Well, You Certainly Have to be Brave to Take on Stephen Hawking.
Thanks to Cassandra, I have a quote that caused my brain to stop dead in its tracks. Writing on the blog of Nature magazine, Daniel Cressey took Stephen Hawking to task for suggesting that we humans are going to need to explore space a lot more vigorously than we have if we expect to continue as a race for “another million years”. Dismissing Hawking pretty much outright, Cressey said:
Hawking is undoubtedly an inspiring man and a brilliant scientist. But what does he really know about space exploration? More than me almost certainly. But more than many of those those working at Nasa and ESA? I doubt it.
This is another example of misplaced attention. When Hawking has something to say about cosmology I’m all ears, but I’d rather have experts stick to their topics of knowledge.
What does Hawking know about space exploration? I’d say one hell of a lot. There is no way in the world he could accumulate as much knowledge as he has about cosmology, astrophysics, quantum physics, and everything else on which he is an expert without picking up quite a bit of knowledge about space exploration. Does he know more than many of the folks at NASA or ESA? Are you kidding me? I’m willing to bet that he could roll into NASA and start working pretty much right away. Let me also point out that neither NASA nor ESA have done much in the way of space exploration in the past two decades. Neither agency has gotten a human being past the International Space Station anytime soon, nor do either of them have any detailed plans to do so anytime soon. I’d be hesitant to say that either agency is full of experts on the kind of space exploration Hawking is talking about, manned space exploration. Having seen NASA take the cheap and easy way out more than a few times, I’m wondering if they have anyone on staff who remembers how to put a human being on the moon and get them back, much less explore any farther. Tht’s not entirely NASA’s fault, for reasons I’ll get to in a moment.
Let us assume, though, that Cressey is correct. Let’s say that Hawking is an expert in many things but knows next to nothing about space exploration. So what? Do you have to be a certified expert to be a visionary? John F. Kennedy was hardly an expert on space exploration, yet his speeches, not unlike Hawking’s, were what provided the impetus that led to Neal Armstrong’s steps on the moon. JFK didn’t know a hundredth about space exploration as Stephen Hawking, but he didn’t need to. He had a vision and he was willing to share it with us boldly. That’s exactly what Hawking has done. So what if he’s an expert or not?
This moves me to a more important point. Cressey is comparing apples and oranges, not just in ability, but in terms of roles. Hawking is a visionary while the folks at NASA, largely, are bureaucrats and engineers. They operate in two completely different circles. If you sat down the last four NASA administrators and asked them to talk about space exploration, they’d start with what we can’t explore and why we can’t explore it. They’d start by focusing on the limitations. That’s not entirely their fault; it’s what bureaucrats do. Engineers are similar creatures. If you put a bunch of engineers in the same room, the first thing they’d ask is what you wanted to do. Engineers are not in the business of coming up with grand plans. They’re in the business of taking those grand plans and making them happen.
If you really want to make something happen, put a visionary in the room and have him say something like, “Okay, folks. I need you to put a crew of four explorers on Mars. I need them to stay there for a week, be able leave the craft and explore around a bit, gather some samples of the rocks and atmosphere, then come back to Earth intact”. Then bring in the bureaucrats to push the project through the mountains of paperwork it’ll take to pull it off. You will have to keep riding herd on the bureaucrats to administer motivational prompts quite often, because their natural state is stasis. But they know how to move papers, and that’s important these days.
The thing is, we need visionaries as surely as we need everyone else. Without them, we never have our imaginations engaged and we never see the need to push our boundaries any farther away than they are right now. The lack of vision is what has allowed NASA to fall into the humble and stagnant state it’s in right now. It’s why we still have the Space Shuttle and we haven’t moved to a better man-rated spacecraft. It’s why we’ve not been back to the moon in about thirty five years. We need the people who can fire our imaginations and knock loose the resources and will necessary for NASA or the ESA to do the job. We are definitely better off if our visionaries have as much know-how as someone like Hawking because they can give us more certain and productive avenues to explore, but it’s not necessary that they do. I would think that Cressey, writing for a science magazine, would recognize the vital need for people of vision (and wouldn’t resort to the tired and easily-defeated argument of “look at all the good we could do with that money down here”). I don’t think he should be so married to an extremely narrow definition of the word “expert” that he’s willing to cavalierly discard a man who knows more about space than anyone we are likely to meet anytime soon. Doing so strikes me as foolish and hidebound. It’s not the attitude that got us to the moon and it surely won’t get us any farther.
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Category: Hey, Mr. Science Guy!
