Potpourri CLIX

Between the day job and the conference, my mind's been all over the place, so if you don't think my links and reads and thoughts don't quite all fit together, you're probably right.

IMF is one of our biggest beggars. If they're asking for a different currency, you know something is awry.
From Tracy:

• John Irving, business inspiration? Yep.
• An online, collaborative writing tool. Looks interesting, but most writers will tell you that writing with other people is a pain in the neck. It's much easier to just put down what you want to say. Any group document is inherently a compromise or series of compromises, not all of them good.

From Lin: an article about the challenges of interstellar travel. As I put it to Lin:

I'd say he hits the problems of interstellar flight dead on. Star Trek notwithstanding, we have no way to travel faster than light. The author actually understates the case. According to relativity theory, as objects accelerate closer to the speed of light, c, their mass becomes nearly infinite due to dynamics that elude me. Pick up Arthur C. Clarke's "The Songs of Distant Earth" for a realistic portrayal of the interstellar travel engineering problem. (The realism of his characterization or sociology are another matter.) We are, I'm afraid, a long way from warp drive. It would be nice to have something, though.

From my space/libertarian friend Berin, a statement about "Do Not Track" legislation:

WASHINGTON D.C. — The following statement can be attributed to Berin Szoka, President of TechFreedom, regarding legislation introduced today by Rep. Jackie Speier that would require the Federal Trade Commission to establish standards for a “Do Not Track” mechanism and require online data collectors to obey consumer opt-outs through such a tool:


Implementing “Do Not Track” without killing advertising won’t be easy. Just as consumers need to be empowered to make effective privacy choices, so too must publishers of ad-supported websites be able to make explicit today’s implicit quid pro quo: Users who opt-out of tracking might have to see more ads, pay for content and so on.

Government cannot design a “marketplace for privacy” from the top down, nor predict the costs of forcing an explicit quid pro quo. It would be sadly ironic if the same FTC that has agonized so much about the future of journalism wound up killing advertising, the golden goose that has sustained free media in this country for centuries.

The market is evolving quickly here, with two very different “Do Not Track” tools debuting in Internet Explorer and Firefox just this week. Ultimately, it is the Internet's existing standards-setting bodies, not Congress or the FTC, that have the expertise to resolve such differences and make a “Do Not Track” mechanism work for both consumers and publishers, as well as advertisers and ad networks.

Other stuff from Lin:

• It's been awhile since I've seen one of these, but it bears repeating: thank our military.
• An intriguing article on the interworkings of science and big universities. The article asks a good question: the universities need science, but does effective scientific research NEED to be performed in a university environment? Before the 20th century, most research was privately funded--think Thomas Edison or Bell Laboratories.
• An editorial on "who fed the tiger" (China). Uh, that'd be us. Or rather, corporate America and their political allies in the White House (Bush I and Clinton). We were told through the '80s and '90s that free trade with the West would moderate Communist China and make them more like us. What happened instead is that it made the Chinese government richer, not more moderate, and while we were selling them the rope with which to hang ourselves, they got a bunch of manufacturing jobs--and technologies--exported to them from the U.S. of A.
• The Navy now has its own carrier-based drone. I wonder if the human pilots pick on the radio-control jockeys for missing that first arresting wire.
• I really liked this one: an obituary for Roger Milliken, a businessman of the old stripe--the kind we're told doesn't exist anymore, so we must depend on government to "take care of the workers." Mr. Milliken's bio will show that such is not always the case.
• An analysis of the Obama Administration's National Security Space Policy. To be fair, I haven't finished reading the Policy yet (it's sitting on top of the pile at work), so I can't comment on the author's arguments. However, I did promise Lin some more thoughts on war in space. Short version: space war would devastate all nations' access to space. Orbital debris of all sizes can whack useful payloads at speeds of up to 20 km/seconds. Without access to space, even basic services like weather or communication satellites would be lost, and we'd be back to 1950s-era tech in some areas.
• Reviewing the state of the world via statistics.

From Kate Down Under: the latest roundtable newsletter on the Battle of Midway.

From a friend who will remain nameless for his own protection, but his attached commentary was too snarky not to share: "Another cleverly disguised study supposedly aimed at helping men but secretly proving women are nuts."
 
And I think I'll end there. At a conservative estimate, I'm processing well over 100 ISDC-related emails a day. N-U-T-S, but making serious progress. Should be a cool conference!

The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man, Part II

Having digested that gobbledyguck, I will now attempt to respond to the late Ms. Arendt's rather lengthy comments. The original question was, more or less, "What has the conquering of space done to the stature of man?"

I think it is unquestionable that the exploration of space (conquering is a bit presumptuous at this stage) has improved humanity's stature as a whole. In addition to developing technologies that have taken our machines and ourselves to an entirely new and hostile environment, we have broadened the scope of human activity as well as our understanding of the universe. Furthermore, the machines, materials, organizational techniques, and knowledge gained from space exploration have been used to improve life here on Earth. All of those are positive goods.

However, the legacy of our exploration has been mixed, as it is with nearly any human activity. The glorious image of our home planet seen above the moon from Apollo 8 was both an inspiring image of beauty as well as an inspiration to the environmental movement, which has had many positive impacts upon the way we interact with our world.

However, extremists in this movement have stopped new technologies that might have led to additional advances or even activities that might have improved the environment further. Many people are convinced that we have only "one world" with limited resources, which is true, to a point. But this ignores the resources of the solar system we have only too briefly explored. We need both energy and materials to maintain our economic and cultural way of life; those resources are abundant in space, and yet space has been short-sightedly ignored and neglected since 1972. Some have said that we need to stop exploring space until we make life perfect here on Earth, an unlikely event in any number of human lifetimes. Indeed, the retreat from space has diminished humanity's stature, from a philosophical point of view.

Another viewpoint--not related to space, but affecting its future--states that "We shouldn't explore or settle other planets because we have already fouled up this one, and we shouldn't spread our nastiness throughout the solar system." This could be based in environmentalism ("We've polluted the Earth!") or traditional religion ("We're fallen creatures and cannot be trusted to make good just because we change locations"). It might also be true, as suggested by historian Jacques Barzun that Western Civilization truly lost its confidence and soul in the First World War. Whatever the origins of this line of thinking, the end results are a lack of belief in either man or his works. This, too, represents a philosophical retreat from human betterment, which certainly cannot be good for us as a people.

So the question becomes, 40 years after Arendt's essay, not what is the impact of space, but what human beings have done with themselves since they started exploring space? It's one thing to go boldly where no one has gone before and then live up to it. It's another to go boldly, take a few rocks and pictures, and then go back home. Arendt wondered what humanity would do with its new powers in space; I doubt she gave serious thought to the idea that we would go into space and stop. She might have responded with dismay: "How shameful, how cowardly."

Exploring space was a true leap into newness. As a government activity, the race to the Moon was truly a liberal adventure. Eisenhower and his presumed disciple Nixon were content to develop aerospace planes on a slow, steady track. Ballistic missile-powered spacecraft were distractions, government action was unnecessary. The NACA model of space development (government does the R&D, the private sector develops it) was just fine, thank you. So if the progressive, future-embracing liberal Democratic party turned its back on space, what then is the public to expect of the conservatives? Certainly not a gargantuan space program on the NASA model.

I must return once more to the failure of vision when it comes to the reasons people give for no longer exploring space:

1. We must make life perfect here, which has a subset assumption, i.e., the money spent on space could and should be used for more worthy problems here on Earth.
2. We've screwed up life here; we shouldn't pollute the rest of the universe.

Item 1 is a retreat from greatness and achievement. Perhaps the loss of faith in government (thanks to Vietnam and Watergate) caused progressives to give up on the idea that America could do good in the world. Or perhaps they just changed their priorities on what they meant by "doing good." But needless to say, the John F. Kennedy vision of "bearing any burden" in the pursuit of liberty--including the exploration of space--no longer holds sway.

Item 2 is self-indulgent nihilism: humanity is the ultimate evil. We've destroyed the planet; we'll destroy anything else we touch. We're scum. We'd all be better off if we were zapped by an asteroid and replaced with the cockroaches. The only way to expiate our sins of militarism, racism, sexism, capitalism, pollution, etc. is to withdraw from space, apologize to all our victims, and commit cultural suicide. What utter bilge.

The only way for cultural mores to survive is for enough people to believe in them. We've now got a second generation (or so) being raised not to believe in the West's values of personal betterment, capitalism, and scientific progress. A frightening number of young people don't even believe we went to the Moon in the first place (one astronaut's great retort to this: "Then why did we fake it six times?"). We have junk science and conspiracy theories in the place of science and engineering. Were I better educated, I might have had a better shot at understanding Hannah Arendt's essay in the first place. The stature of man has fallen since Apollo 11: philosophically, technically, and morally. Space exploration serves to uplift us and inspire the best in us. Turning our back upon it has only been to our detriment.

The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man

The New Atlantis reprinted a 1963 philosophical treatise by Hannah Arendt entitled “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man” and then asked several contemporary authors to respond. Not being a 1960s intellectual, I must confess that a lot Arendt’s points soared over my head, either as a result of not being a professional philosopher, her abstruse language, or both. However, I will do my best to interpret what she wrote and then write my reactions to that understanding. (I once got a “B” in a grad school class for doing this—note to aspiring grad students: your professor’s interpretation of the difficult philosopher is what’s important, not yours.)

One of the first places Arendt leads the reader into airy territory is with this statement:

“The goal of modern science, which eventually and quite literally has led us to the moon, is no longer ‘to augment and order’ human experiences...it is much rather to discover what lies behind natural phenomena as they reveal themselves to the senses and the mind of man.”

This is one of Arendt’s primary concerns in the piece: she sees space exploration (which is, one must state, an engineering not a scientific feat) as the ultimate expression of abstraction in materialistic science. Arendt goes into great detail to describe the linguistic gap between the educated scientist and the non-educated laymen, stating that if scientists are not careful, they could create a totalitarian state by default, as the supremely important decisions before the laymen are no longer comprehensible to them.

This is actually more of a legitimate concern today than it was in the 1960s, when America had healthy schools and the majority of the world’s scientific elite. Now, we see report after report about the deplorable state of our schools, and their ability to teach scientific, technical, engineering, and mathematical (STEM) skills; and in the midst of this rising technical ignorance, we have scientists and advocates pushing hard for global warming remedies that more than half the public doesn’t have the ability to evaluate, except on the basis of political or emotional inclination.

The next item that caught my attention was this:

“[M]odern science…has changed and reconstructed the world we live in so radically that it could be argued that the layman and the humanist, still trusting their common sense and communicating in everyday language, are out of touch with reality; that they understand only what appears but not what is behind appearances.”

This takes me back to The Two Cultures, which I must move to the front of my reading/buying list, given my desire to translate between the technical and “real” worlds.” C.P. Snow suggests this very disconnect (which is not very far from the disconnect I’m experiencing with Arendt) is causing the artistic and scientific worlds to speak completely different languages. As a wannabe science fiction writer, I like to think that I can serve as one of those “Third Culture” types who can bridge the gap. But jeez, if philosophical literature is of Arendt’s sort and scientific writing remains what it is, what hope do laymen have of judging between two “upper classes?” This brought to mind The Bell Curve, which spells out some of the problems of educating the brightest students differently from the mainstream. For instance, what do the majority of folks with IQs ≤125 do when they are ruled by super-bright people who cannot even relate to them? Or what do they do when those elites do not even consider the problems/issues of the less gifted worth considering? As much as people hate the messiness of democracy, would they really prefer rule by a privileged, highly intelligent elite?

Another important concern of Arendt’s is the actual loss of stature man (this is pre-PC, so she doesn’t use “humanity”) faces due to scientific discovery:

“Has not each of the advances of science, since the time of Copernicus, almost automatically resulted in a decrease in his stature?”

As I understand her writing, Arendt is saying that science diminishes us as humanistic (feeling, special, emotional, moral) creatures; however, she also states that if we did not depersonalize our investigations, we could not understand the universe as we do. There is definitely truth in this. Rather than thinking, “It rained today because I forgot to propitiate the Sun God,” some human beings started thinking, “Where did that rain come from in the first place? How did it form?” This analytical, philosophical viewpoint—devoid of personalization or deity—was the contribution of Greek thought to the West, and gave birth to modern science, and it continues to pay dividends to this day. Facts proven in the real world by capitalists work just as well for totalitarians, communists, socialists, or fascists.

Technical positivists like Ray Kurzweil, Arthur C. Clarke, or even the late Carl Sagan have worshipped at the godless altar of unceasing Progress. They fail to recognize that the scientific progress they ardently seek was once called “natural philosophy” and was part of an integrated worldview that included ethics, morals, aesthetics, and even theology. I would venture to say that much of humanity’s technological apparatus, while I admire it greatly, is often running amok like a group of Sorcerer’s Apprentices. One important role science fiction has is to provide warnings: “If you do X, you’d better be prepared for Y.”

Here’s a last elephantine sentence, which I’ll quote in full and try to eat one bite at a time:

“All our pride in what we can do will disappear into some kind of mutation of the human race; the whole of technology, seen from this point, in fact no longer appears ‘as the result of a conscious human effort to extend man’s material powers, but rather as a large-scale biological process’.”

This phrase called to mind (again) Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near. Even 45 years ago, Arendt had an inkling that we could and most likely would turn our technology on ourselves, engineering humanity as we’ve engineered much of the rest of our world. This, of course, is not something I anticipate with great enthusiasm, and neither does Arendt. She concludes by stating that if conquering space causes us to become scientific subjects, then our stature is, indeed, diminished.

Whew! Just translating that made my head hurt. I think I’ll take a break before responding more fully.

*

Book Review: Clarke County, Space and Lit Review: Isaac Asimov


I was going to review Clarke County, Space by Allen Steele for NSS, but the trick to those reviews is that the books need to be on Amazon.com so NSS can get a piece of the action. Oh, well. I read, I write: that's what I do. One thing worth noting/reading on Steele's website is his congressional testimony regarding "the coming space age." Nice to see fellow advocates publish successfully.


Clarke County, Space is a crisply paced and short space adventure compared to most of the ones I see on the shelves lately (231 pages). Clarke County (CC in this review) is a Bernal Sphere space station orbiting Earth in a wide elliptical orbit. CC is part farm community, part tourist attraction, with the occupants divided between corporate financiers, hippie-type communalists, hospitality industry types, and tourists.


The story begins with a frame story, from which the author flashes back. This seems to be a common technique in SF (see Red Mars, Mars Underground, Moving Mars, as well as my review of Star Trek: Best Destiny among others), as authors feel the need to show events that lead up to some grim or glorious future. As with most of these frame stories, it could probably be eliminated with a minimum of fuss, as it mostly tells us that at least one character or two is going to live or die. And in the case of Clarke County, I did not feel that the frame story "added value," if I may use a marketing phrase, so I will concentrate on the primary narrative.


Trouble comes to the life of John Bigthorn, sheriff of CC, when the former girlfriend of a mafia don sneaks away from said bad guy and hides herself at the colony. Behind her is the Golem, a hit man. CC is also "invaded" by a reconstituted Church of Elvis while one of the leaders of the local leadership council suddenly declares that CC should declare its independence from Earth and its corporate interests. And lurking in the midst of all this is Blind Boy Grunt, an electronic blogger who sees all, knows all within CC. If this sounds like a lot of loose ends to tie up in 230 pages, it is; Steele manages to tie up most of them neatly by the end of the book.


The lead character, Bigthorn, is a Native American (Navajo), who stoically puts up with stereotypical "Injun" humor while making equally stereotypical remarks about "Anglos." We aren't given much of his background--or anyone else's, for that matter--except to know that he's an impressive, muscular guy, a bit of a hardass, a peyote user, and a gentleman with an impressive set of male equipment. Early in the story, the wife of the commune's leader (and the one who declares independence later) tries to seduce Bigthorn in a rather Heinleinian manner, using language that, if a man used it on a woman, would probably get him rightly kicked in the equipment.


Aside from fending off seduction attempts from one of CC's leading citizens, Bigthorn is informed of the arrival of Macy, the mafia don's girlfriend, by Blind Boy Grunt, who seems to know everything about everybody. He is also informed about the arrival of the Golem, who he quickly shakes down and irritates. Much of the story, then, swirls around Bigthorn, Macy, and the Golem. Macy eventually takes refuge with the Church of Elvis, which is run by Elvis Parker, a con man who got plastic surgery done on his face to look exactly like "the King."


The Church of Elvis subplot actually comes closest to having a space component to it, as they manage to obtain access (via Macy) to a space weapon. Despite Steele's occasional descriptions and discussions of the construction or interior of CC, I didn't get that much of a "space" feel to the story. Tweak a few things here and there, and the story coul have taken place at an offshore resort here on Earth.


Surprisingly, the aspect of the story that would normally get the most attention in a space colony story like this--the declaration of independence--is mostly a subplot. The woman who makes the declaration seems to make it out of the ether. The reader is not given a lot of insight into what's motivating her, why she makes the declaration, or why the colonists should even care. It's brought up, and then dropped except for a "town meeting" later in the story.


On the whole, I liked Clarke County, both for its brevity and its fast-moving plot. The characters are not deep, but easily distinguishable. John Bigthorn's quick banter and Steele's mildly cynical narration recall Heinlein's early style and move the story along with a minimum of fuss. Perhaps this short adventure story suffers from too little of the gosh-wow factor that I've picked on other books for having too much of. Clarke County is so familiar in its environment that it is difficult to remember that it takes place in space. That could have been intentional on Steele's part: he's telling a tale which just happens to take place in the future on an orbiting habitat, but that's no big deal. While some SF stories go too far into hardware/environment worship, Steele has gone almost entirely in the other direction. He is more concerned with people and what they're doing, and that is a factor worth considering: just as we take our cell phones, text messaging, and other electronic toys for granted, so people in the future would just consider space colonies part of the landscape. It's just we primitives in the past who would bother with the gee-whiz.

*

Continuing my review of the SF Giants, I'll next turn my attention to Isaac Asimov, the chemistry professor who might be the most prolific writer of this (or any) age. The official site for this Grand Master, who died in 1992, lists 506 books to his credit, not to mention countless essays, letters, and Deus knows what else. He gives "work ethic" a whole new meaning. Asimov is known as both an important SF writer and science educator, having written books in just about every fiction and nonfiction category in the library.


Born in 1920, Asimov was one of those authors who brought literary and scientific law and order to a science fiction genre that had been dominated by the "pulps" before the arrival of serious technologists like him, Heinlein, and their mentor, John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding Science Fiction. While Heinlein was writing action-oriented adventure stories, Asimov was selling logic puzzles disguised cleverly as stories about robots and of all things, encyclopedia writers.




Asimov's most famous short stories are his robot stories, collected among other places in the book I, Robot, which should not be confused by the Will Smith movie on which it was loosely based. Asimov put a new spin on runaway robot stories, which in the pulp era had often represented Robby the Robot-type monsters terrorizing the populace. Instead, Asimov and Campbell hacked out the "Three Laws of Robotics" as a means of limiting and explaining robotic behavior. They are:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human
   being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders
   would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

A "runaway" robot, then, was an anomaly for Asimov's peaceful, purposely harmless machines. If a failure occurred, it was usually the result of robots acting as best as they could when trying to interpret human beings who had not thoroughly thought through what they were asking. The mystery of the story, then, becomes figuring out what went wrong in what today we would call the "human-machine interface." The lead character for many of these stories is Dr. Susan Calvin, a roboticist with a brilliant mind but utterly cold personality. Her attitude can be neatly summed up by her opinion of robots:

To you, a robot is just a robot. But you haven't worked with them. You don't
know them. They're a cleaner, better breed than we are.

Following the robot stories (and novels), Asimov's most enduring fictional work is a series of short stories and novellas collected into three books as The Foundation Trilogy. Inspired by reading of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon, Asimov (again with guidance from John W. Campbell) set about creating a "Foundation" that would work to reduce the damage done by the collapse of a Galactic Empire. The Foundation is actually "Encyclopedia Foundation Number One," established on the remote planet Terminus to preserve the knowledge of the Empire and to keep them away from the capital world of Trantor, where their pronouncements of galactic doom were feared to cause unrest.

The Foundation's founding member is a "psychohistorian" named Hari Seldon. Seldon uses the science of psychohistory to predict the future--at least on a statistical basis for large groups of people. Seldon sees the Empire, currently at its greatest extent and power, nearing collapse, following which will be a 30,000-year dark age. He gets the Foundation established and purposely moved to the outer edges of the galaxy in the hopes of reducing the dark age from 30,000 years to a mere 1,000.

Not being comfortable in the rough-and-tumble violence of ancient Rome, Asimov instead conjures up stories that are again logic puzzles, this time of the sociological sort. The most important lead character of early stories is Salvor Hardin, Mayor of Terminus, whose motto is typical Asimov: "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." As the Empire collapses, local petty chieftains begin to threaten the Foundation. Hardin, a pragmatic politician with no training in psychohistory, has to guess at its workings to find ways to keep the Foundation safe. What we are treated to over the course of the next several stories, then, are a series of "Seldon Crises," which end up in the Foundation gradually converting itself from a community of scholars to a theocracy to a trading federation, guided as always by the invisible hand of Seldon's calculations, who had anticipated all these crises along the path toward creating a Second Galactic Empire.

The relentless progress of the Foundation is interrupted by the interference of the Mule, a mutant of some sort who can control the minds of his followers, as well as the mythic "Second Foundation," which Seldon had arranged to be placed "at Star's End."

It helps to have know something about Gibbon or at least post-Roman European history to get the full flavor of what Asimov is attempting. The original stories only took readers through about 250 years of galactic history. It was only at the insistence of one of his editors that Asimov returned to the Foundation universe, and then he did something even more ambitious: writing a series of books that tied together the Robot stories, his less-well-known "Galactic Empire" stories, and the Foundation stories. The leaps of logic are ingenious and thus typically Asimov, but I sometimes wonder if it was worth all the effort. The books were written during different periods in Asimov's career, and technologies were often incompatible or even out of date in the intervening years. But such was the nature of Asimov's work ethic and dedication to his craft.

Of all the science fiction writers whose works have had their stories turned into movies, Asimov's have received the fairest, best treatment. Bicentennial Man starring Robin Williams is based on an Asimov novella by the same name that follows the travails of Andrew Martin, a robot obsessed with becoming human. I, Robot, mentioned earlier, is a Will Smith crime story borrowing from several Asimov stories and including an appearance by Dr. Susan Calvin. Both stories manage to convey Asimov's inherent decency, as Bicentennial Man manages a PG rating, while I, Robot has a PG-13 rating that could probably have been scaled back were it not for the addition of modern-era profanity. Again, Asimov's stories are cerebral, exercises for the mind, not the body, and it is no surprise to me that Disney made Bicentennial Man. Director Chris Columbus manages to convey the charm and benign nature of an Asimovian future.

Oddly, the best treatment Asimov has received has been in movies and television shows that were NOT direct translations of his work. The character of Lt. Commander Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation is one of the best Asimovian robots/androids ever to grace the big or small screens. Another series that owes a lot to (i.e. stole a lot from) Asimov is George Lucas's Star Wars saga, starting with its Galactic Empire and continuing with its capital world Coruscant, which bears more than a passing resemblance to the world-city of Trantor, a planet completely covered by metal. In fact, Star Wars can be seen as a retelling of Foundation, which is a retelling of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which is a work of history about actual events following the fall of Rome. That's one way to get your history lessons, I suppose.

If the reader cannot tell, I am very much a fan of Asimov's; though I am not blinded by some of his literary tics. His stories are very "talky." He is, after all, solving puzzles with words, not battling bad guys or describing a lot of alien landscapes. The Foundation stories are best read on their own, as they appeared in Astounding; otherwise the books suffer from repitition. Despite this dialogue-driven storytelling method, Asimov isn't nearly as pedantic or action-oriented as Heinlein, nor does he aspire to the poetry of Clarke. Instead, he provides the clear, charming prose of an entertaining and erudite professor, which (incredibly) was his day job. Asimov was a political liberal, and had a falling-out with Heinlein after the latter's shift to the right. He stood along with Clarke and Carl Sagan in his opposition to the Strategic Defense Initiative. I cannot, in all honesty, recall any harsh word spoken by or about him. His works will be with us for a long time. If you were somehow able to read one Asimov book a day and started today, you would finish sometime around May 5, 2009. Regardless of what you pick up, you are likely to learn. That is the mark of a truly great writer and teacher.