I love space. I love learning about other planets, fantasizing about being weightless, and watching Apollo 13. Ender’s Game is one of my favorite books. I actually didn’t hate that my older brother made me watch Star Trek: The Next Generation with him when we were kids. I went to Space Camp in Huntsville Alabama. Twice. When Sally Ride gave convocation at my college last year, I grinned for the whole hour of her talk. Just like the eight year olds up front. When I got back to lab after her talk, my labmate and I confessed that we really wanted to be astronauts, and grad school was a small part of our secret stellar plans.
So you can imagine that I was happy to see space shuttle (STS-117 Atlantis) take off on Friday for another mission to the International Space Station. The purpose of this mission is to install another truss segment and to replace a solar array on the station—essentially what occurred on the last mission, only on the starboard side this time. The truss segment is one of many that will form the backbone of the Space Station. Atlantis docked with the station earlier this afternoon, despite concerns about a tear in the heat shield. Installation of the truss segment and solar array will take place in three space walks, or extra-vehicular activities, as they’re known in space lingo.
Another part of this mission is to swap crew members Sunita Williams and Clayton Anderson. Williams will return to Earth after running the Boston Marathon in just under four and a half hours…in space. Additionally, she will have broken the female record for longest single spaceflight for her 118 days in orbit. Clearly, a go-getter. But remarkable as well, so I hope she comes home safely.
Eventually, the space station will serve as a research station and a rest-stop between Earth and other destinations. Obviously I’m all for space exploration. However, I’m bothered when legislators and NASA administrators claim furthering scientific knowledge as a principal reason for the existence of the station. Indeed, data gathered on the station about the planets and rest of the universe is extremely valuable, and those experiments should continue. But often, the science that is played up includes fantastic claims like manufacturing disease-fighting compounds in zero-gravity environments. It’s theoretically possible, but it’s not practical. Even if a compound panned out, that would mean mass-production of a drug in space. That’s definitely not practical right now.
Space exploration is a worthy purpose of the space program. I know it’s cliché, but where would we be without explorers like Columbus and Magellan? Similar challenges faced them hundreds of years ago. Kings forked over lots of money and supplies for many explorers. Many explorers died because travel across the Atlantic Ocean was tough. Yet, exploration yielded our country, so in a way, we have to be grateful for the daring journeymen (yes, there are the bad parts of exploration as well—as of now, there are no Martians, so we won’t face some issues again). I don’t think we should have to present science experiments as a reason to bolster the validity of NASA. Space is a cool enough treehouse on its own.
June 11, 2007 at 10:12 am
Hooray! The long awaited return of the space update! Although I’m all for space exploration, I have a hard time justifying it for its own sake, simply because that’s a lot of money that could go towards health care or education. Which is not to say that we shouldn’t do it, but we should be looking for things to take away from it that might advance human well being, like discovering corn and potatoes in the Americas. Because let me tell you, I can’t wait to fry up a Martian potato.
June 11, 2007 at 7:01 pm
You raise such a good point, Colin. I, too, am conflicted about the amount of money necessary for space exploration. To avoid feeling too guilty about diverting funds from education and healthcare, I focus on the potential good that will come out of space exploration. Humans may need to colonize other planets when overpopulation of the Earth becomes a larger issue in the future. In order for that to happen in time, we must start now. And now I sound like a science fiction writer. At least Stephen Hawking agrees with me.
June 14, 2007 at 7:25 pm
We need grandiose goals as well as quotidian ones. The man who only attempts only what comes easily is a poor creature. There is value in a ten year courtship–in reaching, grasping, trying–though the pain might exceed the prize. The same holds in science, whether it is space exploration or the Large Hadron Collider.
June 25, 2007 at 9:27 am
Because it took me this long to notice is was weird: Why moles? I thought you were into worms?
June 25, 2007 at 10:02 am
Not the animal–the chemical definition of a mole. There are 6.022x 10^23 (remember Avogadro’s number?) atoms in a mole of carbon. Or, in non-technical terms, there are 6.022x 10^23 pennies in a mole of pennies. Don’t worry, I’m still into worms. But have you ever seen a picture of the naked mole rat? Interesting evolutionarily, but it is the ugliest animal on earth.
June 25, 2007 at 10:16 am
Watch “Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control.” It’s an Errol Morris (I think) documentary about naked mole rats, robots, topiary gardening, and the circus. It’s prety awesome.
June 25, 2007 at 2:30 pm
MK, I’m not picking on you, but I am going to pick on something you said, as an example of popular throught. You mentioned that we may need to colonize other planets as a solution to overpopulation, if overpopulation does become a bigger problem in the future. I’ll go out on a limb and assume that this thought has been widely bandied about the NASA offices and those of anyone who has had to justify our space program’s budget. To move one step further (and not necessarily a justified step), this means that many people, smart, influential people, think that the best solution to overpopulation is to colonize another planet, a solution that requires technoligical advances that have not even begun to play out.
My question is this: is colonization of an alien planet really considered to be the best solution to overpopulation? I would have laughed this option off the table before I ever dropped a dollar on it, not because it is impossible or even expensive, but because it is so much more complicated and starry-eyed (sorry) than simply decreasing the population on this planet.
ATTENTION PEOPLE EVERYWHERE:
Please, I beg you, think simple. Overpopulation will undoubtedly become a problem of prime concern and danger in the future. When that happens, do not rest the survival of our species and its brilliant cultures on the hopes of spreading our problems to a barely known and inhospitable place at a bare minimum of 36,000,000 miles away. Just stop having children.
PLEASE DO NOT BREED
June 25, 2007 at 3:49 pm
Replacement rate! Replacement rate! Or something close to it.
Although, suddenly, a completely sterile world in which everyone who’s still alive is getting senile seems like it might be kind of funny. In an in icky, painful sort of way. No. Not funny any more.
So yes. Replacement rate. No more, no less.
June 25, 2007 at 5:04 pm
That’s a fair criticism, Tracy. However, I’ll read into your exclamation “Please do not breed” just a hair of jest, as it’s also an astronomical goal. But, I’ll take the bait and bite. Hard. You know as well as I that our biological purpose in life is to reproduce and raise our young to have progeny of their own. You suggest, “decreasing the population on this planet” to solve overpopulation. Unless you want to decrease the population very slowly (1 child per couple), you will have to choose the ones who breed. If we weren’t speaking about humans, that’s easy—just let natural selection eliminate the weak ones. That’s a little tougher to do in our oh-so politically correct world. I agree that maintaining the population at its current number would be a good goal in an ideal world. However, even though curtailing population growth by limiting the number of children one could legally have is a low-tech and inexpensive solution to overpopulation, it is fairly impractical.
You would have to coordinate all the governments in the world to impose such limits in order to be entirely successful and fair. Of course the technique works, but is there any way to actually enforce this policy? Undocumented births happen all the time in the world, and a replacement rate policy requires strict adherence to the numbers. I’m not sure that we could get all of the countries of the world to agree on any single issue, let alone one fraught with sticky cultural issues like breeding.
I’ll throw out just a couple of sticky cultural impediments to the Replacement Rate. For example, you would have to convince President Bush, his cronies, and many devout Christians that they must remain abstinent after the birth of their first or second child until the wives went through menopause. Thank goodness (I assume) no one has to tell Dick Cheney. Also, you’d have to tell all the farming families in the world that dear Sonny and Sally are going to have to help their parents work the farm all by themselves because other helpers aren’t coming along. Finally, for the stickiest situation of all, what constitutes a person? Don’t laugh. In biology, organisms are only labeled “fit” (or in this argument, a human would only be labeled a “real person”) if their progeny are viable. If an organism is viable, it can reproduce. Donkeys and horses do not produce viable young because mules are sterile. Outside the “westernized” world, mortality rates after birth are high. So, does a child count if they die at age two before they’ve reproduced? Eight? What’s the cutoff? If someone were infertile, would his or her consumption of materials prevent the parents from having another child?
At first, not breeding sounds like a practical solution to overpopulation. After a closer look, however, I’d argue it’s almost as unrealistic as colonizing another planet.
June 25, 2007 at 7:36 pm
MK, you’re too right. A simple step in the right direction might be an abolishment of the current dumbfuck policy of promoting abstinence-only family planning programs abroad. Currently, an organization (other governments included) can’t get any funding from the US for family planning or HIV prevention if they promote condom use. Free and unstigmatized access to all safe forms contraception would be a huge step for population management, family planning, health, poverty, and HIV prevention. Sadly, we are stuck waiting for the end of the Bush adminstration, or for James Dobson to pull his doughy head out of his own sphincter, or perhaps both, for any progress on this front.
June 26, 2007 at 5:51 pm
MK, a couple of points in response:
1) You argue that decreasing (or even maintaining) the world’s population would be a very difficult procedure, difficult to the point of being impractical. But you think finding a hospitable planet to colonize (no real good answer yet), flying a manned space craft to said alien planet (a feat never performed, especially at distances that would likely be required), altering that world’s atmosphere (never performed), starting alien farming, industrial practices, and infrastructure (never performed), deciding upon a political system and government that all of Earth’s population can agree on (never performed), and then transporting millions or billions of people to this planet to peacefully colonize it (never performed) would be easier than decreasing this planet’s population? Have you thought this through?
2)To decide upon a policy of replacement is to assume that the current population is a good one. All the information we currently have about natural resources says that the human population is already beyond sustainable. You could argue that the technology will be found to sustainably handle this population, but that will be decades or centuries from now, and the population will have increased many times over by then already.
3)Your example of farming families needing more kids. Large families are actually a terrible fate for farm families. It means more mouths to feed, thus putting more stain on the land (think subsistance farmers i.e. most of the world). Because land is generally passed on to only one child (parcels being too small to divide), the rest of the siblings will be out on the street with no non-farm jobs skills. There are countless examples of large families in agrarian regions leading to huge unemployment rates, higher than average land pressures, higher malnutrition rates, and increased violence (a factor of increased land pressure and a large number of disenfranchised younger brothers). The most sustainable farming cultures are those that depend on cooperation within age-sets, not reliance on children.
4) This one I’m not sure of, but how much harder would it be to establish a global policy of Less-Than-Replacement than simple Replacement? Either one would require a level of diplomacy we have never seen. And as our population continues to increase, I’m willing to bet that the problems caused by overpopulation will only become continuously more obvious and pronounced. That pressure will help policy decisions for either cause.
5) And now a question: at what point does overpopulation become such a problem that the world cannot wait for a unanimous decision to pass a global Replacement bill? MK, you took biology classes. I know that humans have already bucked all ecological models, but you know that Earth has a carrying capacity for us, too. As Topher Waring always used to say, Mother Nature always bats last. At some point, our population will become so great that it will overrun its resources and cause a collapse, a collapse that could easily take all governments and even nations with it. At what point are we willing to overstep political (even moral?) correctness to do something about this problem? No, I have no answer to this, but I’d bet a pretty penny that I’d do something a lot sooner than the rest of you bleeding heart humanitarians.
June 26, 2007 at 7:22 pm
Tracy, again, you raise some good points–some of which I agree with 100% from a biological perspective but not from my bleeding heart perspective. To clarify, I never said we shouldn’t have a Replacement Rate (or, I guess, a Less-Than Rate)–I said that it, too, is a difficult goal to achieve. And I stand by that statement. I’m leaving for LA for the worm conference tomorrow, so sadly, our debate will have to fizzle for a few days.
You’re right–all of those technical issues with colonizing a new planet must be faced, and all of them will be incredibly difficult to overcome. However, that does not mean they cannot and should not be overcome. Just two hundred years ago, physical scientists did not think it was possible to split the atom. You should not underestimate the power of the human brain (to be a bit melodramatic).
You’re also right that we may be at or over Earth’s capacity for humans right now. I agree completely with this statement as a biologist and as a realist. However, my bleeding heart says, how will you ever implement a Less-Than-Replacement rate? That means saying some people can’t have children. I don’t envy the politician who sponsors that bill. The only fair way I can conceive of doing this is installing a lottery to have kids, and I doubt anyone’s going to be happy with that. Inevitably, some people (those pesky intellectuals) will suggest standards (IQ, beauty, creativity, etc.) in order to have children, and then we’ll have a real eugenics argument.
Eh, I shouldn’t have strayed into the farming issue because you know way more than I do. You’re right.
I may be contradicting myself with the whole “power of the human brain” thing, but currently, we can’t even get politicians to move on climate change. Even if, as some scientists argue, climate change is just a natural cyclical change (measured in millions of years), the amount of pollutants spewing into the air from industry can’t be good for local environments as they are now. And the US can’t get politicians to stand up to Detroit and demand reasonable mpg limits that would equal those of the rest of the modernized world. Organizing our politicians to move on an environmental issue that won’t face our country for a long time is going to be very difficult. I’m thinking we’re going the way of Easter Island before that happens. It’s almost more realistic to expect politicians to move on colonizing another planet before they get together on a Less-Than-Replacement rate. Why? Because President Bush already declared that we’re going back to the Moon to build a base by 2020.
June 28, 2007 at 11:13 am
To set aside the population issue for a moment, let me ask you and anyone else for their opinion on some things I’ve been wondering.
1)Do you think that the modernized world will find and become reliant on green energy before we use up the world’s oil?
1a) If not, will our global system of economics and government survive the End of Oil?
February 4, 2008 at 2:25 pm
Please do not breed? In the National Security Survey Memorandum of 1973, declassified in 74, it makes no real mention of efforts, either in China, nor in the United States of curtailing the population.
Makes quite a mention of other areas. America is not the problem, really, when it comes to population. Get your kaliedescope glasses off, for a change.
The main problem is immigration. And disparities.
And as for energy? A judge is not a king, and a king is not a god.
Don’t you ever forget that. You are not malthus. you are not darwin.
Darwin was a minister, and wrote Origin of Species(not origin of man). As far as oil, it’s like this, you can’t build without carbon. you can’t power anything without hydrogen.
So, if it’s soy, it’s got hydrogen in it. Soybean oil? Thanks.
I will be so glad when everyone realizes that something good and something aweful happened in certian years.. like 67(Multiple Assasinations, while dorks named “hippies” were pushing the mini skirt crowd around), or 79(Neutron Bomb).
Then again, they relaxed the censorship code, then they took a good thing and ruined it, deliberatly.
Btw, Good music there in Monterey.
February 4, 2008 at 2:30 pm
Btw, check out Atlantica I and II, and of course, Kliper. And of course, end of oil?
Only if Saudi Arabia leaves OPEC and joins the IEA. Like normal people do.
Look, dead head becomes dead thread. Hey, Moe!
February 4, 2008 at 2:32 pm
Btw, you flunked. All of you.
F for F UP. Not F for Finally getting the awnsers.
There’s more than one meaning?
:-)… ,look, I’m drooling.
February 4, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Um, did this come from a random complaint generator? Anyone? Anyone?
February 5, 2008 at 10:07 am
IP from Vallejo, California. Hostip isn’t always accurate though. It’s just a normal troll Colin. Gets the timing and context wrong on NSSM 200, makes reference to a few other things. It doesn’t bother keeping its thoughts together. Almost makes points but makes them very aggressively and without really saying anything. “So, if it’s soy, it’s got hydrogen in it. Soybean oil? Thanks.”
It’s a troll. Some kid in California who felt like doing a few wiki searches and spewing some vitriol. Nothing much to see here.