From Eros to Gaia
I begin with three cautionary tales, one from each of the three worlds into which our planet is divided. These tales will have various morals. One of the morals is that human nature is the same in all three worlds. We are the same people making the same mistakes, whether we happen to belong to the third world, the second world, or the first world. But let me tell you the stories first. The stories should speak for themselves. After you hear the stories you can decide what the morals ought to be.
To represent the third world I choose the village of Ngon, a village in Central Africa where my daughter Mia spent some time as a Peace Corps volunteer. My information comes from an unpublished report which Mia wrote after she came home. Mia visited Ngon as an employee of the Office of Community Development of the Republic of Cameroon. Her official function was to assist and encourage local initiatives leading to the improvement of public health and education.
The main problem in Ngon is water. The village is several kilometers away from the nearest source of potable water. Night and morning, the women of the village must walk to the spring and back, with heavy waterpots balanced on their heads. During the dry season the spring degenerates into a muddy swamp. In 1985 the official Committee of Village Development, composed of prominent residents of Ngon and three neighboring villages, met to consider the problem of water supply. The meetings were conducted according to the traditional rules of African hospitality, the village chiefs presiding, their wives keeping the delegates supplied with food and drink, my daughter as an honored guest seated among the chiefs. The villagers mostly belong to the Boulou tribe and have their own Boulou language, but they have been educated for three generations in French bureaucratic jargon. The Committee of Village Development, in keeping with its official status, conducted its deliberations in French.
Two courses of action were available. I will call them Plan A and Plan B. Plan A was to engage the services of a professional well digger who happened to live nearby. The fee he charged was high by village standards, but not prohibitive. He would design and direct the construction of an adequate well, including a bathhouse and laundry, using the villagers as his work force. My daughter had made enquiries about his work in other villages and found that the results were generally satisfactory. Plan B was to write a formal proposal to the central government in Yaoundé, three hundred kilometers away over very bad roads, for a massive water adduction system using urban technology. The chance that the proposal would be accepted was small. Many hundreds of villages were competing for the central government's limited resources. But if Ngon should happen to be the lucky winner, the rewards would be great, especially for the members of the Committee of Village Development. The decision was made unanimously to proceed with Plan B. As a result, at least up to the time when my daughter left the country, Ngon still had no water supply.
After the meetings were over, my daughter went back to the village and spoke privately with the villagers, trying to understand why they had made what seemed to her a clearly wrong decision. She found that everybody, including the women who carry the waterpots to and from the spring, was in favor of Plan B. In the end, they almost convinced my daughter that Plan B made sense. After all, as one of the women said to my daughter, nobody in Ngon ever dies of thirst. The problem of the water supply is not a matter of life and death. The problem is a matter of status. On the one hand, the act of writing an official proposal to the government would enhance the status of the village and of the Committee of Village Development, even if nothing ever came of it. It would open a channel of communication and create contacts between the villagers and the political authorities in Yaoundé. In the long run, such contacts are more important to the life of the village than a communal bathhouse. On the other hand, the act of making a deal with a backwoods well digger would be unworthy of the dignity of an official Committee of Village Development. If these arguments had not been sufficient, there was an even more cogent reason for rejecting Plan A. The well digger is a Fulani. He belongs to the wrong tribe. The Boulous of Ngon are a settled agricultural people. They have lived from time immemorial in villages and consider themselves civilized. The Fulanis are northerners, nomads, and cowherds. No selfrespecting Boulou would want to take orders from a Fulani.
So I leave the villagers of Ngon, on the whole a happy and contented people. They were always friendly and hospitable to my daughter, even when they found her ideas a little strange. I pass on now from the third to the second world.
To represent the second world I choose the great Soviet astronomical observatory at Zelenchukskaya in the Caucasus Mountains. I visited the observatory in 1977. The six-meter telescope,the largest optical telescope in the world, was then brand-new and just beginning to go into operation. I spent three days and nights on the mountain and enjoyed my stay very much. The astronomers at Zelenchukskaya were as friendly to me as the villagers of Ngon were to my daughter. They talked frankly about the six-meter telescope and its history.
Twenty years earlier a committee of the Soviet Academy had met to discuss with the political authorities the facilities for optical astronomy in the Soviet Union. The six-meter telescope was their Plan B. Plan A was to construct four or five modern observatories of modest size at optically excellent sites in Central Asia. One example of a Plan A observatory already existed at Byurakan in Soviet Armenia. The Armenians are the Fulanis of rhe Soviet Union. I also visited Byurakan and saw there a two-meter telescope with a Fulani by the name of Markaryan in charge. Markaryan was using his telescope to great effect, taking pictures of the sky with an objective grating and picking out objects that have strong emission in the blue and violet parts of the spectrum. Many of the most interesting objects in the universe were first identified by Markaryan and still carry Markaryan's catalog numbers. Byurakan has been for thirty years in the hands of Fulanis who know how to do important science with limited means.
Unfortunately, there are no other observatories like Byurakan in the Soviet Union. Instead, Plan B prevailed. The committee of academicians decided to build the biggest telescope in the world. Six meters was chosen as the mirror diameter because it had to be decisively bigger than the five-meter telescope at Palomar. The manufacture of the telescope was entrusted to a heavy industrial outfit in Leningrad which had little previous experience with astronomy. The observatory was under construction for twenty years. When I visited it in 1977, one of the Soviet astronomers remarked that the structure was built out of leftover pieces from dismantled battleships. Another Soviet astronomer told me that this one instrument had set back the progress of optical astronomy in the Soviet Union by twenty years. It had absorbed for twenty years the major part of the funds assigned to telescope building, and it was in many ways already obsolete before it began to operate. It deprived a generation of young astronomers of the opportunity to put their skills to use. Now another thirteen years have gone by and the telescope has set back the progress of astronomy in the Soviet Union by thirty-three years.
One of the factors which the committee planning the observatory did not worry about was the Zelenchukskaya weather. I was on the mountain for three nights and did not see the sky. Even at Mount Palomar one may be unlucky and run into a string of cloudy nights. But at Zelenchukskaya the weather is consistently bad for the greater part of each year. The site is far too close to the high Caucasus peaks which are regularly stirring up storms and clouds. The committee probably chose this site because it is easily accessible by rail and road. The sites with good astronomical seeing in Central Asia may have been excluded because they have no roads suitable for the transport of a supermassive structure. At Zelenchukskaya the roads are good because there is a skiing resort in the same valley. Of course, the snow which makes the area good for skiing also causes problems for the telescope. When I was there, a great mass of accumulated ice had blocked the action of the dome so that the slit could not be opened. Even if the sky had been clear, the telescope would not have been able to see it. I gave a theoretical seminar to the astronomers in a lecture room where the temperature was minus ten Celsius. The situation did not look good for anybody who wanted to do serious work in astronomy.
During my stay at Zelenchukskaya, I looked for clues which might explain how this scientific disaster had happened. I found the essential clue in the visitors' gallery. Some of you may have gone as tourists to visit the 5-meter telescope at Palomar. Palomar has a visitors' gallery, a glass-enclosed area inside the dome where tourists can see the telescope but cannot pollute the air around it with the heat and humidity of their breathing. At Zelenchukskaya they have a visitors' gallery, like the one at Palomar, only about ten times as big. And behind the visitors' gallery at Zelenchukskaya they have a white wall for visitors to write their names on. Instead of a visitors' book they have a wall, and they invited me to write my name on the wall. The wall is huge, about a hundred feet long, and still I had a hard time finding an empty space large enough to write my name on. Every square inch of the wall was tightly packed with names.
When I saw that wall, I understood for the first time what the Zelenchukskaya observatory was for. The government officials who decided to build the observatory twenty years earlier did not care much about astronomy. They did not mind keeping the astronomers waiting for twenty years while the telescope was being built. Even when the telescope was finished, they were not in any hurry to get the dome unstuck so that the astronomers could get to work. For those government officials the things that mattered were the visitors' gallery and the wall. The visitors' gallery and the wall must have been given high priority. They were in full swing for many years before the telescope was ready. For years and years before my visit, busloads of schoolteachers and factory workers and party chairmen were trooping through the visitors' gallery, admiring this latest triumph of Soviet science, and writing their names on the wall.
Plan B gave the political authorities in Moscow what they wanted, a tangible symbol of Soviet greatness. Plan A might have been better for science. Plan A might have saved a whole generation of astronomers from frustration. But with plan A, the political authorities would not have had the satisfaction of building the biggest telescope in the world, and there would have been no hundred-foot wall for the visitors to write their names on.
My third cautionary tale concerns our own world, the so-called first world. The astronomers of the United States have made a habit of setting up a committee at the beginning of each decade to plan lhe facilities to be built in the subsequent ten years. The committees are called by the names of their chairmen, all of them distinguished astronomers. The first was the Whitford Committee which made plans for the 196Os. Next came the Greenstein Committee which dealt with the 1970s. I shalI talk about the third committee, the Field Committee, which dealt with the 1980s and published its report in 1982. The Field Committee had a number of sensible recommendations for ground-based astronomy which I shall not discuss. I shall talk only about the problems of spacebased astronomy, the launching and operation of astronomical telescopes in orbit.
While the Field Committee was meeting from 1978 to 1980, the situation of American space-based astronomy was roughly as follows. We had two active space telescope projects with very different characteristics. We had one Boulou space telescope and one Fulani space telescope. The Boulou telescope was the Hubble Space Telescope, a grand and elaborate instrument which had already been recommended by the Greenstein Committee ten years earlier and was supposed to be launched by the shuttle, if all went well, in 1985. The Fulani telescope was a small and comparatively cheap instrument called the International Ultraviolet Explorer, or the IUE, which had not been recommended by the Greenstein Committee or by any other prestigious committee of experts. I will have more to say about the IUE in chapter 5. The IUE was Iaunched in January 1978, before the Field Committee started work, and has been from the beginning, like Markaryan's telescope in Armenia, a brilliant scientific success. It is still going strong and still doing excellent science after twelve years in space.
The Field Committee considered two programs of space-based astronomy which I will call Plan A and Plan B. I am here interpreting the committee's discussions in my own way. You won't find any explicit mention of PIan A and PIan B in the committee report. Plan A was a series of Explorer missions following the pattern of the IUE. An Explorer mission means a mission small enough and cheap enough to be paid for out of the NASA space science budget without speciaI exertions. Roughy speaking, each Explorer mission costs about one-fifth of the annual space science budget. If Explorer missions were given the highest priority, it would be possible for NASA to sustain a launch rate of one astronomical Explorer per year in addition to the Explorers concerned with other things such as earth-science and plasma physics. There are many important things for astronomicaI Explorers to do. If we had one Explorer mission in X-ray astronomy, one in infrared, one in extreme ultraviolet, one in astrometry, and one in radio interferometry, the scientific harvest would be enormous. If Plan A had been adopted, we could have had all of these flying in the 1980s without any stretching of the NASA space-science budget.
The Field Committee, however, like the committees in Ngon and in Moscow, preferred Plan B. Plan B consisted of a series of space missions known collectively as Great Observatories. The Hubble Space Telescope was the first Great Observatory. After that would come the Gamma-Ray Observatory, aIso dependent on the shuttle for its launch and scheduled to go up in 1987. Next would be the Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility, familiarly known as AXAF. AXAF was the highest-priority item on the Field Committee list of new missions, since the committee assumed the first two Great Observatories, the Hubble Telescope and the Gamma-Ray Observatory, to be already in the bag. After AXAF would come a fourth Great Observatory called LDR, or Large Deployable Reflector, a far-infrared telescope with mirror diameter in the ten-meter class. Plan B began with these four Great Observatory missions, plus a number of smaller missions left over from earlier committee reports. To be fair I should mention that Plan B included an Explorer mission called IRAS or Infrared Astronomy Satellite which flew in 1983 and gave us our first comprehensive view of the infrared universe. IRAS was, like the earlier Explorer mission IUE, an international venture and an enormous scientific success.
The main emphasis in the Field Committee report was on the Great Observatories. Each Great Observatory costs as much as five or ten Explorers. Each requires protracted and difficult negotiations between NASA and various committees of Congress to obtain the necessary funds. Each requires about a decade to complete its engineering development and construction after its funding has been authorized. And each requires a shuttle launch to put it into orbit. As a consequence of the Challenger disaster of January 1986, the Great Observatories have been delayed by an additional three or four years. The scientific return from the entire Plan B program, apart from IRAS and some ground-based activities which I am not discussing here, has been in no way commensurate with its cost. Just like in Ngon. Just like in Zelenchukskaya.
It is important to understand that the debacle of the Great Observatory program is not simply a consequence of the shuttle accident. The Great Observatories were in deep trouble long before the Challenger crashed. Their troubles were technical as well as political. The Hubble Telescope, the only Great Observatory yet built, had a long history of engineering difficulties, delays, and cost overruns. Even if the shuttle had remained alive and well, none of the missions recommended by the Field Committee and not already recommended by earlier committees could possibly have been launched in the 1980s. The Field Committee report was entitled Astronomy and Astrophysics for the 1980s. The title shows that the members of the committee were deluding themselves. So far as the 1980s were concerned, their program was a mirage.
The fundamental flaw in the Great Observatory program is ecological. The Great Observatories are too big and too slow and too expensive to fit comfortably into the ecology of science. They take so long to fund, to build and to launch that they are unable to keep pace with the rapid growth of science. Scientific discoveries emerge, scientific ideas change, and scientific tools develop, all within a year or two. A Great Observatory which takes ten years to build is always in danger of being left behind. The ecology of science needs missions that are small, cheap, and quick enough to respond to new ideas and new questions. This is true, whether or not the shuttle crashes.
That is the end of my third tale. One moral of these tales is clear. The nature of committees is the same, whether it is revealed in an African village assembly or in the academic politics of Moscow and Washington. The same drama is played, whether it is the Committee of Village Development, the Soviet Academy of Sciences, or the Field Committee that takes the leading role. The ascendancy of the committeemen began early in the history of science. One of the decisive steps in their upward progress in the United States occurred in 1906, when the administrators of the newly established Carnegie Institution, at that time the largest source of money for scientific research, announced that funding would be denied for “the amateur, the dilettante and the tyro.” In other words, to qualify for funding you had better have a Ph.D., a certificate of academic respectability. Well diggers need not apply.
The game of status seeking, organized around committees, is played in roughly the same fashion in Africa and in America and in the Soviet Union. Perhaps the aptitude for this game is a part of our genetic inheritance, like the aptitude for speech and for music. The game has had profound consequences for science. In science, as in the quest for a village water supply, big projects bring enhanced status; small projects do not. In the competition for status, big projects usually win, whether or not they are scientifically justified. As the committees of academic professionals compete for power and influence, big science becomes more and more preponderant over small science. The large and fashionable squeezes out the small and unfashionable. The space shuttle squeezes out the modest and scientifically more useful expendable launcher. The Great Observatory squeezes out the Explorer. The centralized adduction system squeezes out the village well. Fortunately, the American academic system is pluralistic and chaotic enough that first-rate small science can still be done in spite of the committees. In odd corners, in out-of-the-way universities, and in obscure industrial laboratories, our Fulanis are still at work.