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
Nietzsche - Beware of People Playing the Victim
In /On the Genealogy of Morals/, Nietzsche searches through history for the origins of morality. And in it, he talks about how some people use morality like a dog-leash to control others. They use morality to get people to do what they want. It’s an inter…
Homeroom with Sal & Eduardo Cetlin - Wednesday, September 2
Hi everyone! Welcome to our homeroom live stream. Really excited about the conversation we’re going to have in a few minutes with Eduardo Setlin from the Amgen Foundation. I encourage any of y’all who have questions to start putting them in the message bo…
Creating rectangles with a given area 2 | Math | 3rd grade | Khan Academy
Draw a rectangle with the same area but with no side lengths the same as those of the given rectangle. So here’s our given rectangle, and we want to draw a rectangle with the same area. The same area, so what is the area of this rectangle? Area is the a…
Khan Academy for your youngest learners
Al Khan here from Khan Academy. Now, some of y’all, or hopefully many of y’all, are familiar with Khan Academy. We are a not-for-profit with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. But one area that people are probabl…
Ancient Life as Old as the Universe
Life has existed on one planet for about 4 billion years, as far as we know. But it might have started right after the Big Bang, when the universe was much stranger and more fantastic than today. A universe that might have allowed life to develop absolute…
Determining angle of rotation
We’re told that triangle A’B’C’ (so that’s this red triangle over here) is the image of triangle ABC (so that’s this blue triangle here) under rotation about the origin. So, we’re rotating about the origin here. Determine the angle of rotation. So, like …