Neil DeGrasse Tyson recently took to the air to defend against pending cuts to the scientific missions part of the space program. I have a little bit of a man nerd crush on the guy – he’s not quite the second coming of Carl Sagan, but he’s got a decent way with words and exactly the right amount of snark to deal with serious matters on TV. His self-assured ease and ability to turn up or down the level of detail on any space-based topic is also a big part of his charm.
It was on his Daily Show appearance (story link) that he struck me with a motive to push beyond my current cynicism about both state and national politics. In the middle of debt fever, still anemic economic recovery, and government-can’t-ever-do-a-damned-thing-right drumbeat, he did something audacious. He called not to restore or maintain NASA funding, but to double it. Double. Double for an agency that has not had much political attention recently other than high-tech pork for defense contractors and red state senators that hate socialism everywhere except at home.
It was audacious, although to be fair he doesn’t have much to lose in calling for this. The alternative (as is much repeated) is for America to further surrender its prestige in the world.
This contrasts to a poll that the Outer Planets Assessment Group repeated in its response to the news of outer planets and Mars science taking a major hit in the NASA FY13 budget (link). In a very rare mark of bipartisanship, both polled Obama voters and Romney voters voted roughly 50 / 35 / 15 to cut, maintain, or increase the budget for the space program. This tells us space nerds that we have some serious explaining to do. Of course, I am also a Democrat. This means I find it hard to coherently justify massive layoffs of state workers, threatened cuts to heating oil aid to the elderly in the Northeast, and abandonment of a large section of our unemployed workforce at the same time I want NASA’s budget increased. We have serious explaining to do.
That is where I come back to Tyson. As he said, we’ve done great things in this country. We’ve had slavery and genocide. But we’ve struggled and made great strides. Our Great Experiment inspired the toppling of monarchies around the world and democratized political expression and control in many places. We went to the moon in under ten years on what was essentially a dare by our President. We led in the development of a global information network. Our government destroyed a disease: smallpox. We led in developing flight. We led in creating nuclear technology. Major scientific and engineering journals are written in English and “international” organizations heavily bias their conference schedules to host in the States. We even declared war on poverty. In other words, we demonstrated that civilization is more than worth having because of what we could do within it together.
We have the opportunity to do so very much more. At this very moment, a global network of satellites, aircraft, balloons, and ground sensors give us an unprecedented view of our world in real time. More are being launched every year (although several of them are to continue previous abilities). We stare to the heavens and touch other worlds. People have never logged more hours in the space environment.
Medicine is also blazing forward at a dramatic pace. We are taking diseases apart and learning the depths of the mysteries behind the most devastating ones such as AIDS and cancer. Imaging technology continues to fly forward and teach us about what really goes inside our bodies. Massive data-processing networks are fed by forward-looking initiatives by countries with universal healthcare to understand chronic diseases in unprecedented ways. The latter effort is one of the brilliant examples of the kind of things that can only really be done by governments – only they are built to have large and regular systems for common data curation and normalization. Bureaucracy can be slow at its worst, but it is also disciplined at its best.
Even environmental science and technology are progressing rapidly. Various alternative energy generation and storage sources are under either advanced investigation or deep into rollout. The amount of oil equivalent energy needed to produce a dollar’s worth of GDP is continuing to fall, as is the carbon intensity of economic activity in the US (although having the world go from 800 million at our standard of living to 2-3 billion will swamp this effect). Advanced computer controls allow for the humble automobile engine to achieve new levels of efficiency. And in general the tools of manufacturing and engineering continue to roll forward in power and precision in advanced nations.
My frustration and cynicism are often amplified rather than sedated by these advances. All of this progress is happening in spite of a fantastic headwind. While our engineers, scientists, and many civil servants drive forward with vigor and ingenuity, they fight against greedy and short-sighted corporate leaders, patriarchal theologians, regressive politicians, and a host of hand-wringing enablers of the whole lot (far too many of them in the press) that continually chant that we are too poor and must lower our expectations of the future.
In the midst of all of the advances in our knowledge and sophistication, we should be striving forward to a way of life not seen by any of our predecessors, lavished in technology and free from want. But these advances are driving against that powerful headwind. The standard of living earned by our advanced manufacturing and engineering efforts are denied to us by the shareholder class that transplants the fruits of our labor abroad and sends us to compete against third-world wages. On the one hand, Apple gave us a marvelous new form factor for computing and publicized the smartphone. On the other, Steve Jobs decided that the resulting prosperity would not be shared but rather he preferred to manufacture under Dickensian conditions. A suicide at an iPhone factory in protest makes this a sadly applicable adjective and harkens back to industrial abuse that spawned our early labor unions.
A side effect of this starvation from above is that we are continually told to expect less. Expect longer hours, lower pay, more abusive and arbitrary human resource maneuvers, fewer benefits. Don’t allow yourself to feel secure because it is above your station. Don’t fight against poverty – we tried that a couple of times and failed, so we should never try that again. As we are told to expect less, it is natural to ask us to dream smaller and look lower. Don’t hope that we can have jobs with clean industry – it must be the God-given right of the ownership to open the taps on toxics and destroy the land or there will be no jobs. Do not aspire to better and higher education – it is expensive and cannot be wasted on the common. Even worse, it will make the common leave behind their cultures and customs that make them so quaint and lovable (so sayeth Rick Santorum if you read him correctly). Don’t hope that our sciences can tell us about the future – we are small and pathetic creatures that will never know the future and it angers our God to try. Certainly let us never reach toward heaven for that is not our domain.
Finally, we come back to the space program. Like Tyson, I see it as a major part of American optimism in the future – we dreamed of a better future because we saw human agency grow so impressively on live TV. Once constrained to a single world, a few of our lucky emissaries touched moon dust and danced upon it. Anything seemed possible after that. As I said earlier, we also removed a major disease, smallpox, systematically and carefully from the earth. It is right to revel in these achievements.
And I think it is right to force our way forward again. We have at least four worlds – Mars, Europa, Titan, Enceladus – to explore for signs of early life and, just as intriguingly, reasons that life did not start in these places. We can look at many other parts of our solar system to understand the beginnings of our world, and in some cases, its future. We may yet mine the asteroids and stretch the palette of human experience as people move out into the ether to future homes.
Let us be clear – there are those that claim poverty, debt, and economic crisis. We are told that there is no problem with distribution and that we seem poorer because are all. Go to Wolfram Alpha and enter the following formula: “US real GDP / US population.” You can see (in constant-year dollars) that we are twice as wealthy as we were in 1970 when we landed on the moon. Public works didn’t seem so hard back then. I’d say to do the same for the world, but it’s harder to adjust for prices across currencies – if you do the unadjusted figure you see that the GDP per capita has increased ten-fold since 1970.
I will now raise the stakes on Tyson and ask: why not invest more in the things that make us richer as a species and shy from those that make us poorer? The space program is an excellent start, but I would also suggest investing in universal health, advanced environmental technology, a new war on poverty, and initiatives to understand how we will eventually share this world with nine billion people until the population peaks and we begin to turn toward a more sustainable footprint on this world. There are so many great things we can do as a nation and species. We can no longer waste our time on those that insist upon our meagerness when it is time to leverage our strengths.
1:29 PM PT: The Rec List! I'm honored by the nod on a day (that like so many others) has so much going on. Hopefully the dreams of the future can help nourish those who press against our austerity-driven present.