Why I Care About Space Exploration

I feel a bit odd writing this. For one thing, many of my friends are already quite heavily invested emotionally in space activism, and for them, caring goes without saying. For those who don’t care, a number of assumptions I suspect they make will lead them to think that caring is quirky or worse. But I have come to think over time not only that space exploration is one of the most important things we can be doing with our intelligence, energy and resources, but that the difference between the extent to which that is the case, and the extent to which people care about it is so great, that talking about it is important.

But first, the assumptions. I admit that I was once enamored with the adventures portrayed in the science fiction novels I read as a young boy, and I know that people who are left cold by space exploration often think that it is a special interest driven by psychologically immature men who want to live the fantasy by proxy. Second, I am well aware of the fact that manned space exploration has always involved funding to corporations which were also defense contractors, that defense spending is high and that war is bad. I am well aware of the fact that the heyday of manned space exploration in this country was intertwined with assertion of national prestige during the Cold War. For many people, that, and the fact that every penny spent on manned space exploration could just as easily be spent on, say, medical research that might save lives, or income redistribution that might improve their quality, settles it. When you put all these considerations together, it is quite natural for some people to think that manned space exploration is simply indefensible. This is compounded by the fact that people interested in space science sometimes themselves argue that knowledge about our universe is best pursued with telescopes and robots, and for people for whom this knowledge is not very interesting anyway, that clinches it. Manned space exploration is a peculiarly pointless and expensive kind of male ego massage. For those suspicious of technology itself who yearn for a simpler, more bucolic way of life, spending money on technology is bad enough, but spending money on useless male ego massaging technology is about the worst thing imaginable. We have to get these thoughts up front and out in the open, because without addressing them head-on, I am preaching to the choir.

Before we turn to costs, which are surprisingly negligible, let us focus on reasons and values. For me, there are three things that bring me back again and again to space.

From time to time, I travel to the Oregon Coast to get away from it all, to have some solitude, to still all the inner chatter for a time and just be. There’s this one spot in particular I like to go to, which is a state park by the shore. To get there, I use my car and the roads, and when I get there, I take advantage of the state park facilities, especially maintained trails, observation platforms, etc. Because we tend to think of such spaces in terms of preventing them from being lost to other uses, protecting them from destruction, we tend to forget that part of the reason for that is so that we may experience the “spiritual” value of direct contact with the natural world, the sublimity of that, the inexpressible truths we learn from these sorts of experiences. Now suppose that I were to say that we should prevent people from going to state parks at all, in fact, we should not have any facilities that make these experiences possible, because you can just as easily learn about nature from wikipedia, or, in a pinch, a well-positioned webcam? Suppose I were to argue that you could provide one free hot meal a day for ten poor people for every park ranger you fired? Would you “go” for that? Maybe you should. Maybe maintaining state parks is just a silly way of symbolically massaging female egos…

Yes, that’s a reductio, and a strange one. But for me, one of the top three reasons for manned space exploration is that the sublimity of making other worlds experienceable directly to at least some human beings is “an end in itself.” It need not be justified in terms of scientific knowledge or job creation any more than state parks do. If you do not know about this sublimity, like some city kid who never had a field trip to a farm, I want to urge you to get out more. Read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy to experience what mountain climbing on Mars might be like. Watch the film For All Mankind and listen to the words of the people who walked on the moon, and the ineffable, transcendent  character of the experience they had there. Notice that but for Apollo photography of Earth, there would very likely have never been an Earth Day at all. Now I know what you’re thinking. These are very small numbers of people having these experiences, far fewer than the numbers who utilize our state and national parks, and the costs we’re talking about are of an entirely different order. But the more human space exploration there is, the cheaper it becomes, and the more people there are who have access to these experiences. Before you judge them to be valueless, be sure you have some notion of what these experiences are, for they are not, at their heart, “male ego massage” but experiences of transcendence, awareness of how much vaster and stranger and more beautiful the universe is than we in our daily lives can easily imagine.

That leads me to the second reason. When I listen to music, read poetry or look at paintings, I never forget that in order for these things to be produced, and in order for them to subsist for any length of time, communities must exist to preserve them and to preserve the capacity for understanding and appreciating them. And yet these communities are tenuous, imperiled things for reasons that might not occur to you: because humanity itself is a tenuous, imperiled thing. I grew up during the Cold War, and apart from however that made me experience the “space race” it also taught me one thing that we now find inconceivable (or, ironically, turn into entertainment because we find it inconceivable): humanity itself can die. This thought was the source of considerable moral pathos back in the day, and people at one time marched to ban nuclear weapons testing, to create nuclear-free zones, etc. Many people are especially moved by the thought that aggression, ego, nationalism, and a kind of short-sightedness about the consequences of our priorities and actions could some day inadvertently lead to our destruction; some of the most haunting writing I recall as a teenager was prophetic science fiction about nuclear war. The thought that our own short-sightedness might destroy us and everything we’ve created and value is a powerful one.

However, it is possible to be even more blind than short-sighted human beings. The dinosaurs were. Like us, they took for granted that the ground under their feet was solid and the sky above them was safe. But the universe is a very big place, and it is full of objects that are, you might say, nature’s own nukes. If you want to see what they can do, look at a photograph of the moon: all those craters were caused. We have the protection of the atmosphere, which burns up and disperses the small stuff that collides with us. The bigger stuff can be much more destructive, and on very rare occasions, can cause planetwide extinction events. Now we tend to think of extinction in terms of the human impact on other species, but actually extinction is the norm: 99.9% of all species that have ever existed are now extinct, and our contribution to that total is negligible. Read the following sentence from Wikipedia, and think about it: “Most simply, any species that cannot survive and reproduce in its environment and cannot move to a new environment where it can do so, dies out and becomes extinct.” Flip that: in order to avoid dying out and becoming extinct, one thing a species must do is diversify the habitats in which lives, in the event that some habitats become impossible to live in. Of course we tend to think of this idea in terms of nonhuman species (no one likes to imagine their own death, let alone that of their whole species) and we think of the sum of all habitats as existing on earth. But in a very real sense, Earth is our “habitat”. Rare circumstances can make it impossible to survive and reproduce here. Diversifying our habitats means increasing the number of planets we sustainably live on, becoming a multiplanetary species. Colonizing other worlds not only opens up new possibilities of human experience, some of them beyond our imagining, it also means that it is less likely that a day will come when, owing to the blind stupidity of lifeless nature and our own tragic short-sightedness, everyone capable of experiencing Van Gogh’s Starry Night, or Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and all their children, and children’s children, are dead.

Which brings me to children. Remember the old Morgenbesserism about how B.F. Skinner insists that we should not anthropomorphize human beings? We are too quick to say that viewing the world as a place filled with opportunity for adventure and wonderment is childish. (And it would be dreadfully sexist to say that it is merely boyish, that girls have no interest in adventure or wonderment.) But you know who should view the world childishly? Children should. We do them no service if we arrange our affairs so that the best we can tell them is that the world used to be filled with opportunities for adventure and wonderment, but now it is only filled with opportunities for sober maturity, labor and service. When things go well, children grow into mature adults whose useful contribution to the world is also one which they themselves find meaningful, and one of the central ways we come to find our adult activities meaningful is by connecting them with our childhood fantasies of what adult activities seemed thrilling to us. You can learn a lot about humanity, and about children, by noticing what kinds of careers children fantasize about. A firefighter has the power to save lives, a doctor has the power to heal and ease suffering. An astronaut has the power to transcend the everyday,  to reveal new worlds. We can always tell children, yes, your dream is a possibility. For some of them, they will become their dream. For others they will do something less grand but meaningfully related to it. For some reason, one of the perennial favorites is “astronaut.” Do you want to turn the possibility of becoming an astronaut into another Santa story, another lie we indulge in until the child is old enough and strong enough to accept the truth that, no, there is no Santa, and there are no such things as astronauts? But a child is hope incarnate, and one of the greatest sins is to unnecessarily sadden a child.

Those are some of the reasons why, whenever I hear someone say that we can better spend the money on ourselves, on Earth, I think: this is to spend money on ourselves, on Earth. Also, if I may let the little boy that still lives in me have the last word: rockets are really cool.

Early Days

I think that there’s no way forward but through all this because the constitutionality of the individual right to bear arms isn’t going anywhere, and we just don’t know what regulations will strike the courts and us after the fact as compatible with the right until we try some and have some of them get held unconstitutional and some not. For that, we need faith, in the democratic and judicial processes, and each other. It took a century to figure out the First Amendment; it’s early days. And someday we will all look back at all those ‘crazy’ gun people the way we now think about all those crazy Eastern European immigrant anarchists handing out leaflets and Jehovah’s Witnesses shouting hellfire on street corners, whose pain in the ass behavior over several decades helped the courts and us figure out what the First Amendment means. Only after all that could we learn to say, “but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Repost: Already Settled Law?

[Originally posted 5/9/2012]

There is a “reasonable people can differ” argument over whether states can decline to create same-sex marriage statutorily without falling afoul of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (the argument, more or less, is that such “bans” mirror bans on mixed race marriages, held unconstitutional in Virginia v. Loving, and here, the argument depends crucially on the analogy between race and sexual orientation holding or not.) However, what happened in North Carolina was not the act of a state legislature (or the omission of an act by a state legislature). It was an amendment to the state constitution. This may matter in ways that have not occurred to people who care only about winning or losing on the substantive issue.

Once upon a time, the state of Colorado attempted to do something similar. There were political forces at work leading to the inclusion of sexual orientation as a prohibited form of discrimination in various antidiscrimination statutes and ordinances within the state. Colorado responded by amending its state constitution. The effect of this would be that even if advocates of sexual orientation antidiscrimination statutes were successful in persuading the majority of the people and the political branches of their desirability, they would still be impossible unless there was also success in repealing the amendment to the state constitution. And the U.S. Supreme Court held that this was a bridge too far.The case is called Romer v. Evans, and you can read it here.

The reasoning of the court focused on the wide range of potential statutory protections homosexuals were prevented from seeking from the legislature by the amendment, and given the absence of any rational relationship to any legitimate governmental interest, the inevitable inference that the amendment was born of animus. “Central both to the idea of the rule of law and to our own Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection is the principle that government and each of its parts remain open on impartial terms to all who seek its assistance.”

Now it is arguable that marriage is quite different in substance from antidiscrimination legislation, but consider: marital status carries with it a slew of status-based advantages both public and private. If North Carolina’s Amendment One left the door open to domestic partnerships or civil unions which were functionally equivalent to marriage but lacking its dignitary value, one could argue that this slew is unaffected, and that the legislature was still “open on impartial terms to those who seek its assistance” but the language of Amendment One makes it clear that this too shall be blocked from statutory creation (“Marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this State”), and that if gays and lesbians seek functional equivalents, they will have to cobble them together piecemeal using existing law (“This section does not prohibit a private party from entering into contracts with another private party; nor does this section prohibit courts from adjudicating the rights of private parties pursuant to such contracts”). This can be done, but it is complex and inconvenient (consider this book of legal forms and notice the long list of forms it provides for precisely this purpose.)

So my question is: isn’t the unconstitutionality of Amendment One already settled law?

Postscript: a legal scholar recommends that the Supreme Court arrive at a holding not unlike what I have described above. I would go further and predict it.

 

[Postscript 3/26/2013: In case it is not clear, the North Carolina amendment is not the subject matter of the case now before the Supreme Court, and there are disanalogies. For one, California is now for all practical purposes a "civil unions" state, so the issue largely becomes a dignitary one rather than a practical one. However, the fact that access to this dignitary interest is blocked by state constitutional amendment in California makes the case not unlike Romer, and since the perennial swing vote, Justice Kennedy, was the author of Romer, I think that at least the following prediction is plausible: California cannot win. Whether the gay community will get everything it wants remains to be seen.]

Nudge, Nudge, Wink, Wink, Know What I Mean, Know What I Mean?

OK, here’s where I think Sarah Conly goes wrong. She thinks that she can defeat “conservative” libertarianism in favor of “liberal” paternalism without sliding into conservative paternalism, by the following expedient: liberal paternalism accepts the agent’s own ends, and only “nudges” (coerces) when irrationality would tend to lead the agent to sabotage their own ends. Conservative paternalism, she thinks, instead concerns itself with setting ends for the agent. The problem is that this distinction won’t hold up, because a lot of conservative paternalism can be construed or re-construed as liberal paternalism plus stigma, with the stigma itself as a part of the benign “nudge”. For example, she would say that a conservative paternalist who bans abortion is saying that the life of a mother is inherently superior, and that a liberal paternalist would never ban abortion, because this would be to stray into setting ends. But suppose that the conservative paternalist reasons that in fact most women ultimately prefer the life they have that includes their children, or eventually regret not having children, so that having children is not the conservative’s foisted end, but the women’s own end. And suppose further that the conservative paternalist says, look, you’ll thank me later, but you are prone to miscalculation, undervaluing having children out of ignorance, tending to delay having children too long by overestimating how much time you’ve got, being overly optimistic about resources that will be available to you to raise children and pursue a career, etc. You’ll wish that we had made that abortion harder for you to get. For that matter, you’ll wish that you had been “nudged” away from a career altogether and into being a stay-at-home mom, you’ll wish that you had been nudged into a more traditional set of attitudes toward gender and a relationship to match, etc. etc. So it will turn out that the difference between the righteous liberal paternalist is not what policies are actually pursued (that’s an empirical question) but whether they are pursued with a nasty, moralistic, mean-spirited, stigmatizing intent, or a wonderfully benign “you’ll thank me later” patronizing intent. And that’s not going to be much of a difference in the end, unless it turns out that the kinds of things the conservative paternalist wants to do are always, remarkably, a bad idea on empirical grounds, and the kinds of things the liberal paternalist wants to do are always, remarkably, a good idea, again, on purely empirical grounds. But there’s no reason to think that the conservative paternalist’s policies are any better or worse in terms of what someone will thank you for later. (There are further questions: whether there can be a principled distinction between means and ends in the way her theory requires, whether expressed regret is a reliable indicator of actual ends, whether actual behavior isn’t a reliable indicator of actual ends, etc.)

Love

… in one sense, is this; he who describes it understood it better than any other.

Better Than Nothing, Ctd.

I wouldn’t want to convey the impression that I expected better, but I should say that I found the following amusing. I wrote to my representative Suzanne Bonamici, suggesting that non-domestic use of drones against U.S. citizens require a warrant from the Surveillance Court or some such similar body yet to be created. The computer writes me back thanking me for my concern about drones. If it had left it at that, I probably wouldn’t have minded, understanding that the representative’s staff simply has no time to determine what a constituent has said. But it went on to reassure me that the domestic use of drones is illegal, but in case I disapproved of that, it’s not Bonamici’s fault because she wasn’t in Congress when it was made so.

I know, I know. I’m just supposed to act like a trained seal and pick a party based on which one stimulates my limbic system the right way (my “values”) and if I wanted to actually influence my democracy in any substantive way I should run, not merely opine and vote. Treating voters who actually bother to involve themselves in a thoughtful way as if they were trained seals is useful though, as it encourages us to get out of the way so our betters can get on with running things.

This may actually be for the best. Plato has powerful arguments against democracy and in favor of rule by knowledgeable experts. However, he never satisfactorily addresses the question of how to persuade the many, who outnumber the few, to wear it. Well, I just thought of a way, but I don’t think I’ll write to Congress about it because I think they’ve already got it covered. And if it actually troubles me, our current system was perfected well before any particular representatives became such, so it would be unfair to blame them for it.

I also wrote to the Senate Intelligence Committee and got a nice note back explaining that I’m not from the right state for that. Noted.

Discredited

There is a notion that has been circulating for as long as I can remember in every piece of writing in the humanities on race and racism to the effect that the concept of race has been scientifically discredited. The most recent example is a piece in last weekend’s New York Times, which contains the statement “Since the mid-20th century no mainstream scientist has considered race a biologically significant category.” In a sense this is true: biologists are not in the habit of using the word “race” in attention-attracting ways. The question is, in what sense has the concept of race been scientifically discredited? The answer proves to be more complicated than at first appears.

It is easy to see why regarding race as scientifically discredited would be useful morally. Racism involves negative value judgments of individuals based on their membership in a race. These judgments receive support from factual claims about racial characteristics. These factual claims, in turn, have to be about something that exists, otherwise the chain of reasoning falls apart. However, notice in passing that the chain might fall apart at any, or indeed at several, of the stages leading to the negative judgment about the individual. One might be correct in claiming that races exist, and be wrong about the factual claims about a race (for example, about average intelligence). One might be correct about a factual claim about an average trait while being wrong about an inference from the average to the trait in a particular case. Lastly, one might make the wrong moral judgment in response to a factual claim about an individual. The claim that the concept of race has been scientifically discredited seems to invoke error at all these stages except the last, since the notion that a moral judgment has been scientifically discredited (as opposed to the facts upon which it is based) is problematic. However, when people make claims like the aforementioned quote, they generally mean not that factual claims about races are false, but that racial predicates don’t map onto anything real (apart from social facts). If this were true, it would cut off racism at the knees quite effectively. The tagline that links to the aforementioned article expresses this with admirable clarity: “When we learned that witches did not exist, we threw out the category. So why do we cling to the discredited notion of race?” However, when the notion that race is scientifically discredited is presented, this is seldom explained.

Up until quite recently, the basic mechanisms of heredity were not understood at all. Two crucial discoveries, that of the rules of Mendelian genetics, and that of the structure of DNA, changed all that. Before that understanding emerged, one popular view, extending all the way back to antiquity, was that every species possessed an Aristotelian essence that existed within each individual, which determined the normal characteristics of members of the species, explained why our classification of individuals into that species was correct, and which was somehow involved in the transmission of heredity. These essences formed nested hierarchies upward (genera) and downward (subspecies). On this account, a possible view is that races are subspecies, determined by Aristotelian sub-essences.

One thing that “discredited” means here, apparently, is that there are no such sub-essences.   If this means that there is no item present in each individual by virtue of which they are members of a race, that is both true and important. Rather, what there are are self-replicating systems (organisms) assembled from information coded in DNA sequences, and populations of such systems. What defines such populations are continua of genetic similarity which can be characterized statistically. However, it is important to note that this particular discrediting applies to species as well. There is no metaphysical item each member of the same species possesses by virtue of which it is a member either.

This point, however, tends to get confused with a different point, which is that, whereas classification by species is biologically meaningful, classification by race is not. This point is not about the existence or non-existence of racial essences, but about the character of the underlying continua, and the arguments that have been made to establish this claim are of a different sort. Crudely, the idea here is that each individual is a unique constellation of traits (phenotypes) and underlying genetic material that codes for them, and whether or not any two individuals are similar or dissimilar depends upon which traits are focused on. For example, if I compare a brown-eyed, dark-skinned person to a brown-eyed light-skinned person, they will be similar as to eye-color, more so than a brown-eyed light-skinned person and a blue-eyed light skinned person. However, if the comparison was by skin color rather than eye color, the similarities and dissimilarities fall out differently. Which group the individual is a member of depends on which trait is chosen as the basis. If several such traits are chosen and it turns out that there is more genetic variability within populations we folk-classify as a race than there is between then, racial classification is said to be not biologically meaningful. A sophisticated version of this argument was made by the famous biologist Richard Lewontin, in his 1972 paper “The Apportionment of Human Diversity.”

Lewontin’s analysis was subject to a powerful critique by A. W. F. Edwards in his 2003 paper ”Human Genetic Diversity: Lewontin’s Fallacy.” The problem, in brief, is that not enough loci and alleles were being compared (say we compared eye color and skin color and hundreds of other traits, instead of a small number). There have been in the past decade or so several  papers which, leveraging more recent data from DNA sequencing and a mathematical tool called “cluster analysis,” reveal that sets of DNA sequences do fall “naturally” into clumps based on degree of similarity and dissimilarity within and between populations, and that these DNA sequence clusters, arrived at independently of folk racial classification, happen to map on to them. In one cluster analysis paper, when the algorithm for clustering was set at K=6, the sets of DNA sequences naturally clumped into African, European, Asian, Melanesian, Native American, and an obscure mountain tribe in Pakistan called the Kalash (Noah Rosenberg, et. al., “Genetic Structure of Human Populations,” Science, vol. 298, Dec. 20, 2002.) In another study, ethnic self-identification deviated from independently determined cluster membership only 0.14% of the time (Hua Tang, et.al. “Genetic Structure, Self-Identified Race/Ethnicity, and Confounding Case-Control Association Studies,” American Journal of Human Genetics, vol. 76, 2005). In short, there are underlying biological facts (statistical frequencies) which correspond to the folk classification. To say that there is no such thing as race, rather, all there is are DNA sequences and statistical patterns populations of them fall into is not unlike saying there is no such thing as water, only underlying facts about protons, electrons and neutrons. We can choose to talk that way, if the concept of water is so freighted with bogus social significance that using the word “water” causes more harm than good. But absent such significance, we don’t say “there is no such thing as water, there is only H2O.” Rather, we say “water is H2O.”

There is of course a further question. That, however, is not a judgment about what is real, but a judgment about what similarities and dissimilarities are important, and how important. And though it is true that we have a confusing tendency to use the word “real” to mean “important” (using the phrase “The real question is not X but Y” to redirect attention from X to Y), there is another, more primary sense of the word “real.” In that sense of “real,” races (statistical clusters of DNA sequences) are real, and witches are not, whatever we choose to call them. The fact that historically, humanity has chosen to run straight to the lowest reaches of hell with that concept is, uncomfortably, a separate issue.

Postscript: I can’t really leave it there, can I? Well, here’s a proposal, and because it is a very slight modification of existing social practices, it is feasible. Let’s simply retire the word “race.” It is, to put it as I did above “freighted with bogus social significance.” However, the “scientifically discredited” meme not only is grossly misleading, but it encourages people to politicize biological inquiries into human geographical populations. But what to do with the “scientifically discrediting” business? I propose that we forge an exclusive link between the word “race” and the pre-Mendelian, pre-Watson and Crick notion of an Aristotelian racial subessence, and the large body of false empirical claims made in the 19th century and earlier about geographical populations. Then humanists can continue to say “science has discredited the concept of race” and for clarification refer, if necessary, back to Mendel, Watson and Crick, rather than referring back to Lewontin’s notion that race is not taxonomically real (since as far as we can now tell, it is). To make this even clearer, humanists should refer to the discrediting of “racial essentialism” and assert a strong analogy between this kind of discussion and gender versus sex discussions. Why? Because one can claim that gender is a social construction, that there is a kind of “essentialism” that promotes sexism, without for a minute denying the manifest fact that there are such things as biological males and females. Thus biologists can continue with their population genetics, and humanists can continue with their critique of essentialism, and not get in each other’s way. But let’s leave the Lewontin Thesis out of the discussion, because if we make the truth of Lewontin’s Thesis a central reason for eschewing racism, we thereby strengthen racism when we discover that Lewontin’s Thesis is better referred to as Lewontin’s Fallacy.