Why do we engage in space exploration?

26 August 20155 March 2016 / raminskibba / 2 Comments

A review of diverse perspectives on space exploration and extraterrestrial life reveal fundamentally human hopes, fears and flaws

Since the dawn of civilization thousands of years ago, humans have looked to the skies. Archaeologists have found evidence of people from China, India, and Persia to Europe and Mesoamerica observing and contemplating the many stars and planets that fascinated them. We humans have also wondered about—and often hoped for—the existence of other intelligent life out there. Considering the large number of planets in the Milky Way and in billions of other galaxies, perhaps we are not alone, and maybe even while you are reading this, extraterrestrials could be looking in our direction through their telescopes or sending us interstellar telegrams. But if our galaxy teems with aliens, following Italian physicist Enrico Fermi’s persistent question, we must ask, “Where are they?”

Artist’s depiction of a travel poster for a “Tatooine-like” planet orbiting two suns, recently discovered by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft. (Courtesy: NASA)

Two recent pieces in the New Yorker and New York Times, as well as numerous books over the past couple years, motivate me to consider this and related questions too. Astronomers and astrophysicists around the world, including scientists working with NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) and many others, have many varieties of telescopes and observatories on Earth and in space, just because we want to investigate and learn about our galactic neighborhood and beyond. We also attempt to communicate, like sending a message in a bottle, with the Golden Records aboard the Voyager spacecrafts, and we listen for alien attempts to contact us. In our lifetime, we have dreams of sending humans to Mars and to more distant planets. Why do we do this? We do it for many reasons, but especially because humans are explorers: we’re driven to see what’s out there and to “boldly go where no one has gone before.” As Carl Sagan put it in Cosmos, “Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still.”

Views of human space exploration

Elizabeth Kolbert reviews three recently published and forthcoming books by Chris Impey, an astronomer at the University of Arizona (where I used to work three years ago), Stephen Petranek, a journalist at Discover, and Erik Conway, a historian of science at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. (She did not mention an award-winning book by Lee Billings, Five Billion Years of Solitude, which I will review in a later post.) She fault finds with the overoptimistic and possibly naïve “boosterism” of Impey and Petranek. “The notion that we could…hurl [humans]…into space, and that this would, to use Petranek’s formulation, constitute ‘our best hope,’ is either fantastically far-fetched or deeply depressing.” She asks, “Why is it that the same people who believe we can live off-Earth tend to believe we can’t live on it?”

Kolbert’s assessment has some merit. Astrophiles and space enthusiasts, of which I am one, sometimes seem to neglect Earth (and Earthlings) in all its wonder, marvels, complexity, brutality and messiness. But is the primary reason for exploring the universe that we can’t take care of ourselves on Earth? Mars should not be viewed as a backup plan but rather as one of many important steps toward better understanding our little corner of the galaxy. Furthermore, we should be clear that sending humans to Mars and more distant worlds is an incredibly complicated and dangerous prospect, with no guarantee of success. Even if the long distances could be traversed—at its closest, Mars comes by at least a staggering 50 million miles (80 million km) away, and then the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, is about 25 trillion miles from us—future human outposts would face many obstacles. The popular novel by Andy Weir, The Martian, demonstrates only some of the extraordinary challenges of living beyond our home planet.

Overview of components of NASA’s Journey to Mars program, which seeks to send humans to the red planet in the 2030s. (Credit: NASA)

Though Kolbert criticizes Conway’s dry writing style, she clearly sympathizes with his views. “If people ever do get to the red planet—an event that Conway…considers ‘unlikely’ in his lifetime—they’ll immediately wreck the place just by showing up…If people start rejiggering the atmosphere and thawing the [planet’s soil], so much the worse.” This line of criticism refers to flaws of geoengineering and of the human species itself. Many times in history, humans ventured out acting like explorers, and then became colonists and then colonialists, exploiting every region’s environment and inhabitants.

Note that Kolbert is a journalist with considerable experience writing about climate, ecology and biology, while astrophysics and space sciences require a stretch of her expertise. In her excellent Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Sixth Extinction, Kolbert argues provocatively that humans could be viewed as invasive species transforming the planet faster than other species can adapt, thereby constituting a danger to them. “As soon as humans started using [language], they pushed beyond the limits of [the] world.” I agree that humans must radically improve their relationship with nature and Earth itself, but this does not preclude space travel; on the contrary, the goal of exploring other worlds should be one aspect of our longer-term and larger-scale perspective of humanity’s place in the universe.

Views of extraterrestrial intelligence

Dennis Overbye, a science writer specializing in physics and astronomy, covers similar ground, but focuses more on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). He mentions the Drake Equation, named after the American astronomer Frank Drake, which quantifies our understanding of the likelihood of intelligent life on other planets with whom we might communicate. Both Drake and Sagan “stressed that a key unknown element in their equations was the average lifetime of technological civilizations.” If advanced species don’t survive very long, then the possibility of contact between overlapping civilizations becomes highly improbable. It would be unfortunate if similarly advanced civilizations, like Earthlings and Klingons, could never meet.

Overbye introduces the controversial University of Oxford philosopher, Nick Bostrom, who is rooting for us to fail in our search for ETs! “It would be good news if we find Mars to be sterile. Dead rocks and lifeless sands would lift my spirit.”

Bostrom bases his argument on a concept he refers to as the Great Filter. Considering the likelihood of advanced civilizations, many conditions and criteria must be satisfied and steps must be taken before a planet in the “habitable zone” has a chance of harboring intelligent life. The planet probably must have the right kind of atmosphere and a significant amount of liquid water and some kind of possibly carbon-based building blocks of life, and after that, the alien species’ evolutionary developments could go in any direction, not necessarily in a direction that facilitates intelligence. In addition, asteroids, pandemics, or volcanic eruptions could wipe out this alien life before it got anywhere. In other words, myriad perils and difficulties filter out the planets, such that only a few might have species that survive and reach a level of social and technological advancement comparable to those of humans.

On the other hand, if we do find life on other planets and if intelligent extraterrestrial life is relatively ubiquitous, our lack of contact with them could mean that advanced civilizations have a short lifetime. Perhaps the Great Filter is ahead of us, “since there is no reason to think that we will be any luckier than other species.” Maybe nuclear war, climate change, or killer robots might wipe us out before we have the chance to explore the galaxy.

I am not convinced by Bostrom’s pessimism. Even if the Great Filter is ahead of us, implying that humans face more existential threats in the future than have been overcome in the past, this doesn’t mean that we are doomed. Humanity does have major problems with acknowledging large-scale impacts and long-term outlooks, but I hope we could learn to change before it is too late.

A more positive outlook

We have learned a lot about planets, stars, galaxies, black holes and the distant universe from our tiny vantage point. But we would be immodest and mistaken to brazenly presume that we’ve already figured out the rest of the universe. We really don’t know how many other “intelligent” species might be out there, and if so, how far they are, what level of evolution they’re at (if evolution is a linear process), or whether or how they might communicate with us. We should continue to discuss and examine these questions though.

While traveling to other planets will take a long time, in the meantime astronomers continue to make exciting discoveries of possibly “Earth-like” planets, such as Kepler-452b, an older bigger cousin to our world. It seems likely that the Earth has a very big family, with many cousins in the Milky Way alone.

So why do we engage in space exploration and why do we seek out extraterrestrial life? This question seems to transform into questions about who we are and how we view our role in the universe. I believe that humans are fundamentally explorers, not only in a scientific sense, and we have boundless curiosity and wonder about our planet and the universe we live in. Humans also explore the depths of the oceans and dense rainforests and they scour remote regions in arid deserts and frigid glaciers (while they still remain), just to see what they’re like and to look for and observe different lifeforms.

More importantly, even after tens of thousands of years of human existence, we are still exploring who we are, not just with scientific work by psychologists and sociologists but also with novelists, poets and philosophers. We still have much to learn. To quote from Q, a capricious yet occasionally wise Star Trek character, “That is the exploration that awaits you: not mapping stars and studying nebulae, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence!”

Struggling Against Gender Bias in STEM Fields

19 August 201531 October 2015 / raminskibba / 1 Comment

In spite of wishful thinking, sexism and gender bias persist in science, tech, engineering and math. (Image: Getty, New Scientist)

[Originally published in the Summer 2015 issue of American Astronomical Society (AAS) Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy (CSWA) Status newsletter (p. 15-17). If you quote this article in any way, please cite the version in Status. Many thanks to Nancy Morrison and Joannah Hinz for editing assistance.]

Suppose that two astrophysicists with similar education, experience, and accomplishments—let’s call them Dr. X and Dr. Y—apply for a tenure-track faculty position. If Dr. X is female and Dr. Y is male, and if the selection committee members have conscious or unconscious gender bias, then, unfortunately, one might expect it to be more likely that Dr. Y would be offered the position.

But a controversial and influential new paper argues the opposite. In the title of their April 2015 article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Wendy M. Williams and Stephen J. Ceci, both psychologists and full professors at Cornell University, claim, “National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track.” [1]

The authors base their conclusions on five randomized, controlled experiments at 371 U.S. colleges and universities in biology, engineering, economics, and psychology. In these experiments, tenure-track faculty members evaluated the biographical summaries or the curricula vitae of fictitious faculty candidates—including one “foil” candidate—mostly with impressive qualifications but with different genders and different life situations, such as being a single parent or having taken parental leave.

Their analysis reveals an unexpected result: faculty reviewers strongly preferred female candidates to male ones by a highly significant 2:1 advantage. Williams and Ceci conclude, “Efforts to combat formerly wide-spread sexism in hiring appear to have succeeded. After decades of overt and covert discrimination against women in academic hiring, our results indicate a surprisingly welcoming atmosphere today for female job candidates in STEM disciplines, by faculty of both genders.”

The article received considerable media attention from a variety of outlets. In particular, Nature, The Washington Post, The Economist, and Inside Higher Ed reviewed the article without much skepticism. Presumably, the authors’ claim that sexism no longer exists and gender bias is a thing of the past is a message that many people want to hear. On 31 October 2014, Williams and Ceci published an op-ed in The New York Times entitled, “Academic Science Isn’t Sexist,” in which they presented a shorter version of the same argument. [2]

On the other hand, Lisa Grossman in New Scientist [3] and Matthew Francis in Slate [4] analyzed the study in more detail and expressed more criticism. Both authors outlined the flaws in the analysis by Williams and Ceci. The experimental evaluations in their study involved only reviews of candidates’ biographies, without all the other activities that normally enter into faculty hiring and that may be affected by gender bias: personal interviews, presentation of talks, social events with potential colleagues, and determination of a short list by a selection committee. These simplified experiments do not accurately represent a real hiring process.

Many other studies and and a wealth of anecdotal evidence contradict the conclusions of Williams and Ceci. For example, Viviane Callier, Ph. D., contractor at the National Cancer Institute, told us [5] that recent surveys [6,7] found evidence of pervasive sexism in letters of recommendation—a domain in which the assumption of a level playing field does not apply and which is out of the woman applicant’s control. Moreover, faculty hiring is dominated by graduates of a few prestigious institutions and labs that are disproportionately headed by men, who are more likely to hire other men. “To imply, like Williams and Ceci, that ‘we are done,’ or that ‘the problem is solved,’ does a great disservice to the scientific community,” Callier said.

In any case, analysts agree that the underrepresentation of women in STEM fields is an ongoing problem. According to a National Science Foundation study in 2008, 31% of full-time science and engineering faculty are women. This fraction varies among different fields, however. In an American Institute of Physics survey [8], the representation of women among physics faculty members reached 14% in 2010, and for astronomy-only departments, it was 19%. Similarly, a 2013 CSWA survey of gender demographics [10] found that 23% of faculty at universities and national research centers are women. These fractions demonstrate improvement in recent decades, but clearly much more work needs to be done.

Furthermore, although women outnumber men among college and university graduates, men continue to dominate the physical sciences, math, and engineering. At higher levels of academic careers, the gender demographics worsen, in what is often described as a “leaky pipeline.” Women constitute only one third of astronomy graduate students and less than 30% of astronomy postdoctoral researchers. In addition to the underrepresentation of women, gender inequality persists in other areas as well: according to a report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research [9], although women now pursue graduate degrees at the same levels as men, women with such degrees earn no more than 70% of their male colleagues, a larger divide than the overall pay gap.

“Unconscious bias” against women in science and math is not unique to men. In a 2012 PNAS study [11], Corinne A. Moss-Racusin and her Yale University colleagues found that female faculty are just as biased as men against female scientists. When people assess students, hire postdocs, award fellowships, and hire and promote faculty, biases propagate through the pipeline. Contrary to the conclusions of Williams and Ceci, the problem is on both the supply side and the demand side.

What can be done to address such biases? As difficult as it may be, if scientists simply acknowledge that we all carry some inner biases, those biases may be reduced. Meg Urry argued in the January 2014 issue of Status [12] that people who are aware of bias tend be more careful about how they make hiring decisions. In addition, increasing the fraction of women in hiring pools and in search committees helps to reduce unconscious bias as well.

Some institutions have National Science Foundation-funded ADVANCE Programs to increase the representation and advancement of women in STEM careers. The University of Michigan’s program [13], for example, includes efforts to develop equitable faculty recruitment practices, increase the retention of valued faculty, improve the departmental climate and work environment, and develop encouraging leadership skills of faculty, staff and students. Their program could be emulated at other institutions.

Finally, other important issues relate to gender bias and underrepresentation of women, including improving maternal and paternal leave policies, increasing access to child care, developing dual-career policies, promoting work-life balance, and reducing gender inequality of housework. Furthermore, other forms of underrepresentation are also important, and workers in STEM fields continue to strive to improve diversity in race, class, and sexual orientation, as well as gender.

References Cited
[1] Williams, W. M., & Ceci, S. J. 2015, “National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track,” PNAS, 112, 5360n
[2] Williams, W. M., & Ceci, S. J. 2014 October 31, “Academic Science Isn’t Sexist,” New York Times
[3] Grossman, L. 2015 April 17, “Claiming sexism in science is over is just wishful thinking,”
New Scientist
[4] Francis, M. R. 2015 April 20, “A Surprisingly Welcome Atmosphere,” Slate
[5] Callier, V. 2015, personal communication by email
[6] McNutt, M. 2015, “Give women an even chance,” Science, 348, 611
[7] Madera, J. M., Hebl, M. R., and Martin, R. C. 2009, “Gender and Letters of Recommendation for Academia: Agentic and Communal Differences,” Journal of Applied Psychology, 94, 1591
[8] Ivie, R., White, S., Garrett, A., & Anderson, G. 2013, “Women Among Physics & Astronomy Faculty: Results from the 2010 Survey of Physics Degree-Granting Departments,” American Institute of Physics
[9] Institute for Women’s Policy Research 2015, “The Status of Women in the States: 2015 Employment and Earnings”
[10] Hughes, A. M. 2014 January, “The 2013 CSWA Demographics Survey: Portrait of a Generation of Women in Astronomy,” Status, p. 1
[11] Moss-Racusin, C. A., Dovidio, J. F., Brescoli, V. L., Graham, M. J., & Handelsman, J. 2012, “Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students,” PNAS, 109, 16474
[12] Urry, C. M. 2014 January, “Why We Resist Unconscious Bias,” Status, p. 10
[13] University of Michigan, ADVANCE Program

As Galaxies’ Light Gradually Fades, the Universe is Slowly Dying!

17 August 201517 August 2015 / raminskibba / Leave a comment

The Universe, long past retirement at an age of 13.8 billion years, appears to be gradually “dying.” New observations strongly indicate that galaxies, vast collections of billions of stars such as our Milky Way and neighbors Andromeda and Triangulum, generate much less energy than they used to across the wavelength spectrum, a clear trend revealing the fading cosmos.

This composite picture shows how a typical galaxy appears at different wavelengths in the GAMA survey. The energy produced by galaxies today is about half what it was two billion years ago, and this fading occurs across all wavelengths. (Credit: ICRAR/GAMA and ESO.)

Scientists with the Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA) survey, led by Simon Driver of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research in Australia, extensively and thoroughly examined more than 200,000 galaxies. Driver and his colleagues presented the results of their analysis at the general assembly of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in Honolulu, Hawaii, which came to a close last weekend. Their announcement coincided with their data release and the submission of their paper to the journal, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The paper has not yet been peer-reviewed or published, but the authors’ main conclusions are unlikely to change.

“While most of the energy sloshing around in the Universe arose in the aftermath of the Big Bang, additional energy is constantly being generated by stars as they fuse elements like hydrogen and helium together,” Driver said. “This new energy is either absorbed by dust as it travels through the host galaxy, or escapes into intergalactic space and travels until it hits something, such as another star, a planet, or, very occasionally, a telescope mirror.”

Stars of all ages throughout this multitude of galaxies convert matter into energy (remember E=mc²?) in the form of radiation ranging from ultraviolet to optical to infrared wavelengths, and astronomers have long known that the total energy production of the universe has dropped by more than a factor of 1.5 since its peak about 2.25 billion years ago. But GAMA scientists, utilizing the Anglo-Australian Telescope at Siding Spring Observatory in eastern Australia, were the first to document the declining energy output so comprehensively over 21 wavebands.

Check out this fly-through of the volume mapped out by the GAMA survey, which is expected to be approximately representative of the rest of the “nearby” universe, with the galaxies’ images enlarged (video courtesy of ICRAR/GAMA/Will Parr, Mark Swinbank and Peder Norberg (Durham University) and Luke Davies (ICRAR)):

The GAMA astronomers’ results point toward the universe’s continued “gentle slide into old age,” as Driver put it, but there is no need to panic! The time-scales involve billions of years, and we humans have only been around for about 100,000th of the universe’s lifespan so far. (That’s like the incredibly short lifetime of mayflies relative to ours.) We should be careful to note that the scientists’ conclusions come from a statistical assessment of numerous and diverse galaxies, similar to the way pollsters or census takers evaluate a population by studying a large number of its members. Individual galaxies and their stars may be young or old, but the general population continues to age with no indication of deviations from the demographic trend, much like the gradual aging of people in Japan.

Filled with galaxies and much more dark matter and much much more empty space, the universe rapidly expands and pulls objects away from each other, countering gravitational forces. Old stars within galaxies provide the fuel for new stars to form, but eventually it becomes harder and harder to scrape enough fuel together to make those new stars and galaxies, and on average the aging universe becomes fainter and fainter. It’s as if potential parents become increasingly unlikely to meet with random encounters and many ultimately die alone.

The universe will eventually pass away, but long after our sun has exploded in its red giant phase and destroyed the Earth and long after the Milky Way and Andromeda collide. I think the universe—and humans—has many more good years left though.

How the Worsening Two-Tier Higher Education System Affects Students and Teachers

6 August 20156 August 2015 / raminskibba / 1 Comment

Two years ago, Margaret Mary Vojtko, an adjunct French professor who had worked for decades at Duquesne University, passed away at the age of 83. According to Daniel Kovalik, a lawyer for her and the United Steelworkers, “unlike a well-paid tenured professor, Margaret Mary worked on a contract basis from semester to semester, with no job security, no benefits, and with a salary of $3,000 to $3,500 [or less] per three-credit course.” But then in a matter of months, her cancer returned, she became nearly homeless as she could not afford the maintenance of her home or even the cost of heating it during the cold Pittsburgh winter, and Duquesne, which did not recognize the adjuncts’ union, let her go. She died as the result of cardiac arrest a couple weeks later.

Vojtko’s struggle and tragic story is a moving reminder about the plight of adjunct professors throughout the United States. Adjuncts strive to get by under immense stress on the lower rung of a widening two-tier academic system while educating the majority of students in colleges and universities. Over the past year, I have worked as a research scientist, a freelance science writer, and recently, a lecturer in physics at the University of California, San Diego. The latter position exposed me to only a fraction of the heavy workload of adjuncts, many of whom teach multiple courses simultaneously at different institutions and with little support, not knowing where or whether they might find work next.

According to a report by the American Association of University Professors, adjuncts now constitute more than 76 percent of U.S. faculty. In a report titled “The Just-in-Time Professor,” the House Education and the Workforce Committee finds that the majority of adjuncts live below the poverty line. Many universities, especially public ones, experience perennial budget pressures over the years and have been reducing their numbers of tenured and tenure-track faculty, resulting in a rapid shift of the teaching load to much lower paid “contingent faculty.” Incoming students expect to be taught by full professors and may be surprised to find adjuncts teaching their classes. In spite of their working conditions, the adjuncts are just as good, but “the problem is not the people who are in the part-time or nontenure positions, it’s the lack of support they get from their institutions,” said John Curtis, the director of research and policy at the AAUP.

Like freelance workers and those in the sharing economy, adjunct professors have become part of a growing “reserve army of labor.” After many years navigating academia, which can be viewed as “path dependence and sunk costs,” many people see teaching and educating the next generation of students as their calling. Adjunct jobs give them the opportunities they seek along with flexible careers that outsiders romanticize. But make no mistake: many adjuncts cannot make a living from their work and have become increasingly unhappy about their working conditions.

The craze about massive open online courses, or MOOCs, further increases pressure on adjunct professors. Many universities, including UC San Diego, have jumped on the bandwagon behind Coursera and other online-education companies. These companies’ MOOCs and technologies may have some utility, but they have not (yet?) delivered on their potential and they are not the wave of the future. MOOCs still have poor completion rates, and nothing beats interacting and engaging with a real teacher in real time.

Adjuncts have been exploited by the “Walmart-ization” of higher education, according to Keith Hoeller, author of Equality for Contingent Faculty: Overcoming the Two-Tier System. This system neither benefits the universities nor the teachers, who have little job security and support, nor the students themselves, who need to develop relationships with teachers with sufficient resources, office space, and career-development tools. Many resist the adjunct crisis by joining unions, such as the American Federation of Teachers (of which I have been a member), Service Employees International Union, and others, and by protesting, such as in the National Adjunct Walkout Day in February. Adjunct unions have advocated for more tenured positions and longer-term salaried contracts with benefits. Some also campaign for an aspirational $15K per course, connecting their struggle to that of workers calling for a $15/hour minimum wage.

Nevertheless, universities need more funding to significantly improve this situation. Increasing student tuition is not the solution, of course, as ballooning student debt levels are already far too high. Tuition costs have rapidly increased over the past few decades because of declining state and federal funding, growing administrations and bureaucracy, and the large costs of sports facilities and coach salaries. If efforts were made along each of these directions, student tuition could be reduced while improving teaching positions. In any case, universities and governments have an important opportunity and responsibility now to improve the conditions in which teachers teach and students learn. In the future, we can hope that other teachers will not have to experience what Margaret Mary Vojtko went through.