WEBVTT 1 00:00:22.923 --> 00:00:39.623 WH11NE- Sunrise: She's the author of three books. All of them have themes around space travel. And her most recent, Endurance, was co-written with astronaut Scott Kelly. And personally, when I read it, I immediately thought she'd be a really exciting speaker for the seminar because of the way that the book weaves. 2 00:00:39.623 --> 00:00:53.853 WH11NE- Sunrise: advocacy into a captivating narrative, and it… in addition to me enjoying it, it was also a New York Times bestseller, and is now translated into 23 languages, so I think it's safe to say that it was a very successful strategy. 3 00:00:53.853 --> 00:01:00.473 WH11NE- Sunrise: In addition to her books, Margaret's writing has appeared in The New Yorker, in The New York Times, Slate, Washington Post. 4 00:01:00.863 --> 00:01:10.362 WH11NE- Sunrise: popular mechanics, basically everywhere, and I'm very excited to welcome her to our Worlds Collide seminar series today. So, thank you so much for joining us, Margaret. 5 00:01:10.853 --> 00:01:18.782 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Thank you so much. What a great intro. I don't often get an intro for someone who's actually read a book that I wrote. 6 00:01:18.783 --> 00:01:19.453 WH11NE- Sunrise: like. 7 00:01:19.453 --> 00:01:39.473 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Extra special. Usually people are just like reading off, reading off the back of the book or something. I'm really excited to have been invited to take part in this series, to have the chance to connect with all of you. So thank you so much for having me. I am really interested in this topic because I've been writing about technology, as Tova mentioned. 8 00:01:39.473 --> 00:01:49.453 Margaret Lazarus Dean: through a creative lens in various ways throughout my writing career. All my work has centered on the intersections between large technological projects. 9 00:01:49.453 --> 00:01:57.532 Margaret Lazarus Dean: culture and the inner emotional experiences of individuals who integrate those projects in various ways into their own lives. 10 00:01:57.613 --> 00:02:15.493 Margaret Lazarus Dean: I've mostly written about spaceflight, especially human spaceflight in the US, though lately I'm also taking on the history of the Y2K mitigation project in the late 1990s, and also, sort of against my own will, taking on the advent of large language models in our current decade. 11 00:02:15.963 --> 00:02:33.413 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Today I want to talk about the Muon Collider project and what we can learn from moments in history when people have come together to advocate for a large, ambitious, expensive science project before. Specifically, I want to talk about Project Apollo in the 1960s. 12 00:02:33.413 --> 00:02:42.362 Margaret Lazarus Dean: A lot of histories of Apollo really focus on the technological achievements, the series of breakthroughs necessary to make the moon landings possible. 13 00:02:42.363 --> 00:02:53.182 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Others have studied the cultural effects of the project. But a lot of the ways that we talk about Apollo tend to commit the retrospective fallacy of treating the conclusion as inevitable. 14 00:02:53.183 --> 00:03:10.502 Margaret Lazarus Dean: and the solutions as somehow obvious. This is an error of logic that I think threatens obfuscation of many of the uncertainties that made up the actual narrative of how this very difficult and very unlikely series of events actually took place. 15 00:03:11.233 --> 00:03:25.592 Margaret Lazarus Dean: The ways in which Project Apollo might have failed are many. A lot of them were technological. For instance, the lunar module might have failed to ignite to take Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin back up off the surface of the Moon and back into lunar orbit. 16 00:03:25.593 --> 00:03:43.142 Margaret Lazarus Dean: This was maybe the most significant point of possible failure, and also the most difficult to mitigate against, because it was impossible to fully test a rocket in a vacuum at 1 6th Earth gravity, the conditions under which it would absolutely have to work, or the astronauts would be left to die. 17 00:03:43.163 --> 00:03:58.753 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Once in orbit, the module might have failed to rendezvous properly with a service module, the service module's trans-Earth injection burn might have failed, which would have left all three astronauts dead in lunar orbit, and so on, times many possible failure points, big and small. 18 00:03:58.803 --> 00:04:11.703 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Space historians love to talk about these possible points of failure, and cultural historians love to think about the alternate universes in which, for instance, the lunar module had been unable to lift off the surface of the moon. 19 00:04:11.703 --> 00:04:28.202 Margaret Lazarus Dean: This was a likely enough possibility that Richard Nixon's speechwriter, Bill Sapphire, prepared a speech for him to give in that eventuality. The speech begins with an iconic line: Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. 20 00:04:29.133 --> 00:04:43.572 Margaret Lazarus Dean: It's kind of baller. So that said, by far the most vulnerable point in the whole sequence actually had to do with funding, a challenge that this group will probably be very familiar with. Project Apollo cost altogether about $300 billion in today's dollars. 21 00:04:43.663 --> 00:04:56.862 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Which is an amount that is both too big to fully comprehend, and also, in a weird way, less than we tend to think of it as being. It was a significant percentage of spending by the US government, reaching 22 00:04:56.863 --> 00:05:05.473 Margaret Lazarus Dean: 4% of the budget at its peak. And we will come back to that later. There were many variables that influenced the outcome of… 23 00:05:05.473 --> 00:05:27.713 Margaret Lazarus Dean: There were very many variables that influenced the outcome that risked being forgotten. Many of those possible alternate outcomes, which is to say many possible stories of failure, beginning with a very real possibility that Congress might not have chosen to support John F. Kennedy's urge that we put an American astronaut on the moon and bring him back safely before the decade was out. 24 00:05:27.713 --> 00:05:40.772 Margaret Lazarus Dean: So it's worth examining closely how that goal was actually accomplished. Spending such an enormous amount of taxpayer money takes not only a clear and compelling set of policies that will resonate with lawmakers and other leaders. 25 00:05:40.773 --> 00:05:47.703 Margaret Lazarus Dean: That is a step that actually comes quite late in the process. A general public support, a general consensus has to come first. 26 00:05:48.773 --> 00:06:00.052 Margaret Lazarus Dean: So why did the public actually support this? Why did people believe in the project of the moon landings, even while they also said again and again that they thought it was too expensive? 27 00:06:00.383 --> 00:06:20.112 Margaret Lazarus Dean: There are sort of received opinions about the answers to this question that often go completely unexamined, as if their truth is so self-evident that it doesn't need to be justified. Those received reasons have to do with nationalism, international competition with the Soviets as an aspect of the Cold War. 28 00:06:20.113 --> 00:06:29.932 Margaret Lazarus Dean: In some cases, an interest in scientific or technological advancement for their own sakes. All of these are posited as obvious reasons why everyone would support this project. 29 00:06:29.933 --> 00:06:52.112 Margaret Lazarus Dean: A lot of people who are not space historians will tell you very soberly that these were in fact the reasons why we went to the moon, but there isn't actually strong evidence for any of those claims, as I'll get into a bit later. There had to have been something else at play, which is very much worth studying and considering for anyone trying to gain public support for an ambitious long-term project in the future. 30 00:06:52.613 --> 00:07:10.223 Margaret Lazarus Dean: To me, the missing factor from those explanations is this. People want to experience wonder and beauty together with other people. They want to feel a sense of collective achievement and something ambitious that they feel they contributed to or were somehow a part of. 31 00:07:10.833 --> 00:07:28.623 Margaret Lazarus Dean: When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the surface of the moon, the overwhelming response from people who got to watch it from the ground was that they felt themselves to be part of that achievement. They felt as though they were there, they felt that the nation, or that humans as a species, had accomplished something that they could take pride in. 32 00:07:28.623 --> 00:07:47.442 Margaret Lazarus Dean: I don't know anyone who was alive at that time, no matter their political affiliation, their nationality, their pre-existing level of interest in science or technology. Everyone felt as though something had happened that changed the course of human history forever, and that they had been included in it somehow, that they had been a part of it. 33 00:07:48.493 --> 00:08:02.552 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Looking back on this phenomenon, I think, is very useful, because we can also look forward and say, how do we create that effect for a new project going forward? It's not easy, it's not always obvious how to accomplish that, but it is 34 00:08:02.553 --> 00:08:11.722 Margaret Lazarus Dean: possible, I think, and I think it's actually easier than trying to hit these other possible goals of patriotism or competition with another nation. 35 00:08:11.723 --> 00:08:16.022 Margaret Lazarus Dean: or paranoia about what another nation will do if they accomplish the goal first. 36 00:08:16.023 --> 00:08:20.583 Margaret Lazarus Dean: These reasons are often offered for a big, expensive project. 37 00:08:20.583 --> 00:08:44.452 Margaret Lazarus Dean: But they are not as effective. You can use those tactics for a moment, but they won't last very long. They won't last long enough to see a big project through, as these emotions don't really provide a very clean burning fuel, so to say. It is possible to reach people with wonder and beauty, with a sense of community and collective achievement, and I think there are valuable lessons in Project Apollo to show us how. 38 00:08:45.193 --> 00:08:56.983 Margaret Lazarus Dean: I would argue that we never would have gotten to the moon without a strong and compelling narrative, or set of narratives, each narrative being not only a great story in and of itself, in the simple science fiction sense. 39 00:08:56.983 --> 00:09:03.983 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Let's send a man to the moon and bring him back safely before the decade is out, even though we don't really know how we're going to be able to do that. 40 00:09:03.983 --> 00:09:27.882 Margaret Lazarus Dean: But the narrative also needed to be a story that created a deep thematic resonance with people's emotional and even spiritual realities. People needed to see something in the story that wasn't just cool and it wasn't just useful. In fact, utility is one of the least important things when we're talking about this kind of narrative making, which I'll get into a bit more later. It had to be not just cool and useful, but personally resonant and meaningful to people. 41 00:09:27.993 --> 00:09:46.342 Margaret Lazarus Dean: if it seems like that's a lot to ask, if you're wondering, for example, how can people made to feel emotionally connected to subatomic particles, I want to point out that the detailed challenges of creating a Saturn V rocket, or creating, let's say the seams and the spacesuits that kept the astronauts alive on the lunar surface. 42 00:09:46.343 --> 00:10:05.222 Margaret Lazarus Dean: each of these individual challenges was too technical, too specialized, too wonky for everyday Americans to have felt emotionally connected to, but the overall goal achieved an emotional resonance that people did understand in a deep way, which ultimately made them feel okay about paying for those metal alloys 43 00:10:05.223 --> 00:10:08.712 Margaret Lazarus Dean: And those new plastic materials, and those details. 44 00:10:09.733 --> 00:10:33.173 Margaret Lazarus Dean: And I would argue that this was not an accident. Storytellers inside and outside NASA understood, maybe without even articulating it in the way that I am today, but I think they understood that without this emotional thematic resonance, this goal could not actually have been achieved. There were so many points when clear and credible attempts were made to defund or severely downgrade this project. 45 00:10:33.173 --> 00:10:39.073 Margaret Lazarus Dean: And the fact that none of these attempts succeeded, and that the project was ultimately an enormous triumph. 46 00:10:39.073 --> 00:10:53.012 Margaret Lazarus Dean: is really down to the fact that these storytellers saw how to talk about the project in a way that connected with people's inner emotional lives in an ongoing way that continued over years. And that, in many ways, continues to this day. 47 00:10:53.053 --> 00:11:04.242 Margaret Lazarus Dean: So I want to talk through some aspects of these narratives that I think were more effective in the specific way that I'm talking about, and I'll also talk about a few I think were not as useful. 48 00:11:07.403 --> 00:11:10.223 Margaret Lazarus Dean: The first one I want to talk about is the power of imagery. 49 00:11:10.323 --> 00:11:29.263 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Nasa used a lot of speculative imagery, like concept paintings, mock-ups, showing what launches would look like, what spacecraft would look like, what missions would look like. These images were inspiring and gave people something to hang onto during the years running up to the actual launches and the actual successes. 50 00:11:29.263 --> 00:11:33.572 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Then, of course, actual imagery of real progress on the project. 51 00:11:33.573 --> 00:11:42.012 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Up to and including the achievements of the launch, the first steps, slush down and recovery, etc, all played a key role in public sentiment. 52 00:11:42.013 --> 00:12:01.422 Margaret Lazarus Dean: When the first Apollo launches took place, there was a huge debate over the idea of bringing cameras and video equipment when weight was at an absolute premium and mission-critical equipment was being shaved down to save on fuel costs. The decision was still made, time after time, to send multiple still NTV cameras 53 00:12:01.423 --> 00:12:12.393 Margaret Lazarus Dean: So the astronauts could document their experiences and bring the viewing public along with them. The coordination and planning it took to broadcast the first steps from the Moon back down to Earth live. 54 00:12:12.393 --> 00:12:25.172 Margaret Lazarus Dean: was substantial and expensive, but the decision was made, and I think it was the correct one, that people needed to be able to experience this in real time, along with the astronauts, in order to feel a deep investment in the achievement. 55 00:12:25.513 --> 00:12:32.522 Margaret Lazarus Dean: as you can imagine, this level of transparency was highly debated. No one actually knew what would happen. 56 00:12:32.613 --> 00:12:42.872 Margaret Lazarus Dean: For instance, the second that Neil Armstrong stepped off the lunar module, there was a possibility that he could just be swallowed up by loose powder on the surface. We didn't really understand what that surface was made out of. 57 00:12:42.873 --> 00:12:54.043 Margaret Lazarus Dean: That would have been bad TV, but the potential of airing a failure live around the world was accepted in favor of the power of bringing people along in real time for the success. 58 00:12:55.543 --> 00:13:08.612 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Two, celebrating intermittent successes was a successful strategy. Nearly a decade passed between Kennedy's call to put an American on the moon and that moment when Neil Armstrong's boot first hit the surface. 59 00:13:08.613 --> 00:13:17.263 Margaret Lazarus Dean: So in between, every small step along the way was celebrated, televised, narrativized to the fullest extent possible. 60 00:13:17.263 --> 00:13:37.262 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Every Gemini launch, of course, Project Gemini was a series of missions to test and rehearse the steps that would be necessary for Apollo. Every Gemini launch, including… and every mission, including rendezvous between two spacecrafts in orbit, spacewalks to test the new spacesuits, these were all televised, celebrated, each one was an event. 61 00:13:37.263 --> 00:13:58.283 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Even an event that didn't necessarily need to be an event, for example, the rollout of each Saturn V rocket, they would roll from the Vehicle Assembly Building about three miles to the launch pad. As you can imagine, moving something the size of a 16-story building, keeping it perfectly level is a very slow, exacting process. 62 00:13:58.283 --> 00:14:12.942 Margaret Lazarus Dean: NASA really made this into a party. They made it into a day-long public event every time. People are invited to come out, bring a picnic. There was live music. There were talks from astronauts who were planning to go up on this rocket or maybe on the next one. 63 00:14:12.943 --> 00:14:25.392 Margaret Lazarus Dean: People sat and watched together as this rocket made this beautiful move across the Central Florida landscape. And the images of those in-between events are some of the most indelible of the space program to this day. 64 00:14:26.583 --> 00:14:46.523 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Number three, third tactic, making local connections. So, NASA was very canny from the start about distributing stakeholders as much as they could across the country. Starting very early on, they built out sites, and they assigned big contracts as far and wide as they could. There was sometimes pressure to keep more of the work 65 00:14:46.523 --> 00:14:51.713 Margaret Lazarus Dean: closer to home in Houston once the Manned Space Flight Center was based in Houston. 66 00:14:51.713 --> 00:14:57.573 Margaret Lazarus Dean: There was often pressure to keep manufacturing closer to Cape Canaveral, which would make sense if you're building a piece. 67 00:14:57.573 --> 00:15:11.792 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Why do you then need to move it across the entire country? But they did because that was politically smart. So by the end of Apollo, there were NASA sites and significant contractors across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. 68 00:15:11.793 --> 00:15:25.452 Margaret Lazarus Dean: So once these sites were established and embedded in the local economies, it became much less appealing for an ambitious lawmaker to try to make their name by shutting down a big, expensive project and claim that they saved the taxpayers money. 69 00:15:25.453 --> 00:15:40.042 Margaret Lazarus Dean: So both conservative and liberal legislators dipped a toe from time to time in the possibility of limiting or even eliminating allocations to NASA at various points, but they never got very far because opposition from within their own states and districts 70 00:15:40.043 --> 00:15:45.512 Margaret Lazarus Dean: made it unwise for them to continue in my own home state of Minnesota. 71 00:15:45.513 --> 00:15:59.513 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Walter Mondale once tried to shut down the space shuttle program early on until it was brought to his attention that Honeywell, which is headquartered in Minnesota, had a significant contract that Honeywell did not want to lose, and so that was the end of that. 72 00:15:59.853 --> 00:16:17.423 Margaret Lazarus Dean: But beyond the legislative motivations, the sense of local connections strengthened people's ability to connect personally with the achievements of Apollo. People didn't feel like they were just looking at something that happened somewhere else, a launch that happened in Florida, or astronauts who trained in Houston. 73 00:16:17.423 --> 00:16:22.793 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Everyone could connect the overall success with a contribution from closer to home, wherever that was. 74 00:16:22.793 --> 00:16:46.122 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Oftentimes people could connect the success to someone they knew. I can't tell you how often I meet a new person just out and about. And when I tell them that I read about spaceflight, they want to tell me that their childhood best friend's dad worked on the tires for the space shuttle, and the pride that they feel inciting this connection makes it feel as though they might as well have gone to space themselves. 75 00:16:46.123 --> 00:16:49.223 Margaret Lazarus Dean: So this kind of connection can be really powerful. 76 00:16:49.822 --> 00:17:07.732 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Fourth and lastly, I want to talk about the power of human avatars. So, people need to be able to connect with human, or sometimes human-like, they can be anthropomorphized, characters into whom we can project our point of view and our hopes and dreams. I really can't say enough 77 00:17:07.763 --> 00:17:26.152 Margaret Lazarus Dean: about the importance of this one. In the case of spaceflight, of course, we will largely be talking about astronauts who are tasked with the responsibility of not just flying in space, but also of telling us the story about how and why they fly in space, what it means to them, even when they're not currently flying or even preparing for a mission. 78 00:17:26.193 --> 00:17:47.962 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Throughout the run up to Apollo, there were constantly calls from inside and outside NASA to simplify the project by maybe leaving the human astronauts out of it altogether. If we want to know more about what's on the moon, what it's made out of, how it developed, et cetera, it would be so much easier and cheaper to send a probe or a rover to the moon rather than actual human bodies, which are so fragile, they need to breathe. 79 00:17:47.963 --> 00:17:54.763 Margaret Lazarus Dean: They need to eat, they need to not get crushed by inertia, but those arguments never really went anywhere, because for one thing. 80 00:17:54.763 --> 00:17:59.762 Margaret Lazarus Dean: John F. Kennedy said very clearly, send a man to the moon before the decade is out. 81 00:17:59.763 --> 00:18:08.262 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Not a rover. But even if there had been some room for interpretation there, I think people within NASA understood how attached the public was 82 00:18:08.263 --> 00:18:22.092 Margaret Lazarus Dean: To the idea of the astronauts as idols that we could look up to, we could see them as heroes, we could see them as main characters for this adventure that we wanted to see them go on and sort of feel as though we were going along with them, too. 83 00:18:22.483 --> 00:18:41.493 Margaret Lazarus Dean: As I wrote in a book about the space shuttle era, the debate over whether it's important for humans to go to space is a debate about the dream lives of taxpayers. The Apollo astronauts were avatars for our own dreams of spaceflight in the same way that movie stars are avatars for dreams of romance or relevance. 84 00:18:41.673 --> 00:18:48.673 Margaret Lazarus Dean: This might seem like a real challenge for a project like the Muon Collider. There will be thousands of people involved in this project. 85 00:18:48.693 --> 00:19:08.223 Margaret Lazarus Dean: ever-changing teams of people involved in different ways over time, and their work will be harder to grasp for the average person than the astronaut's job. But that was, to some extent, true of Project Apollo, too. There were 400,000 people working on Apollo at its height, and many of them developed public personas and played important emotional roles 86 00:19:08.223 --> 00:19:20.803 Margaret Lazarus Dean: for people watching the narrative play out. I'm thinking of people who became famous for their scientific and technological achievements that made the moon landings possible. Chief among them may be rocket engineer Wernher von Braun. 87 00:19:20.803 --> 00:19:34.022 Margaret Lazarus Dean: He became a celebrity in his own right and was celebrated as a genius of his time in much the same way that we talked about Steve Jobs while he was still living, or the way we talked about Elon Musk up until about 10 years ago as a visionary engineer. 88 00:19:35.183 --> 00:19:40.662 Margaret Lazarus Dean: And what didn't contribute, or maybe didn't contribute as much as people might seem to think. 89 00:19:40.883 --> 00:19:47.633 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Firstly, an abstract appeal to scientific discovery, which pains me to say in this group. 90 00:19:47.653 --> 00:20:05.042 Margaret Lazarus Dean: But this has always been a point of tension within the NASA community, because so many people who work for NASA believe in the abstract value of scientific advancement, and so many within that community understand that the nature of scientific advancement is piecemeal. It will consist of failures, it will consist of dead ends. 91 00:20:05.043 --> 00:20:21.133 Margaret Lazarus Dean: as much as headline-grabbing breakthroughs. The sorts of people who wind up working for NASA, whether or not they are scientists, believe in the inherent value of scientific discovery. So it's challenging for them to put themselves into a mind of a person who does not see the point. 92 00:20:21.133 --> 00:20:31.313 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Or has had whatever curiosity they might once have felt for scientific discovery degraded or eroded for them by narratives of elitism and conspiracy. 93 00:20:31.553 --> 00:20:47.482 Margaret Lazarus Dean: So, for better or for worse, we need to be thoughtful about the embedded assumptions underlying the pitches that we are making. And the assumption that scientific discovery is an abstract good worthy of funding in and of itself is not one that a majority of Americans have in their hearts. 94 00:20:47.483 --> 00:20:51.763 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Even while they might also enjoy and celebrate specific scientific achievements. 95 00:20:51.813 --> 00:21:07.542 Margaret Lazarus Dean: People have been saturated in skepticism and distrust about what scientists do, and about how reliable and useful scientists' work actually is. This doesn't mean we have to hide the fact that this is a scientific project. I think that would be pretty hard to hide. 96 00:21:07.543 --> 00:21:23.882 Margaret Lazarus Dean: But the same was true at the time of Project Apollo. People knew that what their taxes were paying for was at some level an enormous publicly funded science project. But they also knew that they were experiencing it, I argued in my book, as a huge publicly funded work of performance art. 97 00:21:23.883 --> 00:21:33.482 Margaret Lazarus Dean: And the pleasure they were able to take in participating in that aspect of it made it worthy of their support, whether or not they cared about, for example, lunar geology. 98 00:21:34.323 --> 00:21:49.403 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Another factor that did not contribute as much as people seem to think, the role of nationalism or patriotism, I think, has been really misremembered in a way that distorts most people's understanding of where the support for Apollo actually came from. 99 00:21:49.403 --> 00:21:57.482 Margaret Lazarus Dean: It's absolutely true that the start of the American space program came directly from a Cold War competition with the Soviets over military strength. 100 00:21:57.543 --> 00:22:22.452 Margaret Lazarus Dean: The launch vehicles for both Soviet and American programs were basically weapons barely repurposed for human spaceflight by sticking capsules onto them in place of nuclear warheads. And the idea that the Soviets might be able to rain down weapons on us from a satellite or from the moon provided a lot of the motivation behind the first rounds of funding for NASA. But by the time the Moon Project was underway, the space race was pretty much winding down. 101 00:22:22.453 --> 00:22:25.512 Margaret Lazarus Dean: down. The Soviets had moved on to other goals. 102 00:22:25.513 --> 00:22:31.403 Margaret Lazarus Dean: They were not putting a lot of resources into their heavy lift moon rocket, the N1, which never did get off the ground. 103 00:22:31.483 --> 00:22:49.932 Margaret Lazarus Dean: What had started as a race wound up being a solo journey undertaken by one nation, while the other looked on with interest, but not even particularly with envy. Even before he died, John F. Kennedy said many times that his hope was to be able to find a way to go to the moon jointly with the Soviets. 104 00:22:49.933 --> 00:23:08.142 Margaret Lazarus Dean: A project that is hard to imagine having come to fruition because of the level of military secrecy that would have had to be breached, especially on the Soviet side. But the US and Soviet Union did work together on the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, which launched in 1975, as a symbol of international cooperation. 105 00:23:08.493 --> 00:23:22.272 Margaret Lazarus Dean: The important thing to remember, I think, is that the spirit of competition and paranoia was enough to launch the overall project of human spaceflight, but it would not have had the staying power to see us through the entire decade of support needed to make the moon landings a success. 106 00:23:22.343 --> 00:23:39.152 Margaret Lazarus Dean: A better motivation than just competition was necessary, and I think that's a good thing, as it doesn't work well to have your science project completely dependent on international hostility, or for it to be potentially entirely lost if peace or cooperation emerged in these global relationships. 107 00:23:40.823 --> 00:23:44.392 Margaret Lazarus Dean: The last tactic I want to discuss that doesn't really work 108 00:23:44.413 --> 00:23:55.883 Margaret Lazarus Dean: is the emphasis on the value of possible technological offshoots. Everyone working on Project Apollo knew that the breakthroughs necessary in order to make the many steps of the project a success 109 00:23:55.883 --> 00:24:07.223 Margaret Lazarus Dean: would have untold benefits for the advancement of technologies on Earth. NASA loves to compile these glossy books showing off the inventions and breakthroughs made possible by their research. 110 00:24:07.363 --> 00:24:24.583 Margaret Lazarus Dean: That came from space-related projects. They love to remind us that this little kind of microchip would not have emerged exactly as it did if computing hadn't been such a significant aspect of Apollo. They love to talk about telecommunications and the array of satellites deployed by NASA that make GPS possible. 111 00:24:24.583 --> 00:24:30.303 Margaret Lazarus Dean: They love to talk about advancements in materials developed for rockets, spacecraft, spacesuits. 112 00:24:30.303 --> 00:24:34.083 Margaret Lazarus Dean: equipment for keeping astronauts alive that have medical uses. 113 00:24:34.083 --> 00:24:47.872 Margaret Lazarus Dean: I grew up hearing about Velcro and how it had been developed for NASA, and that, as it turns out, is not even true. Astronauts do love Velcro on the International Space Station. They have Velcro on everything, but it was not developed by NASA. 114 00:24:49.193 --> 00:25:04.663 Margaret Lazarus Dean: So, this offshoot that was sold to me as a kid was not even really an offshoot. I get why people want to make these types of arguments about offshoots. They seem deeply logical. If the money we're spending on spaceflight is not just thrown out into space, it's actually being spent on Earth. 115 00:25:04.663 --> 00:25:29.652 Margaret Lazarus Dean: investing in new technologies that are then picked up by industry. They will create profit that they don't have to turn around and share with NASA, by the way. So a dollar spent on Project Apollo actually went to creating new technologies that American companies made many dollars from, making it more of an investment than a one-time payout. That kind of argument might appeal in an abstract way to economists, maybe to stockholders and tech companies that stand 116 00:25:29.653 --> 00:25:50.443 Margaret Lazarus Dean: to benefit directly from anticipated achievements, but they just don't seem to be compelling to people's emotional lives. People don't care who deployed the satellites that make their GPS work. So, we can talk about those types of possible benefits, but we shouldn't be surprised when they don't really move the needle on the type of public support that we actually need. 117 00:25:51.483 --> 00:26:07.013 Margaret Lazarus Dean: To be clear, it isn't just human spaceflight that benefits from the kind of storytelling that I'm talking about. People have been made to identify with, care about, profess love for a Mars rover, a space telescope. I love Hubble. I will defend Hubble to my death. 118 00:26:07.013 --> 00:26:15.913 Margaret Lazarus Dean: an interplanetary probe like Voyager, and indeed for a particle accelerator. People take their vacations in Switzerland because it's cool to visit CERN. 119 00:26:15.913 --> 00:26:28.782 Margaret Lazarus Dean: People can be made to identify emotionally with a former Nazi rocket engineer like Wernher von Braun, an Iranian American flight director with a Mohawk, a young blonde woman who wrote oceans of code for Apollo's guidance systems. 120 00:26:28.783 --> 00:26:37.122 Margaret Lazarus Dean: and was never given credit for it at the time. These people all became rock stars in their own right, with books and movies and LEGO sets made in their honor. 121 00:26:39.803 --> 00:26:52.083 Margaret Lazarus Dean: So what would it look like to bring this kind of storytelling to a Muon Collider project? I said earlier that people aren't necessarily moved by the appeal to the abstract value of scientific progress. 122 00:26:52.153 --> 00:27:03.782 Margaret Lazarus Dean: So just saying, this tool will advance the science in my field, but I don't know exactly how yet, does not make people want to spend money, or to contact their members of Congress to express support for their spending money. 123 00:27:03.783 --> 00:27:17.163 Margaret Lazarus Dean: But people are able to connect with the excitement of discovery if it feels more specific or tangible to them, even as a hypothetical. So for instance, people have been made to care about the significance of the findings of space telescopes. 124 00:27:17.163 --> 00:27:41.442 Margaret Lazarus Dean: That have told us how old the universe is and what it's made of. And they can be made to understand retrospectively that that was only made possible by the vision and daring of the people who first advocated for the deployment of that space telescope in the first place. So telling a true and compelling backward looking story can be as effective as looking forward into a future about which we can't yet give any specifics or make any promises. 125 00:27:43.553 --> 00:27:52.463 Margaret Lazarus Dean: So I want to finish by thinking about the moment when John F. Kennedy asked a joint session of Congress to fund the idea of a moon landing in 1961. 126 00:27:52.553 --> 00:28:04.222 Margaret Lazarus Dean: In that speech, rather than downplaying the costs and difficulty, he talked about how difficult and expensive the project would actually be, and he even emphasized that there was no guarantee of success. 127 00:28:04.243 --> 00:28:23.963 Margaret Lazarus Dean: He told them we might spend all this money and find that it was never possible to begin with. He admitted that his first instinct had been that a moon landing would be too much, and that, he said about his eventual decision to advocate for the project, and I quote, I came to this conclusion with some reluctance. 128 00:28:24.073 --> 00:28:37.683 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Then he closes with this. You must decide yourselves, as I have decided, and I am confident that whether you finally decide in the way I have decided or not, that your judgment, as my judgment, was reached in the best interest of our country. 129 00:28:37.753 --> 00:28:56.652 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Now, this was surely a well-considered piece of rhetoric suggested by his speechwriters, but still, at least for me, there's something really moving about Kennedy offering to his political opponents the grace that their decisions about spending taxpayer funds will have been made out of patriotism, just like his, even if they don't reach the same conclusion. 130 00:28:56.763 --> 00:29:12.583 Margaret Lazarus Dean: And he did for the rest of his life, which is unfortunately not long after this point, he died about two and a half years later. For the rest of his life, he would continue to emphasize the importance of proceeding carefully and with consideration for those who might disagree on this project. 131 00:29:12.583 --> 00:29:32.063 Margaret Lazarus Dean: So, I can't help but feel like this is a possible blueprint for a muon Collider as well, accepting the skepticism and the professed frugality among the possible valid responses to the idea of a large, expensive project within the narratives we tell about it can actually create more room for consensus. 132 00:29:33.403 --> 00:29:39.302 Margaret Lazarus Dean: I have more, but I would love to hear your questions so I can direct myself toward what you'd like to hear. 133 00:29:39.833 --> 00:29:54.703 WH11NE- Sunrise: Fantastic. Okay, so first, let's… That was wonderful, and I learned a lot, and also, I'm very impressed by how extremely applicable it is to us. Alright, so who has questions, for Margaret? 134 00:29:56.983 --> 00:29:58.842 WH11NE- Sunrise: Okay, I see Grace in here. 135 00:30:00.313 --> 00:30:24.843 WH11NE- Sunrise: I'll come onto the screen so you can see me. Thank you so much for this. I guess the question that I would have to kind of start it is, with a lot of the narrative building, and maybe taking the imagery part as an example, do you know if that push and those images were generated, like, mainly from within NASA? Were, like, the scientists ever part of it? Did they completely farm it out to artists? Like, who was actually doing this narrative building? 136 00:30:24.843 --> 00:30:28.433 WH11NE- Sunrise: And then providing the materials to disseminate that. 137 00:30:29.123 --> 00:30:43.612 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Yeah, it was really both. It was really all hands on deck. NASA had great relationships with the press at every site, not only in Houston and in Florida, but every site had an office. 138 00:30:43.613 --> 00:30:49.752 Margaret Lazarus Dean: That cultivated strong relationships with the press. So, like, get them the images they needed, get them the interviews. 139 00:30:49.753 --> 00:31:11.323 Margaret Lazarus Dean: whatever they needed to get them to help the story. They also had great storytellers from inside NASA. The NASA Public Affairs Office is sort of famous for having, sort of invented some new tactics for getting people excited about things that might have sounded boring on paper. They also, cultivated arts programs within NASA. 140 00:31:11.323 --> 00:31:22.452 Margaret Lazarus Dean: So NASA has had an arts office and has had artists in residence, not just since it was cool. I feel like I started hearing about this kind of thing, I don't know, in like the 80s or 90s. 141 00:31:22.453 --> 00:31:39.712 Margaret Lazarus Dean: they did since the very beginning. They brought in painters, people who draw with charcoal, sculptors, and gave them access to whatever they wanted, let them follow people around, let them into restricted spaces, in order to get as many 142 00:31:39.713 --> 00:31:44.592 Margaret Lazarus Dean: types of narratives and as many types of images as I could possibly find. 143 00:31:44.593 --> 00:31:59.893 Margaret Lazarus Dean: They also hired historians from the very beginning. NASA's had its own history office. It was actually part of the original charter in 1957, that they had to have a history office. They had to employ historians specifically to preserve 144 00:31:59.893 --> 00:32:06.033 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Impartially, you know, not to be edited in any way or to be biased, but to preserve 145 00:32:06.033 --> 00:32:25.813 Margaret Lazarus Dean: as thorough a record of everything that NASA did as possible, and so to this day, there are PhDs in history who specialize in space history, and they came up through this NASA history office pipeline. So a lot of different types of storytelling, a lot of different ways of cultivating it, both inside the agency. 146 00:32:25.813 --> 00:32:44.163 Margaret Lazarus Dean: outside the agency. I, as an outsider, have always had an easy time getting access to things. When I was working on my very first novel, I wanted to get to see a… the space shuttle was still flying. I wanted to see a space shuttle launch from close up, but I didn't have, any 147 00:32:44.163 --> 00:32:59.843 Margaret Lazarus Dean: real grounding to get press credentials, because I wasn't in the press and I didn't work for a newspaper. But by just reaching out to the press office and telling them my story, they were like, well, if you're a citizen, and if you can get someone to vouch for you… I mean, it's like a security risk to let people close to the launch site. 148 00:32:59.843 --> 00:33:04.862 Margaret Lazarus Dean: But she was like, we want to work with you because we want you to write your novel. 149 00:33:04.943 --> 00:33:26.582 Margaret Lazarus Dean: About the space shuttle and we want it to be as accurate as possible and to be exciting and, you know, to draw more people into the project so it comes from a lot of different places and I think NASA provides some really strong models for like how multifaceted that can be and how effective in many different ways. I know people who love history and they read the history books and they have no idea that NASA paid like. 150 00:33:26.583 --> 00:33:30.603 Margaret Lazarus Dean: choreographers to make dances about NASA in the 60s. 151 00:33:30.603 --> 00:33:34.912 Margaret Lazarus Dean: And vice versa. So yeah, a lot of inspiration to be taken there. 152 00:33:39.033 --> 00:33:46.313 WH11NE- Sunrise: I had a question. I'm going to do mine first and then Larry can go. I'm curious what you know about 153 00:33:46.603 --> 00:33:54.803 WH11NE- Sunrise: What happened before JFK threw his support behind? Strip my question. All right, very good. Yes, who convinced JFK? 154 00:33:55.353 --> 00:34:12.903 Margaret Lazarus Dean: The short answer is his vice president. JFK did not want to go to space, and he did not want to go to the moon. He's… he sort of had his hand forced to, like, create the Mercury program and send a guy into space, like, he understood 155 00:34:12.902 --> 00:34:17.032 Margaret Lazarus Dean: The kind of like race aspect of that with the Soviets. 156 00:34:17.033 --> 00:34:33.432 Margaret Lazarus Dean: But he didn't particularly want to go any further than that. I think to him it sounded spendy. It sounded vaguely military and sort of pointless. After Yuri Gagarin got to space first, there were some, like, emergency meetings. 157 00:34:33.433 --> 00:34:57.902 Margaret Lazarus Dean: in the Oval Office with his, science advisor whose name I can't remember, but he was kind of like, this is like a PR problem. How do we fix this? And Lyndon Johnson, because he's always been a space boy. I don't know why, but he always wanted to go to space. Lyndon Johnson got in his ear and he was like, Mr. President, the only solution is to say we're going to go to the moon because it's it's such a big goal. It'll give us some runway to catch up. 158 00:34:58.113 --> 00:35:11.053 Margaret Lazarus Dean: And we can do that. Like, if it can be done, we can do that. We can beat the Soviets to that. And JFK was literally like, ugh, do I have to? Like, do I have to say we're gonna go to the moon? He really didn't want to, and… 159 00:35:11.053 --> 00:35:27.432 Margaret Lazarus Dean: you can see why, like, I'm gonna announce we're gonna do this crazy thing that, like, might not even be possible to do. But it was, it was really Johnson's thing, and he got his way, and it did. I think by the time he died, which was a couple of, just a couple of years later. 160 00:35:27.433 --> 00:35:41.993 Margaret Lazarus Dean: JFK was seeing how frickin' excited people were about this, and that that was paying off for him in various ways that he hadn't anticipated. Of course, when he did die, then Johnson became the president, and then, NASA had everything 161 00:35:41.993 --> 00:35:43.852 Margaret Lazarus Dean: They needed for for a while. 162 00:35:44.303 --> 00:35:55.572 WH11NE- Sunrise: But was NASA pushing for it before that as well? Like, was it something that originated with scientists or was it more something that originated at a higher level? 163 00:35:56.163 --> 00:36:09.052 Margaret Lazarus Dean: I'm sure there were people within NASA who were positive, who were pushing for it, but like what NASA was at that point was so tiny and so sort of like… 164 00:36:09.123 --> 00:36:13.763 Margaret Lazarus Dean: They were, they were being given very specific missions, like 165 00:36:13.793 --> 00:36:22.003 Margaret Lazarus Dean: the Soviets are working to put a dude in orbit, we need to put a dude in orbit. What is the quick… like, the quickest, dirtiest way to get that done? Like, we already have 166 00:36:22.003 --> 00:36:45.503 Margaret Lazarus Dean: A rain, a missile range at Cape Canaveral. Let's just like Cape Canaveral Air Force Base. Let's just throw, throw some capsules on those guys and shoot 'em off. Like that's kind of all NASA was at that moment. So I, I feel certain that like the rocket engineers who are working for them at that time absolutely wanted to go to the moon and they had, since they were little kids when they first read their Jules Verne, they knew, you know, like that's. 167 00:36:45.503 --> 00:37:04.003 Margaret Lazarus Dean: That's that's the next goal. But yeah, NASA was so small, they didn't even really have their own kind of like advocacy or like a way to communicate, like this is this is what we think you should do, Mr. President. He was just listening to a science advisor who I'm not sure was particularly well informed about space. 168 00:37:05.163 --> 00:37:12.592 WH11NE- Sunrise: As a quick follow-up to that, so, how much was the public already socialized 169 00:37:13.893 --> 00:37:18.333 WH11NE- Sunrise: To have their hearts and minds won over by that call to action. 170 00:37:18.553 --> 00:37:32.143 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Yeah, the public was extremely activated by the launch of Sputnik and then by Yuri Gagarin getting to space before Alan Shepard. So people were like. 171 00:37:33.023 --> 00:37:50.812 Margaret Lazarus Dean: upset about… I mean, so they tell me. I wasn't around, but they… people tell me… everyone was, like, freaked out, and it was really viewed in this, sort of conflict-based way. Like, they are… the Soviets are evil, and they hate us, and they have achieved this thing first. 172 00:37:50.813 --> 00:37:54.083 Margaret Lazarus Dean: And yeah, the idea that, like, Sputnik could, like. 173 00:37:54.083 --> 00:38:17.663 Margaret Lazarus Dean: send down missiles on the American Midwest or that if they conquered the moon first, they could make the moon a military base and rain down weapons from us from the moon. That was the original impetus for like, yes, let's give a bunch of nerds a bunch of money, send them down to Cape Canaveral Air Force Base and just show the Soviets we can do what they're doing and try to keep up with them neck and neck. 174 00:38:17.663 --> 00:38:32.303 Margaret Lazarus Dean: But like I said in my talk, like, that's not a very clean burning fuel. Like, that wears off quickly, and, like, international relations change. You can't have your whole project depend on hate and fear, because they don't, like… 175 00:38:32.373 --> 00:38:45.702 Margaret Lazarus Dean: they could continue in various ways, but it's like, it's very shifty, and the sort of playing field on which the hate and fear are going to play out are constantly going to be changing. So, it did start with fear, paranoia, competitiveness. 176 00:38:45.703 --> 00:39:06.133 Margaret Lazarus Dean: But by the time it was done, I mean, Americans and people from other countries were hugging each other and saying, we did this together. Like, we shared the moon rocks with the Soviets so their scientists could study them and find things that we weren't able to find. Like, it wound up feeling like it was in a very, cooperative place, but by the time it was done. 177 00:39:06.683 --> 00:39:14.863 WH11NE- Sunrise: Thank you so much, by the way, for everything. This is great. All right, I see three hands on Zoom, so let's do this now. 178 00:39:18.603 --> 00:39:20.662 Sneha Dixit 1: Hi, am I… am I audible? 179 00:39:21.253 --> 00:39:21.753 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Yes. 180 00:39:21.833 --> 00:39:22.483 WH11NE- Sunrise: that. 181 00:39:22.483 --> 00:39:36.422 Sneha Dixit 1: Yeah, hi, thank you so much for the talk, it was wonderful, it was lovely hearing your insights. And I had a question about, like, you addressed this just now with what Larry said, but. 182 00:39:36.543 --> 00:39:38.033 Sneha Dixit 1: again, 183 00:39:38.173 --> 00:39:47.042 Sneha Dixit 1: With the space project, one of the reasons it got off the ground was a fear of competition, and that someone else will do it first. 184 00:39:47.203 --> 00:39:59.003 Sneha Dixit 1: My fear with the Muon Collider is that, again, in order to get it off the ground, especially in a time when science funding is so crunched, and, there is, like. 185 00:39:59.133 --> 00:40:05.393 Sneha Dixit 1: The reason funds have been poured into AI is because of a fear of competition from China. 186 00:40:05.403 --> 00:40:19.642 Sneha Dixit 1: is that, the only way to get a Muon Collider project, which is very ambitious off the ground, is to turn it into, like, this mark of American dominance of science, which might make it. 187 00:40:19.813 --> 00:40:24.793 Sneha Dixit 1: a difficult project to go through just because of how ambitious a muon Collider is would 188 00:40:24.933 --> 00:40:34.342 Sneha Dixit 1: What… how should, like, scientists approach getting funding and getting people to work on something like this in an environment like now? 189 00:40:35.233 --> 00:40:42.123 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Yeah, I do think that, that feeling of competition can spur, like, an initial… 190 00:40:42.153 --> 00:41:01.823 Margaret Lazarus Dean: interest, and we are definitely seeing that with AI. I mean, people talk about Apollo… about the expense of Apollo as being one of the things that we remember about it, and it was enormously exp… it was the most expensive thing the U.S. had ever done that wasn't fighting a war, but over the last 3 years, about every 5 or 5 and a half months. 191 00:41:01.823 --> 00:41:06.202 Margaret Lazarus Dean: And Apollo's worth of funding has been put into American AI companies. 192 00:41:06.203 --> 00:41:17.452 Margaret Lazarus Dean: So that's, like, you know, an amount of money that was spent over close to 10 years in order to achieve this goal is now being, like, fed into AI companies at a much… 193 00:41:17.453 --> 00:41:33.132 Margaret Lazarus Dean: faster clip, and I do think that sense of competition is part of what's driving it. A lot of the rhetoric I hear is, like, we don't have time to stop and have a conversation about whether this is good or bad, or how it will affect people, because if we don't, China will get there first, and then, you know, dot dot dot, we're supposed to fill in the rest. 194 00:41:33.173 --> 00:41:40.733 Margaret Lazarus Dean: in our heads, I guess. I think that can spur interest, and if it does, go for it, but that won't… 195 00:41:40.733 --> 00:42:05.173 Margaret Lazarus Dean: get you very far because things do keep shifting and changing. Should we have a regime change soon, the sort of original impetus for like competition with China will shift. And it is nice to think, you know, as JFK did, that these projects go better and they make more sense the more cooperative they are. So, you know, starting in the 1990s, we decided we wanted to build 196 00:42:05.173 --> 00:42:21.612 Margaret Lazarus Dean: an international space station. We wanted to build a space station. The Russians, at that point, wanted to build a space station, and Clinton was like, guys, I have an idea. What if we build our space stations as modules that can click together, and then we'll LEGO them together in space, and we'll have one big space station? 197 00:42:21.613 --> 00:42:25.633 Margaret Lazarus Dean: And that space station is bigger, it's more expensive, it's more ambitious. 198 00:42:25.633 --> 00:42:49.432 Margaret Lazarus Dean: It's been running longer. It's cooler, I think, than if we had had two separate space stations. I don't know nearly enough about the Muon Collider project to know if that logic could play out in some kind of way. And I know there's definitely a benefit to having an instrument like that in the United States and for it to belong to us in some long-term way. But yeah, I think cooperation. 199 00:42:49.433 --> 00:42:51.363 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Just has… has more… 200 00:42:51.423 --> 00:43:10.593 Margaret Lazarus Dean: has more power, has more legs, more… more, longevity than, you know, paranoia, fear, competition, because those, for better or for worse, like, do burn out, and they can be replaced with new fear and paranoia, but, those might not be attached to the same project anymore. I don't know if that answers your question at all. 201 00:43:11.843 --> 00:43:12.963 Sneha Dixit 1: Thank you. 202 00:43:14.353 --> 00:43:15.933 WH11NE- Sunrise: All right, let's go to Cici. 203 00:43:16.993 --> 00:43:21.612 Cici Hanna: Hi, yeah, I wanted to say thanks also for the really great talk. 204 00:43:21.783 --> 00:43:36.543 Cici Hanna: I wanted to ask, because you had mentioned, oh, you know, 10 years ago, Elon Musk had this perception of, this, you know, brilliant little engineer thing going on, and not now. I think broadly, that's true a lot. 205 00:43:36.543 --> 00:43:45.203 Cici Hanna: In just the past 10 or 20 years of people looking at technology as something, like, hopeful and fun and exciting that helps their lives, and now is, like. 206 00:43:45.213 --> 00:44:03.843 Cici Hanna: something, you know, taking all the water in their town and ruining college and elementary school and, you know, crushing friendships and etc, where there's this very dismal… not to be hyperbolic, but there's this very dismal perception of what technology does. 207 00:44:03.843 --> 00:44:07.703 Cici Hanna: As a sort of very, like, privatized, you know, profit-driven thing. 208 00:44:07.723 --> 00:44:14.922 Cici Hanna: Is there… Like, you know, more so than the 60s, is that going to be… 209 00:44:15.593 --> 00:44:31.662 Cici Hanna: something that, you know, a muon Collider can easily overcome? Or, on the flip side, is there a way to present it as, you know, an alternative of, like, a publicly funded collective effort towards a, you know, group science that's, you know, publicly 210 00:44:31.993 --> 00:44:38.142 Cici Hanna: you know, distributed results as opposed to a more cynical private endeavor? I don't know. 211 00:44:38.633 --> 00:44:39.173 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Yeah. 212 00:44:39.273 --> 00:44:47.573 Margaret Lazarus Dean: I think what you just said, like, that contrast, I think really kind of how people are feeling about 213 00:44:47.573 --> 00:45:04.962 Margaret Lazarus Dean: big tech companies in general, like, billionaire tech overlords, but also, like, the idea that there's, like, an engineer who's, like, he's so much smarter, it's always a he, is so much smarter than the rest of us that he's, like, a god. And I do think Wernher von Braun was, like, one of the first, and maybe the first. 214 00:45:04.963 --> 00:45:22.043 Margaret Lazarus Dean: kind of engineers to be worshipped as, like, he's just smarter than everyone. Like, the only reason we got to the moon is that he made the Saturn V, and no one else could have made the Saturn V. No one else could have figured out how to do that. Which, of course, is never the case. Like, he's a regular person. There's a lot of people. He was put in charge of it. He crushed it. 215 00:45:22.043 --> 00:45:34.272 Margaret Lazarus Dean: power to him, but I do feel like I was seeing that kind of logic about, engineers and scientists, specifically coming from people who don't have those backgrounds, and the whole thing just seems like 216 00:45:34.273 --> 00:45:45.653 Margaret Lazarus Dean: magic to them. The way that people talk about Steve Jobs, like, anything he touches just turns to gold, he's just smarter than everyone. Of course, like, he wasn't actually figuring out how to, you know, make my iPhone. He, like, he… 217 00:45:45.653 --> 00:45:52.672 Margaret Lazarus Dean: was part of that from the beginning, but he was more of a salesman. And I think that really hit a peak in, I want to say, like, 2014, 2015. 218 00:45:52.673 --> 00:46:08.132 Margaret Lazarus Dean: When I was still on Twitter, I would hear people say, like, Elon Musk can fix it all. We should just give, we should just hand over the keys to everything to Elon Musk. He's so brilliant. We should just give him all the money, he can fix it. I'm not hearing that anymore, and I'm glad because that's a toxic way to think. 219 00:46:08.133 --> 00:46:08.573 WH11NE- Sunrise: much. 220 00:46:08.573 --> 00:46:27.493 Margaret Lazarus Dean: There are a lot of… a lot of people can solve a lot of different problems, and there's no one person who's so smart he should be given that much more power than he already has, frankly. So I think people are really craving something more authentic, something less profit-driven, something more collective, something more community-based. I mean. 221 00:46:27.493 --> 00:46:39.373 Margaret Lazarus Dean: I teach college students, and I've been talking with them a lot this semester about what they're missing from their education, what they're missing from their lives right now. And they're telling me, like, you should take our phones away from us. 222 00:46:39.373 --> 00:46:58.613 Margaret Lazarus Dean: and throw them into the ocean. You should make it impossible for us to use AI on our work. It's extractive. It's taking something from us. It's not actually helping us. It's not actually a tool. You should force us to talk to each other. We want to be made to be together in groups. It's hard for them, because they're COVID babies, and we're still 223 00:46:58.793 --> 00:47:23.783 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Working through that for a lot of these kids, but like they are really craving something authentic Yeah, pure in some kind of value-based way Community minded. Yeah, I think like crafting an argument around this kind of project It's it will not it will not go to glorify one person It will not go to make one person or a small group of people rich It's not just all a bunch of people are gonna work on this and then 224 00:47:23.783 --> 00:47:35.922 Margaret Lazarus Dean: And it will all go to a small number of shareholders. It's not that kind of project at all. It's a completely different kind of project. I think people are really craving that, actually, and figuring out how to tell that story in a way that can connect with those. 225 00:47:35.923 --> 00:47:41.473 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Desires and those, like, lacks that people are feeling in their lives right now would be really smart. 226 00:47:43.063 --> 00:47:47.293 WH11NE- Sunrise: I love that. All right, we have two more questions on Zoom. Let's do Kevin first. 227 00:47:49.353 --> 00:48:01.613 Kevin Pedro: Yeah, thanks a lot for this talk. I want to go back to the earlier discussion about NASA public relations and the various things they did. Because I'm aware that they have a very large public relations office. I actually knew people who contracted for them. 228 00:48:02.383 --> 00:48:13.193 Kevin Pedro: But this also clearly takes a lot of money. How did they ramp up to be able to do this and convince people to continue to fund them? Because I think that's one of the issues we have, that, you know, the amount of money we have 229 00:48:13.403 --> 00:48:30.582 Kevin Pedro: in this field to do that kind of thing, you know, you could fit in a coffee cup. It's just not something we have that level, you know, probably what they spend on PR is more than we spend on our whole research. So how do we build up that way, the bootstrap to that level? 230 00:48:31.083 --> 00:48:32.783 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Yeah. 231 00:48:32.883 --> 00:48:45.862 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Yeah, I mean, I think NASA had a lot of money to work with at the height of their funding. There was there was a couple of years when the government actually gave them more money than they asked for in their budget request. 232 00:48:45.863 --> 00:49:02.493 Margaret Lazarus Dean: like, once we had locked into this goal, government was like, take more money and, like, do it, do it faster. So, they had a lot to work with. I mean, that said, it never quite feels like enough. It always feels like money is having to be stretched, and so it is part of the story of NASA that they did put as much 233 00:49:02.493 --> 00:49:14.442 Margaret Lazarus Dean: as they did into, like, the storytelling components, rather than… they never seem to be tempted to, like, shave a little bit off there, or, like, cut back on that. Like, maybe this year we can't afford 234 00:49:14.443 --> 00:49:29.903 Margaret Lazarus Dean: And artists in residence, especially once Apollo was over, everyone kind of wandered away. And NASA's been on a very different budget ever since then. And yet they do still put a lot of thought and energy into the ways that stories are being told. 235 00:49:29.903 --> 00:49:30.283 WH11NE- Sunrise: you. 236 00:49:30.283 --> 00:49:39.113 Margaret Lazarus Dean: I think that the public affairs offices are really just a thin piece of that. A lot of what they do is interacting with storytellers. 237 00:49:39.113 --> 00:49:51.353 Margaret Lazarus Dean: and historians and nerds out in the general public who like what they do and will help to amplify that in some way. I went to a NASA event once, I think it was for… 238 00:49:51.353 --> 00:49:59.863 Margaret Lazarus Dean: journalists, and, one of their chief scientists was meeting with us, and he said, if you want to do anything to help NASA, and I know that you do. 239 00:49:59.883 --> 00:50:09.013 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Then, like, keep track of when the International Space Station is gonna come by overhead and take some people out at night and show it to them in the night sky. And I thought to myself. 240 00:50:09.013 --> 00:50:20.022 Margaret Lazarus Dean: you're a big nerd, you like to look at the ISS, but normal people don't like to look at the ISS, I don't think this will work. But I tried it anyway, and the next time, I was at, an artist residency, so a bunch of, like. 241 00:50:20.023 --> 00:50:38.383 Margaret Lazarus Dean: fiction, you know, painters, fiction writers, composers, choreographers. I'm like, 11 PM, we're going outside to this field, we're gonna see the ISS go by overhead. They lost their entire minds. Like, these people had a life-changing experience. One of the poets wrote and published a poem 242 00:50:38.383 --> 00:51:02.813 Margaret Lazarus Dean: about seeing the ISS that night. Other people kept writing me and asking more questions about it. People hadn't even known that we had a space station were suddenly like, who is up there? How long have they been there? What do they do? How'd they get there? How are they getting back? He was right and I was wrong. People want to be brought in on events like this. So something as small as that, you know, a chief scientist 243 00:51:02.813 --> 00:51:16.622 Margaret Lazarus Dean: said to a bunch of journalists, hey, you should take people out to see the ISS. NASA makes an app that makes it very easy to see the ISS going overhead. That didn't cost much money for him to put that in, but I have been doing that for years. I have been… 244 00:51:16.623 --> 00:51:39.952 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Evangelizing in this way and some of the people I've taken out to see ISS, they've learned to do it themselves and they take their friends out even though they have no connection with NASA or space whatsoever, so I think a lot of this can be done without, you know, a full public affairs office. This can be done like in very small strategic ways and I think what holds it together is that there was something very authentic about people's reactions. 245 00:51:39.973 --> 00:51:59.983 Margaret Lazarus Dean: to seeing ISS. Like, my motivations in taking people out to see it were authentic, their responses were authentic, that really creates something that keeps moving forward in a way that I think is a little different from, like, if you hired a PR firm, it's just not… never gonna have quite the same, like, person-to-person authenticity as that kind of experience. 246 00:52:01.243 --> 00:52:06.333 Margaret Lazarus Dean: So whatever you can think of that's just like that for particle accelerators. I don't know what that would be. 247 00:52:06.333 --> 00:52:07.193 Kevin Pedro: Fair enough. 248 00:52:07.673 --> 00:52:12.212 WH11NE- Sunrise: I can think of a few things. Alright, Kylie. 249 00:52:13.803 --> 00:52:28.883 Kiley Kennedy: Hi, thank you so much. This was such a interesting learning experience, so thank you so much, Margaret. So my question is kind of a bit, open-ended, but it really has to do with, kind of. 250 00:52:29.233 --> 00:52:53.653 Kiley Kennedy: creating the abs… making the abstract concrete, because obviously it's, like, easier to… for a layperson to be like, oh, I see the moon, let's put a human there. Like, that's really… that's visceral, that's tangible, the Mars rover is tangible, Hubble is tangible. Like, we're personifying these objects, and I really appreciate all your points on all of these things you made, like. 251 00:52:53.653 --> 00:53:16.523 Kiley Kennedy: But you asked a question earlier in the talk, which I feel like is the question I'm trying to ask as well, which is, like, how do you make people feel connected to subatomic particles, like, things you can't see or feel, without necessarily, like, building a cloud chamber where you can see a cosmic muon, but that isn't… that's harder than just going outside. So, I'm wondering, throughout all of your experience. 252 00:53:16.523 --> 00:53:17.753 Kiley Kennedy: Like, our… 253 00:53:17.753 --> 00:53:28.873 Kiley Kennedy: Do you have any, like, examples of things like this that feel abstract or intangible, where you've found people have had… have used 254 00:53:28.873 --> 00:53:41.172 Kiley Kennedy: kind of creative or effective strategies to personify these, or to make something feel tangible, even when it's not, kind of either with your work on NASA, you know, or… 255 00:53:41.173 --> 00:53:43.933 Kiley Kennedy: Any other, aspect of your work. 256 00:53:44.553 --> 00:53:58.933 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Yeah, no, that's such a good question because I think if you can crack the code on that, then you've cracked the whole thing. I mean, I think it makes me think of the book and the film Hidden Figures. 257 00:53:58.933 --> 00:54:13.293 Margaret Lazarus Dean: And the way that, like, what Katherine Johnson was doing, like, she was doing very high-level math to calculate, launch trajectories. Nobody wants to think about math, no one wants to think about trajectories. 258 00:54:13.293 --> 00:54:26.752 Margaret Lazarus Dean: But a lot of people took their kids to see that movie to see this beautiful woman, you know, writing all these equations on the board, and then John Glenn came home safely as a result. So, like. 259 00:54:26.753 --> 00:54:32.833 Margaret Lazarus Dean: People have… people struggle with subatomic particles like that. I'm not gonna… I'm not gonna lie to you. That's gonna be… 260 00:54:32.833 --> 00:54:33.483 WH11NE- Sunrise: about. 261 00:54:33.483 --> 00:54:47.672 Margaret Lazarus Dean: That's gonna be a challenge. But I think looking at a person who gets subatomic particles and wants to smash them together and wants to talk about them in a way that we can connect to. 262 00:54:47.673 --> 00:55:01.372 Margaret Lazarus Dean: That's maybe gonna be the key to it. And again, like not in a cynical way, not like, you know, find a good-looking person who's charismatic who wants to talk about why they care about particles, like in a really authentic way. Like when people, you know. 263 00:55:01.373 --> 00:55:11.063 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Care about something, it actually does come through and finding that kind of narrative where, like, someone had to struggle, you know, in order to 264 00:55:11.063 --> 00:55:27.843 Margaret Lazarus Dean: get to the point where they could, you know, even start learning about some atomic particles, or someone had to, like, struggle in order to get access to, like, do their first experiment, and now that they've done that, they want to take it to the next level. But in order to do that, we have to build the tool that they need, you know, that kind of… it can… it can sound 265 00:55:27.843 --> 00:55:34.603 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Sort of cheesy and, like, faux inspirational very easily, but if it is authentic, people do… 266 00:55:34.603 --> 00:55:54.143 Margaret Lazarus Dean: sense that. So that's kind of what I want to find here, and I would have to, like… I know I'd have to come there and interview you guys and follow you around and figure out what's in there, but there's something in there. Like, there is a way that people can be made to care about this. I'm positive, because you care about it so much. Like, there has to be… there has to be a way to connect that. 267 00:55:55.913 --> 00:55:56.863 Kiley Kennedy: Cool, thank you. 268 00:55:56.863 --> 00:56:12.752 WH11NE- Sunrise: I see one more question, from Martin, who is behind me. Yes. I really like the framing, or the narrative of, making emotional connections. That makes me think of the, for our field. 269 00:56:13.193 --> 00:56:25.622 WH11NE- Sunrise: the comparative moment for Apollo launch, we already had that, and we had that 10 years ago, and that's the Higgs discovery. Have we done enough? Speaker 5 : In our field to sort of. 270 00:56:25.813 --> 00:56:32.542 WH11NE- Sunrise: Capitalize on that moment. You mentioned hidden figure. 271 00:56:32.583 --> 00:56:48.572 WH11NE- Sunrise: We also had a very, historical movie on, the Hicks discovery called Particle Fever. It humanizes the scientists behind the discovery, some of… 272 00:56:48.573 --> 00:57:00.552 WH11NE- Sunrise: As may have known the people involved as well. And so, yeah, have we done enough? Can we do more? And as someone in the field. 273 00:57:00.963 --> 00:57:20.623 WH11NE- Sunrise: I was a student, like, before graduate school. At that moment, I feel inspired by this, but I don't know how much, the public view of this, maybe collectively, because a lot of us in the field still experience that collectively, can we do something about it? 274 00:57:21.213 --> 00:57:31.953 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Yeah, no, I think that's a really good question. I mean, I think like I I saw like a documentary about Higgs like shortly after it happened, and I yeah. 275 00:57:32.023 --> 00:57:33.143 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Yeah. 276 00:57:33.153 --> 00:57:58.143 Margaret Lazarus Dean: I guess. And I remember watching that and being like absolutely blown away by the achievement and what it meant. I clicked on that. I chose to watch that because I am a nerd. I'm not a particle physicist. I'm not a physicist. All of this had to be explained to me in like elementary school terms, but I am one of the people who chose to click on that. So we're trying to reach like bigger and bigger concentric circles. 277 00:57:58.143 --> 00:58:01.542 Margaret Lazarus Dean: of people. There's a community that, like, always will 278 00:58:01.543 --> 00:58:26.512 Margaret Lazarus Dean: follow news, you know, having to do with science or having to do with particle physics and then there's a community that like we can take interest in it if you explain it to us. If you like dress it up with some colors, we'll click on it and watch it and then we'll care about it and tell our friends and then there's a larger group of people and a larger group of people beyond that. So I think it's always worth thinking about like do you, you know, serve your closest circles? Don't ignore that. Don't reach over 279 00:58:26.513 --> 00:58:51.493 Margaret Lazarus Dean: them to get to a general public who's much more skeptical about science to begin with or has you know a lot of intimidation would need a lot a lot more inviting in don't you know skip over the people that are closest to you because they they can help to be the ambassadors but thinking of different ways to serve different kinds of circles I mean I was recently telling someone like a neighbor I was excited that I was going to get to meet with you guys and I was 280 00:58:51.493 --> 00:58:58.343 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Like, they're particle physicists, they want to build a new Collider, and she said, I don't know what particle physics is. She said it like that, like, don't… 281 00:58:58.343 --> 00:58:59.963 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Don't say that to me. 282 00:58:59.963 --> 00:59:01.533 WH11NE- Sunrise: I was. 283 00:59:01.533 --> 00:59:06.932 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Like, I don't really understand it either, but, like, I think it's subatomic particles, and they're looking at how atoms… and she was like. 284 00:59:06.933 --> 00:59:07.843 WH11NE- Sunrise: Stop, I have to… 285 00:59:07.843 --> 00:59:30.272 Margaret Lazarus Dean: I'll walk away if you keep talking about that. I mean, this is the level of science anxiety that some people are walking around with. I said to her the phrase "particle physics," and she almost ran out of my living room. So what would it take to reach someone like her? What would that look like? She's far away from our center of our concentric circles, but there's a way to tell this story. 286 00:59:30.273 --> 00:59:33.783 Margaret Lazarus Dean: That would get her to say, oh, that's really cool, I hope. 287 00:59:33.783 --> 00:59:39.722 Margaret Lazarus Dean: I hope my congressman will vote for that. And again, if we can crack the code on that, we will have cracked the whole thing. 288 00:59:40.263 --> 00:59:40.843 WH11NE- Sunrise: Okay. 289 00:59:41.053 --> 00:59:48.722 WH11NE- Sunrise: Alright, we are at the end of the hour, and I don't see any more questions, so let's thank Margaret again. Margaret, this was perfect, thank you so much. 290 00:59:48.723 --> 00:59:50.463 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Thank you so much! 291 00:59:50.893 --> 01:00:02.442 WH11NE- Sunrise: Wonderful. And we'll make a recording of this, and I just wanted to say, for those who are following along this series, if you enjoyed this one, we have a couple of speakers coming up. 292 01:00:02.443 --> 01:00:15.543 WH11NE- Sunrise: One of them is also in theme with this. We have Laura Betts who directs communication strategy for JWST and has for the last 12 years or so is gonna talk to us. 293 01:00:15.583 --> 01:00:33.463 WH11NE- Sunrise: That's on the 28th of October, but we also have, Cole Donovan on the 21st of October, who used to work at State, in the State Department, and is going to talk to us about science policy and advocacy, and then we have, Fermilab's own Wally, Lavernier. 294 01:00:33.463 --> 01:00:40.503 WH11NE- Sunrise: who is the ecologist who does environmental impact reports at Fermilab that they have big projects on. 295 01:00:40.503 --> 01:00:55.793 WH11NE- Sunrise: So, and that's November 11th. I don't think I said the dates for all those, but anyway, they're all actually posted on the Indico that you, got this link from, so you can see all of them and add them to your calendar. So, thank you again, Margaret. Margaret, you're also welcome to join for any of those if you're curious. 296 01:00:55.793 --> 01:00:56.802 Margaret Lazarus Dean: I will, so I'm excited. 297 01:00:56.803 --> 01:01:02.462 Gabriele Benelli: Also, I want to say, but she volunteered to come and interview us, right? And then find this helper. 298 01:01:02.463 --> 01:01:04.343 Margaret Lazarus Dean: I did, I set a… yeah. 299 01:01:04.343 --> 01:01:05.083 Gabriele Benelli: So, yeah. 300 01:01:05.083 --> 01:01:05.783 WH11NE- Sunrise: So we hope to see you. 301 01:01:05.783 --> 01:01:08.032 Gabriele Benelli: See you at the Cup. 302 01:01:08.033 --> 01:01:10.172 Margaret Lazarus Dean: I'm just getting dinner on me, guys. I'll do a… 303 01:01:10.173 --> 01:01:10.493 Gabriele Benelli: if. 304 01:01:10.493 --> 01:01:12.373 WH11NE- Sunrise: Thank you, Eric. Wonderful. 305 01:01:12.373 --> 01:01:13.383 Sneha Dixit 1: So much, Margaret. 306 01:01:13.383 --> 01:01:13.793 WH11NE- Sunrise: it. 307 01:01:13.793 --> 01:01:14.533 Margaret Lazarus Dean: Bye-bye. 308 01:01:14.533 --> 01:01:16.012 Kiley Kennedy: Thank you! 309 01:01:16.013 --> 01:01:17.533 Gabriele Benelli: Thank you so much. Bye-bye. 310 01:01:17.533 --> 01:01:18.413 WH11NE- Sunrise: Thanks Tova.