Dennis Overbye

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“We’ve Been Having A Kind Of Mars Moment Lately”

December 13, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

The recently departed John Glenn worried about war being waged in outer space, and wherever humans go, chaos, as well as creativity, will surely follow. While Elon Musk has unilaterally decided that direct democracy will govern Mars (and, hey, how nice for him!), we’ll also launch far less savory arrangements into the stratosphere.

In the Trump years, if awful priorities and utter incompetence don’t ground our further forays into the final frontier–sadly, that’s the most likely outcome–you may see beauty pageants on Mars, Saturn’s rings dipped in cheap gold paint and low-gravity golf courses on the moon, where everyone can drive the ball like the pre-Calligula Tiger Woods.

Actually, voyaging into space may become more necessary than ever if, say, you want to flee a nuclear war with China or escape a fossil-fuel dystopia dotted with internment camps. Just thinking out loud here.

The New York Times has a thoughtful consideration of the nebulous state of NASA in the time of Trump, which was written by Dennis Overbye, whose smart, graceful articles about space exploration I’ve been reading since I was a kid. Now we’re both old, and I mostly blame him. The opening:

Two weeks after a presidential election that could have vaulted him to the head of NASA, John Grunsfeld reached across his peanut curry at a small restaurant on the Far West Side of Manhattan, grabbed my notebook and sketched out a plan for a trip to Mars.

Dr. Grunsfeld, astronomer, astronaut, and former associate administrator of NASA, was in town to promote a National Geographic TV series about Martian exploration. On his shirt was a picture of a space shuttle and the Hubble Space Telescope.

We’ve been having a kind of Mars moment lately. Audiences filled theaters last year to watch Matt Damon as The Martian. Personalities as diverse as President Obama and Elon Musk have declared the Red Planet the next great destination.

In the days leading up the election, Dr. Grunsfeld said, NASA was thinking about a Mars mission to get ready for the transition. He himself was rumored to be on the short list to run the space agency should Hillary Clinton have won.

“NASA has never had a scientist as administrator; you and I would have had fun,” he said.

Now, nobody knows where NASA’s rockets are going on their biblical smoke pillars. Donald J. Trump’s one mention of the space program during his campaign was to tell a kid that potholes on Earth need fixing first.•

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“Can You Fly An iPhone To The Stars?”

April 14, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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At the beginning of 2015, the great fiction writer Ken Kalfus suggested we take a deep breath before attempting to colonize Mars and instead send a human-less probe to Alpha Centauri. It would be a gift to our descendants, and in the meanwhile we could take a more sober approach to relocating humans into space.

Kalfus’ vision might be realized thanks to the largesse of Yuri Milner, one of those modern Russian entrepreneurs so awash in wealth and next-level technology that they can dream the biggest dreams when tiring of mansions and yachts, ones formerly only possible for states, like creating “global brains” and exploring space. 

In a New York Times article, the excellent Dennis Overbye writes of the proposed mission, in which Milner is partnering with Stephen Hawking, among others. The opening:

Can you fly an iPhone to the stars?

In an attempt to leapfrog the planets and vault into the interstellar age, a bevy of scientists and other luminaries from Silicon Valley and beyond, led by Yuri Milner, a Russian philanthropist and Internet entrepreneur, announced a plan on Tuesday to send a fleet of robot spacecraft no bigger than iPhones to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system, 4.37 light-years away.

If it all worked out — a cosmically big “if” that would occur decades and perhaps $10 billion from now — a rocket would deliver a “mother ship” carrying a thousand or so small probes to space. Once in orbit, the probes would unfold thin sails and then, propelled by powerful laser beams from Earth, set off one by one like a flock of migrating butterflies across the universe.

Within two minutes, the probes would be more than 600,000 miles from home — as far as the lasers could maintain a tight beam — and moving at a fifth of the speed of light. But it would still take 20 years for them to get to Alpha Centauri. Those that survived would zip past the star system, making measurements and beaming pictures back to Earth.

Much of this plan is probably half a lifetime away.•

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“[It] Will Have Value Even If There Is Nothing But Silence From The Heavens”

April 8, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Marconi wanted to talk to Martians, and who wouldn’t?

Was just reading “Building a Language to Communicate With Extraterrestrials,” Daniel Oberhaus’ smart Atlantic piece about scientists trying to develop a cosmic lingua franca, and it reminded me of a Dennis Overbye NYT article from early in the Aughts. In that piece, Overbye profiled Dr. Douglas Vakoch, the young “Interstellar Message Group Leader” at the SETI Institute, who was then just starting his career, hopeful we would someday make intelligible contact. Vakoch, who was interviewed two years ago at the New Yorker site, maintains hope, though he knows there are no guarantees. 

Overbye’s opening:

PHILADELPHIA— There is probably only one person on earth although, one hopes, not in the universe — whose business card identifies him as ”Interstellar Message Group Leader.”

That would be Dr. Douglas Vakoch, aspiring psychotherapist, philosopher, self-described exo-semiotician, and resident psychologist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., which is dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It is his job to come with ideas for a response in case any searchers ever discern, amid the crackle and hiss of radio waves from outer space, the equivalent of a ”Hi there — what’s your name?”

It was the search for a suitable answer that found Dr. Vakoch, standing on a lonely sidewalk here late one chilly evening looking for the back way into a brick building. He was in town to attend and discuss a new play about an outer space organism that turns people’s skins green, and to give a talk about the problems of composing interstellar interspecies messages.

In between, he was hoping to squeeze in a visit to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, a homework assignment for getting a license to practice psychotherapy in California, his home state, but the building was locked. Of course, as a SETI researcher, Dr. Vakoch knows that frustration is part of the process.

The receipt of a signal from another civilization, astronomers involved in SETI say, would be one of the greatest events in the history of humanity. The question of how or whether to respond, they say, is too important to be left to the last minute.

”The initial message we send, if we ever do send any, would create the first impression for what would be a dialogue that would be occurring over many generations,” Dr. Vakoch said.

In the interest of making a good impression, and perhaps counteracting the burble of Survivor, automobile ads and political news spreading outward through the galaxy on radio and television waves, Dr. Vakoch is using a grant from the John Templeton Foundation to devise a message that encodes the notion of altruism, which many biologists and humanists would like to think is a pillar of any civilization.

It is an effort, he says, that will have value even if there is nothing but silence from the heavens. ”By thinking about who we would want to represent ourselves, we’re forced to reflect in a different way than we usually do about what our deepest values are,” Dr. Vakoch said.

”And by attempting to put some of the ideas and values most important to us in an abstract universal language, we’re forced to clarify what we mean by those things.”•

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“Someday People Will Hike Through The Canyons Of Mars. I Just Don’t Know When Or How Or Who.”

December 15, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Long-range space exploration plans know their limitations, as changing politics lead to shifting priorities. In a 2007 New York Times essay, Dennis Overbye fretted about the failure of the Space Age to stretch much further than boots on the moon, but he also presciently realized that new-millennium geopolitics and technologist gazillionaires would likely help us shoot for Mars. An excerpt:

Our machines have gone ahead of us. But someday people will hike through the canyons of Mars. I just don’t know when or how or who. Maybe it will be the Chinese, who seem to still feel that they have something to prove as a nation. Maybe it will be billionaire adventurers — like the Google founders who just put up a $25 million prize for the first private Moon lander, who are free to risk their own money and don’t have to answer to Congress when things go wrong, as they sometimes will — who make the dream come true, for at least a few.

There will always be someone willing to ride a pillar of fire into the unknown, but it won’t be me. I don’t want to go to Mars anymore. I no longer have the stuff — if in fact I ever did — to camp out in a tin can for two years. I’d be afraid to be so far from the Earth and my family for so long.

I don’t want my daughter to go either, for the same reason. When our children do go off forever across the void then we will have a chance to find out if we are as strong as our ancestors who bundled their children onto ships in the hope they would reach a better world across the ocean. Someday, somebody will go and not come back, and humans will have escaped their nest, for better or for worse.

There is no galactic immortality. Everything we are and have done, the whole Milky Way with its billions of stars, is eventually destined to be swallowed up in a black hole. Neither ourselves nor our works will survive the end of the universe, if dark energy eventually blows it apart, no matter what we do. All we own is the present, so it behooves each of us to live each moment impeccably, guided by whatever lights we choose. Speaking only for myself, while we are around we might as well embrace the light and the unknown, the violence and vastness that terrify us.

My sci-fi dreams are dead, but Sir Richard Branson and his fellow space entrepreneurs say they have business plans. If Mr. Branson manages to get the cosmologist Stephen Hawking into space and back, he will have done more for the cause of space exploration than 25 years of space shuttles going around in circles.

Watching the Apollo astronauts recount their travels to the Moon in the documentary In the Shadow of the Moon, I was wiping away tears for a time when we had bold dreams and leaders who, for whatever motives, could make them happen. Neil Armstrong’s footprints on the Moon are as crisp as the day he made them.

I will always be glad I was alive when he took that small step, even if we are still waiting for the next big leap.•

 

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