Speaking For All Mankind

“Dawn of the commercial space age.”

As the author points out, private spacecraft don’t have to meet the requirements for a deep space mission.

“11,800 Direct Jobs to Result From NASA’s $6.1 Billion Commercial Spaceflight Investment, Independent Analysis Shows.”

Looks like a big hurdle to further space commercialization has been cleared – Laser “tractor beams” to tidy up space junk.

I wish the dates were moved up – Obama Vows Renewed Space Program.

Fascinating story on NPR about the “trust” hormone (oxytocin) and one researcher’s findings that trust in the government is related to the amount of stress someone feels at the time.  According to the study, trust in the government is at an all time low because of the stress people feel due to the recession.  When college students were given a squirt of oxytocin they reported feeling more trusting of other people.  From this trust, they also reported less distrust in the government.

So, by promoting wellness and lowering the national stress level, could the government also be promoting better citizen engagement?

President Obama laid out an ambitious vision for American space exploration that included missions to an asteroid and to Mars while opening up routine launches to low-Earth orbit by private industries.  It is a great vision and I especially like the mission to an asteroid because of the vast mineral wealth from Near-Earth Objects and to develop an ability to protect against asteroid impacting on Earth.  It also appears that the plan has widespread support in the space community.

I do disagree with leaving out a mission to the Moon.  The Moon is a great base for launching missions to the asteroids and to Mars.  We know we can reach it within a few days, it has mineral resources, water, and an energy source for fusion.  The Moon’s gravity well is much smaller than the Earth’s gravity well and thus it easier to build bigger craft and launch them with less fuel.  Building a base on the Moon allows us to test out technologies and methods that can help us explore Mars.

This is not an argument for reestablishing the Constellation program.  Canceling Constellation was the right call as is the push to leave Low-Earth Orbit.  But skipping past such an obvious asset in our mission to Mars just doesn’t make sense.

The major intellectual influence in my life was Carl Sagan’s Cosmos.  I remember reading the preview for the series in Science Digest and seeing the very first episode.  I must have checked out the Cosmos book hundreds of times and I spent weekend afternoon devouring the science magazines down at the public library. I watched all the  NOVA programs and hung out with other kids in high school who were science and computer enthusiasts.  I was a geek and quite proud of it.

So it was with a bit of sadness when I read the following in Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum’s Unscientific America:  How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future:

“Arguably, the most important news-oriented science communication today occurs via Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report, popular public-affairs-slash-comedy programs that manage to integrate a surprising amount of scientific content and treat it very sympathetically overall – as long as the scientists who go on air can laugh at themselves, and their profession, a little.”

I like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert but a seven-minute science segment is no substitute for the effect Cosmos had on a generation.

Bill Gates backs innovative reactor design.  To me, the best way to get off oil-dependency is a combination of solar, wind, and nuclear.

Along the same lines of my own research – simulation of cultural change.  Computational social science is going to revolutionize the social sciences as simulation revolutionized the hard sciences.