Speculation

Speculation

    The word itself has a variety of meanings but among those most used are "contemplation" and  "consideration;" but other common definitions include (from Dictionary.com): "...conjecture or surmise: a report based on speculation rather than fact," and "engagement in business transactions involving considerable risk but offering the chance of large gains..."  To view the upcoming elections here in the U.S. might be to add to those definitions, the "race" virtually eliminating any outside parties from entering debates (the newly-made rule is that the two main outside parties still don't have at least 15% of the polling voters and thus cannot appear in the debates, this despite what The Atlantic reports: As it stands, neither third-party candidate qualifies under that criterion—Johnson averages 10 percent support, with Stein around 4 percent. But both can now claim significant support from voters when it comes to seeing them onstage. According to the new survey, 49 percent of Democrats, 48 percent of Republicans, and 58 percent of Independents support a Johnson showing at New York’s Hofstra University, which will host the first competition this fall. Stein’s numbers are slightly lower, with support from 47 percent of Democrats, 42 percent of Republicans, and 52 percent of Independents.  And for those of you outside of the U.S. you should know that polls are everywhere as shown by Real Politics, the media inundating the American public with numbers that each feels is accurate...but perhaps a better definition might be accurate speculation.  Such polling and reporting caused Robert Safian, editor at Fast Company, to write: My 12-year-old son loves the United States.  He’s always wearing red, white, and blue, drawn to anything with an American flag.  He even dressed as Uncle Sam for Halloween.  But talking with him about this year’s presidential campaign has been challenging.  In part, that’s because the political discourse has included a coarseness and belligerence that we don’t condone in our household.  More important, none of the candidates have expressed a coherent, compelling vision for the America my son will inherit.  The world we live in is changing faster than it ever has, fueled by advances in technology, bioscience, and artificial intelligence.  These changes are powerful and exciting and sometimes a little scary.  They hold the seeds of our future; their impact is already both unmistakable (people are holding smartphones around the globe) and unstoppable...Yet little of this transformational wave seems to figure into the candidates’ messages, which seem more focused on protecting the way things are (or have been).  If they express any sentiment about the future, it seems to revolve around fear.  And now there's a new word now entering the daily frenzy: confabulation.

    We live in a world of speculation not knowing whether the stocks markets will go up or down or if a country will displace its leader or a company will attempt a hostile takeover.  As in my experience, we even speculate on what will happen to our privacy and our information if and when it is viewed or hacked (Kaspersky Labs, makers of anti-virus software, reported that malware designed to get into smartphones saw a 300% increase last year).  But some speculation leads to exploration and development, a what-if questioning.  Take the case of Daniel Chao and Brett Wingeler who speculated that the implanted brain pacemaker they created to treat epilepsy might also work on different areas of the brain's motor cortex.  They got the Navy SEALS to try their new Halo Sport, then convinced Olympic athletes to try wearing the headphone-type device.  The result says Fast Company: Members of the U.S. Olympic ski team have reported a 31% improvement in their propulsion force, and the Air Force noted a 50% reduction in training time for drone pilots.  Select NBA and MLB players are also testing the device.  Commerical sales of the $750 device sold out within days.  Or the case of nuclear chemist Dawn Shaughnessy whose lab at Lawrence Livermore partnered with an institute in Russia and discovered three new heavy elements (what???), something the same magazine wrote: This is no simple feat: Superheavy elements aren’t found in nature, and creating them, in a cyclotron, requires precision, brute force, and lots of luck.  These elements all decay within seconds, but physicists theorize that still-heavier elements could be chemically stable and might possess remarkable properties such as extreme strength or conductivity that could have applications in fields from aerospace to medicine to energy. 

 

    More impressive might have been the decision 20 years ago to question a small dark portion of space.  With the Hubble spacecraft's time in big demand, then-director Robert Williams had a choice to make, should he take away time from other requests for Hubble's picture-taking orbits to peer at one particular spot of darkness in our galaxy, a long- exposure that would require 150 orbits or 10 days of Hubble's time.  Even a committee of respected advisors had their doubts.  Said an article in Discover: The telescope would point at a patch of sky in Hubble's continuous viewing zone, where it's impossible for Earth to photobomb.  In the chosen area near the Big Dipper. in a spot less than a tenth as wide as the Full Moon, the brightest known star shone at a feeble 19th magnitude.  Peering out of the relatively dust-free plane of the Milky Way, Hubble would get a view of the outside universe that was crystal clear...And quite possibly really blank.  "It was truly a risk," Williams recalls.  "Using more than half the yearly allotment of DD (Department of Defense) time was unprecedented, especially immediately after Servicing Mission 1, when demand for telescope time was huge."  The result...in a tiny dark portion of space rested thousands of galaxies and trillions of stars.  Said the piece by author C. Renee James: ...it revealed thousands of never-before-seen galaxies and humbled anyone who saw it.  Our planet, our solar system, our galaxy all became so much smaller with a single picture...it has changed our understanding of the universe.

 

    In summing all this up, a blog --just as with polls-- becomes little more than an arena of more speculation, much as opening letters from editors in magazines or op-ed pieces in newspapers and digital media.  Still, one can sometimes find hope in these avid editors who have to sort through fact-checked reporting and then put their summation into a few opening paragraphs.  Here's one from July 8, 2016 by William Falk, chief editor of The Week: You're entitled to feel some despair over the state of our world. I sure do, even after a lifetime in the news business.  In recent weeks, there's been an avalanche of evidence of our species' bottomless capacity for stupidity, savagery, and tribal hatred.  An alarming number of our existing and would-be leaders have shown themselves to be clueless, corrupt, self-serving scoundrels and buffoons.  We teeter on the edge of multiple disasters.  But, my friends, there's always hope.  We've also just gotten a reminder that, at our best, human beings are capable of extraordinary intelligence, teamwork, and vision...This week, NASA's Juno spacecraft entered into orbit around Jupiter, after a 1.7 billion–mile journey.  Juno arrived just one second off its scheduled arrival time after five years in space, traveling at 165,000 miles per hour — the fastest human-built object ever.  Where in everyday life, or in government, do we see such sheer competence?  In modern science, miracles are routine.  Physicists have hurled beams of protons at each other with such primordial force that they revealed the elusive Higgs boson that serves as glue for all matter.  Astrophysicists have detected gravitational waves produced by the collision of two black holes more than a billion light-years away, by creating antennae of such exquisite sensitivity they register infinitesimal ripples in space-time.  Molecular biologists are figuring out how to re-engineer genes.  Computer scientists keep shrinking the size of chips and doubling our devices' computing power.  None of this is to say that scientists are gods, or that they are immune to the shortsightedness and egotism that plagues our species.  Underneath their hyperdeveloped cerebral cortexes, even the most brilliant people have a lizard brain, pulsing with primitive impulses.  But they provide proof that not all humans are imbeciles, and that's consolation enough.