I think saving the world is important, but so far the world — at least as represented by the wealthy and the powerful in the less wealthy countries — seems to show no need to be saved. The wealthy keep throwing energy away, under pricing it, subsidizing it, proposing to fix the climate in a few decades. The middle class is groveling for more individual mobility — cars and, in Asia, two-wheelers — even though each additional “mobile” person is slowing everyone else down and most Asian and Latin American cities’ transport systems have collapsed. The price of road fuels today in industrialized nations is still slightly below its peak of the 1980-82 period, and because cars use 10-25% fuel/kilometer, the fuel cost of moving them is well below where it was during those dark years. Biofuels, while not the major reason for high fuel prices, are sending us a signal that they don’t work in the huge quantities needed to make a real dent on fossil fuel and oil use.

What are we doing to save ourselves? Clamoring for schemes to lower taxes, compensate people, punish the oil companies or the environmentalists, etc. In other words, we are trying to punish the messenger rather than reading and understanding the message.

         

How you can save the world, or more precisely, what I can do to save the world, has driven me full time for the past 7 years. As a former astronaut, sometime scientist, and dogged good public policy pusher, I’ve focused my efforts on preventing the largest natural hazard that we know of: asteroid impacts with Earth. One wiped out the dinosaurs (the polar bears of cosmic extinction) and may well, if we cannot ultimately get our act together, wipe us out one day.

The fascinating thing about asteroid impacts, the largest of natural hazards (albeit a cosmic one), is that we can actually prevent them. With current space technology we can slightly modify the solar system to help insure the survival of life on the planet. We can subtly modify the orbit of a threatening asteroid and thereby prevent it, and ultimately its millions of companions, from ever destroying life on Earth again. Will we? Or will we not? Are we? Or are we not still dinosaurs? Interestingly, technology and cost are not the issue. The answer will lie in whether or not we value ourselves as a species over ourselves as a collection of nations.

         

“Think globally, act locally” is a well-known approach to enabling change in the deep structure of our society. Perhaps the ultimate local action is what food we choose to place into our bodies. While deciding on a personal diet may seem very specific, in the aggregate, there are profound global consequences arising from such personal decisions. In particular, for our world to be capable of sustaining our civilization, humanity must live in balance with the resources available from our planet.

Food, water, and energy are fundamental resources that require our wise use for sustainable production practices. However, there are vast differences in how different types of food production draw upon these resources. Meat production is particularly profound: regularly eating meat results in an extremely high and unsustainable resource drain. In contrast, a vegetarian diet is far more sustainable on a global scale. Want to save the world? Become a vegetarian! There are many reasons to change your diet – including increasing the availability of freshwater, sustainable land use, clean air, and more optimal use of energy.

         

The grand myth of environmentalism is that it’s all about saving the Earth.

It’s not. The Earth will be just fine. Environmentalism is all about saving ourselves.

That may seem a bit counter-intuitive; after all, the Earth is certainly central to the rhetoric, the memetic of environmentalism. Most environmental discussions focus on ecological dynamics, with references to human beings typically limited to enumerations of the various insults we’ve visited upon the planet. Given the degree of culpability we bear for the current state of the planet, this is entirely appropriate.

But the rhetorical focus of environmentalism on the planet obscures the fact that what human beings have done to the Earth pales in comparison to past disasters hitting our world, from massive asteroid strikes to super-volcano eruptions killing off 90+% of the Earth’s species. And in every case, the Earth has recovered, and life has once again flourished.

         

Consider this scenario. Your doctor feels a small lump in your gut. You ask her what to do next. And this is what she says: “There is a test we can order to determine if this lump is an early sign of a pretty rare cancer. The prevalence of this cancer in the general population is less than 2 %. If you have a certain antigen on your white blood cells, though, you are 35% more likely to have the cancer — and we can determine your antigen type with perfect accuracy for 2,000 dollars. Now, 65 % of the people who get this cancer will die in a year. The test for the cancer itself is 98% accurate. When it’s wrong, it shows a false positive 75% of the time and a false negative 25% of the time. If the test comes back positive, we’ll then move to perform a procedure — and 3% of the people who have this procedure will die on the operating table. Another 5 % will suffer side effects that will keep them away from work for a month. But if you have the cancer and you don’t die from the procedure, your chances of survival go up by 40%. The test, by the way, costs 3,000 dollars; and the procedure costs 75,000 dollars”

Then she asks you: “So… do you want to have the test?”

You better know how to answer this question. Because if you don’t, it’s not just you that is in trouble. As a society, we’ve got a serious problem.

         

I love transparency, and I wish I believed it could save the world all by itself. Transparency, of course, is the opposite of opacity, secrets, anonymity… all those affordances that can hide bad behavior, foster bribery and corruption, and encourage loutishness. Transparency is far worse for the bad guys than privacy is good for the good guys. And it is not even-handed: It encourages the good/bad guys in the middle to be good and to get rewarded for it, in a self-reinforcing virtuous cycle.

And yet, we can hope for too much for transparency. Transparency is only a start. Businesses and governments should foster transparency; philanthropies should also make sure their money is used properly. These are important steps.

But in many dysfunctional cultures, it’s hard for people to understand what they are seeing. You need to change not just what people can see, but their ability to see it. People from (mostly) clean societies often assume that knowledge of corruption is enough to stop it, but that ’s not the case.

         

On May 2, 2008, Cyclone Nargis touched down on Burma’s western coast, and – according to top U.S. diplomats – may have claimed the lives of 100,000 people. As Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science has pointed out; it’s tough to say whether the devastation can be blamed directly on the sheer strength of the cyclone (aided undoubtedly by global warming) or on Burma’s bad governance, lack of proper infrastructure and warning systems.

Truth is both factors are at play. Climate change and the extreme weather that it brings have direct implications on international security – for the U.S., and for nations like Burma. In that sense, Nargis is just the beginning. In the years to come, we can expect to see increased frequency of extreme weather events, and other factors, particularly in the developing countries in the earth’s low latitudinal band.

In other words: while the U.S. will face its own slew of catastrophes (think: new diseases outbreaks, increased border stress, and – if you can imagine it – even more volatile fuel prices), the world’s poorest people will be worse off. In what can only be characterized as a cruel twist of irony, the same communities who stand to suffer the most from climate change have contributed least to the problem.

         

Science has always mattered to those of us old enough to realize how much society has achieved in a relatively short amount of time. The question becomes: are we creating a culture to ensure that the hearts and minds of those generations after us will come to understand how valuable science really is?

In the ‘50’s, it was alien beings, decoder rings and a way to Mars that would light up our eyes and capture our minds in such a way that gave flight to the imagination that would eventually fuel NASA and the Apollo missions. In the ‘60’s, the generation that created Woodstock inspired our collective conscious to change the culture in ways we still feel today. Two very different eras, tied together by the lasting changes we’ve witnessed in subsequent decades, but also by a groundswell of people who were inspired to allow their imaginations to bring their future into shape.

Today as technology is woven into the very fabric of our day-to-day lives both in terms of our activities and our quality of life, we know that there is no way that our society can continue to solve problems, realize opportunities and shape the future without instilling people with a culture that not only embraces science, technology and mathematics but celebrates how it will enable them to innovate solutions for the myriad of new 21st century issues.

         

I write this as I return to our SCI FI offices at 30 Rock in NYC from a getaway vacation in Indonesia. For those of you unfamiliar with Indonesia, it is an archipelago of over 17,000 islands with a population of more than 200 million, scattered over a land area of some 2.02 million square kilometers. I spent two weeks in Bali which is so picturesque that you could be fooled into thinking it was a painted backdrop: rice paddies trip down hillsides like giant steps, volcanoes soar through the clouds, the forests are lush and tropical, and the beaches are lapped by the warm waters of the Indian Ocean.

But the truth is that Bali is far from free of serious criminal activity. Yes, the people are incredibly friendly and the place is stunning. But there have been two terrorist attacks on tourists there in the last few years. Two suicide bomb attacks targeting tourists at popular beach resorts in 2003 and 2005 by a Muslim terrorist group called Jeemaah Islamiyah (with probable links to Al Quaeda) have killed over 200 tourists and locals.

So, although I had a fantastic time, terrorism is always in the back of your mind. Even while on an idyllic getaway, it is easy to let pessimism creep back in.

And now, as I sit here looking forward to my morning catch-up at the SCI FI offices, I am first hit with the morning newspapers. Headlines jump out from war and nuclear testing to environmental degradation and climate change to AIDS and pandemics to poverty and worsening income inequalities. The need for optimistic visions of the future has never been greater.

         

Industrial and scientific development in the void of space that surrounds our delicate planet is a key to ensuring our ability to carry on living on Earth at all over the next century. Satellites circling the planet already deliver information (through agricultural weather satellites and the GPS system) that provides the extra margin of food that keeps nearly a billion people a year from starving.

Many crucial developments in the earth sciences (from climate to geology) are children of advanced technology satellites we can now put in space as well. We now have the technological ability to do much more industrial work up there, providing communications, advanced science, and even the potential for solar power and server farms in space — thus taking CO² intensive industry out of the atmosphere.

The problem we now face is not the technology but getting it up there in a safe, reliable and cheap way with minimal environmental impact. Large non-reusable rockets launched from the ground based on designs dating back to the 1940s are not the answer to the urgent industrialization of space that we need to achieve.