As he promised in his campaign platform, President Obama has moved quickly to distinguish his foreign policy from the Bush administration by pledging to pursue space arms control. The new Whitehouse.gov website has a short paragraph defining the Obama administration’s defense agenda, including its take on military space:

The usual suspects are already working to parse these paragraphs, with a few concerned that his moves could threaten our defense or jeopardize current defense contracts. It is unlikely that his administration will move quickly on this given the litany of more pressing foreign policy problems (ex. Iran, Iraq, Gaza, Pakistan, North Korea, etc.) that he will have to untangle. He also doesn’t need to get involved in a battle with the Pentagon over defense spending priorities or their updated space operations doctrine this early in his administration.

However, the statement could simply be a diplomatic move, an olive branch to Russia in much the same way his Inaugural address was viewed by many as an overture to Iran. Russia has long been a proponent of a ban on space weapons, in part to express opposition to U.S. missile defense plans especially with U.S. proposals to base interceptors near their border in the Czech Republic and Poland. By signaling to Russia its willingness to negotiate on space weapons and missile defense, the Obama administration may be simply trying to dial down tensions with Russia, a tactic that for now seems to be working.

Whatever the plan, I’ve created a new keyword — “Obama Administration” to track all new articles and arguments related to administration proposals.

Changemakers.net, an Ashoka.org initative, runs competitions to find new ideas for global challenges, or “open sourcing social solutions.” Their newest competition is The Power of Us: Re-Imagine Media and their goal is to find the best new ideas for inspiring a better world through media and technology”. The Open Debate Engine Project was nominated as a candidate and I submitted an entry which outlines the future scope and plans for this project:

Please take a look at the entry and let me know your thoughts, either here in the comments section or on the Changemakers.net website.

Alan Rosenblatt with the Center for American Progress has been running a series of excellent discussions on “digital technology strategies for advocacy and policy campaigns” and the upcoming one promises to be especially interesting for anyone interested in online debate:

If you’re local, you can find out more information or RSVP on their event page. If you’re out of town (or like me, chronically unable to make these events despite being only a few blocks away), they are streaming the presentation live and will have video online shortly. A related discussion also worth checking out from earlier this year — “Crowdsourcing Message and Policy Development” — is now available to watch online (MP4).

In a gift to the election-weary U.S. news audience, the British National Archives has released 1,500 pages of formerly secret government documents relating to UFO sightings. The one incident that has drawn the most attention so far is an account of U.S. aircraft being ordered to shoot down an unidentified flying object over the English countryside. From a Reuters article covering the release:

In a written account, Torres described how he scrambled his F-86 D Sabre jet in calm weather from the Royal Air Force base at Manston, Kent in May 1957.

“I was only a lieutenant and very much aware of the gravity of the situation. I felt very much like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest,” he said.

“The order came to fire a salvo of rockets at the UFO. The authentication was valid and I selected 24 rockets.

“I had a lock-on that had the proportions of a flying aircraft carrier,” he added. “The larger the airplane, the easier the lock-on. This blip almost locked itself.”

At the last moment, the object disappeared from the radar screen and the high-speed chase was called off.

In my initial research sweep for this site, I came across more than a few serious analysts who were considering the utility of space weapons against potential extraterrestrial hostiles. I wasn’t sure what to do with the argument but added a few quotes that were especially notable because of the author (ex. renowned strategist, Colin S. Gray) and lumped the ET threat with the asteroid threat to give it a little more credibility as an argument. As an example:

Now, because the issue has legitimately been raised in the news cycle (well, tangentially) and because I too, am more than a little fatigued of election coverage, I would like to address the burning question: Does the threat of extraterrestrial invasion justify a robust space weapons program?

Short answer: probably not, and in some cases it could possibly invite attack. There is a whole subset of the UFO literature examining the connection between the U.S. missile defense / anti-satellite weapons program with some even claiming the U.S. testing of an air-launched ASAT was an early anti-UFO weapon. However, as the anecdote above (and the first half of any alien invasion science fiction movie) illustrates, it is unlikely that our primitive missiles would do anything more than annoy any civilization capable of traversing interstellar space. The authors of the site “Exopolitics” further warn that our aggressive space power strategy could threaten relations with peaceful civilizations. (example: “Using Space Weapons Against Extraterrestrial Civilizations.”

Another possibility (from the opposing Realist school of international/interplanetary relations) is that existing civilizations will ignore us until we show ourselves to be a threat to them, possibly by developing space weapons. Two American scientists, Charles Pellegrino and George Zebrowski writing in their novel The Killing Star, came up with this theory of a “Relativistic Universe” when they realized that a spaceship that could achieve about 90 percent the speed of light (or 600 million MPH) could annihilate any planet in its path. Given this grim but factual reality, civilizations would be compelled to pre-emptively strike against emerging space powers to avoid their own destruction. As Adrian Berry puts it

Such a civilisation would be obsessed with one question that would seem terrible to it: `Is any other civilisation, beside ourselves, likely to develop the matter/antimatter engines that would enable them to travel at hundreds of millions of miles per hour? If so, we must not wait. We must destroy them now, because if we don’t they might one day destroy us. It may be the law of the jungle, but so be it. We must kill or expect to be killed.’ The most frightening part of the hypothesis is that a relativistic civilisation would not be evil, as we understand the word. Its inhabitants would only be coldly calculating. They might suspect that other beings were capable of friendship and generosity, but they would not dare to believe it. Once they possessed deadly weapons they would feel compelled to use them.

Probably how we might also react if a previously peaceful species suddenly gained sentience on Earth. O.k. enough fun for now, even two weeks before the election, things are getting interesting again with the continued evolution of the U.S. spy satellite program and China’s microsatellite proximity operations. I’l get serious again ;)

Google recently launched a series of wiki-debates focused on some of the key issues in this year’s election. Its an effort to drive more traffic to its Wikipedia-competitor, Knol, which distingushes itself from its larger, more well-known rival by giving more prominence, credit, and even compensation to the authors who write their entries. In this experiment, Google engaged several prominent think-tank experts to pair-off on topics like the economic bailout or foreign policy priorities.

From the announcement on Google’s Official Blog:

Our first debate focuses on the economy. Economists from the Cato Institute and the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) have offered opening arguments on what should come next now that the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act is law. Take a look to see what they think — but don’t stop there. As with most articles in Knol, these are open to collaboration, so you can rate what you read, submit comments, write full responses (i.e. reviews), or even suggest edits to the author by making changes right in the knol itself. These experts are using Knol because they want to collaborate with readers, and they are committed to updating the articles based on your input.

As with most of these projects (including this one), the public response has been limited and not I suspect because the idea is new or unfamiliar but because the idea of collaboratively editing an argument or debate is missing some social / interactive / fun element(s) that are more available in the standard discussion board / comment stack models (more on this later).

Here’s an amusing video on how to prevail in internet arguments by knowing your logical fallacies:

I was explaining this site / idea to a friend recently and clarified that this site isn’t meant to be a place to have an argument — its a place for arguments. By that, I mean that there are plenty of tools already where people can engage in arguments with each other (blogs, forums). I think this site has the potential to become a place where particular arguments can be refined and discussed.

Found this amusing graphic, detailing the “Ten Most Important Satellites Orbiting Earth Now” or, the ten best targets for a good ol’ fashioned space shoot-em-up. The list itself is debatable with the exception of the “GoldenEye” satellite which clearly warrants far more congressional posturing than it has received.

I came across this gem while sifting through new SSRN Law Review releases :

“Debate: Collaborative Environmental Law: Pro and Con.” Eric W. Orts, University of Pennsylvania - Legal Studies Department and Cary Coglianese, University of Pennsylvania Law School. University of Pennsylvania Law Review PENNumbra, Vol. 156, p. 289, 2007

Granted, this isn’t exactly analogous to this or other related ‘open-source’ policymaking and large-scale argumentation projects. The authors are debating the merits of environmental mediation where the regulatory authority attempts to bring together “not only government officials (and their designated scientific and economic experts), but also the representatives of a range of interests in civil society who will be affected by legal rules and decisions concerning a specific environmental problem, including businesses, citizens’ groups, and nongovernmental organizations” in the hopes that better policy will result.

However, several points struck me as relevant, especially this (abridged) list of criticisms from Prof. Coglianese:

On the contrary, what we know from past attempts at collaborative environmental law is that making agreement the goal often introduces one or more of at least five types of policy problems.

1. Tractability over Importance
   When agreement is the goal, collaborative groups tend to give more attention to those issues that are most tractable—not necessarily those that are most important…
2. Imprecision
   People can often more easily reach agreement over imprecise terms. Each side can interpret vague words or broad principles in a light favorable to its own interests, each thinking it has won more (or lost less) than its counterparts think…
3. Lowest Common Denominator
   When securing agreement becomes the primary aim, each party effectively gains a veto over the outcome. If an agreement does result, it is likely to reflect little more than the lowest common denominator of the various parties…
4. Increased Time and Resources
   As Professor Orts notes, collaborative environmental law has been criticized for taking longer to generate decisions. If each party effectively holds a veto, then much time will be needed for all negotiating parties to present their concerns and hear how others respond…
5. Additional Conflict
   Although collaborative environmental law seeks to resolve conflict, it actually can add new and unproductive sources of controversy. For example, conflicts arise over who gets to participate in collaborative groups; in some cases, lawsuits have been threatened or even filed when organizations are not invited to sit at the negotiation table.

A new Air Force recruitment video emphasizes their role in protecting the nation’s critical space assets from attack:

The scenario is a little ridiculous as they argue a single missile could take out our entire space infrastructure (maybe a reference to the Chinese direct-ascent ASAT?). Noah Shachtman does a thorough job refuting this argument in the DangerRoom blog but here’s another good on-point response from the database:

A scan of a Modern Mechanix article from December, 1951 shows how orbiting satellites will be able to police the world. Kinda. The article itself focuses solely on military advances in rocketry — there is no discussion of how these Space Cops would be able to keep the peace beyond the assumption that being able to launch a satellite would give a nation the capacity for global tyranny. Still a great find.

(Via boing boing).