There are many advertisements out there on behalf of the military nowadays, featuring soldiers remote-operating drones at a distance, satellites zooming in on battle terrain as stealth jets fly overhead, conveying a sense of futuristic warfare as they attempt to recruit to their cause. Or smiling, yet serious, soldier-scientists--engineers, physicists, chemists, etc.--going about the business of both military operations and groundbreaking experiments and research. "You can be both [scientist and soldier]! Have a career and serve your country! Come, join the future!" is usually how it goes. Flash to an episode of The Big Bang Theory in which Raj, Leonard, Howard and Sheldon are wrestling with the ethical and moral dilemmas surrounding their project to develop a better guidance system for the Air Force--receiving funding to do this research project, but also realizing the system will likely become another tool of war. This complicated relationship between science and war is everywhere, suffusing our culture, economy, politics, governmental institutions and academia with this uneasy knowledge. To no one's surprise, this complicity between scientific advancements and better technologies of destruction goes way back. Providing a context for our present moment of cyberwarfare, drones and satellites is astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-author Avis Lang's 2018 collaboration Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military.
I remember learning in school about the technological boon to society from the NASA space program, from Velcro to infrared thermometers to warmer, better insulated blankets. Being a kid, I was amazed with science's capacity to push society forward with both the gaining of knowledge and development of better technologies. I suppose I was naive enough not to realize the two-way relationship between scientific/societal advancement and military capabilities, just one of the many dualities and paradoxes of humans in general: building by destroying. Empires rose and fell based off of the level of scientific capital and knowledge present in their societies and the ones they conquered. In other words, science was power in multiple dimensions. After all, the emergence post-WWII of the American superpower on the world stage was greatly facilitated by the scientific and economic boons of the war. Tyson and Lang give vivid illustration to this complicated relationship through a historical jaunt from ancient times to the present.
Those forerunners of today's powers started off by relying on the stars for navigation, time organization, and rituals. After all, knowing where and when you were allowed societies to orient themselves, plan ahead, and standardize everything from rituals to tax collection to the sailing that allowed everything from a more interconnected global economy to the conduct of military operations and conquests. Scientists from the beginning had complicated relations with the state, army, and economic interests with astronomers serving as prized court advisers. Recognizing celestial patterns and cycles and learning to predict them, knowledge gleaned from an immeasurable amount of time of patient observation and recording of the heavens was one of the cornerstones of early societies. It allowed Columbus to trick the natives out of their provisions by his ability to exploit the knowledge of a coming lunar eclipse and explorers to circumnavigate the globe and European powers to colonize and establish outposts in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. The fruits of celestial navigation and prediction gave way to further advances, gained by scientists wanting better observation tools with which to see the universe from and institutionalized armies wanting to see their enemies coming from farther away. The telescope, early message relay systems, the telegraph, photography, spectrography, radar, nuclear power, satellites, GPS and many more such advances flowed from this knowledge.
This perennial quest of constant improvement stemmed from the first stargazers, a quest motivated by humanity's desire to act upon their knowledge of the scale of the world they inhabited, a world that got bigger and bigger the more they advanced, until the seemingly last frontier for which humanity could explore (or conquer) was space. Resources continued their flow between the private sector, academia, and the military, juicing the economy in the process. Society profited from war, while trying to use its newfound knowledge and resources to the common benefit of all, fighting human nature itself.
While countries do engage in scientific collaboration both on Earth and in the emerging dimension of space (think the International Space Station), they also, true to human nature, have started to squabble as each tries to achieve the highest of higher-grounds in space. This is despite the fact that under international law, space is a commons for all humanity, much like the oceans and the air we breathe. [One of the more famous examples of scientific interests (i.e. funding for research and experiments) getting entangled with the geopolitical was the Space Race, an epic Cold War-era fight between communist and capitalist ideologues alike, national pride and international prestige on the line.] Space is getting crowded, full of dual-use, civilian and military satellites and debris from past space missions, making exclusive space control infeasible and space wars with Star Wars-like weaponry of high-powered lasers and the like incredibly dangerous, risking damage to your own space assets and that of your allies and adversaries. Not to mention the astronomical costs of the development of these new and more destructive weapons in the first place, which takes away from other areas of societal investment. Additionally, despite the military investments America continues to make (outpacing the rest of the world presently), China and Russia are closing the gap, developing space programs and capacities of their own and threatening American scientific and technological preeminence (and of course, power).
Instead of doggedly pursuing the doctrine of total command and control (and the development of even more dangerous weapons than the A-bomb) espoused by the American military, Tyson and Lang conclude the well-researched cautionary tale of Accessory to War by making the case for pivoting to more benevolent and economically beneficial space ventures--from space tourism to asteroid mining--that could not only help alleviate the resource disparities that are often the undercurrents to conflict, but open up a new frontier, a glittering future of humanity expanding into the stars. It is a vision of utopian prosperity more akin to Star Trek, where scientific exploration is heavily prioritized because of the alleviation or even elimination of basic need scarcities and embrace of more cooperative means of existence. However, it is a good vision to strive for, especially in a time when science and expertise is often denounced and human capacity for self-destruction is on full display all around us. We may not be able to completely defeat human nature itself, but science continues to give us all a choice to work towards beneficial collaboration rather than mutually-assured destruction.
Works Cited:
Tyson, Neil DeGrasse, & Lang, Avis. (2018). Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
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