Space Legends
By Bill Kauffman, David Isaac, Frederick Turner
In 1993, the name of amateur astronomer David Levy entered science history for the long haul, rather like Edmund Halley and Edwin Hubble, when he and his observation partners discovered Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9--whose subsequent spectacular collision with Jupiter was among the most extraordinary events ever witnessed in the solar system. Discoverer of 21 comets, author of dozens of books, science editor of Parade magazine, and a regular in that other Bible of the heavens, Sky and Telescope, Levy is the nation's foremost popularizer of astronomy. The motivation of this compleat amateur is simply a love of the skies. TAE associate editor Bill Kauffman spoke with Levy amidst the array of 14 telescopes in his backyard observatory in southern Arizona, where the names of his comets are engraved on the scopes with which he made the discoveries.
TAE: So many of the great astronomical discoveries were made by "amateurs" --from Herschel's detection of Uranus to your co-discovery of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. Is it still possible for amateurs to make significant discoveries, or has astronomy joined, say, physics, as the province of professionals?
LEVY: Just a few months ago Bill Bradfield, who lives in Australia, discovered a comet visually. It is easier for Southern Hemisphere people to find comets than it is for those in the Northern Hemisphere because the U.S. government funds a number of programs--a lot of them in the wake of Shoemaker-Levy 9's collision with Jupiter--designed to detect comets and asteroids before they hit the Earth. Almost every comet is now found by one of these programs. So instead of having comets like Shoemaker-Levy or Levy-Rudenko, you've got comets called LINEAR or LONEOS, after a funded program.
TAE: Very unromantic, isn't it?
LEVY: I would think so. They're getting more comets, but they've taken some of the fun out of it. I've now searched for ten years and I don't know if I'll ever find a comet again. But I love the search.
TAE: Is the specter of a doomsday comet crashing into Earth a realistic possibility, or is it a scare tactic to win more federal funding for science?
LEVY: It will not happen tomorrow, but every 100,000 years, maybe every 1 million years, a mile-wide comet or asteroid collides with Earth and has global effects. Our time is growing shorter. The odds of getting hit by a major comet or asteroid are about the same as being in a plane crash.
TAE: Has the line between "amateur" and "professional" astronomer grown sharper or hazier over the last few decades?
LEVY: It's grown hazier. And the reason is the advent of technology. That telescope, Clyde [he points to a 14-inch reflector named after Levy's biographical subject Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto], is capable, using software, of taking upwards of 600 search images per night. It does that without any guidance from me. All I do is choose what areas to photograph and send it on its way. With a system like that I can find comets, study those comets, and take pictures that rival what the big telescopes could have done 20 years ago.
TAE: Do professionals welcome the contributions of amateurs in astronomy?
LEVY: Some do. Some hold their noses up in the sky. The ones that truly understand what the amateur community has been doing really appreciate it. Amateurs don't get funded; they don't get paid. They pay for the privilege of contributing to a professional astronomer's data. The beautiful thing about an amateur is that nobody cares if he succeeds. If the amateur fails and spends ten years doing something without any results, the professionals won't care because they don't know that this work is being done. If the amateur succeeds, they will notice and they will care. There's really no downside for either the amateur or the professionals. It's actually a happy marriage.
TAE: You're working on a Ph.D. Do you fear you'll forfeit your amateur status with the credential?
LEVY: No, because the Ph.D. is in English literature. I've decided that it's not enough for me to enjoy the sky as it is now. I want to enjoy the sky of another time and place: 1570 to 1610. It was the time of Shakespeare, of the Supernova of 1572, the brightest star in the sky in 500 years. A second supernova appears in 1604, a series of eclipses and amazing, wondrous things appear; a parade of 20 comets, and finally the invention of the telescope. Shakespeare begins Henry VI talking about "comets." Not comet, but comets, because there were so many of them.
TAE: Astronomy is the most poetic of sciences, yet isn't it so often presented to laymen in the driest, most lifeless way?
LEVY: Yes, it is. But from the literary point of view you get the magic. You get the feeling. Shakespeare really searches for a cosmic relationship between humanity and the cosmos in King Lear: His characters debate whether eclipses affect our futures. If Lear were being written today, I imagine he'd be talking about Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 and Jupiter: Do comets colliding with planets affect us? Did comets colliding with the Earth when the Earth was young bring the building blocks of life?
TAE: The classic expression of a layman's impatience with jargon is Walt Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer," in which the poet walks out on a lecture by an astronomer to look up at and take refuge in the sky. Do most professional astronomers appreciate the loveliness of the heavens?
LEVY: It depends on how they started. If they started in graduate school, their experience of observational astronomy consists of one undergraduate course where they have to identify a constellation or two. I went to an observatory just east of here, on Mt. Graham, and I spoke to a graduate student who was using this enormous telescope. I said, "What are you observing?" She said, "I'm observing this variable star," and she gave me its number. I said, "Do you know what constellation it's in?" She didn't. I said oh, that's in the Taurus Milky Way! But she didn't know the magic. Bart Bok, one of the greatest astronomers of the twentieth century, said, "When you are in an observatory at three o'clock in the morning, stop your photograph. Stop your photometer. Walk away from the telescope. Walk down the stairs. Walk out the front door. Now walk 20 paces, no more, no less. Then stop--and look up at the stars--just to make sure you are making bloody sense."
TAE: President Bush has proposed a $100 billion program leading to human exploration of Mars. Are you for or against that?
LEVY: I support it--with four provisos. Number one: If we're going to send people to the moon and maybe even Mars, let's not just send a few astronauts, let's send a whole generation. And the way you do this is by putting a lot of energy and funding into science programs in high schools. Caveat two: Let's concentrate on the moon and build a base. Mars is a long way in the future. Third, let's make one of the places we visit the Earth. Admiral Conrad Lautenbacher, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has come up with a plan to set up automated observation stations in the oceans, in the air, and on the ground. If we do this--and the funding is minuscule compared to going to Mars--we will be able to have accurate weather forecasts a week in advance. It would allow the President to go into space and at the same time have some direct, tangible benefits. Fourth: Please save the Hubble Space Telescope. I consider a telescope mine if I have paid for it, used it, or tripped over it. The Hubble is mine because I paid for it as a taxpayer and I've used it to observe Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. We've put a lot of money into it and I don't want to see it go.
TAE: Leslie Peltier, author of the beautifully written classic of amateur astronomy, Starlight Nights (1965), opposed the space program because "so much that man touches he destroys." Will we ruin the moon and Mars?
LEVY: We have a very real chance of ruining Mars. If we're looking for microbial life forms and we land on Mars with our colds and flu and spitting and everything else we do, then so much for the microbial life forms. It might be fun to go to Mars but it's awfully expensive. We don't have to do that. We could go back to the moon and build a base; it would cost a tiny fraction of the amount. But when you look at what government does, don't you think we could spend a few dollars for each citizen to let us dream? It would give me more of a smile when I send in my income tax if I knew that some of it would go to Lewis and Clark. The Founding Fathers explored. Benjamin Franklin and that stupid kite experiment--can you imagine what his mom would have said? "Benjamin, get in here, you're going to kill yourself!" Space is not a Republican thing or a Democratic thing: It's an American thing.
TAE: Have there been any politician-astronomers?
LEVY: Abraham Lincoln. In 1864, Asaph Hall was observing Mars through the telescope at the U.S. Naval Observatory. There was a pounding at the door. He's upset and walks down the stairs to give this guy what-for. He throws the door open and there's President Lincoln, who says, "I'm really sorry to interrupt but I was taking my nightly walk. Would it be okay if I looked through this telescope?" So Hall entertains the President. About a week later there's another knock: It's the President and Secretary of War Stanton. Those two sessions lasted for quite some time.
TAE: Astronomy, one science to which kids really respond, isn't taught at the high school level, is it?
LEVY: No. Or many other places. I have never taken an astronomy course. Every little thing that I've done in astronomy has been self-taught. Turn off your flashlight for a second. [The sky has darkened.] Look up at the sky just to see how gorgeous it's getting. This is going to be a magnificent night!
TAE: Is the computerization of astronomy making nighttime stargazing the province of antiquarians and romantics?
LEVY: Yup. But I don't ever want to lose the visual. If I do, I might as well give it up, move into a condo, and get myself a nice easy chair.
TAE: It's now ten years since Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashed into Jupiter, one of the epochal events in the history of our observation of the solar system. What are your most vivid memories of that time?
LEVY: Our discovery of Shoemaker-Levy 9 was on bad film on a cloudy night. That's memory number one. Memory number two came later, on my birthday, May 22, 1993. Gene Shoemaker was loading film in the darkroom and I was checking my e-mail, and an International Astronomical Union announcement arrived relating to the comet we had discovered. It said, "We now know that this comet is going to collide with Jupiter." Gene Shoemaker's entire career was on cosmic collisions. I'm reading this loud enough for Gene to hear and all I heard was, "Oh, my God!" He rushed out: "I gotta read this!" I gave him my chair and he just stared at the message. He said, "In my lifetime, I'm going to see an impact. This is great." A final memory: I woke up the day after the impact of July 16, 1994 and I thought, "Now I know how Clyde Tombaugh felt the morning after he found Pluto."
TAE: Like Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930 at the age of 24, you made an extraordinary contribution to astronomy at a young age. What does that do to a man? Does it give you a lifetime sense of satisfaction, does it spur you to ever greater things, does it gnaw at you that you probably cannot top the untoppable?
LEVY: If it gnaws at me that I could never top that moment, then I might as well jump off a cliff now. Life has so many things to offer, and I still want to make a contribution. I want to find another comet. It won't be anything like Shoemaker-Levy 9, but it's what I do. Beavers build dams; I search for comets.
TAE: You are tied for third on the all-time comet discovery list with 21. Who's ahead of you and can you catch them?
LEVY: I suppose I could try to catch Jean-Louis Pons [37 comets], since he died in 1831 and it's pretty unlikely he's going to find any more comets. Carolyn Shoemaker has 32, so I've got a lot more to go to catch her. But SOHO, the satellite, has found 500 little cometoids; Project LINEAR has found about 50. I'm never going to catch those. So now, instead of the visual and photographic search being the only game in town, there are a lot of other games. Do I want to be first in the minor leagues? It's become a different ball game. Comet hunting is not really a science, it's a sport. But it's the world's slowest sport, measured in a lifetime instead of a few hours.
TAE: What do you think of the move to strip the title "planet" from Pluto?
LEVY: I hate it. I knew Clyde Tombaugh very well. I saw him in his declining years as he saw what they were doing to his planet. He took it personally. He would say, "Why don't they wait till I'm gone?" He felt they were demoting him with Pluto. The outer solar system has changed a lot. They're finding objects that are closing in on Pluto's size. My proposal is that we make an arbitrary lower limit: Pluto-sized objects are called planets. Anything smaller than Pluto isn't a planet, anything bigger is.
TAE: What was Tombaugh like?
LEVY: He was a punster. He'd say, "For the last 50 years I've been a Plutocrat." One day he passed somebody riding a bicycle and he opened his window and said, "Be careful of your bicycle; it's too tired." He worked at White Sands: There was this hangar queen of a missile that they couldn't get going. Finally one day he picked up the microphone and announced, "If that missile won't work, fire it!"
TAE: You have become America's premier popularizer of astronomy, in a tradition that stretches from Simon Newcomb to Percival Lowell to Carl Sagan. Are you conscious of this role?
LEVY: Providence has given me this opportunity to get a lot of people excited about the night sky. There's more to life than watching television and reading the papers. These are rough times that we're going through; what are we saving our country for? Creature comforts? A high standard of living? Why don't we also save it so that we can dream and explore?
TAE: Does Arizona have the clearest skies in America?
LEVY: Yeah. Arizona, New Mexico, Eastern California, and West Texas are about the clearest skies in the world.
TAE: You have probably spent tens of thousands of hours of your life looking up at the heavens. Why?
LEVY: It's what I love to do. I feel drawn to it. It calls to me. If it's a beautiful clear night and I don't spend at least a little while outside then I feel I'm missing something.
[And so we turn off the recorder, and under a lovely Arizona sky we point the telescopes at Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, the Orion Nebula...]
*****
In popular culture, earthlings have both conquered Mars and been conquered by it. Even Robert Zubrin has taken up this beloved topic of books and films, with his Mars novel First Landing. But his contribution to America's fascination with the Red Planet goes far beyond that. In 1990, as a senior engineer for the Martin Marietta Company, Zubrin showed how to get there. His plan, a version of which has now been adopted by NASA, is described in detail in his book The Case for Mars. Zubrin is also president of The Mars Society, which promotes the importance of manned trips to Mars and engages in technical work to advance the likelihood of success. Zubrin now runs Pioneer Astronautics, a space exploration and research company in Colorado. He was interviewed for TAE by contributing writer David Isaac.
TAE: Why should we send humans to Mars?
ZUBRIN: First for the science, second for the challenge, and third for the future.
First, for science. Mars is the key to letting us know if life is a general phenomenon in the universe. Mars was once a warm and wet planet. We have found the shores of an ancient ocean, thus it was a place where life could have evolved. The question is: Did it? If we go to Mars and find fossils, we'll have shown that the development of life is a general phenomenon. If we go to Mars and drill down to the ground water, which is where life could persist, we'd find out if it has the same biochemical structure that all Earth life has. We all use the same amino acids, the same method of encoding information with RNA and DNA, and the question is: Is that just how we do it? And you're not going to be able to drill down a kilometer with little robotic rovers. You've got to send people.
Second is the challenge. Societies are like individuals. We grow when we're challenged. We stagnate when we're not. A humans-to-Mars program would be a tremendously productive challenge for our society to embrace.
Third, the future. What will people 500 years from now think about what we're doing today? Will they care who was in power in Iraq? What we did to create civilizations on hundreds of other planets, starting with Mars; what we did to transform the human future and open up vast possibilities that otherwise would not have been there--that's what's going to matter.
TAE: You grew up in the '60s and describe yourself as one of Apollo's children. The Apollo missions influenced you as a child, but you say you then fell away from those interests. What took you away?
ZUBRIN: It stopped. The Nixon administration said it's over. We did it. We're done. Goodbye. Here I was in college. And I said, "What do I want to be? Teaching is a noble profession. I'll be a science teacher." So that's what I was for eight years.
Around 1982, I was teaching in Brooklyn and living in northern Manhattan commuting on the A train, reading novels by Herman Melville about sailing the South Seas and wondering, "What am I doing here?"
I applied to graduate school and chose to go to the one that was furthest from New York, which was the University of Washington in Seattle. I enrolled in the nuclear engineering program because at that time the greatest hope for doing something really important in science was controlled fusion.
But the fusion program in the '80s was on a downward slope. This didn't look very good to me, especially as a kind of an inventor, an alternate-concepts type of guy. When you have a program that's in contraction, no one's interested in alternate concepts. They want to try and figure out how to make the single-name concept stay on track. At the same time, I heard about this group of people called the Mars Underground who were holding meetings over at the University of Colorado in Boulder. It was called Underground because it was totally unsanctioned by the space establishment. I went to one of their meetings in '87. People were presenting papers on propulsion technology, life-support technology, human factors, scientific objectives, terraforming, and so forth. I made some contacts at the conference, including a guy who was doing the man-Mars mission design for Martin Marietta, now part of Lockheed Martin, and got myself hired doing preliminary design of interplanetary missions.
TAE: In '89, while you were an aerospace engineer at Martin Marietta, NASA handed the first Bush administration the 90-Day Report, a proposed humans-to-Mars mission. You say everyone recognized it as absurd.
ZUBRIN: It was a nonstarter. It was a $400 billion dollar plan that didn't get to Mars for 30 years. It was politically dead on arrival. They were just doing the most complex missions they possibly could in order to make all the little NASA technology fiefdoms mission-critical so that everybody would have rice in their bowl.
A number of engineers went to management and we said there's no way this is going to fly. Unless someone comes up with a better way to do humans-to-Mars there isn't going to be a program. So they pulled together a team of 12 people within the company to come up with a more practical plan. I was one of the 12.
There were a bunch of very creative people on this team so we could not agree with each other. We ended up with three alternative plans, one of which was Mars Direct [Zubrin's plan]. To his credit, the guy who was running this thing, a vice president named Schallenmuller, did not try to reconcile the plans to create a company party line. He decided to float all three and see what would happen.
What happened was that Mars Direct evoked an immediate swell of support and controversy. It was the most radical departure from the thinking of the 90-Day Report. It was ruthlessly minimalist in terms of avoiding technology development it didn't need, and zeroed in on the one thing that would enable the whole thing, which was making rocket propellant on Mars.
That would knock out all need for on-orbit assembly, all the on-orbit assembly facilities and on-orbit depots and power generation stations and advanced propulsion. Boom. We got a mission to Mars, all with present-day technology.
The reaction was incredible. We immediately had a large amount of support within NASA and even among a number of our competitors. Shortly afterwards there was a counter-reaction. People thought we were shafting them because we weren't using their technology. In 1992, somebody intelligent was appointed head of the exploration office at NASA, Mike Griffin. He invited me in to brief him on Mars Direct and he be- came a very strong supporter; then Daniel Goldin became NASA administrator and was supportive, although in looser terms.
They had me go back to Johnson Space Center and brief everybody there again, this time with the bosses telling them to listen. They said, "Look, we get it. We understand your principles. No on-orbit assembly, direct launch to Mars, use of in situ resources starting on the very first mission, long-duration stays on Mars starting on the very first mission. We accept those, but in order for us to accept the numbers, we have to design the mission ourselves." So they had their team design their own version of Mars Direct. They costed it out at $55 billion.
But by this time Clinton was in office and he decided to kill the whole space exploration initiative. A lot of people who had come around to support Mars Direct were dispersed to other programs, and Goldin was actually trying to come up with excuses why we couldn't do humans to Mars because Vice President Gore told him that that's what the administration wanted to hear. They directed people to design ever more complex mission architectures.
So by 2001 the plans had become quite bizarre. But then President Bush came out calling for humans back to the moon and Mars. There's a new team, and it includes a lot of those people who were around in '91, '92, '93, and they're starting to move things back in the direction of these much leaner mission architectures.
The thing that made Apollo work was the deadline. When Kennedy put that deadline on you had to figure out the most practical way to do it quickly. That's what made NASA efficient in the 1960s. The goal should be humans to Mars by 2016. And we should be on the moon by 2010. I mean it's ridiculous to take more than six years to get to the moon. It only took eight in 1961 and we didn't know anything. At this point we know everything that's needed to send someone to the moon, and about 85 percent of what we need to know to send people to Mars.
TAE: Why do you think the President left the timeline open?
ZUBRIN: Lack of commitment. For the past two years, Sean O'Keefe, the NASA administrator, has been running around saying, "NASA should not be destination-driven." We should be working on the technologies that will someday allow us to go anywhere, anytime. We want to go everywhere, so we won't actually try to go anywhere. It's called business as usual. In the Columbia accident, people were killed doing business as usual, in a mission with no definable science objectives worth talking about. Look at the science manifest of Columbia. The crew was flying an ant farm to see how ants develop in zero gravity.
The disaster called the attention of the political class to the space program and all of a sudden people said, "If we're going to be taking risks associated with human space flight we ought to be undertaking goals worthy of those risks. You have to have a destination for this. Presumably we're sending people into space for some reason. What's the reason?"
Around August, after the Columbia review report came out, the Bush administration people went off to a huddle to decide on the destination. They invited people to talk to the staff. I was one of the people. There were basically four groups lobbying them. One was business-as-usual people. One was the moon people. One was the Mars people. Then there were people who just liked the idea of a big program that could support lots of technology development in lots of places.
What came from Bush was a compromise among those positions. For the rest of the decade, we're going to keep doing what we have been doing. The status quo guys get six years. The moon people get the moon by 2020. The Mars people get Mars sometime--which is not very good except for the fact that it allows money to be spent on Mars technology because Mars is now classified as a legitimate goal. And the fiscal conservatives also get what they want because actually nothing has changed. It accomplishes everything except actually getting people to the moon and Mars.
TAE: You are president of the Mars Society. What are its main achievements?
ZUBRIN: One is broad public outreach to spread the vision. Second is interacting with the political class to get them to embrace humans-to-Mars as a goal and also to support the robotic program and defend it against cuts. Third has been publication of technical and non-technical ideas that are relevant to the exploration and settlement of Mars.
Fourth has been the building of our own projects that relate to Mars exploration. There, the most important achievements have been the building of two exploration stations: one in the high Arctic, where there is a crew right now 100 miles from the North Pole; and one in the desert in southern Utah. We have a third station that has been built: the European Mars Arctic Station. It's supposed to go to Iceland. Human-Mars analog exploration is not a new idea. It's been around for decades, the idea that you'd build an Arctic or Antarctic station in preparation to learn how to explore on Mars.
Back in 1989 we worked on a design for an Antarctic station for NASA. But no one could ever get funding because Congress viewed it as the camel's nose in the tent. "Oh, this is just a few million dollars, but if you do this you're starting the humans-to-Mars program and we're not paying for it so get out of here."
We raised over a million dollars privately and we built the Arctic station. The paradrop failed. The construction workers left. That was an epic in itself, but since then the ninth crew is now in the station. We've had about 28 crews in the desert station.
TAE: What are your scientific findings?
ZUBRIN: Some of the stuff is so obvious you can ask, "Did you really have to go to the station to know that?" Maybe not, but it has driven home a number of points that make people look at these missions differently.
Observation No. 1: Three days in the station doing stuff and you realize this is a physical activity. You do not want to go to Mars in zero gravity.
Artificial gravity is a requirement for effective human-Mars exploration. What that means is that NASA's entire space medicine program is misdirected. NASA has been spending billions to look at ways to operate at zero gravity. They instead should be avoiding zero gravity through artificial gravity.
TAE: Why does NASA pursue zero gravity even though they know it weakens astronauts?
ZUBRIN: Zero gravity health researchers control NASA's space medicine program. In World War II, when the bombers started flying so high that you could get hypoxia, there were two schools of thought on how to deal with it. One was to supply oxygen to the crew through oxygen masks. The other was to try to cure people through drugs to make it possible for them to breathe less oxygen. There were all these people who insisted that with the right drugs we could alter human metabolism and make it possible for the pilots to make do with less oxygen and it would be so much simpler than to bring oxygen cans with you. Changing human physiology to use less oxygen is a lot more complicated than putting oxygen in a can and putting a mask on somebody. That seems obvious now. And it became obvious by 1943, but for a while these people were dominating things.
What you have here is people who think they can alter human physiology to not be negatively affected by zero gravity, a condition that we are not adapted to and have not been living in since we left the ocean 400 million years ago--as opposed to just rotating a spacecraft. Which is the more difficult scientific problem: spinning a rigid object or changing human physiology?
TAE: Where does the future of space exploration lie? In the private sector?
ZUBRIN: That depends on a number of factors. I believe the near future, in terms of actually getting people to the moon or Mars, will require government action. The government has the money. So, like Columbus and Lewis and Clark, the first to go to these new worlds will have to be government-sponsored.
I do think that the development of Mars will require increased takeover by the private sector. You just can't create a viable society out of a base composed of government employees. You'll probably have groups of people. The Puritans were largely self-funded. Many of them had to liquidate their entire net worth in order to pay for their transportation across the ocean. But they were able to do it. Similarly with the Mormons, or the Zionist settlement movement that sends Jews to Palestine. You get a group of people who collectively can put together resources that are beyond the reach of individuals.
TAE: What is terraforming?
ZUBRIN: Terraforming means transforming another planet into one that is liveable for life from Earth. You cannot make it another Earth. Mars has a gravity that is one third of Earth's. That's not within our capability to change. Changing the planet's atmosphere to make it breathable and raising the temperature to make it liveable is within our means in principle.
TAE: Should we terraform?
ZUBRIN: Mars was once a warm and wet planet and could be made so once again. If you set up factories on Mars for producing greenhouse gases, you'll start to warm the planet up. There are large parts of Mars where the soil is 60 percent water by weight. It's frozen mud. You'll get liquid water on the surface of Mars. You'll get rain. You'll get rivers. Plants will be able to grow in the open and spread. And if humans are spreading them, and perhaps genetically engineering them, you'll cover the planet with plants and you'll start putting large amounts of oxygen in the atmosphere. And eventually it will be breathable by people and other animals from Earth. You'll have a novel living world because of the low gravity. Animals and plants will evolve in new directions.
There are some people who call themselves environmentalists who think that this is wrong, that Mars should be left in its natural lifeless-desert state. It's simply reflexive anti-humanism and perhaps political correctness gone berserk.
TAE: You say terraforming Mars "can create the technological underpinnings for not only a new branch but a new type of human society."
ZUBRIN: I can elaborate by analogy. Human beings are not native to the Earth. We're native to East Africa. We're tropical animals. We have long, thin arms with no fur on them. No human could survive a single winter night here in Colorado without technology.
But then around 50,000 years ago, people started migrating from Africa to Europe and Asia, right into the teeth of the Ice Age. To survive in the winter you had to engage in ice fishing or big-game hunting, both of which are very complex activities. Humanity transformed itself radically from this East African being to homo technologicus, the creature who can cope with all sorts of novel environments through technological creation. That is the basis on which we became a global species.
We go to places like Mars, which are perhaps comparatively hostile to us in the way that Europe was to early tropical man. But we figure out how to address that. Ultimately it leads to the creation of a human story that is richer and vaster in its possibilities. Human societies on thousands of planets orbiting thousands of stars in this region of the galaxy. Innumerable social forms and vast arrays of technologies that are as yet unconceived. A profusion of artistic creation and literatures. So yes, a new type of human civilization. That's the stakes.
Mars is the critical test that will determine whether we become a spacefaring species or whether we continue to be limited to Earth. That's why humans-to-Mars is the most important thing that our society will do when viewed from the future. It's going to be risky when people go to Mars for the first time. But nothing great in human history has ever been accomplished without courage.
*****
Freeman Dyson is that rare scientist who is esteemed as much for the felicity of his prose (Disturbing the Universe, Weapons of Hope) as for the elegance and imagination of his work in physics and mathematics. The English-born researcher, whose home base for most of his career has been the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, was an early advocate of interplanetary space exploration and a designer of Orion, a proposed space vehicle that, but for politics, might have slipped the surly bonds of Earth in the 1960s. Freeman Dyson was interviewed in Princeton by Frederick Turner, the TAE contributing writer and University of Texas at Dallas poet whose works include the epic Genesis, which imagines terraforming on Mars.
TAE: Can you tell us a little bit about your family background?
DYSON: My father was working class from the north of England. His mother, a wonderful old lady, went to work in the factory at the age of eight and loved it. She said it was much more fun than going to school. She always insisted that the decline of England started in 1870 when they introduced compulsory schooling. After that, the children never learned to take care of themselves. She made good money and was independent. She was a skilled weaver and she even bought a piano so that her son could play when he was born. She grew up as a member of this oppressed proletariat that Marx and Engels wrote about.
In those days, she said, the family all went to the factory together; the children were not alone. She went with her father and mother and her older sister and so it was a team that worked together. She was closer to her family working in the factory than she would have been if she'd been in school. And she also said that the factory was warm, whereas the cottages where they lived were cold and miserable and dark. It all depended immensely on the factory owner and the fact that the factories were generally quite small, so that it was a personal relationship. You knew the boss even if you didn't like him.
TAE: You have expressed a certain skepticism about formal education, and you were made a professor by Cornell without a Ph.D. What do you make of the credentialism in today's academy?
DYSON: Oh, it's horrible. Occasionally they do make an exception. My son did even better because he never even went to college at all. Not only doesn't he have a Ph.D., he doesn't have any degree of any kind, and two years ago he was appointed as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study here as a historian. He is totally self-educated and is now regarded by the historians as one of them. That is still possible, but it's much harder to do than it should be. I would like to abolish the Ph.D. just like that, but that seems to be unfeasible.
TAE: A huge survey by the Carnegie Commission showed that most scientists are religious. Yet there is a view around that science is incompatible with religion. What do you feel about this?
DYSON: For me personally, religion is a willingness to accept mystery. Most of the important questions are mysteries which we shall never solve, and the purpose and meaning of life is just one of those. Religion in that sense is a way of life, and it has a great deal of meaning.
TAE: At the age of eight, I had a realization of the beauty and the incredible elaboration of nature. I've never really gotten over that feeling that the whole of life is miraculous, from beginning to end. This piece of biochemistry actually has a soul. It seems to me that the world means something.
DYSON: I absolutely agree with that. Whatever you learn from science doesn't contradict that. In fact, it only makes it more miraculous.
TAE: There are differences among scientists, aren't there? A lot of physicists, even if they don't particularly believe in God themselves, almost find it necessary to postulate God in order to be able to do physics: Einstein talking about God playing dice, Hawking talking about what's in God's mind, Rutherford saying that the universe is like a gigantic thought more than like a gigantic machine, and so on. Biologists, on the other hand, in order to be able to do evolutionary biology, feel the need to take it as a principle that there is no creator.
DYSON: Right. Biologists are much more hostile to religion than physicists, and I think needlessly so. They create this opposition to science by being so dogmatic. It certainly is true that if you are a physicist, you are familiar with the fact that things are not machines. They don't follow predestined tracks. All the time we are making random choices. It's just a totally different way of looking at things from these ball and stick models that the biologists use.
TAE: So you're not a determinist?
DYSON: You can't be. Physics tells you quite clearly that randomness is built into nature.
TAE: So nature is in a sense free. There's an old philosophical idea that the physical universe is determined and rumbles on with meaningless predictability. But you don't feel that way?
DYSON: No. I think that every hydrogen atom has freedom. When you do an experiment you can see that, so it's probably true on some level that our freedom of will which we feel subjectively is somehow derived from this freedom of the individual atom. I mean, I have two identical twin grandsons, who have the same genes and the same environment and still they are different people. Somewhere in their brains the connections are different; when their brains were growing in the early stages of development, there was sort of a creativity built in.
TAE: What about genetic engineering? Do you think the human life span will be extended? Is it a good thing? Do you think that we're going to be able to make ourselves much smarter and stronger and even change ourselves so that we can breathe under water or fly and that kind of thing?
DYSON: The one thing I don't want is to have a cure for death. I'm 80 years old so I can speak freely about death. I think death is a good idea. We have to have some means of clearing away the old to make room for the young, and death seems to be a good way of doing that. The only alternative would be if there was some way of really rejuvenating people so that you lost all your old cantankerous thoughts and are really born anew; that would be almost as good as death and new birth.
Apart from that, I think most of what genetic engineering can do for us is good. I want to see a diversification of life, and we need that, of course, if we are to go away from this planet. I would like life to spread in the universe, and to have all these dead, boring places in the universe come to life with new ecologies and new communities. If we could engineer that, it would be great. It might mean that the human species could also cease to exist as a species, and would diversify into all kinds of different creatures that would be adapted to living in different places.
TAE: In a sense, I suppose that's already happened: for instance, when dwellers in the ocean colonized the land.
DYSON: It took them a long time, of course. And getting out into space is probably not all that much more difficult than getting from the ocean to the earth.
TAE: The idea of going out and colonizing the universe raises all kinds of questions--how do we overcome the light-speed barrier, or the huge distance barrier, or the time barrier? How might we have space travel that is efficient?
DYSON: Space travel is easy. It's just the biological adaptation that's difficult. To take the question of the speed barrier: I think it is a good feature of the universe that you can't go faster than light. That means if you go far enough, you really do escape from your neighbors. So there is no way in which a large empire can remain in central control. A good feature of the universe is that it really is big enough so that it has room for diversity. As for the practical aspects of space travel, those are not so difficult. We already know how to get around in the solar system. It's just a question of making it cheap enough so that it's available to ordinary people. That'll take a while. And going on interstellar trips, of course, is a totally different proposition. Then it really is a question of biology. You want to be able to put yourself into the deep freeze for a few hundred years, whatever it takes.
TAE: Or hollow out an asteroid and use that as your vehicle while successive generations live on it for 2,000 years.
DYSON: That you can also do, yes. At any rate, it's going to take a long time.
TAE: What do you think needs to happen politically, socially, economically for us to renew our venture out into space?
DYSON: We've been the victim of this really dishonest marketing of the American space program in which the human exploration of space has been sold to the public. The unmanned part of the American space program is doing beautifully, sending expeditions to the planets and to Mars and to Saturn. This is scientifically very good. It's expensive, but not too expensive. On the other hand, the manned program is not going anywhere. Everybody now realizes the shuttle and the space station are just dead ends going around and around the earth but not doing anything useful. The overall space program has been destroyed by being sold to the public under the false pretenses that what matters is this manned part.
Incidentally, our manned efforts in space could have gotten public support if presented simply as international sporting events. But of course the details would have been very different. In order to be a sporting event, it has to be exciting.
TAE: To call it a space shuttle is exactly the wrong direction.
DYSON: Yes. If it were really an international sporting event, it would be a high performance two-seater, like a sports car, which is really going places, preferably to the moon and to Mars. Something like that could happen. But it then must be honestly described. If it were, I think it would be supported quite generously by the public. I think a race to Mars would be fine.
TAE: What do you think of Robert Zubrin's idea that there should be prizes, that the money now going into NASA's manned space program ought to go into setting up prizes that individuals or corporations or enthusiastic groups of people would compete to attain?
DYSON: I completely agree with him.
TAE: I also like his idea of going to Mars and then using the Martian atmosphere to make fuel to come back with.
DYSON: His scheme for going to Mars is very good. He's a real engineer. He knows what he's talking about. And I think from a human point of view it also makes sense that it shouldn't be just a one-shot mission. It should be a succession of missions, and each one then uses the one before as a guarantee that they can get back. The one fatal flaw in his program is that he's expecting NASA to do it. When I argued with him about this he said that if NASA were given a job like this to do, it would become a different agency. Maybe he's right, but that remains to be seen.
TAE: Would NASA work better if it had some competition?
DYSON: Of course. A competition between different countries would work best. We can hope that China will compete with us some day.
TAE: What about competition right here in the U.S. between private institutions and public institutions? What if some billionaire set up a Burt Rutan or Robert Zubrin and a few other bright sparks, and put some people on Mars and brought them back?
DYSON: That could happen. I don't think it's feasible at the moment but there's no reason it shouldn't be eventually. But all this will only make sense when things get a lot cheaper than they are now. As long as the costs of Mars are as high as even Zubrin's lowest estimates, the costs are for me much too high.
TAE: There seems to be a kind of joy, a kind of hope, in your work. Can you talk a little bit about that?
DYSON: I think to a large extent it comes from growing up in the 1930s, when the situation in all respects was much worse than it is today. We had an economic depression much worse than what we have now. We had industrial pollution much worse than it is today. We had Hitler on the horizon. Our parents had lived through the horrors of World War I, and we expected World War II to be at least as bad. We all expected World War II would be a biological war. And in spite of that, we survived. Not everybody, but most of us did. If we could survive that, then I can't have any serious doubt we can survive the problems we have today.
TAE: I was born in 1943, and it seems to me that since 1943, things have just been getting better and better all the time. So I wonder why people are so worried and anxious and miserable and pessimistic.
DYSON: It's part of human nature. I think of my grandparents, who lived through this wonderful Victorian era which in retrospect was so prosperous and peaceful, and they were always worried about one thing or another. My grandmother on my mother's side actually believed the world was going to end in 1897. So my mother was brought up expecting not to be alive after age 17.
TAE: Do you think that we could, or should, one day improve ourselves biochemically so that we're not quite as miserable as we are?
DYSON: It's very dangerous once you start doing that. It's the same problem we have with drugs.
TAE: So you seem to be optimistic about our ability to use science to improve our lives, but you think there need to be rules about what to mess around with and what not to mess around with.
DYSON: Yes. Because things often go in unforeseen directions. I think of the computer industry as an interesting example. It started out with Richard Feynman here in Princeton, in this very institute. When he was building his machine he estimated that the total demand for computers in the United States would be 18. He thought of computers as being centralized, expensive, massive, and used by institutions like the Army and the nuclear weapons labs. He never dreamed of computers in the hands of children and housewives. Of course, the domestication of computers has been transforming to the whole society. I see that same thing happening with biotech in the next 30 years.
TAE: Why are the Europeans so hostile to genetic engineering?
DYSON: They see the future and don't like it. But some day a gardener who loves to grow roses and orchids will have the genetic tools available to do it better. And children will play games with little dinosaur eggs and see who can hatch the cutest dinosaur.
TAE: You seem to be saying that the safest place for any kind of new technology is in the hands of everybody.
DYSON: If everybody has the technology, you have much more chance to know what's going on. We need to try to make it very difficult to do things in secret.
TAE: So you are a sort of free marketer?
DYSON: Oh, yes, very much so. For managing technology it is certainly what's needed. Anyway, I feel very hopeful about biotech, and if it gets out into the open in this fashion, people won't be so scared of it. Every child will grow up able to handle genomes, just as today's children are more capable with computers than their parents. And in the process, those children will be much more in touch with the organisms themselves. They will have a feeling for plants and animals, which is also very precious.
