July 13, 1997

We Are On Mars – So What Now?

At 9:57am on Friday, July 4, 1997, a spacecraft containing a small wheeled "rover" landed on the surface of the planet Mars. The Sagan Memorial Landing Site, as it is now called, is under study. This was a remarkable achievement, an amazing use of technology. But why do we do it? Should we continue to explore space? How do these otherworldly events affect our own Earth and our priorities towards its environmental crisis?

How strange and wonderful is our home, our Earth,
With its swirling vaporous atmosphere,
Its flowing and frozen climbing creatures,
The croaking things with wings that hang on rocks
And soar through fog, the furry grass, the scaly seas . . .
How utterly rich and wild . . .
Yet some among us have the nerve,
The insolence, the brass, the gall to whine
About the limitations of our earthbound fate
And yearn for some more perfect world beyond the sky.
We are none of us good enough
For the world we have.

Edward Abbey

THE VIEWS AND OPINIONS EXPRESSED IN THIS ARTICLE IN NO WAY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE JET PROPULSION LABORATORY, THE NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION, OR THE CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY.

Strange way to begin an opinion piece, isn’t it? Well, that’s the way the JPL Ethics Office wants it. You see, I have an interesting combination of careers. I am a Professor of Environmental Studies, a lecturer and writer in the fields of ecopsychology, ecofeminism, women’s spirituality, and speed reading. I teach students of all ages about the wonders of our connections to the life forces of our home planet, Earth and the perils that result when the connection to the natural world is severed. But I am also an employee of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a high tech facility run by the California Institute of Technology for NASA. I have been for nearly 20 years.

JPL is responsible for the "un-personed" (they would say "un-manned") exploration of the Solar System using robotic explorers. I began my journey with NASA as a "mission planner," a person whose job it is to understand what the spacecraft being built for a planetary rendezvous can do. I was among the group of people for the Voyager and Galileo missions who met with the scientists who built the various science instruments that collect information (like the camera, the infra-red detector, etc.). The job of my team was to develop conflict-free, time-ordered sequences of events, computer programs that would be transmitted to the spacecraft. These sequences would tell the robot – really a computer flying in space – when to take pictures, when to turn and point in a different direction, and when to transmit data to the Earth. I did this for 14 years.

For many years (since the age of 5), I concerned myself with the affairs of every other planet except the one of my birth. But in the early 1980’s, I rediscovered the Earth – I came home after many years in space. I realized one day, while standing in Yosemite National Park, surrounded by unparalleled beauty, that you can go from one end of the Solar System to the other and not find a single drop of fresh, available water or a breath of fresh air. No sounds of birds, no cries of babies. This Earth is, and always has been, our home. I left the engineering behind a few years ago to devote my life to teaching.

I am still associated with JPL, but as an educator. I manage the Educational Outreach Program for the Ice and Fire Preprojects, a series of space missions that propose to visit the planet Pluto, never before visited by our robotic explorers, Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, now believed to possibly have twice the water of the Earth, but locked up in ice-covered oceans, and the Sun, our nearest star. And I still believe in exploring space, but with qualifications. Let’s talk about that now.

As I was watching Carl Sagan’s biography on television last night, I was reminded of the career of that man who was a passionate teacher. He brought the universe to over 400 million people around the world with his TV series, COSMOS. He himself, like me, turned to the Earth and until he died in the Fall of 1996, devoted himself to exposing the greed and short-sightedness that is bringing our planet to the brink of disaster. He protested nuclear weapons (and got arrested at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site), warned of global warming, and spoke of the importance of the Earth. He saw the Earth as a wondrous planet that should be cherished. And the scientific community shunned him.

I witnessed this shunning of Carl Sagan personally while I was working on the Voyager project, a mission that launched two spacecraft in 1977 to explore to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. He was laughed at and made fun of by the teams of scientists and engineers, particularly the camera team (they said NASA forced them to have him as a member because of his popularity). It was here that I first saw that the disconnection that infects science in general was an inescapable epidemic. People in the scientific community shunned Sagan because he was popular, because he was on TV, and because he was making money sharing what he knew. They were jealous and envious and resentful. Those people could have chosen to be grateful for the exposure he had given their programs and happy for his success.

But they really couldn’t. The system is not set up to foster positive emotions. Our patriarchal system of education, especially for scientists and engineers, is built on a long legacy of competition and, sadly, closed-mindedness. The ivory tower of academia is still one of the tallest in the land.

Many scientists and researchers of all kinds live in six-month increments, making proposals for projects to funding sources, competing for small allocations of research monies, and guarding their results so that they can make a splash at a press conference or scientific meeting. This system does not foster cooperation and openness.

Creativity is stifled in most science and engineering training programs. You are taught the scientific method, you are taught that objectivity is the rule and emotions ruin the results, and you are taught, basically, to not color outside the lines. In other words, you are taught to deny your humanity and to behave like something you are not – a dispassionate "observer." Try as we might, pretend as we do, we cannot – and should not – remove our emotional beings from our "work."

But scientists do just that – and pay a powerful price. In order to convince yourself that you can remove your emotions from your work, you must develop the skill of rationalization, you must disconnect from your own emotions, and you must protect yourself from sources in the outside world that could shatter this precarious position. Hence, you often have people who practice science who appear somewhat socially inept, awkward in their bodies, and fearful of the creative world. I know this intimately for I was just like that for much of my early life. I was stiff in my body – afraid to move for fear of upsetting some precarious balancing act I was in the middle of.

Of course, like anything, this does not apply to everyone who practices science. There are many balanced professionals out there who are compassionate, reasonable, enlightened, and connected to themselves and the natural world. They, however, are rarely in positions of power or making science policy decisions.

The most glaring example I ever saw of the stiffness and fear present in many scientists and engineers came in 1987, the tenth anniversary of the launching of the Voyager missions. The Planetary Society, a support organization for space exploration started by Carl Sagan and Bruce Murry, former director of JPL, gave a party at JPL for all Voyager participants over the years. The entire laboratory community, was invited. That evening, there were at least a thousand people on the mall at JPL. People were milling around, sipping drinks and chatting (a typical engineer party!) when all of a sudden music began and none other than Chuck Berry came out and started playing on the steps to the main engineering building. [Chuck Berry has a connection to Voyager – on the record that Carl Sagan put together with his loving wife, Ann Druyan, Chuck Berry is one of the "Voices of Earth" that was digitally encoded so that any extraterrestrials that find the spacecraft could get a taste of our culture!]

So get this picture straight – a beautiful summer night outside, thousands of people around, and Chuck Berry is fifty feet in front of you playing his heart out – and only 2 people are dancing! Everyone else was smiling and kind of moving their head – including me. I was amazed.

Fear. It paralyzes so many of us and keeps us from achieving our dreams. How differently we would all work if we didn’t have fear of

• losing our jobs
• not paying the rent
• our bosses
• of standing out in the crowd
• of someone else stealing our work and getting credit
• and on and on and on.

Fear keeps you from acting, from challenging assumptions, and from calling things by their right name.

So the people who are in charge of exploring space are humans, humans trained by the same system that rationalizes away many of the ills of our culture, trained by a system that lives by cost benefit analyses and tradeoffs.

But there are a few things that space explorations professionals are NOT:

1. They are not part of the military nor do they have any military agenda. NASA is entirely separate from the Department of Defense. DOD has used the Space Shuttle before to launch obscene spy satellites, but NASA was the driver, not a participant in the design of the missions. The Shuttle pilots don’t even know what they are launching. NASA is a civilian agency.
2. The space program does not try to hide anything from anyone. Because they are trained in the system I discussed above, their fears will cause them to present information in such a way that it looks like hiding. For example, when someone raises a concern about money, the response of a space program professional is often "well, NASA gets a very small piece of the federal budget pie and spends the money well. And we get many benefits from space exploration." A better response might be, "I am as concerned as you are about that. But there is plenty of money in the world and we should all fight together to see that people who need help are taken care of. No one should be sick or go hungry for any reason."
3. The space program is not hiding evidence of extraterrestrial contact. I believe that I can say this with all confidence having worked with NASA for 20 years. All of our data that gets returned from space missions is open for all to see. The Mars Pathfinder mission is an excellent example. Everyone shares in seeing the data as it is being received right along with the scientists at JPL. Over 200 million people have accessed it on the world wide web over the last week. Anyone with a large enough receiving antenna could receive the signals and decode them. And believe me, everyone at NASA would be delighted if we found life in space. I am convinced that a secret like that could not be kept. Many of the thousands of people working for the space program are in their 20’s and 30’s. Many are even younger who participate in our programs for high schoolers and undergraduates. There is no way they could keep any secret! [Please don’t get started about the "face" on Mars. It is just a mountain range that looks like a face from a great distance. Look at any atlas of shots of the Earth from orbit. I can find you any body part you like! We will get higher resolution images of that region with the next Mars mission which will hopefully put that issue to rest.]
4. NASA is not using nuclear material in their outer planets spacecraft because they are bent on supporting the nuclear-industrial complex. This is nonsense. I am a radical environmentalist and believe me, I would say something if this were true. Here is the situation: When you travel to planetary destinations that are far from the Sun (or when you need a steady, constant source of electricity for your instruments) solar panel technology is not yet good enough. To get enough solar energy, you would need solar panels the size of football fields with current technology. There is no way that such a thing could be launched. It is getting better, but it is not yet available. So, unfortunately, NASA uses plutonium as a source of HEAT. This heat is transformed into electricity.

If enough money were pumped into solar panel technology, then it would move faster. But remember, the system has been based on being stuck in old patterns of being for a long time. Traditionally, it has been more desirable to go with "proven" technology than with something new. And NASA is a government agency after all, right down the street from one of the most daunting and oppressive forces on planet Earth – The White House. The pressures they are under to conserve money are extreme and they do not always make the right choices.

The program I am working on, the mission to the Planet Pluto, is under huge, and appropriate pressure from NASA to push the envelope for solar panel technology and not use nuclear material on that probe. Everyone is trying pretty hard. They would be able to try harder if they were given more money.

So the way the scientists are trained affects their responses to the concerns about the nuclear fuel. When questioned about its safety, an engineer will tell you about the tests and the studies that prove all is well. They will get defensive and resentful that you would think that they are doing anything wrong. They start talking about how you need to pulverize the nuclear material and inhale it before it can cause damage. Pretty soon, neither "side" is talking about the issues. Everyone begins talking from their fears of being wrong. All the engineers want to do is explore space and find out about the origins of the Earth.

I would answer the question of concern about the nuclear material differently. I would say that we are all concerned. We are all afraid. No one wants to release plutonium into the atmosphere. No one. Not for any reason. Not at NASA anyway. In fact, we shouldn’t be making deadly plutonium at all. That is why NASA has spent millions of dollars to encase the material in vessels that could literally be dropped from Earth orbit, hit the side of a mountain, and not break. But that is not the point. We should all sit in a room together and discuss the risks and decide together if we want to take the risk. Sadly, some of the environmentalists who lead the anti-NASA campaign do very poorly – they take statements out of context and misrepresent the truth to serve an extreme agenda. They are as bad as those we fight regularly to keep the Earth alive. They distort the facts and make all those who love the Earth look foolish. And NASA seems like it is minimizing and not acknowledging the concern because even the documentation is coming from a place of fear and indignation.

Both sides need to sit in a room and breathe together, to remind themselves that we are all on this world together, that we all share the same water, the same air, the same soil. None of us should ever do anything that will jeopardize the sacredness of our world.

It’s important that we all understand each other’s fears. Looking at each other as adversaries and demonizing our "opponents" helps no one. Conflict is an opportunity to explore other points of view. Sadly, I don’t see any progress being made on bringing the two sides together.

So should we continue to explore space? Yes, but with qualifications:

1. The money. Let’s get this one out of the way. As I have said before, there is plenty of money in the world. The world spends over a trillion dollars per year just on warfare. To deal with just about every social and environmental problem on the planet would cost less than 25% of that amount. It would cost only about 19 billion dollars to end starvation and malnutrition world-wide (2,500 babies under the age of 5 die each hour). There are people living in Los Angeles who could write a check for that – today. So it’s not a matter of money (see my Healing Our World article referenced below for a detailed discussion of this).
   
   
2. We must not look at space exploration and space colonization as a justification for continuing to exploit the Earth. Some believe that we will eventually leave this Earth and our mess behind. Not true. I don’t believe that it will ever be true. We will not find any greener pastures in the Solar System (or probably anything green at all) and we are farther away from discovering "warp speed" than the abacuss is from becoming a laptop computer. We should not take our bad habits and greed-based ethics into space. The Earth will aways be our home.
   
   
3. We should not classify other bodies in our Solar System as "resources" to satisfy our lust for minerals and profit. I am sick of seeing artists’ conceptions (deceptions?) of a lunar or martian base with a strip mine in the background or hearing talk of bringing an asteroid back to the Earth to pillage. We need to change our consumer-based lifestyles and reassess our priorities. Our space program is already firmly entrenched in the "throwaway mentality." Our rocket launches dump many pounds of pieces of junk into Earth orbit, causing a real hazard to or space efforts. A chip of paint, traveling at speeds of 2,000 miles an hour in orbit, chipped a Space Shuttle window a few years ago and could have caused a catastrophic accident.

4. The space program needs a grounding vision, a reason that comes from within. Ever since the "race to the Moon," begun by President John F. Kennedy and ending with the Apollo program, NASA has lacked a grounding vision. It is not really their fault. We must remember that the space program was born out of conflict, as a response to the Russians launching Sputnik. It was a matter of pride and national security, not exploration and the quest for knowledge. In fact, when the Soviet Union broke up, the many members of the U.S. Congress really thought it was time to cancel our entire space program. "What do you need it for now that there is no more space race" asked many members of Congress of NASA. Sadly, we have dismantled the technology that we used to get to the Moon! It could not be duplicated without spending many billions of dollars. Sad. The Moon should be where we concentrate our efforts, but many within the space agency feel it is not flashy enough. Trying to get to Mars with people is way too difficult to consider. The technological hurdles are extreme and the return on the investment is difficult to quantify. The Space Station program appears difficult to justify as well. Using robotic explorers is clearly the most cost efficient way to explore our galactic neighborhood. Using humans at this stage of our development is unnecessarily costly and risky.
   
   
5. The space program needs a more focused set of questions to ask. Scientists have debated about what we should be looking for in our explorations. Some, such as James Lovelock, creator of the "Gain Hypothesis," where the Earth is perceived as a holistic, living system, thought the criterion we use in our biological experiments in space are all wrong. Lovelock used to work at JPL, on the team for the Viking landers, trying to come up with the procedures for searching for life on Mars. He left when it was clear to him that no one was asking the right questions. Sure enough, Viking’s measurements came up "inconclusive" and some believe that if the probe landed in the middle of a rain forest on Earth, the results would have been the same. Deciding what you want to find out is vital to any investigation in any field.

As always, we can choose. Write your elected representative and NASA with your feelings. If you wish to support the space exploration program, demand that it be done with an unprecedented concern for our relationship with the natural world – both on and off the Earth. Demand that we find ways to "pack out what we pack in" and that we treat the other worlds in the Solar System with more respect than we have treated our Mother Earth. You get to choose. It is your program.

With the space program, we have a great opportunity to re-make our Western, patriarchal, distorted values and revitalize our human spirit. We have the chance to decide what footprint we want to leave behind that says "humans from Planet Earth" have been here. Our actions in space can set powerful example for a new way to care for our Earth or it can promote the same wasteful, greedy values that have damaged our planetary life-support systems and disconnected us from the sacred natural world.

Exploring wilderness is important. Rene Dubos spoke often on the importance of wilderness. He said that humanized environments feel safe and give us confidence because everything is remade in a human scale. When we experience wilderness, though, it provides the opportunity to measure ourselves against the cosmos. It invites us to explore the realms of eternity and infinity. But all wilderness everywhere, on and off the Earth, must be protected from the pitfalls of greed and disconnection.

Silently a flower blooms,
In silence it falls away;
Yet here now, at this moment, at this place,
The world of the flower, the whole of
the world is blooming.
This is the talk of the flower, the truth
of the blossom;
The glory of eternal life is fully shining here.

Zenkei Shibayama

Resources

1. Mars Pathfinder information is easy to get to on the Internet. One particularly nice site is done by radio station KFWB in Los Angeles. Check them out at http://www.kfwb.com/mars.html. They also provide a list of "mirror sites" where you can get the same information. The main JPL site is usually very busy right now, so try some of the sites that have fewer visitations.
   
   
2. To explore more this idea that there is plenty of money in the world, visit the World Game Institute and study their "What The World Wants" Chart. It is very revealing. See it at http://www.worldgame.org/~wgi/resource/doright/wwants.html.
   
   
3. To learn more about Carl Sagan and his work, visit http://www.hk.super.net/~paulchui/sagan.html.
   
   
4. To learn of the Ice and Fire missions to Pluto, Europa and the Sun, visit http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/pluto/icefire.htm.
   
   
5. To learn more about the Nevada Test Site and the efforts by activists to stop tests there, visit http://www.macronet.org/macronet/shundahai/index.html.
   
   
6. For a more thorough discussion about what it would take to pay for our problems, read "Basic Human Needs," another in this Healing our World series, at http://www.envirolink.org/environews/ens/newsfeed/mar31-1997g.html.
   
   
7. To learn more about James Lovelock and the Gaia theory, visit http://magna.com.au/~prfbrown/gaia_jim.html.

[Jackie Giuliano can be found looking skyward, with his feet planted firmly on the Earth, in Venice, California. He is a Professor of Environmental Studies for Antioch University, Los Angeles, The University of Phoenix Southern California campuses, Please send your comments, thoughts, and visions to him.]