Will Rocket Builders Risk a Million Lives for the Tiny Few Interested in Uranus?

An interesting recent scientific paper examined the willingness of scientists to risk the death of very many people (or possibly even the destruction of the entire planet) to satisfy the curiosity of specialists about topics that are of no interest to 99% of humans. The paper ("Agencies and Science Experiment Risk") by Eric E. Johnson looked at two cases:

(1) the hazardous Cassini mission, which risked a disastrous plutonium release event that could have given cancer to millions;

(2) the Brookhaven laboratory's experiments involving so-called strange matter, which some thought might result in a physics disaster destroying all life on Earth. 

The paper by Johnson starts out by describing a case of scientist recklessness that I have described before:

"When getting ready to test the first atomic bomb, scientists of the Manhattan Project considered the possibility that detonating the device might ignite a runaway chain reaction in the atmosphere, engulfing the world in a fireball that would kill all plant and animal life. They wagered it would not and threw the switch."

It is often claimed that scientists did calculations beforehand proving to them an atmosphere-destroying chain reaction would not occur from the detonation of the first atomic bomb, but that is not correct. At the beginning of the post here, you can read some quotes I make from a book dealing with the topic, quotes indicating that when the first atomic bomb was exploded, the worry of a runaway reaction detonating the entire atmosphere was not at all anything that had been disproven. According to one source, before the first nuclear weapon was ignited the leading nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi said this:

"It would be a miracle if the atmosphere were ignited. I reckon the chance of a miracle to be about ten percent."

Apparently the atomic bomb scientists gambled with the destruction of all of humanity. Decades later another great gamble was taken by NASA, when it launched a Cassini spacecraft that was powered by plutonium-238. Being incredibly radioactive, plutonium-238 is one of the most deadly substances ever created.  

The Cassini mission sent a spacecraft including plutonium towards Venus. The mission plan was to leverage what are called gravitational slingshots. When a spacecraft flies by a planet, the spacecraft's speed can be greatly increased. The Cassini plan was to send the spacecraft to fly by Venus,  and to then have the spacecraft turn around and fly by Earth to increase the spacecraft's speed even further, with the spacecraft eventually going into orbit around Saturn.  With this plan there were two opportunities for disaster:

(1) The Cassini spacecraft could have blown up during its liftoff from Earth, just as the Challenger space shuttle did.

(2) The Cassini spacecraft could have burned up in Earth's atmosphere or crashed on Earth while the attempt was being made for the spacecraft to do a flyby of Earth. 

In either case, the result would have been catastrophic. On page 539 Johnson quotes a NASA estimate that 5000 people might die because of contamination from the Cassini probe's plutonium-238. On page page 540 Johnson says this:

" One critic was Michio Kaku, a professor of physics at City University of New York and author of several popular science books. He said, 'I find that NASA bureaucrats in some sense are living in Fantasyland . . . . Pure guesswork has replaced rigorous physics. Many of these numbers are simply made up.'  Kaku thought 200,000 deaths was a fairer estimate. Other estimates were even higher. John Gofman, an emeritus professor of molecular and cellular biology at the University of California, Berkeley, estimated up to 1 million deaths would result from a Cassini swing-by burn-up.  And Ernest J. Sternglass, an emeritus professor of radiological physics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, suggested 40 million deaths could result."

On the same page we are given a reason why NASA's risk assessment was almost certainly very flawed.  NASA's risk assessment was based mainly on an estimate of a tiny micrometeorite hitting its Cassini spacecraft. NASA estimated almost no chance that a software error could cause the spacecraft to fail and release plutonium.  But the paper tells us a reason why it made no sense to estimate such a low chance of failure by software error:

"Just weeks after Cassini flew by Earth without incident, NASA lost contact with the Mars Climate Orbiter. A subsequent investigation determined that the spacecraft burned up in the Martian atmosphere. The reason the Mars Climate Orbiter came in too low was that some of its software code used English unit measurements instead of the metric system —the kind of failure that NASA thought so improbable for Cassini as to be statistically insignificant."

Almost every software developer knows that software errors (called bugs) usually end up in the final releases of software, no matter how carefully the software has been tested. And you can never do all the required software tests before introducing a novel type of spacecraft, which requires the mission itself to do the bug testing. It seemed that an overconfident NASA played "megadeath Russian roulette," risking the life of millions for its Cassini mission to Saturn. And it may do the same thing again, to investigate a planet much less interesting than Saturn: the deadly dull planet Uranus. Uranus is a lifeless ball of ice and frozen gas, about the dullest planet imaginable. No one thinks there is any life on Uranus or any of its moons, because it's too cold where Uranus is. 

Here is a photo of the extremely boring, featureless planet that is Uranus. Can anyone imagine a less interesting-looking planet?

Dull as dishwater: Uranus as seen by Voyager 2 (Credit: NASA)

I was very surprised last year to read a baffling headline of "Probing Uranus is Top Priority, US Science Advisors Say." Apparently there's some limited launch window which might lead to a rushed hurry-up Uranus mission. A white paper by a Uranus enthusiast (Mark Hofstadter) who attempts to make "The Case for a Uranus Orbiter." The case is very weak.  There is no mention of life or biology. The biggest points the author makes seem to be these:

(1) Uranus "is the only giant planet whose gravity data cannot be fit by a simple 3-component model, with separate layers of rock, ice, and gas. Instead, it requires more realistic mixed-density regions (Podolak et al. 1995)." So the planet would be kind of interesting to planetary gravity modeling specialists. 

(2) Composition-wise, the "ice giants" such as Uranus and Neptune are different kind of planets from the "gas giants" such as Jupiter and Saturn, so let's study them for kind of "variety" reasons (a weak point).  

(3) It's easier to get to Uranus than Neptune. 

Reading the paper confirms my suspicion that Uranus is of zero interest to anyone who is not a scientist specializing in the planets of our solar system.  How would a Uranus mission work? It would apparently involve a plutonium gamble like the Cassini probe used: what could well be another case of "megadeath Russian roulette." 

We read in the rather recent article here that new plutonium-238 is being created to meet NASA's space travel needs, an indication that the Cassini "megadeath Russian roulette" approach may be repeated. Besides the risk of vast numbers getting cancer from a spacecraft disaster, the very production of additional plutonium-238 puts the public at danger.  Being the perfect weapon for a "dirty bomb," plutonium is a tempting target for theft by terrorists.  A dirty bomb combining plutonium-238 and conventional explosives might be enough to render the downtown part of a major city effectively uninhabitable. 

A disaster like the one imagined above may already have occurred. A 1990's article in the Christian Science monitor states this:

"Three out of the 26 earlier US nuclear space missions have involved mishaps. The worst: In 1964 a satellite with a SNAP 9-A plutonium system aboard fell to earth, disintegrating and dispersing its 2.1 pounds of plutonium. Gofman has long linked that accident to a rise in lung cancer on earth."

According to the source here, plutonium 238 was used for a variety of space missions. We read this:

"Pu-238 fueled the first RTG used in space, launched aboard the Navy TRANSIT 4A Navigational Satellite in 1961. Since then, the fuel has been used in nearly every National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) mission that required an RTG, including several Apollo flights (1969–1972), the Viking 1 and 2 Mars landers (1976–1982), Voyager 1 and 2 space probes to the outer planets of our solar system (launched in 1977) and the New Horizons mission to Pluto (launched in 2006)."

Every one of these missions risked huge number of earthly deaths from a launch failure that would have released plutonium into the atmosphere. Risking such loss of life for a mission to the boring site of Pluto is particularly objectionable. 

The paper I quoted from above (by Eric E. Johnson) also discusses how scientists may have risked the destruction of the entire Earth by doing experiments at Brookhaven Laboratory. We read this about that laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC):

"Some expressed concern, however, about the RHIC’s venture into unknown realms of physics—particularly a question of whether the experiment might create a 'strangelet,' a tiny particle of exotic strange matter.  Creating a strangelet would be a triumph of modern physics. In an unlikely scenario, however, it might also be unbelievably dangerous— unstoppably transforming and absorbing all normal matter it touches. After a latency of many years, the concern is, the accreting mass of strange matter within the Earth would overtake the whole planet. In the words of one eminent scientist, the Earth would be left 'an inert hyperdense sphere about one hundred metres across.' ”

We read that one pair of physicists described the following possible scenario:

"[G]ravity and thermal motion may then sustain the accreting chain reaction until, perhaps, the whole planet is digested, leaving behind a strangelet with roughly the mass of the Earth and ~ 100 m radius. The release of energy per nucleon should be of the order of several MeV and, if the process is a run-away one, the planet would end in a supernova-like catastrophe."

Referring to two leading physicists, we read that "far from characterizing the issue as absurd, Glashow and Wilson wrote, 'It is a fair concern: one that must be raised.' " We then read of an analysis by Cambridge University theoretical physicist Kent of the likelihood of this strangelet catastrophe:

"Kent explained that the 'probability bound'—meaning the maximum-possible risk—implied by Busza’s analysis was ...no more than a one-in-10,000 chance that the RHIC would destroy the Earth.  It was this result the Busza report deemed “comfortable.' "

We read on page 551-552 of Johnson's paper that this Busza report was produced by scientists who had financial and career interests in letting the strangelet research proceed, which is a reason for doubting their probability estimates. On page 552 we read that these concerns about the Earth being destroyed have had no effect on the research program, which is intensifying:

"These criticisms have not had a perceivable impact at Brookhaven, which has continued to run its experiments. In fact, the RHIC program has expanded and evolved since the strangelet controversy was aired. Originally, the RHIC was scheduled to collide gold ions over a 10- year-long program. Program extensions, however, have kept the RHIC going, and it is now in its 15th year. The program has also changed in ways unanticipated by the Busza team’s report. Brookhaven has moved beyond gold nuclei to begin experimenting with copper and uranium ions. The RHIC has also been upgraded to achieve many times more collisions than it was able to make under its original design."

These examples are part of a pattern of scientists putting the public at risk for the sake of research that is of no interest to anyone but a small clique of specialists. Such a thing has long gone on in the field of experimental neuroscience (not to be confused with physician-controlled neurology, which involves medical treatments and diagnostics rather than experimentation). Many healthy subjects without brain problems are put through long brain scans with 3T scanners, typically for the sake of poorly designed experiments that do nothing to advance human knowledge because they commit multiple examples of Questionable Research Practices (QRP). The issue is discussed in my post here.  We have no idea of how many of these people will end up with cancer because of the long unnecessary scans they received. Following a "scan them and forget them" policy, our scientists are failing to make the long-term tracking of health results of brain scan subjects that would allow them to reliably judge whether long 3T brain scans increase a risk of cancer. 

In the field of virology, there is occurring reckless "gain of function" research that creates risks of some new pandemic arising from a lab leak. A recent article in The Atlantic states, "The 1977 flu pandemic, which killed roughly 700,000 people, may well have started in a laboratory." It has a link to the paper "The Reemergent 1977 H1N1 Strain and the Gain-of-Function Debate." That paper states, "The 1977-1978 influenza epidemic was probably not a natural event, as the genetic sequence of the virus was nearly identical to the sequences of decades-old strains. " 

Scientists have a poor record of alerting us to grave risks. The paper by Eric E. Johnson reminds us of how physicists were so often wrong about alerting people to the threat of nuclear weapons. We read this:

"In the early 1930s, scientists dismissed the possibility of nuclear fission. When, in 1934, chemist Ida Noddack wrote a paper arguing that the uranium nucleus might be capable of fission, her paper was poorly received. In fact, famed physicist Enrico Fermi dismissed her work as having no possibility of being correct....Likewise, physicist Otto Frisch considered fission of uranium to be 'impossible,' and he initially refused to believe the compelling (and correct) arguments made by his aunt, Lise Meitner. Robert Oppenheimer also flatly rejected the possibility of uranium fission, and he offered a number of theoretical reasons why fission could not happen."

Biologists in particular often sound like they are bad at estimating probabilities. Committed to the dogmas of Darwinism entangled with socially constructed 19th century triumphal legends, the modern biologist repeatedly asserts that there occurred by chance things that we have every reason to believe could not possibly have occurred by chance -- things such as the origin of vastly impressive fine-tuned molecular machinery involving novel protein molecules and protein complexes that require many thousands of well-arranged atomic parts to do their incredibly complex metabolic missions. Such claims are like a claim that very many five-page grammatical, correctly spelled and well-reasoned essays were produced by typing monkeys. How should we judge the probability calculation skills of people who make such claims? Borrowing a phrase from the title of a children's book, we might say that  biologists making such claims are sometimes "very bad, no good, horrible" at realistically estimating probabilities. But now our lives are in the hands of gene-splicers who assure us that the risks of their genetic tinkering activity are small. We should be very concerned after realizing that modern biologists have repeatedly acted as if they were incompetent at realistically estimating probabilities. 

An example of the molecular machinery I refer to above is the spliceosome, pictured below:

Credit: MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology

At the site here, we read this about the human spliceosome: 

"The spliceosome is a complicated and formidable example of a multi-subunit molecular machine, with the pre-catalytic form being the largest spliceosomal complex, containing 5 RNA molecules and 65 proteins, in addition to a substrate mRNA precursor. The arrangement and activities of all of these has to be intricately coordinated, paradoxically to catalyse a rather simple chemical reaction."

The structure shown above is not specified in DNA, which merely specifies which amino acids make up each of the protein parts. The amino acid information needed to make the structure above (only a small part of what is needed to make the shown structure) is not at all contiguous in DNA. To assemble the structure above, among other wonders of construction a human body must magically gather genetic information scattered across 46 different chromosomes in the nucleus, like someone quickly finding just the right 65 loose pages hidden in random books of 46 tall, long bookcases in a library. I am in the middle of analyzing the spliceosome components for a future post, and my preliminary work suggests that the spliceosome structure requires accessing at least these human chromosomes: Number 1 (SF3A3 and PRPF3), Number 5 (SLU7 and RBM22), Number 9 (PRP4), Number 17 (PRP8 and U5S1), Number 19 (SF3A2 and PRP31) , and Number 22 (SF3A1).