by Bill Nye
If you are really good at internalizing and overcoming fear, people may never know that you felt it in the first place. Consider James Cameron. He went to the bottom of the ocean in his own $23 million submersible called the Deepsea Challenger. He wanted to do good science, but he wanted to prove himself, too. And of course, he wanted to go just because he’s an explorer and the ocean had been a longtime fascination for him. Along the way he had some frightening moments: I’m sure he was filled with a bit of doubt when his ship drifted loose of its ship-to-ship cables and when he heard a very loud bang as the crushing pressure outside his vessel suddenly hammered his main hatch into place. A great many people were skeptical about his project because they thought of him only as a movie director. After Titanic came out, he famously proclaimed himself “king of the world,” but that was the film world. In the world of underwater exploration, he was a relative unknown.
So Cameron decided to prove himself all over again. He designed his ship from scratch, and he was alone down there. He landed in the Challenger Deep, a spot 11 kilometers (7 miles) below sea level, much more carefully than the Navy did in an exploratory mission in 1960; he didn’t kick up big clouds of silt everywhere. One fascinating thing he discovered is that a few kilometers away, where the ocean is only 30 meters (100 feet) less deep, there is an abundance of life. Where the Deepsea Challenger settled, though, there is virtually nothing living. Somehow, as the water flows to the bottommost part of the ultra-deep ocean, it gets starved of everything life needs: oxygen, nutrients, and minerals of the proper sort. We never would have known this remarkable fact if James Cameron hadn’t decided he was an explorer as well as a moviemaker. He did some great science down there and brought a new perspective and profile to the work.
Even if you never try to travel down to the bottom of the ocean or build a rocket ship to Mars, there are two kinds of imposter syndromes that almost every one of us deals with and that are absolutely essential to overcome. First, there is the question “Am I just pretending to be a good person?” I hear this all the time, and I wonder about it myself. People wonder whether they are trying to do good for ultimately selfish reasons. Do I favor vaccines for the greater good or just to keep my kid safe? Do I support green energy only because it’s the easiest way not to feel guilty about my comfortable lifestyle? Do I donate to a clean-water fund in the developing world mainly for the tax write-off?
When you take an everything-all-at-once approach, you can make those kinds of imposter feelings fade away. You slowly come to recognize that the things that benefit you also benefit the people around you. Reducing infectious disease, slowing climate change, and building up developing-world infrastructure all contribute to the global commons. In the long run, being selfish and being selfless take you to similar places. Nobody wants poverty. When people are poor, they are much more likely to cause crime; they contribute less to the overall economy; they suffer more disease. The extreme poverty in Chad has a strong influence on health. The average life expectancy there is just 50. You want everybody to have a decent standard of living. Even if you’re a selfish bastard, you want everybody to have a high quality of life for the betterment of you. The best solution may not be the easiest, but it is ultimately in everybody’s interest. That’s why I talk about changing the world for us. In good design, everybody comes out ahead.
Then there is the second form of imposter syndrome, perhaps the most common of all. It’s that feeling that the problems in the world—poverty, disease, climate change—are so huge, and the solutions are so complicated and daunting, that it feels absurd to presume that we can really solve them. It is easy to feel presumptuous even in trying; it’s easy to give up and think, I’m not a truly good person after all because I’m not facing up to the hard reality. It’s the flip side of being an actual imposter. When those feelings strike, remember one of the great gifts of nerd honesty. Looking at everything all at once doesn’t mean that you have to solve every problem all at once. Let’s face it—that’s not going to happen. What you can do, though, is apply a rigorous standard to your actions. You can overcome the fear of being an imposter or in over your head. Do your ideas further your own interests by furthering the common good? A positive answer can emerge from small acts as much as from big ones. Your answers don’t need to live up to some absurdly overwhelming standard—just a carefully considered one.
As you know, I love learning new words. Here’s an especially relevant one that Corey Powell just introduced to me: “neltiliztli.” It is an Aztec term meaning “well-rooted, authentic, and true.” It was their guideline for how to live a good life in an uncertain world on a sometimes- dangerous Earth, not by seeking power or affirmation but by doing your best to be in balance with your surroundings. The Aztecs—a society that most of us in the West do not associate with science—came up with a beautifully succinct expression for nerd honesty. The solution to feeling like an imposter is to be authentic, and the path of authenticity is the path to a better world.
CHAPTER 22
How High Can You Go?
Some years ago, I worked as a consultant to General Motors. I had made a deal that I would get to drive the EV1, General Motors’ first electric vehicle, in exchange for making a few public appearances and sharing my feedback with the company’s low-emissions designers and public relations people. I wanted to do my part to help move the market to zero-emission vehicles, and I was genuinely curious about what I might hear behind the scenes. In one meeting, a manager started his presentation with the statement, “We want our light trucks to be 50 percent recyclable.” Well, that got me going. My immediate reaction was “No, no, no! You want your trucks to be 100 percent recyclable. That’s the goal.”
For me, it was a crazy-making moment. I barely even remember the rest of that meeting, but that one sentence still sticks in my head. It was like the manager was saying, “I sure hope I get a C in this class.” Here he was, in a roomful of bright, hardworking people who had made their way through the thicket of filtering, timing, self-doubt, and so on, only to get completely tangled up in confusion over short-term realities versus long-term goals. If you want to change the world—and creating a practical modern electric car is, and certainly was, a step in that direction—then you need to keep those two things very clearly separate. You don’t want to set a mediocre accomplishment as your ultimate destination. It’s okay to talk about small steps, but they should all be taken to get to a big goal.
It was unnerving enough to see that kind of confusion at General Motors, but for me it’s been even worse to find it happening at the good old National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Here the problem runs in the opposite direction: not failure of imagination in the long-term goals, but unrealistic expectations in the short-term realities. At The Planetary Society, we are on a great many space and aerospace mailing lists. Every few weeks, or even every few days, I get e-mails full of high expectations from NASA’s public information office. The messages are designed to solicit ideas or submissions for some new agency-sponsored venture, and they typically go like this: “This solicitation seeks proposals to develop unique, disruptive, or transformational space technologies currently at low technology readiness levels that have the potential to lead to dramatic improvements at the system level. Specifically, the proposals must address one of the following . . .”
Unique! Disruptive! Transformational! That is not, absolutely not, how actual technological progress happens, and if anybody should know that it’s the scientists and engineers at NASA. Real progress unfolds bit by bit, small improvement after small improvement, with a clear, ambitious end goal in mind. Expectations of immediate, radical transformation are an expressway to disappointment and dead ends. They don’t facilitate the long-term goals; more often, they prevent them from ever happening. I’m pretty sure the real researchers and inventors at NASA are fully aware of this. What’s happening is that there is a management structure desperately trying to will breakthroughs into existence simply by crafting an
impressive-sounding project with lots of the right buzzwords and breathless e-mail solicitations. This is the shortcut-seeking behavior of an agency that feels pressure to perform beyond its resources.
There’s a pretty good analogy to baseball. Your coach says, “Here’s a bat, now go up there and hit a home run.” It’s not so easy, or we’d all be doing it all the time. Even making contact with a pitched ball is hard enough. Driving it out of the stadium is very, very difficult. At NASA, this disruptive, gotta-hit-a-home-run thinking is probably a leftover from the Apollo era. At that time, the agency’s budget peaked at a little more than 4 percent of the US federal budget. That is a huge amount of money for any program. NASA was flush with cash, a young and talented workforce, and a razor-sharp directive to put humans on the Moon. Progress still happened incrementally, but there were so many innovations coming through so quickly that it often looked like overnight success—especially in retrospect.
Today the NASA budget is around 0.4 percent—that fraction is less than 1⁄10th of what NASA’s budget once was compared with the federal budget—and its mission statement lacks the clarity it once had. It may be that the managers, especially older managers, retain elevated expectations consistent with the resources NASA had in its heyday. More likely, the problem is deeper and wider. I think the program managers generally understand that the expectations are unrealistic, but they feel like they have no choice but to play along. This situation is hardly unique to the space agency. If a recording artist has a hit, the record label wants to know when the next hit song will be ready. Companies and people get a reputation for innovation and then the pressure mounts to keep the innovations coming. There are investors or friends or (in the case of NASA) congressional committees to be satisfied. If you are in danger of losing some of your funding, the pressure ratchets up even higher. And if you fail to deliver, the pressure on your next big promise ratchets up higher still.
This is where things get tricky for all of us who want to change the world. If you bite off more than you can chew, you won’t be able to swallow. On the other hand, if you make plans that are too small, like that fellow at GM, you won’t ever accomplish much at all.
In case you haven’t noticed, I have a big agenda for my change-the-world plans. I want to remake our transportation network, solve climate change, drastically reduce poverty, and vastly improve human health. Having a robust space program might seem like a secondary project compared with those things. I would strongly argue otherwise—pretty much the opposite, actually. Space exploration sets stretch goals that help us achieve all the others. It also forces us to think very clearly about how to get to those lofty end points, and address the short-term/long-term confusion that stymies everything-all-at-once planning—when it gets to the action stage. And, I’ll admit, my interest is also partly personal. I’m a space enthusiast. I believe in the transformative power of exploring the universe. That’s how I ended up as the CEO of The Planetary Society, where we emulate a lot of what old NASA was about . . . and hope to save some of new NASA from itself.
I often say that, around the world, NASA is the greatest brand the United States has. The acronym “NASA” is practically a shorthand expression for brilliant engineering, for the joy of science literacy, for the possibility of shooting for the Moon—for real—and getting there by meticulously carrying out all the amazingly difficult steps along the way. The agency is full of great scientists and engineers; even the managers and bosses, much as I feel concern about many of them, are unique. No other organization on Earth can do what NASA does. Nevertheless, there is clearly home-run hopeful pressure at work. For several years now, the agency has promoted a human “Journey to Mars” predicated on rockets that don’t exist and life-support technologies that have not been developed. Much more important, those things have not been funded for development. So far, the journey consists more of beautiful graphics than real hardware.
But think for a moment what it would mean to have NASA unleashed again, with short- and long-term plans working together in harmony. Think what a real Journey to Mars could do for humanity. It could answer the most stirring question in planetary science, maybe all of science: Are we alone out here in the cosmos, or is there life in the universe beyond Earth?
If we found evidence of life on Mars—or stranger still, something still alive there—it would transform the way we think about life here on Earth. It would stir and shake people’s philosophical and religious beliefs. It would galvanize science education. It would almost certainly affect medicine, biotechnology, and ecology, too. It would advance all the ways we want to change the world. But I think the hugest, everything-est thing it would do is change us. It would tell us that we are not alone in the universe.
I claim such a discovery would be as profound and world-changing as the proof that the Earth is round rather than flat or that the stars are other suns. The discovery of life would change the way every one of us thinks about being a living thing in the cosmos. This is the longterm goal NASA should be working toward.
We have the means to do this, and we have no shortage of system architectures and plans. What we lack are good executable plans, the kind that fulfill the principles of nerd design and planning, executed across all timescales. We’re off to a decent start at least. Our Mars robots—Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity—are amazing and have transformed the way we think about the planet. The upcoming Mars 2020 rover will be the most capable one yet, with radar vision and the ability to scan for organic compounds. But these machines, even though they are built by our best robot builders, piloted by our most skilled robot operators, and guided by our top planetary scientists, are not enough.
What we really want to do is send people. They will be scientifically trained, to be sure, but what they’ll really be is explorers. When we send people out into truly unknown territory, two things happen. First, they make discoveries. Second, they have an adventure unlike any before. When people are orbiting above Mars or walking upon it, all the people of Earth will share in those experiences. It’s been estimated that what our best robots do in a week, a human explorer (properly dressed and outfitted) could do in 5 minutes. If there is life on Mars, or a good place to go looking for life, astronauts will find it in relatively no time.
So why haven’t we started? It’s that short-term/long-term problem again. Humankind has kinda sorta gotten started on looking for life on Mars a few times, but there was always too much long-term vision and not enough short-term support. The Bush administration—the first one, under President George H.W. Bush—developed a scheme called the Space Exploration Initiative that would have sent humans back to the Moon and eventually to Mars. It had an unclear timetable and an estimated cost of $500 billion (in 1989 dollars no less) over a couple decades. In 2004, the second President Bush proposed an updated version, the Vision for Space Exploration, which would have put humans on Mars in 30ish years. It spawned an actual program called Constellation, which was supposed to create a new generation of giant rockets. But neither of those plans ended up going anywhere. They were beginnings without an end, with no long-term strategy.
There was a long-held presumption that once a NASA project got started, Congress would find ways to fund it, cost be damned. In reality, Congress took one look and declared the first Bush plan dead on arrival. After President Obama took office in 2008, he canceled the Constellation project, and the second Mars plan was gone, too. Obama took a lot of heat from space enthusiasts for giving up on Constellation, but the truth is that it was never even officially funded. You can’t start creating rockets without a plan to complete them. It’s something Ned Nye drilled into me and my brother and sister as kids: It’s good to have initiative, but you have to have “finish-itive.”
I feel that part of my job at The Planetary Society is to help NASA untangle its short-term/long-term confusion and come up with a better-balanced, realistic plan to do great things. Starting a couple of years ago, we proposed a program that would allow NASA to
both search for life on Mars within current funding levels and accomplish its key goals on a politically meaningful timescale—over the span of a couple of presidential elections, say, rather than 20 or 30 years. Now we have that plan.
We started with this idea: To keep costs down and political support up, we have to use what we already have, the existing space technology from NASA and the private rocket companies. NASA’s Space Launch System rocket is well along in its development and testing. SpaceX has the Falcon Heavy on the way, and another company, Blue Origin, recently announced a competitor called New Glenn. Let’s not start over with new launch vehicles (rockets) yet again. I took lessons from my GM EV1 experience: no mediocre goals. But I also took lessons from the failure of NASA’s previous Mars plans: no absurd home-run wishes. No calls for immediate “disruptive!” breakthroughs.
First, our team at The Planetary Society came up with an architecture that requires no real increase in the NASA budget. The budget, like that of every other federal program, would only have to be periodically adjusted for inflation. My friends, this is a radical idea in the Mars exploration community. Second, we set a hard date for humans reaching Mars: 2033. Third, we would start with humans orbiting Mars rather than going straight to the surface. This is how we went to the Moon. Humans orbited in Apollo 8 before landing with Apollo 11. The human Mars landing would not happen until 6 Earth-years later, in 2039. The Planetary Society published these ideas in a 2015 study called Humans Orbiting Mars, which incorporated input from more than 70 experts at the Jet Propulsion Lab and other leaders in spaceflight.
To handle the cost of the mission, we proposed that NASA, per contract, spin off the International Space Station (ISS) in 2024, which would save at least $3 billion a year. There are other agencies and organizations that have expressed interest in taking over the operation of the ISS. All that newly available money could be redirected to starting stepping-stone missions back to the Moon, if need be, and on through cislunar space. I love that word, “cislunar.” It means all the space between Earth and the Moon (literally “on this side of” the Moon), including stable points in the lunar orbit that might be extremely valuable spots for astronomy research. We crunched the numbers and found that there is a mission architecture that would work. We could get humans in orbit around Mars in 2033 without increasing the NASA budget.
