Mr. Gullible

Since I was a kid a had a fascination with rockets, spaceships and other BIG stuff. I loved the Saturn V rocket. But the crawler, the huge vehicle carrying it from the assembly complex to the launch pad, and the gantry did it for me. This fascination with BIG hardware is what sucked me into Science Fiction and stuff like the Culture universe of Iain Banks. Here you are talking about space ships 30km long. I mean, that’s from Martinsville to Indianapolis! And then there are the ‘orbitals’. Giant rings, 10 million kilometers in diameter, consisting of a string of plates each a thousand km square. Of course the Culture has all sorts of machines and robotic equipment for their building needs – and I guess a few thousand years of experience.

A few years ago, after our second daughter Jasmin was born, our house started to get crammed. Instead of selling it and buying a larger one we decided to build a simple addition. Just an extra two rooms on the north side of the house. No plumbing, no gas lines. Just like this:

Old house

New house

After finding a contractor we finally broke ground in July of 2003. Those were exciting times. Daily videos of the progress were made.
After a week the concrete foundation had settled and the frame for the basement went up. Day by day you could see it grow. After three weeks or so both floors were framed and the roof was covered. At that time I thought it would only be another few weeks until we could move into the new rooms. But little did I know how long hanging drywall would take. Upgrading the power connection to the house, installing electrical wires, light fixtures. Painting took forever. I wasn’t aware that they would stain the new doors right there in our basement. Hardwood floors. By November it was totally normal for us to share our limited living space with the contractor’s people – and then, five months after breaking ground, it was finished. I admit I had not appreciated all the planning and various steps of execution involving backhoes, concrete trucks, carpenters, roofers, gutterers, drywall-hangers, electricians, painters and a building inspector.

And then, this summer, it was time to do something about our old rusty garden shed. We needed a dry space for the mower, four bikes and other stuff that is crowding our basement. After the old shed had been picked up for scrap metal I decided on a wooden 10×10 foot shed. Nothing fancy. A kit with all necessary parts. At first I thought about pouring a concrete foundation but my friend Dave quickly talked me out of that – water coming down the hill during a heavy rain might flood the concrete slab. Wooden posts would lift the structure above ground so that any water was able to pass underneath. Keep in mind now that I have never done anything like that before. I can repair my amps, program in a bunch of computer languages and I write pretty decent jazz tunes. But how would I make sure the holes I started to dig at the site were properly lined up so that the posts (16 of them, overkill!) would form a perfect 10×10 square?

Well, I started out by making a 3D model in Cinema 4D to visualize it. After my kids had helped me picking out a shed at the hardware store I had second thoughts – not about quitting but rather about not using a kit which comes with all parts sawed to size but to build my own from scratch. My wife quickly talked me out of that – she knew I would have no time for anything else for the better part of a year and it would probably still come out crooked. In late September I started digging the first hole. I had planned to spend an hour or two a day digging holes for the posts. Once I had started I could see the construction site staring up at me through my office window every time I worked on my computer. What a good motivation for picking up a shovel and dig some more. After about a month I had 16 holes and the six kittens that were born at our house around June started using them as litter boxes. On a Saturday afternoon my friend Dave came over to help me setting the posts. I had bought 20 bags of concrete the day before and with string, stakes and other crude tools we tried to lay our posts out in a nice 10×10 square. That first afternoon we managed to put eight posts in and I did the rest on the following Sunday. A few days went by to let the concrete set then we screwed the boards to the posts. After that I put in some more cross boards for extra floor support. By that time I spent six hours a day out there. When I played gigs in the evening I couldn’t hold the strings down on my guitar because my fingers hurt from pressing the GO button on the screwdriver. The following Saturday the kit arrived in a huge package. Just unpacking all the parts took an afternoon. It’s Thursday now and since three days I have been building frames for the walls. Probably hammered in something like four pounds of nails. Tomorrow my wife and I will try to erect the walls on the site. I am sure it will be fun….

Wait a minute. Why am I telling this story?

Because reading books of the Culture, watching Star Trek and consuming large quantities of Science Fiction in general has distorted my perception of reality. In the future, they make you believe, anything is possible. I mean, people like Stephen Baxter often write about alien races who are able to engineer galaxies according to their whims. That’s great and great fun, too. But it didn’t take rocket science to build that garden shed. Just time and sweat. There are about 32 or so individual parts my foundation is made of (not counting the screws). And despite careful measuring there still were some things that didn’t fit quite right. Nobody’s life depends on the function of this foundation. And yet I have been at it for two months – and it will probably turn out not to be perfectly square.

Now if I look at that gantry for the Saturn V, I don’t think that came as a kit. That was planned and built from scratch. And at a height of around 120m it has a lot more parts than my foundation. And it has to actually work. How much harder is it then to send something to the Moon, to build a human habitat there? Or on Mars? I mean, just getting all the power tools there. Oh wait, you also have to bring your own power outlets (let alone your own air). This stuff isn’t easy. And now I appreciate it more than ever before.

I am a frustrated, castrated, suppressed mathematician, physicist, rocket engineer. I was born in 1960. Ok, Sputnik, was three years earlier. But when in 1968 Apollo 8 traveled around the Moon my granddad had already started giving me science books for birthdays and Christmas. The books about the U.S. space program were my favorites. From that time I have kept many notepads full of childish doodles of spaceships and astronauts.

When, on July 20 1969, just three days before my ninth birthday, Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon I was the only one in my family who staid up late to watch the live broadcast on German TV.  Consequently, I learned all I could about the US space program. I knew all the Astronauts by name and had see-through drawings of the Saturn V internalized. There was no doubt in my mind (and my parents’) that I would become an Astronaut, a rocket engineer or at least a pilot of some sort.

At one point in my teens puberty set in, the last two Apollo missions were canceled and surplus materials used in Skylab and somehow all talk of going to Mars next, or setting up a permanent moon base had gone away. Not only did the first girl I fell in love with not care for me but I was old enough to be asked “So, do you know what you want to be when you grow up?” At that time I started to realize that this question was somehow linked with money. While I had always been interested in Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics I just wasn’t able to get good grades in these subjects.

Around age 14, by sheer coincidence, I started playing guitar and just a few months later I played my first gig and got paid for it. Not much but enough to encourage me to pursue music. My interest in science and engineering never went away, With proper guidance I might have finished Gymnasium and gone on to study – University was free in Germany, for crying out loud! But I went the artistic way. I kept some sort of contact with my scientific interests by subscribing to various magazines. TV shows about technology were still my favorites and I developed an appetite for the literature called ‘Science Fiction’. In the course of my late teens and early twenties I drifted away from pure science – while my ex-classmates became doctors, chemists and biologists – and was consuming SF pretty much exclusively. While I actually started supporting myself by teaching guitar lessons and playing gigs and recording sessions every once in while the old science connection stirred in me. But there just didn’t seem to be a way to change professions (in retrospect of course I can see many junctures at which it would have been easy to switch, old people can be so much wiser.)

In 1983 I had my first practical exposure to a real computer. A Commodore 64, when I started to work part time at a friend’s computer store. There the old passion surfaced again. Learning programming, first Basic then Assembly, was such a blast. Again, I could have easily switched careers. At that time computer knowledge was in demand. Again I missed the boat and struggled on as a mediocre musician. At least computers became a big part of my everyday life and that kept the old interest in science and technology alive.

In the mid 80s I started to become interested in more, shall we say, esoteric topics. I had discovered books about past-life regression, reincarnation, UFOs. While I don’t know if I ever really believed any of this I still consumed large quantities of books dealing with these subjects. This phase lasted roughly about 10 years until after I had relocated to the US. Out of a melange of SF books and metaphysical literature I had been reading in that decade came the strange realization that:
#1, somehow there wasn’t much of a difference between the Science Fiction and the books about reincarnation, conspiracies, etc,
#2, the metaphysics books had vastly different and conflicting views from each other about reality and I started wondering where exactly these authors had their information from
#3, I had been an Atheist for most of my life and slowly I came to the conclusion that believing in UFOs and many other ‘unproven’  supernatural claims actually falls in the same category as Religion: You believe because you have faith and not because there is evidence

Within a short few years I started reading pure science books again and started a subscription to Scientific American. And now, as I am working the exercises from the ‘Idiot’s Guide to Geometry’ and am learning about the Scientific Method I realize that I still want to be a Scientist, engineer or something like that.

And that finally brings me to the point of this blather: How can someone who is not a PH.D. contribute to Science? How can you help building a base on the Moon and landing a man on Mars without working for NASA? Ok, I can always contribute money to the Planetary Society or the Mars Society. But that’s not really what I mean (although I am a member). How can I contribute, without being a physicist, an engineer or a billionaire? Are there more people like me out there. People who were very interested in Science for a while and then the needs of a job and family forced them unto a different path?

It now seems to me that one of the biggest things would be a community for people like me. Not quite geniuses and not quite idiots.