoins me to think about such question, s is that if I’m presented someday with real bona fide evidence of an extraterrestrial civilization, that is God, in a sense, saying to me, “OK, here is this. Now deal with that, think about that, work through that, expand your mind, see where I’m working in ways that maybe you did not expect.”

Kat Robison: I love this question, about what happens to your faith if you’re confronted with something that would seemingly shake the foundations of your faith. Because for me, it’s one of those questions that says, “is your conceptualization of God big enough for God?” You know, because we put God in these boxes, right, where we put our spirituality. And we put a lot of things in life in very narrow boxes, so I love these kind of questions, because I think they invite us to open our minds to something different.

And this sort of also, I think, is a good point to move – Megan, I want to talk a little bit about, before we run out of time here on this podcast, something that you mentioned during conversations that we’ve had before, about sort of the Overview Effect that astronauts [get] looking back at Earth from a distance, where they see Earth differently, and how that affects them, and sort of what role awe can play in that conversation, and what we can learn from that.

Megan Cuzzolino: Yeah. So to me, this is actually better evidence than anything we can see in a lab of the impact that experiences of awe can have on our perspectives and our behavior.

So you mentioned the Overview Effect. This is a phenomenon that is nearly universal, where astronauts who get far enough away to be able to observe Earth from space, and see it hanging there in the void, report this experience of awe. You know, they may use different types of language to describe it, but it is this long lasting shift in the way they think about their place on the world, and the world’s place in the universe, that goes beyond just the time that they’re in the spacecraft. So it’s this instantaneous sensation of seeing the planet in a way that most of us only get to see through photography, but then returning to Earth and reflecting on that experience and having it shape their future lives.

So Ron Garan, who is an astronaut, has a book called “The Orbital Perspective,” and in it, he talks about how his experience of the Overview Effect has led him to pursue work in environmental advocacy, humanitarian efforts, so he’s really shifted his attention toward this focus on caring for the planet as a whole because of this experience that he’s had. So the question then, I think, is how do we give this experience to most of us, who are never going to be in a spacecraft? And there’s people who are taking this very literally, and are using virtual technology to try to create Overview Effect-like experiences through these immersive environments, where people have headsets on and are feeling like they’re in orbit, but I think that there are other experiences that we have that may also create similar, if less dramatic, effects.

And I think, from an education perspective, which is where my research is centered, thinking about how do we teach in this way, Rick Weissbourd, who is a researcher here at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, talks about expanding children’s circles of concern, and so how do you get kids thinking about people who are outside of their immediate environment? How do you make them realize that it’s not just their friends, their family, the people on their block that they should care about, but that people in broader communities, whether that’s first just expanding to “who else lives in your state who you might not normally encounter?” or “who lives on the other side of the world whose issues if you care about?”. So how do you expand children’s circles of concern through the things you expose them to?

And so I think this could be a useful framing to think about as we think about ways to give Overview Effect-like experiences to the vast majority of us who are never going to step foot in a spacecraft.

John ZuHone: If I could just comment on what Megan said right there, I think that really really hits the nail on the head for me, because I sort of think of, as a scientist, I often get the chance to attend conferences in different countries, places that I never would have imagined I would have been (I’m from a small rural area in Illinois originally) and places that are just very different from the context in which I grew up, and people who walk around with very different assumptions that I do, and experiences.

And I believe that that’s, at least for people who have the wherewithal to get on a plane (which is accessible to many more of us, at least, than people who get to go on a spacecraft), that’s, I think, the closest experience we can have, is to go somewhere else, as she was saying, and visit and talk and just have, like, real conversation with people who are very different from us. And I think that that produces the kind of results that I think we’d like to have.

I’ve even already thought of it, about this a little bit, as I’ve recently become a father and I’m looking my little son currently, just doing nothing much more than sleeping, eating, but just imagining how, just by living in this area of Boston, he will have so many more experiences to see many different things, interact with many different types of people, than I had. And that’s certainly not a knock against my experience, or my family, or anything else about the way I grew up, but it’s just a way for him to sort of – from the very get go – sort of have that experience that we’re talking about, and be able to develop a broader sense of empathy, you know, a deeper sense of concern for the broader world instead of just what’s going on in the street.

Kat Robison: That’s such an insightful comment, because when you do travel, you are exposed to so many different people and cultures, and I’ve been very lucky myself that I’ve lived overseas several times, in Africa, in Botswana, as well as in Turkey, which gives an incredibly different experience when you’re somewhere completely different from the United States.

And I think that this is an important point that I often discuss with my friends who travel internationally a lot, is that the more I travel internationally, the more I realize that the U.S. is sort of almost an island. I found so many similarities between cultures on different continents that I don’t always find here. In fact I come to find myself experiencing culture shock sometimes more coming home than I ever do travel[ing]. But I think this question, of sort of awe and significance, and what can we learn about that from gazing at the heavens, is a really important question, it’s really great to have you all on to discuss this.

And this overview effect, where Megan, as you’re saying, to expand people’s  circle of concerns, because I’m even thinking about my own research right now, and I’m looking at trying to find a new measure of public opinion for space, because the question we ask on public opinion research is not a great question and it has no framing. And one thing that I’ve found out is that the vast majority of Americans support scientific research, even if there is no immediate benefit. Which I [wasn’t] surprised to see that, especially considering, you know, we see cuts in science funding and National Science Foundation, N.I.H., etc.

But then, when you come to ask people to support specific things within science, that’s when you get a disconnect. So to me, we’re having this conversation, I think, where is that disconnect, to where we can see, we can think, and we have this intellectual knowledge that, yes, we’re all on one world, that this is Spaceship Earth, and it’s the only advanced life of which we know.

So we all can know that, and we know this intellectually, but then when it comes to caring for each other, or caring for our communities, or caring for other nations, there’s a disconnect somewhere. And so I wonder, you know, any of your thoughts on, sort of, issues of that, and how can awe play into that, or how can this question of “does it matter for if we’re alone in the universe?” and how can we begin to tackle what is the significance of even these questions.

Dan Ain: I think these are great questions. And I think what has been said is beautiful. What I try to do as a rabbi, and I think there are a lot of people that all of the studies have said that people are fleeing from traditional religious organizations – I think the reason is because they don’t get a sense of the awe that we are all describing here in those contexts anymore, and they seek out other avenues and other pathways to tap into that greater sense of awe.

My concern, however, remains – I guess that FOMO, that fear of missing out, the fear that the awe is to be found across the universe or across the continent, or, you know, far away from here. I experience awe when, you know, I see a parent’s love for a child. I experience awe when I see someone help somebody cross the street, or certainly experience awe when I see people, firefighters or police officers or people who risk their lives for other people. There is a sense of awe that we could tap into that is right here in our neighborhood, and I think at its best, Judaism teaches us how to tap into that, how to see that, not to have to go far afield searching for that, but how to have a perspective that enables us to experience that right in our day-to-day lives.

Kat Robison: I think that this point you raise is really important, because as I was hearing this thread of the conversation, I was thinking about the flip side of travel, and expanding that circle of concern and attending to matters that are far from you. Which you see, I think, a lot in education, and probably in other fields as well, where people have these experiences and then devote their careers to helping some population that they’ve identified as being in need. But they don’t go home, right. And you hear people talking about “there are issues in my own community that I could have drawn more attention to, or devoted my efforts to, but now that I’ve experienced the world, I’m spending my energies somewhere else, that’s meaningful to me, and that’s useful to the people who are living there.”

But I do think we see, and especially in the way people live now, going far away for college, never having these experiences, that I can’t imagine a circumstance in which I would move back to my hometown, just because I’m not sure what I would do there. It would be nice to be close to family, but I can’t imagine a professional life for me there, and that’s unfortunate, I think. And I think that the experience that a lot of us have, that we have this exposure to the broader world, which is a luxury and a privilege, but then it does leave behind where we came from.

So I think the questions that you’re raising, about how do we help people experience these profound sensations, but then direct the energy to the nearby surround, rather than necessarily feeling that, “oh, if I’m going to do something, it’s got to be big,” and that means I have to go far away, or do something that involves a lot of travel, a lot of expense. That there are ways to experience awe and also to contribute to people close to home. You know, in our own homes or in our community. I think that’s really important.

Dan Ain: Beautiful. I – for me, I have an illustration of this, where I had left a service, and at the service, a part of that was to do a project, not unlike the type that you’re describing, where people are coming together to serve an underserved population very far from where the service was taking place, and people really tapping into that sense of responsibility. And then as I left the service, a man who had attended it was a quadriplegic, and he was waiting by the bus stop, and the people who had been praying together and working together walked by him. He was just at night on a bus stop by himself waiting for the bus to arrive, and people just walked right by him, and didn’t stand with him, or didn’t communicate with him.

And that made me aware of the way in which we can feel really good about what we are contributing to the other side of the world, and in the process lose the sight of a neighbor who is by himself waiting for a bus to come. And that was a really poignant moment for me in my life as clergy, in terms of where our perspective is focused, for better or worse.

John ZuHone: Also, just wanted bring a bit of the religious angle into it as well. At least for me, one of the central, if not the central message of the Bible is that the Creator deeply loves and delights in every creature He has made. And He’s called all of it very good. It seems that the onus is on me if I want to follow in the footsteps, I suppose you could say, of the way that he’d like me to live, is that to try to have that same kind of love and delight for everything, in every person that I see, and when I don’t do that, when I’m short sighted or only thinking about myself, or, you know, my immediate needs or things like that, that I’m kind of going against the grain of that deep well of my tradition. And the issue is with me.

Now, it’s very obvious that people have used religious traditions to be exclusive, to go to war with other groups and things like that, but it always seems to be against the grain of that central concern of the creator, which is to find love and delight in everything that he has made, and to be sorrowful and upset with things mar it or destroy it. And so I think that having that – I guess, having the sense of awe of just seeing how big the world is, the planet, let alone the whole universe, and yet knowing that the Creator has that concern for all these people, all these creatures, knows the names every star in the sky and that sort of thing, should, I hope, in my best moments, motivate me to feel the same way.

Kat Robison: Well, I can’t think of a better place to end this conversation, because unfortunately we are out of time, but one thing is, we must not only find awe in the larger universe, that it’s important to see the awe in our small universes – in each other and in our communities and families, not just the larger world. So again, thank you so much for joining me in this conversation, John.

John ZuHone: Thank you.

Kat Robison: And always a pleasure, Megan.

Megan Cuzzolino: Thanks a lot, Kat.

Kat Robison: And really great to have you, Dan.

Dan Ain: And thank you, everyone. Thank you.

Kat Robison: And thank you all so much for listening. This podcast was made possible by the Sinai and Synapses fellowship, and our founding director Rabbi Geoff Mitelman. Our audio engineer is Kassy Tamanini, and I’m your host, Kat Robison. And again, we thank you for joining in on our conversation and we hope that you continue this discussion in your own communities.