Category Archives: Technology and Society

Business, Economics, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Science And Policy

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Words of wisdom from Daniel Sarewitz:

Whatever science you’re doing on a post-normal problem, it is always going to be incomplete, and it is always going to be subject to revision, and highly uncertain. It can be viewed from numerous scientific perspectives. So multiple scientific studies can come up with multiple results, so it leads to a profusion of truths that can be mobilized on behalf of different sets of values. Values and facts can pair up with each other in different ways.

One example I love is how everyone talks about how there’s a consensus on GMOs. Well there is consensus around a narrow part of the GMO issue, like there is a consensus around a narrow part of climate change. But the real problems have to do with the ‚what could be done?‘ questions. So for GMOs for example, when people say there is a consensus, what they mean is ‚we know they’re not a health risk‘. So I’ll accept it on health risk, I don’t have a problem with it. But then you say, ‚and we know that they’ll be an essential part of the economic future of Africa‘. Well, maybe that’s true — whose model are you using? What kind of data have you used to generate that? What are your assumptions? I mean anything dealing with projections of the future and claims about how the world is going to look, in a multi-variate, open system, are going to be subject to different people coming up with different claims and conclusions. And that’s exactly what happens.

And when you bring science into the political debate, you have to pick and choose which science you want to use. You have to match that with particular priorities about what policy problems you want to solve. I think science is really important, I think we want to be factual, I think we want to have a grip on reality and I think science can help us do that. But for problems where there are so many paths forward, so many competing values, the systems themselves are so complicated, I don’t think science is a privileged part of the solution.

…The post-normal science idea really does challenge the notion of science as a unitary thing that tells us what to do, PNS really says that we have to think of science in a different way in these contested contexts, and I don’t think most scientists want to go there. The deficit model puts them in charge: “we communicate the facts, you listen and take action.” So if the problem isn’t solved it’s not science’s problem. This is a self-serving superstition that the scientific community generally holds. And superstitions are hard to destabilize.

Over on Twitter, I’ve been having arguments with people about the proposed cut at the EPA, in which the budget for “protecting the climate,” is reduced to “only” $29M.

What in the hell does “protecting the climate” even mean?

Business, Economics, Space, Technology and Society

Blue Moon

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The private sector continues to seize the initiative in space:

Blue Origin could perform the first lunar mission as early as July 2020, Bezos wrote, but stressed that it could “only be done in partnership with NASA. Our liquid hydrogen expertise and experience with precision vertical landing offer the fastest path to a lunar lander mission. I’m excited about this and am ready to invest my own money alongside NASA to make it happen.”

Last year, Blue Origin successfully launched and landed its suborbital rocket, the New Shepard, five times within less than a year, flying just past the 62-mile edge of space and then landing vertically on a landing pad at the company’s West Texas facility.

That same technology could be used to land the Blue Moon vehicle on the lunar surface, the company said. Its white paper shows what looks like a modified New Shepard rocket, standing on the moon with an American flag, a NASA logo and Blue Origin’s feather symbol.

The company said it plans to land its Blue Moon lunar lander at Shackleton Crater on the moon’s south pole. The site has nearly continuous sunlight to provide power through the spacecraft’s solar arrays. The company also chose to land there because of the “water ice in the perpetual shadow of the crater’s deep crevices.”

Water is vital not just for human survival, but also because hydrogen and oxygen in water could be transformed into rocket fuel. The moon, then, is seen as a massive gas station in space.

If this happens, SLS/Orion are dead programs walking. This is the 21st century I’ve been waiting for. We’re finally putting a stake through the heart of the Apollo Cargo Cult.

Note (as usual with such pieces in such venues) the stupidity and ignorance of the comments.

[Update a few minutes later]

Eric Berger thinks this is a big deal. So do I. I think that people are going to be very surprised at how quickly things start happening. And I suspect that 2017 will be viewed as a very important year in space history.

[Update late morning]

Miri Kramer thinks it’s “unhinged sounding.” I think that applies better to NASA sending crew to the moon on the very first flight of SLS. Even in Apollo they had test flights of the launch system.

[Update early afternoon]

Let the space tycoons lead the way. I think the transcontinental railroad analogy is very apt. NASA’s (and the National Research Council’s) “vision,” such as it is, is indeed paltry, as I wrote last year.

Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society, War Commentary

Reforming Milspace

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Coyote Smith is recently retired from the Air Force, and is apparently free to be much less circumspect about his thoughts on the Air Force:

It is easy to understand why the advancement of American space power has stalled under the Air Force. For very reasonable organizational and bureaucratic reasons, space power simply cannot receive the priority it deserves inside the Air Force.

Everything else will be sacrificed for the air power mission. As a matter of culture, this is the right thing to do. Carl Builder, a RAND analyst working a project for the Air Force Chief of Staff, pointed out in the The Icarus Syndrome that space power is a competing faction that air power advocates must hold at bay. The lesson being, no matter how vital space power becomes to the nation, if it is assigned to the Air Force, or any other service or agency, it will always receive short shrift.

It’s not a new problem. We were talking about it in the eighties. But we may finally be approaching a time in which we can finally fix it. I’ll be on a panel in DC on Monday with Coyote to talk about the U. S. Space Guard.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Sort of related: The coming warbot revolution.

Education, General Science, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Bill Nye On Tucker Carlson

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Bill Nye the Pseudo-Psychology Guy was amazing to behold last night.

Scott Adams has a good take on it:

Tucker then asked Nye a simple question about climate science. He asked how much of the warming is caused by human activity. Nye’s entire ego depended on knowing whether human activity is contributing to climate change in a big way, a medium way, or a small way. Tucker wanted some details. How much difference do humans make? After all, Nye had said this was settled science. Tucker just wanted to know what that settled science said.

Nye didn’t know. And by not knowing that simple answer about the percentage of human contribution to warming – the only issue that really mattered to the topic – he proved in public that his opinions on science are not based on facts or knowledge. Nye tried and tried to dodge the question, but Tucker was relentless. That was the trigger. Nye could plainly see, thanks to Tucker’s simple question, that his belief in science was just a belief, because he didn’t actually know the science. When your self-image and ego get annihilated on live television, you can’t simply admit you have been ridiculous all along. Your brain can’t let you do that to yourself. So instead, it concocts weird hallucinations to force-glue your observations into some sort of semi-coherent movie in which you are not totally and thoroughly wrong. That semi-coherent movie will look like a form of insanity to observers.

Look for Nye to go totally mental in the last minute of the clip, changing the topic to political leaks for no apparent reason. That’s your tell. His brain just sort of broke right in front of you.

If I’d been debating him, when he started ranting about being able to grow grapes in England, I’d have asked, “Bill, have you ever heard of Hadrian’s wall? Because the Romans were growing grapes that far north 2000 years ago. Do you know why Greenland was called that, and why North America was called “Vinland” by the Vikings? Are you blaming their SUVs?”

[Wednesday-afternoon update]

Nine reasons you shouldn’t listen to Bill Nye about science. Or anything else. And only nine?