by Ed Finn
And yet many areas of potential improvement in the human condition, whether on planet Earth or in infinite space, do not seem to lend themselves to targeting. Targeting seems least effective, and most costly, when goals are broad and poorly defined. Fuzzy targets, in short, should inspire anxiety. Such laudable far-reaching targets as democratizing a country ruled by a tyrant, or improving American primary education, or preventing terrorists from using social media, are inherently flawed expressions of homo targetus. These goals and others like them require pushing down multiple paths, incorporating many specific targets, which may exponentially increase costs, complexity and chances of failure.
In his classic 1977 essay The Moon and the Ghetto, the economist Richard R. Nelson examined the paradox of the modern American state, which could put men on the Moon but not desegregate schools, improve education, find a cure for cancer, or better equip parents to raise successful children.[6] Long a leading analyst of the political economy of publicly funded research, Nelson brings valuable humility to the search for methods that can raise the odds of achieving desirable civilian goals through the concerted efforts of scientists and engineers. Neither the internal tensions within the dual-use paradigm nor the seeming ethical benefits of freedom from military imperatives and constraints are decisive here. In his 2011 essay “The Moon and the Ghetto Revisited,” Nelson identifies a different culprit:
Clearly the difficulties that societies are having in dealing effectively with some of these problems are due to the constraints associated with significant differences among citizen groups in their interests and the values they hold. However, a central argument of my book was that in many cases the constraints were not so much political as a consequence of the fact that, given existing knowledge, there were no clear paths to a solution. The heart of the problem was that society lacked the know-how to deal with it effectively.
I would argue that this remains the case today.[7]
Nelson’s concern about the centrality of knowledge to the innovation enterprise brings us full circle. Perhaps the very reason why imaginative scenarios about the future of space travel—in form, circumstance, and value—appear so compelling and useful is because fiction works best in filling critical gaps in human knowledge. It is in the gaps of our knowledge that the imagination flowers and alternative narratives thrive. While engaging with future scenarios, innovators must remain alive to the challenge of closing knowledge gaps—and in ways that insure that the inevitable spillovers from civilian to military, or military to civilian, are part of the anticipatory governance afforded the innovation project. Unintended consequences need not be wholly unanticipated. Space is a place of extraordinary promise, where the best in human impulses and aspirations can commingle with emerging technologies as yet dimly understood. Better understood are the risks of ignoring the lessons of the experience of dual-use technologies, whether in the skies or on the Earth.[8]
[1] Robert Rosner, “Preface,” in Governance of Dual-Use Technologies: Theory and Practice, ed. Elisa D. Harris (Cambridge, MA: American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2016), 1. [back]
[2] Rosner, “Preface,” 1. [back]
[3] Rosner, “Preface,” 1-2. [back]
[4] For Star Wars to actually be implemented—not simply rendered feasible in the lab—the U.S. government would have had to abandon the principles established in the 1967 Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space (colloquially, the “Outer Space Treaty”) brokered by the United Nations, as well as the 1972 Treaty on the Limitation of Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems (the “ABM Treaty”) with the Soviet Union. For more on the legal and diplomatic effects of these two treaties, see Chayes, Handler Chayes, and Spitzer, “Space Weapons: The Legal Context.” The legal constraints, as well as the force of public opinion, made the development of Star Wars as a viable operational system impractical for Reagan and his administration. For a more recent analysis of how dual-use technologies might undermine the existing space treaties’ scope and effectiveness, see Faith, “The Future of Space: Trouble on the Final Frontier.” [back]
[5] For more on the revolt against elite control over techno-science throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, see “The Port Huron Statement” published in 1962 by the Students for a Democratic Society, as well as Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” and Hughes, “Counterculture and Momentum.” [back]
[6] Richard R. Nelson, The Moon and the Ghetto (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1977). [back]
[7] Richard R. Nelson, “The Moon and the Ghetto Revisited,” Science and Public Policy 38, no. 9 (2011): 681. [back]
[8] For more information on dual-use technology, see John A. Alic, Lewis M. Branscomb, Harvey Brooks, Ashton B. Carter, and Gerald L. Epstein, Beyond Spinoff; Jay Stowsky, “The Dual-Use Dilemma”; and White House National Economic Council, National Security Council, and Office of Science and Technology Policy, Second to None. Each of these publications appears as an entry in the bibliography for this collection. [back]
Mozart on the Kalahari
by Steven Barnes
It took Michael “Meek” Prouder half an hour to magtube from Claremont to the Coachella Valley desert, near the Nestlé Reservoir entertainment pier. In this oasis of hot dogs, pinwheel fireworks, and whirlygigs, he could lounge and marinate himself, soak up rays as he listened to the music radiating from the dam wall, and sink under the rhythmic roar of artificial waves crashing against the artificial shore. He could walk out into the desert away from the city lights, far enough to gather cactus flowers or, when the sun died and the stars peeked out, to set up his telescope and watch the little matchstick structures floating there in orbit, simultaneously out of reach and close enough to touch.
The Disney Observation Platform, where the uber-wealthy could vacation above them all, free from gravity, gazing at the stars with no shrouding clouds to mask their glory, close enough to the Moon to taste the cheese.
A hundred thousand dollars a day, and cheap at the price.
If his arms were just a little longer. Just a little. If he only had the time. But when he looked in the mirror, at his discolored hands and stained eyes, he knew that time was something he couldn’t afford.
Seventeen-year-old Meek Prouder was dying, and it was his own damned fault. He could see the damage, and feel it too, a constant itching like ants marching through his veins.
He could soothe that itch by covering his mocha skin in sand, and soaking in the day’s heat. There, bathed in warmth, he could escape the constant reminder of what he had become. There, he could close his eyes against the bright light of day and dream he was on the DOP. He could … but then he wouldn’t feel the sunlight on his skin, get that tingle, that sense that something good might trickle into a wasted life. He could just soak it in.
But that feeling vanished like desert dew when he caught the magtube back west, as if every mile drained something from him, something that was alive in the greenhouse, or in the desert, but that trickled out of him in school, or shambling around the neighborhood like a brown bear in purple shades.
And by the time the tube settled onto its rails at Claremont station, all of that warmth had evaporated.
“Hey, Meek,” said Mrs. Adabezi as he walked the last row of the trailer park. “Hey, Meek,” Mr. Zhao nodded, pouring filtered piss on the little picket-rowed vegetable garden. The old man meant no harm. None of them did. But Meek walked on, paying no attention, until he was home.
“How was the desert, Michael?” Grandpa Tyrone asked, after a look and a sniff at the bouquet of pink and orange cactus flowers sprouting from a table vase. He smiled as he set a plate stacked high with quinoa pancakes in front of Meek. He was really too weak to cook Meek’s brunch, but when Meek had tried to do his own cooking after Grandma died, the look on his grandfather’s weathered face broke his heart. It was as if Meek was telling him that he was good for nothing these days
. Meek couldn’t take that last thing from a man with so little left to give.
While he ate he told Grandpa of the things he’d seen and the people he’d met out in Palm Springs. Grandpa tried to look attentive but his smiles were slow to rise, and he seemed fatigued and ashen, as if he had eaten a bad apple. Or maybe had some of the same stuff that was killing Meek. Grandpa seemed to think the same about Meek, and asked: “You feeling okay?”
“Fine.”
“Let’s go out to the greenhouse,” Grandpa said, and after dishes were cleared and desserts dished into trays Meek wheeled him out. And there, inside the plastic flaps of the tent in the little square of yard they rented from the Zhaos, they sat and spoke of the old days. Grandpa was ancient enough to remember when the magtube was just built, when the government used that eminent domain thing to build what nobody had wanted.
“What you wanna do, boy?” he asked.
Meek took another big bite of dwarf-peach cobbler and pointed up. “Get up there,” he said. The Moon was high above them, visible through the transparent roof as a big old pie he could just eat up.
Grandpa gummed his cobbler, thoughtful.
“They say people like us don’t go up there,” he said. “That we’re trapped. That robots are taking all the jobs, and folks hate us for being dole babies.” A twinge of pain crossed the old man’s face. Once he’d earned his living by the sweat of his brow, supported a wife and grandson. But the L.A. Quake had broken the city’s finances and much of the infrastructure, and the corporations that swooped in to provide and maintain services made … let’s just say different decisions than had the general electorate.
Declining tax base and virtual classrooms had crumbled the state’s college system. Then they brought in the drone gardeners … and early retirement had been the best of Grandpa’s very poor options. Still, he found the optimism to add, “But I still believe that if you use your mind, you can go anywhere you want.”
And he meant it. Grandpa was the only one who didn’t laugh at Meek’s dreams. The last time Meek’s girlfriend Sonja had come to the greenhouse, she’d ooohed and aaahed at the only such facility she’d ever seen, eaten free peaches and pears and nuzzled him with honeyed breath, but just rolled her eyes when he’d told her about the Moon. Space wasn’t for them. Hell, shouldn’t be for anybody, the way she saw it. What good was it, when there weren’t enough jobs right here on Earth?
“All kinds of things came out of people trying to get to space,” he’d said.
“You wanna tell me about satellites again?” Sonja laughed. “Maybe cell phones and microchips, like Mickey says?” She squeaked her voice like the mouse in the cartoon they’d watched in assembly: “We need Space! We need to get to Pluto, Pluto!”
He remembered that animation, an attempt to convince them that tax subsidies were not wasted on the Disney Observation Platforms hovering around the globe. “That stuff is real,” he said, her kisses cooling as he did. “We need dreams even more.” She’d looked at him slyly, smoothing his hand up along her leg. “What are you dreamin’ now, boy?”
“That there’s a way out,” Meek said. “Up there.”
“What?” Her hand froze where it was. “We shippin’ all the broke-asses up there? Ain’t enough spaceships, Meek. You trippin’. The Meek ain’t gonna inherit the Earth.” They’d argued. She’d left. And that was the end of Them.
As he often did, Meek poured all his emotion into his plants, thinking of nothing outside the plastic walls until Grandpa wheeled out with a covered dish of mac and cheese and homegrown broccoli. The old man turned his head to watch what Meek was doing. “Whatchu up to, boy?”
“I want this orchid to dance with this dwarf orange tree, Gramps. Would sell great at the street fair.”
“Did at that, boy.” He peered more closely at Meek’s workbench, with the centrifuge and the pipettes and the little racks and stain-wipes. The label said MONSANTO GENE KIT UNIVERSITY EDITION.
Grandpa squinted. “Where you get that stuff?”
“Traded for it,” Meek mumbled.
His grandfather’s face tightened in response. “You steal that, boy?”
His face burned. “Traded for it.”
“From someone who stole it for you,” said Grandpa, being no fool. “I know you. Don’t you try to lie to me now. You traded what?”
“Stuff I made,” he said, hating himself. A lie was a lie, even when hiding behind a half-truth.
His grandfather scowled, but then began to laugh. “Boy, you ain’t got the sense God gave a gopher, but damned if you don’t straight-up remind me of your daddy.”
Meek’s daddy. He’d been out of work too, wanted something to do. Meek had only been five years old when his daddy and a few friends tried to rob the OPEC ambassador, and gone to jail forever.
“Let’s not talk about it,” Meek said, and turned on the little box that gave them their entertainment. Meek liked the Wizard of Aaahs science show, and watched its lectures and demonstrations whenever he could wrest the set away from Gramps. Grandpa liked the news. Together they scanned through the dozens of news channels until Meek saw something that he liked: an image of Clarke Station. The Clavius-based Biology Lab was dedicated to recombinant DNA research, where escaping microbes were a quarter-million miles of insulating vacuum away from Earth.
And then an image of the luxurious DOP, visible only as a skeletal matchbox through his telescope.
“No way,” Meek whispered.
“—and on the twentieth anniversary of the establishment of Luna base, we announce the American Space Society’s first annual Science Contest. Five lucky students will receive five-year college scholarships to Yale-Gates and an all-expenses paid trip to the Disney Observation Platform …."
It reverberated in his head like a gong.
Trip to the DOP!
The contestants would be selected from a pool of science lottery winners, schools being gifted with tickets according to some arcane formula, distribution of said tickets to be determined by each school. Winners would have six weeks to create a project related in some way to human exploration of the solar system.
Six weeks. Then all winners in the western states would gather, and compete for one of the five scholarships.
In the halls of school the next day, he ghosted through classes he was failing anyway, damaged eyes hidden behind his shades, tainted hands concealed in gloves, fear and despair numbing him until he could barely hear what was said to him by the students and teachers.
Trip to the DOP!
The words echoed in his head in gym class, a soundtrack to the thuds and grunts on the football field, the constant companion of the pain in his knees strangely absent. He was numbing out, he reckoned. Nerve damage, another symptom of the toxins that would take his life. Oh, he could take the hits, but knew that deep down his bones were breaking a little more every day. He had maybe a year. Possibly two. Certainly no more.
Young, desperate, invincible, he had made drugs for the Ballers to supplement the money Grandpa made at the Pomona Street Market, and he knew the chemicals he’d used had poisoned him. “Make more of it,” they said to him. “We can make you rich.”
But it wasn’t enough money to make a damned bit of difference in the long run, and with the time bomb ticking in his blood there wasn’t a long run. Nothing much mattered any more, except the last dream his heart dared to hold.
Meek sleepwalked home, his brain abuzz.
“What you thinking about, boy?” Grandpa seemed more shrunken than usual, his face greenish in the reflected light. “What you doing over there in the back where I can’t get no more? Just because I can’t get around don’t mean that I don’t know what you doin’ back there!”
A locked toolshed abutted the greenhouse, through a vertical slit cut in the plastic. Meek spoke the password to the lock on the shed’s door, and it swung open. This was where he did his magic, where he grew the plants that had earned him the fast money, the “friends,” the things he’d traded fo
r the Monsanto kit. It was stealing, no matter what he said. He knew it, Grandpa knew it. This was why he did it: orchids and dwarf orange trees and crossbreeds with no names. This was his place, the greenhouse within the greenhouse, the only place in this world he felt at home. But maybe there was another world. If he wasn’t almost out of time.
The work sink in his secret place was a simple thing of beaten metal and thin porcelain. A hobgoblin glared back at him from the mirror. Ghoul’s eyes. A ghost without a grave, the sclera tinged green as mold on rotting cheese.
No one knew him. No one would miss him, once Grandpa was gone, which would be soon, he knew. Soon.
And then Meek would be gone too, as if he had never lived at all.
Exactly one week later, Tyrone Prouder didn’t wake up. When the county men came to take him away, Meek refused to let go of his cold hand, or let the paramedics carry his body out of the house. That was his job. Grandpa’s body felt as brittle and hollow as a bag of dried leaves. Because Meek was more man than boy he was allowed to stay in the house, although relations came sniffing around and told him that they’d had “arrangements” with Grandpa Prouder, “understandings” that they would own the house after his death.
“We’ll take care of you,” Aunt Emma from Bakersfield said.
“And you can believe that,” said “Minister” Folks from Kansas, a cousin or great-uncle or something. Meek didn’t know, and didn’t care.
He spent more and more time in the greenhouse. When he wasn’t deep in his cuttings, he was in the desert soaking in the sun and searching for the little cactus flowers his grandpa loved. He’d bring them back to the trailer because the house was still clotted with family who seemed to think that “wake” meant “move on in.”