Continuing day two of the convention, I chose the Political Outreach/Volunteerism sessions.
I honestly figured that these would be the most important sessions of the whole weekend and that they would be considered mandatory for all members, if the real goal was to get The Case For Mars presented to power-masters and the steps begun. To my surprise, these sessions were held way up on the third floor in the smallest room of the center ... and there were seats to spare.
Continuing day two of the convention, I chose the Political Outreach/Volunteerism sessions.
I honestly figured that these would be the most important sessions of the whole weekend and that they would be considered mandatory for all members, if the real goal was to get The Case For Mars presented to power-masters and the steps begun. To my surprise, these sessions were held way up on the third floor in the smallest room of the center ... and there were seats to spare.
The first meeting was "Gaining Progressive Friends for Humans to Mars" presented by Gustave Scheerbaum. The blurb in the convention book said "Humans to Mars advocates are frequently challenged by opponents who honestly feel that funding such expeditions are wasteful or irrelevent in view of international and National challenges on Earth".
It was a neat session, and interesting.
Mr. Scheerbaum contacted various non-profit advocacy groups (in the fields of Prisoner Rights, HIV/Health Care, Ecological/Environmental) and asked the humans there what their feelings were about a non-profit going after awareness and higher budgets for NASA and Space related funding.
The bottom lines, across the board, were that every group initially reacted with the rant that NASA in particular and Space work in general was useless, holding no benefit for people here on Earth.
He then asked each what they thought the NASA budget was, and heard that the impression ranged from 2 and a half to 5 percent of the federal budget. This explained why NASA/Space is so often used as a selling point for cutting NASA in favor of their own pet programs.
Scheerbaum then started mentioning to these groups actual NASA programs including ones that were directly related to each of the groups own goals. He gave a number of good examples, but the biggies were pretty easy to guess:
- Relatable to Prison Reformers, he mentioned the research being done on human psychology for isolation and closed long-term habitat design.
- Related to Health Care, he brought up the advances in pharmacuetical development made possible only because of the ISS lab microGravity environment
- For Eco/Environmentalists, how it has been proven that Mars was once a waterworld much like our own but climate changes turned it into the dead planet it is now... and that research on how our Sister planet died has direct bearing and can have direct actionable results - on the lifecycle of Earth
- For everyone, a quick reality check on the true and present dangers of Near Earth Objects followed by the statement of fact that NASA is the ONLY organization in the world with an ongoing project cataloging and watching NEOs and devising plans for protecting Earth from any that WILL stray too close.
According to Scheerbaum, at this point the contacts each said "I didn't know NASA was doing that, Why don't they tell people?" Because these groups, like most everyone without an active Space interest, only hears about the minutia of the various Robots - without context - and if they ever do happen hear anything about NASA in the regular press they hear stressed, more than anything, the millions of dollars that are spent on that Robotic minutia.
Scheerbaum then told each of the groups that NASA's actual funding - for EVERYTHING is does - was about one half of a percent of the federal budget.
And at this point, each of the groups responded quite differently than before, saying such things as "that is disgraceful" and "what is wrong with them [Congress]?"
Why? Not just because the real usefulness of NASA programs was finally presented to them in relation to the things they see as important, but also because These Particular People know their own budget percentages. They had been using NASA as an easy target and a shining example of a wasteful agency in their own pitches for money, but now they could see that even if they got all of NASA's budget it wouldn't add up to much of a drop in a hat to helping them.
NASA gets more done with less then almost any other agency ... in fact when you think about the things that NASA actually does with the monies that they get it can be (and is) said with confidence that they are the best example of doing Major and tangible things for Humanity on less than a shoestring.
By the way, two side points came out of this session.
First, Mr. Scheerbaum casually mentioned that in his experiences doing the study, he started noticing that older people, those who could remember Apollo, were more quick to take his calls and meetings; some even started by telling him of their own personal memories of those days and occasionally he heard Apollo being used as an example of what could be done with hard work and dedication. Certain older activists, on their own, found a relationship between Apollo and their current non-profit work. On the other hand, younger staffers were often more hesitant or even leery of his contact and more closed minded in the beginning about the evil, wasteful NASA. Younger activists in general were more likely to discard the whole agency and Space interests in general as being a useless remnant of an long-gone Cold War, including using the cliche "We already went to the moon, if it were so helpful to anything at all then we would have stayed and developed it back then."
Older/Younger... a pattern that repeated so many times in the convention, always as an aside though. Hmmm.
The other thing that came as an interesting aside was that, unlike the other groups, he found that some members of the Eco/Environmental groups expressed the opinion that using Mars to figure out Earth's climate changes was a threat to Mars that shouldn't be done even if Mars was already dead and even if the result was of direct benefit to Earth.
This dovetailed into a more disturbing bit of research. Some more passionate EcoActivism respondents expressed the opinion that if Earth gets hit by an Asteroid it might be what’s best for Earth - The Planet Earth, the "Mother" of [non-human] plant and animal life. Their personal feeling was that continuing to allow mere humans to alter Earth for bad OR even for *the good of humans* was worse than total destruction from an outside “natural” source. Not to say that this was the full out opinion of any Eco/Environmental group... but it was expressed by certain individuals. A disdain for humans outweighed any desire to help our species exist and flourish.
After the session I mentioned to Mr. Scheerbaum that those particular folks obviously didn't yet have children ;-).
Takeaway from this session? A confirmation of logic.
There are a lot of groups all trying to get a positive Congressional mindshare and a larger share of the budget pie. Small groups can and do knee jerk into using other small groups as easy targets of places to get more of the budget share. Small groups are full of passionate people who honestly want to help make a better future (even the Eco people who seem to hate humans do feel that they are working to help something bigger than themselves), and if one small group can present to another the fact that they too are just an underdog and that they too have real positive potentials related to the other group's desires then it takes the teeth out of the attack and can even persuade an attacking group to pick instead a Big Money / Low Benefit target for funding reallocation. In fact, Scheerbaum mentioned that after explaining NASA's real work and real funding he saw a fast switch from NASA to the MIlitary budget as the best target.
I think that Mr. Scheerbaum did an excellent job, not just in his presentation and not just in his takikng the initiative and gathering research data but also in doing the work of informing people in other non-profit groups about the positive benefits of NASA and Space Interests.
I wish more people had attended this session … but I guess for most people the concurrent Big Room session “Hydraulic Antipodal Focusing As a Contributing Factor to Fingertip Injury During The Use Of EVA Gloves” dealt with far more pressing issues to the advancement of The Case For Mars. :-(