Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Wednesday September 26 2018, @03:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the It's-a-bird,-it's-a-plane,-it's-an...art-object? dept.

Less than a year after "Humanity's Star" was launched by Rocket Lab and destroyed in Earth's atmosphere, another art project aims to place a highly reflective object in the night sky:

Now, nearly 50 years [after the Apollo 12 mission], artist Trevor Paglen hopes to draw the public's eye back to the sky with "Orbital Reflector," a sculpture made of shiny material much like Mylar that will reflect the Sun's light while orbiting the Earth. The sculpture, contained in a small structure called a CubeSat, is scheduled to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, in mid-November. When it enters orbit about 350 miles away from Earth, the sculpture will detach and inflate to its full shape, a diamond that may shine as bright as a star in the Big Dipper. After about two months, it will re-enter Earth's atmosphere and disintegrate.

By sending an object with no military value into space, Paglen said he hopes to raise a conversation about who is allowed to operate past Earth's atmosphere. As artists and historians praise his effort as boundary-breaking, some people within scientific communities are saying it lacks a practical purpose.

Paglen, a 2017 MacArthur fellow, has long been preoccupied with the less-visible, or deliberately hidden, infrastructures that make up the world. For years, he tracked the movements of more than 180 classified U.S. military spy satellites, measuring and photographing their locations for his project "The Other Night Sky."

[...] The project has drawn some criticism and confusion from scientists who question the value of adding what they see as impractical items to Earth's orbit. "It's the space equivalent of someone putting a neon advertising billboard right outside your bedroom window," Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Gizmodo. [...] Paglen responded to criticisms in August in a Medium post titled "Let's Get Pissed Off About Orbital Reflector...," saying he hoped to provoke productive conversations.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday September 26 2018, @12:36PM (4 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday September 26 2018, @12:36PM (#740124)

    some people within scientific communities are saying it lacks a practical purpose.

    Then, of course, these people are either willfully ignoring, or unable to mentally process, the social value of "awareness."

    Whether or not the value of awareness exceeds the cost of the project (including delayed or otherwise hindered "hard science" projects) is a subjective question - but "art" which can reach 7+ billion people, even if it has a tiny positive social value, can be far more valuable than a less than 1% reduction in the "science capacity" of this year's impacted research.

    Now, it is entirely possible that the net social value is negative (though highly improbable that it is zero, or even insignificant given the 7B multiplier), that is a subjective matter based on how you measure value - much like the age old question: what is Art?

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday September 26 2018, @06:04PM (3 children)

    by urza9814 (3954) on Wednesday September 26 2018, @06:04PM (#740348) Journal

    I think it would have to be a hell of a lot more impressive for "7 billion" to be a legitimate multiplier for anything.

    TFS says it *might* be as bright as other stars. Which aren't really as bright as aircraft and other crap that's already flying around overhead all the time. So unless you see the news articles about it, and then go look up where it's going to be, and generally go out of your way to find and see it...you won't. Or at least you won't realize that you did.

    I don't think something which most of the world probably won't know about, and fewer still will experience, can be said to be reaching the entire global population. Most people never even bother to look up at all.

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday September 26 2018, @06:46PM (2 children)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday September 26 2018, @06:46PM (#740381)

      7B may be optimistic, however 2B of us have smartphones and therefore the capability to easily go outside and see this thing if we should choose to (and the sky is clear...) Even if only 1% of the 2B capable even attempt to see it, that is 20 million, and if 1% of those are in some way positively impacted, that's 200,000 positive impacts, and if 1% of those positive impacts end up doing something significant as a result, that's 2000 significant positive results.

      Take the cost of the project, including diminished science, and divide by 2000 - that's not a high bar.

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]
      • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday September 26 2018, @07:17PM (1 child)

        by urza9814 (3954) on Wednesday September 26 2018, @07:17PM (#740401) Journal

        Yeah, that's a more reasonable number :)

        I'm not really buying the argument that it's going to "destroy science" in any significant amount...but it does seem like a waste of money and rockets. It's their money, they can do what they want I guess, but this doesn't seem particularly productive considering their goals. The moon landing inspired a ton of people; and even more directly we have things like ISS astronauts talking to ham radio operators. Then we've got hobbyist cubesats and such launching today (Hell, Make Magazine had an article about launching your own satellite back in 2014!). What's more inspiring -- learning that some civilian stuck a big mylar balloon up there, or learning that some civilian is in radio contact with their own makeshift Sputnik? It's pretty expensive to throw a satellite up there; I'd expect that making the satellite actually *do something* would be fairly affordable in comparison. Inspire people to learn a bit so they can tune in to its transmissions or learn what it's actually doing up there rather than just looking through a cellphone screen at some space tracker app going "Oh, there it is"....

        • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday September 26 2018, @07:35PM

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday September 26 2018, @07:35PM (#740413)

          Well, being visible is "doing something" - although Sputnik was maybe more impressive with its AM transmitter, but.. that's been done and who has portable AM radios anymore (and knows how to use it)?

          I would wish for "better science," but on the other hand, most really good science is far beyond the interest zone of most people, so... again, there's a social value in being simple and that social value (this one time) might just outweigh the lack of science.

          I feel it's kind of like the dolphin shows at Sea World - on the one hand, the whole thing sickens me, captives in tiny tanks with nothing to do but perform for little stadiums full of people. On the other hand, the awareness-impact on those people in the stadium, including my children, is going to do far more good for dolphins as a species in the future than any possible suffering the performers might endure, and I don't know of a more efficient and effective way to make that awareness-impact, so....

          --
          🌻🌻 [google.com]