Filed under: Carl Sagan, Climate Change, Global Warming, Government, James Burke, NASA, NPR, Predictions, Press, Science Fiction, Society, Writing stuff
NASA Administrator Michael Griffin was interviewed yesterday morning by Steve Inskeep on NPR’s Morning Edition. During that interview the following exchange took place, on the topic of global warming:
(Inskeep): Do you have any doubt that this is a problem that mankind has to wrestle with?
(Griffin): I have no doubt that … a trend of global warming exists. I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with. To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth’s climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn’t change. First of all, I don’t think it’s within the power of human beings to assure that the climate does not change, as millions of years of history have shown. And second of all, I guess I would ask which human beings — where and when — are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that’s a rather arrogant position for people to take.
This morning’s program had a follow-up segment about how this conflicts with the general consensus in the scientific community, and other reports in the media point out that it is at odds with NASA’s own scientists. Even President Bush just came out with a plan to address climate change concerns in advance of a big global warming symposium being held in Germany next week.
The callousness of Griffin’s remarks is what has most people upset, I think. Because under most scenarios studied, significant global warming is going to lead to the death of millions of people. James Burke did a good series on how this will likely play out called After the Warming, and then of course there’s Al Gore’s book and movie An Inconvenient Truth. To have the NASA chief say that it would be arrogant of us to presume that this is “the best climate for all other human beings” seems assinine, at best.
I believe in global warming. I believe that it is likely a huge problem facing us. For the world of Communion of Dreams, set about 50 years hence, I had to deal with what I expect will be the reality of global warming. Since I wanted to deal with other issues, I decided that I needed a way to explain why the effects of global warming hadn’t yet created additional huge problems for humankind. My initial choice was to have an asteroid impact kick up a lot of dust into the stratosphere, and thereby slightly alter the albedo of Earth. When that additional disaster seemed to be too much for my initial readers, I changed it to having a man-made source: limited nuclear exchanges in Asia, creating a mild “nuclear winter” effect. Given that this term was partly a product of Carl Sagan’s scientific research, it seemed a fitting solution. (As I’ve mentioned previously, Sagan was part of my inspiration for Communion.)
Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see whether Griffin survives this little climate change in his job situation, created by his own hot air.
Jim Downey
Filed under: BoingBoing, Buzz Aldrin, Cory Doctorow, General Musings, Heinlein, movies, NASA, Science Fiction, Space, Uncategorized
Via BoingBoing, info about a Heinlein Centennial celebration to be held in my neck of the woods 7/7/07:
July 7, 2007 – 07/07/07! – will be the birth centennial of American author, futurist, philosopher and spaceflight advocate Robert A. Heinlein. The science fiction Grandmaster’s Centennial year will be marked with a grand event on the weekend of July 6, 7 and 8 in his home town of Kansas City, Missouri.
The clock is ticking down, and only weeks remain before this exceptional event. The time is now now NOW! to make your plans to join us for this huge, once in a lifetime gathering, remembrance and birthday celebration. Whether you’re a science fiction fan, a student of Heinlein’s work and legacy or involved with the growing world of commercial spaceflight… This is where you’ll want to be that weekend. Don’t miss out!
Hmm…KC is only about 2 hours away from me…may need to see what’s going on that weekend…could be a chance to do a little networking, meet some people (the list of participants includes quite a number of interesting people, from Buzz Aldrin to moviemakers to SF luminaries…)
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Io, Jupiter, movies, NASA, New Horizons, Science Fiction, Space, Writing stuff
…get around to writing anything within the Communion ‘universe’ which occurs in the vicinity of Jupiter, I am definitely going to have to reference this amazing volcano captured in eruption by the New Horizons spacecraft earlier this year. What a wonderful series of images, played out as a little animation!
Jim Downey
Filed under: Apollo program, General Musings, NASA, Press, Space, Walter Shirra, Writing stuff
I don’t remember much of my childhood. The sudden deaths of my parents, just 18 months apart when I was on the verge of adolescence, was such a shock that most of my childhood was just lost to me.
But I remember the space race. I remember watching the early manned launches. And I remember Walter Shirra, admittedly more for his time working with Walter Cronkite commenting on the news during launches late in the 60s than as an astronaut himself.
Rest in Peace, Mr. Shirra. And thank you for your bravery and intelligence.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Carl Sagan, Cassini, General Musings, movies, NASA, Predictions, Saturn, Science Fiction, Space, tech, Titan, Writing stuff
NASA has put up a nice little movie showing the rings of Saturn as seen by the Cassini spacecraft as it transitions through the plane of those rings – fascinating stuff. Of course, you can also see a lot of images taken during the Cassini mission at the CICLOPS site, including many different images of Titan – images which conform to my suppositions about the surface of that moon in Communion of Dreams.
That’s hardly just luck, of course. I tried to base my depiction of the moon in keeping with the best known science at the time of writing, and during revisions updating to reflect new data once the Cassini mission arrived at Saturn. As I have mentioned previously, Carl Sagan’s work was of particular value to me in formulating not just the environment of Titan, but in also how weather works there.
Emphasis on keeping everything as accurate and in accord with known science was important to me in writing Communion, so far as I was able. I even made extensive use of a precursor to this JPL site in calculating distance (as reflected in the amount of time it takes radio signals to travel) for the actual dates mentioned in the book. It’s kind of fun – you just plug in your date, select your two points in the solar system, and the site will not only give you distance in km/miles but also show you what you would see from a specified vantage point if you were looking through a telescope. I no longer remember whether the earlier site gave me actual light-minutes distances (which would also be how long radio waves would take to transit), or if I did the calculations myself. Either way, the numbers cited in the book are accurate.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Apollo program, BoingBoing, Buzz Aldrin, General Musings, Government, NASA, Neil Armstrong, Science Fiction, Space, tech, Writing stuff
It’d be fun to include this little gem into any future revision of Communion. From an article in Aviation Week:
Space History Buffs Try to Save Sat Dish
A chance reading of a “for sale” advertisement in a weekly newspaper has launched a group of 30 space history buffs on a mission to save the 30-meter Jamesburg AT&T/Comsat satellite dish about an hour from Monterey, Calif.
The dish was built in 1968 to support the Apollo 11 moon landing a year later. Besides its commercial duties, it also played a role in capturing and distributing images of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, says Pat Barthelow, an avionics technician from Sacramento who first noticed the ad in the Carmel (Calif.) Pine Cone and quickly put out the word.The weekend restorers worked over the past four months to get the dish running. The 10-story high dish is housed in a 20,000 square foot building, both of which are in excellent shape, Barthelow said.
[Mild spoiler] This would make for a perfect reference about ‘industrial archeology’ for Arthur Bailey to make at any of several junctures in the book. I love the notion that people are now starting to realize that the NASA era contains valuable historical artifacts that are outside our usual scope of consideration. Sure, someday there will be a dome covering the site of the Apollo 11 landing, where Niel Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked. But places like the Jamesburg Earth Station are just as valuable from the perspective of understanding the tech behind our first ventures into space.
(Via BoingBoing.)
Jim Downey
Filed under: Buzz Aldrin, General Musings, movies, NASA, Predictions, Science Fiction, Space, tech
I recently came across this old (going on 5 years now) vid of Buzz Aldrin popping Bart Sibrel (a proponent of theory that the lunar landings were a hoax) in the mouth when the guy confronts him:
I grew up with the “Space Race”, and it helped to shape a lot of my attitudes and thoughts about not just science fiction, but about life. The men (unfortunately, the mindset of the time meant that astronauts were all men) who were in that program accepted that it was a very risky thing to want to go into space, but thought that the risks were worth it. Sure, NASA was working to limit the dangers, but it was just a given that the dangers would always be there.
That was a different era. From my perspective now, it was not unlike adolescence, when you *think* you can understand the risks you’re taking in doing stupid and dangerous things, but you don’t really – your brain hasn’t matured sufficiently, and you don’t have enough experience to know just how crazy you’re being. But when you have a couple of close calls – or lose some friends and loved ones – your perspective changes, and you want to take a safer path. We call it maturity in an individual, and prudence in the space program.
But I fear that it has become just timidness, and is the reason why we haven’t continued to build on our early successes (and failures) in our efforts to explore our solar system.
There is a natural, and understandable, reaction to facing death and injury (of every sort, from physical to emotional to financial): you seek safety. You try and arrange your life to be less dangerous, to be more predictable. Or at least that’s how most people react. And really, it is not a bad thing, for a person or for a society, to take that course.
But sometimes it works out that an individual, or a society, will have an incentive to continue the risk-taking. In the ‘history’ of Communion, I have the real exploitation of space being spurred by disaster – initially, it is by the Israeli effort to establish a viable sanctuary on the Moon using conventional heavy-lift rockets after a devastating nuclear exchange. This is undertaken even in the face of huge risks (the tech is only where we’re at now – meaning that rockets, with crew and passengers, are lost perhaps 5-10% of the time), because it is felt that these risks outweigh those of staying on Earth.
Humans are complex. We don’t always respond to stimuli in ways which are predictable by a simple formula. Sometimes, the calculation of risk goes all wonky. Sometimes we factor in so many variables that we ourselves don’t even understand our decisions. And sometimes, we just plain make mistakes. As a fiction author, I love that – it gives plenty of latitude in plotting and character.
Buzz Aldrin would probably say in retrospect that the risks he took to go to the Moon were well worth it, that he and the other astronauts knew well the dangers they faced, and that they didn’t change when confronted with death and loss. Rather, they did what they could to correct the problems that they encountered, adjusted and went on…knowing that there were many other risks still facing them.
That he didn’t allow those adjustments to make him timid is clear in his reaction to Sibrel. Sure, there are other ways of dealing with an idiot who is harrassing you, particularly when you’re a 72 year-old man. Some of them are arguably better ways. But it gives me a certain smile every time I think about that incident to know that “The Right Stuff” hasn’t completely disappeared.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Feedback, General Musings, NASA, Predictions, Press, Science Fiction, Space, tech, Writing stuff
On this morning’s Marketplace, Robert Reich had a good commentary about the problem with near-Earth asteroids and the NASA effort to identify and track these potential threats. Being an economist, he took the position that for the cost of one week’s expeditures in Iraq, we could fund this program completely through 2020, and then start thinking about what technologies we might need to deal with such a problem asteroid.
All well and good. But what does it have to do with Communion?
My previous versions of the book contained another bit of ‘history’ in addition to the “Fire-flu”: that an asteroid of about 300 meters diameter had hit in central China in the mid 2020’s. This I used for an explanation for several things in the world that I create: an offset to the effects of global warming; an explanation for what happened to the rise of China as an economic power in coming decades; and as a motivation for humankind’s rapid development of the necessary technologies to get into space in a big way.
I don’t see the matter as at all unlikely, and if you look at the information provided by the scientists involved in the search to identify these near-Earth asteroids, you quickly come to the conclusion that we’re rolling the dice each year to see whether or not we’re gonna get hit.
But this seemed to be the thing that tripped up most of my early readers. The prospect of both a pandemic flu and a meteor strike was just too much – even though the two things are in no way related, and we’re ‘overdue’ for both. I’m not sure whether this was just asking people to suspend their disbelief a bit too much, or whether it was just a little too frightening a prospect, but it was clear that however well it worked to create the “world” of Communion, it had to go.
So I dropped back, thought through the potential ramifications of a pandemic flu, and figured that I could more or less accomplish the same things with saying that the world collapse which followed the Fire-flu leads to some small-scale nuclear wars. In the great scheme of things, I see this as probably just as likely a scenario, I suppose. But it is somehow less satisfying an explanation for me. Ah well.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 