Extraterrestrial auditor

Posting may be light for a while. I have pieces in the pipeline in a couple of magazines, and work to do on my book. Meanwhile, here's something I saw on a recent visit to the Queens Museum.

Convenient to think an extraterrestrial auditor would share one's own political convictions. As I've written before, there's a wide range of possibilities as to what they might want to say to us.

More interstellar ideas

Finally got around to watching the latest episode of Cosmos, "The Immortals." Somewhere Fred Hoyle is smiling about panspermia (life being seeded from space) getting a respectful hearing. I was fascinated by the imagery of a future civilization complete with giant starships. Thinking about interstellar travel ideas seems to be heating up, perhaps in time to help the Interstellar movie's box office.

Life in space movies

Recommended reading: "Life in space is impossible," by Dwayne Day at The Space Review. The title refers to a line from the opening of Gravity. The article is about various movies, including the weak Elysium and the much-anticipated (by me) Interstellar. Day has a somewhat downbeat view of how the pro-space movement, as he calls it, is doing, as reflected in the movies, though I'd add that such a movement has always had its challenges, including in the supposedly halcyon 1960s when public opinion did not give much support for the Apollo program.

Carbon taxation for skeptics

Sometimes, an opinion piece is notable not just for its opinion but for the lengths to which the author will go to convince a particular audience of that opinion. Case in point: Irwin Stelzer's "Let's Tax Carbon," in the Weekly Standard. I strongly agree with the basic position (tax carbon and cut taxes on other things), which is one of the issues on which my centrist zig veered from the conservatives' zag in recent years. But I'd part company from Stelzer's rhetoric at moments like this:

Conservatives can maintain their skepticism about global climate change, but that does not mean that a bit of prudential action might not be appropriate should it turn out that carbon emissions are indeed having a negative effect on climate.

Me: Conservative identity has become so beholden to "skepticism about global climate change" that it's apparently now necessary to tell conservatives they can keep that set of beliefs even while trying to convince them to act as if they didn't hold them. If you like your skepticism, you can keep your skepticism. But I'm a pragmatist and not complaining. I hope Stelzer's approach is convincing.

Delhi-Washington prospects

The words in bold below (my emphasis) jump out at me from this piece by Tunku Varadarajan on India's incoming prime minisater, Narendra Modi, and his likely awkward relations with President Obama:

The foreign leader he [Modi] will bond with best is unlikely to be Obama, an American president who has none of the instinctive feel for India, or for the enormous potential of a U.S.-India alliance, that George W. Bush had. The withering of that alliance has been one of the bleak, untold stories of Obama’s period in office, and one senses that India will have to wait for Hillary Clinton to reach the White House before the Delhi-Washington relationship blossoms again.

What's interesting is not just that Varadarajan, a conservative writer, seems to assume or strongly suspect that Hillary Clinton will be the next president, but that among the major Republican prospects there's nobody that would fit easily into the sentence. "One senses that India will have to wait for Rand Paul..."? No way. "One senses that India will have to wait for..." Ted Cruz? Paul Ryan? None of the biggest hitters has distinguished himself on foreign policy. If Bobby Jindal's star had risen higher in recent years, the idea that he might repair relations with India might have been noteworthy, because it's his ancestral homeland if for no other reason. (Or would he be under pressure to show he's not engaged in favoritism on that basis?) Obama foreign policy looks likely to leave a legacy of great mediocrity, but who in the Republican Party is positioned to make a strong case about that?

Potentially interesting movie note: Interstellar

Planned for a November release is a movie called Interstellar, with an all-star cast. (I hope Michael Caine is an alien.) The plot, about which little is known, reportedly involves a wormhole, which may not be the most original device but it's hard to come up with ways to get people to another star system that won't bore an audience. Here's hoping it's good.

UPDATE: "I'm coming back." I like the trailer.

 

Space priority disagreements

I expressed some skepticism about the Asteroid Redirect Mission in my recent Space Review piece (while making a suggestion on how it might be improved). But I think it's fair to say my attitude toward that mission is mild compared to that of Paul Spudis, a lunar scientist whom I interviewed years ago. Spudis also has a pretty clear opinion about the idea of a human flyby of Mars.

Meanwhile, for those who think Mars is all that, here's Lee Billings arguing that the real scientific payoff is on Europa. (What I'm not clear about is whether the Monolith's "attempt no landing there" dictate applied only to human or also robotic missions.)

Climate denial panel

As a follow-up to my recent post on anti-science politics, I highly recommend this excellent analysis by Jonathan Chait: "All Science is Wrong, Concludes Esteemed Fox News Panel." As I've pointed out many times, the conservative movement wasn't always like this, and need not always be like this.

Future solar statement

It's good that solar panels are back on top of the White House. Let's hope a future administration launches a solar array into orbit, beams energy down to an offshore platform and then transmits it wirelessly to Washington.

Platforms, privileges, philistines

A few odds and ends:

-- Some dangers of living in a bubble illustrated. I've warned about this kind of thing.

-- An idea for space solar power, desalination and offshore platforms (some of my favorite topics), which I came across because of a comment at my Space Review piece this week.

-- A critique of Tal Fortgang's critics on "checking your privilege." Seems right to me.

-- Damon Linker accuses Neil deGrasse Tyson of being a philistine; his critique gets pushback (weakened by the misspelling of "Neil"). Having listened to Tyson's comments, I'm with the pushback (especially in that he goes on to discussion of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke; what philistine does that?).

Space economy ideas [updated]

I've got a piece up at The Space Review: "How to energize the space economy." It involves space solar power and space property rights, and related topics.

UPDATE 5/7: A lot of interesting comments at my post, and I got some positive feedback privately from someone experienced in moving stuff around in space. The Space Review has a readership that's very focused on space policy, a subject that doesn't get its due in the media world at large. I'll write for the site again sooner or later. Meanwhile, posting may be light here at Quicksilber in the near term.

UPDATE 5/7: Flashback to 2003: "Choices in Space." This piece is dated but still has some relevance in summarizing different viewpoints as to what to do (and not do) in space. I'm less of a Humans to Mars (anytime soon) believer than I was then, though.

UPDATE: Someone likes this in Portugal.

Port Authority infra-scandal

Back in January, I wrote about the Bridgegate scandal that has devoured much of Chris Christie's political cachet, and mentioned this:

I think a lesson conservatives and centrists should be embracing is that big government is a source of the current scandal or possible scandals--for instance, that the bloated Port Authority of NY/NJ lends itself to political pressure and shenanigans. Reforming that rotten institution, and privatizing its functions to the degree possible, is an approach we should be hearing a lot about in the wake of Bridgegate--but sadly few seem to care.

Now,  I'm pleased to note that said indifference is not total, in that Reason (with which I've had plenty of disagreements in recent years) has a piece called "Port Authoritarians" in its May issue that examines the underlying problem of a sprawling, unaccountable bureaucracy. I'm glad that the sober policy wonk side of libertarianism still has some life in it, in contradistinction to the hipster utopian conspiracist side.

Who's the anti-science party? And who will be?

Who’s pro-science in American politics? Who’s anti-science? Questions along those lines have been the subject of contentious debate in recent years, and a recurrent theme of this blog.

           

A recent post by Ezra Klein at Vox asked “What’s the liberal equivalent of climate denial?” and in exploring that question drew on the work of social scientist Dan Kahan, whose research shows both conservatives and liberals (or “hierarchical individualists” and “egalitarian communitarians” to be more precise) use faulty reasoning in assessing evidence.

           

For instance, one Kahan study showed that attitudes of both liberals and conservatives toward global warming were altered when it was presented in the context of geoengineering.  The prospect of large-scale tech interventions made liberals less willing to believe a (fake) report that warming was worse than expected, while conservatives became less dismissive of warming if it could be fixed through such means as a flying “turbine-fitted vessel” rather than emissions cuts.

           

What Kahan fails to see, according to Klein, is a bigger picture: “Political reasoning doesn’t take place inside our heads. It takes place inside our parties.” In other words, cognitive foibles are widespread but political parties play an important role in filtering them out (or not) when it comes to setting policy.

           

Klein argues, in short, that the Democratic Party has done a better job of keeping flawed views of science away from its policy agenda, compared to Republicans in recent years. I think that’s right, and I’ve made similar arguments as a Republican science writer critical of my own party during the Obama era.

           

The trump card in making such a case is the question Klein raises in his headline (and at the end of the piece still challenges his audience to answer): What is the liberal equivalent of climate denial? (And please don’t respond with word chopping such as that nobody denies there’s a climate or that it changes.)

Common answers given to that question—alarmism about genetically modified foods, and about vaccines—fall short. In neither of those cases have Democratic politicians en masse taken a position at odds with the scientific mainstream, let alone pushed such a position in shaping national policy.

We can leave aside the debate based on polling data as to whether Democrats or Republicans at large are more likely to hold anti-science views. (Republicans may be more averse to vaccines, while Democrats may put more stock in astrology.) The important thing is whether such beliefs are rising to prominence and influence.

Democrats might be tempted to leave it at that, satisfied that their party has done a better job of aligning policy stances with science, particularly when it comes to the climate. That would be too complacent. The next few decades hold vast potential for partisan realignment about climate policy and relevant technology.

Recall that Kahan study of climate attitudes and geoengineering, mentioned above. For now, that was a study about choices that are not actually on the table. What will climate politics be like in, say, the 2020s and 2030s, when global warming has gotten worse (indulge me for a minute if you think that won’t happen) and technological solutions are becoming more feasible?

Options may include not only geoengineering (efforts to remove, or limit the effects of, carbon in the atmosphere) but also advanced energy technologies that produce no carbon emissions. Such technologies could include solar power satellites that beam energy from orbit, and floating nuclear power plants. Both of these futuristic possibilities have gotten increased attention lately.

What geoengineering and these other advanced technologies have in common is that they will be large-scale, expensive and controversial. Undoubtedly, there will be political fights about their environmental risks and whether these are worth taking given the environmental downsides of not taking action.

One can imagine the strange politics that might arise. Conservative Republicans might be denouncing the do-little attitude of liberal Democrats regarding the climate crisis. Liberal Democrats might be assailing conservative Republicans for their recklessness in wanting to place powerful technologies into the skies and seas.

If that happens and I am still around, I suspect my sympathies will be with the risk-taking technologists. But for the Republican Party today to stop being labeled the anti-science party, it needs to stop acting as if the future climate will just take care of itself.

UPDATE: And until that future comes, we'll have stories like this, about my ex-colleague Michael Moyer's experience going on Fox News.

Sea Launch and the waterworld that wasn't

Back in the last millennium--1997 to be more precise--I wrote an article for Reason magazine called "New Waterworld Order." (This was long before that magazine and I parted company.) In it, I predicted a growing "free market waterworld" in which offshore platforms would serve a variety of purposes and offer some relief from heavy-handed regulators on shore. I also expressed skepticism at the idea that the platforms would become autonomous societies, free of all government control. That latter idea, which later was popularized as "seasteading," struck me as utopian and far-fetched.

One example I gave of the emerging offshore economy was Sea Launch, a joint venture then being formed in which Boeing and partners were planning to launch rockets from a platform in the Pacific. Sea Launch has had various troubles over the years. In 2007 a rocket exploded on launch. In 2009 it went into bankruptcy, emerging the following year under majority Russian ownership (but registered in Switzerland), with Boeing retaining only a small share. In early 2013, Boeing sued its Russian and Ukrainian partners, saying they had failed to pay Boeing more than $350 million they owed it.

The dispute is ongoing, and resolution has been stalled by uncertainty over who has jurisdiction. Boeing took its case to arbitration at the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce as per an agreement with its partners, but that body then said it lacked jurisdiction. So Boeing appealed to a Swedish appellate court but that body said the arbitrator's decision can't be appealed. Next stop is the Swedish Supreme Court. Who knows if that body thinks it has authority over this matter?

It turns out that the murkiness of doing business in the ocean is not necessarily conducive to a "free market waterworld" but instead can lead to a legal dead zone that's not healthy for business. Expect the same sort of problems to arise in other areas of the space industry as well, as companies try to operate in the even more hostile legal and regulatory environment beyond Earth's atmosphere.

The challenge of misinformation

David Frum, in his final CNN column, sketches out the contours of our misinformed era:

Information has never been more accessible and abundant. And yet so much of that information turns out not be true. And whereas in early terms it was the least informed people who were vulnerable to the grossest inaccuracies, today it is very often the nominally best informed.

How you assess economic conditions, for example, turns out be less connected to actual economic events than how you feel about the party of the president. Better education seems actually to enhance one's vulnerability to partisan distortion: A 2008 Pew study found that Republicans who had completed college were more likely to reject the scientific consensus on climate change than Republicans who had not done so.

More sophisticated news consumers turn out to use this sophistication to do a better job of filtering out what they don't want to hear.

Me: That last point is the most surprising part of the phenomenon. Sophisticated people are misinformed, too--in fact, may be more misinformed in some ways than less sophisticated people. Did any futurist predict that a deluge of information would leave people less knowledgeable and more prone to misconstrue reality? I wrote last year about how financial professionals, with vast data at their fingertips, can live in a bubble (and am pleased that piece was given some recognition recently). I wonder sometimes about the new trend of data journalism. To what extent will it make sense of the flood of data, and to what extent will it provide more sophisticated ways for writers and readers to convince themselves, without justification, that they know what's going on?

Debate despair

Here's some downbeat stuff: "Rational Debate: We Can't Live (Together) Without It," which draws on "Fighting creationism through debate is pointless; how then can we do it?" I've long been of the view that on creationism and other subjects, you need to be out there, willing to make a case even to people who don't seem receptive. Guess it's just hard to convince me I'm wrong!

Denialism watch

Recommended reading: "What's the liberal equivalent of climate denial?," by Ezra Klein. A lot of material there for anyone who found interesting my writings on science attitudes across the political spectrum, such as here and here. It seems to me that some of the quick answers that have been given to that question actually confirm the point that there isn't an important policy issue on which the Democratic Party has been beholden to an ideological position that's clearly at odds with the scientific mainstream. That may happen in the future, though, when geoengineering is at issue.

Good WSJ acquisition

Christopher Mims, colleague and friend from Scientific American days, is heading to the Wall Street Journal as technology columnist (and leaving his previous job at Quartz, which is available). I am sure he will be excellent in that role. I recommend following his lively Twitter feed as well.

Arbitrary action

I learned about the arbitrariness of affirmative action over 30 years ago, when an affluent friend of mine in Puerto Rico told me that he would be getting preferential treatment in college admissions. David Frum makes the point at greater length in The Atlantic, "Why Affirmative Action No Longer Works." Excerpt:

I once worked alongside a woman whose mother was a Cuban of partly African descent and whose father was Irish via Australia. Her first name was Latino, her last name was purest Hibernian. Preference? No preference? What about the children of an Anglo-Canadian multimillionaire and an African-American mother, to mention another prominent example? Preference? No preference? 

Both Puerto Rico and the Philippines were conquered and colonized by the United States. Yet migrants from the one commonwealth and their descendants receive legal preferences; migrants from the other do not.

Me: I'm sure that my friend, now a lawyer in Puerto Rico, would've done fine in any case.

How not to defend GOP environmental policies

I came across this Jonah Goldberg column "Obama's Keystone Pipeline Trap" via Kevin Drum. Before going on, let me point out that I am not convinced there's a compelling environmental case for stopping the Keystone pipeline; rather, it seems to me that environmental groups engage in symbolic politics by making this pipeline a target and a proxy for climate change. And on fracking, I incline to the view that, with proper regulation, natural gas can provide environmental and economic benefits.

Still, similar to Drum, I am unfavorably struck by Goldberg's line: "Contrary to what you may have heard, GOP politicians still care about the environment, but they take their cues from public opinion, not from the green lobby." Better, by far, to take your cues from science and cost-benefit analysis. By the way, hasn't going against public opinion once in a while (even standing athwart history yelling Stop, when no one is inclined to do so) been a conservative thing in the past?

And then there's this from Goldberg:

Important work is being done on serious problems, such as ocean acidification, overfishing, elephant and rhino poaching and loss of habitat. None of these issues get a fraction of the coverage they deserve. That's because many environmental reporters think their beat begins and ends with climate change.

Me: I've made a case that Republicans should devote more effort to protecting rhinos, and I think Goldberg is right that those are all serious issues. But if he's implying that the GOP is currently doing a lot of the "important work" on them, I'd like to see the basis for that claim. Moreover, in pressing for a focus on "loss of habitat" (presumably he means of numerous species, not just the elephants and rhinos) Goldberg is raising an issue that is exacerbated by climate change, and in bringing up "ocean acidification" he is raising an issue that is intimately connected to climate change (and indeed often presented as a subset of climate change problems).

Goldberg's column is one of those arguments that's really a gift to those on the other side. Expect green groups to cite it in their fundraising letters.

UPDATE 4/25: Some others have criticisms, overlapping with mine, of Goldberg's column. See: "The Goldberg Variations," by D.R. Tucker, and "Conservative Pundit Jonah Goldberg Calls For More Attention To Ocean Acidification," by Shauna Theel.