jameswharris

Magnificent Desolation by Buzz Aldrin

I’ve read other memoirs by the Apollo astronauts who went to the Moon, most of whom wrote about their tremendous efforts to become space jocks and their stories always peaked with their lunar adventures. Buzz Aldrin second autobiographical book starts with the Apollo 11 landing and quickly wraps that adventure up, because his book is about the second half of his life, the forty years of life after being a famous man who landed on the Moon. Aldrin had an exciting first half of life before becoming the “second” man to walk on another world. He went to West Point, flew jet fighters in the Korean War, got a PhD at MIT, became a NASA astronaut and blasted into orbit on the Gemini 12 space mission, getting to do one of the early space walks.

So after coming home from the Moon and spending a year touring the world and being famous, Buzz Aldrin had a tough second act to follow his first. His book chronicles his decline into depression and alcoholism, and it’s not a pretty story. The real magic of his life appears to be recovering from his early success and starting over, especially his amazing luck of finding Lois Driggs Cannon, his third wife who helped him rediscover a purpose in life that has carried him forward these last twenty plus years. It’s the Buzz Aldrin 2.0 that I find the most fascinating.

Of all the Apollo astronauts, Buzz Aldrin is the only one that has stayed in the limelight making a career campaigning for space exploration. This is the tragic part of Magnificent Desolation, and maybe not one Buzz intended to portray. Aldrin is completely gung-ho on space travel – the trouble is the rest of the world isn’t ready to follow his lead. Why have we never left low-Earth orbit since 1972? It took less than 10 years to get to the Moon starting from scratch, but with all the fantastic technology we have today, we can’t seem to get back to the Moon, much less go further. Why? Well, it’s not for Buzz’s heroic effort in trying.

I believe the portion of the population who are space travel true believers is so small that they don’t have the political critical mass to make Aldrin’s dream come true. I’m not even sure 1/10th of 1 percent of the world’s population, or 7 million people are space advocates. The Planetary Society doesn’t state how many members it has, but I’m guessing it’s in the low hundred thousands range. The National Space Society, is even smaller. In other words, the core group of humanity that seriously wants for humans to live in space is probably another magnitude smaller, 1/100th of 1 percent, or 700,000, and probably much less.

Buzz Aldrin has a tremendous uphill battle to convince the world to spend the money on manned missions to the Moon and Mars when only .01 percent of the population really cares. Even if you add in all the the heavy duty science fiction fans, I doubt the number grows beyond .1 percent of the population.

Aldrin has hitched his star to the space tourism philosophy, which I have never bought. Magnificent Desolation is current through late 2008 or early 2009, so Buzz reports on all his friends in the private space exploration business, the people who keep the dream alive, but it’s like what Aldrin states in the book, it only takes a rocket going 2,000 mph to achieve sub-orbital success, but it would take a spacecraft going 17,000 mph to make orbit.

Can private space programs launch that kind of leap in technology? We know the minimum required, an Atlas rocket like John Glenn road to fame. The minimum to get to the Moon is a Saturn 5 – can anyone really imagine a private company funding that kind of expense? If there’s a better way to space don’t you think someone would have found it in the last forty years? Rocket technology seems to be the sole technology for heaving people off Earth. Many space advocates campaign for the space elevator, but that technology is far more fantastic than real.

I grew up with the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronauts – they were my childhood heroes. I thought NASA was blazing a trail to a future where science fiction would become real, but that hasn’t happened. We have the technology to colonize the Moon and Mars now, and we have pioneers who are ready to go, we just don’t have the patrons to pay their way to the stars. Buzz Aldrin still dreams the dream, and so do I, and a lot of other space enthusiasts, but I don’t think there’s enough of us to make a political or financial difference.

The only force that inspires the tax payers of America to send missions beyond low-Earth orbit is international politics. We went to the Moon because of the Russians. I believe President Bush announced the Vision for Space Exploration and the plans for Project Constellation in 2005 because China, Japan and India were making their own plans to send their citizens to the Moon. However, President Bush’s vision didn’t impassion America like John F. Kennedy did in 1961.

I think most Americans feel “been there, done that” and don’t see the point of returning to the Moon. Even the majority of science fiction fans don’t pine for new missions to the final frontier. For forty years we’ve been great at planning new manned space exploration, but no country or company is willing to spend the big bucks. Space travel still excites and inspires legions of kids, but most somehow lose the dream as they get older because the political climate never seems to change.

Buzz Aldrin could have called his book Magnificent Ambitions, because space travel true believers feel that spawning a branch of humanity that lives off Earth and eventually colonizes other worlds in this system before moving on to other stellar systems is the ultimate purpose of our species. I think many of us space travel true believers have been depressed, like Buzz, since the success of the Apollo Moon landings because the United States didn’t go on to greater missions.

The phrase “to infinity and beyond” was the funny rallying cry of Buzz Lightyear, a cartoon character, but that’s how space travel believers feel. The fascinating question about the 21st century is whether or not the rest of humanity will take up the challenge. I don’t think the political leaders of China, India and Japan are space travel true believers. Since 1945 there have been two spectacular ways for a nation to prove they are great – exploding an atomic bomb or developing a space program. Nationalism isn’t a good force for long term space patronage because citizens eventually feel such wealth should be spent on programs closer to home.

JWH – 11/20/9

She Had a Mind Like an Intel Core i7

As I get older, I realize my mind is slowing down. I was never a quad-processor kind of thinker, but I’d like to believe my brain could chug along like a good ole AMD X2 chip. Now my thoughts feel like they are powered by the original Pentium. I’m starting to pay attention to the people around me, and realize we have unequal minds when it comes to gray matter CPU speeds. I’m also wondering if working with machines is pushing everyone to think faster.

In our culture, we mostly judge people by their covers, but when it comes to brain power we’re as diverse as our physical features, and we seldom take that into account when communicating. In a classroom of third graders or even a college calculus class, all the students are expected to learn the same material at the same pace. Is that fair? When I was a kid I had supercomputer ambitions. It took decades to accept my brain was just ordinary, like computers built to run Microsoft Office.

At work I’m a computer geek, and friends envy my tech knowledge. I’m thankful I’m good at something because I’m so bad at everything else. My brain struggles to remember the names of the people I already know, and it seldom remembers new names, but I’m surprised at how fast I learn technical tidbits. But even that ability is eroding with age.

The other day I was helping a young women who had asked me about putting words on photos in Microsoft Word – something I didn’t know how to do within Word. Her hands flew over the keys showing me her project and files, and I was amazed by how fast she could think, type and traverse folders with keyboard shortcuts. I pulled up Google and searched on her problem and found a good solution, but before I could tell her anything, she read over my shoulders what to and was ready to go. This girl had a mind like an Intel Core i7.

I could tell her young brain, about a third in age of my rusty noggin, could process input far snappier than I could. I admired and envied her fast thinking, wishing I was young again, because now is a fabulous time to be young working with computers. On the other hand, I have to worry about slower thinkers, and the fact that I’m slowing down myself.

Is it me, or does the world feel like it’s speeding up? Aging has me feeling like a lethargic cold blooded lizard living among fast thinking mammals. My wife often gets impatient with my slow mental processing and tries to finish sentences for me. This is why I love blogging – I can take as much time as I want to put my thoughts together.

Speed of thought is relative though. Usually people complain that I go too fast when I help them with their computers, so I have to slow down. When helping most people I show them the routine, let them walk through it once on their own, and then they are usually good for solo flying. Some people I have to repeat the steps 2-3 times. Occasionally I get people who have no knack for computers and I can show them how six times, let them write the steps down exactly, watch them four more times and then they still call me back 15 minutes later. Often I have to learn on-the-spot how to solve the problem people want me to teach them, but few people notice how I do this. Google is the magic word, folks.

On one hand, I worry about these people who don’t seem to be adapting well to the machine age. I admire the ones who refuse to run at gigahertz speeds and reject interfacing with machines. I think I stand between two generations, the ones who lived without computers and didn’t need them, and the next generation of cyborgs that think like a CPU co-processor.

But computer literacy doesn’t always run along generational lines. Even though it seems we’re forcing everyone in our society to use a computer, not everyone is a PC or a Mac. My friend Laurie, who is a scholar of reading literacy, hates that other skills add the word “literacy” behind their noun to refer to their minimum standard of expressing knowledge, so we need to think of another term for people who work well with computers – cyberbiotic?

As much as I admire fast thinking, I also have to worry if speeding thoughts aren’t the best way to think. Has anyone notice how fast they edit TV shows and movies today, with the average length of film cut getting shorter and shorter over the years? This makes the action go faster and faster. I can’t watch The Amazing Race anymore because its quick edits are jarring to me. When I watch an old movie from the 1930s, the pace suggests their time had calmer thoughts, and the long meandering sentences in a 19th century novel implies even more leisurely thinking.

I think it’s unfair that practically everyone has to use a computer in their jobs in the 21st century. Computers do enhance creative pursuits, but does every task need to be computerized? It’s as if we’re all adapting to living inside a new digital reality. Will this cause us to breed humans with faster and faster minds to keep up with computer evolution?

I’m not sure the average person ever thinks about the speed of thought, but it’s obvious one of the inequalities of life that we suffer. And I’ve noticed not all young people are fast thinkers either. In the old days, when kids had learning disabilities they were called slow. When everything speeds up, will people with average ability be considered slow too?

Minds are not like computers, but there are many fascinating comparisons. Fast thinking can be compared to having a brain like the latest Intel chip, while old minds can be likened to the ancient 386 CPU. Human memory is a far cry from computer RAM, because computing would be impossible if machines had recall times and error rates of gray matter memory. Now that my memory is slipping away, I know that memory is often more important than processing speed. I can still think fairly fast, but it often takes me hours to recall specific words and names. The computers in the Apollo space capsule that went to the Moon were less powerful than the computers in today’s cheap telephones. Efficient programming and accurate memory can overcome major CPU limitations.

I’ll bet a person with a slow mind but good memory can beat out a fast mind with a poor memory in many job categories. But there are other factors, such as Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences. A person with a mathematical mind can pursue careers that average Jacks and Jills can’t. Nor would gimpy math minds want to have to work with numbers. I wanted to be an astronomer when I was a kid, and got through high school physics, college calculus and several college physics courses before I ran out of mathematical momentum. I also wanted to follow in the footsteps of Bob Dylan, but I have zero point zero musical ability.

If I had been tested in the 7th grade and told about the limits of my brain, and informed that I could be an astronomer if I was willing to practice math two hours a day, would my life have been different? The mind is like a muscle, it can be improved with exercise – like I pointed out in “10,000 Hours to Greatness.” This really is a case of “If I knew then what I know now.”

We all hear about kids in other countries that must grind through hours of study to keep up with the standard. Now that everyone is competing with machines, will everyone have to run faster and faster? Maybe I could have pushed myself to work harder as a kid to become an astronomer, but will future kids compete with AI astronomers?

We all hear about how our educational system is in crisis, whether that’s true or news media chicken-littling, I think it’s a mistake to make an educational system that essentially tries to be one size to fit all. Would kids try harder if you customized their curriculum to fit their personal ambitions, matched to their brain speed and the amount of time they wish to practice?

Politically we like to think we live in an egalitarian society. And as growing adolescents we like to think we can be anything we want when we grow up. Socially we like to think we live in a classless society and can marry whomever we wish. Our churches teach us to believe that God created us all equal. Good or bad, I think we’re diversely unequal in our ambitions, the speed of our thoughts, and how much attention time we can apply to any task.

As I make my to-do list of projects I want to pursue in my waning years, I think I’m far more realistic because of this knowledge about my limitations than when I was young daydreamer planning what I could do with my life.

Maybe I’m just feeling sorry for myself and my slowing mind. Maybe it’s the way of the world for every new generation to speed past their elders, and for the elders to crab about the speeding youngsters. I turn 58 in eleven days, which is still pretty young, but I’m already looking forward to living in a retirement community where things move at a slower pace. Hell, if I move to the land of the ancient, they’ll think I have an Intel Core i7 mind, at least for awhile.

JWH – 11/14/9

Pale Blue Dot

I discovered over at Mike Brotherton’s blog that today, 11/7/9, is Carl Sagan Day, and Mike makes some interesting observations about Sagan and Richard Dawkins and the public’s attitude towards their atheism. For awhile, Carl Sagan was the face of science to the general public, sort of like Stephen Hawking is today. Any second rate pop/rock/movie/sports star is more famous than these scientists, but they have great influence on millions of Earthlings. I think Sagan’s Cosmos book and TV documentary series introduced cosmology and science to a generation of people and it’s impossible to judge his impact.

Mike Brotherton’s blog is a favorite of mine because he and I share a similar fascination with science and constantly wonder why science isn’t more widely accepted by the public. Read his recent essay “Smarts, Spontaneity, Science, and Science Fiction.” It explores just how hard it is to teach science, or even just express scientific ideas. That’s why Carl Sagan was so admired, he could communicate scientific ideas. And I agree with Mike, Sagan wasn’t as successful as his popularity, too often Carl Sagan was ridiculed on SNL other LCD comedy shows as being a geeky guy, too overly enthusiastic about billions of stars.

The people of our planet focus too narrowly on their own personal immediate reality, and all too often they believe silly theories about ontology. Carl Sagan tried to show people we live in a vast Cosmos and reality can’t be explained by just what we see in front of our noses. Look at this photo:

If you look close you’ll see a little pale blue dot in the center, a bit bigger than all the other dots in this grainy photograph. That’s Earth as seen from Voyager 1 on the way out of the solar system. By astronomy standards, this is an extreme close-up. We’re use to seeing high-powered electron-microscope photos of our planet in comparison. If a photograph could be taken of the universe as a whole, our galaxy wouldn’t even be visible. It’s hard to take our silly ideas about the meaning of life seriously when we see the relative perspective of our existence in relationship to all of space and time.

That’s why I call existence the foam of reality. From most perspectives, whether 10 to the +25 or 10 to the -25 magnitude vantage points, reality looks like a homogenous foam or fuzzy collection of points of reflected light. We only see details at magnitude 0.

The universe is so vast in scope and dimensions, that it’s hard to imagine a deity even noticing us. One of the major lessons that Carl Sagan taught us, is we are insignificant in relation to the rest of the universe. That little dot is home to seven billion people, and from their perspective their lives are the center of the universe, but we must remember that’s an illusion.

Carl Sagan is most famous for his book Cosmos, but he wrote a sequel that is less famous, based on this photograph, and also called, The Pale Blue Dot. Any philosophy or theology that tries to explain the meaning of reality must incorporate our true position in the universe, anything less will be delusional. Science is hard to teach because you have to get little minds to think big, and Carl Sagan could do that.

JWH – 11/7/9

NOVA – Becoming Human

The PBS show NOVA began a three part series called Becoming Human that is an excellent roundup on the science exploring the evolution of humans. The show aired on Tuesday night but most PBS stations repeats NOVA throughout the week, and you can also watch the episode online.

Evolution is a controversial topic in this country, and a good portion of the population refuse to accept the concept, especially regarding the ascent of man from earlier species. From the time of Darwin through the Scopes trial, attackers of evolution have claimed that anthropologists have never found the missing link between man and monkey. Well this show covers a range of fossils that provide a succession of missing links. Not only that, but the show covers many new theories that go well beyond anything Darwin imagined in the 19th century. The time range and scope of human evolution is expanding as we gain more evidence. This is a very rich in ideas documentary.

I doubt this show will change anybody’s mind about evolution, but it does summarize the current knowledge in an excellent manner and provides terrific graphics to help imagine the immensity of the topic. I do believe that most of the people who refuse to believe in evolution do so because of their religion. I also believe those religions will die off in the future if they refuse to incorporate scientific knowledge and evolve.

JWH – 11/5/9

Prayers for Atheists 1

Why would atheists want to pray if they don’t believe in God? Let’s make a theoretical assumption that tomorrow we all wake up and it’s obvious to everyone that God doesn’t exist. Do we just throw away all the sacred books, bulldoze the churches and forget religion completely? Or would we recycle the components of worship for practical secular use? For thousands of years the best and brightest of the human race applied their minds to understanding reality through the eyes of God. What if we step back, and say God was not the inspiration to these spiritual seers, but their own seeking minds, then all sacred knowledge discovered by our ancestors in the name of the all-powerful was really created by the minds of men. Religion serves homo sapiens whether God exists or not.

What if religion has a purpose even if God doesn’t exist. Take for instance the “Serenity Prayer” made famous by Alcoholics Anonymous.

God grant me the serenity

To accept the things I cannot change;

Courage to change the things I can;

And wisdom to know the difference.

The prayer begins by petitioning God, but is God’s assistance really necessary for the prayer to succeed? We could begin, “Let the universe grant me the serenity,” to imply that all of reality offers help, or we can pray to ourselves by saying “If I can find the serenity,” which affirms that we are pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps. The goal really doesn’t change, we want to grasp a philosophical concept that is extremely useful that’s embedded within the words of the prayer.

People often see God in the role of the father, but can you imagine being a father to 7,000,000,000 children all pleading for attention? And since we’ve discovered how big the universe is, it could mean that God’s children runs to a 7 with pages and pages of zeroes. Even if God does exist, don’t you think it’s time we stand on our own feet and give the old Eternal One a breather?

In the prayer above, the petitioner is asking for a kind of serenity that comes with special wisdom. Is that wisdom something we can learn on our own, or teach one another? The serenity prayer is a fantastic prayer, one of my favorites, that gets to the absolute core of religion. From the dawn of the conscious mind we have all wanted to understand reality, and on the surface this prayer requests the wisdom to understand reality in a very fundamental way.

The serenity prayer is very subtle and has onion-like layers. On first reading we think it’s asking for the ability to look around ourselves, at reality outside our body, and see what’s possible and impossible to change. It implies we want an answer every time we attempt to alter reality as to whether we have to strength to make the change. But at a much deeper level, at the spiritual level, it’s asking for the knowledge to see how our minds work, or our souls, if you wish, so we can program our perception of the world.

Do people and events around us encourage us to drink, or do motivations within pour another shot? Do we hate our jobs because of the people we work with or because we can’t control our emotions? Did we fail to write that novel because life never gave us the time or because we never made the time? What does it take to beat cancer, and when must I accept death?

This is why AA loves this prayer – to stop drinking requires the power to change our inner programming, but the prayer works just as well on any negative or even positive addiction, whether you want to give up heroin or become an artist. Of course everyone assumes they can find the power to change, and that might not be true. That’s why the prayer requests serenity as the primary subject of the prayer.

Eastern and Western religions break down along two lines of force: acceptance and change, so the Serenity Prayer meets the two in the middle. The force of the Western mind has been to adapt reality to our desires, while Eastern philosophies has been to teach the gentle path of acceptance. The Western path has always been about the will of God and obedience. To the faithful, that will came from a higher power, but to the secular mind, the will of God has always been the desire of the leaders, the men who wanted to build a nation or cathedral and worked their people like the Great and Wondrous Oz, pulling strings and levers behind the alter.

The Serenity Prayer can work without an all powerful creator, or even without a powerful leader wearing religious robes, or even without a mundane individual called a psychiatrist, because it does work when the petitioner gains their own self-wisdom. That person can get outside help, as soon as they see how to accept it, but the help can come from anywhere or anyone. If you want to credit an unseen force, and call it God, that works too, but the real success belongs to the individual who can make the prayer come true with enlightenment.

The actual purpose of religion has always been to build stronger souls, to create civilization by evolving the minds of men and women. If you look at the Serenity Prayer it’s about change, and if the Force of Evolution had a conscious mind, the Serenity Prayer would guide it. The Serenity Prayer is amazing because it doesn’t just beg, “God give me power to change the world.”

The prayer asks for serenity, a state of being that comes from meditation and wisdom. It asks for acceptance for what we can’t change – a power that lets us avoid frustration and living a life of quiet desperation. Then it asks for courage to change what we can, implying that we need to move full speed ahead when we can and not live with comfort of the status quo. Finally the prayer asks to tell the difference between what we can and cannot change, because that’s real wisdom.

Any atheist, agnostic or theist who meditates on The Serenity Prayer each morning will benefit from its inspirational power. What I’d like to do is create a book of prayers for the atheists, but for now I’ll create a series of blog posts about my favorite prayers. I tend to believe that my atheist friends in their hast to free themselves of the illusions of theism might have overlooked hardcore religious wisdom that works well with the reality of science. We might not have an eternal soul watched over by a guardian angel, but we do have a soulful mind that is evolving. And we might not have a God that shapes our lives, but we do have the collective wisdom of the ages that inspires us to keep trying, to keep evolving.

JWH – 11/4/9