Hold off on the Venus dirigibles
As we live with the consequences of "move fast and break things", maybe other worlds can teach us to take it slow and build, instead
Hey everybody!
I'm writing to you from the other side of a giant creative drought. This morning, I read a thread on Twitter about "hitting a wall" during the sixth month of a crisis, written by Professor Aisha Ahmad. Professor Ahmad has experience working in disaster zones, and this thread is full of excellent advice for extending grace to yourself, especially as each of us struggles to cope with a rapidly shifting "normal" where every current event that comes along seems to ask the last event to hold its beer.
I'll confess, though, that I did read this wise thread and think that, for me, it doesn't feel like I've hit a wall at six months— it feels like I have been walking INSIDE a wall, FOR six months. Imagine the usual wall metaphor, where you walk up to a wall, it blocks your path, and then you either go over, under, or through it. I feel like maybe I am doing the wall metaphor wrong, because it feels like instead of approaching the wall perpendicularly at month six, I started on one end of the wall on day one, and have just been walking inside the wall, through solid brick, constantly, for six months. If you're having trouble picturing what I'm talking about, that's OK, I drew you a diagram:
So, yeah. The good news, I suppose, is that while I still feel like I'm stuck inside the wall and walking within its... walls (don't worry, I'm abandoning this metaphor now), I've at least gotten to the part where I can piece some coherent written thoughts together. So:
Did you hear about Venus?
Last week, Venus made headlines for being even more perplexing than we'd originally thought. While much of the astronomy and space enthusiast community has been hyped up on finding life on Mars, Enceladus, Europa, or pretty much any exoplanet, Venus had the audacity to pop up with a possible whiff of phosphine, a gas that (at least on Earth) is often associated with life. If you're curious to learn more, I wrote about my excitement (and worries!) for Venus on Slate.
There are several proposed Venus missions in the works; Most are by national space agencies, but at least one belongs to a private company named Rocket Lab. With the excitement over this phosphine detection, many people have looked to Rocket Lab as the team best poised to get to Venus fast— but we need to ask ourselves: is "fast" really what we value most? The universe, including planets, the evolution of life, etc, operates at very different timescales than the human attention span. I'm worried that we'll rush towards confirming or disproving the existence of life, without really considering our potential long-term impact. While we all wade through the 2020 morass of disinformation, chattering trolls, and online flame wars wrought (at least in part) by a company whose motto was "Move fast and break things", maybe we could take a moment to pause, look at the burning wreckage around us, and consider whether we want to move fast and break other planets, too. That's not to say I'm not curious about Venus, because of course I am-- but there's a lot one can do to study a world that doesn't necessarily involve interfering with a potential ecosystem. For starters, I think we should start by just confirming the phosphine is there, and how it could have formed-- not because the team who made the detection isn't great (they know their stuff!), but because phosphine’s presence could also just mean that Venus has some cool non-life chemistry we don't fully understand.
Words Matter
I also spoke to Marina Koren over at the Atlantic about the use of language for framing our adventures in space— specifically, that we should stop using words drawn from colonial violence ("colonize", "manifest destiny", etc) to describe space activities. Why worry about the words we use for space? Well, for one thing, that language has a sharp edge for those who experience colonial violence (in the US, that means Black and Indigenous peoples, specifically). The language of genocide is not inspiring, folks! But don't take my word for it-- I liked this quote from John Herrington, “a retired NASA astronaut and the first enrolled member of a Native American tribe to go to space" in Koren's article::
“Native kids, when they hear the words colonizing and pioneers and the frontier, that makes the hair on the back of their neck stand up.”
If my Twitter mentions are any indication, though, nothing makes space bros on the internet angrier than having history pointed out to them. For some reason, the suggestion that we can (and should) be more intentional with our words is immediately equated with some sort of impingement on freedom of speech. Look: freedom of speech is great, but it's freedom of speech, not freedom from people thinking you're an asshole. If you choose to keep trying to "inspire" people by referencing murderous histories that have very real consequences— not just in the past, but for people who are alive and living with those consequences today— don't be surprised when your words don't land how you planned. On the other hand, I am entirely uninterested in people whose plans for space are colonial using different words to dress those plans up with "acceptable" language. All I'm asking is that we be intentional with our words, because both they are both how we inscribe memories of the past, and draw blueprints for the future.
Something to watch
I recently had the pleasure of discussing the premiere of Ridley Scott’s new series, Raised By Wolves (airing on HBO Max) with the wonderful Holly Frey! Our chat isn’t online, but I mention it here because the show is really wild, and thus far really unlike other series I’ve seen (not to mention visually stunning). It’s set on a fictional version of Kepler-22b, the first small-ish, habitable zone planet the Kepler mission found! Sadly the real Kepler-22b is likely to be much more like the planet in 1995’s Waterworld, which I cannot recommend you watch— so check out Raised By Wolves instead.
Finally, a few brief previews of things to come!
In October, The JustSpace Alliance is going to start rolling out new monthly features! We're starting by digging into the Outer Space Treaty (OST), the single most important agreement for how people explore space. We're hoping to bring some fresh perspectives to it, and I think you'll like it— so if you haven't yet, follow us on Twitter, or sign up for our newsletter on Substack!
In the past few months, I helped start a new team at the Adler, and we have some really fun stuff coming out to the virtual world near you soon. I can't share much yet, but I will say that it has involved me needing to write a song about black holes for work. In the meantime, our team made this cute pillow fort moon base challenge, so enjoy!
Lastly, fall is upon us, and with it the roughly 45 day period in which I give myself permission to watch as many horror movies as possible (please suspend your disbelief, and pretend I have self control during the rest of the year). I know I need to get back on my Star Trek train (Star Trek space train?) too, but you'll probably be hearing some movie commentary from me as well sometime soon. Maybe I should review some space horror, just in time for spooky season? Please enjoy this still from The Universe, where I explained that our sun is in fact a very large jack o’lantern:
That’s all for now!
