Draining down Science

We need to step up our efforts in science in this country. We had a wake up call once before, when the Russians launched Sputnik. That panicked Americans because until that time we sat back in fortress America, secure in the certainty that we were ahead and invincible. Spuntik taught us that if the Russians could launch a satellite, they could launch ICBMs and wipe us out.

Our panic spurred the space race, drove a generation of students into science and engineering, put men on the moon, and provided us with the boost to keep us ahead in technology for decades.

We stand at a point similar to that right now. This crisis isn't as clear as Sputnik but its implications are just as dire. The problem is that we are divided in our understanding and perception of this crisis. In fact, have a sizable faction of the country that doesn't think there is a crisis.

The main crisis I'm speaking about, of course, is climate change, but that is just a result. The root crisis is energy and our using up resources while polluting our planet. The tragedy is that not only are we not prepared with enough engineers and scientists, but we aren't trying to increase our pool of qualified people or fund the institutions that train them and produce our basic research.

These are not new thoughts to me, but lately, there are some things that have happened that remind me of the horrible position we are in. I love the Mars exploration rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Last month's decision to scale back the Martian Probe program and idle the probes shows a lack of spirit and squanders a golden opportunity. Here is a program that is being cut because it is succeeding far beyond its initial expectations. The probes can't last forever, shouldn't have lasted for as long as they do, and shouldn't be abandoned just because we are short sighted and don't have the will to see this experiment out to the end.

The mounting crisis I fear the most is the degredation science education in schools. It started coming under deliberate and systematic attack because creationists objected to the teaching of evolution in schools. Elections of School Board officials in Kansas were based solely on the desire to turn back science education 140 years and derail progress in rational thought. When parents teach their children that science is attacking their religion and they shouldn't believe in what science tells them, they are no better than the Taliban or Iranian fundamentalists that sought to cram their people's increasingly free minds back into the box of religion inspired ignorance.

Science has also been under attack by Bush Administration, starting with the muzzling of any government scientist that spoke out about climate change and continuing with the restrictions on funding stem cell research.

Our trade agreements have resulted in a steady drain of manufacturing jobs, requiring less trained engineers in industry than in the past. Our software companies cannot find enough qualified programmers to develop the programs we need to function in society (witness the latest Windows launch of Vista, in addition to many other examples of glitchy, slow, and poor performing systems and software).

A recent Journal of Science podcast had an excellent discussion where the speaker talked about the long term benefits of primary research. He mentioned that some of the most important discoveries were originally just novelties and real breakthroughs took years to become developed, put into widespread use, and eventually become essential to life as we know it. The podcast listed railroads (almost 60 years from discovery to widespread use), computers (40 years), lasers (30 years), and transistors (30 years) as inventions that fit this description.

The mysteries we are probing now, such as the nature of Mars and Saturn, the search for dark matter, and understanding subatomic particals are basic fields of research that need to be explored. No one can predict where these searches will take us. The discoveries we are tapping into now have the promise of fueling industry and solving our problems for many years to come. Now is not the time to scrimp on science, now is the time to redouble our efforts.

Post Script: right after posting this, I heard a Scientific American story about the movie Expelled starring Ben Stein. This is a movie touting the merits of Intelligent Design and talking about how Evolution is flawed, but the scientific community is aggressively working to discredit anyone that opposes it. So my posting is timely, and the story goes beyond my premise to show that there are people actively working to discredit science.

The Forever War

Joe Haldeman wrote a science fiction classic back in the 70s.

It was originally published as installments in the Science Fiction magazine Analog. Later it was published as a book and went on to win many awards and become quite well known.

My father subscribed to Analog, and I still do. I don't know if I read it originally in the magazine or as a book, but I know I used to have a dogeared copy of the book that I read several times. My brothers read it too, and we used to talk about it.

Recently, the author released an "Author's Preferred Version" of the book, as I heard on NPR from Nancy Pearl, author of the "Book Lust" series. Nancy is a librarian and prolific reader and has nice clean concise summaries of books that seldom fail to make me want to read the book.

So I went out and got the new version. It took me a day to read it.

Granted, I was sick (therefore immobile and not distracted) and it was familiar ground, but it was still impressive how smoothly the material flows in. A truly laminar work.

I did not know or realize until hearing Nancy Pearl's review that Joe Haldeman was a Viet Nam vet. He wrote the novel because of his experiences, which taught him that war is stupid and senseless. The chapters he was asked to remove and rewrite from the original version were deemed too depressing. Haldeman had great difficulty getting a publisher because they all feared that the public did not want another war protest book. Good fiction can divorce itself from the original inspiration and outline basic truths in a way that make you see universal rules that underlie our existence. I believe Haldeman achieved that with this book. I found myself throwing his thought template over the current situation, the Iraq War to see if any truisms emerged from it. There are definitely lessons that apply to all three wars, Viet Nam, Iraq, and Haldeman's fictional Forever War.

Beyond the depth of the work, there are also some very compelling and fun elements to it. I use the word fun even though it is somewhat inappropriate, but being a technophile, I love the gagets in this book.

While the stasis field, grenade launchers, missiles, gigawatt lasers, and immense ships with all their fighters and drones are interesting, the apex of his creation is the fighting suit. Part spacesuit and part exoskeleton, the suits tranform soldiers into their own tanks. They could be camoflagued with the flick of a wrist and enabled the soldier to see at any magnification or illumination he needed. They had unlimited food and recycling capabilities, emergency medical features, high tech communications, and finger lasers. Best of all, they had strength amplification circuits, so a person could leap incredibly high or crush things with their hands. Just this week, there was an item in the news about the military working to develop a soldier exoskeleton - possibly inspired by Haldeman's work? The other coolest thing about the story was that soldiers that lost a limb were taken to a hospital planet called Heaven and had their limbs regrown. Stem cell technology of the future.

Overpopulation, birth control, homosexuality, mind control, time dialation, future shock, and the inherent violence of the human species are all woven together in the story.

And it has possibly the most touching love letter I've read in the last chapter. So I would highly recommend this classic to anyone that enjoys a good action story, a good war story, or a good mirror to society and the human condition.

Greenersburg

Sent: Sun, 13 May 2007 11:52 AM
Subject: Remaking Greensburg Green

Laura,

Your article in the paper this morning (Sunday 5-13-07) is excellent.

I would be interested in getting the contact information of Lonnie McCollum and Steve Hewitt, to put them in contact with the people below.

Can you help me out?

I was inspired by the April 27th broadcast of Science Friday, which is available at http://www.sciencefriday.com/pages/2007/Apr/hour1_042707.html, or through iTunes if you prefer to listen via podcast, like me. The description of the green buildings is a nice vision for Greensburg. Can you see people coming from all around the country to learn about how to build a new green city from Greensburg? They would be a green tech mecca. That would fulfill their desire to generate more tourism and interest in their city. There is a company here in Olathe or Overland Park, that specializes in digestion of sewage to capture the methane and generate energy, as well as lessen the nitrogen impact. I'm not sure if it's easy to apply to a whole city. I thought I would talk to him about it on Monday.

Thank you.

Attached Message:
Sent: Sun, 13 May 2007 11:38 AM
Subject: Remaking Greensburg Green

Ira Flatow, Host of Science Friday
Susan Hockfield, President, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Rob Pratt, Senior Vice-President of Henry P. Kendall Foundation
Susanne Rasmussen, Environmental and Transportation Planning - City of Cambridge
John Spengler, Co-Chair, Harvard Green Campus Initiative

Hello,

After listening to the April 27th program of Science Friday, I wanted to contact all of you with a proposition. I believe your efforts and talents at making greener cities and green buildings should be offered to the town of Greensburg Kansas in their efforts at rebuilding their city.

I just read an article in the Sunday May 13th issue of the Kansas City Star about the young City Manager and Mayor of Greensburg and their determination to remake their city into to something better after the recent tornado that wiped the town out. They will need a lot of help and assistance, both financial and in planning and conception. No doubt, funding will be made available from various state and federal sources, as well as private and public insurance policies. You also mentioned on Science Friday that no-interest loans were being made available for some green building initiatives, and perhaps that would also be a way for them to defer the cost of rebuilding.

Why not make the town a showcase for green technology? Before the tornado, they were looking for ways to increase interest and tourism in the town. What better way to become something worth visiting than to become the first city in the U.S. to go completely green? It's perfect, they've got Green right in their name.

Their previous claim to fame is a huge hand dug water well, so securing a sustainable water source has already been in their past. There is a huge wind turbine project about 45 minutes to the west away from Greenville, between Liberal and Dodge City. I can see how more wind power would make the community a net exporter of energy, and what better advertisement for wind energy than a city that is a symbol of the power of wind? Another issue that could be emphasized is sustainable agri- or aqua-culture, as I understand that food miles are a great carbon concern, as well as the recent work that indicates that nitrogen fertilizer byproducts could be an even more deadly source of greenhouse gasses than carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels. How to process the city's waste, could be another project to complete the greening of the new city. If they could harness the methane output to generate heat and electricity, as well as generating a more natural form of fertilizer, they could lessen the emission of methane and the various NOx's that are greenhouse gasses.

Laura Bauer of the Kansas City Star wrote the article about rebuilding Greensburg. I have her number and email. I'm trying to get the Mayor Lonnie McCollum and the City Manager Steve Hewitt contact information from her. Would any of you be interested in trying to see if we can rebuild Greensburg as the first Green City in the U.S.? People love rebuilding and rebirth stories, and if we could wrap it in a green mantle, we may be able to push green technology into the hearts of the average American and really kick start our green revolution.

Sincerely,
etc.

Cooperation Makes Strength

Evolution has rewarded those that can out compete. Capitalism rewards those that can out compete at the expense of others. I have the vague sense that capitalism has some fatal flaws that will eventually drag democracy down the rathole.

I have great admiration for Benjamin Franklin. The guy was always curious, always questioning, and always sharing his knowledge. He's responsible for many of the concepts of cooperative civil society in America. Public Libraries and Fire Stations are just 2 of many things he came up with. He was the most renowned scientist in America in the mid 18th century, due to his work on electricity. He freely published the plans for building protection with lightning rods in order to help the greatest number of people. There's no patent for the lightning rod, Franklin did not profit monetarily from the sale of them. He also came up with the Franklin stove, and was encouraged to patent it. He refused, saying that ideas freely shared can be freely improved upon. He saw patents as a detriment to innovation. After all, how can you own knowledge? It's not as if a Franklin Stove could not have happened without Franklin, someone would have come up with it. Franklin's coin was the ability to see a need, study the concepts involved and come up with a useful idea.

So, am I a communist? Well, to be fair, the world has never seen true communism. It never got a clear and fair chance in its pure form. It was always used as a justification for totalitarianism. So you can't say that communism was tried and failed, it was never tried. I don't think it would work in all the forms it was described. The problem is that people do perform out of the profit motive, and people like to think they are being compensated for their time, efforts, and brilliance. So, the whole "from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs" is also bogus. If you are willfully ignorant or lazy, you should suffer somewhat for it. That's how you pay for your mental and/or physical slothfulness (if that's a word). We do have an obligation to care for those that are in need, if for no other reason than to prevent an atmosphere or spread of misery.

I believe competition has reached a point where it is destructive to society. When investment bankers and lawyers are being produced in more numbers and making more money than engineers and doctors, we are in trouble. The siren song of competition tells us to take what the other person has and become strong at the expense of others. When civilization was primitive, we could see these principles at work as barbarian hordes rode into all the civilized cities and killed everyone and took what they wanted. We put up with this kind of behavior within civilized society when we can dress it up with laws and procedures and make it seem clean and justified. But how is a lawyer suing a doctor for malpractice for a multimillion dollar settlement justified? This is ruining people who stepped forward, sacrificed and worked hard to serve society, and doing it for sport and profit. This is the worst perversion of democracy the legal system has ever come up with. Engineers get it pretty bad, too. Some bonehead either doesn't maintain a piece of equipment or uses it in a manner it was never meant to be used, and of course the engineer should pay to the point of ruin for someone else's mistake. I'm not saying there should never be consequences for medical incompetence or that flawed products should not be recalled or banned. However, companies that are trying to bring you the next wonder drug will never be able to do it at an affordable price if the number one sport of tort attorneys in this country is the class action lawsuit against pharmaceutical firms.

And what about our current energy crisis? I was in high school the last time gas prices skyrocketed. Right when I reached the age of the Teenaged American Dream including the magical driver's license and first car, gas was too expensive to allow for much freedom. America just spent the last 30 years drifting, not preparing for the next crisis. How does this happen? It's in the interests of the huge (enormously profitable) companies that bring you energy and transportation to keep their lock on the consumer. They've fought emissions and fuel efficiency standards for 30 years. This has not served us well. It has not served the auto companies either. Look at how Japan is sprinting past GM with the vigor of a marathoner passing a geriatric with emphysema. What happened to American know-how and ingenuity? What happened to leading the world with technology? Things are the way they are because competition demands that those on top with the money keep things going like they are and prevent any innovation.

America got its first technological boost in the 1700's with the innovation of textile mills. The concepts were simple, use water power and put all of the processes to manufacture cloth under one roof. Raw material in one side of the plant, finished product out the other. England had all the elements of this simple, cost effective, efficient, and highly profitable system in their hands, but were powerless to implement them. They had guilds that were threatened by this new way of doing things and worked to prevent any improvements. Look at England today compared to America. The textile revolution is where we catapulted past in technology and industry. How is what the oil and auto companies are doing to us now any different? If Congress had forced the U.S. Auto Industry to make continuous improvements on fuel efficiency, they would be as competitive if not more by now. They may not have liked it, they may have had to raise prices, but they would have all been in the same boat and would have all been equally hampered in the beginning, and equally healthy and profitable by now.

I believe the world needs to find ways to provide an individual's energy and clean water needs at a grass roots level. We should transform the technology we use to provide these commodities and then sell that technology to the rest of the world. We need to start a revolution and overthrow our corporate overlords. Capitalism has the potential to kill the golden goose if knowledge can be bottled up and either kept away from us or used against us. Information should be a free exchange that generates prosperity for everyone. A healthy a prosperous world, where everyone's energy, food, and water needs are met without taking away from others is a worthy goal. Can you imagine any group of people in the world being disgruntled if all their basic needs are met? Of course, health care and education are pretty basic needs, too, so there are social needs to be met as well to make the picture complete. I believe that terrorism would whither on the vine if it weren't for massive disparities in health, wealth, and opportunity. This is where the real strength of cooperation and the free exchange of knowledge comes in.