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?

The Rundown: Quotable edition

For our first piece. This, in a nutshell, is why I distrust manifestos. Great satirical work from Kim Mok.

Knee-deep in journalism work (yes, readers, this comes as a total surprise, I know), so this edition of The Rundown will focus on some apt quotes and thoughts.

The following timely "there is no they" gem is from Eli Sagan's The Honey and the Hemlock, on the thorny relationship between democracy and paranoia:

The one psychological mode of action that almost everyone recognizes as intrinsic to the paranoid position (and, in its most exaggerated form, intrinsic to paranoia) is projection: "...the attribution to external figures of motivations, drives, or other tensions that are repudiated and intolerable in oneself." If we want to conquer the world, we announce that "they" are the ones who are so intent. If we cannot abide the tolerance that democratic society demands, we discover conspiracies whereby "they" are intent on overthrowing the democracy. Hofstadter points out how the Ku Klux Klan, violently anti-Catholic, imitated the Catholic Church by wearing priestly robes, erecting elaborate ritual structures, and creating a complex hierarchy. What the paranoid personality cannot do is to create a significant psychological distance between him- or herself and others. To a degree, there are no others, only friends (a part of me) and enemies (the projections of the bad, repudiated parts of me). Lacking an integrated, internal sense of self, the paranoid cannot conceive of an independent, possibly different, even indifferent, other. Democratic society, on the other hand, rests on the fundamental assumption of the independence and integrity of other people, that they be allowed wishes and desires and lives independent of what others may require of them. The paranoid cannot abide tolerance. People who do not believe in God must allow prayer in the schools; people who do not believe their identity is dependent on a piece of cloth; must recite the Pledge of Allegiance; women who get pregnant by mistake must have the child. Every democratic society has its frontier on which paranoid forces struggle with those of tolerance.

Sex positive feminist badass Susie Bright on some lessons from her years in the trenches. There are some major points here that many activists still need to learn:

I've been thinking a lot about the abortion fight that's going on right now. What if the women's movement had kept its eye on the ball? What if we had realized what was at stake? We saw it, the Moral Majority was being formed at this time in the '80s, and we should have been saying, "We need to pull together everyone we've got and strategize on these issues because we're in for the fight of our lives and our daughters' lives." But, no, we had a sectarian battle over pornography. The FBI didn't bother to infiltrate the women's movement, but if they had, they couldn't have come up with a better plan to sow the seed of destruction. I'll still go to places where a feminist activist gingerly approaches me, not quite sure we still have anything to talk about and worried about whether I'm on the right side. It's a little hard to keep that crap up at this point.

Since the world's had more than its usual share of terrifying uncertainty lately, I find the late Octavia Butler's A Few Rules for Predicting the Future more relevant than ever:

"So do you really believe that in the future we're going to have the kind of trouble you write about in your books?" a student asked me as I was signing books after a talk. The young man was referring to the troubles I'd described in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, novels that take place in a near future of increasing drug addiction and illiteracy, marked by the popularity of prisons and the unpopularity of public schools, the vast and growing gap between the rich and everyone else, and the whole nasty family of problems brought on by global warming.

"I didn't make up the problems," I pointed out. "All I did was look around at the problems we're neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters."

"Okay," the young man challenged. "So what's the answer?"

“There isn’t one,” I told him.

“No answer? You mean we’re just doomed?” He smiled as though he thought this might be a joke.

“No,” I said. “I mean there’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers—at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.”

Amen to that. Good night, everyone. Dream well.

Poems for Friday: Prediction (The Future)

There are jetpacks, naturally. Art by Fred Freeman, 1966

Today's poem didn't strike me as a poem, at first. This piece by Mark Wallace is really more of a manifesto-style rant formed into epigrams. 

But it's too perfect, and too damn quotable, to pass up. Here's a brilliant stab into future-loves' jet-pack adoring heart:

In the future, we’ll plan the future better.

In the future, you can just become your TV.

In the future, your sexual partners will meet all the qualities on your checklist.

And this anxiety you’re feeling now? In the future you won’t feel it.

In the future, technology will always work, and there won’t even be weekend downtime for systems repair.

In the future, Friday night parties will never be boring.

In the future there will be less deadlines and they’ll be easier to meet.

In the future, all pollution will contain its own self-cleaning element.

In the future, if your house burns down, you’ll have another house by the time you get home.

In the future, your insurance policy will actually pay.

In the future, your friends won’t talk so constantly about everything they think they should already have.

In the future, no good deed will go unrewarded.

In the future people will like you just for who you are.

In the future, everyone will have their own sky marshal.

The Rundown: bodies on the highway

The body of a man killed execution style and wrapped in bin liners lies by the side of the Acapulco-Mexico highway November 16, 2006. REUTERS/Stringer

*Drug Wars A stunning set of pictures inside Mexico's drug war. Fair warning, the picture above is one of the least graphic in the set, which includes everything from blinged-out .45s and narco-saints to headless bodies hanging from a bridge. A harrowing look inside how ugly a drug-fueled civil war is.

*New Haven uses SWAT team to crack down on nightlife New Haven, Conn. has apparently decided people drinking and attending strip clubs is such a dire threat that it needs to use the SWAT team — with masks and assault rifles, no less — to round up the patrons, on a search warrant that produced a single, unrelated charge. This comes on the heels of Operation Nightlife where police started rounding up clubgoers and were widely reported to have attacked and tased a Yale student. Bunny Colvin's rant from The Wire — "call something a war, and pretty soon everyone starts acting like warriors" — comes to mind.

*LGBTIQQAA Yes, that's now the going abbreviation. I remember when it was gay and lesbian, then, around the time I was in college, LGBT became popular, and that was fine. But at this point, the acronym's stretching to the point of uselessness.

There is a term, however, that covers all those groups and their struggle for rights without resorting to a ludicrous degree of political correctness or tongue-twistingly garbled abbreviations: human.

*Catholics in US overwhelmingly support homosexual unions Many do this in direct defiance of their official hierarchy, and in percentages greater, in some cases, than the rest of the mainstream populace. A reassuring sign and a reminder that adherents to a creed don't always follow the attendant hierarchy. Again, the lesson is to be careful lumping traditions into too-neat boxes. There is No They.

*Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? A surprisingly decent series on the rise, hybridization and collapse of a subculture(s?) by Steven Hyden over at The Onion's AV Club. A good look at the way grunge and alt music linked into culture trends in one of the last eras before rock n' roll (along with mass music in general) splintered or become totally retro. Particular kudos for the way Hyden manages to balance enthusiasm with a realistic look at the limits of art.

*Experimentation, orgasms and the rise of anal sex Slate journalist William Saletan looks at changing sexual trends. Interesting material here on a social revolution steadily continuing in the background, though some of the "whoa" tone in Saletan's is a little puerile.

*'39 Queen doing an acoustic (what? yes!) presentation of one of the peppiest, saddest songs ever written about space travel:

Ray vs. the Modern World

Cats good. Internets NOT.

Oh, Ray Bradbury. You have not mellowed with age. He had these choice remarks at a recent event marking his 90th birthday:

Ray Bradbury is mad at President Obama, but it's not about the economy, the war or the plan to a construct a mosque near Ground Zero in New York City.

“He should be announcing that we should go back to the moon,” says the iconic author, whose 90th birthday on Aug. 22 will be marked in Los Angeles with more than week's worth of Bradbury film and TV screenings, tributes and other events.  “We should never have left there. We should go to the moon and prepare a base to fire a rocket off to Mars and then go to Mars and colonize Mars. Then when we do that, we will live forever."

The man who wrote "Fahrenheit 451," "Something Wicked This Way Comes," "The Martian Chronicles," "Dandelion Wine"and "The Illustrated Man" has been called one of America's great dreamers, but his imagination takes him to some dark places when it comes to contemporary politics. “I think our country is in need of a revolution."

“There is too much government today. We've  got to remember the government should be by the people, of the people and for the people.”

---

“We have too many cellphones. We've got too many Internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.”

Bradbury wrote darkly about bookburning in "Fahrenheit 451," but he sounds ready to use a Kindle for kindling. “I was approached three times during the last year by Internet companies wanting to put my books" on an electronic reading device, he said. "I said to Yahoo, 'Prick up your ears and go to hell.' "

Yeah. Mr. Bradbury manages the amazing feat of encouraging political revolution because of a lack of a grand technological project which will make us immortal space gods, then tuns around and gives full throttle to the Luddite demons that have possessed him since way back when.

Is this hilarious? Yes. I can't help but being a little sad as well. Once upon a time, Bradbury was the ferociously cynical (yet humanistic) voice of a better sci-fi. He played a major role in igniting the medium's Deviant Age (also its Golden one, for my money) and his stories remain justly famed.

He's always been prickly, to put it kindly, but part of me always hoped that at some point he'd get past his prejudices and find some shred of the voice he once possessed in such abundance. We could certainly use it.

Nah. Chuck the machines, chuck the internet(s). The only majesty's in rocket ships. And we need to shoot the too-much-government motherfuckers who aren't getting us to Mars. STAT. Really, Mr. Bradbury?

On the other hand, perhaps he saw this:

Yes, take a moment. Then watch that again. Comedian Rachel Bloom hits one out of the park. "Fuck me, Ray Bradbury" is deliciously filthy and perfectly timed (see how she intones "you're a prolific author, Ray Bradbury"). It's unrepentant fun and, in its own strange way, a tribute to the wonder that the best of his works possessed while managing a catchy tribute to the kink side of geekdom. 

Meet the future, Ray. It loves you anyway.

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.

The Rundown: Technology Will Crush You

Maybe Magnus was right...

Oh bloody hell, where to start?

* Bizarre writer and friends get microchip implants Of the variety used to ID pets. They're cheap and apparently not all that hard to install or read, as Emma Mendes Da Costa and a few of her friends were able to get one implanted just fine in a local body mod shop.

The article's fun and tongue-in-cheek, but it indicates how a once-scary, science fictional tech is becoming increasingly common. So far it's mostly a novelty, because the infrastructure to read those chips on a massive scale doesn't yet exist. Mark my words, though, given our current times of turmoil, the potential for oppressive backlash on this particular technology is huge.

While I of course believe in people's right to install, tinker or put whatever they want into their body, there's no way in hell I personally want a chip of any sort under my flesh. Piercings are lovely, tattoos too, but there's an extra level of intrusion there that I'm deeply uncomfortable with.

Which brings us to the next item...

* First human 'infected with computer virus' Oh my, how I love our species. No sooner has a new technology started to become widely available than we begin figuring out ways to infect and corrupt it. Brilliant, and a process that happens with laws and attempts at repression too as well as machinery.

In this particular case, British scientist Mark Gasson, installed with the Cadillac version of the chip Da Costa and her friends received, managed to infect said chip and then spread the virus to surrounding machinery. Now we see  a future where humans face mechanical viruses as well as biological ones.

Of course, then there's the matter of the oft-forgotten workers who are building those and similar objects of tech-fetish lust...

* Apple's Chinese suicide problem From Andrew Leonard, of the superb How the World Works, comes news that, after a spate of recent suicides, workers assembling iPhones in China are asked to promise they won't kill themselves. 

Leonard writes that the situation is pretty dire:

I don't know about you, but if I was working 12 hours a day, six days a week, plugging circuit boards into Apple gadgets that sell for more than I might make in a month, and I looked out the window and saw nets being installed to keep co-workers from dashing their brains out on the streets below, I'd start to feel a little depressed. Top that off with an explicit corporate request to refrain from suicide and I'd be seriously questioning my career path.

However, he also notes that by Chinese standards, a job at the Foxconn plant is considered pretty good. In some ways, perhaps, Foxconn is lucky, Johann Hari's excellent piece on hideous working conditions in China reveals that labor uprisings often include kidnapping management.

Meanwhile, Apple's market capitalization just exceeded Microsoft's. I believe this sums it up.

Naturally, my Apple shit-talking is written on a Mac.

* Robots replacing Damien Hirst and your baby A creepily thought-provoking exhibit in (where else?) China highlights how easily the dreaded robots can replace a number of basic human functions.

Robots can have Hirst, but I don't want to live in a world where my rickshaw drivers ain't people.

The Rundown: Razing Arizona edition

Flank attack!

* LA boycotts Arizona. Arizona threatens to cut off power LA invades Arizona, rounds up supporters of draconian anti-immigrant law and deports them to Mexico. Ok, so I'm making that last part up (though, as Grumpy Owl points out, LA already has their marching music).

On another note, the fight over Arizona's law illustrates a number of interesting breaking points and important shifts. The first is how ill-equipped state lines mostly drawn in the 19th century are to dealing with today's environmental and resource issues. One of the major things states fight about is resources: who's stealing whose water, power, etc. Part of this is because environmental regions are hacked up, pie-style, between any number of arbitrary boundaries. The basic support system for a modern city stretches across many political jurisdictions, something that makes tackling disagreements or problems extremely difficult.

Also, notice that it's LA fighting Arizona: a city versus a state. Within Arizona, Phoenix is notable as a hot-bed of opposition to the law. As more and more people move to cities, they become greater centers of political power, often deeply at odds with the surrounding territory. Forget Red States and Blue States (one of the dumbest political memes of the past decade), look at a more accurate map and you'll see that the biggest political divide is urban-rural.

* New Social Networking Site Changing the Way, Oh, Christ, Forget It "Let someone else report on this bullshit." The Onion goes there. Spectacularly.

* Is the Drug War more militarized than the military? A soldier argues that raids in Afghanistan and Iraq often have more restrictions than SWAT teams busting in the doors of suspected drug traffickers. An interesting read.

* Robot conducts wedding in Tokyo No word yet on if the infernal machine seduced the bride beforehand. 

An interesting example of how culture can drive technology as much as the other way around. Japan has more (and often more sophisticated) robots than anywhere else in the world. This is partly because Japan's is a first-world industrial power with the resources to build such devices. However, there's also a cultural fascination that shapes what it builds with that capability, and what ends it's put to.

Speaking of...

* Because Every Country is the Best at Something Yes, Japan actually is number 1 in the world in the robotics department. The US leads in, uh, serial killers (send them to fight the robots, I smell a hit movie here). The UK leads in CCTV cameras and France in sugar beets. It's a strange world.

* The French Anti-Burqa Jihad An excellent column by Indian atheist Shikha Dalmia on the crusading and dictatorial impulses behind France's new law. Includes this passage, which could stand to be repeated often:

Nor will it do to justify this ban on grounds that it will save women from having to make painful personal choices. It is not the job of liberal governments to make personal tradeoffs painless--just possible. Giving individuals the right to exit without fearing physical retaliation provides an automatic check on oppressive traditions without taking away the crucial tool that minority communities in liberal polities have to perpetuate themselves: moral suasion. Banning the burqa or the Sikh turban or the Jewish yarmulke is tantamount to telling observant Muslims, Sikhs and Jews that they don't have a right to exist.

Despite years of sectarian bloodletting, if Indians still intuitively understand this and take a benign view of the burqa, it is hardly because they are inherently more rational. It is because their secularism has been shaped by India's dominant religion--Hinduism--whose non-monotheistic ethos allows the space for multiple faiths. In this sense, Hinduism is perhaps more profoundly in sync with liberal tolerance than monotheistic faiths.

More crucially, however, there is nothing in Hinduism that makes an individual's spiritual salvation anyone's business except the individual herself. By contrast, Hitchens, et al, who have been raised in the cradle of a Christian civilization, have imbibed a certain comfort level with the crusading notion that people can--and ought to--be saved even against their will. Hence, it does not matter if Muslim women don't regard the burqa as oppressive. They have to be given sartorial liberation in the same way that the heathens need to be given spiritual liberation.

This is a profoundly anti-liberal and anti-secular idea. Indeed, if the French and Hitchens were serious about either secularism or liberalism, instead of asking Muslim women to shed the burqa, they would be shedding their own proselytizing prejudice against it.

Amen. I've always found it interesting that the anti-Roman Christian sects ended up becoming the heir to the Roman Empire. Similarly, I can't help but wonder if a certain strand of atheism won't end up embodying the crusading and socially meddlesome mentality of its worst foes. The wheel turns...

Durable Infection

But, if we don't all have helicopter packs, how will we fight the commies?

Earlier this month, Kevin Zero, of Grinding fame, wrote Your Jetpack (Cannibal Futures), an excellent rant on the old "Where's my fucking jetpack?" trope that called on people to stop sitting around and actually build their own future. There was also something about a latex gimp suit and strapping rockets to asses, which I quite appreciated.

It's dead-on, and provoked me to think about what exactly people want out of a future. For a long time my grousing reply to "Where's my fucking jetpack?" had been "I don't know, you were too busy whining to build the damn thing."

My ire is because when someone says the aforementioned words to me, they're immediately indicating two things.

1) They want their future handed to them. The indignant entitlement in WMFJ is impossible to miss.

2) They associate the future primarily with technology. Not just technology, but extremely fancy technology.

I mean, really, are you going to go to the bar in your jetpack? Pick up the kids? In some ways it's the ultimate in conspicuous futurotica: loud, explosive, resource-guzzling and not particularly useful.

Things that really change the type of world we live in, technological or otherwise, aren't usually big, complex or awe-inspiring. Instead, they're simple, reliable and easy to replicate, usually fulfilling a very basic niche. For that reason they prove extremely infectious and end up shaping countless lives.

What do I mean? It's worth looking at some recent examples that have drastically changed the world we live in, for millions, if not billions, of people. They offer a guide that anyone looking at creating something to survive tomorrow must take into account.

Let's start with one of the most successful, world-changing technologies of the past half century. It beats the jetpack all to shit.