Back in the 1997 my dad took me to the park to observe the Hale-Bopp Comet. I recall being surprised that it was static in the sky and nothing like the shooting stars I saw on TV, not realizing that comets and meteors were completely different things. Hale-Bopp was named after the two people who discovered at about the same time in 1995, Alan Hale and Thomas Bopp. Bopp was an amateur astronomer, whereas Hale had a Ph.D. in the field. I say "Ph.D." and not "professional astronomer" because he wasn't working then. Using the publicity he received from his discover, Hale made several statements about how it's impossible for many scientists to find jobs. This did not make him popular within the scientific community, which is always trying to get people to enter the field.

I've been thinking about the STEM vs. humanities fight for a long time. For over a thousand years in the west (and I'd argue elsewhere) humanities reigned supreme to the point of ridiculousness; Galileo was silenced even with empirical proof. I feel the pendulum has swung too far the other way. You'll see lots of videos about how science is cool, which is totally is, but I think learning about medieval theology is totally cool too. With science you can discover how atoms form to create the world around us. Or why a platypus lays its eggs. Or how a comet works. But with theology, I can see how Christianity evolved. And how it helped Europe's transition from a polytheistic, Roman world into a fragmented, Romano-German one. And why the society I live in is how it is.

There's a perception of humanities' uselessness — after all, who uses their English major in their career? — and yeah, many of them are outside of an academic context. Before people who studied history, theology, philosophy, or whatever had wealthy patrons to support them, which we don't really do anymore. But simultaneously I want to say STEM faces the same prospects too. There are so many mysteries out there in the universe that we should have tens of thousands of astronomers working round the clock. Except, like having a specialist of Kierkegaard's ideas on faith, our society doesn't think having lots of people studying the Oort Cloud to be particularly useful, particularly when it's much more expensive buying an astronomer his fancy tools. Yeah, there many fields in STEM that are great and profitable — doctors, engineers, chemists, programmers — but going into it doesn't necessarily guarantee you're going to be successful. There's still the question you have to ask: How much does society feel it needs you?