Making a Woke GenZ Anthropologist a Celebrity Shows the Left’s Grip on Science
What is particularly alarming is Savannah Mandel’s call for “the inclusion of more social scientists” at NASA and elsewhere.
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.”
IT’S RELEASE DAY! Can you believe we’ve finally made it to the finish line? That this incredible project has come full circle? I sure can’t. And I really could not have done it without the support of my friends, family, #teachers, and #mentors. pic.twitter.com/Vd2LOl8Fh6
— Savannah Mandel (@TheSpaceSav) July 16, 2024
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Comments
The good thing is that if intellectual pygmies like this woman flock to NASA we at least know where they are all…and can then continue to rely on Elon to get us to Mars.
Maybe we can get them to all gather in a space station somewhere….
Transported by Boeing.
Nah. SPaceX can transport them there. But Boeing can design and install the portholes on the space station.
I hear they make a damn fine million-dollar toilet.
They will work to make it unlawful for Elon to go to mars.
Let us all hold hands and wish the rocket holding Mtumbo to rise into the heavens on afro-power.
She looks like the head hooker in the Firefly Heart of Gold episode. Not saying that’s a bad thing. Just saying.
(And that character sounded wiser than this woman.)
I mean lets be honest…Id go there! 😉
Took me a while, but… Zooey Deschanel.
‘What is influencing this? Who is influencing this? What beliefs and values have gone into this?’
Funny thing is, we’ve all been asking those questions for years. Without benefit of a college degree in said area. And our conclusions might shock you, Ms Mandel.
In the misty past, I was on the Usenet group alt.talk.space and someone put out a prompt for ideas on how to terraform Venus. There were a bunch of ideas but I remember a post that said “Venus isn’t there for us. It is there for itself.” The person was roundly criticized. Now they have a degree program for them.
Want to bet she hasn’t bothered reading any of the hundreds of excellent science fiction novels that already explored the subject?
I believe the nose ring is the universal symbol that means:
Please ignore everything that emanates from the mouth below.
Unless it is oink or moo.
She knows her beliefs are toxic and limits who can reply to her on X.
We must keep exploring space until we locate the Jupiter 2, which has been missing for almost 60 years.
I want to know why they can’t find Gor. It’s right on the other side of the sun.
Gor is hidden by the Priest-Kings.
Relax NASA is already wrecked. For example in 2010 NASA head Charles Bolden said one NASA’s primary missions is making Muslims feel good about their contributions to science, math and engineering. People like Mandel can further degrade the institution, but it won’t matter. It looks like NASA can’t do what it did 50 years ago. Sobering to think that in 1976 Viking 1 and Viking 2 landed on Mars, explored the surface, and sent back analysis of soil samples.
Of of the principles that one learns as an engineer: good, cheap and fast, pick any two. Well in the 1990s NASA came out with a program called “faster, better cheaper.” What did that lead to? The Mars Climate Orbiter debacle. A joint project between JPL and Lockheed Martin. But JPL was using metric units while Lockheed was using Imperial units. Somehow the data from Lockheed fed to JPL never got converted! DEI?
Savannah Mandel represents yet another phase in the decline of NASA and American science and technology in general. Perhaps NASA should just only hire women and non-white men, and be done with it.
NASA is consistently over budget and behind deadline.
Where’s my September nova in Corona, you deadbeats?
they want no men
they want abortion
they want wars
looks like there is a pattern with it and its people
Social science is fine but it’s gone downhill. The good guys are gone, like Erving Goffman and Joseph Gusfield, whose texts you could read for pleasure.
This site is literally the first I had heard of her…celebrity?
NASA and NOAA were infiltrated with useless PhD’s years ago. This is one of the reasons they both torture temperature data to support the AGW hoax, among other things that will not get a manned rocket and support to Mars.
Until we get the feds out of student loans, this sort of moron will be joined with many, many more.
She’s got a pretty mouth. And the nose ring seals the deal.
Where’s HAL when you need him?
What is she studying for a Ph.D.? Article doesn’t say.
This strikes me as a long game play to ensure that future limitations on federal student loans to STEM subjects will continue to fund progressive works. Just reclassify your BS degree as a science degree and you can still get sweet federal dollars.