From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
I'm always rather skeptical of conversion stories - someone did something and it opened their eyes to an issue or gave them a new perspective. There's something fundamentally wrong with a society that thinks someone's miraculous conversion somehow imbues them with an authoritative voice or a spiritual gift or something, whereas someone who has seen and been guided by this same revelatory light all their life, rarely gets any credit or any sort of spotlight on their equally valid and majorly contributing 'non-conversion'.
It's entirely wrong; even ass-backwards, but it's how we work on this planet unfortunately. I know authors typically don't write their own book descriptions, so this isn't on her, but the blurb here says "When Nicole Stott first saw Earth from space, she realized how interconnected we are." I'm sorry, but if you have to be shot 250 miles into space at 25,000 mph to realize this, then you've been sleepwalking through life, and you really don't deserve much credit for your epiphany.
I was interested in this book because it seemed to offer a scientific perspective on how we can help Earth, but by a third in I was already disillusioned with it because I'd learned nothing to that end. I'm not saying what I did read wasn't interesting at all; there were parts that were engaging and informative, but none of it had to do with helping fix the problems on Earth.
The story was very autobiographical, with the author calling everyone 'my friend' or 'my dear friend' if she knew them at all, and it carried a sense of desperation to it. It's irrelevant to the reader how close the author is to person A or person B and this constant repetition of that 'friend' mantra had an aura of pathos to it. Not that this is a critical disaster. It just struck me as rather odd in the same way it does when an author writes the more pretentious 'utilizing' instead of simply typing 'using'.
There were parts where the author seemed to start in on a topic and then just abandon it, or go off at a tangent. One example that comes immediately to mind was about painting in space. None of this of course helps save Earth, but I happened to find this particular piece quite fascinating, yet instead of talking about the actual painting she was doing, it seems like she lost interest once the paint was on the brush, and essentially abandoned that story!
In contrast, other tangential stories about life in space or astronaut training seemed like they went on forever or were repeated several times instead of letting the issue go like she did with the art. It made for a messy story overall. These things had nothing whatsoever to do with with applying what had been learned in space to solving Earth's problems, and if all of these extraneous parts had been excised, it would have made for a very thin book indeed. It's like she couldn't make up her mind whether to write an autobiography or an Earth-self-help book, and so we got a disjointed and somewhat repetitive mishmash of both.
The real disaster though, lay in other directions. In the first third of this book, the closest it came to discussing how technology can help Earth, was when discussing the water shortage and how many people are denied a basic human right: access to clean, fresh water. They have filtration units in the space program which take all water - even sweat and urine - and purify it so that it's cleaner than most water you can get on Earth, including that microplastic-infused bottled water that far too many people drink under the delusion that it's healthier than tap water. In some countries I'm sure it is, but that's rarely applicable in the USA. Nowhere in this discussion did the author say how this was applied to helping people on Earth. More on this anon.
The worst part of this section of the story though was that the author mentioned Guy Laliberté. This guy is a Canadian billionaire and gambler who founded Cirque du Soleil, but the latter enterprise, which is multinational (and in which Laliberté has now sold his interests, I understand), was all that got mentioned in the story - that and the fact that Laliberté paid thirty two million dollars to take a space tourist trip. The author talks like this was a deliberate trip to raise awareness of problems on Earth. It was a fail with me, because I never heard of this guy going into space so my awareness was not raised by his $32 million investment. I don't know how many people did hear about it because the author never discusses that.
But here's the thing: this guy paid $32 million!! How many of those problems he claimed he was highlighting could have been solved by putting that $32 million directly into solving them? The author never explored that, and this bothered me. The guy is a billionaire. He could have paid a hundred million to help solve the problems he was raising awareness about and he would never have missed that, yet he's presented in this book as some sort of hero for his work! I don't get that mentality at all.
To me it seems equally likely that he just wanted to take a trip into space and could afford it, which is fine, it's his own money, but then he turns around and tries to 'justify' the extravagance by saying it's an awareness-raising trip. Maybe it was, but who knows? I don't. I just know $32 million went into space and none of that particular amount contributed to bringing "one drop" of clean water to any child. Reading this, I confess I sometimes thought that maybe it's the author's awareness which needs raising?
I was enthralled with the space program when I was a kid, but lately I've wondered more about the PoV of those who ask: why is this money being sent into space when we need help on Earth. I was disappointed in the author's retort to that. It seemed outright facetious to me. She effectively side-stepped the question by redirecting it. She said the money doesn't go into space, it's all spent right here on Earth. That was hilarious, Nicole. Yeah, it's spent on Earth, and a small portion of it goes into setting up experiments in space that can help people on Earth. Thinking people get that. But NASA's space shuttle program cost almost $200 billion in total. Each flight cost $450 million.
So the question, Nicole, is not where the money was spent, but how much value for money we got for that $200 billion. Was it truly worth it? Yeah it was thrilling, but who did it really help? Yeah, there have been concrete returns from the spending, in terms of computer advances and medicine and so on, but where's the evidence that those advances could not have come about by directly investing the $200 billion in technology and medicine?
Did we have to go to space to get these advances? I've never seen a justification for that, and it wasn't discussed in this book. Australia built six seawater desalination plants for ten billion. How many of those would $200 billion buy? Seventy percent of Earth's surface is covered with saltwater and forty percent of the world's population lives within 60 miles of it. Desalination uses a huge amount of energy, but water is most scarce where it's hot, and it's hot because the sun is shining. Can you say solar power?! No alternatives were ever discussed.
I like the space program. Always have, but it needs to be justified, not blown-off with facetious comebacks. In the sixties, robotics, AIs, and computers were pathetic compared with what we have today, but now we do have robots very effectively working on Mars. So what exactly is the justification for sending people into space? I've seen some halfhearted justifications, but never anything that truly made me nod my head in agreement.
Now if everyone had a roof over their head, clothes on their back, food in their belly, clean water, sanitation, and an education in their brain, then by all means blow $200 billion on sending people into space. Until then, there needs to be serious justification for what we spend set against what we can realistically expect to get back from it in temrs of direct benefits to those who most need them. The author never offers any such cost analysis.
The justification needs to be spectacular. it needs to be something that's essential, that can only be done by humans, and that can only be done in space, otherwise it's simply not justifiable when people are starving and suffering, and homeless, and living in migrant camps and being recruited into under-age armies, and drinking disgusting water, and suffering diseases. Anyone with a functioning mind can see that with ever having to go into space.
It needs to be spectacular because, as the author explains, it costs dramatically more money to send a living thing into space than ever it does a robot. It costs more because humans have to be coddled as the author makes quite clear. They're not evolved to live in space, with little gravity tugging on them, and with the brutal cold, the radiation, and a complete vacuum. That's where a heck of a lot of the money goes: into coddling people who are out of their depth - or height in this case! The question that really needs to be asked is: can automation and even robots do the same work that's being done? This question isn't explored in this book either.
Don't tell me it can't be done. It used to be that to fight an air war you needed trained pilots in expensive aircraft - aircraft also designed to coddle humans. Now we have drones doing a lot of that work. I'm not saying it's great, or even justifiable, but it is being done. So you can't tell me that we couldn't achieve the same thing in space - not when we're already doing it, for example, on Mars right now.
But the thrust of this book is about how we can learn lessons from space that we can employ on Earth and the first of these seems to be that we can purify water, but the fact is that the Bill Gates foundation funds the development of waste processing facilities that can be deployed in countries with little infrastructure, and which will handle waste from 100,000 people, producing up to 86,000 liters of potable water a day and a net 250 kw of electricity. None of this came from space exploration. It came from human ingenuity and a challenge to solve a problem. Bill Gates has never been into space and neither - to my knowledge - have any of the people who developed this system. The investment was spent right here on Earth and is already solving problems.
So that brings us back to what this book has to offer in terms of learning lessons from space? The amusing book description has it that the author knows we can overcome differences to address global issues, because she saw this every day on the International Space Station, but this is such a simplistic view of things that it's laughable. The people who are selected to go into space have to pass a barrage of tests and psychological considerations. They're not regular people!
They're purposefully selected for tolerance and sociability and education level and so on! To pretend you can extrapolate from this highly-managed microcosm of Earth's population to the world at large is to show a disturbing level of ignorance about how people are in real life, especially people who are stressed, and deprived, and poorly educated, and poor, and tired, and sick, and hungry. You can't take the harmony of that micro environment and expect it to translate to a world where 74 million people willingly and freely voted for an asshole like Donald Trump. It doesn't work.
At one point I read, “I’m pleased that today we recognize the value of international partnership and cooperation and don’t focus so much on competition." Has the author met China? It's home home to almost a third of the human race which is having nothing to do with the ISS, and is going its own sweet way in space and on Earth. At another point I read, that Earth’s oceans will boil in a billion years, but it's not that simple.
Yes, in a Billion years our climate will change due to changes in solar output, but the oceans and not going to instantly boil away at that point! it will be a slow change, but slowly accelerating as the sun increases its brilliance and eventually, its size. But a billion years from now it won't matter because humans will either be extinct through our own willful scientific ignorance (Republicans I;m looking at you), or have moved off Earth onto other planets. So again, this seemed inapplicable.
So, in short, I cannot commend a book that so dissipated its resources, and so consistently failed to meet its own aims.
