Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier (13 page)

MP
: I hate when that happens!

JG
: It’s so inconvenient!

NDT
: When you’re at war, money flows like rivers. In 1945 physicists basically won the war in the Pacific with the Manhattan Project. Long before the bomb, and continuing through the entire Cold War, America sustained a fully funded particle physics program. Then the Berlin wall comes down in 1989, and within four years the entire budget for the Super Collider gets canceled.

What happens now? Europe says, “We’ll take the mantle.” They start building the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and now we’re standing on our shores and looking across the pond, crying out, “Can we join? Can we help?”

MP
: I remember an interesting exchange from those hearings you’re talking about. One senator who was evaluating the continued expense for the Super Collider said to Steven Weinberg, a physicist testifying before Congress, “Unfortunately, one of the problems is that it’s hard for me to justify this expense to my constituents, because, after all, nobody eats quarks.” And then Weinberg, in his typical fashion, pretended to do a little calculation on the piece of paper in front of him and, as I remember it, said something along the lines of, “Actually, Senator, by my calculation, you just ate a billion billion billion quarks this morning for breakfast.” In any case, the bottom line is that large basic-research projects get funded only if they piggyback on, as you said, the big three.

NDT
: Either they have to piggyback on one of them or come in below the funding threshold for getting scrutinized.

MP
: Somebody may reasonably ask, “Should it be otherwise?” In some sense, the senator brought up a good question: How do I justify this to my constituents?

NDT
: I claim that even if Weinberg had said, “At the end of this, you’ll get great technological spin-offs,” it would still have been canceled. He would have had to say, “At the end of this, you’ll have a weapon that protects the country.” There’s a famous reply, I don’t remember who said it to whom, but it would have played well here. The senator says to the scientist, “What aspects of this project will help in the defense of America?”—there it is, plainly stated: the question of war—and the scientist replies, “Senator, I don’t know how it can help in the defense of America, other than to ensure that America is a country worth defending.”

MP
: And that, as you know, is a great argument that doesn’t fly.

NDT
: Yes, it makes a good headline, but no, it doesn’t garner the funding. Unless we’re going to believe we’re a fundamentally different kind of population and culture than those that have preceded us for the past five thousand years, I’m going to take my cue from the history of major funded projects and say that if we want to go to Mars, we’d better find either an economic driver or a military driver for it. Sometimes I half-joke about this and say, “Let’s get China to leak a memo that says they want to build military bases on Mars. We’d be on Mars in twelve months.”

JG
: Do you think there’s any case to be made for the fact that so many scientific discoveries that end up being incredibly useful and practical were discovered accidentally, in the course of exploratory research or completely unrelated research—that the discoverers got lucky? Can we make that case for space exploration?

NDT
: That’s an excellent question. But no, because the time delay between a serendipitous scientific discovery on the frontier and the fully developed product that has been engineered, designed, and marketed is typically longer than the reelection cycles of those who allocate money. Therefore it does not survive. You can’t get politicians to decide to invest this way, because it’s irrelevant to the needs of their constituencies. So I don’t think we’ll ever go to Mars unless we can find an economic or a military reason for doing so.

By the way, I know how to justify the $100 billion. But my pitch takes longer than what’s called the “elevator conversation” with the member of Congress, where you get only thirty seconds to make your case, and it’s your only chance—go! I need maybe three minutes.

JG
: You could stop the elevator.

MP
: Or, if you wanted to make the point to the general public rather than the congressman, you could say, “Here are good reasons to fund space exploration or basic scientific research in astrophysics. It’s not just my curiosity or my wanting to be paid to do things I like.”

NDT
: In fact, we
are
funding basic research in astrophysics. But my conversation with you is about the manned space program. That’s where the expense comes in. That’s where all your budget options come in above the funding threshold for heavy scrutiny, and you have no choice but to appeal to these great drivers in the history of culture. As far as basic research goes, we’ve got the Hubble telescope; we’re going to have a laboratory on Mars in a few years; we have the spacecraft Cassini in orbit around Saturn right now, observing the planet and its moons and its ring systems. We’ve got another spacecraft on its way to Pluto. We’ve got telescopes being designed and built that will observe more parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Science is getting done. I wish there was more of it, but it’s getting done.

MP
: But not the Large Hadron Collider, which is getting done by the Europeans.

JG
: There’s one other potential case for space travel that we haven’t really talked about. Earlier you alluded to the idea that if we become a spacefaring people, we might need to use the Moon and Mars as a sort of Quik Mart. Do you think we could make the practical case that we need to venture out into space because Earth will at some point become uninhabitable?

NDT
: There are many who make that case. Stephen Hawking is among them; J. Richard Gott at Princeton is another. But if we acquire enough know-how to terraform Mars and ship a billion people there, surely that know-how will include the capacity to fix Earth’s rivers, oceans, and atmosphere, as well as to deflect asteroids. So I don’t think escaping to other planets is necessarily the most expedient solution to protecting life on Earth.

• • •
CHAPTER TWELVE

PATHS TO DISCOVERY
^*

From the Discovery of Places to the Discovery of Ideas

In how many ways does society today differ from that of last year, last century, or last millennium? The list of medical and scientific achievements would convince anybody that we live in special times. It’s easy to notice what is different; the challenge is to see what has remained the same.

Behind all the technology, we’re still human beings, no more or less so than participants in all the rest of recorded history. In particular, some of the basic forces in organized society change slowly, if at all; contemporary humans still exhibit basic behaviors. We climb mountains, wage war, vie for sex, seek entertainment, and long for economic and political power. Complaints about the demise of society and the “youth of today” also tend to be timeless. Consider this pronouncement, inscribed on an Assyrian tablet circa 2800
B.C.
:

Our earth is degenerate these days . . . bribery and corruption abound, children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book, and the end of the world is evidently approaching.

The urge to climb a mountain may not be shared by everyone, but the urge to discover—which might drive some people to climb mountains and others to invent methods of cooking—does seem to be shared, and that tendency has been uniquely responsible for changes in society across the centuries. Discovery is the only enterprise that builds upon itself, persists from generation to generation, and expands human understanding of the universe. This is true whether the boundary of your known world is the other side of the ocean or the other side of the galaxy.

Discovery provokes comparisons between what you already know to exist and what you have just discovered. Successful prior discoveries often help dictate how subsequent discoveries unfold. To find something that has no analog to your own experience constitutes a personal discovery. To find something with no analog to the sum of the world’s known objects, life-forms, practices, and physical processes constitutes a discovery for all of humanity.

The act of discovery can take many forms beyond “look what I’ve found!” Historically, discoverers were people who embarked on long ocean voyages to unknown places. When they reached a destination, they could see, hear, smell, feel, and taste up close what was inaccessible from far away. Such was the Age of Exploration through the sixteenth century. But once the world had been explored and the continents mapped, human discovery began to focus not on voyages but on concepts.

The dawn of the seventeenth century saw the near-simultaneous invention of what are arguably the two most important scientific instruments ever conceived: the microscope and the telescope. (Not that this should be a measure of importance, but among the eighty-eight constellations are star patterns named for each: Microscopium and Telescopium.) The Dutch optician Antoni van Leeuwenhoek subsequently introduced the microscope to the world of biology, while the Italian physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei turned a telescope of his own design to the sky. Jointly, they heralded a new era of technology-aided discovery, whereby the capacities of the human senses could be extended, revealing the natural world in unprecedented, even heretical, ways. Bacteria and other simple organisms whose existence could be revealed only through a microscope yielded knowledge that transcended the prior limits of human experience. The fact that Galileo revealed the Sun to have spots, the planet Jupiter to have satellites, and Earth not to be the center of all celestial motion was enough to unsettle centuries of Aristotelian teachings by the Catholic Church and to put Galileo under house arrest.

Telescopic and microscopic discoveries defied “common sense.” They forever changed the nature of discovery and the paths taken to achieve it; no longer would common sense be accepted as an effective tool of intellectual investigation. Our unaided five senses were shown to be not only insufficient but untrustworthy. To understand the world required trustworthy measurements—which might not agree with one’s preconceptions—derived from experiments conducted with care and precision. The scientific method of hypothesis, unbiased testing, and retesting would rise to significance and continue unabated thenceforth, unavoidably shutting out the ill-equipped layperson from modern research and discovery.

Incentives to Discovery

Travel was the method of choice for most historic explorers because technology had not yet progressed to permit discovery by other means. Apparently it was so important for European explorers to discover something that the places they found were declared “discovered”—and ceremonially planted with flags—even when indigenous peoples were there in great numbers to greet them on the shores.

What drives us to explore? In 1969, the Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin Jr. landed, walked, and frolicked on the Moon. It was the first time in history that humans had landed on the surface of another planet. Being Westerners as well as discoverers, we immediately fell back to our old imperialist ways—the astronaut-emissaries planted a flag—but this time no natives showed up to greet us. And the flag needed to have a stick inserted along its upper edge to simulate the effects of a supportive, photo-friendly breeze on that barren, airless world.

The lunar missions are generally considered to be humanity’s greatest technological achievement. But I would propose a couple of modifications to our first words and deeds on the Moon. Upon stepping onto the lunar surface, Neil Armstrong said, “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind” and then proceeded to plant the American flag in lunar soil. If indeed his giant leap was for “mankind,” perhaps the flag should have been that of the United Nations. If he had been politically honest, he would have referred to “one giant leap for the United States of America.”

The revenue stream that fed America’s era of space-age discovery derived from taxpayers and was motivated by the prospect of military conflict with the Soviet Union. Major funded projects require major motivation. War is a preeminent motivator, and was largely responsible for projects such as the Great Wall of China, the atomic bomb, and the Soviet and American space programs. Indeed, as a result of two world wars within thirty years of each other and the protracted Cold War that followed, scientific and technological discovery in the twentieth century was accelerated in the West.

A close second in incentives for major funded projects is the prospect of high economic return. Among the most notable examples are the voyages of Columbus, whose funding level was a nontrivial fraction of Spain’s gross national product, and the Panama Canal, which made possible in the twentieth century what Columbus had failed to find in the fifteenth—a shorter trading route to the Far East.

When major projects are driven primarily by the sheer quest to discover, they stand the greatest chance of achieving major breakthroughs—that’s what they’re designed to do—but the least chance of being adequately funded. The construction of a superconducting supercollider in the United States—an enormous (and enormously expensive) underground particle accelerator that was to extend human understanding of the fundamental forces of nature and the conditions in the early universe—never got past a big hole in the ground. Perhaps that shouldn’t surprise us. With a price tag of more than $20 billion, its cost was far out of proportion to the expected economic returns from spin-off technologies, and there was no obvious military benefit.

When major funded projects are driven primarily by ego or self-promotion, rarely do the achievements extend beyond architecture per se, as in the Hearst Castle in California, the Taj Mahal in India, and the Palace of Versailles in France. Such lavish monuments to individuals, which have always been a luxury of either a successful or an exploitative society, make unsurpassed tourist attractions but do not reach the level of discovery.

Most individuals cannot afford to build pyramids; a mere handful of us get to be the first on the Moon or the first anywhere. Yet that doesn’t seem to stop the desire to leave one’s mark. Like animals that delineate territory with growls or urine, when flags are unavailable ordinary people leave a carved or painted name instead—no matter how sacred or revered the discovered spot may be. If the Apollo 11 had forgotten to take along the flag, the astronauts just might have chiseled into a nearby boulder “N
EIL &
B
UZZ
WERE HERE
—7/20/69.” In any case, the space program left behind plenty of evidence on each visit: all manner of hardware and other jetsam, from golf balls to automobiles, is scattered on the Moon’s surface as testament to the six Apollo missions. The litter-strewn lunar soil simultaneously represents the proof and the consequences of discovery.

Amateur astronomers, who monitor the sky far more thoroughly than anybody else, are especially good at discovering comets. The prospect of getting something named after oneself is strong motivation: to discover a bright comet means the world will be forced to identify it with your name. Well-known examples include Comet Halley, which needs no introduction; Comet Ikeya-Seki, perhaps the most beautiful comet of the twentieth century, with its long and graceful tail; and Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which plunged into Jupiter’s atmosphere in July 1994, within a few days of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. Although among the most famous celestial bodies of our times, these comets endured neither the planting of flags nor the carving of initials.

If money is the most widely recognized reward for achievement, then the twentieth century was off to a good start. A roll call of the world’s greatest and most influential scientific discoveries can be found among the recipients of the Nobel Prize, endowed in perpetuity by the Swedish chemist Alfred Bernhard Nobel, from wealth accrued through the manufacture of armaments and the invention of dynamite. The impressive size of the prize—currently approaching a million and a half dollars—serves as a carrot for many scientists working in the fields of physics, medicine, and chemistry. The awards began in 1901, five years after Nobel’s death—which is fortunate because scientific discovery was just then attaining a rate commensurate with an annual reward. But if the volume of published research in, say, astrophysics can be used as a barometer, then as much has been discovered in the past fifteen years as in the entire previous history of the field. Perhaps there will come a day when the Nobel science prizes will be awarded monthly.

Discovery and the Extension of Human Senses

If technology extends our muscle and brain power, science extends the power of our senses beyond inborn limits. A primitive way we can do better is to move closer and get a better look; trees can’t walk, but they don’t have eyeballs either. Among humans, the eye is often regarded as an impressive organ. Its capacity to focus near and far, to adjust to a broad range of light levels, and to distinguish colors puts it at the top of most people’s list of desirable features. Yet when we take note of the many bands of light that are invisible to us, we are forced to declare humans to be practically blind—even after walking closer to get a better look. How impressive is our hearing? Bats clearly fly circles around us, given their sensitivity to pitch that exceeds our own by an order of magnitude. And if the human sense of smell were as good as that of dogs, then Fred rather than Fido might be sniffing out the drugs and bombs.