Spring Insider 2018

SQ INSIDER

SQ High School Essay Contest Winner Simar Bajaj

The Harker School San Jose, California

In the fifth annual High School Essay Contest, the SQ Community Outreach team asked high school students to write a 500-750 word piece about whether we should focus our resources towards space exploration or towards conservation here on Earth. SQ hopes this experience will encourage and celebrate science communication among future scientists and inspire them to think about biology in a broader context.

BEYOND THE FRONTIER ...continued from front cover

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ike other major investments of scientific resources in the past, space exploration promises benefits beyond its primary goal.

The Cold War lasted from 1947 to 1991, seeing bitter hostility between the Soviet Union and the United States in a struggle for survival. Neither country won this undeclared war, but the effect of this epoch cannot be overstated. The technological innovations of the era, from the invention of the Internet to the usage of nuclear power for energy, made society into what it is today. The time called for enormous research and development, and Big Science, with the proper funding, delivered. If today’s society focused more of its resources on interplanetary exploration, the number of innovations produced would make the whole endeavor worth the effort by functionally transforming society.

NASA’s research already produces societal dividends from public safety advances with

better water-purification systems to medical breakthroughs with cancer therapy to environmental advances with renewable energy.

These innovations all come from a budget that has never reached more than 4.5% of the US’s GDP. Creating an interplanetary future need not succeed in order to revolutionize society; the devotion of adequate resources alone would bring about profound beneficial change in a way that ignoring space exploration never could.

Space exploration and the preservation of the Earth are not mutually exclusive goals.

Indeed, the success of NASA’s Technology Transfer program suggests that the two work hand-in-hand. Creating an interplanetary future, specifically because of its implications for the survival of the human species, will likely even bring countries together to pool resources and talent to tackle the most formidable issues of this venture. The multinational effort may also be the artifact that unites the world’s nations, like the International Space Station did, and allows for the diplomatic capital to address critical Earth-specific issues like climate change, the rapid extinction rate, and deforestation.

While an interplanetary future is not yet feasible, the current pace of innovation makes it imminent. NASA has estimated that a people-carrying spaceship to Mars would weigh 1250 tons, less than the 4500ton International Space Station currently in orbit. With improved technologies, like those incorporated into NASA’s Space

Launch System, this vehicle could handily achieve escape velocity of 11.2 km/s to leave the Earth’s orbit. Every day, scientists come closer to solving other potential issues such as fuel storage or allowing the crew to live on Mars. For example, NASA is working on the Cryogenic Propellant Storage and Transfer project to store propellant in space, prevent fuel loss, and allow for more efficient thrusters. Reaching Mars, rocket fuel could even be manufactured from the ubiquitous perchlorate that the Curiosity rover and other probes have discovered. The most salient obstacle may be making Mars habitable; however, UC Berkeley’s Professor Berliner and McKay suggest a plan for that endeavor in their paper “The Terraforming Timeline.” With enough water, carbon dioxide, and nitrate, all of which are known to be on Mars, terraforming through a “warming phase” and an “oxygenation phase” to allow for Earth-like conditions is practicable (Berliner and McKay). Photoautotrophs and eventually other chemoheterotrophs could be introduced as food sources, and humans would be able to walk freely in this temperature-favorable and oxygen-rich Martian environment.

Striving towards an interplanetary future is indeed an achievable and worthwhile goal to secure humankind’s long-term survival while also preserving a clean environment for our posterity. Exploration may be expensive and precarious, but as Sagan duly remarked, “if the dinosaurs had had a space program, they would not be extinct.”

CONTENTS Climate Change pg 2

Saltman Quarterly

Volume 7| Spring 2019

...continued on back cover

get involved with saltman quarterly Visit SQ Online

SQ High School Essay Contest pg 4

Leading American astrophysicist Carl Sagan once declared that the survival of the human race “might be owed to a relentless few, drawn by a craving they can hardly articulate or understand to undiscovered lands, and new worlds.” Sagan’s sage words raise an important historical question: why did early explorers like Leif Erikson or Ferdinand Magellan depart their homes when they had everything to lose and no idea of what they might find? Some scholars insist that they were motivated solely by fame and fortune while others contend that they explored the frontiers of their world because of “an everlasting itch for things remote” (Melville). Regardless of their motivation, they expanded the horizon beyond what was previously imaginable, from new innovations to aid their seafaring to the discovery of crops that spurred an agricultural revolution in Europe. Similarly, humanity’s effort to extend its habitable frontier to the interplanetary scale, whether it ultimately succeeds or fails, will drive global innovation and allow for the preservation of our Earth...

Illustration by CORLY HUANG STAFF ILLUSTRATOR

Read feature articles, check out our photo gallery, and meet our bloggers. sqonline.ucsd.edu Like us on facebook @SaltmanQuarterly

California Wildfires pg 3

Print Publications

Pick up a print version of Saltman Quarterly Journal Volume 16 and Under the Scope Magazine Volume 9 end of Spring Quarter!

Available at the Department of Biology, Geisel and Biomedical Library.

Undergraduate Research Showcase Curious about the research that some of your peers are doing right now? See the inside scoop on some of the projects that undergraduates are currently undertaking.

Illustration by MICHAEL KALISZ | SQ STAFF ILLUSTRATOR

SQ INSIDER

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RISING TEMPERS & TEMPERATURES:

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HO STARTED THE FIRE?

WHY CALIFORNIA HAS BEEN BURNING

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THE MISPLACED DEBATE ON CLIMATE CHANGE

Written by GAYATHRI KALLA | SQ STAFF WRITER Illustration by FIONA HALDER | STAFF ILLUSTRATOR

veryone seems to have an opinion on climate change these days: the politician on TV, the playwright down the street, and every single relative at your dining table. But the words of the most authoritative figures on climate change, actual climate scientists, have been reduced to throwaway opinions.

How is it that the country has lost faith in scientific fact? The truth of climate change has become increasingly obscured by debate.

The short term financial burden for corporations to become environmentally conscious appears massive, so a narrative of ambiguity offers them a protective buffer. Decades of delegitimizing the evidence presented by climate scientists has turned climate change into a moral debate where everyone, from the experts to the public, can pick sides.

The economic costs of becoming more environmentally conscious are most immediately felt by corporations. Consequently, they do everything in their power—lobbying, interest group financing, and media manipulation—to continue to maximize efficiency and profitability to stay competitive in a capitalist economy. Investing in sustainable resources, retraining employees in more eco-friendly processes, and creating more durable products are all costly changes to make. As a result, some companies employ backhanded methods to encourage increased contention regarding climate change while publicly putting on an eco-friendly front to avoid consumer backlash. ExxonMobil, for example, is now infamous for its “two-faced” personality: the oil company funds research on climate change and pollution reduction methods, while also funding climate change denial groups. Former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson has helped fund those same denial groups, even after issuing a statement saying

that the company would stop. Once appointed Secretary of State, however, he switched gears, voiced support for staying in the Paris Agreement, a global accord in which 185 countries from around the world have committed to combating climate change.

Regardless of what information companies may choose to disseminate, climate change itself is a major economic threat.

The World Economic Forum labeled climate change and associated natural disasters as the biggest threat to the global economy in 2016, and it is likely that this status will persist in subsequent years. Not only is it dangerous, but according to Samson et al. (2011), climate change disproportionately affects areas that have contributed the least to global warming. This sets up a platform for moral tension between the companies causing the problems and the communities facing the consequences.

Our political climate has also been perfectly primed to produce oppositionist voices. There has been a sweeping trend of “right-wing populism” (RWP) across the US and around the world in recent decades.

RWP, as explained in Lockwood (2018), is a populist trend with conservative leanings.

Populism itself is the rule of the ordinary person, and it encompasses a strong mistrust of elites, including scientific and academic experts. RWP can explain the smaller groups of climate change deniers, including people left behind by recent economic growth, the grassroots protestors who fear losing their jobs if technology outpaces them, and oil or factory workers who might get scaled out because of governmental environmental limits.

Lockwood suggests that the rising numbers of RW populists around the world are in

Written by ELEANOR WANG | SQ STAFF WRITER Illustration by KATIE CLARK | STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

“suspicion of both the complexity of climate science and policy and of the role of climate scientists and environmentalists,” and we see now how their voices can be quite loud, possibly even loud enough to drown out the consensus of the climate science community.

Climate change is happening, no matter how anybody feels about it. Our sweltering summers and absurdly cold winters, our rising sea levels, and persistent wildfires are tangible examples of the global change we are bringing about. Yet, the first opponent we must face will be ourselves, pushing back against moralistic rhetoric to actually enact preventative and restorative methods for our world.

Editor-in-Chief: Sharada Saraf Executive Editor: Tushara Govind Head Production Editor: Dominique Sy UTS Production Editor: Arya Natarajan Production Team: Varsha Rajesh, Laura Zhang, Zarina Gallardo, Khulan Hoshartsaga Online Editor: Lauren Brumage SQ Features Editor: Samreen Haque UTS Features Editor: Ashni Vora Staff Writers: Gayathri Kalla, Eleanor Wang Staff Illustrators/Photographers: Fiona Halder, Katie Clark, Corly Huang, Michael Kalisz Head Advisers: James Cooke, Ph.D Assistant Teaching Professor of Neurobiology Hermila Torres Manager, do/bio Center

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requent, intense, and deadly California wildfires have stripped families of homes and laid waste to hundreds of thousands of acres of land. To date, the Camp Fire of November 2018 is not only the most destructive California wildfire in state history, but also the deadliest in the country since 1918. In addition to the staggering environmental and human impacts, this past wildfire season has also disrupted education systems across the state. The Thomas Fire during Fall 2017 forced UC Santa Barbara to postpone finals week until after Winter Break. In Fall 2018, several colleges in the San Francisco Bay Area were closed as smoke from the Camp Fire lowered air quality to dangerously unhealthy levels.

What’s causing these devastating fires, and why now?

Wildfires are not unnatural in California: many of the state’s ecosystems, like chaparrals and pine forests, have even evolved to burn. Seeds in chaparrals and conifer communities require intense heat to germinate, with some plant species even coating their leaves with highly flammable resins to promote their own combustion.

Fires also expose the forest floor to sunshine and break down organic debris into soil nutrients. In this regard, small-scale wildfires are essential to California’s ecological communities.

Climate change, however, has intensified and lengthened heatwaves and droughts. These dry conditions have increased the frequency of megafires—wildfires that burn faster and farther. But the causes of this dramatic increase in severe wildfires are complex. Rapid population growth and forest management strategies accompany climate change to generate conditions in which fires can spread at dangerous rates. The vegetation-drying effects of droughts and global warming leave forests, shrubs, and grasslands extra dry and particularly fire prone. Susceptibility to megafires is only exacerbated by human land-use and management practices. Federally mandated fire suppression efforts have increased the number of successfully extinguished fires, but an unintended side-effect has been a deficit of low-intensity, forest-regenerating natural fires.

As a result, wildfire fuel accumulates in the form of denser forests and thicker undergrowth—this again leaves our forests more susceptible to fire. Actually, proper forest management strategies involve using small, controlled fires, or prescribed fires, to thin out forests and reduce the hazard of uncontrollable wildfires. Prescribed fires are becoming more widely applied nationwide with the goal of reducing wildfire danger and enhancing biodiversity through habitat restoration for fire-adapted species.

While forest management practices do play a role in the spread of megafires, politicians can be quick to use these practices to dismiss climate change as a causal fac-

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tor. For instance, last November, President Donald Trump tweeted, “There is no reason for these massive, deadly, and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor,” and later, “With proper Forest Management, we can stop the devastation constantly going on in California. Get smart!” His politicization of the wildfire issue points blame at the mismanagement of forests and dismisses the science behind climate change. Densely packed forests are indeed prone to the spread of wildfires, but research has demonstrated that dry conditions resulting from intense droughts have provided the most fuel for the megafires.

While there are several contributing factors to the recent increase in California megafires, it is important for us to remember to be thorough in investigating the causes of devastating natural disasters. Misinformation can easily spread when complex matters are oversimplified. Public officials have a duty to hold themselves accountable for the information they share by properly analyzing the root causes of disaster and communicating evidence-based conclusions.

As debates around the most effective ways to combat the consequences of climate change continue, we can have more fruitful conversations when we understand how our actions have influenced the environment and what kind of strategies can be implemented to protect our state and planet.

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