The Great Space Debate: neoliberalism wins…

I recently observed “The Great Space Debate,” a public high-school debate competition put on by the National Association of Urban Debate Leagues. The team I was rooting for lost.

This year’s debate topic was: “Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially increase its exploration and/or development of space beyond the Earth’s mesosphere.” Earlier in the school year I’d been contacted by a few students who had come across some of my publications on the history of and rationales for space exploration.

In “The Great Space Debate” (April 13 at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.), the team that argued the negative offered a critique of neoliberal* arguments for investing in a national space program. The panel of judges found their arguments lacking. I did not. (More on the judges below…)

Lauren Loper and Stephanie Jimenez of the Dallas, TX, Urban Debate Alliance, argued in the affirmative that expanding the U.S. space program is vital to the U.S. economic future: “Space exploration challenges the human mind,” and greater investments in the space program will improve science, technology, and math (STEM) education and stimulate innovation, thereby improving economic strength and competitiveness. For every dollar spent on the space program, the U.S. economy gets many more dollars back. Commercial “spinoffs” of technologies developed for space exploration justify larger investments in the space program. Space infrastructure development is vital to maintaining the U.S. image abroad as “a global hegemonic power.” And increasing investment in the space program would also be an incentive to pursue greater international cooperation in space, which would help the United States maintain its hegemonic position.

Darian Murray and Corwin Jones of the Baltimore, MD, Urban Debate League argued in the negative: Expanding the space program is not “vital” to the U.S. economic future; rather, it will hurt it. If we spend more, the national deficit will grow. What’s vital to the U.S. future are investments that benefit everyone, with education and jobs. It’s more important to help high school dropouts land jobs than to create more STEM jobs for college graduates. “Instead of investing in NASA to inspire students, we need to invest in our [K-12] schools.” And U.S. leadership “is not always a good thing…. The U.S. doesn’t need to lead everything.” NASA tech spinoffs are overstated, and the trickledown argument for investing in the space program is a “false ideology.”

In the current environment, the Baltimore team’s arguments make more sense to me. For more than 25 years I’ve heard space advocates make the education-and-innovation argument, and I find it less convincing today than I did 25 years ago. NASA’s annual budget is $18 billion, and U.S. student performance still lags behind many other countries (especially in STEM disciplines). And I’m not at all convinced that NASA is the engine of innovation that current and past administrations have claimed it to be. More disturbing is the Dallas team’s argument that the pursuit of global hegemonic power is desirable. I find it problematic, at the very least. According to Merriam-Webster, hegemony is “the social, cultural, ideological, or economic influence exerted by a dominant group.” To me, hegemony conveys the idea of imperial dominance. Gramsci’s conception of cultural hegemony is more relevant in this case, and here’s a brief but accurate distillation provided by Wikipedia: “Capitalism, Gramsci suggested, maintain[s] control not just through violence and political and economic coercion, but also ideologically, through a hegemonic culture in which the values of the bourgeoisie bec[o]me the ‘common sense‘ values of all.”

The panel of 14 judges favored the Dallas team’s neoliberal argument, by a vote of 10 to 4. Among the 14 were five government and corporate officials in the national security sector (all male), three government and corporate attorneys (all male), two museum curators (female), and three educators (female). I’d love to know how the vote broke down….

I know, I know, it was just a debate. The debaters train to argue both the affirmative and the negative for their assigned topic. What they argue for is not necessarily what they believe. But these are high-school students…. I worry….

In a recent issue of Social Studies of Science,** STS*** scholars Rebecca Lave, Philip Murowski, and Samuel Randall urge fellow STS scholars “to undertake a detailed exploration of exactly how the external political-economic forces of neoliberalism are transforming technoscience.” I hope the Baltimore debaters can sustain their critique of “space neoliberalism.” Somebody needs to do it.

* Neoliberalism, a la Friedrich von Hayek, frames “the market as the central agent in human society, and thus shift government focus from public wel­fare to market creation and protection.” (See “Introduction: STS and Neoliberal Science,” p. 660)

** “Introduction: STS and Neoliberal Science,” Vol. 40, #5, pp. 659-675, 2010

** Science, technology, and society

Women@NASA: progress made, equity elusive

NASA’s March 8 “Women@NASA” conference was a pleasant surprise. It really was all about women at NASA, and women-at-NASA-to-be, their status and their accomplishments, free of sales pitches for new Space Launch Systems or the International Space Station or human missions to anywhere.

Looking around the Jack Morton auditorium at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., I saw that all seats were filled, women outnumbered men by close to 100 to 1, and I was one of a small minority of white women in attendance.

One positive change at NASA that Administrator Charlie Bolden and Deputy Administrator Lori Garver have received little to no credit for in the aerospace community is public recognition of the significant presence of female and minority employees at the agency, which has greatly improved morale, especially at NASA headquarters. Until Bolden and Garver arrived at NASA, it was all too common, and often with good reason, for women and members of other underrepresented groups to feel invisible at NASA. These two have done a lot to turn this sad situation around, and I thank them for their efforts. My thanks have nothing to do with NASA or space exploration or the fact that I voted for Obama. I thank them for advancing social justice.

In her opening keynote at last week’s conference, Garver showed her true colors as an advocate for social change. Government bureaucracies are “structured to protect the status quo,” she observed, which in her judgment requires change. So how do we effect change?

In 1968, NASA held a “Miss NASA beauty contest.” In 1970, a (female) NASA Goddard Space Flight employee wrote a memo to all “Goddard gals” about the propriety of women wearing pants to work, concluding that it was okay as long as it didn’t offend their male bosses. “We cannot allow ourselves to be treated this way,” Garver said, choking up a bit. Where are the pantsuit memos of 2012? She asked. Where does NASA need to work on being more inclusive?

NASA’s workforce of 18,000 people includes 6,000 women. Garver’s message was that while women have made a lot of progress at NASA since the 1960s, they have not obtained equity. And until women achieve equity at NASA, she asserted, women’s work is not done. Only 20 percent of NASA’s engineers are female, and only 22 percent of NASA STEM jobs are held by women. Only 29 percent of NASA’s leadership is female, and only 6 of 40 members of NASA’s senior management team are women. No NASA Mission Directorate chiefs or NASA field center directors are female.

Given these facts, is NASA as innovative as it purports to be? Garver asked. Maybe we don’t innovate as much as we think we do at NASA, she observed. “Does our [NASA] culture accept women fully?” Why is it still okay for men to ask female colleagues about their hair color? Is it okay for women to ask their male colleagues about their thinning hair? (And what wasn’t said but was implied is that these things are nobody’s business in the workplace.)

Lori expanded upon these remarks in a March 12 blog post: “A diverse workforce will create a wide variety of ideas, pushing forward innovation and making NASA better than ever. Equal representation of women in the key science, technology, engineering, and math fields will be critical to developing tomorrow’s exploration leaders.”

Kathy Sullivan, one of the six women in NASA’s first class of 35 shuttle astronauts (1978) and now deputy administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said that NASA had proposed establishing a dress code for the women in this group but not for the men. Sullivan’s message was that women are different, and we bring these differences into the work place, and work places should value rather than discount these differences – for example, women’s tendency to be more collaborative than competitive, assertive rather than aggressive.

Kamla Modi, an analyst with the Girl Scout Research Institute, reported on a recently completed study, “Generation STEM: What Girls Say About Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math,” based on focus groups and an online survey conducted with girls aged 14-17. Some findings: 74 percent of girls surveyed said they are interested in STEM.  Why? Because they want to know how things work. While 81 percent of STEM-interested girls said they are interested in STEM careers, only 13 percent said STEM is their first choice. One way to narrow this gap, Modi said, would be to provide girls more exposure to people, especially women, in STEM careers. The situation is worse for African-American and Hispanic girls, she noted, as they have fewer role models, less encouragement, and less exposure to STEM fields than other girls do.

During Q&As, two young women affiliated with Larouche PAC took to the microphones to complain about President Obama’s space policy. Both accused the administration of “killing humans to Mars,” and one asked what opportunities women could possibly have to “innovate at NASA” under current space policy. Bolden and Garver disabused them of their notions (and rightfully so).

(Lyndon Larouche and his supporters have long been critical of any space policies or plans that do not feature an aggressive human space exploration and settlement agenda, and Larouche PAC is currently engaged in an “Impeach Obama” campaign. If you are easily offended, don’t check it out. Some things never change….)

I talked to a number of seventh and eighth grade African-American and Latina girls who were in attendance at “Women@NASA,” asking what they’d learned and liked best at the conference. They told me: don’t give up, don’t accept stereotyping, do what you want to do no matter what others may say. I asked them what they were interested in doing or studying when then graduated from high school. They told me: chef/teacher, cardio-thoracic surgeon (geeze…), veterinarian, computer scientist, engineer…. If we continue to encourage and educate girls, and boys, the world may very well turn out to be a better place than it is today.

Scientists: know your budget process

I have a message to convey to the space science community: if you are seeking or receiving government funding for your research, then you need to know how government funding works.

On February 28 I attended a meeting of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group to hear what space scientists and NASA officials had to say about the cut in funding for NASA’s Mars program proposed in President Obama’s budget request for the coming fiscal year (fiscal 2013). (I add these emphases to remind readers that we’re many months away from an approved budget.) I was appalled, though not surprised, at the level of ignorance about the federal budget process displayed by some scientists there.

There’s no excuse for this ignorance. If you’re old enough to vote and pay taxes, you should know something about how your government works.

The post-World-War-II era of Big Science took off officially with science advisor Vannevar Bush’s 1945 report to President Harry Truman, Science: The Endless Frontier. President Franklin Roosevelt had commissioned this report in 1944, asking, “What can be done…to make known to the world as soon as possible the contributions which have been made during our war effort to scientific knowledge?”

The U.S. government sustained its build-up of U.S. scientific and technological capability through WWII and the following Cold War era on the grounds that it was critical to national security. The aerospace community, of which I’ve been a member for almost 30 years, continues to depend on this rationale, well after the end of the Cold War, with too little attention paid to the need for updating it to fit the current cultural context. In the space community, even today too many scientists who receive NASA funding for their work appear to believe that they are entitled to continue receiving the funding they want and that NASA is responsible for ensuring that they get their money.

Let’s do some myth-busting here.

Myth No. 1: space scientists do not need to justify the work they do. The U.S. needs a space exploration program, and those who are engaged in space exploration that they are entitled to government funding.

Myth-buster No. 1: NASA’s Mars exploration program is not an entitlement program – nor is any other program at the agency.

NASA is an executive agency, and as such, its budget falls into the federal budgeting category of non-defense discretionary spending. Not a single NASA program or project or researcher is “entitled” to federal dollars.

Myth No. 2: NASA will do all the program/ project/mission advocacy needed to ensure that space scientists get the funding they want.

Myth-buster No. 2: NASA doesn’t do advocacy. NASA’s responsible for informing Congress and the public about what it’s done, what it’s doing, and what it would like to do. NASA officials will tell you they are not permitted to “advocate” for agency activities to Congress. (I often wonder what the difference is between advocating for and branding and marketing programs, a common practice at NASA, but that’s a subject for another blog post). Most NASA officials I know claim they cannot even ask, let alone direct, recipients of NASA funding to advocate for their programs and projects and missions before Congress. Many scientific societies, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, The American Geophysical Union, and the American Society for Microbiology, provide training for scientists who want to engage in advocacy work. (I’ve participated in AGU’s advocacy training, and it’s very good.)

Myth No. 3: Science is separate from politics. A scientist’s job is to do science and not to engage in advocacy for that science.

Myth-buster No. 3: Inside the Washington Beltway, where all federal research funding comes from, science is politics. If you, Doctor Scientist, cannot or will not advocate for your work, why should anybody else?

A good description of the federal budget process can be found in the White House Office of Management and Budget’s Circular A-11, Section 10(2008).  A brief introduction to the federal budget process is available from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. I vouch for the reliability of both of these sources. (For those scientists in the Mars community who are convinced that OMB is The Devil, while I’d recommend letting go of that notion for your own sakes, I’ll note that, no matter what you think about OMB, it is a voice of authority on the federal budget process.)

I’ll close this post by noting that, of course, the process by which NASA prepares its budget request to submit to OMB, negotiates with OMB to reach agreement on the request that the President will send to Congress, and justifies its request before Congress is exceedingly complex, highly contingent on current events and specific individuals, minimally open to public scrutiny, and cannot be fully understood simply by reading OMB circulars.  I doubt that any individual at NASA (or elsewhere) can know the full breadth and depth of effort that goes into the preparation of the agency’s budget or any particular element of it, including the Mars exploration program budget.

The myth of Men on the Moon

(Time, July 18, 1988)

 

Newt Gingrich reaped a ton of free publicity for his promise last week to – in the unlikely event he might be elected president of the United States – build a human settlement (colony? outpost? base?) on the Moon in eight years with substantial private investment.

Hah.

Since the Kennedy administration landed men on the Moon in 1969, it seems that Republican administrations, and now a GOP-nominee-wannabe, have been preoccupied with going back. Nobody else seems too excited about it, but no matter, they persist. Same goes for this “commercial space” thing.

Look up Newt’s 1984 book, “Window of Opportunity: A Blueprint for the Future,” in which he hyped the so-called “commercial” development of space. The book was co-authored with David Drake and Marianne Gingrich. Newt was identified on the cover as chairman of the Congressional Space Caucus.

The cover illustration (courtesy of amazon.com) featured a space shuttle flying over the Earth, with a huge bald eagle stretching its wings around the two. Also on the cover was a quote from President Ronald Reagan (“A vision of the American dream…”).

Though, while editor of Space Business News (1983-1985), I went to a book-signing party for “Window…”, alas, I don’t have a copy of it.

In 1982 the Reagan administration issued a space policy statement (National Security Decision Directive 42) establishing that the government would promote and expand private-sector involvement and investment in space activities. In 1983, I became the editor of a new trade publication called Space Business News, devoted to reporting on the so-called commercial development of space.

In 1984 Reagan pitched a space station program to Congress, with a promised cost cap of $8 billion (really). It cost U.S. taxpayers somewhere around $100 billion to complete (not including the contributions of international partners).

In 1985 President Reagan appointed a National Commission on Space to develop a long-term plan for civilian/commercial space exploration and development, reaching far beyond the space station. (Full disclosure: I served on the staff of the commission.) In 1986, the Commission published its plan, entitled “Pioneering the Space Frontier.” It was grand and unaffordable.

In 1989 President George H.W. Bush said he would send people back to the Moon and on to Mars. His Space Exploration Initiative was, of course, unaffordable.

In 2004 President George W. Bush unveiled his “Vision for Space Exploration” – a plan to send people back to the Moon and on to Mars! It proved to be unaffordable, even more so than it was in 1989.

Now Newt wants to go back to the Moon. Others of a similar libertarian bent just can’t let go of their Moon-Mars bone. (See, for example, the wacky “Human Mission to Mars: Colonizing the Red Planet,” and its dozens of dreamy cousins.) Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, Harrison “Jack” Schmitt and other ex-Apollo astronauts have jumped all over President Obama for allegedly abandoning the Moon-Mars Thing.

Newt and his ilk are living in Apollo La-La Land. It ain’t the ‘60s. The U.S. government does not have a budget surplus, the Cold War is over, and Newt Gingrich is no Jack Kennedy.

 

State of the Union? Getting better

 

I liked President Obama’s State of the Union speech. While I don’t agree with everything he said (don’t even get me started on the offshore drilling thing), he covered all the issues people care about these days, and he made it clear that he needs Congress to get onboard with his “Blueprint for an America Built to Last.”

You can watch the speech here here. If you prefer speed-reading, you can flip through the slide-show version here here. You can read the President’s 2012 “Blueprint” here.

We – at least we middle-classers – who are privileged to live in the Washington, D.C., area are relatively protected from economic recessions and depressions. Bad times generate as much government work as good times do (maybe more…). But we all have friends and family living in less-protected places who have suffered since Republicans took the White House in 1980. I’ve watched it up close, here inside the Beltway, and heard it from beyond. The Reagan Administration gutted the regulatory and enforcement arms of agencies ranging from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Mine Safety and Health Administration and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Even eight years of Democratic administration (Clinton, 1992-2000) was not enough time to rebuild, and President Clinton and his appointees didn’t push back hard enough against powerful interests such as the telecommunications oligopoly. From 2001 to 2008, more gutting took place, by more subtle, less public, but equally pernicious means.

I vote for getting to work on cleaning up the mess.

I wrote the President late last year to report that under his administration, American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds had helped to put my brother back to work while the Federal Emergency Management Agency had helped him to put his home back into working order after a catastrophic flood. In my book, this is what government’s supposed to for The People. Let’s keep it up.

Godzilla studies

To be honest, I’m writing this blog post as an excuse to show off a few out of a bundle of terrific pics I stumbled across while searching for something else on Google Images (where you’ll find many, many more)…

Ya gotta love Godzilla (more properly, Gojira). Godzilla R Us. S/he’s crabby, overly sensitive, vengeful, impulsive, both predicable and unpredictable, and sometimes downright motherly-protective. Godzilla is a Good/Bad Guy/Girl (who says Godzilla is a he?) who sometimes trashes Tokyo and sometimes saves it from destruction, battling with other products of human crimes against humanity – Mothra, King Gidorah (a.k.a. Gidrah the Three-Headed Monster), Gamera, et alia.

Godzilla has evolved, too, as we (hope we) have, from Cold War icon of the 1950s, a warning about the dangers of Nuclear Anything, to a post-postmodern emblem of impending environmental apocalypse.

And, in keeping with everything else in recent decades, Godzilla has gone global as well. See, for example, In Godzilla’s Footsteps: Japanese Pop Culture and the Global Stage, a compendium of scholarly essays about Godzilla in culture (William Tsutsui and Michiko Ito, eds., New York: Palgrave, 2006).

In the Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, Rafael Montes writes about Japanese and Cuban Godzillas: “Directed by Honda Ishiro, [the original, Japanese] Gojira enacts a narrative of geopolitical disturbance based on the event which took place less than a decade earlier in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki…. The diegetic awakening of Godzilla, brought about by American nuclear testing at the Bikini Atoll after the conclusion of the war, served to illustrate the continuation of militaristic threat for the island of Japan. Moved by the continued presence of and potential for nuclear radiation, especially after the March 1954 nuclear encounter between the United States and the crew of the Daigo Fukuryumaru (Lucky Dragon No. 5), a tuna fishing vessel navigating too close to American nuclear testing sites, Honda created a film to underscore the themes of, in the words of Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu [see In Godzilla’s Footsteps], ‘nuclear annihilation, environmental degradation, and the apocalyptic potential of modern science run amuck’…. Jorge Molina’s invocation of Godzilla, in his 2000 short film, Yo Soy Godzilla, occurs in a Cuba where, to the director, social, economic, and political monstrosities are readily apparent…. Molina appropriates archetypal images of global horror (vampires, slashers, werewolves, monsters) in order to explore his philosophical and political ideology under the repression of a totalitarian regime. Dolman 2000, the collection of short films in which Yo Soy Godzilla appears, uses the horrific in order to impart to the audience the horror that is living in modern-day Cuba outside of the dictates of the regime.” Read it yourself: “Yo Soy Godzilla! – the possibilities and futilities of Cuban horror.”

Last month, Open University’s Alan Valdez gave a seminar at the University of Nottingham on the topic “Godzilla meets Fukushima: Science fiction and vernacular sense making regarding nuclear disasters in Japan, US and UK,” explaining how “atomic monsters” (or kaiju) in science fiction movies serve as “metaphors of processes and socio-technical complexes too complicated and too difficult to visualize otherwise.”

If you are not so interested as I am in cultural critique and more inclined to “hard” science, you might be interested in learning about Godzilla’s anatomy and biology. See “The science of Godzilla, 2010,” a Tetrapod Zoology blog post at Scientific American’s web site.

Turning from science to cinema again, I must recommend one of my favorite cartoons, “Bambi Meets Godzilla,” by Marv Newland (1969). You can watch it on YouTube. I recall seeing, but cannot locate online, “Bambi’s Revenge.” According to Paghat the Rat Girl – who reviews “horror films & Japanese cinema & Asian films generally” at a web site called Weird Wild Realm – “an even shorter, even more primitive sequel to [Bambi Meets Godzilla], Bambi’s Revenge (1978) [is] rumored to have been created by Frank Wetzel while he was living in a truck.”

Finally, I have to mention sightings of Godzilla, and Bambi, in the world of psychiatry. “In a now classic 1982 article” in the American Journal of Psychiatry, M.B. Parloff described “psychotherapy research evidence and reimbursements decision[s]” as a “Bambi meets Godzilla” scenario (Am J Psychiatry 139(6):718-727). According to Richard M. Glass, M.D., reporting in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Parloff “concluded that although research evidence in psychotherapy outcome at that time was ‘extensive and positive,’ it was not responsive” to policymakers’ questions about what kinds of psychotherapy are most effective and for what sorts of problems.   Glass’s 2008 article is entitled  “Psychodynamic Psychotherapy and Research Evidence: Bambi Survives Godzilla?”

Just FYI, Glass concludes that since 1982, “there has been a substantial increase in evidence for the efficacy of specific forms of psycho-therapy for specific psychiatric disorders.”

That’s all for today!

 

 

 

I [heart] Physics Today

Physics is a subject that escapes me more often than not, sad to say. For no good reason, I was not required to study it in high school or colleague, so I didn’t (for no good reason).

Luckily, over the past 30 years I’ve been able to learn about physics from leading experts in the field, at scientific conferences and symposia and in the scientific and popular media. Yet I’m always running to keep up.

That‘s why, once a month, when I see my new issue of Physics Today in my pile of daily mail, my heart goes pitter patter.

I LOVE Physics Today.  Really. Even though much of the content flies over my head (at supersonic speed – like the articles about “binary black hole mergers” and “dynamic similarity, the dimensionless science”). Why? Because the content that I can actually absorb is almost always fascinating….

In the January issue I learned about “Slow slip: a new kind of earthquake.” The authors, professors of earth and space science at the University of Washington, explain what goes on in “the intermediate realm of intermittent slipping and rumbling” between “the shallow region of sudden, infrequent earthquakes and the deeper home [of] continuous viscous motion.” (Ooh, I want to go there….) Thanks to a sidebar in this article, I now understand the respective actions of subduction zones, mid-ocean ridges, and transform boundaries. Talk about a “living planet”!

Also in this issue, physicist David Mermin reviews a book by fellow physicist Philip W. Anderson, More and Different: Notes from a Thoughtful Curmudgeon. Here are a couple of quotes from Anderson that Mermin says give the book its “special charm”:

“When we are all done, it will turn out that there is no exotic form of ‘dark matter,’ merely a comedy of errors in a field where it is practically de rigeur to underestimate one’s limits of error.” (Hah, I knew it….)

“Consciousness” – one of my favorites subjects! – is “one of the major deep problems…which may take most of the 21^st century to solve.” (If ever, I say…) “The greatest puzzle of all [is] the emergence of consciousness.” Yep.

And there’s more. In today’s news at Physics Today.org, I read about how “diamonds travel to Earth’s surface on fizz” – that is, “frothing kimberlite lava.” Look it up.

In the November issue of the magazine is a fascinating review of what we now know about Saturn’s moon, “Watery Enceladus.” Also in that issue is an intriguing article about subtle gender-based biases embedded in undergraduate physics textbooks – one in an ongoing stream of articles in the magazine about how to improve physics education.

The history articles in the magazine are always worth reading. If you don’t have time to read Isaacson’s biography of Einstein, look up a couple of articles about him in Physics Today instead – guaranteed interesting!

Physics Today is published by the American Institute of Physics. Thanks, AIP!

Planets, planets everywhere – but life’s another matter

Today my emailbox yielded several announcements about extrasolar planets, all announced this week at the American Astronomical Society’s annual meeting – an event that scientists save up news for, as AAS has a well-oiled PR machine in place, and a large media following, to get the word out on new discoveries.

Findings of “real-life ‘Tatooine’ planets with two suns”*, a Mars-sized and ostensibly rocky planet, and “more planets than stars” in our Milky Way galaxy are today’s news. According to the Space Telescope Science Institute, “The Milky Way contains at least 100 billion planets.”

So of course we’re bound to find life on another planet soon. It’s inevitable, right?

And we can safely assume that where life has evolved, there will be intelligent life, yes?

Nope, and nope.

The most interesting insight I’ve extracted from the last decade of extrasolar planet searching is that there’s no such thing as a typical planet or planetary system. These days our own solar system, once thought “average,” looks about as typical as a two-headed cow: proved possible but not proved common.

At the same time, the last decade of research on boundary conditions for life (as we know it) has revealed that scientists don’t yet fully understand the boundary conditions for life on Earth, let alone ET life. They keep finding life where they believe life couldn’t be. And while astrobiologists are working on ways to identify life that is not like Earth life, they can’t yet say they’re ready to know it if they see it.

Extrasolar planet detection is one thing. Obviously astronomers have figured out some good ways to do it. And while this field of research has been under way for  more than two decades, the launch of the Kepler planet-detecting spacecraft in 2009 turbocharged the endeavor, to put it mildly.

Understanding extrasolar planetary habitability is something different, and this field of research is not so far along in its development as planet detection is. And while planet detection is hard, planetary habitability detection is really hard.

As to ET life, the scientific search for evidence of it in our own solar system focuses solely on the possibility of past or present microbial life. It’s a big enough leap, though not unreasonable, to assume that if life began in our solar system it might begin in another planetary system as well. To assume that if life has begun elsewhere, it likely has evolved to a level of complexity that has produced intelligence, as we understand it (which is, in my humble opinion, not very well), is – well, it’s an assumption that I would characterize as a somewhat educated guess, at best.

Of course we should keep looking – for planets, habitability, and life. Our conception of ourselves and our place in the universe has already changed – I think for the better – as a result of these (relatively young) scientific endeavors. I only ask that we keep our expectations tuned to “reasonable” (and remember that the so-called “Drake equation is not an equation”).

 

* Keep in mind, though, that while the fictional Tatooine of “Star Wars” was an inhabited rocky planet, these two new planets are low-density gas giants reported to be close to but not within the assumed habitable zones of their star system.)

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,500 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 25 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

China in space: partner or threat?

Today the State Council of the People’s Republic of China published a 2011 update of a white paper on China’s space activities. This policy document (the State Council has no legal or regulatory authority) states:

“Outer space is the common wealth of mankind. Exploration, development and utilization of outer space are an unremitting pursuit of mankind. Space activities around the world have been flourishing. Leading space-faring countries have formulated or modified their development strategies, plans and goals in this sphere. The position and role of space activities are becoming increasingly salient for each active country’s overall development strategy, and their influence on human civilization and social progress is increasing.

The Chinese government makes the space industry an important part of the nation’s overall development strategy, and adheres to exploration and utilization of outer space for peaceful purposes. Over the past few years, China’s space industry has developed rapidly and China ranks among the world’s leading countries in certain major areas of space technology. Space activities play an increasingly important role in China’s economic and social development.”

Sound threatening? Well, no…. No doubt the process of reading between the lines is under way, though, with China hawks in the U.S. Congress and right-leaning policy analysts, among others. This process is complicated by the subjectivity involved in interpretation as well as the subtleties involved in translation (see below).

The 2011 white paper states:

“The purposes of China’s space industry are: to explore outer space and to enhance understanding of the Earth and the cosmos; to utilize outer space for peaceful purposes, promote human civilization and social progress, and to benefit the whole of mankind; to meet the demands of economic development, scientific and technological development, national security and social progress; and to improve the scientific and cultural knowledge of the Chinese people, protect China’s national rights and interests, and build up its national comprehensive strength.”

Among key principles underlying the Obama administration’s 2010 national space policy are these:

*  “The United States considers the sustainability, stability, and free access to, and use of, space vital to its national interests.”

*   “A robust and competitive commercial space sector is vital to continued progress in space. The United States is committed to encouraging and facilitating the growth of a U.S. commercial space sector that supports U.S. needs, is globally competitive, and advances U.S. leadership in the generation of new markets and innovation-driven entrepreneurship.”

Among goals established in this policy are to:

*  “Energize competitive domestic industries to participate in global markets and advance the development of: satellite manufacturing; satellite-based services; space launch; terrestrial applications; and increased entrepreneurship”; and

*  “Expand international cooperation on mutually beneficial space activities to: broaden and extend the benefits of space; further the peaceful use of space; and enhance collection and partnership in sharing of space-derived information.”

Except for the facts that the U.S. space program is older and bigger and thus further ahead, what’s the big difference? (You tell me….)

Dr. Wang Guoyu, visiting scholar at the National Center for Remote Sensing, Air and Space Law, University of Mississippi, and Deputy Director of the Institute of Space Law at the Beijing Institute of Technology, is a member of the committee of experts assembled by the Chinese government to draft regulations on space debris mitigation. At the 6^th Eilene M. Galloway Symposium on Critical Issues in Space Law, Dec. 1, 2011, in Washington, D.C., Dr. Wang reported that a key term in English-language versions of Chinese space policy documents is the product of an error in translation.

Chinese space policy documents, including the 2011 space policy white paper and its two predecessors (2006 and 2001), incorporate the critical term “common heritage of mankind” used in the United Nations Moon Treaty. The meaning of “common heritage” in the Moon Treaty is vague. In translating this English-language term into Chinese, incorporating it in Chinese space policy documents, and then translating Chinese space policy documents back into English, the term has become “common wealth” (two words), Wang said.

The Chinese word for “common heritage,” when read in Chinese, “means ‘joint possession,’ which includes the right of ownership and the obligation of getting permission from other co-owners before [exercising] the right,” Wang explained. Rights and obligations “are improperly enlarged (or emphasized) in the Chinese translation because the [Moon Treaty] does not clearly stipulate” what they are. “Did the translator intend to emphasize [the] right[s] and obligation[s] of common ownership?” he asked. “What is the legal meaning of the Chinese word and its translation as ‘common wealth’…? What is the relationship between the Chinese word, the translation, and the relevant space treaty terms?”

Back to China’s new white paper…. China has “established a long-term cooperation plan with Russia…undertaken extensive cooperation with Ukraine…signed the ‘Status Quo of China-Europe Space Cooperation and the Cooperation Plan Protocol’ under the mechanism of the China-Europe Joint Commission on Space Cooperation….have worked out a comprehensive bilateral space cooperation plan [with Brazil]…signed a cooperation framework agreement on space and marine science and technology with France under the mechanism of the Sino-French Joint Commission on Space Cooperation…established a joint laboratory on space science and technology [with Britain]…signed a framework agreement with Germany on bilateral cooperation in the field of human spaceflight…signed a memorandum of understanding on technological cooperation in the peaceful utilization and development of outer space with Venezuela…taken part in activities organized by the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space…[and participated in] the Asia-Pacific Space Cooperation Organization [and] activities organized by the International Committee on Global Navigation Satellite Systems, International Space Exploration Coordination Group, Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee, Group on Earth Observations, World Meteorological Organization and other inter-governmental international organizations.”

What about U.S.-China space cooperation? “The director of the U.S. National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA) visited China and the two sides will continue to make dialogue regarding the space field” – though not if the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives can help it….

Chung-yue Chang, professor of philosophy at Montclair State University, writes in the Chinese government’s English-language news source China Daily, “Let 2012 be [the] year of cooperation.”

“The year 2011 is significant for China in many ways…. This year China became the world’s second largest economy, and the world’s third nation to launch a space station program of its own design…. 2012, the Chinese Year of the Long, or the divine Chinese dragon -a legendary combination of snake, phoenix, fish, tiger and deer – is expected to bring about auspicious changes…. Reform and opening-up will be deepened, the transformation of the economic development pattern will gain pace, and the construction of a moderately prosperous (xiaokang) society will intensify,” Chang forecasts. “Peace and harmony, the deep-rooted cultural value, has become China’s strategic guide for national and international development.”

Go ahead, read between the lines….

Luo Huaiyu, a Ph.D. candidate at Beijing Language and Culture University and a columnist for china.org (“the authorized government portal site to China”) writes, “With the world’s strategic and economic center of gravity shifting to the Asia-Pacific region, China may need to reexamine its foreign policy strategy…. As the strategic importance of the Asia-Pacific region continues to increase, China should more explicitly emphasize its foreign policy priority shift to Asia, to its neighbors and the entire international community. Prioritizing Asia, while assuming a more active role in global affairs, will further establish China as a pragmatic and responsible world power and provide much-needed space for China’s sustainable growth.”

Interesting….

Have a happy, peaceful New Year! I’ll be back in 2012.