The Breaking Time

Who's left in the space race?

An abandoned cosmodrome. Location and photographer unknown. More photos here.

So, Russia's decided to ditch human space travel:

Moscow no longer sees manned spaceflight as its top priority but remains committed to its International Space Station obligations, the head of Russian space agency Roskosmos said on Wednesday.

Russia holds a monopoly on flights to and from the 16-nation station. Soyuz launches from its Baikonur cosmodrome are now the only way to space since the United States retired its 30-year shuttle programme in July.

NASA pays it more than $50 million per flight to send its astronauts to the space outpost.

Roskosmos chief Vladimir Popovkin said Russia was spending almost half of its space budget on manned flights and needed to shift focus to more technology-oriented projects. He added however it would stand by its station commitments.

"Unfortunately manned spaceflight accounts for an unjustifiably large part of the budget: It makes up 48 percent," he told reporters at Russia's flagship MAKS airshow near Moscow.

No, it doesn't mean the end of manned spaceflight entirely, but combined with the end of NASA's shuttle program, it's yet another move in the wrong direction.

So, NASA's bowed out of major human space travel for the foreseeable future, Russia's followed suit. Who does that leave? China? Europe? Weyland-Yutani?

For all the talk that private industry might take over the space race, it doesn't look feasible in the near future. The whole enterprise lacks, so far, the huge returns shareholders generally crave. Long-term planning is not corporate culture's strong suit.

What I'd like to see is an alliance. Instead of looking at expenses and dwindling budgets and going "cut!" space agencies should take a cue the cooperation that's increased since the end of the Cold War. Throw together the reduced space agencies, a few more forward-looking private businesses and some coordinating non-profits with the overall goal of advancing space travel. Split the costs and the potential gains in research and resources. This might even allow rising powers like India, South Africa and Brazil to join in, as they could gain access to existing infrastructure and expertise for an investment, without the huge up-front cost of having to build their own programs. Cash-strapped but infrastructure-rich agencies like NASA and Roskosmos get much-needed funds. Business gets a safer investment, because the odds are better than going solo. The non-profits, especially the scientific ones, get to advance their own goals. Win-win, if it was done right.

Of course, as I observed after the end of the space shuttle program, that solution would require motivation: cultures that viewed space travel as a serious priority. Right now, that's seriously lacking.

When did we stop looking at the stars?

Into the wild blue yonder

Last Friday, the space shuttle Atlantis broke Earth's gravity, headed for the international space station. It marked the last space shuttle launch.

While this is not the end of the space program, Atlantis' final journey marks a major point on a long, downward trajectory, not least for the 25,000 workers who will suffer directly from the program's end. These days, the government spends more on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan than on NASA.

Appropriately, today is the 42nd anniversary of David Bowie's "Space Oddity," the classic lament of a doomed astronaut:

Let's not get too altruistic here, either. The space program's heyday came about in large part because Americans and their government viewed it as part of a greater war against the USSR.

Still, NASA's zenith proved something: we can go to space. We can send people to space. The resources exist. The technology is there. Hell, at this point the technology is old.

The only remaining question is: do we want to? When people look out at their society and think "what do I want us to do?" is "go to space, and keep going" on the list?

Not for a long time. People can talk efficiency all they wish, but governments have proven perfectly capable of spending larger sums on far more questionable things (remember all that air conditioning?). The program's death marked a deeper turn.

Partly, the shift came from space travel's birth, tied to the Cold War and '50s hubris. By the era's end, people were, rightly, tired of the damn struggle, and anything associated with it. "Space Oddity" was one early marker, the increasing skepticism of science fiction another.

"Fighting the commies" was never the whole reason, of course. Space exploration had real popular appeal for a long time, tapping into a primal grandeur, combined with humanity's explorational urge. But, forever tied to far-off dividends and the conflict that created it, the whole enterprise proved vulnerable to accusations that the only thing all that money created was "garbage floating in the sky," as Ursula LeGuin's infamously dismissed.

Defenders could even point to more immediate benefits, like the ridiculous amount of more down-to-earth devices spawned by space research. It didn't help. This is the kind of popular argument won in the heart, not the head.

The fact is, the populace at large decided space travel wasn't a priority. It lost its glamour, its war, its money and its support. There were other fears, other dangers. Everything that's followed, from the lack of cutting edge spacecraft to the shuttle's end, is all part of that downward spiral.

So here's the question: we decided to give up on space travel. What did we get instead?

Was it worth it?

Ode to apolitical scientists

I'm mostly tied up with journalism work this week, but it's a good time to highlight this classic gem from Tom Lehrer, an ode to Wernher Von Braun, patron saint of "apolitical" scientists. It's funny, and a lovely thing to keep in mind the next time someone idealizes science without all those inconvenient "limits," or, for that matter, tries to pretend that the estimable profession is something more than humans, pursuing a human method of understanding.

Where's my shiny future digestive tract?

Super digestive tract a must, for some reason...

The Economist came out with an excellent report recently on the rising cost of food. To make a long story short, it's a complex problem with factors ranging from biofuels to increased meat and vegetable consumption.

One of the most striking elements of this was this piece on waste:

Unlike in rich countries, much of the waste in poor ones is a matter of money, not behaviour. Grain is often heaped on the ground and covered with a sheet: no wonder the rats get at it. Losses could be reduced by building new silos and better roads and providing more refrigeration, but those things are expensive. The African Development Bank is financing a seven-year programme to reduce waste by 3% a year. Given the scale of the losses, says Divine Njie of the FAO, who worked on the scheme, “we were surprised at how modest the targets were.” But 3% a year adds up to a 20% reduction in waste over seven years, a good start.

---

Rich countries waste about the same amount of food as poor ones, up to half of what is produced, but in quite different ways. Studies in America and Britain find that a quarter of food from shops goes straight into the rubbish bin or is thrown away by shops and restaurants. Top of the list come salads, about half of which are chucked away. A third of all bread, a quarter of fruit and a fifth of vegetables—all are thrown out uneaten. In America this amounted to 43m tonnes of food in 1997; in Britain to 4m tonnes in 2006.

Shortly after, I recalled a design proposal, via bldg blog, to deal with increased food demand by augmenting the human digestive system.

The contradiction of the two is impossible to ignore. People have asked, at various points, about why I call myself a tech skeptic. This is why.

While technology is a necessary element for tackling any number of today's ills, here's a perfect example of tech-fetishism run amok. Take a very real problem (needed food goes to waste, fueling shortages) with deep causes and try to solve it with something technologically advanced, even if more efficient — but less shiny — solutions are within reach.

Actually, much of the developing world's food problems aren't due to a lack of new technology, but a lack of things available for decades in the developed world that need wider accessibility. African farmers don't need to be able to eat goddamn trees, they need adequate ways to store and transport their food. More well-fed countries could reduce waste by a combination of cultural and legal changes. Those will take major efforts, and that's where the attention should be focused.

But, while they come with difficulties, none of those require rewiring the human digestive tract, impressive a feat as that might be. In fact, that rather flashy "solution" is a hell of a lot less efficient than those mentioned above. It's one example of how over-reliance on technological solutions can obscure better options.

"If you can't fix it, you don't own it"

I'm usually not a huge fan of anything bearing the word "manifesto," even when I might agree with its principles, but this absolutely wonderful declaration from ifixit deserves a look. The accompanying blog post details how some companies actually go to pretty drastic lengths to keep repair information from people, and to encourage turnover of devices by some disgustingly intrusive means.

That's bullshit. You buy something, you should have the right to modify or tinker with it as you please. Any longtime reader of this blog knows that I'm a big fan of reliability over flash, and the ability to easily fix something is an important part of that. Repair — in everything from cars to clothing —is an important way to keep what we like longer, make technology more accessible to the non-wealthy and apply human ingenuity to our artifice.

I'll admit that, personally, I'm not naturally that technically talented. By practice and necessity, I've picked up some tricks over the years. I can generally do basic troubleshooting and repair, along with occasional tinkering if I've a) got the time b) am reasonably confident I won't cause an explosion.

Still, the wonderful thing about being a human, knowing other humans, is that we're social creatures and don't need to be an expert in every skill under the sun. I will gladly barter with friends that are to get a needed repair done, especially if they can teach me something new in the process. This is one reason "to choose our own repair technician" and a number of the other rights are important even for those of us who aren't necessarily home mechanics.

On that note too, "easy to repair/tinker with" should become something generally expected of new devices, and rewarded accordingly.

If homelessness were genetic

So yes, I've been derelict in my blog duties. I missed the usual Breaking Time poetry moment on Friday.

So you get a poem today, because I'm still busy as hell with my day job and because you all deserve one, dammit. This devastating piece by cognitive neuropsychiatrist Sean Spence has already made the rounds on Andrew Sullivan and Mind Hacks, but it's come back to my mind every time I read some well-heeled snit put forward a condescending plan to end poverty. Spence's poem is so damn good and relevant that I can't resist posting it here.

A fetish for genetically explaining everything is one of the most insidious pseudosciences of our era —especially as it twists, in the popular mind, the very real and interesting discoveries taking place — and Spence's genius poem manages to hit an oft-ignored social ill while simultaneously skewering that illusion.

If homelessness were genetic,


Institutes would be constructed


With tall white walls,


And ‘driven’ people (with thick glasses)


Would congregate


In libraries

And mumble.

If homelessness were genetic


Bright young things


Would draft manifestos


‘To crack the problem’,

Girls with braces on their teeth


Would stoop to kiss


Boys with dandruff


At Unit discos

While dancing (slowly)
To ‘Careless Whisper’.

Meanwhile, upstairs, in the offices


Secretaries in long white coats


And horn-rimmed spectacles,


Carrying clipboards,


Would cross their legs


And take dictation:

  ‘Miss Brown, a memo please,
  

To the eminent Professor Levchenko,
  

"Many thanks indeed
  

For all those sachets you sent to me,
  

Of homeless toddlers’ teeth."’

If homelessness were genetic


Rats from broken homes


Would sleep in cardboard shoeboxes


Evading violent fathers,


Who broke their bones,


While small white mice


With cocaine habits


Would huddle in fear,


Sleeping in doorways,


Receiving calibrated kicks from gangs of passers-by

(A ‘geneenvironment interaction’).

If homelessness were genetic


Then the limping man, with swollen feet,


A fever,


And the voices crying out within his brain


Would not traipse


Between surgery and casualty


Being turned away


For being roofless

Because, of course,
Homelessness would be genetic

And, therefore,

‘Interesting’.

50,000 Goldilocks

Goldilocks and the Three Bears by Paul Woodroffe

Driving back to Asheville this weekend, I heard a striking segment on NPR's On the Media, about an insidious little number that's wended its way throw decades of crime, politics and hysteria.

50,000. 

The segment begins 27 minutes in.

Yes, that's right: "50,000" (possibly) began as "human sacrifices to Satan per annum" back in the '80s cult craze. It endured on as the annual death toll from secondhand smoke and even jumped back in time to take a place as the number of Korean war casualties.

It re-emerged in recent years in an NBC report (from "law enforcement sources") as the number of child predators online at any given time, including in a speech by then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Someone says it, a journalist quotes them, a politician quotes the newspaper, the number becomes official lore.

The researchers interviewed called it a "Goldilocks number" just large enough to be shocking, but not so large as to trigger a person's tendency to disbelieve. What makes it so fascinating is that, unlike many bogus statistics, it's true origins seem lost, making it fascinatingly mysterious.

But why it's endured is something else, I think. Numbers have become one of our societal gospels: put in a stat (true or not) and people of whatever other creed will tremble for a moment. No matter how shoddy the rest of the argument, it grants an instant credibility.

So try an experiment: the next time you're in a heated discussion where you have no statistics, invoke "50,000 [blank]" and see what happens. Goldilocks lives.

Science meets "the Clouds"

It seemed like a good idea at the time...

An excellent WIRED essay by Jonah Lehrer warns that Breaking Things Down to Particles Blinds Scientists to Big Picture:

Functional MRI has been used to study all sorts of sexy psychological properties. You’ve probably seen the headlines: “Scientists Discover Love in the Brain!” and “This Is Your Brain on God!” Such claims are often accompanied by a pretty silhouette of a skull, highlighted with splotches of primary color. It’s like staring at a portrait of the soul. It’s also false. In reality, huge swaths of the cortex are involved in every aspect of cognition. The mind is a knot of interconnections, so interpreting the scan depends on leaving lots of stuff out, sifting through noise for the signal. We make sense of the data by deleting what we don’t understand.

What’s disappointing here isn’t just that these early fMRI studies are overhyped or miss important facts. It’s that this mistake is all too familiar. Time and time again, an experimental gadget gets introduced — it doesn’t matter if it’s a supercollider or a gene chip or an fMRI machine — and we’re told it will allow us to glimpse the underlying logic of everything. But the tool always disappoints, doesn’t it? We soon realize that those pretty pictures are incomplete and that we can’t reduce our complex subject to a few colorful spots. So here’s a pitch: Scientists should learn to expect this cycle — to anticipate that the universe is always more networked and complicated than reductionist approaches can reveal.

Look at genetics: When the Human Genome Project was launched in the early 1990s, it was sold as a means of finally making sense of our DNA by documenting the slight differences that encode our individuality. But that didn’t happen. Instead, the project has mostly demonstrated that we are more than a text, and that our base pairs rarely explain anything in isolation. It has forced researchers to focus on the much broader study of how our genes interact with the environment.

—

Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, once divided the world into two categories: clocks and clouds. Clocks are neat, orderly systems that can be solved through reduction; clouds are an epistemic mess, “highly irregular, disorderly, and more or less unpredictable.” The mistake of modern science is to pretend that everything is a clock, which is why we get seduced again and again by the false promises of brain scanners and gene sequencers. We want to believe we will understand nature if we find the exact right tool to cut its joints. But that approach is doomed to failure. We live in a universe not of clocks but of clouds.

Exactly. Lehrer's piece points to a concern I've long had, especially as science (or more accurately SCIENCE! to separate the popular impression from the real practice) is too-often embraced as an all-purpose answer for just about any question or ailment.

To be fair, that popular impression is shaped by the generally terrible state of science journalism. I can't count the number of times I've seen the following situation take place:

Scientist: Well, we've discovered this gene that, in some cases, occurs more frequently in people with stunning flatulence.

Headline: Science cures farts!

So there's that. But Lehrer's correct in that many parts of the modern science community do often mistake the forest for the trees and miss some important connections. Some of this arises from the fact that scientists are a professional culture made up of people who tend to be pretty good at taking things apart and analyzing them, sometimes down to minute levels. Add years of scientific training and constant socializing with people of similar bent, and the trend becomes exaggerated.

We often forget that, of course, because the sciences do make stunning discoveries and accomplish amazing things. All too often, we like our would-be solutions simple, so science is a useful, essential tool that has led to fascinating revelations becomes science is THE answer.

I've often thought, after talking with scientist and soon-to-be scientist friends of mine, that scientific education would be improved by incorporating it more closely with history, both in replicating milestone experiments and in examining the ways science has held up, defended and shattered its own assumptions throughout history. 

Because it's a telling story (Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything is a good place to start). Scientists throughout history emerge as an interesting casts of characters with a staggering amount of intelligent ideas. They're also tied up in their own assumptions, cultural myths, power struggles and greed. On top of that, for all their prescience, they're not particularly more immune to dogma than any other person.

Being aware, for example, that all the finest scientific minds in Europe once dismissed tales of blazing rocks falling from the sky as peasant superstition might lead to better questioning of today's theories and a willingness to better examine the world outside one's own corner.

A better science — tomorrow's, I hope — will seek to connect with more understanding from other fields, especially those where things are vague and complex, while creating a more versatile breed of knowledge-seekers who search for many useful tools instead of one perfect one.

This is because, in reality, science is excellent in some areas, useful but limited in others (sociology and psychology come to mind) and ill-suited entirely to others still. Science can't tell us who to fall in love with or how to run our governments and things usually ends up really, really badly when people believe that it can (hello, eugenics). It is a human endeavor — an indispensable tool, but not the only one — for facing the masses of clouds which surround our lives.

Is space still the place?

The next generation's view?

Recently the Cassini probe detected chemicals that could indicate life on Titan, prompting renewed speculation about what exactly space travel means to our current world, especially as a lander will be needed to confirm if some form of utterly exotic life exists on Saturn's largest moon.

That, of course, brings to attention the current crumbling state of just about every space program out there, especially that of the United States. It's hard to imagine that the assumption that we would increasingly explore — and eventually live in — space used to be widely-held.

A lot has changed since the moon landing. The economy got shakier, the Cold War wound down and perhaps most of all, the novel majesty wore off as we realized exactly how difficult, bloody and expensive it was to actually tackle the void.

It's also worth mentioning that Sci-fi, the genre that had acted as a cultural spearhead of the space race, got much bleaker and more cynical about the whole effort.

The result is that, while most still think of the future primarily in technological terms, it's not exploring space, but communication devices and various forms of physical augmentation. Transhumanists are, on a lot of levels, the descendants of the space nuts of yesteryear, projecting out today's technology to a point of mythical transcendence (and just as full of bullshit, but that's another story).

However, there's still hope. The costs of space programs were overstated in the first place, and don't seem so bad compared to bailouts and environmental cleanup. Little discoveries, like the possibility of life on Titan, remind us of how vast and strange a universe is waiting out there, and what opportunities it holds. The desire to be part of a grand endeavor has not faded from humanity. If anything, it seems to be slowly building as our current cultures seem shakier. Perhaps space will soon be the place again.

Perhaps, also, we didn't exactly realize what we were in for when we all too accurately dubbed it "the final frontier." Frontiers are messy, dangerous things, full of false starts and unintended consequences, not to mention horrifically high body counts. Yet somehow we end up going towards them anyway and succeed in part because we have no idea what we're getting into.

Plus, not every country's vision evolved in the same way. One notable feature of the anime that's rapidly infected Western culture over the past 15 years is that, even in the bleak stuff, humanity gets to space (though Japan's tech research is more concentrated on another obsession: robots).

So, it's fitting to end with something I played here before, a long time ago: an interesting remix of anime space visions. Watch it and try not to smile at the wide-eyed, earnest determination.

Eventually, you're going to die (so get over it)

As usual, xkcd has it right

With faster, masstier (it's a word now, dammit) media, mass fear becomes easier to achieve. Part of this is the downside of an imaginative age: being able to envision all sorts of possibilities includes plenty of horrors too. Part of it is the fact that most humans in industrialized nations live drastically comfortable lives compared to most of their ancestors.

However, at some level people are aware that much of the world (and even plenty in their own lands) are in a much more terrible state. So there's a very primal fear of a sudden disaster sweeping that all away. Hence politicians and prognosticators can make some hay out of situations that, while terrible, are extremely unlikely to come to pass.

Bruce Schneier has an excellent post on exactly this topic:

At a security conference recently, the moderator asked the panel of distinguished cybersecurity leaders what their nightmare scenario was. The answers were the predictable array of large-scale attacks: against our communications infrastructure, against the power grid, against the financial system, in combination with a physical attack.

I didn't get to give my answer until the afternoon, which was: "My nightmare scenario is that people keep talking about their nightmare scenarios."

There's a certain blindness that comes from worst-case thinking. An extension of the precautionary principle, it involves imagining the worst possible outcome and then acting as if it were a certainty. It substitutes imagination for thinking, speculation for risk analysis, and fear for reason. It fosters powerlessness and vulnerability and magnifies social paralysis. And it makes us more vulnerable to the effects of terrorism.

Worst-case thinking means generally bad decision making for several reasons. First, it's only half of the cost-benefit equation. Every decision has costs and benefits, risks and rewards. By speculating about what can possibly go wrong, and then acting as if that is likely to happen, worst-case thinking focuses only on the extreme but improbable risks and does a poor job at assessing outcomes.

Second, it's based on flawed logic. It begs the question by assuming that a proponent of an action must prove that the nightmare scenario is impossible.

Third, it can be used to support any position or its opposite. If we build a nuclear power plant, it could melt down. If we don't build it, we will run short of power and society will collapse into anarchy. If we allow flights near Iceland's volcanic ash, planes will crash and people will die. If we don't, organs won’t arrive in time for transplant operations and people will die. If we don't invade Iraq, Saddam Hussein might use the nuclear weapons he might have. If we do, we might destabilize the Middle East, leading to widespread violence and death.

Of course, not all fears are equal. Those that we tend to exaggerate are more easily justified by worst-case thinking. So terrorism fears trump privacy fears, and almost everything else; technology is hard to understand and therefore scary; nuclear weapons are worse than conventional weapons; our children need to be protected at all costs; and annihilating the planet is bad. Basically, any fear that would make a good movie plot is amenable to worst-case thinking.

Fourth and finally, worst-case thinking validates ignorance. Instead of focusing on what we know, it focuses on what we don't know -- and what we can imagine.

Exactly. Dwelling in all this is an unspoken truth that most people don't want to face: there is no such thing as absolute security. Of course, no political leader wants to go on television and say "look, we'll take every reasonable precaution and do our best to protect you, but in the end there's no way to stop every maniac from doing some damage or an unforeseen natural disaster. You might die from something we can't do shit about, no matter how capable we are."

Of course, that's hardly a comforting thought, but it is reality. It's something people are generally hesitant to face in their personal lives too. We don't want to think about the fact that we may be healthy, capable and smart, but still die randomly because there are simply too many big, unpredictable things out there to prepare perfectly against every last one. We can all be eaten by the storm.

Furthermore, trying to prepare for every possibility is insane and leads to paranoia personally and societally. Since it involves choices, over-preparing for one thing opens up vulnerabilities to others. A society paranoid about invasion will pour cash into their military, but neglect infrastructure and other essentials, actually making a catastrophe more likely (this was one factor in the USSR's fall).

This isn't an excuse for a lack of prudent preparation, of course. Safety rules, contingency plans and rainy-day funds all exist for a reason, and on a societal level, people should insist that they function. A positive approach is best summed up by the "Keep Calm and Carry On" attitude of London during the Blitz: not reckless, but not freaking out at the fact that danger existed.

Similarly, on a personal level, being aware of your surroundings, living a healthy life and knowing how to defend yourself all decrease the odds of catastrophe.

But they do not eliminate it. Sooner or later, that's something we all have to face. If any of us want to end up a future worth having, we'd probably better start demanding it in our culture as well. There are many routes to a better tomorrow. Fear is not one of them.