Most people think NASA exists primarily to put humans in
space and bring them safely back. Congress seems to think
so too. I seriously disagree. Did you know that the International
Space Station has thus far cost around a hundred billion
dollars? That it has yet to produce any scientific results,
or demonstrate any use at all except to just temporarily and
expensively house a couple of astronauts at a time? Congress
gets all bent out of shape when physicists ask for eight billion
dollars for an underground particle accelerator that could
help us understand the most fundamental structure of matter,
but when it comes to putting astronauts in orbit, we basically
give NASA a blank check. The idea behind the International
Space Station was to be a staging ground to send people to
the moon and Mars. Do we seriously want to spend a trillion
dollars that we'll never get back to send people to look around
at a planet that robots have already studied and mapped in
extensive detail? We have better and more accurate maps of
Mars than we do of the Earth's ocean floors. We even have
some Mars rocks - they were knocked into space by a long-ago
asteroid impact, and a few landed in Antarctica. Sending people
to Mars would make for gripping television, but for a trillion
dollars?
What's the point in sending any more humans into space at
all, aside from the occasional repair to the Hubble telescope
that's too complicated for robots? It's like going to the
top of Mount Everest - nature has made it abundantly clear
that humans have no business being off the ground or outside
the atmosphere. All the money we're wasting on trying to keep
astronauts alive in environments so profoundly unfriendly
to them would be better spent elsewhere. I propose we dedicate
our tax dollars instead to to sending robots to Europa,
drilling through the ice and finding out whether there are
alien plankton and fish underneath. Ever since
Arthur C Clarke first drew my attention to this most intriguing
moon of Jupiter, with its possibly warm and liquid oceans,
I've been dying to find out what's going on in there.
I'd also dry up public funding for the search for extraterrestrial
intelligence. If private citizens want to pursue SETI on their
own time (like with that
screen saver thing), fine, but not with my tax dollars.
People, it is just not going to happen. I'm almost certain
that there are plenty of other organisms out there in the
universe, but the universe contains a whole hell of a lot
of empty space. In elementary school you see posters that
show all the stars and planets sitting right next to each
other. Those posters are never to scale, because everything
in space is actually appallingly far away from everything
else. As Bill
Bryson puts it, if we got a message from one one of our"closest"
neighbor star systems, it would congratulate us on our mastery
of whale oil and our stylish powdered wigs.
But Ethan, aren't you a recovering Trekkie? Don't you still
love science fiction? Yes I do, very much, but as fiction,
as representations of our internal fantasies. Movies like
ET are valuable for their portrayal of humans, both literally
and symbolically. We need all the help we can get in understanding
ourselves, and the language of science fiction is one of many
conceptual frameworks we can use. ET is a beautifully made
portrayal of Steven Spielberg's divorce, but no one should
mistake it for a story about the world outside our collective
heads, much less outer space.
In the unlikely event that someone does contact us, would
that be a good thing? In The
Third Chimpanzee, Jared Diamond asks: Why do we assume
that the aliens, if they find us, will be nice to us, or even
acknowledge us? Let's assume that if anyone contacts or visits
us, they'll have better technology than we do. Would that
make them more inclined to help us or harm us? If humans are
any example, there's cause for grave pessimism. Historically,
people have generally been cruelly exploitative of one another
whenever we're under duress. We've also demonstrated a general
level of callousness toward all the other large-brained social
animals, from pigs to whales to parrots. There used to be
many more species of hominid than just Homo sapiens. Where
did all the neanderthals,
australopithecenes
and ergasters
go? For that matter, what happened to the wooly mammoths and
sabertooth tigers and twenty-five foot eagles and armadillos
the size of Volkswagons? Given our own history, I think Alien
is a more plausible movie than ET or Close Encounters or Star
Wars.
I think there's a fundamental loneliness driving the intense
attachment we have to the wish of finding other intelligences
from elsewhere in the galaxy, no matter how unlikely that
wish is to ever be fulfilled. As Eric Idle of Monty Python
puts
it: "Hope that there's intelligent life somewhere
out in space, 'cause there's bugger-all down here on Earth."
How is it possible to be lonely in a world with nearly seven
billion people in it? And yet, loneliness is epidemic in America,
and in the rest of the industrialized world as well, because
evolution prepared us
to live in widely dispersed medium-sized bands of hunter-gatherers,
not closely surrounded by strangers. I don't think the solution
to the modern plague of isolation lies in outer space. It
lies in getting people to talk about and think about their
feelings, and in further refinements of the selective serotonin
reuptake inhibitors.
Letting go of our wish to find some humanoid companionship
in space would free up a lot of attentional and financial
resources better spent on looking at all the extraordinarily
strange things in the sky. I'd like to take whatever amount
we're spending on long-range observation devices like Voyager
2 and the Hubble Space Telescope and put some more zeros on
it. The HST has cost us five or six billion dollars so far,
which sounds like a lot of money until you have a look at
the rest of the federal budget. As of this writing, the Iraq
war has cost over sixty Hubble telescopes, with no end in
sight. If the feds are determined to throw money around like
there's no tomorrow, we might as well get some more basic
science out of it. There's been some discussion of putting
a humungous telescope array on the moon. That sounds to me
like an admirably useful project for NASA. I know, the Bush
people aren't exactly eager to hear more about the Big
Bang, but they're not going to be with us much longer.
What do you say, federal government? Who's with me?
© ethan hein 2007 | back
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