A stray meme from the blogosphere that I have to comment on.Robert Scoble points to a comment by Glenn Reynolds, and posits that the lives of the seven astronauts were more valuable than those of your average seven people because of the work they were doing in space. There's been a lot of blogging about the higher purpose of the space program, and the value of its work.
First, on the value of human life. We place greater value as a culture on the lives of people we know, and react with greater sorrow to events we witness ourselves. Television and the spotlight made these seven astronauts on Columbia more valuable to us–at some level, many people have an emotional investment in the space program that goes far beyond the cost/benefit ratio of sending people into orbit. NASA is still with us today because of that emotional investment, which everyone of my generation was made a stockholder in from a very early age.
The Columbia crew looked like people we know. They were straight arrows, type-A personalities and polymaths–traits not unknown in the technology industry. We can project personalities onto these people we've seen on our television screens, and heard recordings of on the radio. Having served in the Navy, I've got plenty of people to base my personal projections of them on.
A number of the people I went through college with became Navy pilots; a good friend of mine died in flight training. Bill McCool got his Navy commission 3 years ahead of me; he served on a ship that sat one pier over from mine during my tour in Norfolk. I might have bumped into him at happy hour at the NAS OceanaOfficer's Club. These things make his passing, and those of the others on the crew, hit closer to home with me.
Tragedy elsewhere in the world, hidden from our eyes by distance, is less meaningful emotionally to us, because we generally have no emotional investment beforehand in it. Only by the personification of the victims do we understand the tragedy, and become emotionally involved–and let's face it, that doesn't happen very much.
The attacks of September 11 personalized the tragedy of terrorism and war for this country in a very public way; it was a shared experience as much as it was a mass of very personal one for the families of victims and for survivors. But still, as a country, we can't seem to project that kind of personal loss on the events elsewhere on the globe where thousands of innocents have been killed. We may individually recognize the losses of those other people we never met, but there seems to be no larger recognition of them. In other words, we can sympathize, but we can't empathize.
As for the value of the work being done by these seven astronauts, there are many who would debate whether it was truly important to mankind in a purely scientific sense. The Wall Street Journal (in an article by Sharon Begley, on B1 below the fold) details the science on the last flight of Columbia, and quotes physicist Robert Park of the American Physical Society: “There is no experiment that has been done on the space shuttle that has mae a significant difference to any field of science.”
The benefit, rather, has been to fund the development of the technology to make space flight possible–something we all have learned to value, and something with some tangible lifestyle benefits for some of us, but also something that is a means to keep the vast base of technical contractors that contribute to the space program on life support in case their talents should be needed for some other (and probably less humanitarian) excercise.
I believe that we should explore space, and that there are benefits beyond the tangible to what the crew of Columbia and other astronauts have done. A life lost in a noble pursuit is certainly more tragic than one lost, say, pursuing evil. But to say those seven people were worth more because of what they did than the people who died in a train wreck in Zimbabwe is to say that we who care about the astronauts and their families are worth more than the families of the victims of that accident on a continent that we in America tend to associate with faceless tragedies of epic scale. And there's a bug in that reasoning.
The real tragedy is not the death of people who did great things, but the deaths of innocents who were never given the opportunity to do anything.
Sean M. Gallagher 