Twenty Years

Having anxiously awaited Cassini's last moments for the previous week, I spent last Friday morning glued to the iPad, eavesdropping on the operations room at JPL where the folks who'd been working on the project monitored its End of Mission. As I watched the room erupt in hugs and tears after Cassini's final signal was called, I marveled at the idea of spending twenty years (as some of them had) working on a project that contributed so significantly to the sum of human knowledge. If you missed the live feed, NASA's flickr page features collection of photos that can provide a hint of the moment's emotional power. 

The combined sadness and joy expressed during the television coverage was both moving and enviable to an old space groupie like me. Ending one month shy of the twentieth anniversary of its launch, the project went out quite literally in a blaze of glory--which we'll never see because there wasn't anyone there to shoot the video. After having accomplished far more than anyone had expected when the Cassini-Huygens mission began, many more years will be required to digest all of the data gathered.

From its inception, the mission that took the probe Huygens to Titan in 2004 and enabled Cassini to continue on for several added missions made possible by a good battery and international cooperation presented us with almost incalculable benefits (partially enumerated on the nifty poster included below). But its ending also reminded me that quite a number of things have changed since the 1997 launch.

It's hard to believe that in those twenty years communications technologies have moved us from dialup computer service to wireless, from bulky mobile telephones to smartphones, and from clunky desktop computers to sleek Macs and ever skinnier, ever more powerful laptops and tablets. It was also in 1997 that I purchased my owlfarmer.com web domain from Network Solutions and developed the first faculty web pages for the use of my students--because The Institution (which had programs in web development, computer graphics, and animation) hadn't yet caught on to the value of online education. But even this cranky old technophobe saw the potential of being able to put instructional materials where they could be easily accessed at any time. And so, "Owldroppings" came into being, and served me well for the remainder of my teaching career. In honor of its twentieth anniversary, in fact, the domain is in the process of being transformed into a more complex version of Owl's Farm, where the Owldroppings materials will be archived and other concerns developed.

As rewarding as my experience with digital enhancements was, the general tenor of higher education had declined so badly by the time I retired that I found myself truly envying the level of accomplishment in evidence at the end of the Cassini mission. How good it must feel to have been a part of such an enormously rewarding experience! The emotions were obviously mixed, but even those members of the team who will themselves soon retire will have all that glory to bask in and all that experience to contribute to yet other endeavors.

So, yeah, I was jealous. But then, one of my former students texted to check up on me, and I invited her and another of those few but significant grads who are both memorable and have kept in touch to come to lunch on Saturday so we could all reconnect. Later, yet another student (who had recently texted to announce her pregnancy) stopped by. We had a lovely afternoon and a romp down Memory Lane (even though not all of those memories were pleasant), and as they were leaving I began to realize that rewarding experiences don't all have to be big, spectacular accomplishments like Cassini.

Seeing these bright, affable, creative young women again, moving toward their own futures (much as my own children have done--taking their own time, but leading rewarding lives), and realizing that I played a small part in how they've turned out, is well worth the effort that went into a teaching career that didn't always seem particularly meaningful.

In the end, my disappointment in not having the proper education to become an astronaut or a rocket scientist can be assuaged by the knowledge that there are some terrific people out there that I would never have met (or children I would never have borne) if I had made it to the space program.

Image credits: One of my favorite of Cassini's gazillion shots of Saturn and its moons (Epimetheus, Rings, and Titan, from April 2006), I pinched this from Wikimedia Commons. Many more can be found through NASA/JPL's pages, including the chart of Cassini's accomplishments (which I originally found in Wikipedia's rather nice article on the mission).

Happy Mars Day!

Work on the house is proceeding apace, but I'm waiting for the exterior to be completely finished before I go back to posting on the restoration.

Meanwhile, my space-groopieness is being rewarded handsomely with today's successful landing of the Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity.  I might have liked it to be called Serenity instead, but Curiosity is more apt, and I'm glad it was a kid who thought it up.

I couldn't manage to stay up last night to hear the breaking news, but the NASA channel provided some information this morning (awkwardly, though, with audio from one end of the conversation and not the other), and as soon as the rover starts broadcasting in earnest, there should be mounds of pictures.

Wikipedia's article (from whence I pinched the opening image) is helpful for the uninitiated, but the faithful will be using the NASA mission website and/or the Jet Propulsion Laboratory pages to keep up. For the young at heart, who might want to play along with Curiosity, I highly recommend installing the Explore Mars software. It explains the mission and will enable us to go along for the ride as Curiosity starts its exploration of Gale Crater.

To celebrate the impending landing last night, we watched the so-so film Red Planet with Val Kilmer and Carrie Anne Moss (not to be confused with the other movie from 2000,  Mission to Mars with Tim Robbins, which was also mediocre and a notch up on the silliness scale).  I hope Robert Heinlein's estate got a bunch of money for the title, since the plot had nothing at all to do with his 1949 novel. This, along with Wilmar Shiras's Children of the Atom (which may have inspired the X-men stories), was one of the first SF novels I ever read--and it hooked me on the genre for a lifetime, even though I probably got the expurgated version of the Heinlein book (the restored edition is available through Amazon).

I'm a real softie when it comes to space operas in general, and nearby-planet stories in particular, but to the less fervent, there's a whole website devoted to Mars Movies, complete with garish web design. Ever since my father first mentioned to me, in 1957, that there would come a time when the sky would be full of satellites and we'd at least get to the moon, I've been hooked.  I follow space missions like a fan girl, and really do hope I'll hang around earth long enough to see folks actually walking around and doing science on Mars.

We're one small step further along the way, thanks to Curiosity, and the crew that got her safely to the Red Planet.  Congratulations to the entire outfit, the support facilities, and especially to the person whose own curiosity got this mission started in the first place.

Image credit:  This color image from NASA's Curiosity rover shows part of the wall of Gale Crater, the location on Mars where the rover landed on Aug. 5, 2012 PDT (Aug. 6, 2012 EDT). This is part of a larger, high-resolution color mosaic made from images obtained by Curiosity's Mast Camera. NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Farewell, Wild Blue Yonder

It's hard for a space junkie like me to look at the sky these days. As I watched the last liftoff of Atlantis last week, I already missed the space program. At the moment, we really don't have anything to replace it, and it's occupied a considerable portion of my adult life.

Ever since, at an Angels game in Anaheim in 1969, I watched the cheesy animated graphics on the scoreboard that mimicked the first moon landing, I've been a devoted fan. I've had a NASA TV gadget on my desktop since I got this computer. The first apps I bought for my iPhone and iPad were NASA and/or space related. The newest app I have for the iPad (after the Star Trek PADD, which is seriously cool if not yet perfect) is a catalogue of exoplanets. I can't get enough of this stuff.

I can remember where I was and what I was doing when the two shuttle disasters took place, and when Columbia broke up over the Dallas area, my son immediately called me from Seattle because he knew I'd be inconsolable. I always regretted the fact that I'd been socialized out of science and maths as a child (girls weren't considered capable of either in my day, and I didn't yet know I could buck the system), because I think I'd probably have tried out for the astronaut corps otherwise.

And now, perhaps only for the time being, it's gone. Unlike many of my fellow citizens, however, I'm not going to rail against the President or anybody else for cancelling the show. Our holy governor is screaming about the jobs lost in Houston, while he hacks away at education and rails against clean air. Space programs cost money, and we don't really have it to spend these days, and nobody seems willing to pay the taxes it would take to keep it going, so that's that.

I will probably send letters shortly to our representatives, asking them to please raise my taxes, but I doubt that anybody else will. It's an empty gesture, I know, but I do realize that a country of damn near 300,000,000 people takes a lot of money to run and we all have to pay a share of that. You can't want to be the Greatest Country in the World if you're not willing to fund the programs that keep people safe, make sure their air is breathable, their water potable, their poor and sick taken care of. And you can't have leaders in science, engineering, or the arts if you aren't willing to build and support a superb education system with teachers paid in accordance with their responsibility to train the children who will one day have to run this country.

I'm glad the ISS is still up there, and I'm grateful to the Russians for maintaining a system to get the astronauts up to it. But I'm going to miss the launches, and the cute group pictures of folks floating around and smiling at the camera, and the glorious shots of spacewalks. And I'm certainly going to miss the boost to kids' imaginations that the space program has fostered over the last forty years.

Live long, prosper, and dream of better days.

Image notes: Taken with the iPhone 4 Camera+ app on one of the last cool mornings with clouds we've seen this summer.

Space Dreams

As faithful and devoted a space-junkie as I am, and as disappointed as I am that human presence in space will be limited to the ISS in the near future, I have to admit that shelving man-on-the-moon programs and costly (both environmentally and fiscally) shuttle launches may be the best thing that's happened to the space program in years.

Many of us who escape being earth-bound only by means of science-fiction enduced flights of fancy have actually hoped that the focus on near-earth orbit ventures would at some point give way to more adventurous and potentially interesting projects, like Mars visits and bigger, better, badder telescopes and data-gathering technologies. Before I die I would really like to know a lot more about what's outside our solar system. Although I don't expect this to happen, I'd also love to be alive when the first explorers set foot on Mars.

The February 8 editorial in the New York Times (a follow-up to the story on February 1 about proposed budget cuts and changes for NASA) lays out the proposed plans beautifully, many of which may turn out to get us where I'd like to see us go.

Although space travel and moon landings have a way of inspiring people, as they did in the sixties, they also tend to bring out international oneupsmanship, as they did in the fifties. What we need now is co-operation, and there's really no reason at all why Russia can't take over the task of ferrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station once it's complete. The European Space Agency and private firms are also perfectly viable sources of potential space exploratory vehicles and technology. We could certainly focus on thinking and planning before we worry too much more about building--especially since the kinds of technologies we'd need to get beyond low-earth orbit involve (at least in part) the same kind of digital wizardry that's brought us millions of Toyota recalls.

The United States has always fused adventure with pragmatism, cloaking visits to the moon in promises of "useful" products (Tang, Teflon). But interest in gimmicks has died down a bit (Tang tasted awful and was full of crap we shouldn't be ingesting; Teflon infuses our food with more crap we shouldn't be ingesting). The successes don't seem to have provided all that much in the way of revolutions in consumer goods. Freeze-dried strawberries (they did get that right) probably aren't a big enough payback for what we're pouring into NASA's budget. In tough economic times, people's imaginations tend to wither. Rather like freeze-dried strawberries.

For nearly three decades I have watched Shuttle launches, monitored NASA's website during missions, mourned lost astronauts, and envied everyone who's gone up. But I've also hated the idea that they had to leave the planet riding huge fossil-fuel filled towers of incendiary chemicals. It's always seemed to me that if we're so smart, we ought to be able to figure out a way to "slip the surly bonds of earth" without mucking up the atmosphere or risking the lives of everyone on board the vehicles being shot into space like ammunition.

Perhaps a respite and an effort to reinvigorate the very idea of space exploration isn't such a bad idea. And it does give me an incentive to stay well, so I'll be around for whatever discoveries come from it all. What I do fear in the hiatus, however, is a lessening of educational focus on astronomy and space, without the wonder of a shuttle launch to remind our children of how seriously cool space exploration really is.

In Robert Charles Wilson's Hugo award-winning novel, Spin, the earth is enveloped in a sort of time blanket, outside of which the universe ages precipitously, and inside of which an artificial sun is the only feature to be seen in the sky. When the "spin" ends, a generation has already grown up that hasn't ever seen the stars. My only real fear about losing the current focus on moon-landings and "local" exploration is that we may be fostering a generation of children with little interest in "outer space." Still, I was ten years old when Sputnik was launched, and have been a staunch fan of the universe ever since. Perhaps a few years won't make all that much difference. To take a look at what's still going on, it wouldn't hurt to visit the NASA Current Missions page. It's actually pretty reassuring.

Image credit: Launch of STS 130, 8 February 2010. NASA gallery.

The Age of Endarkenment

I stole the title of this post from an article by Michael Ventura in the Winter 1989 issue of Whole Earth Review. He focused on the lack of rites of passage among adolescence in the modern world, but I'm beginning to think of "endarkenment" as a pretty good description of the growing anti-intellectual attitude in this country in particular. More recently, Susan Jacoby (following in the footsteps of Richard Hofstadter) has described the problem fairly clearly in her new book, The Age of American Unreason.

Of course, predicting the fall of Western civilization at the hands of the unthinking is nothing new. H. L. Mencken and Jonathan Swift, writing about the "boobocracy" and the "Yahoos" respectively were describing earlier manifestations of the phenomenon (then in its nascence, as it turns out) in the previous two centuries. The problem, it appears, is not at all new, but consequences much more dire than those imagined previously now loom darkly. That's because we had only begun to destroy the environment by then, and our demise only seemed imminent.

The promise of the eighteenth century, of the Age of Enlightenment (particularly in Scotland, where they didn't send a bunch of their intellectuals to the guillotine as they did in France during the "sleep of reason"), was fulfilled in the rise of capitalism (thanks to Adam Smith's description of the process in The Wealth of Nations--which should not be read without also reading The Theory of Moral Sentiments) and the scientific and industrial revolutions. The seeds of everything we're living through today were sowed then. I'm pretty sure the guys talking about this stuff over beers with the fellas in Scottish pubs had no idea what would unfold.

If market capitalism had gone no further than the streets of Edinburgh, where folks kept an eye on one another and the "invisible hand" could actually work, maybe things wouldn't have gotten out of hand. But human beings don't seem to be able to think very far ahead, or imagine consequences very well, and so ideas that seem terrific at the time end up going afoul when we don't exercise the imagination we're also born with.

What bothers me is not so much general ignorance; there is simply so much information flooding the culture these days, that it's not surprising that people can't keep up--let alone spend much time wandering around in the past. The real problem is a fundamental lack of curiosity, the absence of wondering--which is where, according to Plato, philosophy begins. How can one become wise (that is--again according to Plato--arrive at a place where you're aware of what you don't know), unless one wonders enough to formulate questions and seek answers?

I'm writing this as I'm watching shenanigans on the Discovery shuttle (STS 124), where gleeful scientists spent part of yesterday turning somersaults and making videos of their activities in preparation for docking with the International Space Station today (where they're going to install a new lab and fix a toilet). None of this would have been possible without the Enlightenment, of course. But what I worry about is whether or not the Endarkenment will threaten future space exploration, one of my abiding interests as a child of the Sputnik era and sometime writer of science fiction.

Science education is also on the decline in this country, as children become less and less well prepared for the maths involved, and as their attention is drawn increasingly away from intellectual activities toward the seductions of popular culture and its various media. In some ways, science itself is making it more difficult to attract kids to basic learning experiences. A recent post on the Science of Battlestar Gallactica blog noted that kids are so used to seeing the enhanced-color shots from the Hubble Space Telescope that they're disappointed by what they can see in backyard telescopes.

But the real culprits are the activities that take them away from time to think--the multiplicity of extracurricular sports and "lessons" of all kinds that occupy every waking moment that's not taken up by watching television or playing video games. Many of us used to be able to get away from the doldrums of schooling and go home to read, or romp with our friends, or just sit and stare out the window, letting our minds wander. Now, however, children's lives are far more orchestrated, perhaps to keep them away from more sordid temptations, and/or to compensate for lack of genuine family interaction in two-income households. Whatever the reason, imagination seems to be suffering, and science is just another "boring" class they have to take in order to pass a "skills" test.

For what it's worth, I advocate the "Only One Thing" rule. Children can participate in one scheduled activity and that's it. Early on, the parent decides (music lessons were our choice; both kids took piano lessons until they couldn't stand it any more). Then the child gets to choose. My son chose orchestra in high school, and my daughter decided to get a job when she was fifteen. They both participated in "Odyssey of the Mind" events as well, but it involved the whole family, so it fell within the spirit of the Rule, and it only lasted a few weeks per year. The rest of the time was devoted to studying when necessary, and to fooling around whenever possible. Both kids had mediocre high school grades, but went on to creative careers. I will, alas, never attend a Nobel Prize award ceremony, but my kids are smart and happy and brimming with imagination.

All I really want these days is for kids to be able to have the same thing: a life filled with creativity and interest in what's going on around them. The future is theirs, and what I fear today--in the country where the word "intellectual" is a put-down more devastating than "whore" (which I've hear little girls call one another with glee)--is that our generation is stunting their creative development by vilifying actual thinking. When children can watch "educational" television shows that vastly misrepresent evidence and provide spurious interpretations (such as the recent Secrets of the Dead episode on the Minoans), or suggest (uncritically) that "crystal skulls" (which we know are fake) could never have been made by human beings (on the Discovery Channel feature), they grow up thinking that Indiana Jones is a real archaeologist and that stuff he finds is really stored at a secret warehouse and that Roswell isn't just a town in New Mexico.

Until we wake up and realize as a culture that we're putting reason to sleep and creating monsters that our kids are going to have to battle, we're not doing them any favors. We owe them the opportunity to be bored, and to seek avenues of intellectual stimulation that aren't programmed from babyhood. How will they ever understand the natural world if they never see it up close? How will they understand the wonders of advances in scientific technology if they don't look through a basic telescope? How will they ever be able to adjudicate between reason and unreason if they're fed predigested pabulum through a textbook that dumbs ideas down into formulaic "concepts" designed to be spit back on standardized tests?

I admire the mom in New York who gave her kid car fare, phone change, and a map, and sent him out to find his way home. When I was about his age (ten), my parents gave me free rein in a foreign country where I pretty much wandered at will, taking pedicabs to the movies in Taipei, or wandering trails on the mountainside outside the city. I spoke only enough Japanese (I never did learn Chinese) to communicate with the old guys who'd lived through the Japanese occupation, but I knew my address and that's all I needed. I remember being ill-at-ease when my kids were out doing who-knows-what when they were growing up in pre-cellphone America, but I lived through it and so did they.

We do live in dangerous times. But we're probably making them even more dangerous by trying to cocoon our children out of fear, and suffocating them with good intentions. Rather than occupying every second of their time and hovering over them, maybe we could start by throwing away the television set, assigning "media hours" and following the "Only One Thing" rule. If we parents turned out okay, shouldn't we give our kids the opportunity to develop the imagination and the real life skills it's going to take to stave of the forces of Endarkenment?

Image: Francisco de Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.