Why America is Becoming a Second-World Nation and California is in the Crosshairs

America must make much more social investment in its citizenry if people are to survive and become active participant in “big science, great policy” concerns. But, no social investment will matter much if American Academe is not reconfigured to train the knowledge workers to engage the great environmental issues of the dawn of the Anthropocene Epoch. That reconfiguration could begin if leaders expected more out of American Academe in relation to the national and global interest. Among the investments that must be made in postsecondary institutions is the investment of stringent state and federal oversight over them.

The Return-to-the-Moon effort poses the opportunity for another Apollo Era to rev up America’s knowledge production machinery. Space-based technical and policy innovations are of the kind that most closely resemble and/or lead to the kind of innovation to meet the direct and indirect effects of global warming, developing alternative energy, and offsetting natural disasters. If it can get off the ground…. Quite likely China, Russia, India, and the European Union acting together will loft the permanent space infrastructure in Low Earth Orbit and on the Moon that will be of practical value to humans in the near future.

Why Space-Based Systems Are Important

Detractors of space expenditures will argue: What is returning to the Moon and the other things, if, alongside those accomplishments, the poor, the elderly, the disabled, the sick, and the incarcerated are left in extreme circumstances, the last to receive relief, many to die as they did in New Orleans? I say to these detractors that returning to the Moon directly bears on such concerns. Because the Earth is becoming more extreme, space-based systems are not frivolities. Somehow, Americans need to be made to understand this, and the old baseless argument that pits space expenditures against social investments swept away for good. The fact is, American social funding accounts for about a third of the national budget and expenditures to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has an annual budget of about the size of the National Park Service.

The engagement with space means invigoration of American science, technology, and scholarship and boldness in policymaking, the “big science, great policy” needed to mitigate the challenges at the dawn of the Anthropocene Epoch. First of all, on-orbit space platforms (i.e., satellites, space stations) are necessary for monitoring the worsening condition of the planet, in ways that cannot be done adequately from the Earth’s surface alone, in order to plan technological mitigations and to levy informed policymaking mitigations.

A recent controversy has raged over the federal government’s downscaling of a system of planned American climate monitoring satellites to take the place of aging satellite systems soon to go offline. This downscaled system means that scientists in the Pentagon, with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and with NASA will have to depend upon European satellites for much of their climate data.

Secondly, a variety of disaster warning and mitigation systems are possible because of space-based systems. Satellite imagery is at the heart of space geodesist Geoffrey Blewitt’s concept that can detect killer tsunamis in about 15 minutes’ time. Blewitt’s concept works by measuring GPS satellite radio signals as they are broadcast during an undersea earthquake by GPS ground stations positioned around the globe. By accurately knowing the location of Global Positioning System satellites, how far GPS ground stations move during an earthquake, relative to the earthquake, one can then calculate how big the earthquake is and how large a tsunami might be produced by it.

Blewitt and collaborators at the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology and at the University of Nevada-Reno came up with the concept after analyzing GPS measurements from the South Asian tsunami. A minimum of five GPS satellites are required to be in view of the ground station to accurately and swiftly predict the size of an earthquake. In practice, this condition is almost always satisfied. There are already enough GPS ground stations in place that could contribute to the concept, if put into practice.

Thirdly, space-based systems hold the promise of alternative energy sources and their spin-offs. Like solar-to-microwave-to-electrical generation systems and like cheap hydrogen fuel production. It is critical that we develop the means to produce cheap, plentiful hydrogen fuel. If airplanes cannot be successfully adapted to biofuels, rapid transportation, especially between continents, is going to disappear. With the needs of a world population edging up to 10 billion over the next nine decades, that in and of itself could be a disaster.

As our ancestors who made it past the Pleistocene-Holocene bottleneck proved, the process of expanding the human ecology into increasingly hostile regions is essential to our survival and vitality as a species. It would be a mistake to attempt to tease apart an engagement with space from social investment. They are two sides of the same coin.

Conclusion

We find ourselves in a new geological-environmental epoch; truly a new world where being bold and brave in thought and deed is required. World environment becoming more extreme is generating a demand for knowledge workers as never before – not simply because of the greater outcry of an increasing global public in direr need – but also because of the need to formulate a response to the epochal change in a collective and organized way over large numbers of people.

In the effort to meet the challenges of the Anthropocene world, a vast number of science and technology workers will have to be mobilized through their training and labor. The machinery of training and labor must be overhauled. In the United States and elsewhere, this will require a new operating paradigm for colleges and universities. Jobs must be created that address the national and global need. The act of mobilizing such a large skilled labor force to meet the issues of the Anthropocene would have the latent, spin-off function of responding to social needs with ways and means that exceed how those needs have been met thus far.

“If it happens here, it happens everywhere.” That is what Californians say. Our state has been highly productive on the national scene and on the world stage. People across the planet admire us and harbor their own “California dreams.” But, those golden dreams will turn to leaden nightmares if we do not ramp up our ability to make big science and great policy innovations. Our prosperity over various sectors has enriched our world; a reversal of fortune in a new epoch will only succeed in impoverishing it. We must act. We must take the lead with the “big science, great policy” innovations that are needed. The time for that was yesterday, but we will have to settle for now. I am optimistic that if we act, we will emerge better Californians, better Americans, and a better species. California and its assets, both material and human, is still poised to lead in a worldwide human ecology where adaptation to and mitigations to Anthropocene challenges will depend on space-based systems, energy infrastructures, environmental knowledge, and the computing power to coordinate a worldwide response.

The challenges that are unfolding are enormous, but if not catastrophic, gradual extremity presents the opportunity to create a sense among individuals and societies that “we are in this together, we must pull together” that may be expected to grow into a deeper social consciousness about the interconnectivity of us all. Our quest for alternative energy sources and mitigations of and adaptations to environmental challenges may be expected to penetrate the capitalist paradigm, and transform it as the ecology of capital moves out of the oilfield to other venues – inevitably to locations off the Earth. A co-development will be new technologies, and thus, new technological means of production. Our chance to make it past the Holocene-Anthropocene bottleneck successfully lies in the possibility that the extremity will be gradual.

However, if we maintain the status quo and if the extremity occurs with a rapidity that will outstrip our means to act, then the upbeat conceptualizations of high-tech entrepreneurs and financiers – for water control, for effective carbon monitoring policies, for alternative energy sources, etc. -- will have as much specie as the rumors of Hitler’s Wunderwaffen to the ears of Berliners who were being overrun by the Soviet Army at the end of World War II. Only by enabling innovators and innovation can the time of the ticking clock that is this new epoch be told.

In the meantime, the old lesson that global warming and its interrelated phenomena are reviewing humankind over is this: Innovation permits the engagement of challenges of evermore extreme environments. In our modern situation, this means proactively
adapting to and mitigating our environmental depredations and also venturing further from the Earth in order to expand the human ecology. Undoubtedly, great suffering lies ahead, but also great opportunities. We became fully human during the Pleistocene Epoch. There is the chance that we will become fully humane during the Anthropocene Epoch. In meeting adversity, we meet who we will become as a species.

For part one of this series, click here.

Marilyn Dudley-Flores, Ph.D is a multidisciplinary scientist. She currently is the CEO of OPS-Alaska, (OPS: Oceanic, Polar, Space) a think tank based in Petaluma, where she manages projects over a range of disciplines. She frequently co-authors and speaks with OPS-Alaska’s Executive Director, Thomas Gangale, on a variety of topics including climate change and the need for social investment.