Single Issues And Narrow Minds

A recent story about the planned de-orbiting of the International Space Station (ISS) provided an illustration of this blogbit’s title.

Like anything humans put into low (<1000 km) orbit around the Earth, the ISS will eventually fall out of the sky. There is enough atmosphere even at its 400 km altitude to drag on the satellite, and every so often they have to fire on-board rockets to compensate for this.

Like anything else, the ISS costs money to operate and maintain (and on-board rockets need to be refueled from time to time). The powers-that-be have decided that its useful life will come to an end in 2031. At that time, the powers-that-be will deliberately de-orbit the satellite by pointing its rockets in the direction opposite to its orbital motion, and cause it to splash into the Pacific Ocean. More specifically, to “Point Nemo,” a spot (also known as the oceanic pole of inaccessibility) in the South Pacific that has the distinction of being the farthest point from land.

Point Nemo is selected as a spacecraft cemetery as a matter of several forms of safety. It is not only the farthest point from land, it is the farthest point from human habitation, there are no sea routes anywhere near to it, and it also has very little marine life activity. In other words, it’s as ideal as can be for dumping old satellites and other space debris.

Naturally, a ton of thought went into Point Nemo’s selection.

As naturally, people who applied very little thought found the idea of plopping ISS there to be so problematic they had to offer their contrary opinions. These are people who have too much free time and have had their egos unjustifiably inflated by social media. They are annoyances.

More annoying are the fanatical types. They elevate one issue above all others, and filter everything though that lens. In this case, there are ecology organizations protesting the use of Point Nemo for this purpose.

Why?

Because they can. Because they aren’t responsible for making such decisions. Because they don’t have to deal with the reality that ISS is going to come down one day, and that this reality bounds the range of what’s possible and what’s practical.

Some knuckleheads suggested, on one thread I saw, the commonly suggested but extremely ignorant “fly it into the Sun” remedy. I could go into the physics of doing so here, which would be boring and pointless. Just take my word for it - doing so would be mind-bogglingly expensive and difficult. I only bring it up to point out that people without a clue are nevertheless very liberal with their “obvious” solutions.

Again, these aren’t serious people and should not be given more effort than the tiny bit it took them to say that something. Now, if someone asks, in an honest manner, “why not...”, that’s a different ballgame. Curing ignorance is time well spent.

The organized opposition doesn’t get to hide behind ignorance, however. If you’re going to take a formal stand against something, you cannot claim “I didn’t know...” You should feel at least some obligation to intellectual honesty.

They rarely do. Their opposition comes across as “we don’t want this to happen, so you have to figure out how to manage the problem differently.” Or, if they aren’t that blatant, they bias their cost-benefit computations in favor of their single issue. In the case of ISS, boosting it into a much higher orbit, where its orbital decay will measure in centuries or longer, is an alternative. Another is dismantling it bit by bit, and either burning those bits in the atmosphere or recovering them some other way. Both would be much more expensive than Point Nemo, but that doesn’t matter. It’s Other People’s Money, after all, and no one is nearly as careful with Other People’s Money as they are with their own.

Watch for the telltales of such single-issue tunnel vision. Their objections are usually a combination of hyperbole, anecdote, and (taking a page out of the Critical Theory playbook) criticism without alternative. Or, when an alternative is proposed, the “tradeoff” aspect associated with problem solving in the real world is greatly diminished or absent altogether. When you see them, be aware that they aren’t arguing from a dispassionate or “best answer” position, but instead are servicing their ideological priority.