yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

How NASA averted the 2060 apocalypse | Michelle Thaller | Big Think


3m read
·Nov 3, 2024

Processing might take a few minutes. Refresh later.

Well, I am one of the directors of science at NASA, and my specialty is communications. There's the idea that a mission ends when you return the data, when you make the discoveries, when the scientists publish their papers. To me, the mission doesn’t end until you have some sort of public involvement, until you have some sort of public buy-in. I think that’s as important as any other part of the mission.

I’ve been trying to tell people for years that a communications team on a mission is just like having your crack team of electrical engineers or your best computer programmers. You need to have people that really understand communications well. And it helps—I mean, in my case I started out as a research astrophysicist and so I understand a lot of the topics as well. But I do communications now at NASA.

And as far as why NASA is important, I think this is one of these things that people have no idea: We run, at the moment, 108 science missions. Those are mostly spacecraft. Some of them are on balloons or sounding rockets or on the space station. Some of them are on the earth. We have people embedded with the Sami reindeer herders trying to understand how climate change is changing the migration of reindeer herds. I mean it’s amazing that NASA is all over.

Everything from the disaster mitigation from all of those hurricanes—we actually sent staff to Puerto Rico when FEMA was overwhelmed, they had been setting up communication centers. I mean everything from determining what set off the Big Bang to where those wildfires are going to be spreading to in southern California. We have 108 missions and I’ve never seen any organization operate more efficiently. I’ve never worked with more brilliant people.

I think people often don't understand what the real value is as far as blue sky research, you know. People talk about spinoffs and people joke about things like Velcro and Tang. I mean those are jokes, but the more intelligent people might notice things like microprocessors started at NASA. Cell phones. The reason you have computers, the reason the United States was poised to lead the computer revolution was because of the Apollo program.

But all those kind of fall flat, to tell you the truth. I think that people don’t understand. It was a NASA satellite doing research just out of curiosity to see what gases were in the atmosphere that discovered that the ozone hole was being depleted in the 1980s. And the NASA scientists with a number of university scientists went running to the U.N. and said, “If we don’t do something, we are literally going to destroy the planet.”

And they actually got the Montreal Protocol signed. They actually made treaties. They banned these chemicals that were depleting our ozone layer. And we’ve since done atmospheric models that show that we would have actually destroyed the ozone layer, had we done nothing, by the year 2060, which, if not in my lifetime, is probably in our children’s lifetime.

And basically, that would have destroyed agriculture. Crops would have failed all over the world. You couldn’t have livestock outside. People couldn’t have lived outside. We very nearly destroyed civilization, and your grandchildren would have lived through that.

And so when people talk about what’s the best NASA spinoff, you know, what's the worth of blue sky research where you don’t understand where it’s going to lead? The best spinoff I know of is grandchildren...

More Articles

View All
Cumulative geometric probability (less than a value) | AP Statistics | Khan Academy
Lilliana runs a cake decorating business for which 10% of her orders come over the telephone. Let’s see ( C ), the number of cake orders Lilliana receives in a month until she first gets an order over the telephone. Assumed a method of placing each cake …
Uncle Tom's Cabin part 2
So Becca and I have been talking about Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which is this book from the 1850s that Abraham Lincoln actually said started the Civil War. So how did this book start a war? In this video, we’ll tell you a little bit more about the plot. Um, bu…
The nitrogen cycle | Energy and matter in biological systems | High school biology | Khan Academy
Nitrogen often gets less attention than carbon or oxygen, but nitrogen is very important to life as well. Like carbon and oxygen, it cycles through our biosphere. Now, one thing that may be surprising about nitrogen, if you haven’t studied it much, is th…
Clearly I messed something up...
Hey, it’s me Destin. Welcome back to Smarter Every Day! So the last video I uploaded was about helping an orphanage and trying to motivate you to help me build this orphanage, but it’s pretty clear that I messed that up. So I’ve flown over to England, I’…
Curvature of a helix, part 1
So let’s compute the curvature of a three-dimensional parametric curve. The one I have in mind has a special name; it’s a helix. The first two components kind of make it look like a circle. It’s going to be cosine of t for the X component, sine of t for t…
THE ART OF SLOW LIVING: SAVORING LIFE ONE MOMENT AT A TIME | STOICISM
In our relentless quest for more and faster, it’s astonishing how much of life’s profound beauty and depth we sacrifice. The Stoics believe that to live fully, one must not just bear life’s challenges but also cherish them. Each obstacle is a teacher, and…