About 35 years ago, astrophysicist Carl Sagan wrote the
best-selling book of popular science, Cosmos,
to accompany his enormously popular public broadcast series of the same
name. Cosmos is still in book stores,
which explains why my son gave it to me a few months back
for Hanukkah.
Sagan surveyed a broad expanse of science in Cosmos, touching on the evolution of the
cosmos and life, and the history of the attempts by humans to understand both.
Most of the science that Sagan explicated is still valid, and his anecdotes
about Kepler, Tycho Brahe, Newton and other scientists were refreshingly
non-heroic, focusing on the intriguing mix of science and pseudoscience that
animated these titans of physics, chemistry and biology.
The last chapter of Cosmos
may be the most compelling to 21st century readers. Writing at the moment in
history when our elected officials were beginning to consider curtailment of the
space program, Sagan argues fervently for an active program of space
exploration. His proposal was to end the nuclear arms program and use the money
saved to fund aggressive space exploration. Sagan talked about “Our obligation
to survive,” which requires us both to disarm and to explore non-earthly sources
of needed resources and a new home for humans. As a pacifist, I would do Sagan
one better, and call for a massive reduction in military spending including
complete nuclear disarmament; certainly, space exploration would join the development
of alternative energy, basic research, repair of our infrastructure, expansion
of mass transit and enlarged support for public education as recipients of the
money we would save from significantly reducing our military budget. The effect
on the economy would be to shift jobs from death-producing industries to
life-sustaining industries.
As we know, our elected officials ignored Sagan’s pleas. We
have made cut after cut to our program of space exploration for more than three
decades. The official position of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) now
encourages the private sector take the lead in exploring space. The Wall Street Journal reports that a
NASA official recently said that he expects multiple space stations to
emerge around the end of the next decade, mostly private, “very single-purpose, small and
entrepreneurial.”
Based on the American experience privatizing prisons,
higher education and the military, privatization of space exploration will
prove to be lucrative for the privatizers and a disaster for everyone else. Each
space privatization corporation will pursue its own interests, which tend to be
quite short-term. Their reasons for conducting pure research will always be private
inurement and not the long-term good of society. An article a few years backby Taylor Dinerman, a member of the board of advisers of a company working
on space-solar-power concepts, pointed out that so far all private space efforts have failed.
In a fluff piece called “What Was the Worst Prediction of All Time?” that just appeared, The
Atlantic recalls that in 1950 science fiction author Ray Bradbury predicted
that we would colonize Mars in the early 2000s as a matter of necessity after
poisoning the earth in a global nuclear war. When asked decades later why
humanity is not spending spring vacation on the Red Planet, Bradbury reportedly
said, “It chose consuming instead—drinking beer and watching soap operas.”
Funny, but untrue.
We—meaning humanity—didn’t chose anything. Our leaders chose for us, and their
choice has been to disinvest in science, just as they chose to disinvest in
public education and infrastructure development. To most Republicans and
Democrats, space exploration and other science research are just one more item
to cut, so we can continue to provide the wealthy with the historically high
tax cuts they have enjoyed over the past 35 years and perhaps, if the
Republicans get their way, cut their taxes even more.
The earth will
eventually become inhabitable, either because of environmental degradation or
an expected increase in the intensity of solar energy hitting the atmosphere in
about a billion years. The human race has a limited amount of time to develop
the means to transport ourselves to another habitable celestial body. Space
exploration is as important as addressing global warming and learning how to
operate a no-growth economy if we are to survive as a species.
