Space...humans or robots

"Humans vs. Robots: Who Should Dominate Space Exploration?"

by

Adam Mann

April 11th, 2012

Wired

The most recent footprints on the moon are 40 years old, and the next artificial mark on the lunar surface will probably be made by a robot’s wheels rather than human soles.

Many space scientists, engineers and politicians argue that this is a good thing. Most astronomers will tell you that virtually anything a human can do on another planet, a robot can do, only cheaper and without the risk of losing a life. But the battle between humans and robots for the starring role in the next chapter of space exploration is not yet settled.

“In what was really only a few days on the lunar surface, the Apollo astronauts produced a tremendous scientific legacy,” said planetary scientist Ian Crawford of Birkbeck College in London, author of a paper in the April issue of Astronomy and Geophysics. “Robotic exploration of the moon and Mars pales in comparison.”

Robots have done all the recent planetary exploration in the solar system. In past decades, rovers, landers, and orbiters have visited the moon, asteroids and comets, every planet in the solar system and many of their moons as well. But how does their work compare to that of human astronauts?

In terms of sheer scientific output, manned exploration of outer space has a good track record. More than 2,000 papers have been published over the last four decades using data collected during the manned Apollo missions, and the rate of new papers is still rising. In comparison, the Soviet robotic Luna explorers and NASA’s Mars Exploration rover program — Mars Pathfinder, Spirit, and Opportunity — have each generated around 400 publications.

Humans hold a number of advantages over robots. They can make quick decisions in response to changing conditions or new discoveries, rather than waiting for time-delayed instructions from Earth. They are more mobile than current robot explorers: The Apollo 17 astronauts covered more than 22 miles in three days, a distance that has taken the Mars Opportunity rover eight years to match. Humans can drill for samples deep underground and deploy large-scale geologic instruments, something that no rover has achieved on another body.

Despite these qualities, many experts are skeptical of Crawford’s argument.

“I strongly disagree with his conclusions,” wrote engineer Adrian Stoica, who supervises the Advanced Robotic Controls group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in an email to Wired. He notes that Crawford’s paper seems to focus on cost in terms of scientific output achieved.

The Apollo program was incredibly expensive — about $175 billion in today’s money — though it was not solely a scientific mission. It was mainly a geopolitical stunt during the Cold War to show American technological superiority over Russia, with science piggybacking on the ride.

The total amount spent on science over the Apollo missions, Crawford estimates, comes to about $2.09 billion in today’s dollars, making it comparable to or even cheaper than the recent $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory.

But contrasting manned lunar missions with robotic Mars missions is not the right way to go, wrote Stoica. A better analysis would use the potential cost of a manned Mars mission, which NASA estimates to be at least hundreds of billions of dollars.

Crawford counters that cost is not the biggest impetus behind his analysis. Instead, he wanted to bring attention to the sheer efficiency and legacy that the Apollo program achieved during its short time. If space exploration continues to focus on sending robots to other planets, “we will learn less about the solar system in the next 100 years than we will if we engage in an ambitious program of human exploration,” he said.

Of course, humans and robots each have their own advantages for exploration of outer space.

“There isn’t a battle between robots and humans — that’s comparing apples and oranges,” said James Garvin, chief scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “We send the robots as our pathfinders and scouts, and they open the frontiers so that we can decide where and when to send the people.”

Humans and robots already work together on Earth and in space. There are schemes that offer the advantages of human exploration without incurring as high of a cost.

“What makes robots at a distance inferior to humans is one thing only: latency,” said astronomer Dan Lester of the University of Texas at Austin.

The time it takes for a signal to travel from a robot back to mission control on Earth is a major stumbling block. Commands sent to a Mars rover take between 5 and 15 minutes. Light travel time to the moon is around 2.6 seconds.

“It takes 10 minutes to tie a knot with the Earth-moon latency,” said Lester. “But if we could bring that down to about 100 milliseconds, the robots themselves are very capable.” Teleoperated robots on the surface of another planet would have greater strength, endurance, and precision than human explorers, he added.

Teleoperation has been considered in the past for space exploration. During the Apollo era, the technology was not well developed but in the last decade, it has taken off. On Earth, surgeons in Baltimore now perform operations in Indonesia while officers in Nevada covertly spy on nuclear sites in Iran.

Lester envisions a future where astronauts camp out on Mars’ moons Phobos and Deimos and order remote-controlled robots to drive long distances over the planet’s surface, set up geologic instruments, and collect samples for analysis. He estimates this could greatly reduce costs because roughly half the price tag of a manned mission is spent on getting people down and back up the deep gravity well of a planet.

Crawford agrees such a plan would be a step beyond simply sending a robot, though perhaps less efficient than putting people on a planet’s surface.

“I think it will be strange to spend all the money to go all that way and then not land,” he said.

Historic voyages...your choice--Odysseus or the Titanic

"Cruisin’ Together"

A classicist and his father retrace the steps of Odysseus.

by

Daniel Mendelsohn

April 8th, 2012

T+L Magazine

In the end, we never got to Ithaca—never followed “in the wake of Odysseus,” as the brochure for the cruise had promised; at least, not all the way to this most famous of literary destinations, Ithaca (Itháki in modern Greek), the small and rocky island of which Homer sings, and where Odysseus had his famously gratifying homecoming. We saw much that he had seen: Troy, where his war ended and his wanderings began; Malta, where he was imprisoned by the nymph Calypso for seven years; Sicily, where his sailors were devoured by Scylla; the Neapolitan coast, which the ancients believed was close to the entrance to the underworld. But Ithaca turned out to be unattainable. For the hero of legend, that island was the culminating adventure; for us, on our Mediterranean cruise, there were just the inconveniences of modern politics—in this case, a strike that forced us to make a mad nighttime dash for Athens to catch our flights home.

But we weren’t at all disappointed, those of us who’d signed up for “Journey of Odysseus: Retracing the Odyssey through the Ancient Mediterranean,” one of several history- and literature-themed voyages run by Travel Dynamics International, a small-ship cruise operator. The opening lines of The Odyssey, after all, describe Odysseus as someone curiously like us—he’s the first tourist, the first person in either legend or recorded history who traveled because he thought the world was interesting, because he wanted to “know the minds and see the cities of many men,” as the poem puts it. So did we; and for a brief period, we felt a bit like our hero—for the 10 days we sailed, one day for each of the years he had to travel before he got to the home we never managed to see.

I was on this Mediterranean cruise less for myself than for my father. As a classicist, I have read and taught The Odyssey many times, and have been to many of these sites before, but my dad hadn’t. Now in his eighties, a retired research scientist—a man more comfortable with numbers than with literature, I had always thought—he decided a couple of years ago that he wanted to read the Greek classics, to know what I’ve spent much of my own career reading and writing about. And so, he’s been studying his Homer. (He even took my Odyssey seminar, enlivening the class with his irreverent comments: “Hero? How can Odysseus be a hero when he cheats on his wife and lies so much?!”) When I saw an advertisement for “Journey of Odysseus,” it seemed ideal—a perfect way to introduce him to the landscapes, the weather, the flavors of the eastern Mediterranean, none of which has changed much since Homer first sang his songs.

But I wanted him to have more than just a pleasant vacation. I’d been a guest lecturer about 10 years ago on a Travel Dynamics cruise of the eastern Aegean, and had been impressed by the intellectual seriousness of the undertaking. For one thing, the tours are often conducted by the archaeologists excavating the historical sites, a privilege not available to the average tourist. Our cruise on the intimate, 57-suite Corinthian II would include daily excursions to archaeological sites in Troy, Pylos, Malta, and Sicily, as well as a full program of onboard lectures every day—often two in a day—given by scholars of classical antiquity and archaeologists.

And then there was the homework. The hefty pre-embarkation packet came complete with a reading list that suggested six “essential” texts—The Odyssey, of course, but also Henry Miller’s Colossus of Maroussi and Moses Finley’s classic The World of Odysseus—and 15 “recommended” texts. Very soon after we set sail from Athens to our first stop, Çanakkale, in northwestern Turkey—the modern-day site of Troy—a nice rhythm established itself, of morning excursions, a leisurely lunch back on the ship on the aft sundeck, and then a lecture or two. Then there would be cocktails and dinner. It was like a very opulent graduate seminar—rich, but also rigorous.

I didn’t really understand how committed our little group of about 80 or so passengers was until one day at lunchtime, when I turned to the youngster standing next to me at the buffet—a serious-looking boy of about 10 whom I’d noticed traveling with what looked like three generations of his family. I jokingly asked what he thought of Robert Fagles’s rendering of The Odyssey, one of our “required” texts. He leveled a cool glance at me. “It’s very good, although it was pretty clear that Homer needed an editor,” the boy, whose name was Robert, replied. I didn’t dare admit that I myself had neglected to do my homework.

We began, of course, in Troy—the city where The Iliad ends, and where Odysseus’s homeward-bound adventures begin. Troy is not the name that the Greeks gave to the city where the greatest war of myth was fought; they called it Ilion, a word ultimately derived from the ancient Hittite name Wilusa. (Iliad just means “a song about Ilion.”) Homer calls the city “windy,” and it is windy still. On the day we visited, there was, despite the summer heat, a faint, steady breeze, coming from somewhere you couldn’t quite identify, just enough to persuade the spiky acanthus plants to wave their hostile leaves in your direction or the thronging wildflowers to nod their heavy heads. It’s a large, meandering site, and most of what there is to look at—once you get past the pier, which has inherited the giant Trojan horse constructed for the movie Troy—is walls: the remains of what were, in fact, nine successive settlements on the site, a seemingly endless series of massive accumulations of stone, from whose crevices little yellow flowers poke out. Brian Rose, the improbably boyish University of Pennsylvania archaeologist who was one of the cruise leaders and who’s been working at the site since 1988, led us around. He explained to the rapt gaggle of shipmates how the dogleg layout of the walls may have been meant to foil invaders. It seemed pretty good at holding tourists back, too: Troy never feels as crowded as, say, Pompeii, which we later visited.

Rose specializes in Troy’s post–Bronze Age history, and he reminded us that the area was a major tourist attraction in ancient times; wandering around gawking at the famous walls is something people have been doing since the time of the Persian king Xerxes (480 B.C.). Alexander the Great visited, en route to conquering Asia. (He slept with a copy of The Iliad under his pillow.) That thought—the idea that you, as a tourist, aren’t somehow desecrating an ancient site by visiting it, but joining its long history—together with the whispering of that never-dying breeze, makes the place feel alive with ghosts. Unquiet ghosts, to be sure: across the strait from Çanakkale is Gallipoli. As we first sailed up the strait, Gallipoli on our left—with its heart-wrenching monument to the Australian and Kiwi World War I dead—and Troy on our right, my dad (who has always had more respect for The Iliad than The Odyssey) shook his head and said, “Twenty-five hundred years, and it’s still the same story.”

A few days later, after some bad weather had forced us into an un-Odyssean but delicious daylong detour on the Cycladic island of Syros—the capital of the Cyclades, it now seems to spend all of its time posing for postcards, with its little white houses as crisp as newly folded laundry and harbor bristling with masts—we landed at Pylos, at one of the southernmost tips of the Peloponnese, the legendary stronghold of Homer’s King Nestor. Already an old man in The Iliad and very ancient indeed in The Odyssey, Nestor is the hero who enjoys regaling the younger warriors with his tales of how much stronger heroes were in his day.

Pylos isn’t far from Kalamata: when you arrive at the site known as Nestor’s Palace, the landscape shimmers with silver-green olive leaves. The palace is a Mycenaean structure consisting, now, of little more than some thigh-high foundations and an occasional column-base to suggest what the architecture had been. But every now and then, something extraordinary will pop out at you, an object that draws you right into Homer’s world. It was here we saw the richly carved, nearly intact bathtub that sits at one end of the palace enclosure and is decorated with an undulating pattern of large whorls.

Clustered around this stolid household fixture that had so improbably survived, our little group nodded in eager recognition, remembering the scene in which Odysseus’s son is given a bath during a visit to Nestor’s Palace, where he goes seeking news of his long-lost father. One of our fellow cruisers also recalled another famous bathtub moment in The Odyssey: the scene in which Odysseus, having made his way back to his own palace disguised as a filthy beggar, is recognized by the old slave-woman who’s bathing him after she notices a telltale scar on his leg—a scar that, like pretty much everything in The Odyssey, has a story of its own. Clearly, people were doing their homework and enjoying it.

Pylos is typical of the places you encounter on a cruise like this one, where every site has innumerable strata of history; we were always encouraged to explore these post-Homeric layers. Far grander than Nestor’s Palace at Pylos, for instance, is the nearby fortress of Methoni, a relic of the Venetians’ ownership of much of Greece during the Middle Ages: its gargantuan stone walls are studded with carvings of the Lion of St. Mark. I noticed my 10-year-old friend and his grandparents strolling through the silver-gray artemisia, wild with yellow blossoms, that grows riotously among the crumbling arches.

Sometimes, a site would convey not so much this or that era in history, but merely the enormity of time itself. Not far from Nestor’s Palace is a Mycenaean “beehive” tomb. Given the blazing sun, many of us practically ran to the black opening at the base of what does indeed look like a giant domed hive. But once you’re inside, the hairs on the back of your neck stand up: a dank and perfect stillness suggests what 30 centuries of being dead might feel like. When we emerged, we were grateful for the whiff of red currants in the air. They grow wild all around the tomb.

Indeed, I kept worrying secretly that the very richness of these sites and the immensity of their histories threatened, rather pleasantly, to distract us from our Homeric focus at times—although it occurred to me that such distraction was itself very Odyssean. The greatest threat to his homecoming is the pleasure and interest and beauty of so much of what he encounters on his journey: fascinating new cultures; opulent riches; amorous nymphs. The claustrophobia-inducing little grotto on Gozo that has been identified as Calypso’s cave—at least since the era of the Grand Tour, when local guides wooed gullible northern Europeans (“Looks a little phony,” my dad said, casting an anxious eye down the lumpy, narrow steps)—is certainly picturesque, but can’t possibly compete, for sheer jaw-dropping impact, with the enormous, Stonehenge-like, Neolithic temples nearby. “I know this isn’t what we came for,” a smartly dressed businesswoman from California—whose tender care of her frail but sprightly father had made her a favorite among the other passengers—turned to me and said as we examined some 19th-century graffiti, as insubstantial as chicken scratches on the man-size stones. “But as far as I’m concerned, it’s worth the whole trip.”

Unlike some college students, grown-up readers of The Odyssey on Mediterranean cruises like ours aren’t fulfilling an “area requirement”; their enthusiasm was palpable, and created an infectious shipboard bonhomie. One morning, during yet another lavish breakfast outside on the afterdeck—the coffee cups gleaming white in the Mediterranean sun, the teak tables shaded by blue canvas awnings—my father and I got to talking with a couple from California. In one of those improbable coincidences that somehow characterizes everything to do with The Odyssey, the husband had been the CEO of the company my dad had spent most of his life working for. “We’re having the greatest conversations we’ve ever had,” the husband declared about the cruise. Evenings after dinner, a group (including the dutiful daughter from California, after she had put her dad to bed) would gather in the lounge for drinks. My dad highly approved of the pianist’s penchant for Gershwin, and Rodgers and Hart; on some nights, Elena Myasoedova, the cruise manager, and Rose gave impromptu folk music concerts—congenial sessions that would last late into the night. It was on one of these evenings, as the pianist played Cole Porter, that Rose told us how he’d trained GI’s fighting in Iraq to recognize and, if possible, to avoid disturbing potentially important archaeological sites. “If you see a gentle mound, it’s an archaeological site—there are no natural hills in southern Iraq.”

After a few days’ sailing, we reached the Sicilian coast, the cone of Mount Etna hazily beckoning in the distance, as symmetrical and ethereal as something on a Japanese print. Whatever claims this stretch of coast may have as the mythical home of the huge, cannibalistic Laestrygonians who terrorized Odysseus and his crew, it’s the doggedly optimistic symmetries of the Doric temple at Segesta, which was begun three centuries after Homer composed his poems and has sat on a little hilltop ever since, quietly asserting the values of order and aesthetic calm through two and a half millennia of war and destruction and renewal, that I remember best from the ship’s stop on the coast near Erice.

As Homer knew well, the danger of a great odyssey is that, like the Lotus-Eaters, you can be so distracted by incidental pleasures that you forget your destination and purpose. One afternoon after our visit to Segesta, I bumped into my young friend Robert in the ship’s library, and offered to split some of the sugary pastries I’d bought ashore. While he was happily munching, I couldn’t help noticing what he’d written on his iPad about Odysseus: “He makes many stupid mistakes that get him in trouble.”

But maybe it doesn’t matter how closely you follow in Odysseus’s footsteps, in the end. More than anything, The Odyssey is a story about stories—stories about Odysseus, so long missing in action; stories that Odysseus hears; stories that, often to save his skin, he tells; stories that we all tell about ourselves, often without knowing it: the canny businesswoman who becomes a little girl again with her dad, the family whose Mediterranean reunion seeks to palliate a recent loss, the scientist who sits breakfasting pleasantly with the executive who dismantled the company to which he gave his life.

And then there was the story that I couldn’t have made up if I were writing a novel instead of a travel article. One day, while I was sunbathing, I noticed that the elderly gentleman next to me had quite a scar on his leg; when he noticed me noticing it, he smiled. “There’s a story to that scar,” he said; I settled in to listen. The scar, he began, was why he was on the cruise. He was Dutch, and during the final, most dreadful winter of World War II, when he was a teenager and people in Holland were eating tulip bulbs to stay alive, he went out, weak and underfed as he was, to chop some wood; unable to wield the heavy axe properly, he ended up swinging it into his own leg. For weeks he hovered near death. What saved him was The Odyssey. A family friend who was a professor of Greek would come every day and, to distract the teenager from his pain, would teach him bits of Greek and recite passages from Homer’s epic of wonder and pain. “I can still recite parts of it in Greek!” he exclaimed; and did just that, right there on the deck of the Corinthian II, nearly seven decades later. He grew quiet and said, “I made a vow that, before I died, I would see what Odysseus saw.”

The stories we tell! This was why, when the captain announced that the Corinth Canal had been closed by disgruntled strikers, and that we’d therefore have to skip Ithaca—skip Ithaca!—in order to get back to Athens in time for our flights, I don’t think anyone really minded. For Ithaca—as the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy writes in his famous poem by that name—represents the gift of a “beautiful journey.” If the island itself disappoints, you’re still “rich with all you’ve gotten on the way.”

"Cruise ship retraces voyage of Titanic 100 years later"

April 9th, 2012

USA TODAY

A cruise carrying relatives of some of the more than 1,500 people who died aboard the Titanic nearly 100 years ago set sail from England on Sunday to retrace the ship's voyage, including a visit to the location where it sank.

The Titanic Memorial Cruise, carrying the same number of passengers — not including crew — as the Titanic did, cast off from Southampton, where the doomed vessel left on its maiden voyage. The 12-night cruise will commemorate the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the White Star liner.

Waving passengers crowded the decks as the ship prepared to set sail, many dressed in period costumes as first-class passengers, crew members, steerage passenger and stewards.

Graham Free was dressed as an Edwardian gentleman and described his excitement for the cruise as he waited to board.

"I have been a fan of the Titanic since I was nine years old and this cruise is the closest you are going to get to it," said the 37-year-old. "The trip has cost a considerable amount, but I wanted to do it."

Fellow cruiser Carmel Bradburn, 55, who lives in Australia, described herself as "fanatical" about the Titanic and struck back at accusations that retracing the doomed voyage is in poor taste.

"I don't think the cruise is morbid. It's like saying Gallipoli is morbid or commemorating the (Crimean) war," she said. "Remembering those who died is not morbid."

With 1,309 passengers aboard, the MS Balmoral will follow the same route as the Titanic — though the Balmoral had to leave two days earlier than the Titanic did because it is a small and slower vessel.

The Balmoral is operated by Fred Olsen Cruise Lines, whose parent company, Harland and Wolff, built the Titanic in Belfast. It has been chartered for the event by Miles Morgan Travel, which specializes in tailor-made holidays.

The organizers are trying to recreate the onboard experience — minus the disaster — including the food and a live band playing music from that era, in a tribute to Titanic's musicians who reportedly played their instruments until the ship sank.

People from 28 countries have booked passage, organizers said, including relatives of some of the more than 1,500 people who died when the Titanic collided with an iceberg and sank on April 15, 1912, in international waters in the North Atlantic. Other passengers include relatives of the around 700 survivors, along with authors and historians.

The tickets varied in cost from $4,445 to $9,520.

Over the course of the voyage, passengers will attend lectures by Titanic experts such as Philip Littlejohn, grandson of a Titanic survivor. Littlejohn said he is sure his grandfather would be proud to know his story would be shared with passengers on the Titanic Memorial Cruise.

"It will be an emotional moment when we are over the wreck site, where I dived in 2001 and where my grandfather left Titanic rowing Lifeboat 13," he said.

While on board, passengers also will dine on meals based around dishes served in April 1912, with a formal dinner on April 13 made up entirely of dishes served aboard the Titanic.

Cruise organizers have set up a special memorial service on April 14 to start at 11:40 p.m. to mark the moment Titanic hit the iceberg, and later at the exact moment when the ship sank.

The cruise is among an abundance of commemorations and memorials to the reputedly unsinkable ship that have sprung up to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the Titanic's voyage.

Martian pareidolia

"An Elephant on Mars? At Least According to This NASA Photo"

by

Erica Ho

April 9th, 2012

Time

NASA managed to snag this unique picture of an elephant-shaped lava flow on Mars in the Elysium Planitia sector of the planet. Located on a Martian plain known for displaying some of the planet’s youngest lava flows, this flow may have occurred within the past 100 million years – a relatively short time in the planet’s history. The Red Planet is largely believed to be relatively inactive at present day.

University of Arizona planetary geologist Alfred McEwen told MSNBC:

“Most lava floods on Earth are emplaced over years to decades, and this is probably true for much of the lava on Mars as well. An elephant can walk away from the slowly advancing flow front. However, there is also evidence for much more rapidly flowing lava on Mars, a true flood of lava. In this instance, maybe this elephant couldn’t run away fast enough.”

As for the elephant? It’s a classic case of pareidolia, a psychological phenomenon where human brains see familiar objects in random shapes. It is also the same reason why people often see bunnies and animals in the clouds. And Mars often gets wacky images associated with it — think little green men.

pareidolia [Wikipedia]

A lost art?...glass blowing

Here is a documentary from Johns Hopkins University.

Aired October 8th, 1951...

The Master Glass Blower

SCIENTIFIC GLASS BLOWING: AN INTRODUCTION

by

Clair Ivan Colvin

ISBN-10: 1436343496
ISBN-13: 978-1436343497

Azbakia Book Market

Next time you are in Cairo, Egypt.

"Rummaging Around Nooks and Crannies in Azbakia Book Market, Cairo"

by

Nick Rowlands

February 15th, 2010

trazzler

Take the Metro to Ataba—a sprawling neighborhood of chaotic markets, where you can even buy the proverbial kitchen sink—and you first emerge into Sour El Azbakia Book Market. Rows of whitewashed wooden shacks with battered mashrabia paneling, the market is an Aladdin’s Cave for culture vultures. Books of all shapes and sizes tumble from groaning shelves. Leather and gilt-bound Qurans jostle for space with HTML 4 Dummies, and Magic’s First Gymkhana does battle with The Bourne Identity. Burrow a little deeper, and you’ll turn up seventy-year-old National Geographics, satirical Egyptian comics, and faded vintage film posters. Seek out the most wizened old man with the most wizard-like beard, and if he doesn’t have an ancient alchemical tome, he’ll at least have a genuine, framed photo of King Farouk. The air here is thick with the dust of time, and the hope that tired old print will once more see the light of day.

Deceased--Fang Lizhi

Fang Lizhi
February 12th, 1936 to April 6th, 2012

"Fang Lizhi, Chinese Physicist and Seminal Dissident, Dies at 76"

b7y

Michael Wines

April 7th, 2012

The New York Times

Fang Lizhi, whose advocacy of economic and democratic freedoms shaped China’s brief era of student dissent that ended with the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and his exile, died on Friday in Tucson, Ariz., his son, Fang Ke, said Saturday.

Mr. Fang was 76. The cause of death was not known, his son said in a telephone interview.

A brilliant scientist — and in his early years a loyal member of the Communist Party — Mr. Fang had become China’s best-known dissident by the 1980s, his views shaped by persecution in China and exposure to Western political concepts abroad.

In early 1989, he published an open letter to China’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, calling for the release of political prisoners. The letter helped galvanize a pro-democracy student movement that spring, peaking on June 4, when Chinese troops killed hundreds of student protesters among the masses occupying Tiananmen Square.

Fearing arrest, Mr. Fang sought refuge with his family at the United States Embassy in Beijing. President George Bush’s decision to grant him protection there provoked a yearlong diplomatic standoff with the Chinese that ended, after secret negotiations, with a decision by Chinese leaders in June 1990 to allow the family to leave China, ostensibly for medical treatment.

Mr. Fang later became a professor of physics at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where he taught and continued to speak out on human rights until his death.

Word of his death initially spread on Twitter, where veterans of the 1989 democracy movement mourned his passing and proposed a rights award in his honor.

“No words can express my grief,” wrote Wang Dan, who was imprisoned for four years for his leadership role in the Tiananmen protests. “Fang Lizhi has inspired the ’89 generation and has awakened the people’s yearning for human rights and democracy.”

Mr. Fang’s willingness to test the boundaries of his eventual academic discipline, the physics of the universe, seemed foreshadowed even at an early age by his penchant for questioning authority.

Born in 1936 to a Hangzhou postal clerk and his wife, Mr. Fang entered the prestigious Beijing University as a youth and excelled in physics. According to a 1988 article in The Atlantic Monthly, he quickly flouted official norms, taking over a founding meeting of the university’s Communist Youth League and urging students to think independently instead of accepting party dogma on proper academic behavior.

He joined China’s Institute of Modern Physics after graduating in 1956, only to be expelled from the Communist Party a year later during Mao Zedong’s Anti-Rightist Campaign, a movement against intellectuals and others who were seen to have strayed from Communist principles. His offense was writing an essay criticizing political interference in scientific research.

Mr. Fang was considered too valuable to allow party censure to affect his work, and he continued to rise in academia. But when the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, he was again persecuted, first imprisoned and then sent to rural Anhui Province to work with peasants. He carried with him but one book, on astrophysics, and his repeated readings of it led him to change his research focus from fundamental physics to cosmology.

Still an outcast, he continued to flout convention. In 1972, Mr. Fang and colleagues at Anhui’s branch of the University of Science and Technology of China published a paper titled “A Solution of the Cosmological Equations in Scalar-Tensor Theory, with Mass and Blackbody Radiation.”

“This innocuous-sounding article met with a furious response from leading theoretical circles of the party,” The China Quarterly recounted in a 1990 article. “Fang et al. had broken a longstanding taboo by introducing the Big Bang theory to the Chinese physics world. Insofar as the Big Bang contradicted Engels’s declaration that the universe must be infinite in space and time, Fang’s paper was tantamount to heresy.”

Like most of the persecuted, Mr. Fang was rehabilitated after Mao’s death in 1976, and in Deng’s more open China he traveled to conferences abroad, earning a worldwide scientific reputation. But his exposure to foreign political concepts sharpened his doubts about the Communist system, and he began to write and lecture on its shortcomings.

During a brief flowering of political openness, he gained a large following in China and abroad for his outspoken criticism of the Communist system. But in January 1987, after he helped organize pro-reform student demonstrations in cities across China, he was again expelled from the party and stripped of his job as vice president of Anhui University of Science and Technology.

Anger over the demonstrations among Communist Politburo members forced the resignation days later of Hu Yaobang, the reform-minded party general secretary, who had presided over the period of openness. Mr. Hu’s death in April 1989 set off the final round of student protests that ended with the occupation of Tiananmen Square and the subsequent assault on the demonstrators.

Freedom did not change Mr. Fang’s disregard for authority. Not long after leaving the American Embassy for the West, he angered his host, James Lilley, the American ambassador to China, by publicly accusing the United States of holding China to a lower human rights standard than it applied to the Soviet Union and its treatment of dissidents. The charge prompted a brisk response from President Bush, who said Mr. Fang’s views were mistaken and outdated.

But Mr. Fang consistently reserved his sharpest criticism for his homeland.

“Human rights are fundamental privileges that people have from birth, such as the right to think and be educated, the right to marry, and so on. But we Chinese consider those rights dangerous,” he said 26 years ago in a speech to students at Tongji University in Shanghai.

“If we are the democratic country we say we are, these rights should be stronger here than elsewhere. But at present they are nothing more than an abstract idea.”

See the following for more and an interview...

Fang Lizhi...science and politics=volatile mix

"Should the Titanic's Artifacts Stay Underwater?" poll

No....6

Yes....3

Who cares....7

The "Who cares" voters may be too young or have no sense of history. Would King Tut's treasures remain in situ? I see no reason to halt the recovery of artifacts whether it is done for profit or not. Most of us will never visit the site and it is a connection with the past via the artifacts that do make a living history and make the touring exhibition circuit. There is one in my city now.

"Should the Titanic's Artifacts Stay Underwater?"

As the 100th anniversary of the ship's demise approaches, an auction and a museum exhibit take two distinct approaches to commemorating the disaster. Are the remains meant for public education or private mourning?

by

Samantha Grossman

April 5th, 2012

Time

From the educational to the experiential to the downright bizarre, ways to commemorate the April centennial of the Titanic disaster won’t be in short supply. Whether through eerily specific replica cruises or the more foreseeable 3-D release of James Cameron’s 1997 film, history buffs and Leonardo DiCaprio fans alike can pay homage to one of the world’s deadliest peacetime sea tragedies 100 years after it happened.

While cruising the Atlantic or immersing oneself in the world of Jack and Rose might re-create the experience of being on the ill-fated ship, a new exhibit at Connecticut’s Mystic Aquarium aims to re-create the adventure of discovering its resting place. The team behind the exhibit, called “Titanic — 12,450 Feet Below,” includes Robert Ballard, a former U.S. Navy officer who discovered the Titanic in a 1985 expedition with French oceanographer Jean-Louis Michel. Ballard is the founder and president of the Institute for Exploration, a division of the Sea Research Foundation, which is the nonprofit that operates Mystic Aquarium.

Set to launch April 12, the exhibit aims to tell a unique but comprehensive story. The lead creator, Tim Delaney, says that means establishing an emotional connection with the events leading up to the disaster and the eventual discovery of its remains. What it does not entail — and what Ballard expressly opposes — is displaying any artifacts extracted from the wreckage. Ballard compares the experience of discovering Titanic to visiting a historic battlefield — a final resting place, a gravesite.

“You don’t go to Gettysburg with a shovel,” he says. “If we cannot protect the Titanic, what can we protect?”

So instead of focusing on the aftermath of the discovery, the exhibit celebrates “the art of the hunt,” Ballard says. After experiencing a digital re-creation of the ship’s collision with an iceberg and its subsequent capsizing, visitors enter a simulated undersea world, meant to re-create Ballard’s journey, which he says was at times taxing and tedious but ultimately rewarding.

With 52 years of experience in undersea exploration, Ballard harbors reverence toward all shipwrecks, particularly those whose death tolls crept as high as the Titanic’s. That’s why he questions the ethics of extracting and displaying Titanic artifacts — because they’re personal effects of the deceased, meant to be preserved and respected.

“The deep sea is the largest museum on our planet, but there’s no lock on its door,” Ballard says. And indeed, since Ballard and Michel discovered the Titanic some 27 years ago, whether or not the sea should be “locked up” has been a divisive issue. Just six weeks prior to the discovery, another noted ocean explorer, Mel Fisher, discovered the wreck site of the Nuestra Señora de Atocha, a ship en route to Spain that sank in 1622 off the coast of Florida. Fisher called for the recovery of the site’s gold, silver, jewels and artifacts, worth hundreds of millions of dollars. After legal battles with Congress, Fisher managed to victoriously maintain the phrase finders keepers.

Seeking to protect Titanic artifacts from a similar fate, Ballard appeared before Congress in 1985, shortly after the discovery. The following year, President Reagan signed into law the R.M.S. Titanic Maritime Memorial Act to establish guidelines for exploration and recovery. The bill prohibits any individual or vessel under U.S. jurisdiction, or without a registered nationality, from removing, injuring or selling Titanic property without a permit issued by the Secretary of Commerce. It mandates that permits can be granted only if the activity in question furthers educational, scientific or cultural purposes in the public interest.

But neither legislation nor Ballard’s stance on artifact recovery have kept Titanic heirlooms on the ocean floor. In fact, another event marking the tragedy’s centennial is an auction of more than 5,000 artifacts, ranging from pocket-size personal effects to a 17-ton slab of the ship’s hull. The auction, coordinated by Guernsey’s Auction House in New York, won’t sell the items individually, but rather as one collection. Currently owned by R.M.S. Titanic Inc., a division of Premier Exhibitions Inc., the artifacts are displayed at five locations around the world, and will be consolidated as a single set for the first time.

The heirlooms’ new owner could be an individual, a corporation or even a city, but the party must agree to keep the collection together as one unit, says Arlan Ettinger, president of Guernsey’s. The owner must also agree to display a considerable portion for public access, corresponding to the clause in the R.M.S. Titanic Maritime Memorial Act that requires salvaged artifacts to further “cultural purposes.” Serious bidders must communicate with the auction house in advance to determine if their intentions adhere to all guidelines. Some artifacts will be on display at the April 11 reception, but it won’t be a traditional auction as much as a public announcement of the winning bidder.

Though Ettinger says he’s aware of the conflicting beliefs regarding the extraction of artifacts, he says items recovered from the scenes of a tragedy can help improve knowledge of the events. For example, the slab of Titanic’s hull, simply dubbed “the big piece,” has given scientists the opportunity to study the ship’s metallurgy and construction.

Understanding any structural shortcomings or defects that affected the Titanic disaster could help prevent future catastrophes, Ettinger argues. “If we can learn from the past, this is the way to do it,” he says.

All of the 5,500 items heading to the auction block have been recovered from the debris field surrounding the disintegrating ship — as far as 13 miles away, Ettinger notes. Along with the 17-ton bulk of the hull, the collection includes a trove of personal belongings plucked from the icy depths, from a pair of binoculars to a bracelet with the name “Amy” engraved in diamonds.

According to Ettinger, about six parties have come forward with a serious interest in acquiring the collection. Though it’s difficult to predict where the artifacts will end up, it’s safe to say there’s at least one noted explorer who will not be bidding.

And this...

"Titanic wreck to be protected by UN maritime convention?"

Fears of damage to historic site by tourist vessels and submarines prompts Unesco to confer protection on sunken liner

by

Robert Booth

April 5th, 2012

guardian.co.uk

The United Nations has moved to protect the wreck of the Titanic amid growing concern at its deterioration as a result of tourist visits and exploration submarines crashing into its structure.

The 100-year old wreck has been brought under the cover of the 2001 Unesco convention on the protection of underwater cultural heritage, which gives signed-up member states the right to prevent exploration deemed unscientific or unethical, seize illicitly recovered artefacts and close their ports to all vessels undertaking exploration that is not done according to the principles of the doctrine.

Robert Ballard, the undersea explorer who was part of the expedition that discovered the wreck in 1985, has raised concerns about its condition and in 2004 undertook a dive that found the mainmast had been destroyed, the ship's bell and light torn off and several holes had been made in the deck.

"When [submarines] bump into things, they can do damage," he said at the time. "When they land, they can do damage. You can clearly see, all over the ship, where the common landing sites are knocking the holes in the deck."

Announcing the application of the heritage convention to the wreck on Thursday, Unesco's director general, Irina Bokova, called on divers not to dump equipment or commemorative plaques on the Titanic, a common practice that is causing conservationists significant concern.

"The sinking of the Titanic is anchored in the memory of humanity and I am pleased that this site can now be protected by the Unesco convention," said Bokova.

"But there are thousands of other shipwrecks that need safeguarding as well. All of them are archaeological sites of scientific and historical value. They are also the memory of human tragedy that should be treated with respect. We do not tolerate the plundering of cultural sites on land, and the same should be true for our sunken heritage."

The convention stipulates that underwater heritage should be preserved in its original location in the first instance and that it should not be exploited for trade or speculation.

However, the protections are limited by the fact that neither the US nor Canada is among the 41 signatory states and a number of the tourist and exploration trips chartered to the wreck site 4,000m under the sea off the coast of Newfoundland come from those countries.

A US company called Bluefish is offering 40 places on two trips in submersibles to the wreck this July, with each place costing $59,680 (£37,636). The brochure promises: "Experience for yourself the mystique and majesty of this poignant chapter in humanity's collective history."

Ulrike Guerin, the Unesco official responsible for the convention, said: "Damage has been done by ROVs [remote-controlled submersibles] bumping in the wreck and memorial plaques being placed on it.

"One ROV got also caught in the cables. Artifacts have been taken and are for sale now and this is a main issue. The Unesco convention foresees very detailed rules for activities directed at ancient wrecks, for instance supervision by an archeologist, respect for human remains and the prohibition of the commercial for-profit recovery of artifacts."


HMS Titanic artifact auction