My colleague Mike LaChance recently wrote about Savannah Mandel, a PhD candidate at Virginia Tech and an “outer space anthropologist.”
This budding scientist (and I use this term loosely) thinks that human space exploration is “imperialist.” Mandel’s opinion and her book touting such nonsense are more symptoms of the continuing ideological capture of our scientific institutions.
What is particularly alarming to me was her call for “the inclusion of more social scientists” at NASA and elsewhere. As evidenced by the recent struggles at Boeing, with its airplanes and Starliner, adding anything other than physical science professionals, mathematicians, and engineers is the last thing we need in the aeronautics and space industry.
I have found it very instructive to examine the backgrounds of those being promoted as the next generation of experts. Mandel received a glowing write-up at Physics.org for her work.
She earned the title of rising star and “the vanguard of researchers looking at the human side of leaving Earth” from Ozy Magazine.She’s worked alongside physicists and space technology scholars with the goal of ensuring humanity stands at the forefront.On the side, she’s a budding novelist.All this, and yet Mandel’s career is still in its early stages. Through her research, Mandel reinforces the concepts of collaboration, social awareness, and reflexivity.
It appears that the social justice plans for science include a new “studies” field: “Science and Technology Studies”….where both are considered “socially constructed entities“.
Science and Technology Studies is a small field that teaches us that science and technology are socially constructed entities. In other words, when we work on a scientific project or create technology, we don’t do so in an unbiased way. Science and technology are created with intention, cultural motivation, and political influence. Space projects are no different — they typically have a motivation or intention behind them, even if it’s not always explicit.So when I look at space organizations or any other science and technology companies, I ask questions like, ‘What is influencing this? Who is influencing this? What beliefs and values have gone into this?’ These are the kinds of questions my field encourages.
I am sure Science and Technology Studies will be just as big a failure as “Women’s Studies” and “Gender Studies,” and all the other woke nonsense that has been squandering the minds of America’s young scholars for the past few decades.
Meanwhile, CEO Elon Musk and his team of real scientists at SpaceX are planning for cities on Mars within 20 years.
Mr. Musk, 53, has directed SpaceX employees to drill into the design and details of a Martian city, according to five people with knowledge of the efforts and documents viewed by The New York Times. One team is drawing up plans for small dome habitats, including the materials that could be used to build them. Another is working on spacesuits to combat Mars’s hostile environment, while a medical team is researching whether humans can have children there. Mr. Musk has volunteered his sperm to help seed a colony, two people familiar with his comments said.The initiatives, which are in their infancy, are a shift toward more concrete planning for life on Mars as Mr. Musk’s timeline has hastened. While he said in 2016 that it would take 40 to 100 years to have a self-sustaining civilization on the planet, Mr. Musk told SpaceX employees in April that he now expects one million people to be living there in about 20 years.
If the United States doesn’t have people willing to explore and develop, other countries will.
China’s historic attempt to bring samples from Mars to Earth could launch as soon as 2028, two years earlier than previously stated, according to a senior mission official.The country’s Tianwen-3 mission would carry out two launches “around 2028” to retrieve the Martian samples, chief mission designer Liu Jizhong said at a deep-space exploration event in eastern China’s Anhui province last week.
Including more social-justice-oriented social scientists in NASA or any other critical scientific institution is setting us on a trajectory for failure.
I will conclude by noting that Mandel’s social media account is limited. One of the hallmarks of true science is the ability to absorb new data and readjust theories. This tells me exactly how much science is actually involved in “outer space anthropology.”
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