Who is my audience?

The easiest audience to write for, and the one I most often find myself writing for, is myself. I know what I like, and it’s easy to judge (not always, but most of the time) whether I meet that criteria. Of course, writing for an audience that thinks and acts like has, the way I see it, two main flaws:
1. It’s boring. Sure I know what I like, but there are so many things I’ve never read that I could potentially enjoy reading. They may be uncomfortable to read, which means they would be even more uncomfortable to write. Writing using myself as a model audience biases me towards my comfort zone.
2. The world isn’t actually filled up with multiple mes (thank goodness). Some things I like are absolutely repulsive to other people. If I manage the (surprisingly difficult) task of writing something I like, there will still be more people than not that hate it (most likely).

With a little effort and tweaking, though, writing for an ideal audience comprised of people like me isn’t actually such a bad proposition. (If the world was made up of mes, I wouldn’t have to write anything at all, actually, because I would already know what I was going to say, right?)

But expanding the issue of audience to the kind of writing I’m doing for 21W.775, one of the main problems I see with environmental journalism is that, for the most part, the only people that will actually read it, not to mention buy what you are saying, are probably self-selecting environmentalists. That is, the only people who you will reach are the ones who already think the way you do. This isn’t, I’m sure, always the case, and it also doesn’t have to be a bad thing (as long as you use it to meet your goals). For example, you could write something that at first looks like the typical environmental essay and then completely frustrate the environmental-sympathizer audience after you’ve pulled them in (a la Evans). So, there are various things you can do with an essay that naturally attracts a certain type of audience. However, the aim of my essay is to make people who aren’t already environmentally conscious think about where their technology goes once they’ve disposed of it. I want people who don’t recycle to think about their electronic junk (although I’d like to speak to people who already recycle, as well). I want the people that are actually consuming and disposing off electronics and automobiles at a rapidly increasing pace to hear what I have to say. Ok, so maybe that’s a stiff demand, but to even attempt to do that I need to at least get people other than the pre-disposed-to-be-environmentally-sympathetic crowd to read it.

I may have this wrong, but I feel like a lot of the time when an article about environmentally-theme article comes out, say an article on global warming, a lot of people look at it and think “Oh, yet another environmental problem that no one can really do anything about, I don’t need to read that.” I want to find some way to circumvent this phenomenon. I want to make people think about what they are doing, what they are buying, and most importantly, what happens to things after they disappear from our lives. (Because they don’t, as it’s so easy to imagine, vanish completely).

But wait, that’s just what I feel like people would think…now I’ve just fallen back into using myself as a model. This is going to be harder than I thought.

Space Junk: Part II

Ok, so let’s assume space junk is indeed a problem worth devoting time and energy to solve. (Although at this point I wouldn’t label it as a “crisis”, even if it does meet some of the criteria we discussed in class, namely the fact that it represents a trend that radically deviates from historical trends.) What can be done about it, what should be done about it, and what is being done about it?

The NASA Orbital Debris Program Office has this to say about debris mitigation:
“Controlling the growth of the orbital debris population is a high priority for NASA, the United States, and the major space-faring nations of the world to preserve near-Earth space for future generations. Mitigation measures can take the form of curtailing or preventing the creation of new debris, designing satellites to withstand impacts by small debris, and implementing operational procedures ranging from utilizing orbital regimes with less debris, adopting specific spacecraft attitudes, and even maneuvering to avoid collisions with debris.”

That doesn’t quite sound like mitigation to me. The statement introducing the paragraph references the importance of controlling the growth of orbital debris, but except for the first measure listed, all the solutions listed are merely ways of dealing with a large (and growing) amount of junk. That sounds like mitigation of the effects of space junk, not mitigation of the problem of space junk itself.

Is this a problem that is best solved by adaptation or by reduction and elimination? Let’s assume, for a few moments, that we need to get rid of much of the abandoned, burnt out, used up, forgotten, useless, and lost hunks of metal and plastic as we can. There are really only two options for doing this: bring them down to Earth or send them further out into space.

But what about destroying them? Without sci-fi super-villain scheming, the conventional methods of blowing things up merely breaks up the guilty debris into smaller fragments, and micro-meteorites can be just as problematic as their toaster or refrigerator sized predecessors.

“Re-entry” is the polite name for bringing space junk back down to Earth. It has two forms: uncontrolled re-entry and controlled re-entry. Uncontrolled re-entry involves the inevitable orbit decay that accompanies the loss of the satellite’s energy followed by an eventual crashing down to Earth. That sounds fun, right? As the NASA Orbital Debris Program Office website puts it, “the surviving debris impact footprint cannot be guaranteed to avoid inhabited landmasses.”

Well, at least there’s comfort in the fact that 70% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water, and with the imminent threat of global-warming induced sea-level rise it’ll be easier to miss land if we start bringing dead satellites down in 50 or 100 years.

Of course, there are less hazardous ways of bringing large objects down to Earth from space. For example, the MIR space station successfully plummeted into the ocean without any complications. (You can read about the entire saga here on space.com.) Needless to say, despite the fact that no one got hurt people living in the South Pacific weren’t very happy about the fact that it was happening.

Sending satellites further out into space typically involves sending useless satellites to a “graveyard orbit.” This only postpones the plummeting to Earth problem. True, it will take hundreds of years for satellites in a graveyard orbit to lose enough energy to de-orbit and crash into the Earth, but it will eventually happen.

So, the two solutions to space debris (which, of course, only apply to satellites and spacecraft that have control and propulsion systems and not to the innumerable pieces of inanimate trash—here’s a breakdown of the space debris by type: operational spacecraft — 7%, old spacecraft — 22%, rocket bodies — 17%, mission-related objects — 13%, miscellaneous fragments — 41%) boil down to: not really that safe and reliable versus putting off the inevitable until another day.

I haven’t stumbled across any radical solutions, like making a spacecraft with a giant bulldozer-type shovel attached to it that scoops up all the trash and sends it into the sun or anything, but I’m sure people have tossed those around too.

And we've traversed another giant circle. Coming back to the real problem with this problem: not the difficultly posed by its geographic remoteness, but by its conceptual remoteness. Who really has time (or money, or effort) to worry about all the junk floating around in orbit when Tuvalu will be submerged within a century? I think that’s a challenge that mars the entire space program, especially with all of the looming “environmental crises” we’ve been discussing nipping at our heels.