On technology and freedom

Charles Krauthammer's year-end observation, "Are We Alone In The Universe" prompted me to recall for how long I have seen humanity's tenuous grip on high technology-- including the means to destroy itself by nuclear weapons-- as inextricably linked to human freedom, and democracy in particular.  I developed my view during the Cold War era that nation-states that did not derive legitimacy from a politically free people did not have the right to possess the technological means to destroy civilization, even in self-defense.  The right to amass a nuclear arsenal, my assertion went, belonged only to democracies whose national powers were subject to the consent of the governed.

The "corollary" to my theorem proved it so: When the Soviet Union collapsed under, among other things, the sheer weight of technological advances in the West's anti-ballistic missile arsenal and its government realized that it no longer could no longer keep pace without trusting its scientists to work independently, the necessity for democracy seemed airtight.  In other words, without freedom, a society's technological advancement would hit a wall, making it incapable of defending itself militarily.  I recall thinking how Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost (openness they could survive without) was a risky prerequisite for perestroika (restructuring they could not survive without).

When I met Microsoft founder Bill Gates in 1995, I thanked him for ending the Cold War, quickly explaining my theory that the personal computing revolution forced the Soviet military industry to either trust their own people (and decentralize computational power) or surrender.  Gates responded he had not thought about the impact of his products quite this way, but he accepted my thanks.

In Krauthammer's piece, he argues that while politics is derided in the media and politicians might be intellectual midgets as compared to, say, nuclear physicists, it's the art of statecraft that has prevented humanity from letting its technological ingenuousness destroy itself.  (Score one for reading over math!)  But when I see technology and innovation more broadly, I am less equivocal; human freedom is why a civilization thrives economically, not how (e.g., free markets), but by feeding and protecting open thought and putting a premium on creativity above all else.

[Ahem: That's why I say it is freedom's ultimate duty to either remove nuclear weapons from non-democracies, or proliferate freedom and democracy to any country that dares to possess them.]

In the case of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon, there is no apparent political legitimacy to match such power.  If we were to go down the list, Russia, China, North Korea, Pakistan, and others would be morally excluded from the nuclear club, too, because they are not capable (for their lack of freedom) to meet future technological requirements to safeguard them.  The US has itself diverted enough engineering and scientific talent to keep and maintain its arsenal, but truth be told, it struggles to maintain its technological edge because America's "best and brightest" would rather make iPad and Android apps than guns.

The global borderless Internet and all its derivative open-source exchange of opinion and technological toys and tools-- which sprang 100% from the inextricable marriage between freedom of expression and technological prowess itself, has unalterably changed the measure of freedom on the planet.  (Thump our free, hairy chests on that!)  One can now truly hope the power of this global, backbone "utility" will only cause global freedom to exponentially expand and increase.

Yet in places like Syria, Egypt, or Yemen or Libya, this ultimate technological platform for freedom and free expression has just been used to launch an unthinkable1000-year biblical march backwards, against individual freedom and expression throughout the Muslim world.  I can only explain the paradox by saying that my cherished inextricable link between technology and freedom is broken, unchained temporarily. How else to explain the use of Enlightenment means to achieve Dark Ages ends?

Until every nation state sees their economic fortunes tied to technological advancement, and devotes the necessary support for freedom to sustain it, the threat of war over lesser, albeit important resources (energy supplies, minerals, etc.) will persist-- and the duty of free nations like the US will be to win.

But if Krauthammer's provocation is true-- that humanity is alone, abandoned by failed exoplanetary civilizations that destroyed themselves at the peak of their technological advancement-- know that we human folk have a vast undeveloped frontier called "freedom" untapped here on Earth, so ripe and rich, to explore and exploit.

Krauthammer Profound - (My take to follow)

Are we alone in the universe?

By Charles Krauthammer, Published: December 29

Huge excitement last week. Two Earth-size planetsfound orbiting a sun-like star less than a thousand light-years away. This comes two weeks after the stunning announcement of another planet orbiting another star at precisely the right distance — within the “habitable zone” that is not too hot and not too cold — to allow for liquid water and therefore possible life.

Unfortunately, the planets of the right size are too close to their sun, and thus too scorching hot, to permit Earth-like life. And the Goldilocks planet in the habitable zone is too large. At 2.4 times the size of Earth, it is probably gaseous, like Jupiter. No earthlings there. But it’s only a matter of time — perhaps a year or two, estimates one astronomer — before we find the right one of the right size in the right place.
And at just the right time. As the romance of manned space exploration has waned, the drive today is to find our living, thinking counterparts in the universe. For all the excitement, however, the search betrays a profound melancholy — a lonely species in a merciless universe anxiously awaits an answering voice amid utter silence.

That silence is maddening. Not just because it compounds our feeling of cosmic isolation, but because it makes no sense. As we inevitably find more and more exo-planets where intelligent life can exist, why have we found no evidence — no signals, no radio waves — that intelligent life does exist?
It’s called the Fermi Paradox, after the great physicist who once asked, “Where is everybody?” Or as was once elaborated: “All our logic, all our anti- isocentrism, assures us that we are not unique — that they must be there. And yet we do not see them.”

How many of them should there be? The Drake Equation (1961) tries to quantify the number of advanced civilizations in just our own galaxy. To simplify slightly, it’s the number of stars in the galaxy . . .
 
multiplied by the fraction that form planets . . .
multiplied by the average number of planets in the habitable zone . . .
multiplied by the fraction of these that give birth to life . . .
multiplied by the fraction of these that develop intelligence . . .
multiplied by the fraction of these that produce interstellar communications . . .
multiplied by the fraction of the planet’s lifetime during which such civilizations survive.

Modern satellite data, applied to the Drake Equation, suggest that the number should be very high. So why the silence? Carl Sagan (among others) thought that the answer is to be found, tragically, in the final variable: the high probability that advanced civilizations destroy themselves.

In other words, this silent universe is conveying not a flattering lesson about our uniqueness but a tragic story about our destiny. It is telling us that intelligence may be the most cursed faculty in the entire universe — an endowment not just ultimately fatal but, on the scale of cosmic time, nearly instantly so.

This is not mere theory. Look around. On the very day that astronomers rejoiced at the discovery of the two Earth-size planets, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity urged two leading scientific journals not to publish details of lab experiments that had created a lethal and highly transmittable form of bird flu virus, lest that fateful knowledge fall into the wrong hands.

Wrong hands, human hands. This is not just the age of holy terror but also the threshold of an age of hyper-proliferation. Nuclear weapons in the hands of half-mad tyrants (North Korea) and radical apocalypticists (Iran) are only the beginning. Lethal biologic agents may soon find their way into the hands of those for whom genocidal pandemics loosed upon infidels are the royal road to redemption.

And forget the psychopaths: Why, a mere 17 years after Homo sapiens — born 200,000 years ago — discovered atomic power, those most stable and sober states, America and the Soviet Union, came within inches of mutual annihilation.

Rather than despair, however, let’s put the most hopeful face on the cosmic silence and on humanity’s own short, already baleful history with its new Promethean powers: Intelligence is a capacity so godlike, so protean that it must be contained and disciplined. This is the work of politics — understood as the ordering of society and the regulation of power to permit human flourishing while simultaneously restraining the most Hobbesian human instincts.

There could be no greater irony: For all the sublimity of art, physics, music, mathematics and other manifestations of human genius, everything depends on the mundane, frustrating, often debased vocation known as politics (and its most exacting subspecialty — statecraft). Because if we don’t get politics right, everything else risks extinction.

We grow justly weary of our politics. But we must remember this: Politics — in all its grubby, grasping, corrupt, contemptible manifestations — is sovereign in human affairs. Everything ultimately rests upon it.
Fairly or not, politics is the driver of history. It will determine whether we will live long enough to be heard one day. Out there. By them, the few — the only — who got it right.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com

© The Washington Post Company

A dissrevice to Iowa

For most newspaper-reading folk, the highly-anticipated Iowa Caucuses on January 3 sure sound important.  For the GOP candidates for president, they surely are.

But why?

No offense, Iowans, but the more attention these delegate selection caucuses get, the less they mean to me.  Moreover, the Iowa I know from living next-door in Wisconsin (and having organized caravans of College Republicans to cross the Mississippi to campaign for Iowa Republican candidates) is barely recognizable in the heat of this particular winter.  From the coverage in national news outlets, Iowa sounds like it's full of narrow-minded people who will render an especially harsh judgement on the fate of each GOP candidate.

In the Iowa I remember, pork roasts and farm dinners were happy affairs that joined like-minded conservatives in the excitement of grass-roots politics.  On TV, it's as though the GOP candidates are bowing to Ku Klux Klan, or at least the evangelical wing of such, in order to prove their purity and chastity.  But, I digress, dear Iowa; all this is not of your making.  No, the blame goes to none other than the candidates themselves.

True, perhaps Iowa is more conservative or more "family values" than other places, but to watch the GOP primary boil down to pandering to what its candidates think Iowans want does Iowa a bad deed.  While it's understood that a loss in Iowa will end the campaigns of Rick Santorum and Michelle Bachmann, and I understand how hard it must be for a candidate to have, essentially, a one-state strategy, their recent statements have begun to make me wonder just how much, deep down, they actually hate Iowans.

When Mr. Santorum treads water proclaiming the size of his family and his political purity on social issues makes him the only logical choice for Iowans, he is discounting their intelligence.  When Mrs. Bachmann insists that her simpleton's meshing of scripture with the US Constitution makes her a better president, Iowans are smart enough to cringe, too.

Coalition politics is not the same as party politics and is twice-removed from governing.  Iowa might have tons of conservatives and simple folk to appeal to, but none of them are dumb or simple-minded.  Despite the economic boost from having so many politicians running around the state every four years, Iowans might consider what all this pandering-- or a particularly strong showing by Ron Paul in the caucuses-- does to its citizens' reputation.

It might be worth it for most Iowans to take a step back from being the first delegate-nominating state and let all the base pandering go on someplace else.  Then again, if I remember them, Iowans just don't give much thought to how they look to the rest of the country in the first place.

Guts vs. Glory

Enough said.

The Republican Smoothie

Last night’s CNBC debate between the GOP candidates in Michigan was truly revealing of each of the hopeful’s core beliefs and policy proposals.  It was one of the most substantive discussions that stuck mostly to major issues in memory.  Easy as it might be to rate their performances or score them by “points” earned (or lost, er… uhm… due to forgetfulness), my mind wandered to how voters could magically throw them all in a blender to make a more potent if tart-tasting Republican smoothie.

Bananas. It’s too bad that Ron Paul comes off as such an old flake, but his avowedly libertarian view of classical free market economics is at the core of post-Rockefeller Republican thought.  His central point, poorly put by his rambling responses last night, is fundamentally correct: Anytime the government enters any marketplace, it creates distortions that increase costs on top of the taxes raised to pay for the program.  Smoothies use bananas less for flavor than for viscosity and structure.  Ron Paul’s observation that markets are perverted by government is an indispensable ingredient.

Fiber. Newt Gingrich’s deep reservoir of fact-rich arguments that elevate typical conservative slogans to meaningful policy proposals ensure nutritional value for a country that is not just starving for new leadership, but is malnourished when it comes to sturdy solutions.  The smoothie is just an icy milkshake without stalks of celery or kale, and the former “third-in-line” to the presidency refuses to make small talk with voters.  His seriousness is breathtaking and his answers in last night’s debate were exhilarating, particularly in his illustration, using the College of the Ozarks’ work-study program, as a counterweight to whining about the fate of current student loan programs.

Apples and oranges. Herman Cain did not, thank goodness, need to resort last night to the “apples and oranges” argument he used clumsily in a previous debate to distinguish between his proposed national sales tax and state sales taxes.  But without apples and oranges thrown in for sweetness and tartness, smoothies can wind up tasting bland or bitter.  Mr. Cain’s 9-9-9 plan (which stands for a 9% corporate flat-tax, a 9% personal income flat-tax, and a 9% national sales tax) has caught fire not just for its simplicity and voter appeal, but because it upends the Washington apple cart.  As Mr. Cain points out, lobbyists, accountants and tax attorneys will be jobless if he wins.  Other (twice-higher) flat-tax proposals put forth by his GOP rivals don’t offer near the satisfaction, and debate watchers were thrilled to see Mr. Cain get back to talking about 9-9-9.

Strawberries, raspberries. Without making too little of Rick Santorum or Michelle Bachman, not every smoothie needs them.  Only the strawberries or raspberries feel so special about being included.  In a smoothie, berry flavors are quickly lost, leaving just their tiny little seeds to stick between your teeth. Santorum and Bachman shared a shrill quality last night, boasting that various legislative proposals they each had made qualified them best to be president— not because they were made law, but because they were clairvoyant.  Bragging “I told you so” is not a distinguishing policy strategy and it’s a really weak debate point.  Pick one or the other, or neither; they won’t be missed after Iowa.

Ice. Tempted as I may be to forget about Rick Perry after he so forcefully forgot the third agency of the federal government he would eliminate, a smoothie worth its name is impossible to make without adding ice cubes— knowing full-well they will get chopped up and melt in the blender.  Without enough ice, smoothies turn lukewarm and are no longer refreshing or enjoyable.  True, debates are not the full measure of a presidential candidate, and perhaps Perry is hiding non-rhetorical gifts we can’t see from watching his glassy-eyed expressions listening while other candidates speak.  With so much coolness he could yet offer, Perry’s the GOP ice man.

And speaking of being forgetful, how can Republicans please forget Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman?  These two are easily the most adaptable flavors in the GOP field, consistent only by their purported thoughtfulness and openness to positions and policies no Republican would dare run on in a primary.  Both are also self-made candidates, that is, wealthy heirs who have decided, seemingly altruistic, to spend their fortunes in the name of public service.  Ideological positions are just not their strong suit.  One has implied Republicans prefer to be dumb when it comes to science, and the other insists he won’t do for America what he did while governor of Massachusetts.  Only one of them, Romney, stands a serious chance of winning the Republican nomination.

If he does in fact win the primaries, sticking to this analogy a final gasp, Romney will be but the paper cup—the untrustworthy vehicle, apologetically carrying the great Republican smoothie into the general election, devoid of any flavor of his own while Huntsman stands by as the eco-friendly, bio-degradable plastic straw.

Everything you need to know about space

This year marks my twentieth year in space.  In 1991 I was appointed to monitor NASA programs for the minority staff of the House Committee on Science, and quickly made myself at home in a warren of cubicles in the Rayburn House Office Building that housed the “Subcommittee on Space, Science and Applications” staff— scientists and engineers of one kind or the other— who each year examined the president’s budget proposal for NASA and write the “authorization of appropriations” bill.

As a Republican outsider with just a political science degree, I learned quickly that I had to learn quickly to keep up.  Briefings by NASA officials and aerospace companies on every space mission and program were regular, almost daily occurrences, chock full of technical terms and financial reporting nuances I had little familiarity with.  Each week or so, the Subcommittee would conduct hearings for Members of Congress to question agency officials on the progress of specific programs. My job was to brief Republican members on the subject matters before them, suggest thoughtful questions to ask witnesses, write “opening statements” that reflected the policy preferences of GOP members— all in order to create a written official “record” on which to base the program direction and budget levels to be enshrined in the annual NASA authorization bill. Lacking any prior frames of reference than simple political common sense, and envious of my staff colleagues’ apparent experience and technical knowledge, I approached learning on-the-job with great vigor.

Here, in summary form, is what I learned from 20 years "in space"...

1. No bucks, no Buck Rogers.  Though space is the quintessential existential human endeavor, it has a steep price, especially where human space travel is concerned.  If the US wishes to remain on the forefront of human space exploration, it must pledge the taxpayer resources to do so.  Too many times, companies who pretend to heed the call for “commercial” space alternatives to government-owned space systems, fall short closing the business case.  Whether they are simply pandering to the anorexic political will that quickly seizes on any space program that’s “free,” when push comes to shove, few are serious entrepreneurs and even fewer risk more than marketing money.
2. Until magic is harnessed, moving any amount of useful material (equipment, satellites, laboratories, inter-stellar spacecraft) reliably off the face of the earth into low-earth orbit is apt to remain highly expensive.  Without huge numbers of launches to lower average per-launch costs, no magic fuel has been invented that breaks gravity for much less than $11,000 per pound, making space access exclusive to purposes able to justify the threshold cost.  Even though operational improvements by commercial companies may cut marginal space launch costs by noticeable amounts, the physics still require transporting huge amounts of fuel weight every time. 
3. Private space tourism is essential to government space exploration.  Given the high reliability and consequent price tags for making useful manmade devices (upwards of $25,000 per pound) that might be catapulted to orbit in any given year, opening the market model to safely launch natural human beings, who in fact pay for their “rocket ticket,” is the only viable strategy for vastly increasing launch demand and vastly reducing average launch costs.
4. There is no substitute for the president.  Because we’re not talking about meeting an immediate crisis— say, an asteroid on a direct path towards Earth menacing human extinction— the only urgency for funding space exploration by the US government must come directly from the president.  It’s almost cliché to repeat John F. Kennedy’s speeches that staked his reputation on sending humans to the Moon (and returning them safely to Earth…before the decade was out), yet Kennedy’s leadership is only reason why the Apollo missions were funded and completed.
5. NASA is weak.  Without the president leading the charge into space, NASA can’t lobby itself out of a paper bag.  Notorious cost overages in major programs are routine, making the most positively predisposed president reluctant to push for a budget that can’t be reliably upheld.  Public confidence in government is low; government confidence in NASA is lower.
6. Congress is weak, too.  When it comes to NASA, Congressmen and Senators with the power of the purse dare not exceed the president’s imagination or budget requests.  In the current fiscal crisis of super-committees and mandatory automatic cuts to discretionary budgets, it is very tempting to let NASA suffer and not look back.  With the major operational program of NASA, the Space Shuttle, permanently retired from its books, the chances of NASA surviving Washington’s new thermal-vacuum austerity with any meaningful capacity are slim-to-none.
7. The public is already there.  Apart from adding financial demand for space tourism, the general public that buys billions of dollars a year worth of science fiction books, games, movies and so-forth, must make their consumer demands heard by politicians.  Their multi-billion dollar purchases fairly represent proven investments in scientific, futuristic curiosity and, I would argue, a significantly higher public investment in space exploration.
8. Space is not timeless.  When it comes to NASA, a precious, perishable resource is at stake.  Despite due criticism, there is no other bunch of people on Earth who has “done it”— “it” being the ability to land humans on another celestial body and get them back alive— and they are dying off.  Bridging between the generation of engineers and mission planners that did to a new generation that can only hope is worth every penny, lest the know-how and can-do be irreplaceably lost.  Time is short and the consequences of failing loom large.
9. Sell the program and the dreams will follow.  For all of its faults, the imposition of a national infrastructure for access to space is akin to building the national highway system or the modern internet.  When NASA has failed to sell its missions to Congress, it turns to selling the many interesting “spin-offs” that have resulted from space technology, some of them remarkable, but most of these are easier and more economically invented without carrying the whole NASA budget behind them.  If NASA is worth funding, sell the missions and the science to be realized, not the ancillary "spin-off" benefits.
10. Sell the dream and the programs will follow.  If we have anything to show for the Apollo project and the expenditure of 1 percent of GDP that it required, it is too large to be appreciated.  An exceptional generation of young people grew up 100% certain they would travel frequently to space and live in colonies established on the Moon.  When that did not happen because their government abandoned those dreams, the generation that frequently calls themselves the “Apollo Orphans” went on to do such trivial things as build the internet economy, personal computing, biotechnology and the mobile web.  Who knows what else this mathematics-friendly generation might have invented had their country kept going into space?

The CAIN Doctrine

Republicans last night worked hard to score points with Jewish voters and evangelical Christians by vowing their unconditional support for Israel in the face of increasing threats to its security from Iran and the so-called Arab Spring uprisings.  Candidate Herman Cain won rapturous applause when he said, plain-spoken as ever, “If you mess with Israel, you’re messing with the USA.”

Though none of his opponents questioned the “Cain Doctrine” last night, much less debated the finer points of whether US troops would enter a war between Israel and any of its enemies, it was a moment of rare clarity to be seized on.

The reason US policy in the entire region is failing under President Obama is simply that he is the first president to have abandoned the de-facto “Cain Doctrine” that has been the cornerstone of US policy throughout since the British mandate over Palestine expired in 1948.  Without this cornerstone alliance, only very recently abandoned, all US relationships, alliances, and US diplomacy with Israel and its neighbors have utterly disintegrated.

What we learn from the policy of President Obama is that absent the anchor of an evident, visible US-Israeli alliance, the US has no place to berth its power and influence in the region.

When President Obama abandoned Israel’s only peace treaty partner, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, it was not interpreted by regional actors as siding with Egyptian democracy, but only as a further step taken by his administration to disengage the US from Israel.  From the palaces to the streets, the symbolism and effect was not lost in the Arab world.  And while it is convenient to say the US did not anticipate the sweep of Arab Spring passions for democracy, history will record a net loss of political freedom and US influence throughout the region.

When best friends don’t know where the US stands, it is impossible for our adversaries (and adversaries of our friends) to know.  Instead of the easily discernable framework of friends and enemies required by the game of peace, President Obama has thrown all the cards in the air, determined only that they will land in new hands.

For proof, witness the spectacle this week in the United Nations where the Palestinian Authority—a whole-cloth creation of the US at Oslo— thumbs its nose at the obligations it took to negotiate with Israel, simply demands admission to the UN, thus abandoning them.  One sees the domino effect of toppling decades of strong practical alliances and agreements throughout the region, not due to the audacity of antagonists, but due solely to the paucity of the US President.

Having established a pattern of visibly undermining the Israeli-US alliance, it was yet more ridiculous and dissembling for President Obama to stand at the UN podium and lecture the Palestinian Authority about what peace requires.  Oh really?

True perhaps the simplicity of the Cain Doctrine makes it easy fodder for liberals to question how far US obligations to Israel could extend.  But single-handedly and in less than 3 years, President Obama has shown us where the so-called alternative to it leads America in vivid, living diplomatic disaster.