I hope the James Webb Space Telescope changes human history

Source: NASA - https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasawebbtelescope/33433274343/in/album-72157629134274763/

As I write this in January of 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is hurtling intrepidly to Lagrange Point 2, its home for the duration of its mission, about 1 million miles away from Earth. Launched on Christmas Day in 2021, the construction and launch of the observatory was a massive undertaking - spanning 25 years, at a cost of $10B, involving a team of 1000 people, and the space agencies of 14 countries.

When it arrives at LG2, it will calibrate its instruments, which are protected by a tennis court-sized sun shield that will keep its onboard instruments at a chilly -374 F temperature. Without this protection the warmth of the Earth and the Sun would interfere with the telescope’s ability to detect infrared wavelengths, such as the ones emitted just after the birth of the universe, which the JWST will study during its mission.

The mission’s four science goals, are as simple as they are profound:

Source: NASA - https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/science/index.html

The observatory’s planned mission is ten years, with its first images expected in June of 2022. Between now and 2032, I think we will learn many very important things about the universe. Perhaps even something that changes the arc of human history.

One of the deepest existential questions we ask as humans is, “are we alone in the universe?” In ten years, I doubt we will have a concrete answer to that question. But even if we had a shred of evidence, that gives us something - some clarity, a more accurate probability, something - wouldn’t that be absolutely incredible?

I am inspired and in awe of the possibility of what we could learn, rather than the reality of what we will learn. What if we learned that the proportion of habitable planets is significantly larger than what we currently estimate? What if we observe that the universe’s early formation makes it possible to predict where habitable planets will cluster? What if we learn that organic life is more possible than we thought?

If we realized that the development of other space-faring species is just a little tiny bit more possible than we currently think, it would open the door to ask dramatically new questions and contemplate exponentially more ambitious possibilities.

If we realized there were many more habitable planets, for example, wouldn’t we imagine if we could explore them? If we realized that space-faring aliens were more likely to exist than we thought, wouldn’t we try to imagine what they may be like, and how their societies may work? Wouldn’t we become more open to thinking about life’s biggest questions with more wonder and possibility?

And yet, despite all of the possibilities of what could be out there in the universe. I think the most profound conclusions we’d have if we look out into the universe will be introspective, helping us to examine life on Earth. By looking out into the expanse of the universe, the most important conclusions we’d draw could be about ourselves and about our own existence. The JWST will help us look outward, but also powerfully inward. 

For example, I think often about what I call exomorality, which is trying to philosophize about the moral frameworks space-faring aliens might have. I wonder about how resource constraints on our planet, our physical bodies and lifespans, may affect how we contemplate right and wrong. Would aliens be different? Is it possible to have a society that doesn’t have rigorous ideas of right and wrong? Why? How?

I’ll concede that my forays into exomorality are a bit of a fool’s errand and just a tad premature (but it is fun). But even if I’m 100% wrong about the morality of aliens, it’s a liberating way to reflect on our own, human, morality. Looking outward makes it easier to look inward.

Despite my eagerness to hear about the possibility of habitable worlds and alien species, the JSWT may reveal the opposite. By looking outward, we may instead learn that the universe is an even more barren place than we thought. And learning that may be even more transformative for our species than if we discovered more signs of life. 

What if we learn that the likeliest outcome is that we’re mostly alone out here? What if we learned that the conditions for organic life are incredibly and exquisitely rare?

Imagine how quickly how we view ourselves might change if we realized, simultaneously as a species, that maybe we don’t have a safety net. That there is no techno-civilization out there to learn from; no deus ex machina.  Maybe there’s really nowhere else for us to go, even if we could get there somehow. Maybe we are alone out here and this one precious Earth really is all we have.

I’m certainly not a NASA scientist, and these hypotheses are all my own. And I doubt we’ll have any absolute “proof” to validate any of the thought experiments I’ve suggested here, especially after just 10 years.

But what if we end up having 1% more clarity on something related to these deepest of the deep questions? What if we have even 0.5% less doubt about some question related to life in the universe?

If we have some evidence, of some thing, that gives us a foothold to think deeper and explore further - I think that could change everything that follows.

I love space. I have followed NASA since I visited the Kennedy Space Center as a kid and somehow got a scholarship to go to space camp. I read interstellar travel blogs, still. I think about aliens, like, 5 times a week at least (just ask my wife, ha!). Perhaps most controversially, I like both Star Wars and Star Trek, (gasp) equally. Especially for a non-scientist, I’m a space nerd of galactic proportions.

Thinking about space is what nurtured my ability to dream and dream big. Like it does for millions across the planet, space exploration gave me something, from an early age, to grab onto, that made it possible to believe in something huge and that anything may really be possible.

Just looking up, on a clear night, is as much a path to a spiritual plane to me as going to church, performing a pooja, or doing transcendental meditation. Seeing a sky full of stars from the trails of our nation’s national parks is still among the most beautiful, humbling moments I’ve ever been part of.

Our efforts to explore our solar system and our universe have already given us, as a species, so many images that have expanded what we, as a species, believe is possible. Exploring space, and going out there, into the final frontier has helped so many people across our entire planet imagine the magical and magnificent possibilities of this universe. 

Images like Earthrise from Apollo 8, which some credit as starting the modern environmental movement:

Source: NASA - https://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a410/AS8-14-2383HR.jpg

Or this “small step” moment from Apollo 11:

Or this image of our “Pale Blue Dot” from Voyager 1 which Carl Sagan famously reflected on:

Source: NASA - https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/536/voyager-1s-pale-blue-dot/

For me and so many others, what we’ve seen and learned about by exploring space has expanded what we believe is possible. And it’s expanded what we believe we can be.

I’m not at NASA scientist, clearly. So do I actually know what we might learn during the JWST’s mission? No, not really. I’ll concede that too.

But let’s remember, we’ve just launched the most powerful telescope with the most ambitious mission in the history of human kind. For goodness sakes, we will be studying the birth of the universe a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, a few blinks of an eye in universal terms. With such bold ambitions, even if what we discover during the JWST’s mission is just 1% of what I hope it is, it could fundamentally transform how we perceive the universe and ourselves.

In 2032, we will probably still have income inequality or political strife. We will probably still have a warming planet. We may still have many of the problems which plague us today (fingers crossed, NOT Covid). But I think it’s possible that in 10 years, when the planned mission of the James Webb Space Telescope comes to a close, we may have learned something that dramatically expands what our species believes is possible. And if we learned something like that, it could change everything that follows.

---

Other Links:

https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/about/faqs/faq.html

https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/science/index.html

https://jwst.nasa.gov/index.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope

A choking son; My brother’s keeper

I knew it was only a matter of time until one of our sons had a real choking scare. And it finally happened yesterday, when one of our boys put a quarter into his mouth, playfully, but then couldn’t breathe.

It was while I was cooking breakfast. The boys and I were in the kitchen and I was turning some hash browns over in a cast iron pan. And my back was turned to them for maybe 10 or 15 seconds. When I turned to check back, he was doing the sort of quiet, gasping head bob when you’re trying to dislodge something in the throat.

I struck his upper back sharply once. Then twice. And the quarter - and I’ll remember it forever, it was one of those state quarters for Idaho - popped out. And just like that, in another few seconds, it was over. My son and I melted into each other, him in shock, me trying to be stoic and calm, even though I was coming back from a feeling of free-fall inside.

It was the shortest worst moment of my life. I was about the same age when I choked on a hard candy lifesaver and I remember it vividly, still. He and I will both remember this, forever, I think. I woke up from sleep last night and couldn’t stop replaying it in my head for 30 minutes straight, until I tried reimagining us taking that quarter between both our palms, while on our knees intertwined in the kitchen, using magical energy to make it disappear away.

—

The scariest part of choking is that it literally makes someone helpless. As in, the act of choking makes it impossible to shout for help, and therefore makes one help-less. To even notice someone is choking you have to be very close to them, any more than a few yards away, literally or figuratively, and you can’t see or hear their signals.

I knew this day would come, someday. So when I’m on duty with the kids, I don’t like being away from them for any measurable period of time. Even if I’m immersed in something, like cooking breakfast, I always have one eye and one ear in their direction. Because I knew this day would come, and knowing it would has haunted me since our first son was born.

The scariest part of someone choking is that it makes them helpless. To notice someone is choking you have to be around to notice them. That’s all I’ve been thinking about for the past day straight.

And it has led me to reflect more broadly. Who am I choosing to notice? It is just my wife and kids? Is it my family and close friends? What about my neighbors? What if I, literally or figuratively, saw someone choking and help-less at a park or while out shopping? Would I notice them? Who am I noticing? Who am I choosing not to notice?

This whole experience of choking - both living through my son’s scare and reliving my own - has got me thinking about my relationship with the world outside myself. And I think this idea of noticing rhymes with the spirt of the phrase “I am my brother’s keeper.” Who we choose to notice is our brother or sister, someone we don’t cannot be. Who we choose to notice matters. Who I am choosing to notice and not notice matters.

There’s a chasm between who I ought to  notice, who I choose to notice, and who I actually notice. It’s humbling and intimidating to think how big that chasm might be.

This chasm, it seems, is one way to represent the challenge of trying to be a good person, day to day, in the trenches of real life. Who am I choosing to notice and not notice is an indicting, messy, moral question. But it’s one, I think, worth walking toward, with intention into the unknown, instead of running away from.

Management is moral

These are the three questions I think about a lot, with regard to my professional role as a people manager:

1. Am I here to enrich the lives of others (customers, colleagues, owners) or my own?

2. Are my expectations for my team (starting with myself) going to be high or low?

3. When my team doesn’t meet my expectations (which is bound to happen sometime) am I committed to coaching them, or merely shaming them into compliance with my wishes?

Don’t be fooled, these decisions are all moral in nature. Being a manager is not merely transactional, tactical, or even just strategic. Management is moral. Or I should say, depending on how one answers these questions, management might be moral. In my view, it ought to be.

As managers we are the stewards of whether the talent of the people we manage is wasted or not. And we steward tens of thousands of dollars worth of people’s time, if not more. For that reason, I think management ought to be a moral endeavor where we consider its moral implications.

And it starts with the expectations we set for ourselves and, in turn, others.

I persist, management is moral. We should take it that seriously.

"Even if I don't like you, I will carry you."

There isn’t much about our lives that isn’t affected by how wealthy we are. Wealth is insidious, it creeps into every corner of our lives. Our health, our mental state, our life spans, our relationships, our vocations. It’s everywhere; every damn place.

I am very grateful when friends comment on questions I ask on facebook. And there were many thoughtful responses folks shared to, “what’s something that has little to do with how wealthy we are?”

One friend commented with, “the earth’s rotation.” Which is true, the natural world and the laws of physics have little to do with how wealthy we are. But, knowing her that answer was sincere but probably also a little tongue-in-cheek. Because if an answer is the earth’s rotation - that implies that basically nothing else on earth has little to do with wealth.

Even inner peace and integrity, which some people shared, seems to be affected at least somewhat. Yes, money can’t buy peace or integrity, but chronic poverty probably makes it so that peace and acting with integrity are orders of magnitude harder to achieve for some.

But especially after several friends talked about how they thought hard about the question and literally couldn’t think of anything, I was unsatisfied. I agreed with them, but I was unsatisfied because it’s really sad if no aspect of human life is untouched by wealth.

So I thought about it some more, and I don’t even know if this is correct, but it’s the best I’ve got.

—

Suppose you go to an ice cream shop and order a scoop of chocolate ice cream. Instead of providing the ice cream, however, the clerk becomes very angry and indiscriminately hits you with a wooden rod. No warning, no apparent cause - just blow after blow from the business end of a broomstick.

This, by all reasonable accounts would be a completely unacceptable behavior. There is no circumstance I can think of where some story like this would be acceptable. It is illegal, yes. But more than that, it violates a norm we have when living in a free and peaceful society. It doesn’t matter who you are - it’s not okay to beat someone with a broomstick indiscriminately and without provocation. It doesn’t matter how wealthy you are or how poor you are, that is NOT acceptable.

To be sure, things like this still happen, but to reasonable people it is not acceptable that they happen. Reasonable people do not think it’s acceptable to be on the giving or receiving end of a broomstick in this way. That’s just now how we live.

And, because this sort of thing happens in ways that are somewhat predictable based on race and class, I concede that lots of people perhaps aren’t reasonable by the parameters laid out in this thought experiment. But let’s just continue because that’s not the problem I’m focusing on here.

What this thought experiment illustrates, however, is that norms about what’s right and wrong exist. Norms we owe it to each other to follow, and that moral obligation has little to do with how wealthy we are. There is moral obligation that exists, that has little to do with wealth.

Now, we may disagree on exactly what those moral obligations are, but this preposterous example, hopefully articulates that there is some moral compact among reasonable people - in this case, not bashing someone’s head in with a stick without provocation or warning - that has little to do with wealth.

The most common discussion that advances from this fertile soil is the question of - what are our moral obligations to each other? And, that’s literally and endless, and important, but also a stupid, impractical debate. Not in the sense that we shouldn’t have this discussion, but stupid in the sense that we facilitate this discussion stupidly.

Because we often exclude people with inconvenient opinions from this sort of discussion and often go into discussions to discern moral obligation where at least one party is unwilling to admit they are wrong. So it’s stupid - because we start discussions without the possibility of reaching a thoughtful conclusion.

But I think there’s another path this conversation can take. Instead of asking what our moral obligations are to others, we can ask something more hopeful. What if we asked: if we imagine the community we wished we lived in, what would that community believe they owed to each other?

And this thought experiment took me back to thinking about wealth.

Because I believe at the time we are conceived we all have equal potential. But then as the clock starts ticking, that starts changing. Because from what I’ve read, the wealth of our mother (or even if our grandmother underwent a period of famine) starts to affect us in the womb, before we are born. So from the moment we are conceived - the context in which we live, which is so strongly affected by our wealth - starts to influence our lives.

But I also believe potential is different than worth. And even though our potential as humans may be different (and unfairly influenced by wealth) our worth is equivalent. We all have equal worth. But more importantly, we all have immeasurably large worth. A life is not just worth something, and worth something equal - it is worth more than we can count or comprehend.

And that’s all fine and aspirational and mushy gushy, blah blah. Here’s what that means for me on the question of the moral standards of the community I wish I lived in.

Let’s ignore what moral obligations we have to the people we love and even the people we like. I’ve found, at least, that it’s much easier to treat people well if you love or like them. What really reveals the character of a person or group is how they treat people they don’t love or like.

I am not this man today, I know I’m not, but the man I want to be would live a creed like this:

I will treat you - whoever you are, whether I love you or not, whether I like you or not, whether I fear you or not - in the way that you would like to be treated. Even if it is difficult, I will treat you with respect. I will try to learn to love you or to like you. But even if I don’t like you, I will carry you. I will carry you without expecting your gratitude or the recognition of others. And if I falter, and need you to carry me, I will let you and be gracious for your kindness.

And ideas like this inevitably attract pessimism. “That’ll never happen. It’s not scalable. It’s not in people’s nature. That’s a waste of time. Let’s focus on something achievable.” I’ve heard phrases like these, over and over.

I think we should try, and try courageously to create a community that believes it has this stringent of a moral obligation to others.

The hope of a community like this is worth failing for. Because even if we only advance one inch in this effort which is equivalent to a journey of many miles, we will have moved an inch. And that inch creates the permission for others to try for two inches. And then for the generation after them to try for four. And maybe someday, even if it’s many decades after our own deaths, the long walk will be over and we will have arrived.

And this whole argument rests on the assumption that we have some defensible moral obligation to others we live in community with. And maybe that’s presumptuous. But I think that assumption is worth having faith in, even if it’s not decidedly proven. It is worth taking a leap for.