Tetherd Cow Ahead

While Violet Towne and I were out on our bikes yesterday, our conversation turned to philosophy and politics, as it sometimes does. Specifically, I was defending the Mars Lab/Curiosity program against her assertion that it was a waste of money when there were so many much more important issues on the political plate. Well, I agree that there are numerous pressing matters that need our attention (and money) but I was most vehement that there are a lot of other things that could lose a few pounds (metaphorically speaking) before we should start carving up great and inspiring science projects.

“For instance,” I said, “Do you realise that the 2012 Olympics cost more than twice as much as Curiosity? And that the US bank bailout was more than ten times the budget of the Mars Science Lab mission?”

I don’t think she believed me.

“Show me the numbers!” she said, defiantly.

Well, Acowlytes, you all know it’s best not to challenge the Reverend when he’s on his soapbox, even if you’re the Reverend’s wife. ((You’d’ve thought she would have figured this one out by now…)) When we had pedalled homewards, I went straight to Captain Google, and plugged in my questions. You might understand, dear Cowpokes, my utter amazement when I found my figures were wrong. Wrong by an order of magnitude. But not in the direction VT had hoped. It’s FAR worse than I had even imagined. Here ya go. I made a graph:

As you can plainly see, the budget for the Curiosity/Science Lab project is not even one pixel high on this comparison scale.

So, in order to get some perspective on how much that little rover trundling around on the surface of Mars costs, let’s examine some of those figures and related issues. First of all, it’s obvious that the military budget for the US for one year (2012) and the amount of money spent on the bank bailout are each in a completely different league to the kind of expense put aside for Curiosity. It isn’t hard to see that even NASA’s entire budget for 2012 is hardly a blip on the radar for the government accountants when compared to sums like that. What’s even more gobsmacking is that each of these figures (that is, ONE SINGLE YEAR of US military spending, or the humoungous pile of money forked out to save the US economy from the destruction wrought by the excesses of greedy and morally reprehensible assholes) exceeds the budget of NASA’s entire 50 year existence. ((Here. Do the sums.)) The yearly outlay for military air-conditioning alone exceeds NASA’s annual budget by 4 billion dollars. ((The Pentagon rejects this figure, which was calculated by Brigadier General Steven Anderson, a military logician for operations in Iraq. They have, however, not put forward an alternative anywhere I could find. I’m open to correction on this.))

The London Olympics cost, in fact, nearly 6 times more than Curiosity – not merely double as I’d thought – and we’re only talking about the money spent to stage the games. ((Arguably, some of that expense is recouped in benefits of one kind of another by the British taxpayers, but not the majority of it by any means. Equally as arguably, the Mars Science Lab program has benefits of one kind or another for the human race.)) It’s plain that large amounts are poured into the Olympics from elsewhere as well, including every participating nation’s competition expenses, and not insubstantial amounts from all the bids made by countries attempting to secure the Games every four years. That’s a frikkin’ ginormous pile of cash for a sporting event. Even if you amortize the London expense over 4 years, the yearly figure still exceeds that of the Mars Science Lab mission. Of course if we permit that, it should be fair to amortize Curiosity’s cost over the Mars Science Lab program’s lifetime (9 years), making the contrast even greater and returning an expense to the US taxpayers of $277m per year (or, less than a dollar per person per year). For 2012/13 the Australian government has budgeted over 10 times that figure for sport. ((I had trouble finding out how much the US government spends on sport. It’s either a well kept secret, or they don’t care to support the same ridiculous level of sports fantaticism as ours does.))

To put that per-person/per-dollar/per-year expense into perspective, Americans ((Canadians are also included in this figure, but even cutting it by, say, a generous third, that’s still a shitload of money.)) spent 4 times the cost of the Curiosity mission at the cinema in 2010 ((I couldn’t find anything more recent, but I think it’s safe to say that 2011 & 2011 will track that figure.)), and are spending something like $137 billion dollars a year on alcohol ((2002 figures, but I think we can probably assume that has trended upwards rather than down.)) and somewhere in excess of 30 billion dollars a year on cigarettes. In 2011, the US government spent 313 billion dollars ((This is probably a conservative estimate – it’s hard to get an exact figure due to the nature of defining the field, but I’m quoting on the conservative side. Stats here and here.)) on ameliorating the problems caused by the abuse of all that alcohol & tobacco. And, while we’re on the subject of substance abuse, coming in at a staggering 30 billion dollars, ((Depending who you ask. It’s variously quoted at somewhere between 20 and 40 billion. It’s certainly not less than 20, but it may be more than 40. In any case, I’ve erred on the probable side of conservatism and just taken the median.)) America’s so-called ‘War on Drugs’ costs the nation over 10 times the budget of Curiosity (or, nearly twice the annual NASA budget) every year and that is widely argued to be a complete waste of money. ((Here, here, and here, for just three examples of hundreds you can find.))

I could, of course keep going with this – I haven’t touched on gambling, or government inefficiency, or tax breaks for religion or a half dozen other areas where large amounts of money seem to slush around without a proper degree of scrutiny. But what does all this mean, in the end?

For me, it’s simple. As humans we can, of course, choose to put our resources wherever we like. So far, I believe that choice has always leaned far too heavily towards the things at which animals are good – being the fittest, the strongest, the fastest. Or being the greediest, the most aggressive, the most dominant. It has not served us well. The result is that we have become powerful animals facing an existential crisis, and the traits that we carry as animals – the aggression, the greed, the power-mongering – are the exact opposite of what we need to get us out of this crisis. We are starting to encounter problems that we will not conquer by being fast, or strong or fit. ((Or religious.)) Being better at animal things was once enough. Now it isn’t.

The things that humans alone are good at – the things that our brains enable us to do such as imagining the possibilities of the future, pondering the poetry of our existence, turning our curious gaze onto the mechanics of the very universe itself – occupy the very tiniest parts of the minds of most people (and therefore most governments). This ability that humans have to plan for the future by creating a mental vision of it is more-or-less nonexistant in all other animals. ((To all intents and purposes it is completely non-existant as far as we know, but that’s an area of research that is still contentious.)) So what do we do to the people who are very good at this kind of inspirational far-thinking? We vilify and undervalue them. When they tell us ‘There is a big problem with the climate and we should do something about it!’ the powerful apes get up on their boxes and beat their chests, so that they might remain popular and powerful, and the greedy apes use all the cunning that their superior brain has given them to make arguments that everything is OK and we should all just kick back and consume, and the fit and fast apes run around entertaining everyone. If we cannot use the leverage that nature has given us to come to terms with the world-destroying problems we now face, we are truly doomed. We have squandered the one advantage that we have over other animals. Our difference will have enabled us to wipe ourselves out, rather than allowed us to achieve that future which we alone can imagine.

So what has all this to do with a little vehicle pottering around in the dust of a cold world some 225 million kilometers from our home? Well, in my opinion, projects like Curiosity help us turn our gaze outward – out of ourselves and away from our tiny little human preocupations. Indeed, I think that this curiosity to know stuff that has no direct consequence to our animal existence is a marker that says that we may, perhaps, have a chance after all.

There are, of course, many areas where we might have directed the 2.5 billion dollars that went to Curiosity. Violet Towne considered that it would have been better spent going towards helping solve the climate change problem, for example. Well, I agree that climate change research is an area that could really use that kind of money. And there are numerous pressing compassionate issues that are desperately in need of money also. I hope my argument has convinced you (and her), though, that stealing the funds from visionary human endeavours like the Mars Science Lab is entirely the wrong tactic if you want to help address these probems. I want to make it quite clear that I’m not advocating doing away with sport, or stopping everyone from imbibing reality-altering substances, or even saying that we could conveniently curtail all our military spending, but to me it seems that all these pursuits – these profoundly ‘ape-like’ pursuits – are where we should look first for money that could be better off spent elsewhere. I’m pretty sure they could spare a little of the quite exorbitant amounts of cash that are currently rained down on them.

___________________________________________________________________________

Violet Towne fears that I have portrayed her as a Luddite here, and as somewhat anti-science. I want to assure you that she is not, and that I respect her views, and her willingness to challenge me on my own, very much. You all know that it’s unlikely I would last long with a partner who didn’t have a vibrant and informed worldview. But I think I am right in saying that, like many people, she had formed an opinion – almost entirely concocted by irresponsible and ignorant media reporting, in my view – that NASA spends excessive amounts of money on things no-one really cares about. My intent with this post is simply to demonstrate that, in the grand scheme of things, NASA’s budget is relatively well spent. It seems to me that robbing Peter to pay Paul by redistributing NASA’s budget to areas of more pressing need is a kind of madness fanned by a perplexing and distressing anti-science sentiment creeping across the world.

The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands. ~ Oscar Wilde

The Sydney Morning Herald is carrying at the moment, as one of the ‘Editor’s Picks’, this story which salaciously promises to reveal to the world the ‘dirty little secret’ behind the Mars rover Curiosity. It’s a shabby piece of hyperactive journalism from the blog of writer Geoff Brumfiel and echoed back through Slate, which essentially uses hyperbole and paranoia to try to spin the fact that Curiosity is powered by nuclear fuel into some kind of meaningful comment on… oh, I don’t even know what the point is supposed to be. ((The tone of the article reminds me of nothing so much as a dinner guest pointing out to his convivial companions – for the express reason of making himself the centre of attention by being contrary – that people are starving in Africa. There are people who seem to compulsively feel the need to attempt to suck the life out of the joy & inspiration of others.))

As mostly anyone with any acumen understands, Curiosity uses nuclear power to implement its science, unlike its smaller cousins Opportunity and Spirit which were/are powered by solar cells. ((Contrary to the implication on Brumfiel’s blog, NASA has not tried to ‘cover up’ this fact in any way whatsoever. It’s easily available with all the other information about the Mars Science Lab, on the Curiosity site.)) Solar power is great for space missions where you don’t need to do anything too hefty, but it has limitations, especially in the outer solar system where sunlight is feeble, or in circumstances where you wish to deploy energy-intensive instruments like Curiosity’s ChemCam laser. The problem is that the fuel required for Curiosity’s tiny reactor, Plutonium 238, is not manufactured in the US any longer, and so a small amount of it has been acquired by NASA from Russia for the exclusive purpose of powering space craft (a legacy of the old Soviet Union’s now decommissioned nuclear weapons program is that a stock of Pu-238 still exists in storage).

The main thrust of Brumfiel’s article, then, is that Curiosity is nuclear powered and that its nuclear fuel comes from the manufacture of Evil Russian Nuclear Weapons. Well, to an extent that’s sort of true – for whatever relevance that has. Pu-238 can be garnered during the manufacture of the Pu-239 that is used for for nuclear weapons (and this is how the Russians made it) but it is actually an opportunistic re-use of the unused isotopes of the process – you can make Pu-238 without making bombs. It’s just that if you are making bombs anyway, you may as well use the waste for something useful.

Physicist Luke Weston, from the University of Melbourne, puts it like this:

[To make Pu-238] you need uranium targets, production reactors, preferably high flux reactors, and radiochemical processing facilities, so traditionally it has been sort of piggybacked onto the existing infrastructure at the weapons labs, but no, it’s not really a “byproduct”.

NASA doesn’t particularly want to get the Pu-238 from the Russians and would like to control its manufacture in the US, but, Luke continues:

There has been a fight between NASA and DOE over the last couple of years regarding who should pay for the restart of USA Pu-238 production capacity – NASA says DOE should continue to do it, because DOE has the facilities and expertise, but Congress refuses to allow it to come out of DOE budgets – and as a result, planetary science right now and in the near future is suffering.

So, by using the Russian Pu-238, NASA is merely being pragmatic. Let’s be clear here – the stuff is already in existence. If it’s not being used for something, it’s just sitting on a shelf. ((Arguably being somewhat of a problem.)) We can’t unmake it. ((Seriously: what’s A BETTER way to use the stuff? Anyone?))

Geoff Brumfiel doesn’t think we should see it like that, however. He provocatively reminds us just how irresponsible the Russians were with their nuclear weapons manufacture, and how awful the ramifications were and then colourfully declares:

A few pounds of Stalin’s finest plutonium-238 hitched a ride to Mars on the back of Curiosity.

This kind of journalism is not helpful, enlightening or germane. It’s just grubbing around in the dirt for tawdry titillation and Mr Brumfiel should be truly ashamed of himself for doing it. It’s hardly even worthy of the Daily Mail.

Let me try to illustrate the logical sleight-of-hand being played out here.

This week, we saw the death of astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first human to set foot on the surface of another world. Armstrong’s passing was universally mourned. If we were so inclined, however, we could point out that NASA and Armstrong were aided in their grand lunar endeavour by the rocket propulsion systems designed for the Nazis in World War 2 by Wernher Von Braun – rockets meant for the express purpose of raining down death and destruction on terrified English citizens. Von Braun, in his post-war role as NASA’s chief scientist in the Saturn V program (having been famously and clandestinely ‘acquired’ after the war by the US military to help with their rocket science), designed the rocket engines that launched Apollo 11 into space and carried it to the moon. To attempt to portray the Apollo moon missions in this way sounds petty and stupid and pathetic, and yet, this is the very same kind of tactic used by Geoff Brumfiel in the Curiosity article, which has been circulated around the world and now warrants the ‘editor’s pick’ in the SMH. We can even extrapolate further: Curiosity also used the very same Nazi rocket technology that underpinned the Saturn V program to get to Mars, but Brumfiel is not telling that story here. Why? Because even people with zero science education would spot it for the irrelevant and egregious nonsense it is. Oh, and it doesn’t have the scary spectre of nookyular to juice it up.

Geoff Brumfiel claims that he is ‘as happy as anyone’ that Curiosity is on Mars, something I find disingenuous given the hand-wavingly hysterical tone of his article. He finishes up:

There’s nothing wrong with oooh-ing and aaah-ing over Curiosity’s photos. The project is an incredible achievement, and the science it produces will be amazing. But remember this, too: That little rover on Mars has left a big mess back here on Earth.

This kind of bereft backwards logic makes me furious. No, Mr Brumfiel – the fact is that when that nuclear material was made, a trip to the Red Planet by a mobile science lab with a computer brain was very much the stuff of science fiction. Trying to brand NASA or Curiosity with the responsibility for any ‘mess’ made by decades-old nuclear programs is vapid sensationalist rubbish dressed up in wilful scare-mongering.

At this point in time, when the world is in desperate need of better understanding of science, what it truly doesn’t need is silly Frankenstein’s Monster-style journalism masquerading as science commentary. Thanks Geoff Brumfiel, and Slate, for adding to the huge oxygen-depleted ocean of dreck-filled sludge that is slowly sucking us back into the Middle Ages.

___________________________________________________________________________

Thanks to Jo Benhamu for spotting the article and for Luke Weston for allowing me to quote from his comments.

Atlas brings to my attention this news over on Den of Geek, in which Lucasfilm producer Rick McCallum is interviewed about numerous matters, including a forthcoming live-action Star Wars TV series.

Yes, that’s right. It’s MORE Star Wars, Jim, but apparently this time it’s not as we know it.

Mr McCallum, speaking about the challenges in getting the show into a new era of television, dropped this little bombshell:

It so unlike anything you’ve ever associated with George before in relation to Star Wars. Our biggest problem is that these stories are adult. I mean… these are like ‘Deadwood’ in space. ((I’m not at all sure that Mr McCallum has seen Deadwood)) These aren’t for kids.

Star Wars as Deadwood in space? O..k..a..y.. I think I can picture that…

This morning I had cause to do a YouTube search for one of my favourite artists, Luke Jerram, who has been mentioned in despatches previously here on The Cow. The landing page at YouTube featured a Meet the Artist video with Mr Jerram, which I highly recommend you watch, not because it has anything at all to do with today’s post, but simply because he’s a smart and funny fellow and his work is incredible.

But you know how YouTube gives you a list of selected associated links down the side of the page when you go to a particular video? Well, amongst a bunch of similar ‘meet-the-artist’ offerings, and other videos from Mr Jerram, there was, perplexingly, a link to this: ((There is a rule of thumb when reading any kind of speculative ‘journalism’, whether it be on paper or on the internet: if the headline proposes something as a question, the answer is always ‘No’.))

I really have no idea whatsoever what it was doing sitting amongst videos of practising artists talking about their work and I’d love to know what kind of berserk algorithm matched it up. Anyway, there it was, sticking out like a pig at a christening, just daring me to click on the link. Which, unfortunately for you, I did.

Now, I don’t blame you if you are not inclined to watch it all. I did, but only because I found it hard to tear myself away from the sheer wrong-headed thinking of the whole thing (and because I’m a masochist, evidently). And despite the warning:

Well, it did both scare and depress me, but probably not for the reasons the creator of the video anticipated. So that you don’t have to experience the fear and depression yourself ((Unless you really want to, of course, in which case be my guest…)) I will sysnopsize the content for you (with annotations, of course):

•The World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001 was predicted widely in popular culture before it happened. [Yes folks, everybody from the creators of Super Mario brothers, through the artists behind Marvel Comics to the illustrators of The Simpons knew it was gonna happen, but instead of simply telling us, ((I bet you didn’t even know that cartoonists and game creators got to know all that Top Secrety information and stuff. Of course they couldn’t tell us because, oh, well, they were in on it, and well, just BECAUSE!)) they drew it in cryptically in the background of their characters’ amusing antics.] ((I will admit that the episode of The Lone Gunman that aired a few months before, that depicts a plane almost crashing into the Twin Towers is a little eerie, but the crucial thing to note is that IT MISSED. Also, the aircraft concerned was being remotely piloted by factions within the US Government in order to facilitate arms trade, and the incident happened at night, not in daylight. I don’t think I need to point out how cherry-picked this ‘evidence’ is.)) ^, ((Even so, I can’t help but wonder if the Al Qaeda minions who executed the operation saw that show and wondered if their mission had been compromised.))

•The London Underground bombings of 2005 were predicted by a BBC Panorama episode that aired a year before. [Yep, that’s right – the BBC, the London police force, security agencies, politicians and emergency services were all in on it and they all got together to carry out an elaborate mockup televised by the BBC to let the entire world know it was going to happen beforehand so that, well, so that, um… OK, well BECAUSE. I dunno. Can anyone follow the logic of what the video maker is meant to be asserting here? All these people knew the exact details ((Well, not exact details, exactly… The three bombs on the Underground didn’t happen in the same places, and the fourth bomb – a vehicle aboveground – was a substantially different affair. In the reality it was a bomb on a bus, in the fiction it was the much more devastating scenario of the targeting of a chlorine tanker chosen for its catastrophic consequences. Sure, these similarities appear spooky, but the fact is (as the Panorama programme even points out) it was a scenario that had been advanced by numerous people on numerous previous occasions. Like the World Trade Center – which had already even been attacked some years before – the London Underground is an obvious terrorist target. You need no real brains to figure out that if you want to cause destruction and panic, one bomb is effective, two bombs are better, but three will really cause some serious problems.)) about bombs that were really going to go off in the Underground a year later and they went to the trouble of making a tv show just to hint at it. Whyyyyyyyy?]

•Based on the compelling prescience of these two events, it is suggested that a spinoff of the British tv series Spooks – Spooks: Code 9 – has predicted that a hundred thousand people are going to be killed in a nuclear attack this year at the London 2012 Olympic Games.

Before we go on, I’d like you to ruminate on the following images, all of which are just samples of numerous examples that I found on a lightning fast web search:

Quite unsurprisingly, popular culture likes to conjure images of the destruction of well-known landmarks. And yet, every one of the above buildings is still, in reality, completely intact. ((I guess the ‘terrorists’ intend to bring ’em all down eventually, they just haven’t gotten around to it yet…)) Similarly, there are countless comics, tv shows, movies and books that use, as their mise-en-scène, catastrophic, apocalyptic scenarios. Hear me, Mr Conspiracy Video Guy: this is called IMAGINATION. We in the creative industries like to imagine the kinds of things we think people will get a kick out of, and make stories about them. And the thing about the stories we imagine? There are a SHITLOAD of them. Thousands and thousands and thousands. Millions, even. The fact is, somewhere, sometime, some imaginative person is going to imagine something – based on real situations, perhaps – that will have things in common with something that actually happens. It just isn’t that remarkable.

The video goes on to wheel out all the usual daft conspiracy theory ideas: the logo for the 2012 Olympics can be rearranged to read ‘Zion’[It’s those bloody Jews again…] ((For Pete’s sake – how much paranoia can these people have? It’s the Muslims. It’s the Jews. It’s the US government. What a fearful and miserable way to live a life.)); the ‘eye’ symbol – a well known ‘Illuminati’ trademark – features throughout the Spooks episodes [That Illuminati really has its fingers in everything. Why, even my local optometrist is controlled by them. Oh, and what’s that up there in the TCA header… wooo-ooo-oooo]; There are also lots of ‘special’ numbers in the Spooks show. Like 9, and 33, and 7, and 13, which as everybody knows are all numbers reserved by the Illuminati to sprinkle through the imaginings of popular culture in order to HINT that they are controlling everything because… well… because that’s what you do when you are an evil force controlling humanity. It goes along with the obligatory white fluffy cat, the black robes and the maniacal gloating laugh.

Anyway, you get the drift. What we have here, Acowyltes, is a kind of paranoia pareidolia. Mr Conspiracy Video Guy looks at a vast raft of unrelated events – images and stories and movies and comics – slices them into tiny little slivers of convenient resolution (single frames; words; numbers, even) and then sees a picture that simply isn’t there.

The 2012 London Olympics will come and go without so much as a fizz, and Mr CVG will make up some daft story about how the Illuminati chose to take the weekend off or something, and next year he’ll have another clip up about the forthcoming dirty bomb attack in New York in 2013. Which is a much more logical prediction because 13 is an Illuminati number. And if you add 20 + 13, you get 33, another Illuminati number. If this isn’t a sign, I don’t know what is. I just can’t believe he missed all that.

Everybody singin’

I’ve got no strings
So I have fun
I’m not tied up to anyone
They’ve got strings
But you can see
There are no strings on me