The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2018

by Sam Kean

  In March of 2009, George and his older sister, Esther Dyson, an entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist, had traveled with Freeman to a former Soviet missile base in Kazakhstan for the launch of a Russian rocket, a Soyuz mission to the International Space Station.

  “Esther invested in a company in Russia called Yandex,” George explained. “She’s actually one of the founders. It’s the only thing Esther ever did that made a big pile of money. Most of her investments, she’s made a million here or there, but in Russia she helped found this search engine, it became the Google of Russia, and then it went public and she got a pile of rubles. She couldn’t take it out of Russia, or she didn’t want to take it out. Esther, she’s never driven a car, she doesn’t own a house. So she thought, ‘What can I do with a whole pile of Russian money?’ She decided to buy a seat on one of those Russian rockets.

  “It’s an irony. When we were kids, Freeman was building a spaceship, and I really wanted to go. I was five years old, and I thought they were building it there in San Diego. I imagined that the big, round building at General Atomic was the launch pad for the spaceship, and we were going to get in it and go. Then all these years later, it’s actually Esther. The story of my life! Everything I ever did was always outshadowed by Esther. So we end up going to Kazakhstan. Esther was the backup on the rocket flight. Every time they fly one of these tourists, they have a backup, in case you break your leg the week before the flight. She took all the training. Survival course, and so on. Even the standby seat costs $3 million.”

  The missile base, it seemed to George, was caught in a time warp, stuck in the Sputnik era. “They haven’t changed anything,” he said. “It worked in 1960, and that’s the way they still do it. The telephones are all dial phones. The whole launch site is run on coal-fired generators. The place looks like it was built by Soviet slave labor. Which it was.”

  Charles Simonyi, the billionaire for whom Esther was understudy, and who had paid $35 million for his seat, did not break a leg, unfortunately. “He brought his beautiful young Swedish wife and all her family,” said George. “They were wearing mink coats out in the Kazakh desert. And Esther shows up with her motley family. They put us all up in the Sputnik Hotel. Everything was very choreographed. It was like a wedding. Russian Orthodox priests. One side of the family were aristocrats, and the other side were hillbillies.”

  The rocket went up, with the three Dysons, the hillbillies, watching from the ground. George and Freeman had a whispered conversation. They agreed that this was crazy.

  “The real irony is that here I am with Freeman, 50 years after Project Orion, watching the American pay $35 million to go into very low Earth orbit on a Russian rocket. It’s just so depressing. None of those space dreams came true. Or, they totally didn’t come true in terms of manned space flight. They absolutely did come true in terms of the robot machines, which are sending back all these incredible pictures.”

  In 1975, Freeman brought reading material to Swanson Island. Among the books in his bag was an annotated version of Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut’s fictionalized, black-humor account of the firebombing of Dresden, which the novelist witnessed from the ground as a German POW. This was the first Vonnegut book I had seen given this sort of academic gloss.

  I had no doubt back then, nor do I now, why Freeman was giving the firebombing of Dresden this close read between the lines. In July 1943, at the age of nineteen, he had reported for duty as mathematician at the headquarters of the Royal Air Force Bomber Command. Just days thereafter, on July 27, British bombers succeeded, for the first time in history, in igniting a firestorm, burning 42,000 Germans to death in Hamburg. On every big raid after that first one, the Allies tried for another firestorm, but the bombers succeeded only twice more in Europe—Hamburg again and then Dresden. “We still do not understand why,” he recalled. “It probably happened when there was some instability in the atmosphere before the attack so that meteorological energy amplified the energy of the fires. The firestorms had a big effect on civilian casualties.” Targeting civilians is a war crime. Freeman felt complicit.

  Interviewing him in 1975, with the embers of Dresden 30 years cold, I asked whether firestorms figured in his drive for the stars. He nodded. “Our strongest feelings are subconscious. I grew up in a time of despair—the late ’30s. It was far worse than it is now.” In a postwar essay, Freeman wrote, “In my personal view of the human situation, the exploration of space appears as the most hopeful feature of a dark landscape.”

  Slaughterhouse-Five is Vonnegut’s bleakest book, too haunted for me. My own favorite is his second, The Sirens of Titan. At the heart of that one is a parable that better illuminates the question at hand: colonization, or not, of outer space.

  All events in this novel unfold from a strange accident suffered by one of its characters, Winston Niles Rumfoord, a New England aristocrat wealthy enough to build his own spacecraft. (An Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos sort of figure, or the other way around, as Vonnegut conceived him years before the birth of either of those entrepreneurs.) Two days out of Mars, Rumfoord steers into an uncharted space hazard, a chrono-synclastic infundibulum. (Chrono is Greek for time. Synclastic means curving all to the same side, like the skin of an orange. Infundibulum is Latin for funnel.) Swept up by this funnel, like Dorothy by the tornado, Rumfoord and his great hound, Kazak, become wave phenomena, twin spirals stretching from origins in the sun to termini in the star Betelgeuse. Their spirals intersect at regular intervals with Earth or Mars or Mercury, at which times Rumfoord and Kazak materialize briefly on those planets. Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, is the only spot in the universe where they remain solid and corporeal year round.

  Chrono-synclastic infundibula, it turns out, are commonplace in the universe. They are everywhere, wild threads in the worn fabric of space-time. The infundibula are Vonnegut’s metaphor for the huge surges of radiation, the bone loss in astronauts, and all the unimagined hazards waiting out there in the dark matter and the light. The moral of the infundibula, their message to humanity, he writes, is simple:

  What makes you think you’re going anywhere?

  What does make us think we’re going anywhere? Colonization of the stars is wonderful as romance, but is up against two intractable realities: the cosmological and the biological. The cosmic problem is distance. The TRAPPIST-1 system, at 40 light-years and 232 trillion miles away, is indeed relatively close, yet still unimaginably far. It is nearly 40 times more distant than Alpha Centauri, which Freeman’s heat-sink starship would have taken 150 years to reach.

  The biological problem is the ephemerality of species. Homo sapiens is just 200,000 years old, yet already we are on our way to becoming something else. How much time do we have left, as us, to complete some of these interminable crossings? What sort of creature will shamble out when the hatch opens on the other side? (In The Sirens of Titan, Winston Niles Rumfoord addresses this difficulty: “What an optimistic animal man is!” he cries. “Imagine expecting the species to last for ten million more years—as though people were as well-designed as turtles!”) Evidence mounts that we have passed our peak and a devolutionary downslide has begun. Consider the GOP. Just 150 years ago it was the party of Lincoln.

  The word adaptation came into wide use after Darwin, and its most common application is still biological, a reference to the adjustments that an organism makes to conditions in its ecosystem if it is to survive. A species is not just its DNA. A species is an interaction between its genes, its culture, and the other organisms and climate of a particular place. Every instant of our evolutionary adaptation, to date, has been in the community of life on this third planet from the middling G star we orbit. So far as we know, to date, there is no community of life out there with which we might continue our coevolution. Our manifest destiny, it seems obvious to me, is down here on Earth.

  In visiting the TRAPPIST planets illustrated on the NASA website, I grew increasingly uneasy with the artists’ conceptions. I began noticing doubtful details.
For example: In the waves at the foot of the icebergs on TRAPPIST-1f new ice is forming. The ice panes are polygons of sharp angles floating slightly separated, like the pieces of a finished jigsaw puzzle after the dog has bumped the table. It could be that the seas on TRAPPIST-1f are methane, like the lakes on Titan. It could be that methane ice really does behave this way near an M star. But it is also possible that the artist was unfamiliar with how ice forms in our own cold seas—first as slush and then pancake ice, worn circular, with raised rims all around, from collisions with other pancakes in the waves.

  For any conceptual artist rendering a new dinosaur, there are fossilized bones to work from, and sometimes the tracks of that reptile, and educated guesses to be made from reconstruction of its ecosystem. For the illustrators of TRAPPIST-1, there is only periodic dimming of light from an ultra-cool dwarf. In that signal there is enough information to suggest planetary density and allow speculation that the seven planets are rocky. Beyond that, the illustrations are figments.

  These made-up planets are fun. They spur imagination in viewers. They make, or pretend to make, elusive astronomical realities palpable. As PR for NASA, they jack up public interest, keep appropriations flowing in, and fund new missions. But they are false. They suggest that we know more about these worlds than we do. How many viewers, I wonder, even those who have noted the “artist’s conception” advisory, come away believing that the look of these planets is based on actual evidence.

  My killjoy instincts in this are annoying even to me. Their source, I think, is in the first manned mission to circumnavigate another world.

  On Christmas Eve of 1968, Bill Anders, an astronaut orbiting the lunar surface in Apollo 8, snapped a picture through the module window: Earthrise above the dead white curvature of the moon. It is commonplace for environmentalists to mark this as the most important photograph ever taken, and legions of commentators from other disciplines have marked Earthrise as the epiphany of epiphanies. The Apollo 8 astronauts certainly saw it that way. “We came all this way to explore the moon,” said Bill Anders, “and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.”

  There it was, our place, a small blue marble, a “cloudy,” kids call it. An oasis in the blackness of space.

  A NASA illustrator has borrowed this motif for the agency’s website, painting the TRAPPIST-1 planets as varicolored marbles in a line against the blackness of the void. TRAPPIST-1b looks like Mars with acne. TRAPPIST-1c looks like just regular Mars. TRAPPIST-1d has a longitudinal chain of turquoise lakes suspiciously similar to Grand Prismatic Springs in Yellowstone. TRAPPIST-1e and TRAPPIST-1f are both Earthlike, bluish and wreathed in cloud. TRAPPIST-1h looks like Venus.

  These marbles are all mirage. The Apollo 8 photograph Earthrise is a true picture of a real world and our actual circumstances.

  Thousands of exoplanets have been discovered in the past two decades, and artistic liberties have been taken with many. To the extent that this artwork plants the idea, even subconsciously, that we have alternatives, that these far places are real possibilities, that we can solve our pollution and population problems somewhere out in Aquarius or the Orion Arm, or even closer in, by mining the asteroids or colonizing comets, then it subverts the epiphany of Earthrise. The solutions to our problems will be down here.

  In the early 1980s, NASA announced a plan to send a journalist into space on the shuttle. Reader’s Digest believed it had the inside track in placing a writer on board. The magazine liked The Starship and the Canoe, believing that the book’s duality—the view both Earthward and spaceward—was what it wanted, and it proposed that I go. Unmarried then, with no kids, I agreed on the spot. In writing up my résumé, I exaggerated my physical fitness, which was already good, and I glossed over problems I have with machinery and instrument panels.

  It did not escape me that if, indeed, I made the cut for the shuttle, then Freeman was the man who had bought me my ticket. It was ironic. In constructing The Starship and the Canoe, I had been careful not to let my own biases infect the whole book. I had confined my opinion to a chapter titled “My Opinion.” In that one I threw in with George and his canoe. I came out against Freeman and his starship. (“Freeman has faith in the hospitality of space, and I have faith, almost equally groundless, in its inhospitality.”) What a hypocrite. The first time someone offers to send me into orbit, I jump.

  There was a setback. NASA decided, for incomprehensible reasons, to send a teacher first. Christa McAuliffe, who taught high school in New Hampshire, won out over 11,000 candidates. By the day of the Challenger mission that launched her, January 28, 1986, I had a five-week-old son. The baby had diminished somewhat my enthusiasm for risking my life on assignments, yet I was envious still of McAuliffe. She had jumped her place in line.

  Like tens of millions of Americans, I watched the televised liftoff and then, 73 seconds later, the explosion, pieces of the ship rocketing off in all directions, with one giant smoky contrail curving back upon itself. Like everyone, I had a moment of confusion and denial. Was this fireball just the first booster disintegrating? Then came the keening moan from the crowd at Cape Canaveral and the shock and grief. Within that emotion, for me, was a small, shameful countercurrent of relief, as in a passenger whose missed train has cost him his berth on the Titanic.

  What made me think I was going anywhere?

  SUSANNAH FELTS

  Astonish Me: Anticipating an Eclipse in the Age of Information

  from Catapult

  There are theories all over YouTube. Already I know too much. My special glasses meet the Transmission Requirements of ISO 12312–2, Filters for Direct Observation of the Sun. My nine-year-old returns home from school with key vocabulary words set to the tune of that old 1980s ballad “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” If my head wasn’t already stuffed with facts, she could provide.

  But really, I’d like to be less ready. On the afternoon of August 21, what I want is to be astonished.

  In the thick haze and cicada drone of this afternoon, the moon’s shadow will race at 1,800 miles an hour across the United States, its path like a pageant sash draped from Oregon shoulder to South Carolina hip. On that decorated continental body the city of Nashville, my home, will be the largest to experience totality. This area hasn’t seen a total eclipse for more than 500 years; not since 1979 has the United States experienced one. Annie Dillard wrote ecstatically of that planetary pas de deux, and now her words surface repeatedly in my Facebook feed, shared for the occasion. But while Dillard’s 1979 eclipse darkened the Pacific Northwest and stretched into Canada, this one will shadow only the Lower 48—a first-ever occurrence—and sweep neatly from coast to coast (the next eclipse to do that will happen in 2045). For an estimated 55 million Americans, a swath of Tennessee will provide the closest and best view. You can imagine the nervous murmurs about traffic.

  In early July, the viewing parties began to twinkle, distant stars on the blank expanse of the calendar, all clustered upon this one August Monday. A city-sponsored gathering at the baseball stadium; viewing parties at local parks. A brunch at a fancy hotel, with eggs Benedict and waffles. Free hot dogs in an auto dealer’s parking lot. Farm parties with celebrity chefs and live music.

  I want to make the most of it, but I do not want to sip mimosas among strangers. I do not want to pay for parking or get a free commemorative koozie. I don’t want to feel, first, pity, for the eclipse-swag vendors—what a way to spend the celestial event of a lifetime, hawking souvenirs—and then shame, because who am I to say that padding one’s wallet with the profit from trinkets manufactured overseas isn’t just the right way to do the Great American Eclipse of 2017?

  Still, I can’t stop thinking about the fact that, centuries ago, a total eclipse was cause for panic, a sign of doom—or a moment of great discovery.

  Today, it is the strangest of things: absolutely predictable and astoundingly rare. The thought of it ignites my curiosities, my fierce devotion to the magic of the natural world. Just the phrase
path of totality charms me—the repetition of sounds, the metaphoric sinew. Its very definition—the area covered as the moon’s shadow, or umbra, hits the Earth—demands I slow down and consider it. A journey made by darkness, a trail 70 miles wide that will vanish as quickly as it appeared. On a hill in the Yakima Valley, as the sky went dark, Annie Dillard heard the other eclipse watchers scream. I might wish to feel that kind of awe, or fear.

  An eclipse is also the surest of things, no alarms and no surprises. While so much of life—the very moments that will alter us the most—we cannot predict, we can know even the minute truths of a spectacular celestial event with utter certainty.

  Yet it is a happening so far from the infinitesimal movements of us humans that to break it down to our science almost seems a hubristic offense. How can I restore to it some measure of its power to surprise? How can I make my two minutes count?

  The answer, in the end, is simple. I know a place, a half hour from downtown and ideal for eclipse-viewing. Large, wide-open lawn, a dome of sky above. Home to sundry animals and a small planet’s worth of rare plant species. Bourbon on the shelf, baby goats frisking in the barn, hummingbirds buzzing about—until the dark suddenly quiets them all. This, my parents’ land, is where I have decided to watch the sky go dark and feel the air go cool. My family beside me, all of us growing a little older as the shadow hits us and we listen to the birds cease to sing.

  It will be my parents’ last eclipse; it will be my daughter’s first. It may well be the only total eclipse any of us are granted. In their presence, I hope to kindle the awe that too much knowledge, or the flurry of public celebration, might just stamp out. I try to imagine what I will remember, on normal days far into the future, of that 1 minute and 57 seconds. “Usually it is a bit of a trick to keep your knowledge from blinding you,” Dillard writes. “But during an eclipse it is easy. What you see is much more convincing than any wild-eyed theory you may know.”