Alcove

Science, culture, complexity

Tag: sustainability

  • Solve all our problems

    This is xkcd #1232. When it came out I remember it was to rebut a particular line of argument against NASA’s lunar and interplanetary missions — that the agency was spending large sums of money that would be better spent on “solving problems on Earth”. Considering Earth would always have problems, xkcd and others contended, we’d never be able to go to space if we had to spend all our time, money, and labours fixing them. The snark implied in #1232 was warranted.

    But recently, I saw this comic used in a different context: during a conversation (in a private group) about Elon Musk’s aggression with SpaceX and his plans to colonise the moon and visit Mars in his lifetime. Insofar as #1232 pushed back against space exploration that couldn’t by any measure subtract from public spending on socio-economic welfare and justice, it was clever and good. But in the conversation in the group, #1232 donned a new implication: of reducing any other (even minimally) legitimate criticism of the world’s plans to land probes on the moon, establish lunar bases, and start the human campaign to permanently settle the moon and of Elon Musk’s and SpaceX’s plans to being an argument about spending on space exploration subtracting from more immediately measurable pursuits.

    Two arguments come to mind that are poorly served by such flattening. First: the pace at which SpaceX has been manufacturing satellites, launching rockets, and expanding its satellite constellations is at odds with its, and our, ability to deal with the environmental footprint of these activities. Neither SpaceX nor Musk have made any provisions for the activities to be sustainable and they should asap. Doing so might slow the company down, and the company needs to stop considering this retardation to be undesirable. Yet SpaceX’s supporters have often construed any criticism of the company’s pace to be criticism of the company altogether and as the argument that its money would be better spent doing other things.

    Second: I was recently asked a curious question during a formal engagement at work. Is it ethical for India to spend so much on Gaganyaan considering we live in a world with war, violence, and poverty? Gaganyaan has so far cost the Indian government more than Rs 11,000 crore. But there are a couple underlying assumptions here, leading up to questions of the ethicality of human spaceflight, that are flawed.

    (i) The allocation of resources for various activities isn’t a zero-sum game in India. The national budget is voluminous enough for the government to fund both human spaceflight and poverty alleviation programmes. Also unlike in game theory, fractional outcomes are possible and possibly more desirable. For example, India can make great strides in its poverty alleviation programme if it diverts only 0.1% of its defence spending (Rs 6.2 lakh crore in 2024-2025) that way.

    (ii) Many of us like to believe if we don’t spend money on X, it will be available for Y. (Here, X could be ’spaceflight’ and Y could be ‘alleviating poverty’.) We don’t stop to ask whether the state will divert it to Z instead (say, ‘missiles’). If we’d like to guarantee X → Y, we need to persuade the state to rejig its existing priorities and prevent X → Z. Expecting ISRO to not pursue Gaganyaan with funds provided by the state isn’t reasonable.

    In sum, it seems like the “let’s first fix all problems on Earth” argument has become both straw man and red herring in conversations about off-world human activities whose benefits aren’t entirely clear at the moment. The real problem is of course that the benefits aren’t clear, not that the activities are happening at all, plus the belief that money spared by not performing one activity will automatically become available for the precise alternative activity we’re rooting for.

  • Refusing battles

    “Pick your battles” is probably the most important thing I’ve learnt as a journalist. A lot of it is probably due to my firm belief that science has always been political, and getting people to see this has often left me grappling with difficult questions in a variety of areas, which in turn required my engagement with a diverse multiplicity of people, ideas, and problems. In the course of working like this as a journalist for a decade, I got to contribute to as well as publish some wonderful work. But it also took me a decade to be honest to myself and admit that I was going about all this the wrong way.

    Constantly questioning myself and my privileges as I began my journalistic career had, over time, pressed into my skull the idea that, given the resources at my disposal, I could always do more than I was doing at any moment. So I took on more work, and more kinds of work, even as I began to interpret the resulting stress as an inability to be as efficient as necessary. By mid-2022, this misguided conflation had exacted a heavy toll on my body. My doctor immediately ordered a change in gears and my therapist helped me figure out that I hadn’t picked my battles. But I soon realised that the bigger mistake I’d made was underestimating how difficult declining all the other battles would be.

    This is FOMO but it’s also more than that. One way to define caste, class, and gender privilege in India (the benefits of all of which I enjoy, by the way) is to say that more privileged people can afford to fight more battles than less privileged people. Privileged bodies can also tolerate more harm (accidental, not deliberate) because they can afford good doctors and healthier living environments. But this sort of thinking misses the point, I realised later, because it overlooks sustainability. Performing 100 units of work and then fizzling out after five years is not better than performing eight units of work per year for many years. The latter is also advantageous because spending more time doing something allows you to persist – and enhance your credentials – in that community, establish more as well as stronger relationships, and mentor people. These things in turn bring advantages that working by oneself never will.

    You probably already know all of this, but I want to make sure you know one more thing: not trivialising the allure of the battles you’ve decided to overlook. This problem is more than FOMO because FOMO implies a temptation to do something. But when you’re a privileged person and you’ve decided that you’re not going to fight some battle, you also need to deal with the allegations – both self-inflicted and inflicted by others, especially by people in your own circles and sometimes publicly – of having abdicated your privileges. Instead of not giving in to the resulting temptation, as with FOMO, you need to not give in to the resulting shame.

    When I first experienced it, my self-esteem plummeted. I found myself clutching at straws when, for example, someone tagged me on Twitter demanding to know why I couldn’t do something about a news report with average writing, put out by the publication I worked at (along with hundreds of other journalists). The old me would have sprung into action, messaging the relevant editors, going into why XYZ is problematic, and becoming entangled in increasingly vexed follow-ups. But I’ve found that the shame eventually calcifies into a kind of courage, one that allows me today to say – after a few deep breaths – that while I’m sure XYZ is an important problem, I’m not going to pay much attention to it.