Beyond earth's orbit -- going to the moon and Mars

The Soviets earned the awe of the world in 1957 when they put the first artificial satellite into orbit, Sputnik. This was quite the PR coup, and was one of the motivators for the US national alarm about our lagging scientific expertise compared to the Soviet Union. That was probably a good thing for the US (investment in human infrastructure, we might call it today) -- there was a name for this US response but I can't remember what it was. But as I understand it, the Soviet coup wasn't due to greater knowledge, it was that the US military didn't think it was a priority. For the Soviets the ICBM was the first way to threaten the US homeland with nuclear attack (a rocket that can put a satellite in orbit can with a bit less power land a nuclear warhead anywhere on earth). The US already had ample ways of threatening the USSR from a variety of bomber bases right next to the USSR. In terms of the PR coup, what I've heard is that basically the US was asleep at the wheel and wasn't thinking along those lines. Of course the US took up the challenge, including Kennedy's promise to put a man on the moon, and we met that goal. That was our PR coup.

I don't recall any debate on whether we should go to the moon. The one snippet I have for an "anti" view was from Tom Lehrer. On one of his albums he notes that the US space program "will make it possible to spend $20 billion of your money to put some clown on the moon". Tom Lehrer was insightful about many things, but it seems he missed the boat on that one. I think most Americans thought it was $20 billion well spent, and much of the world population agreed. Pictures of the earth from the moon were valuable, and as a major human accomplishment it seemed to resonate with lots of people. I believe those 30-odd men from Apollo missions are the only humans who have ever gone more than a paltry 300 miles above the surface of the earth. Yet it didn't lead to much. I am reminded a bit of the dog who chases a car. The car pulls over, he's "caught" the car -- but now he doesn't know what to do with it. The moon is basically a big rock and there isn't much to do there. No one has gone back since Apollo ended, not because there are serious technical obstacles, but because there's not really any point.

Aside from the Apollo missions, human forays beyond earth have included a great many robotic probes. They explore various places in our solar system, and they convey valuable information back to us at relatively little cost. Getting humans to these places would be enormously expensive, especially as we need a return trip to bring them home safely. Our robotic craft are now far more capable than they were in the 1960s when the humans landing on the moon could gather some information better than robots.

We humans have for some years maintained the continuously-manned international space station, in low orbit around the earth. It is interesting for studying how things work in prolonged weightlessness, but I haven't heard of any truly astonishing discoveries that have resulted. Only 250 miles above the earth, it requires frequent rocket arrivals from earth to keep it going. It would be interesting to know how many earthlings know it is there, and of those that do, how often they think about it.

But what are the prospects for sending more humans beyond near-earth orbit?

There are a fair number of smart people who have in mind the idea of space colonization -- that humanity will spread throughout the galaxy. To a lot of other smart people (and me) this seems crazy. 

On earth, exponential growth allows organism to grow from small beginnings to occupy large areas. The space-colonization enthusiasts see humans doing this from star to star throughout the galaxy. Spreading humanity among the stars requires a great many planets to support the sort of economy we have on earth, using native materials to build more huge spacecraft, for instance. That is what would be required to let human expansion grow exponentially. We know there is no environment in the solar system that could possibly support that.

The nearest remotely suitable star is Alpha Centauri. There is no reason to think there is anything remotely habitable in that particular star system, let alone anything that would support a vibrant civilization. The requirements of a world that supports life in some form are far more lenient than a world that could support vibrant, flourishing human life. And to top off the list of problems, such worlds might already be full of other kinds of intelligent, vibrant, flourishing life that would not take kindly to human efforts to appropriate their world.

What about the more modest goal of just getting humans to another star? The obstacles are enormous. I found this brief write-up <rather amusing> (maybe I just have a quirky sense of humor). 

Within the solar system, all space missions we can imagine require transferring enormous resources from earth to support the endeavor. We probably could set up a permanently inhabited station on the moon, but the rocket trips up there to support it would be unending.

A human trip to Mars isn't out of the question. It "only" takes 9 months to get there, given rockets we know how to make. 

A permanent station on Mars is also a possibility, but once again the rocket trips to support it continuously are unending.

But these aren't just pipe dreams. Serious people in government bureaucracies seem to have <plans for this>.

Are these government pronouncements part of a calculation to support space budgets, figuring that popular support can be marshaled for programs with the human touch of sending humans? Does it lift human spirits to think we'll get to it "some day" even if never happens? Does it connect in people's minds to that goal of human colonization of space, however unfeasible in sober, practical terms?

For me, I'd say we made the point that it's possible to send humans from earth to other heavenly bodies back in 1969. We proved a point. From now on let's have the robots roam the solar system and beyond, and keep humans right here on earth.

<This XKCD> stayed with me. If you stop thinking astronomically, trapped on the surface of a sphere isn't a bad place to be.

wage magnification

Wage magnification is a form of redistribution from rich to poor. I may have alluded to it in previous posts, but here I focus on it (and just imagine a blog author writing about the same thing twice - unheard of!)

Suppose your minimum wage is the (quite low) figure of $5 an hour. The government ponies up directly, into the worker's paycheck, $7 an hour to give them a wage of $12 an hour. If the job pays $10 an hour, the government pays another $5 an hour to make it a $15 per hour job. Perhaps it would also turn a $15 an hour job into an $18 an hour job, the magnification rather quickly falling off to zero as the rate of pay goes up.

A key premise is that people like to feel useful, and for many of them this involves work. As with ordinary work today, with wage magnification the more they work, the more they earn. If they get a job that pays a bit better, then they earn a bit more. This means that people are rewarded in accord with their effort and performance -- they have control.

It compares favorably with a minimum wage for a couple reasons. One is that the minimum wage is paid by the employer, and creates an incentive for them to cut jobs and hours. (Compared to the world as it is now, raising minimum wage is a good idea, but I propose that wage magnification would be even better). In contrast to a minimum wage, wage magnification is paid by the government. If employers have useful work to be done for even $5 an hour, they can hire people to do it, and the incentive for labor-saving technologies and procedures is much less. The work gets done, it is truly useful work, and they feel good about doing it. Another problem with a minimum wage is a sort of "floor effect". You imagine that a whole lot of jobs that would otherwise pay varying amounts less than the minimum wage will all get paid at that rate, so finding a more responsible job would at the low end of the scale not be rewarded with more money.

A guaranteed basic income is a decent idea, but it very much removes any incentive. You get the money no matter what you do, which once again removes control over that aspect of your earnings.

An example of wage magnification that is already in place is the earned income credit. It is very limited, and its effect is delayed, visible only after you file your taxes for the year. And it is tied to your overall financial situation.

Wage magnification could be made simple to administer. You don't look at someone's overall financial situation, the magnification just happens in the paycheck.

By improving people's incomes, wage magnification should reduce somewhat the need for other social programs. At that level of pay, people spend most of their income, improving the economy.

In tax policy, we need a place to look very carefully at someone's overall financial situation and make our taxes progressive, and we have it today in two places: the income tax and the inheritance tax. That is where we tax the rich more heavily (and could do so more effectively by closing loopholes). It is unnecessary complexity and overhead to do "means testing" in other programs, though there is a natural political pressure against giving things to the wealthy.

There are plenty of other ways we could make things fairer by reducing regressive taxes -- eliminating sales tax would be one. No longer making prisoners and criminal suspects pay hefty fees is another.

We also have in place a variety of other programs to help the less-well-off, and I am not proposing replacing them, such as disability insurance, Medicaid, Social Security and Medicare. Universal health insurance is a good idea. Credits for help in raising children also seem like a good idea. What wage magnification competes with most directly is the minimum wage, which could be kept low or possibly even lowered.

 

God Still Doesn't Exist

 

I argued in <this post> that God doesn't exist. I was recently looking at some Wikipedia entries on the existence of God, and had a few more thoughts to share.

The starting position of other atheists should be that there is no God, and it is the obligation of the theist to tell us about a God and some of its properties and give evidence for its existence. The burden of proof is on them. There are some "strong" atheists who argue how there couldn't possibly be a God where the burden of proof is reversed, but that is not a position I care to defend. But many atheists enter the debate as if they were on equal footing. Socially and politically, this is true, since lots of human beliefs and human institutions are based on religion. But logically, it is not true. The atheist seeking truth can sweep aside culture and require that theists start from zero and tell us about their God.

Theists don't want just any God, they want a personal God who cares about us and our concerns and is to a considerable extent knowable by us. "God exists, therefore Lutheranism is the one true faith!" is I hope a joke, as there is quite a large gap in the reasoning there.

Suppose you accept that there must be a first cause to the universe, and therefore God must exist. We would have no reason to think that this God has anything to do with humanity. Certainly if you think God is the cause of the Big Bang, which formed billions of galaxies, numbers alone suggest that we don't have much of God's attention, if indeed he was inclined to care about any entities like us at all.

I argued before for why <personal experience was a poor reason to believe in God>.

Another sort of argument is that humans have a universal tendency to believe in God, that there is a "God-shaped hole" in every person. It should instead be called a "belief-in-God shaped hole". We have a great many tendencies that are common but false. See for instance some <cognitive distortions>.

Another argument is that religion is helpful. It has led to people doing good works, and it may be correlated with happiness, notably in today's USA. Many things that are useful are not true. For instance, a belief by young children that their parents' beliefs are correct might be one -- true or not, the parents' beliefs got them far enough to have children. Another might be the belief that one's own country or people is greater or better than all the others. This is usually useful to one's own people. Whether it leads to greater overall total happiness is debatable but not clearly false. If you think of competing companies in a given field, employee belief that their company is best might lead to harder work in all such companies and an overall better result for society as they compete.

You can approach life from many perspectives. The one I favor most often is, "However inconvenient or depressing it may be, what is true?" But there are others. One is something like, "let's find common ground and try to get along with each other." It's not a bad idea. I am what I call a "friendly atheist", because I don't feel the need to twist people's arms to make them give up their religion and see the truth of atheism. If their religion gives them a comfortable place to live and does no harm, why rock the boat? I draw the line at religions that constrain the lives of other people. Theocracies are an obvious example. If one can deter such believers at all, it should be sufficient for them to ask if their conception of God is so obviously correct that they should constrain the behavior of other believers who share most of their beliefs. There is no need to get them to consider becoming atheists, which would likely be a far more radical change for them.

With truth in mind, a quip comes to my mind... "The existence of God is fake news." Of course it trivializes a long-standing and important question, but it's also an honest reaction of an atheist, where an old truth can be expressed in a new metaphor.

Another snarky internal reaction I sometimes have to a statement about God is, "Who?" This reflects the idea that the burden of proof is on the theist, and until proven otherwise God is a fiction. Also, there are so many different conceptions of God I don't even know which fiction the speaker is professing to believe in.

Racism in Brief

 The horror of slavery in the US was ended in roughly 1865. Jim Crow included laws which enforced discrimination against Blacks. It ended in roughly 1965. The easy part of ending discrimination against any group is to change the laws. Today I believe that in a great many areas of life, if any Black person can prove that they were discriminated against on account of race, they can likely win a court case. In a great many subcultures of the US, it is prohibited to state any racist views.

The racism that's left -- and there is plenty of it -- is the kind that is harder to remedy. Much has to do with attitudes and assumptions. Much is hard to prove, and much is unconscious. Some is just plain tribal in nature -- white supremacist groups presumably have considerable backing within the population at large.

Combating racism has come to be central to the liberal agenda. A fair number of people think it is THE social issue that must be addressed. Unfortunately, it is one of the many problems in life where progress is limited despite how earnestly you want to solve it and how much effort you put into it. Unfortunately, I think the earnest and loud calls to end racism will be heard primarily by unsympathetic people and convey the wrong message. Sympathetic whites will react to the message by reducing their micro-aggressions. Unsympathetic whites will go right on with their macro-aggressions, and might increase them.

I do not have any sympathy for those who actively seek to make Blacks uncomfortable or worse. I find the idea highly repugnant. Yet I know such people exist. Human psychology suggests they will continue to exist in large numbers. The economic prospects of working class whites have been getting worse in recent decades. When they hear of so much attention going to combat racism, it sounds like a plan to benefit others at their expense. They resent that. The knowledge that Blacks have it worse, if accepted at all, does not sway their thinking. Our country and its politics are influenced heavily by such people.

So while I myself agree that racism exists and is a serious problem, I actually think we should downplay the issue rather than publicize it heavily. What I favor instead are programs that help all poor and working class people, Black or white. Such programs can be administered without regard to race and can make a real difference in people's lives. Universal health insurance, a higher minimum wage (or "wage magnification"), free child care, perhaps a guaranteed basic income -- all such things are possible and should hopefully serve to unite the less well off instead of dividing them by race.

I imagine racism will lessen as the demographics of America change -- as those working class whites become a minority in a few more states. With patience, the worst excesses will fix themselves gradually through the ballot box. Yet in some form it will continue for tens or hundreds of years. This is profoundly unjust, but no problem is fixed by passion alone -- political will must be marshaled and maintained for any change in society.

If the liberal message on racism is loud, and it is,"We whites are privileged, so give more attention and resources to remedying racism!", the net results will not be good. While morally just, it is not a good idea politically in terms of actually achieving the desired changes. The benefits will be small, while the costs will be large.

Dangerous misperceptions of white police killing Blacks

In the past couple years, police violence against Blacks has enraged people of good will. Videos record in shocking detail how white officers acted badly with Black suspects. The conclusion is that overall, systematically, white police are killing Black people without justification.

Sam Harris made a podcast that casts doubt on this and tells a very different story. Here is the transcript: https://samharris.org/can-pull-back-brink. The podcast came out last June, and I read the transcript shortly after. I didn't choose to blog about it then. I go for long periods choosing not to blog about anything, but now I feel motivated to do so.

Sam Harris is not some creature of the right. He is generally in line with liberal values: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Harris.

It is a long podcast, so I will be simplifying a great deal. In the first half he describes how racism is a serious problem in so many ways, and how he hopes it can be lessened. He is harshly critical of police who react violently to peaceful protesters but stand by when stores are being looted.

The point that seemed most important to me is that viral videos that enrage people are a very poor basis for understanding the big picture. They may have ignited a Black Lives Matter movement, and this may result in improvements for Blacks, but they were not themselves evidence of racism against Blacks by police. One tiny fact: there are similar videos of whites being killed by police, though not as many and they do not get the same publicity. You can imagine someone posting one might be viciously attacked as a racist.

There are roughly 10 million arrests in the US each year, and approximately 1,000 civilians killed by police. A great many of these are clearly justified, as when a suspect has a gun that they are using or likely to use. At the other extreme, a few are just plain murders by the police, as in a couple of the viral videos where a suspect is running away. But these are extraordinarily rare and it's not even clear they are motivated by racism. The incidents where suspects are suffocated appear to be the result of poor training and understanding of the danger of their procedure, not any police desire to kill the suspect.

Harris notes that many of these incidents start with a suspect resisting arrest. He says that even if suspects are unarmed, there is the real potential that they will take control of the officer's weapon. It's not easy to subdue people who are bigger and stronger than you are, and police are not trained to do it. This sets the context for a few of those 10 million arrests leading to unjustified police killings of civilians. Yet Black and Hispanic officers are more likely to kill Black suspects than white officers are.

Harris is surprised that the "woke" left watching videos seem untroubled by clear evidence that the suspects are resisting arrest. He notes that even if a person is being arrested unjustly, resisting is a very dangerous way to register protest. Officers are not at all crazy to fear for their lives.

Much is made of how police arrest Blacks at a higher rate than whites. He notes that 90% of murders in the US are committed by Blacks, usually on other Blacks. They also commit other crimes at a much higher rate. So if they are arresting them at a higher rate, it is no evidence of racism.

When police are being investigated in the wake of a viral video of their force, their morale goes down and they are of course much more cautious, not wanting to risk being the next one in a video. As a result, Black-on-Black crime goes up. The same thing is likely happening on a national scale.

Harris notes that even if we made enormous progress in all areas, such as purging demonstrably racist police, hiring more Black and Hispanic officers, and implementing improved training, there will still be the occasional video of a white officer unjustifiably killing a Black suspect. In 10 million arrests, things will go wrong. Some white officer will panic or react inappropriately. It's bound to happen. So just as the viral videos are a poor way of identifying real police shortcomings, they will be a poor way to measure real improvements.

Harris is also deeply concerned that investigative journalists who should know better are not challenging this narrative at all, because their jobs are at stake. The leftist public has decided what the right answer is, and any attempt to look at inconvenient facts risks a serious backlash. Management will minimize the damage to their organization by firing the journalist.

Now, I don't assume that Harris correct in what he writes. What I do feel confident of is that the way to get clearer on the issue is to present other, better facts. It is not to call him a racist or tell him he has no business discussing the issue since he is a white person. If people have any rebuttals I hope they will share them.

Morality in a different time of life

If this post has any merit, it is perhaps in pointing out what tiny issues from the past a blogger can find to write about. Or how early memories are often more "real" to us than more recent ones.

I attended Swarthmore College. A few of my friends were Quakers, and towards the end I was flirting with the idea of becoming one myself. Doing the right thing was important. I had a debate with a friend about the ethics of sneaking food out of the cafeteria: The meal plan allowed for 3 meals a day, seven days a week, but no food could be taken out of the dining hall. If you wanted to eat some place else, you had to pay for it yourself. One friend felt that it was ethical to sneak food out of the cafeteria to consume at a meal that one was entitled to eat in the dining hall but was in fact going to eat elsewhere (say, as a picnic on campus). I argued this was not ethical since the dining hall set its prices and made its plans with the expectation that some students would miss some meals in such a fashion, so it was not fair to them, or other students who followed the rules exactly. I'm not sure what we thought about the case where the food was to be consumed as a midnight snack instead -- I don't remember. Isn't that one of life's gripping moral dilemmas?

But I partook in a worse transgression. The campus employed a woman known to us as Catherine, an institution at the college for many years. Her job was to make sure that only people who were enrolled in the dining plan ate there. In theory we should all show I.D.s, but after the first few days no one ever did. Catherine apparently had a good memory and could tell who was allowed and who was not. I, however, did not enroll in the second semester of my senior year -- I had credits from the University of New Hampshire, which was what our high school in Durham did in place of AP courses. While AP courses did not qualify for college credit, these courses qualified I guess under the same theory as credits from other colleges would count for transfer students, even though I was not a transfer student. Such are the arcane details college administrators must confront. In any case, that gave me enough credits to graduate without enrolling for the second half of my senior year, and I had run out of courses I really wanted to take, and my frugal Yankee nature was aware that this would save my parents a fair amount of money (maybe $2,600!) They were fully funding my college education. However, during that semester I lived near campus, worked as a research assistant, and participated fully in the social life of the campus.

Just for fun, I went into the dining hall at the start of the spring semester as I always had to see if Catherine could tell that I was not enrolled. She could not! Somehow I had slipped through her net. It was certainly convenient, because the rule was that those who were not on the meal plan could eat but they had to pay cash right there at the entrance table. This was a nuisance and slowed the line down. It was awfully convenient to just walk down the stairs with all my other friends. And of course once I revealed that I was not enrolled, Catherine would surely remember and I would be unable to do this any more. Fessing up was an irreversible decision. So, I just kept walking freely down the stairs with all my friends for the whole semester.

This did, however, bother me. Partly this had to do with my Quaker leanings. But another factor might have been the spring weather. The Philadelphia area has mild spring days, one after another, for weeks at a time. This pattern is rarely seen up here near Boston. Union soldiers camped around Washington, D.C. remarked upon this in letters home, in the 1860s. Swarthmore's campus is also an arboretum, and the combination makes the campus quite stunning at that time of year. Feeling generous and morally upright were in harmony with the weather.

Eventually I got one of my Quaker friends to approach the director of the dining services with some amount of cash -- sixty dollars, maybe? -- explaining the situation and that one of his friends wanted to reimburse them for meals he had eaten that he was not entitled to. The director was apparently moved that a college student in 1976 would make such a choice. It wasn't, however, all of what I owed. It was perhaps a bit more than half. Or was it a bit less?

What was I thinking? One possibility would be that since I was not making the line stop at each meal to collect my cash, which I was entitled to do, I was saving everyone money by cheating and giving a lump sum later, and deserved a discount. Maybe I was figuring that I should be entitled to the pro-rated lower "bulk discount" price that students on the meal plan got. If they could not enforce their rules, was it my job to pay? Perhaps I thought that giving any significant sum at all was a good thing, and after all most students in my position would have just taken advantage of their good fortune. There is a lot of rationalization there. Maybe I just didn't want to part with the money. I dimly recall being aware that I had still cheated to some extent and being mildly troubled by that fact. I think my concern rapidly faded.

Certain people with highly developed scruples might argue that even if I reimbursed them in full it was still morally wrong to break the rules. I don't recall worrying about that at the time.

If you've gotten this far, perhaps you've joined me in nostalgia for a time when that level of moral question was on my mind. I like to think I've been pretty upstanding and moral since then but I can think of a few lapses. When I was a grad student at MIT there were piano practice rooms that I was not eligible to use, but I was able to "pick" the 5-button lock and use pianos when others were not around. There weren't other students waiting, and I didn't harm the piano, but there is of course wear and tear...

My parents had bought 10 ounces or so of gold, and when I got to handling their affairs, it was time to sell it. I was dimly aware that we might be liable for capital gains tax if (as was likely) it had gone up in price since they bought it. But they had no record of the purchase price, and the sale was handled anonymously in a coin shop, so... I just made no report of this gold to the IRS. I suppose I cheated the feds.

It is ludicrous to think that that is the worst of my moral transgressions. I have undoubtedly filtered out of my awareness others, or justified them because everyone else was doing them too, or others were doing worse. I've had 45 years to accumulate sins. I suspect I have made use of as many cognitive distortions to justify them as the next person, but (likely another distortion) figure I'm more ethical than average even if I'm not.

So there.