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Entry
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0- Contact Info
Tournament: none | Round: 9 | Opponent: none | Judge: none I'm Mahad Best place to reach me: https://www.facebook.com/mahad.sohail.1293/ mahadsohail@gmail.com Let me know before the round if there are any content warnings I should be aware of
erpretation: Debaters must disclose all broken constructive positions on open source with highlighting on the 2020-21 NDCA LD wiki under their own names and schools after the round in which they read them
Violation – they don't See the screen shots bellow – they participated in Byram Hills and didn't disclose any positions
1~ Debate resource inequities—you'll say people will steal cards, but that's good—it's the only way to truly level the playing field for students such as novices in under-privileged programs who can't bypass paywalled articles.
Louden 10 – Allan D. Louden, professor of Communication at Wake Forest ("Navigating Opportunity: Policy Debate in the 21st Century" Wake Forest National Debate Conference. IDEA, 2010) Groups interested in engaging in competitive National Debate Tournament (NDT)-Cross Examination Debate AND multiple professional teaching positions, such as those discussed earlier in the chapter.
2~ Evidence ethics – open source is the only way to verify pre-round that cards aren't miscut or highlighted or bracketed unethically. That's a voter – maintaining ethical ev practices is key to being good academics and we should be able to verify you didn't cheat
3~ Depth of clash – it allows debaters to have nuanced researched objections to their opponents evidence before the round at a much faster rate, which leads to higher quality ev comparison – outweighs cause thinking on your feet is NUQ but the best quality responses come from full access to a case.
Fairness – all arguments concede the validity of fairness
Education – the only reason schools fund debate
Competing interps on theory – A~ disclosing is a yes/no question, you can't reasonably not disclose B~ norm setting – reasonability is arbitrary and invites judge intervention C~ reasonability causes a race to the bottom.
Drop the debater – Sets good norms for the debate space, losing this round will make my opponent disclose next round, Dropping the argument means dropping their case essentially making it a drop the debater
No RVIs: 1~ Encourages theory baiting and chills checking real abuse. 2~ Illogical b/c don't win for being fair and logic is meta-constraint on arguments because it comes lexically prior.
Interp: The neg must specify the status of all advocacies in the 1NC during the 1NC. To clarify, you must say if advocacies are condo, uncondo, or dispo in the 1NC.
Violation – they didn't
~1~ Strat Skew – waiting till CX means I lose 7 minutes to prep answers and determine strategies like reading case outweighs or theory. Irreciprocal since you know the aff is uncondo and have the whole 36 minutes to prep so I need the ability to prep during the NC too.
Key to education since I'll have less time to think of quality arguments for clash. Also key to inclusion since newer debaters are less likely to ask about the status in CX, so debaters are incentivized to not tell novices the status and shift after encouraging a strategic error. Inclusion is an independent voter – you can't debate if you can't participate.
11/14/21
2- Dysfluency
Tournament: Virtual Scarsdale Invitational Scarvite | Round: 4 | Opponent: Prince PE | Judge: Augustin, Shamika
Kritik
Communicative arenas such as debate links disabled folk under modes of compulsive able-bodiedness. They are controlled by biopolitical systems of fluency which systematically smooths dysfluencies to maintain a fluid semiotic operation. Thus, the role of the ballot is to vote for the debater that best resists the technologies of fluency.
St. Pierre 17 ~Becoming Dysfluent: Fluency as Biopolitics and Hegemony Joshua St. Pierre Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Volume 11, Issue 3, 2017, pp. 339-356 (Article) Published by Liverpool University Press~ Lex VM "Given that compulsory able-bodiedness emanates from everywhere and nowhere, it is AND ends through the logic of optimization and closure." (342-344)
New biopolitical developments in neoliberal capitalism has shifted the focus of normalizing the disabled body to profiting off of its capacitation through medicalization. Bodies are now evaluated in regard to their productivity and health blurring the distinction between abled and disabled forming gradations of capacity and debility.
Fritsch 15 ~Fritsch, Kelly Michelle. "The Neoliberal Biopolitics of Disability: Towards Emergent Intracorporeal Practices." Diss. York U, Toronto, 2015. YorkSpace Institutional Repository. York University, 16 Dec. 2015. Web.~ Lex VM Puar argues that all bodies in neoliberal capitalism are "being evaluated in relation to AND of citizenship has intensified the costs associated with failing to access the workplace."
Speech and technologies of fluency has fueled the rise of Semiocapitalism which requires information to move quickly and effortlessly. This results in the capacitation of certain disabled bodies at the expense of debilitating dysfluent ones.
St. Pierre 2 ~Becoming Dysfluent: Fluency as Biopolitics and Hegemony Joshua St. Pierre Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Volume 11, Issue 3, 2017, pp. 339-356 (Article) Published by Liverpool University Press~ Lex VM Considered in terms of optimization, the function of fluency is quite familiar: technologies AND excellent communication skills" marginalize dysfluent laborers in postindustrial economies." (344)
Biocapitalism creates a structure of value where the ideal Child that symbolizes the image of futurity is the one that embodies maximized productivity. In reality, this sacred Child is unobtainable and requires the death and enhancement of disability to give it meaning. This locks disability in a cycle of cruelly optimistic futures that are predicated on disabled death.
Fritsch 2 ~Fritsch, Kelly Michelle. "The Neoliberal Biopolitics of Disability: Towards Emergent Intracorporeal Practices." Diss. York U, Toronto, 2015. YorkSpace Institutional Repository. York University, 16 Dec. 2015. Web.~ Lex VM What Berardi (2011) and Edelman (2004) do not account for are AND sliding into neoliberalism's forms of capacitation and enhancement that incapacitates and disables others.
Neoliberal biocapitalism forecloses futures by constructing groups based on historical suffering. Only gradations if ability can move beyond the abled/disabled binary.
Fritsch 3 ~Fritsch, Kelly Michelle. "The Neoliberal Biopolitics of Disability: Towards Emergent Intracorporeal Practices." Diss. York U, Toronto, 2015. YorkSpace Institutional Repository. York University, 16 Dec. 2015. Web.~ Lex VM "Puar's intervention is uncomfortable for disability studies insofar as she challenges the ways in AND allow for a more just future for everyone." (116-119)
Vote aff to enact dysfluencies in communicative spheres to create frictions that disrupt the semiotic flow of debate. Our politics resists the spell of the linguistic by using dysfluent systems of grammar, norms and communication to escape the totalizing demands of fluency.
St. Pierre 3 ~Becoming Dysfluent: Fluency as Biopolitics and Hegemony Joshua St. Pierre Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Volume 11, Issue 3, 2017, pp. 339-356 (Article) Published by Liverpool University Press~ Lex VM "In conclusion, we might consider that for McRuer, following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick AND precisely in its flight from understanding and intelligibility." (353-354)
Our method is a heterotopic imagination of disability that views disability differently outside of the current neoliberal conditions. The product is a figure of disability not as something to overcome but as a life worth living.
Fritsch 4 ~Fritsch, Kelly Michelle. "The Neoliberal Biopolitics of Disability: Towards Emergent Intracorporeal Practices." Diss. York U, Toronto, 2015. YorkSpace Institutional Repository. York University, 16 Dec. 2015. Web.~ UTDD recut Lex VM Challenging the undesirability of disability is a shared responsibility and goes beyond the inclusion of AND disability is, how it is practiced, and what it can be.
uv
Us violating any T or theory shells is a performative reason to vote for us since we are creating dysfluencies within the system
Neg may only read 1 T or theory shell. Multiple shells spread out the 1AR and allow the 2NR to collapse to whichever shell was under covered, meaning disabled bodies aren't able to defend themselves. Multiple rounds solve your offense since we can check lots of abusive practices over time.
No omissions: All neg theory violations and kritik links must come from the text of the AC, not the absence of specification. (A) I have a limited time to speak so it's an infinite aff burden (B) Race to bottom – incentivizes people to not engage the aff and make a bunch frivolous spec argument to preclude
Communicative arenas such as debate links disabled folk under modes of compulsive able-bodiedness. They are controlled by biopolitical systems of fluency which systematically smooths dysfluencies to maintain the fluid semiotic operation. Thus, the role of the ballot is to vote for the debater that best resists the technologies of fluency.
St. Pierre 17 ~Becoming Dysfluent: Fluency as Biopolitics and Hegemony Joshua St. Pierre Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Volume 11, Issue 3, 2017, pp. 339-356 (Article) Published by Liverpool University Press~ Lex VM "Given that compulsory able-bodiedness emanates from everywhere and nowhere, it is AND ends through the logic of optimization and closure." (342-344)
New biopolitical developments in neoliberal capitalism has shifted the focus of normalizing the disabled body to profiting off of its capacitation through medicalization. Bodies are now evaluated in regard to their productivity and health blurring the distinction between abled and disabled forming gradations of capacity and debility.
Fritsch 15 ~Fritsch, Kelly Michelle. "The Neoliberal Biopolitics of Disability: Towards Emergent Intracorporeal Practices." Diss. York U, Toronto, 2015. YorkSpace Institutional Repository. York University, 16 Dec. 2015. Web.~ Lex VM Puar argues that all bodies in neoliberal capitalism are "being evaluated in relation to AND of citizenship has intensified the costs associated with failing to access the workplace."
Speech and technologies of fluency has fueled the rise of Semiocapitalism which requires information to move quickly and effortlessly. This results in the capacitation of certain disabled bodies at the expense of debilitating dysfluent ones.
St. Pierre 2 ~Becoming Dysfluent: Fluency as Biopolitics and Hegemony Joshua St. Pierre Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Volume 11, Issue 3, 2017, pp. 339-356 (Article) Published by Liverpool University Press~ UTDD recut Lex VM Considered in terms of optimization, the function of fluency is quite familiar: technologies AND excellent communication skills" marginalize dysfluent laborers in postindustrial economies." (344)
Biocapitalism creates a structure of value where the ideal Child that symbolizes the image of futurity is the one that embodies maximized productivity. In reality, this sacred Child is unobtainable and requires the death and enhancement of disability to give it meaning. This locks disability in a cycle of cruelly optimistic futures that are predicated on disabled death.
Fritsch 2 ~Fritsch, Kelly Michelle. "The Neoliberal Biopolitics of Disability: Towards Emergent Intracorporeal Practices." Diss. York U, Toronto, 2015. YorkSpace Institutional Repository. York University, 16 Dec. 2015. Web.~ Lex VM What Berardi (2011) and Edelman (2004) do not account for are AND sliding into neoliberalism's forms of capacitation and enhancement that incapacitates and disables others.
This affective economy determines the value and circulation of social goods which allows biocapitalism to frame disability through a narrative of overcoming suffering. This produces disability as tragedy, pity, and disgust.
Fritsch 2 The Neoliberal Biopolitics of Disability: Towards Emergent Intracorporeal Practices by Kelly Fritsch JUNE 2015 UTDD "Indebted to the work of Henri- Bergson, Baruch Spinoza, and Gilles AND face of contested understandings of disability or accessibility." (82-84)
Vote aff to enact dysfluencies in communicative spheres to create frictions that disrupt the semiotic flow of debate. Our politics resists the spell of the linguistic by using dysfluent systems of grammar, norms and communication to escape the totalizing demands of fluency.
St. Pierre 3 ~Becoming Dysfluent: Fluency as Biopolitics and Hegemony Joshua St. Pierre Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Volume 11, Issue 3, 2017, pp. 339-356 (Article) Published by Liverpool University Press~ UTDD recut Lex VM "In conclusion, we might consider that for McRuer, following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick AND precisely in its flight from understanding and intelligibility." (353-354)
Voting affirmative engages in a heterotopic imagination of disability. This is a method of imagining disability differently outside of the current neoliberal conditions. The product is a figure of disability not as something to overcome but as a life worth living.
Fritsch 3 ~Fritsch, Kelly Michelle. "The Neoliberal Biopolitics of Disability: Towards Emergent Intracorporeal Practices." Diss. York U, Toronto, 2015. YorkSpace Institutional Repository. York University, 16 Dec. 2015. Web.~ UTDD recut Lex VM Challenging the undesirability of disability is a shared responsibility and goes beyond the inclusion of AND disability is, how it is practiced, and what it can be.
12/11/21
2- Productivity
Tournament: John Edie Holiday Debates Hosted by The Blake School | Round: 6 | Opponent: Apple Valley KW | Judge: Kuffour, Julian
1AC
Communicative arenas such as debate links disabled folk under modes of compulsive able-bodiedness. They are controlled by biopolitical systems of fluency which systematically smooths dysfluencies to maintain the fluid semiotic operation. Thus, the role of the ballot is to vote for the debater that best resists the technologies of fluency.
St. Pierre 17 ~Becoming Dysfluent: Fluency as Biopolitics and Hegemony Joshua St. Pierre Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Volume 11, Issue 3, 2017, pp. 339-356 (Article) Published by Liverpool University Press~ Lex VM "Given that compulsory able-bodiedness emanates from everywhere and nowhere, it is AND ends through the logic of optimization and closure." (342-344)
New biopolitical developments in neoliberal capitalism has shifted the focus of normalizing the disabled body to profiting off of its capacitation through medicalization. Bodies are now evaluated in regard to their productivity and health blurring the distinction between abled and disabled forming gradations of capacity and debility.
Fritsch 15 ~Fritsch, Kelly Michelle. "The Neoliberal Biopolitics of Disability: Towards Emergent Intracorporeal Practices." Diss. York U, Toronto, 2015. YorkSpace Institutional Repository. York University, 16 Dec. 2015. Web.~ Lex VM Puar argues that all bodies in neoliberal capitalism are "being evaluated in relation to AND of citizenship has intensified the costs associated with failing to access the workplace."
Speech and technologies of fluency has fueled the rise of Semiocapitalism which requires information to move quickly and effortlessly. This results in the capacitation of certain disabled bodies at the expense of debilitating dysfluent ones.
St. Pierre 2 ~Becoming Dysfluent: Fluency as Biopolitics and Hegemony Joshua St. Pierre Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Volume 11, Issue 3, 2017, pp. 339-356 (Article) Published by Liverpool University Press~ UTDD recut Lex VM Considered in terms of optimization, the function of fluency is quite familiar: technologies AND excellent communication skills" marginalize dysfluent laborers in postindustrial economies." (344)
Biocapitalism creates a structure of value where the ideal Child that symbolizes the image of futurity is the one that embodies maximized productivity. In reality, this sacred Child is unobtainable and requires the death and enhancement of disability to give it meaning. This locks disability in a cycle of cruelly optimistic futures that are predicated on disabled death.
Fritsch 2 ~Fritsch, Kelly Michelle. "The Neoliberal Biopolitics of Disability: Towards Emergent Intracorporeal Practices." Diss. York U, Toronto, 2015. YorkSpace Institutional Repository. York University, 16 Dec. 2015. Web.~ Lex VM What Berardi (2011) and Edelman (2004) do not account for are AND sliding into neoliberalism's forms of capacitation and enhancement that incapacitates and disables others.
This affective economy determines the value and circulation of social goods which allows biocapitalism to frame disability through a narrative of overcoming suffering. This produces disability as tragedy, pity, and disgust.
Fritsch 2 The Neoliberal Biopolitics of Disability: Towards Emergent Intracorporeal Practices by Kelly Fritsch JUNE 2015 UTDD "Indebted to the work of Henri- Bergson, Baruch Spinoza, and Gilles AND face of contested understandings of disability or accessibility." (82-84)
Vote aff to enact dysfluencies in communicative spheres to create frictions that disrupt the semiotic flow of debate. Our politics resists the spell of the linguistic by using dysfluent systems of grammar, norms and communication to escape the totalizing demands of fluency.
St. Pierre 3 ~Becoming Dysfluent: Fluency as Biopolitics and Hegemony Joshua St. Pierre Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Volume 11, Issue 3, 2017, pp. 339-356 (Article) Published by Liverpool University Press~ UTDD recut Lex VM "In conclusion, we might consider that for McRuer, following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick AND precisely in its flight from understanding and intelligibility." (353-354)
Voting affirmative engages in a heterotopic imagination of disability. This is a method of imagining disability differently outside of the current neoliberal conditions. The product is a figure of disability not as something to overcome but as a life worth living.
Fritsch 3 ~Fritsch, Kelly Michelle. "The Neoliberal Biopolitics of Disability: Towards Emergent Intracorporeal Practices." Diss. York U, Toronto, 2015. YorkSpace Institutional Repository. York University, 16 Dec. 2015. Web.~ UTDD recut Lex VM Challenging the undesirability of disability is a shared responsibility and goes beyond the inclusion of AND disability is, how it is practiced, and what it can be.
Uv
1~ Theory is incoherent:
A~ The ballot is always determined off inequalities
B~ Theory is evaluating off the flow rather than making the better norm
C~ Things get proven true in debate rounds all the time that aren't true in the real world
D~ No competitive activity would establish rules in the middle of a competition.
E~ It sets bad norms because we vote for interps that are marginally better rather than the best version
F~ It's paradoxical because it limits arguments but uses arguments to do that
The standard is maximizing expected well being or saving lives.
1~ Death is bad and outweighs – it destroys the subject itself – kills any ability to achieve value in ethics since life is a prerequisite.
2~ Extinction outweighs –
1 – Paternalism – taking everyones lives without their consent is actively violent and takes away people's autonomy.
2 – Suffering – mass death causes suffering because people can't get access to resources and basic necessities
3 – Moral uncertainty – if we're unsure about which interpretation of the world is true – we ought to preserve the world to keep debating about it
3~ Util forces you to justify why actions are good and bad – intuitions fail in the real world.
Hare 79, R.M. What Is Wrong with Slavery. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1979, links,jstor.org/sici?sici=0048-3915281979242983A23C1033AWIWWS3E2.0.CO3B2-6. TG Utilitarianism therefore, unlike some other theories, is exposed to the facts. The AND to show this, as opposed to merely protesting that slavery is wrong.
12/3/21
3- Util v3
Tournament: John Edie Holiday Debates Hosted by The Blake School | Round: 2 | Opponent: Eden Prairie AG | Judge: Czyz, Kaya
Util
Pleasure and pain are intrinsically valuable. People consistently regard pleasure and pain as good reasons for action, despite the fact that pleasure doesn't seem to be instrumentally valuable for anything.
Moen 16 ~(Ole Martin Moen, Research Fellow in Philosophy at University of Oslo) "An Argument for Hedonism," Journal of Value Inquiry (Springer), 50 (2) 2016: 267–281, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10790-015-9506-9~~ TDI Let us start by observing, empirically, that a widely shared judgment about intrinsic value and disvalue is that pleasure is intrinsically valuable and pain is intrinsically disvaluable. On virtually any proposed list of intrinsic values and disvalues (we will look at some of them below), pleasure is included among the intrinsic values and pain among the intrinsic disvalues. This inclusion makes intuitive sense, moreover, for there is something undeniably good about the way pleasure feels and something undeniably bad about the way pain feels, and neither the goodness of pleasure nor the badness of pain seems to be exhausted by the further effects that these experiences might have. "Pleasure" and "pain" are here understood inclusively, as encompassing anything hedonically positive and anything hedonically negative.2 The special value statuses of pleasure and pain are manifested in how we treat these experiences in our everyday reasoning about values. If you tell me that you are heading for the convenience store, I might ask: "What for?" This is a reasonable question, for when you go to the convenience store you usually do so, not merely for the sake of going to the convenience store, but for the sake of achieving something further that you deem to be valuable. You might answer, for example: "To buy soda." This answer makes sense, for soda is a nice thing and you can get it at the convenience store. I might further inquire, however: "What is buying the soda good for?" This further question can also be a reasonable one, for it need not be obvious why you want the soda. You might answer: "Well, I want it for the pleasure of drinking it." If I then proceed by asking "But what is the pleasure of drinking the soda good for?" the discussion is likely to reach an awkward end. The reason is that the pleasure is not good for anything further; it is simply that for which going to the convenience store and buying the soda is good.3 As Aristotle observes: "We never ask ~a man~ what his end is in being pleased, because we assume that pleasure is choice worthy in itself."4 Presumably, a similar story can be told in the case of pains, for if someone says "This is painful!" we never respond by asking: "And why is that a problem?" We take for granted that if something is painful, we have a sufficient explanation of why it is bad. If we are onto something in our everyday reasoning about values, it seems that pleasure and pain are both places where we reach the end of the line in matters of value.
Moral uncertainty means preventing extinction should be our highest priority.
Interp: Debaters must disclose round reports on the 2021-2022 NDCA LD wiki for every round they have debated this season. Round reports disclose which positions (AC, NC, K, T, Theory, etc.) were read/gone for in every speech.
Violation: screenshot in the doc – they have none – look in the round reports column
Standards:
1~ Level Playing Field – big schools can go around and collect flows but independents are left in the dark so round reports are key for them to prep- they give you an idea of overall what layers debaters like going for so you can best prepare your strategy against them. Accessibility first and independent voter – it's an impact multiplier.
2~ Strategy Education – round reports help novices understand the context in which positions are read by good debaters and help with brainstorming potential 1NCs vs affs – helps compensate for kids who can't afford coaches to prep out affs.
3~ Pre-round prep –1ARs gives especially give an idea of what type of debater someone is – they could go for 1AR theory every round– otherwise I enter every round unknowing whereas you have an idea of what you want to go for from the start – key to good clash
~1~ DTD on 1ac theory and disclosure – a) disclosure cannot be drop the argument because it would just drop you because you're the norm b) deterrence
~2~ No RVI on ac theory – otherwise the neg would dump for 7 mins on a shell and moot the possibility of a 1ar out – any reason why they get an rvi is nonunique because you would have to respond to 6 minutes of the 1AC regardless of if its theory or a contention
~3~ Competing Interps – 1~ reasonability is arbitrary – impossible to know what is reasonable until you establish a brightline 2~ bites judge intervention cuz they have to gut check what they think is good 3~ reasonability collapses cuz u use offense defense to evaluate offense under the BL 4~ norms – you can sidestep norms by selectively choosing a different brightline you meet every round.
~4~ Fairness is a voter because debate is a game governed by rules and you can't tell who actually won if the layer was skewed.
Plan: The Peoples Republic of China ought to prohibit appropriation of space by private entities.
1AC – Adv
The Advantage is Primacy.
The US is in the lead now but China's set to surpass – space becomes a new frontier for war, influence, and property.
Kharpal 21 ~Arjun Kharpal, 5-29-2021, "China once said it couldn't put a potato in space. Now it's eyeing Mars," CNBC, https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/30/china-space-goals-ccp-100th-anniversary.html JB~ GUANGZHOU, China — In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first AND debris, space traffic management and the exploitation of extra-terrestrial resources."
Appropriation is key to meet China's goals through space resources and tech
Campo 21 ~Jose A. Martin del Campo, J.D. Candidate at Texas AandM University School of Law, 3-23-2021, "Finders K Finders Keepers: Who Has Say Over Private Property in Space," Texas AandM Journal of Property Law, https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1155andcontext=journal-of-property-law~~/Kankee I. INTRODUCTION On October 4, 1957, the Space Age officially began when AND of property rights. II. LEGAL PRINCIPLES INFLUENCING THE DEVELOPMENT OF SPACE LAW
It's exponential – more and more companies will follow
Jiang Zhao 18 ~Shengli Jiang and Yun Zhao (2018) "The Aftermath of the US Space Resource Exploration and Utilization Act: What's Left for China?" https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c3a4/fb6e0f91f4d8a13ddac4b0f949f6c3afa5c0.pdf JB~ Olinga argued that the legal regime prohibiting the appropriation of space resources deprives private entities AND the priority to the interests from the exploration and utilization of space resources.
Space becomes a new domain where China establishes primacy and appropriation is their golden ticket
Jiang Zhao 18 ~Shengli Jiang and Yun Zhao (2018) "The Aftermath of the US Space Resource Exploration and Utilization Act: What's Left for China?" https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c3a4/fb6e0f91f4d8a13ddac4b0f949f6c3afa5c0.pdf JB~ China is a "responsible major country" of space activities.96 It should AND This part will focus on an international mechanism for the space mining activities.
Scenario 1 is Primacy –
Space dominance is key to US hegemony
Weichert 17 ~(Brandon J., a former Congressional staff member who holds a Master of Arts in Statecraft and National Security Affairs from the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C. He is the founder of The Weichert Report: An Online Journal of Geopolitics, and is currently completing a book on national security space policy.) "The High Ground: The Case for U.S. Space Dominance," Science Direct, 2017. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0030438717300108~~ RR The global order is currently disordered. New states with completely different values from the AND It must be the goal of U.S. policymakers today.24
Primacy solves arms races, land grabs, rogue states, and great power war.
Brands 18 ~Hal, Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments." American Grand Strategy in the Age of Trump." Page 129-133~ Since World War II, the United States has had a military second to none AND to its military dominance than it has for at least a quarter century.
Chinese leadership in technology causes extinction.
Kroenig 18 ~Matthew, Associate Professor of Government and Foreign Service at Georgetown University and Deputy Director for Strategy in the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council, and Bharath Gopalaswamy, Director of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council, holds a PhD in mechanical engineering with a specialization in numerical acoustics from Trinity College, Dublin, Nov 2018, "Will disruptive technology cause nuclear war?", Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, https://thebulletin.org/2018/11/will-disruptive-technology-cause-nuclear-war~~ Recently, analysts have argued that emerging technologies with military applications may undermine nuclear stability AND race for technological superiority to its autocratic challengers just might mean nuclear Armageddon.
Reject heg bad arguments – their evidence is epistemologically suspect
Gilsinan 20 ~(Kathy, a St. Louis-based contributing writer at The Atlantic. Her book, The Helpers: Profiles From the Front Lines of the Pandemic, comes out in March 2022. She was previously an editor at World Politics Review.) "How China Is Planning to Win Back the World" The Atlantic, 5/28/2020. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/05/china-disinformation-propaganda-united-states-xi-jinping/612085/~~ BC This was a bizarre salvo in China's propaganda war with the United States over the AND and that the reeling world may condemn it but still depends on it.
1AC – Framing
I value morality.
The metaethic is naturalism.
The standard is act hedonistic util.
~1~ Pleasure and pain are the starting point for moral reasoning—they're our most baseline desires and the only things that explain the intrinsic value of objects or actions
Moen 16, Ole Martin (PhD, Research Fellow in Philosophy at University of Oslo). "An Argument for Hedonism." Journal of Value Inquiry 50.2 (2016): 267. Let us start by observing, empirically, that a widely shared judgment about intrinsic AND notion of legal standing will outstrip the power relations that ground Pettit's theory.
~2~ Extinction is bad and outweighs
MacAskill 14 ~William, Oxford Philosopher and youngest tenured philosopher in the world, Normative Uncertainty, 2014~ The human race might go extinct from a number of causes: asteroids, supervolcanoes AND with the benefit of keeping one's options open while one gains new information.
1/7/22
JF- Debris
Tournament: John Edie Holiday Debates Hosted by The Blake School | Round: 3 | Opponent: Minnetonka AJ | Judge: Chang, Curtis
Debris
Privatization of space travel kills off public space exploration.
Commercial rocket launches produce space clutter—increased debris could reach a tipping point
Thompson 20 ~(Clive, author of Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World, a columnist for Wired magazine, and a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine) "Monetizing the Final Frontier The strange new push for space privatization," December 3, 2020 https://newrepublic.com/article/160303/monetizing-final-frontier~~ TDI "Physics tells us that two things can't occupy the same space at the same AND -conference call, he conceded that it's a huge, unresolved issue.
Space dust wrecks satellites and debris exponentially spirals
Intagliata 17 ~(Christopher Intagliata, MA Journalism from NYU, Editor for NPRs All Things Considered, Reporter/Host for Scientific American's 60 Second Science) "The Sneaky Danger of Space Dust," Scientific American, May 11, 2017, https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/the-sneaky-danger-of-space-dust/~~ TDI When tiny particles of space debris slam into satellites, the collision could cause the emission of hardware-frying radiation, Christopher Intagliata reports. Aside from all the satellites, and the space station orbiting the Earth, there's a lot of trash circling the planet, too. Twenty-one thousand baseball-sized chunks of debris, according to NASA. But that number's dwarfed by the number of small particles. There's hundreds of millions of those. "And those smaller particles tend to be going fast. Think of picking up a grain of sand at the beach, and that would be on the large side. But they're going 60 kilometers per second." Sigrid Close, an applied physicist and astronautical engineer at Stanford University. Close says that whereas mechanical damage—like punctures—is the worry with the bigger chunks, the dust-sized stuff might leave more insidious, invisible marks on satellites—by causing electrical damage. "We also think this phenomenon can be attributed to some of the failures and anomalies we see on orbit, that right now are basically tagged as 'unknown cause.'" Close and her colleague Alex Fletcher modeled this phenomenon mathematically, based on plasma physics behavior. And here's what they think happens. First, the dust slams into the spacecraft. Incredibly fast. It vaporizes and ionizes a bit of the ship—and itself. Which generates a cloud of ions and electrons, traveling at different speeds. And then: "It's like a spring action, the electrons are pulled back to the ions, ions are being pushed ahead a little bit. And then the electrons overshoot the ions, so they oscillate, and then they go back out again." That movement of electrons creates a pulse of electromagnetic radiation, which Close says could be the culprit for some of that electrical damage to satellites. The study is in the journal Physics of Plasmas. ~Alex C. Fletcher and Sigrid Close, Particle-in-cell simulations of an RF emission mechanism associated with hypervelocity impact plasmas~
Privatized space tourism increases collision risks due to orbital debris.
Tehrani 4/1 ~(James, Editor in Chief of Spark Magazine) "Space Junk: A Safety and Sustainability Problem Moving at 18,000 MPH," April 1, 2021, https://sphera.com/spark/space-junk-a-safety-and-sustainability-problem-moving-at-18000-mph/~~ TDI Most of the current debris is found in the low Earth orbit (LEO), which is about 600 to 1,200 miles (1,000 to 2,000 kilometers) above the planet. NASA calls LEO an "orbital space junkyard." The junk isn't sitting idly in a landfill; it is moving around at speeds up to 18,000 mph (29,000 kph), or 23 times the speed of sound. While the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee was designed to coordinate space debris efforts, there are currently no international laws in place regarding removing space debris. Since a single satellite can cost between $50 million and $400 million, the risk of damage from space debris to a satellite is clearly significant. And as more debris is left behind, there is obviously more risk of collisions, especially when space tourism picks up. The orbiting junk was explored in the 2013 film "Gravity," starring George Clooney and Sandra Bullock; it's known as the Kessler Effect. Don Kessler, the former NASA scientist who studied space debris even told the Guardian back in 2011 in regard to formulating a plan to deal with space junk: "The longer you wait to do this, the more expensive it's going to be. … This scenario of increasing space debris will play out even if we don't put anything else in orbit," he said. On that point, the European Space Agency has contracted with a Swiss startup called ClearSpace that plans to launch its first mission to remove space debris in 2025. The Gravity of the Situation Without a doubt, space debris is an Operational Risk; even the International Space Station has to dodge space junk at times. Former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine even tweeted last September that the "Space Station has maneuvered 3 times in 2020 to avoid debris. In the last 2 weeks, there have been 3 high concern potential conjunctions. Debris is getting worse!" Some of the larger debris that doesn't burn up re-entering the atmosphere (about one object per day) even crashes back on Earth. Since most of the Earth's surface is covered in water, it's not surprisingly that most of the junk winds up in oceans, so the risk to humans is statistically very low. That doesn't mean nil though. For example, there is debris from Russian Proton rockets that has been found in Siberia, including that of old fuel tanks containing toxic fuel residue, which can be harmful to plants, animals and humans. The environmental risks of space junk need to be explored further. A piece of space junk floating through the ocean is certainly not nearly as concerning as our plastic problem, but it's nothing to ignore either. LCA Leads the Way Just as more and more companies are assessing the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of their products and services from cradle to grave on Planet Earth, it stands to reason that LCA could be just as important in outer space. That's especially true when you consider space tourism is poised to blast off to become a potential $1.5 billion industry by 2028. The more activity, the more debris.
Increased space debris makes future space exploration impossible
Webb 18 ~(Amy Webb is a professor at the NYU Stern School of Business and is the chief executive of the Future Today Institute, a strategic foresight and research group in Washington, D.C.), "Space Oddities: We Need a Plan to Stop Polluting Space Before It's Too Late" WIRED Science April 12, 2018 https://www.wired.com/story/we-need-a-plan-to-stop-polluting-space-before-its-too-late/~~ TDI Space is our next dumping ground. As many as 170 million fragments of metal and astro debris necklace Earth. That includes 20,000 pieces larger than a softball, and 500,000 about the size of a marble, according to NASA. Old satellites, like Tiangong-1, are the biggest and highest-profile lumps of rubbish, but most of it comes from rocket parts and even lost astronaut tools. Size doesn't always matter—a fleck of paint, orbiting at a high velocity, cracked the Space Shuttle's windshield. This debris will pose a navigation hazard for many centuries to come. At least 200 objects roar back into the atmosphere each year, including pieces of solar panels and antennas and fragments of metal. All of them pose dangers for future astronauts: One plum-sized piece of gnarled space trash traveling faster than a speeding bullet could rip a five-foot hole into a spacecraft. And that collision, then, would hatch its own spectacle of shrapnel, which would join the rushing river of junk already circling the planet. It's not just Americans doing the dumping. China and Russia each have dozens of decommissioned satellites overhead, though the US certainly does it with style. Like everyone, I marveled at the successful launch of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket, whose cargo included Elon Musk's Tesla Roaster and a mannequin driver named Starman. I'll admit, I teared up listening to David Bowie as the rockets separated from the payload. It was an incredible technological achievement, one proving that the system could someday transport people and goods—perhaps real cars, and real people—into space. Now that Tesla and its driver are overhead, in America's junkyard in the sky. To be sure, space is big. Really big. Most debris soars about 1,250 miles above the Earth's surface, so you have better odds scoring a seat on Virgin Galactic's maiden voyage than witnessing Starman crash into your next door neighbor's house. But it's our behavior back here on Earth—our insistence on sending things up, without really thinking how to safely contain or send them back down—that should concern you. We weren't always so short-sighted. Ancient Native Americans lived by the Seventh Generation Principal, a way of long-term thinking that considered how every decision would affect their descendants seven generations into the future. In Japan, Buddhist monks devoted part of their daily rituals and work to ensuring the longevity of their communities, even planting and tending to bamboo forests, which would eventually be harvested, treated and used to repair temple roofs many decades hence. With each new generation, we live life faster than our ancestors. As a result, we spend less time thinking about the farther future of humanity. We now have our sights set on colonizing Mars, mining asteroids for research and commerce, and venturing out to the furthest reaches of our galaxy. Space is no longer the final frontier; we're already exploring it. Our current approach is about getting there, rather than considering what "getting there" could mean for future generations of humans, not to mention other life in the universe. Where all that junk winds up isn't something we can predict accurately. We could be unintentionally wreaking havoc on civilizations far away from Earth, catalyzing future intergalactic wars. Or, we might cause far less scintillating problems. Space junk could start to behave in unpredictable ways, reflecting sunlight the wrong direction, or changing our atmosphere, or impacting the universe in ways that don't fit into our current understanding of physics. Last week—30 years after my friends and I created an imaginary net to capture space debris—SpaceX launched RemoveDEBRIS, its own prototype, an experimental net to collect junk in orbit. It's a neat idea, but even as middle schoolers, we knew it was an impractical one. Individual nets can't possibly scale to address the hundreds of millions of particles of debris already in orbit. The challenge is that all of our space agencies are inextricably tied to national governments and militaries. Seeking a global agreement on how to mitigate debris would involve each country divulging exactly what it was launching and when—an unlikely scenario. The private sector could collaborate to build grand-scale orbital cleaners, but their commercial interests are driven by immediate launches. Given all the planned launches in our near future, we don't have much time to wait. We must learn to be better stewards of our own planet—and commit to very long-term thinking—before we try to colonize any others.
Early warning satellites going dark signals attacks – causes miscalc and goes nuclear
Orwig 16 ~(Jessica, MS in science and tech journalism from Texas AandM, BS in astronomy and physics from Ohio State) "Russia says a growing problem in space could be enough to spark a war," Insider,' January 26, 2016, https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-says-space-junk-could-spark-war-2016-1~~ TDI NASA has already warned that the large amount of space junk around our planet is growing beyond our control, but now a team of Russian scientists has cited another potentially unforeseen consequence of that debris: War. Scientists estimate that anywhere from 500,000 to 600,000 pieces of human-made space debris between 0.4 and 4 inches in size are currently orbiting the Earth and traveling at speeds over 17,000 miles per hour. If one of those pieces smashed into a military satellite it "may provoke political or even armed conflict between space-faring nations," Vitaly Adushkin, a researcher for the Institute of Geosphere Dynamics at the Russian Academy of Sciences, reported in a paper set to be published in the peer-reviewed journal Acta Astronautica, which is sponsored by the International Academy of Astronautics. Say, for example, that a satellite was destroyed or significantly damaged in orbit — something that a 4-inch hunk of space junk could easily do traveling at speeds of 17,500 miles per hour, Adushkin reported. (Even smaller pieces no bigger than size of a pea could cause enough damage to the satellite that it would no longer operate correctly, he notes.) It would be difficult for anyone to determine whether the event was accidental or deliberate. This lack of immediate proof could lead to false accusations, heated arguments and, eventually, war, according to Adushkin and his colleagues. A politically dangerous dilemma In the report, the Adushkin said that there have already been repeated "sudden failures" of military spacecraft in te last two decades that cannot be explained. "So, there are two possible explanations," he wrote. The first is "unregistered collisions with space objects." The second is "machinations" ~deliberate action~ of the space adversary. "This is a politically dangerous dilemma," he added. But these mysterious failures in the past aren't what concerns Adushkin most. It's a future threat of what experts call the cascade effect that has Adushkin and other scientists around the world extremely concerned. The Kessler Syndrome In 1978, American astrophysicist Donald Kessler predicted that the amount of space debris around Earth would begin to grow exponentially after the turn of the millennium. Kessler 's predictions rely on the fact that over time, space junk accumulates. We leave most of our defunct satellites in space, and when meteors and other man-made space debris slam into them, you get a cascade of debris. The cascade effect — also known as the Kessler Syndrome — refers to a critical point wherein the density of space junk grows so large that a single collision could set off a domino effect of increasingly more collisions. For Kessler, this is a problem because it would "create small debris faster than it can be removed," Kessler said last year. And this cloud of junk could eventually make missions to space too dangerous. For Adushkin, this would exacerbate the issue of identifying what, or who, could be behind broken satellites. The future So far, the US and Russian Space Surveillance Systems have catalogued 170,000 pieces of large space debris (between 4 and 8 inches wide) and are currently tracking them to prevent anymore dilemmas like the ones Adushkin and his colleagues cite in their paper. But it's not just the large objects that concern Adushkin, who reported that even small objects (less than 1/3 of an inch) could damage satellites to the point they can't function properly. Using mathematical models, Adushkin and his colleagues calculated what the situtation will be like in 200 years if we continue to leave satellites in space and make no effort to clean up the mess. They estimate we'll have: 1.5 times more fragments greater than 8 inches across 3.2 times more fragments between 4 and 8 inches across 13-20 times more smaller-sized fragments less than 4 inches across "The number of small-size, non-catalogued objects will grow exponentially in mutual collisions," the researchers reported.
Earth observation satellites key to warming adaptation
Alonso 18 ~(Elisa Jiménez Alonso, communications consultant with Acclimatise, climate resilience organization) "Earth Observation of Increasing Importance for Climate Change Adaptation," Acclimatise, May 2, 2018, https://www.acclimatise.uk.com/2018/05/02/earth-observation-of-increasing-importance-for-climate-change-adaptation/~~ TDI Earth observation (EO) satellites are playing an increasingly important role in assessing climate change. By providing a constant and consistent stream of data about the state of the climate, EO is not just improving scientific outcomes but can also inform climate policy. Managing climate-related risks effectively requires accurate, robust, sustained, and wide-ranging climate information. Reliable observational climate data can help scientists test the accuracy of their models and improve the science of attributing certain events to climate change. Information based on projections from models and historic data can help decision makers plan and implement adaptation actions. Providing information in data-sparse regions Ground-based weather and climate monitoring systems only cover about 30 of the Earth's surface. In many parts of the world such data is incomplete and patchy due to poorly maintained weather stations and a general lack of such facilities. EO satellites and rapidly improving satellite technology, especially data from open access programmes, offer a valuable source information for such data-sparse regions. This is especially important since countries and regions with a lack of climate data are often particularly vulnerable to climate change impacts. International efforts for systematic observation The importance of satellite-based observations is also recognised by the international community. Following the recommendations of the World Meteorological Organization's (WMO) Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) programme, the UNFCCC strongly encourages countries that support space agencies with EO programmes to get involved in GCOS and support the programme's implementation. The Paris Agreement highlights the need for and importance of effective and progressive responses to the threat of climate change based on the best available scientific knowledge. This implies that climate knowledge needs to be strengthened, which includes continuously improving systematic observations of the Earth's climate. To meet the need of such systematic climate observations, GCOS developed the concept of the Essential Climate Variable, or ECV. According to WMO, an ECV "is a physical, chemical or biological variable or a group of linked variables that critically contributes to the characterization of Earth' s climate." In 2010, 50 ECVs which would help the work of the UNFCCC and IPCC were defined by GCOS. The ECVs, which can be seen below, were identified due to their relevance for characterising the climate system and its changes, the technical feasibility of observing or deriving them on a global scale, and their cost effectiveness. The 50 Essential Climate Variables as defined by GCOS. One effort supporting the systemic observation of the climate is the European Space Agency's (ESA) Climate Change Initiative (CCI). The programme taps into its own and its member countries' EO archives that have been established in the last three decades in order to provide a timely and adequate contribution to the ECV databases required by the UNFCCC. Robust evidence supporting climate risk management Earth observation satellites can observe the entire Earth on a daily basis (polar orbiting satellites) or continuously monitor the disk of Earth below them (geostationary satellites) maintaining a constant watch of the entire globe. Sensors can target any point on Earth even the most remote and inhospitable areas which helps monitor deforestation in vast tropical forests and the melting of the ice caps. Without insights offered by EO satellites there would not be enough evidence for decision makers to base their climate policies on, increasing the risk of maladaptation. Robust EO data is an invaluable resource for collecting climate information that can inform climate risk management and make it more effective.
Warming causes extinction
Klein 14~(Naomi Klein, award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist, former Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics, member of the board of directors of 350.org), This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, pp. 12-14~ In a 2012 report, the World Bank laid out the gamble implied by that target. "As global warming approaches and exceeds 2-degrees Celsius, there is a risk of triggering nonlinear tipping elements. Examples include the disintegration of the West Antarctic ice sheet leading to more rapid sea-level rise, or large-scale Amazon dieback drastically affecting ecosystems, rivers, agriculture, energy production, and livelihoods. This would further add to 21st-century global warming and impact entire continents." In other words, once we allow temperatures to climb past a certain point, where the mercury stops is not in our control. But the bigger problem—and the reason Copenhagen caused such great despair—is that because governments did not agree to binding targets, they are free to pretty much ignore their commitments. Which is precisely what is happening. Indeed, emissions are rising so rapidly that unless something radical changes within our economic structure, 2 degrees now looks like a utopian dream. And it's not just environmentalists who are raising the alarm. The World Bank also warned when it released its report that "we're on track to a 4-C warmer world ~by century's end~ marked by extreme heat waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise." And the report cautioned that, "there is also no certainty that adaptation to a 4-C world is possible." Kevin Anderson, former director (now deputy director) of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change, which has quickly established itself as one of the U.K's premier climate research institutions, is even blunter; he says 4 degrees Celsius warming—7.2 degrees Fahrenheit—is "incompatible with an organized, equitable, and civilized global community." We don't know exactly what a 4 degree Celsius world would look like, but even the best-case scenario is likely to be calamitous. Four degrees of warming could raise global sea levels by 1 or possibly even 2 meters by 2100 (and would lock in at least a few additional meters over future centuries). This would drown some island nations such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, and inundate many coastal areas from Ecuador and Brazil to the Netherlands to much of California and the northeastern United States as well as huge swaths of South and Southeast Asia. Major cities likely in jeopardy include Boston, New York, greater Los Angeles, Vancouver, London, Mumbai, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. Meanwhile, brutal heat waves that can kill tens of thousands of people, even in wealthy countries, would become entirely unremarkable summer events on every continent but Antarctica. The heat would also cause staple crops to suffer dramatic yield losses across the globe (it is possible that Indian wheat and U.S. could plummet by as much as 60 percent), this at a time when demand will be surging due to population growth and a growing demand for meat. And since crops will be facing not just heat stress but also extreme events such as wide-ranging droughts, flooding, or pest outbreaks, the losses could easily turn out to be more severe than the models have predicted. When you add ruinous hurricanes, raging wildfires, fisheries collapses, widespread disruptions to water supplies, extinctions, and globe-trotting diseases to the mix, it indeed becomes difficult to imagine that a peaceful, ordered society could be sustained (that is, where such a thing exists in the first place). And keep in mind that these are the optimistic scenarios in which warming is more or less stabilized at 4 degrees Celsius and does not trigger tipping points beyond which runaway warming would occur. Based on the latest modeling, it is becoming safer to assume that 4 degrees could bring about a number of extremely dangerous feedback loops—an Arctic that is regularly ice-free in September, for instance, or, according to one recent study, global vegetation that is too saturated to act as a reliable "sink", leading to more carbon being emitted rather than stored. Once this happens, any hope of predicting impacts pretty much goes out the window. And this process may be starting sooner than anyone predicted. In May 2014, NASA and the University of California, Irvine scientists revealed that glacier melt in a section of West Antarctica roughly the size of France now "appears unstoppable." This likely spells down for the entire West Antarctic ice sheet, which according to lead study author Eric Rignot "comes with a sea level rise between three and five metres. Such an event will displace millions of people worldwide." The disintegration, however, could unfold over centuries and there is still time for emission reductions to slow down the process and prevent the worst. Much more frightening than any of this is the fact that plenty of mainstream analysts think that on our current emissions trajectory, we are headed for even more than 4 degrees of warming. In 2011, the usually staid International Energy Agency (IEA) issued a report predicting that we are actually on track for 6 degrees Celsius—10.8 degrees Fahrenheit—of warming. And as the IEA's chief economist put it: "Everybody, even the school children, knows that this will have catastrophic implications for all of us." (The evidence indicates that 6 degrees of warming is likely to set in motion several major tipping points—not only slower ones such as the aforementioned breakdown of the West Antarctic ice sheet, but possibly more abrupt ones, like massive releases of methane from Arctic permafrost.) The accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers as also published a report warning businesses that we are headed for "4-C , or even 6-C" of warming. These various projections are the equivalent of every alarm in your house going off simultaneously. And then every alarm on your street going off as well, one by one by one. They mean, quite simply, that climate change has become an existential crisis for the human species. The only historical precedent for a crisis of this depth and scale was the Cold War fear that we were headed toward nuclear holocaust, which would have made much of the planet uninhabitable. But that was (and remains) a threat; a slim possibility, should geopolitics spiral out of control. The vast majority of nuclear scientists never told us that we were almost certainly going to put our civilization in peril if we kept going about our daily lives as usual, doing exactly what we were already going, which is what climate scientists have been telling us for years. As the Ohio State University climatologist Lonnie G. Thompson, a world-renowned specialist on glacier melt, explained in 2010, "Climatologists, like other scientists, tend to be a stolid group. We are not given to theatrical rantings about falling skies. Most of us are far more comfortable in our laboratories or gathering data in the field than we are giving interviews to journalists or speaking before Congressional committees. When then are climatologists speaking out about the dangers of global warming? The answer is that virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization."
12/18/21
JF- Russia
Tournament: John Edie Holiday Debates Hosted by The Blake School | Round: 3 | Opponent: Minnetonka AJ | Judge: Chang, Curtis
Russia
Deep space exploration is a shared goal that prevents escalation of US-Russia tensions. But privatization threatens it independent of our other internal links
CSIS 18 ~(Center for Strategic and International Studies), "Why Human Space Exploration Matters," August 21, 2018 https://www.csis.org/blogs/post-soviet-post/space-cooperation~~ TDI U.S.-Russian space cooperation continues to be a stated mutual goal. AND a phase out date of Russian RD-180 rocket engines by 2022.
It's make or break for the relationship—Ukraine, decline of US moral authority on international affairs puts us at the brink of the end of Russian diplomacy and even war
Weir 21 ~(Fred Weir has been the Monitor's Moscow correspondent, covering Russia and the former Soviet Union, since 1998. He's traveled over much of that vast territory, reporting on stories ranging from Russia's financial crash to the war in Chechnya, creeping Islamization in central Asia, Russia's demographic crisis, the rise of Vladimir Putin and his repeated returns to the Kremlin, and the ups and downs of US-Russia relations). "Worse than the Cold War? US-Russia relations hit new low." Christian Science Monitor 4-20-2021 https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2021/0420/Worse-than-the-Cold-War-US-Russia-relations-hit-new-low~~ TDI Russia's relations with the West, and the United States in particular, appear to AND .S. activities and policies that are harmful to our two countries."
Nuke war causes extinction – it won't stay limited
Edwards 17 ~(Paul N. Edwards, CISAC's William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Being interviewed by EarthSky/card is only parts of the interview directly from Paul Edwards.) "How nuclear war would affect Earth's climate," EarthSky, September 8, 2017, earthsky.org/human-world/how-nuclear-war-would-affect-earths-climate~ TDI We are not talking enough about the climatic effects of nuclear war. The " AND two nuclear powers would stay limited to these smaller, less destructive bombs.
12/18/21
JF- Russia v2
Tournament: Sunvite | Round: 6 | Opponent: American Heritage Broward AP | Judge: Peters, Donny
Fwk
Pleasure and pain are intrinsically valuable. People consistently regard pleasure and pain as good reasons for action,
Moen 16 ~(Ole Martin Moen, Research Fellow in Philosophy at University of Oslo) "An Argument for Hedonism," Journal of Value Inquiry (Springer), 50 (2) 2016: 267–281, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10790-015-9506-9~~ TDI Let us start by observing, empirically, that a widely shared judgment about intrinsic AND being pleased, because we assume that pleasure is choice worthy in itself."
Moral uncertainty means preventing extinction should be our highest priority.
Bostrom 12 ~(Nick Bostrom, Faculty of Philosophy and Oxford Martin School University of Oxford) "Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority." Global Policy, 2012~ TDI These reflections on moral uncertainty suggest an alternative, complementary way of looking at existential AND of value. To do this, we must prevent any existential catastrophe.
AC – Exploration Advantage
Space exploration is essential to the survival of humanity. Russia—
Deep space exploration is a shared goal that prevents escalation of US-Russia tensions. But privatization threatens it independent of our other internal links
CSIS 18 ~(Center for Strategic and International Studies), "Why Human Space Exploration Matters," August 21, 2018 https://www.csis.org/blogs/post-soviet-post/space-cooperation~~ TDI U.S.-Russian space cooperation continues to be a stated mutual goal. AND a phase out date of Russian RD-180 rocket engines by 2022.
It's make or break for the relationship—Ukraine, decline of US moral authority on international affairs puts us at the brink of the end of Russian diplomacy and even war
Weir 21 ~(Fred Weir has been the Monitor's Moscow correspondent, covering Russia and the former Soviet Union, since 1998. He's traveled over much of that vast territory, reporting on stories ranging from Russia's financial crash to the war in Chechnya, creeping Islamization in central Asia, Russia's demographic crisis, the rise of Vladimir Putin and his repeated returns to the Kremlin, and the ups and downs of US-Russia relations). "Worse than the Cold War? US-Russia relations hit new low." Christian Science Monitor 4-20-2021 https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2021/0420/Worse-than-the-Cold-War-US-Russia-relations-hit-new-low~~ TDI Russia's relations with the West, and the United States in particular, appear to AND .S. activities and policies that are harmful to our two countries."
Space weapons heighten potential for escalation and make perceptions of US-Russia space conflict key.
Alexey Arbatov et al, head of the Center for International Security at the Primakov National Research Institute of World Economy and International Relations, Major General Vladimir Dvorkin, a principal researcher at the Center for International Security at the Primakov National Research Institute of World Economy and International Relations and Peter Topychkanov, fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center's Nonproliferation Program, '17 "Russian And Chinese Perspectives On Non-Nuclear Weapons And Nuclear Risks" Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Publications, https://www.russiamatters.org/sites/default/files/media/files/Entanglement_interior_FNL.pdf Against this background, Russian military and technical experts are currently engaged in efforts to AND discusses how new and emerging military technologies might contribute to such an escalation.
Nuke war causes extinction – it won't stay limited
Edwards 17 ~(Paul N. Edwards, CISAC's William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Being interviewed by EarthSky/card is only parts of the interview directly from Paul Edwards.) "How nuclear war would affect Earth's climate," EarthSky, September 8, 2017, earthsky.org/human-world/how-nuclear-war-would-affect-earths-climate~ TDI We are not talking enough about the climatic effects of nuclear war. The " AND two nuclear powers would stay limited to these smaller, less destructive bombs.
debris—
Commercial rocket launches produce space clutter—increased debris could reach a tipping point
Thompson 20 ~(Clive, author of Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World, a columnist for Wired magazine, and a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine) "Monetizing the Final Frontier The strange new push for space privatization," December 3, 2020 https://newrepublic.com/article/160303/monetizing-final-frontier~~ TDI "Physics tells us that two things can't occupy the same space at the same AND -conference call, he conceded that it's a huge, unresolved issue.
Space dust wrecks satellites and debris exponentially spirals
Intagliata 17 ~(Christopher Intagliata, MA Journalism from NYU, Editor for NPRs All Things Considered, Reporter/Host for Scientific American's 60 Second Science) "The Sneaky Danger of Space Dust," Scientific American, May 11, 2017, https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/the-sneaky-danger-of-space-dust/~~ TDI When tiny particles of space debris slam into satellites, the collision could cause the emission of hardware-frying radiation, Christopher Intagliata reports. Aside from all the satellites, and the space station orbiting the Earth, there's a lot of trash circling the planet, too. Twenty-one thousand baseball-sized chunks of debris, according to NASA. But that number's dwarfed by the number of small particles. There's hundreds of millions of those. "And those smaller particles tend to be going fast. Think of picking up a grain of sand at the beach, and that would be on the large side. But they're going 60 kilometers per second." Sigrid Close, an applied physicist and astronautical engineer at Stanford University. Close says that whereas mechanical damage—like punctures—is the worry with the bigger chunks, the dust-sized stuff might leave more insidious, invisible marks on satellites—by causing electrical damage. "We also think this phenomenon can be attributed to some of the failures and anomalies we see on orbit, that right now are basically tagged as 'unknown cause.'" Close and her colleague Alex Fletcher modeled this phenomenon mathematically, based on plasma physics behavior. And here's what they think happens. First, the dust slams into the spacecraft. Incredibly fast. It vaporizes and ionizes a bit of the ship—and itself. Which generates a cloud of ions and electrons, traveling at different speeds. And then: "It's like a spring action, the electrons are pulled back to the ions, ions are being pushed ahead a little bit. And then the electrons overshoot the ions, so they oscillate, and then they go back out again." That movement of electrons creates a pulse of electromagnetic radiation, which Close says could be the culprit for some of that electrical damage to satellites. The study is in the journal Physics of Plasmas. ~Alex C. Fletcher and Sigrid Close, Particle-in-cell simulations of an RF emission mechanism associated with hypervelocity impact plasmas~
Privatized space tourism increases collision risks due to orbital debris.
Tehrani 4/1 ~(James, Editor in Chief of Spark Magazine) "Space Junk: A Safety and Sustainability Problem Moving at 18,000 MPH," April 1, 2021, https://sphera.com/spark/space-junk-a-safety-and-sustainability-problem-moving-at-18000-mph/~~ TDI Most of the current debris is found in the low Earth orbit (LEO), which is about 600 to 1,200 miles (1,000 to 2,000 kilometers) above the planet. NASA calls LEO an "orbital space junkyard." The junk isn't sitting idly in a landfill; it is moving around at speeds up to 18,000 mph (29,000 kph), or 23 times the speed of sound. While the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee was designed to coordinate space debris efforts, there are currently no international laws in place regarding removing space debris. Since a single satellite can cost between $50 million and $400 million, the risk of damage from space debris to a satellite is clearly significant. And as more debris is left behind, there is obviously more risk of collisions, especially when space tourism picks up. The orbiting junk was explored in the 2013 film "Gravity," starring George Clooney and Sandra Bullock; it's known as the Kessler Effect. Don Kessler, the former NASA scientist who studied space debris even told the Guardian back in 2011 in regard to formulating a plan to deal with space junk: "The longer you wait to do this, the more expensive it's going to be. … This scenario of increasing space debris will play out even if we don't put anything else in orbit," he said. On that point, the European Space Agency has contracted with a Swiss startup called ClearSpace that plans to launch its first mission to remove space debris in 2025. The Gravity of the Situation Without a doubt, space debris is an Operational Risk; even the International Space Station has to dodge space junk at times. Former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine even tweeted last September that the "Space Station has maneuvered 3 times in 2020 to avoid debris. In the last 2 weeks, there have been 3 high concern potential conjunctions. Debris is getting worse!" Some of the larger debris that doesn't burn up re-entering the atmosphere (about one object per day) even crashes back on Earth. Since most of the Earth's surface is covered in water, it's not surprisingly that most of the junk winds up in oceans, so the risk to humans is statistically very low. That doesn't mean nil though. For example, there is debris from Russian Proton rockets that has been found in Siberia, including that of old fuel tanks containing toxic fuel residue, which can be harmful to plants, animals and humans. The environmental risks of space junk need to be explored further. A piece of space junk floating through the ocean is certainly not nearly as concerning as our plastic problem, but it's nothing to ignore either. LCA Leads the Way Just as more and more companies are assessing the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of their products and services from cradle to grave on Planet Earth, it stands to reason that LCA could be just as important in outer space. That's especially true when you consider space tourism is poised to blast off to become a potential $1.5 billion industry by 2028. The more activity, the more debris.
Early warning satellites going dark signals attacks – causes miscalc and goes nuclear
Orwig 16 ~(Jessica, MS in science and tech journalism from Texas AandM, BS in astronomy and physics from Ohio State) "Russia says a growing problem in space could be enough to spark a war," Insider,' January 26, 2016, https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-says-space-junk-could-spark-war-2016-1~~ TDI NASA has already warned that the large amount of space junk around our planet is growing beyond our control, but now a team of Russian scientists has cited another potentially unforeseen consequence of that debris: War. Scientists estimate that anywhere from 500,000 to 600,000 pieces of human-made space debris between 0.4 and 4 inches in size are currently orbiting the Earth and traveling at speeds over 17,000 miles per hour. If one of those pieces smashed into a military satellite it "may provoke political or even armed conflict between space-faring nations," Vitaly Adushkin, a researcher for the Institute of Geosphere Dynamics at the Russian Academy of Sciences, reported in a paper set to be published in the peer-reviewed journal Acta Astronautica, which is sponsored by the International Academy of Astronautics. Say, for example, that a satellite was destroyed or significantly damaged in orbit — something that a 4-inch hunk of space junk could easily do traveling at speeds of 17,500 miles per hour, Adushkin reported. (Even smaller pieces no bigger than size of a pea could cause enough damage to the satellite that it would no longer operate correctly, he notes.) It would be difficult for anyone to determine whether the event was accidental or deliberate. This lack of immediate proof could lead to false accusations, heated arguments and, eventually, war, according to Adushkin and his colleagues. A politically dangerous dilemma In the report, the Adushkin said that there have already been repeated "sudden failures" of military spacecraft in te last two decades that cannot be explained. "So, there are two possible explanations," he wrote. The first is "unregistered collisions with space objects." The second is "machinations" ~deliberate action~ of the space adversary. "This is a politically dangerous dilemma," he added. But these mysterious failures in the past aren't what concerns Adushkin most. It's a future threat of what experts call the cascade effect that has Adushkin and other scientists around the world extremely concerned. The Kessler Syndrome In 1978, American astrophysicist Donald Kessler predicted that the amount of space debris around Earth would begin to grow exponentially after the turn of the millennium. Kessler 's predictions rely on the fact that over time, space junk accumulates. We leave most of our defunct satellites in space, and when meteors and other man-made space debris slam into them, you get a cascade of debris. The cascade effect — also known as the Kessler Syndrome — refers to a critical point wherein the density of space junk grows so large that a single collision could set off a domino effect of increasingly more collisions. For Kessler, this is a problem because it would "create small debris faster than it can be removed," Kessler said last year. And this cloud of junk could eventually make missions to space too dangerous. For Adushkin, this would exacerbate the issue of identifying what, or who, could be behind broken satellites. The future So far, the US and Russian Space Surveillance Systems have catalogued 170,000 pieces of large space debris (between 4 and 8 inches wide) and are currently tracking them to prevent anymore dilemmas like the ones Adushkin and his colleagues cite in their paper. But it's not just the large objects that concern Adushkin, who reported that even small objects (less than 1/3 of an inch) could damage satellites to the point they can't function properly. Using mathematical models, Adushkin and his colleagues calculated what the situtation will be like in 200 years if we continue to leave satellites in space and make no effort to clean up the mess. They estimate we'll have: 1.5 times more fragments greater than 8 inches across 3.2 times more fragments between 4 and 8 inches across 13-20 times more smaller-sized fragments less than 4 inches across "The number of small-size, non-catalogued objects will grow exponentially in mutual collisions," the researchers reported.
AC – Solvency
The aff solves orbital debris and decreases collision risks.
Budhiraia 20 ~(Mili, LL.B. candidate 2022 at Faculty of Law, University of Delhi.) "The Menace of Space Debris," August 30, 2020, https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2020/08/mili-budhiraja-space-debris-india/~~ TDI For most of the time India has participated in the space industry, it has played with one hand firmly tied behind its back. But with the introduction of the Self-Reliant India Movement (Aatma Nirbhar Bharat Abhiyaan), private companies hold the baton along with the government organizations to operate in the entire range of space activities. The Indian space industry now has unrivaled possibilities in the sectorial dimensions that constitute the field of space research and exploration. This raises the question of how privatization in the new space economy has increased the threshold of accountability for state actors involved in the operations. As of now, there are 375 private companies all across the globe engaged in the space industry. The privatization of the space industry relies upon the premise that it would lead to the expansion of opportunities to utilize the space. When in the mid-twentieth century the concept of privatization rose to the fore, it was faced with a bitter backlash. The Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, popularly known as the 'Outer Space Treaty', was made when the concept of involving commercial entities into the multitude of space operations was not favored. The United States Communication Satellite Act of 1962 provided foundational support to the launch of communication satellites by commercial enterprises, thereby setting the stage for the entry of private players into the industry. But with increasing access to space operations and a growing level of satellite population, the problem of space debris, and the pollution caused due to the congestion of satellites, witnessed a simultaneous growth reaction. Space debris ranges from defunct spacecraft to paint flecks chipped off from wear and tear. A small debris particle of a mere 1 millimeter has the potential to cause catastrophic collisions. Privatization can act as an inducement in a hyper-dependent society banking upon satellite supported technology to launch more satellites into space. The estimate hints upon a possible 1100 satellites launched by the space industry each year by 2025. While satellites provide a broad, interdisciplinary use including human space exploration, meteorology, and climate change to name a few, the situation has the potential to significantly increase space traffic. It calls for a higher level of safety in the orbiting region from the floating debris, which can cause collisions. Astrophysicist Donald J. Kessler predicted that the debris in the Lower Earth Orbit (LEO) would reach a breaking point with an increase in satellite traffic and would start a collision chain reaction. This phenomenon is known as Kessler Syndrome. As a corollary to this phenomenon runs the concept of "Tragedy of the Commons" introduced by Garrett Hardins. The tragedy of commons occurs in a shared-resource system where independent operations motivated by self-interests deplete the shared-resource through their collective action. The increase in space traffic, which subsequently leads to an increase in space debris, can render LEO economically unviable for other participants. The legal framework dealing with the issue of space contamination is insufficient to provide any recourse. The Space Debris Mitigation Guidelines of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (2007) provides an international instrument of a persuasive nature and therefore, making it obligatory on the state parties is an onerous task. Article VI of the Outer Space Treaty imposes an international responsibility on the states, and Article VII renders a state party internationally liable to other states for any harm caused due to their operations. Though these provisions address the issues of responsibility in case of ruptures caused at an international level, they do not obligate states to take preventive actions or to remove the harmful agents from the outer space region. Moreover, Article IX of the Outer Space Treaty creates an obligation on the state parties to intimate with other members of the "potentially harmful activities", but because the release of pollution is a recurrent phenomenon, the law cannot be put to good use. Article I of the Convention on International Liability for Damage Caused by Space Objects (Liability Convention) does not even cover environmental harm under the definition of damage. It exhibits the temperament of organizations on addressing the issues of environmental safety. The academic debate over the tackling of this issue has steered into the arena of taxation. A study has suggested that the problem of space debris can be controlled by levying "Orbit Tax". The concept of Orbit Tax or Orbital Use Fees (OUF) stems from the Pigouvian Tax System proposed by the economist, Arthur Pigou. The Pigouvian tax was assessed on activities that adversely affect societal interests. The carbon tax which is assessed on the emission of greenhouse gasses illustrates the nature of this taxation system and the jurisprudence behind it. But as the question stands, is the employing of Orbit Tax an effective solution to curb the menace of space pollution? The answer cannot be in a binary nature. The implementation of the OUF requires global participation of the state actors who are involved in the space industry. Harmonious participation could only be ensured with the consensus reached among the state parties on the rate of taxation proposed, the criteria of assessing tax, etc. The Carbon Tax, a form of pollution tax, was implemented under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It has witnessed significant participation and changes brought about in the municipal laws of many state members. But there has been a difference in the rate of taxation among the states which convolutes its implementation. Such disparities cannot be allowed to persist in the OUF model adopted for space debris taxation. Even if a presumption is accepted that Orbit Tax will be efficient in controlling the space debris release, the issue of the increased cost of operating satellites can result in a subsequent increase in the cost of providing satellite services. This can have an adverse impact on economically backward countries which are dependent on other state parties for launch and other satellite operations. Moreover, this does not provide an ultimate solution to eliminate the greater risk that debris causes. A better solution would be to motivate states to deploy efficient satellite infrastructure with a lower depletion rate. Instead of increasing the overall cost of a satellite through haphazard taxation measures, the satellite infrastructure shall be made more efficient. The goal should be of sustainable use of the resources. With the growing privatization of the Space Industry, the responsibility in outer space requires prompt actions. There is a need for international agreements of a binding nature to increase the threshold of accountability of member states to ensure a sustainable orbital domain. While increased participation of commercial enterprises is expounded as an economically growing feature of a country, the liability involved with the enlargement of the opportunity base cannot be side-lined. A legal framework has to be structured at both the international and national level to respond to the international responsibility laid down in Article VI of the Outer Space Treaty. Since the Outer Space Treaty is limited in its jurisdiction to state-sponsored activities, there is a need for an international instrument governing the operations of private players. The delay in employing environmental measures has significantly impacted the atmospheric make-up. The same temperament showcased for this issue could bring Kessler Syndrome to life.
A public-private partnership solves none of the aff – market dynamics and hiring competition mean the two sectors are zero sum.
Davenport 2/25 ~(Christian, Reporter covering NASA and the space industry, Colby College, B.A., American Studies), "As private companies erode government's hold on space travel, NASA looks to open a new frontier," February 25, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/25/nasa-space-future-private/~~ TDI The four astronauts who will fly on a SpaceX mission by the end of the year will be a bunch of private citizens with no space experience. One's a billionaire funding the mission; another is a health care provider. The third will be selected at random through a sweepstakes, and the last seat will go to the winner of a competition. In the new Space Age, you can buy a ticket to orbit — no need to have been a fighter pilot in the military or to compete against thousands of other overachievers for a coveted spot in NASA's astronaut corps. In fact, for this mission, the first composed entirely of private citizens, NASA is little more than a bystander. It does not own or operate the rocket that will blast the astronauts into space or the capsule they will live in for the few days they are scheduled to circle Earth every 90 minutes. NASA has no say in selecting the astronauts, and it will not train or outfit them — that will all be done by Elon Musk's SpaceX. The money to pay for the flight also will not come from NASA — or any other government account. The cost of the project is being borne by a billionaire, Jared Isaacman, who has set it up as a fundraiser for St. Jude's Research Hospital and a promotional device for his business, Shift4Shop, which helps businesses set up websites and process payments. This is the new look of human space exploration as government's long-held monopoly on space travel continues to erode, redefining not only who owns the vehicles that carry people to space, but also the very nature of what an astronaut is and who gets to be one. And it comes as NASA confronts some of the largest changes it has faced since it was founded in 1958 when the United States' world standing was challenged by the Soviet Union's surprise launch of the first Sputnik into orbit. Now it is NASA's unrivaled primacy in human spaceflight that is under challenge. Thanks to NASA's investments and guidance, the private space sector has grown tremendously — no entity more than SpaceX, which according to CNBC is now worth $74 billion. The commercial space industry is taking on ever more roles and responsibilities — flying not just cargo and supplies to the International Space Station, but even NASA's astronauts there. The private sector will launch some of the major components of the space station NASA wants to build in orbit around the moon, and private companies are developing the spacecraft that will fly astronauts to and from the lunar surface. Space enthusiasts, including NASA, see enormous benefit in the shift — a new era of space exploration that will usher in a more capable and efficient space industry. But the changing dynamic also has left NASA, which for decades has set the pace for the American space project, with an uncertain role, a development NASA's Safety Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel warns could have consequences for years to come. The growth of companies like SpaceX has "tremendous upside potential — and are accompanied by equally tremendous challenges for managing the risk of human space exploration," it said in its annual report, released last month. "NASA leadership in human space exploration is still preeminent, but the agency's role is evolving with critical implications for how risk and safety will be managed." So far, NASA has done well "as it shifts from principally executing its programs and missions to commercially acquiring significant key elements and services," it said. But as the agency continues to evolve, "NASA must make some strategically critical decisions, based on deliberate and thorough consideration, that are necessary because of their momentous consequences for the future of human space exploration and, in particular, for the management of the attendant risks." In an interview, Steve Jurczyk, NASA's acting administrator, said the agency is well aware of how its identity and role are changing, and he likened the agency's role to how the U.S. government fostered the commercial aviation industry in the early 20th century. NASA's predecessor, NACA, or the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, "did research, technology development to initially support defense … but also later on supporting a burgeoning commercial aircraft industry and aviation industry," he said. "So that may be how we evolve, moving forward on the space side. We're going to do the research and the technology development and be the enablers for continuing to support the commercial space sector." NASA has not ceded all ground. It still leads major exploration and science programs that no company could match. Last week, for example, it landed a rover the size of a car on Mars, hitting a precise landing target after traveling nearly 300 million miles. Later this year, it is scheduled to launch the James Webb telescope, which is designed to look back in time to the origins of the universe. And it also recently snagged a sample of rocks and soil from an asteroid 200 million miles from Earth to return them to Earth for study. "NASA works," Rob Manning, the chief engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said after the Perseverance landed safely on Mars. "When we put our arms together and our hands together and our brains together, we can succeed. This is what NASA does." Those big, daring, push-the-envelope missions is where NASA's future lies, agency and industry officials agree. Not in looking for financial gain, but blazing the trail and opening new frontiers, and then allowing private industry to take over in the way homesteaders expanded into the West. Within NASA, there is still some resistance to that paradigm shift. "NASA feels like that's our domain," said Phil McAlister, NASA's director of commercial spaceflight. "And my response is, the solar system is a big place. We at NASA should always be doing the next thing, the thing where the profit motive is not as evident and where the barriers to entry are still too high for the private sector to really make a compelling business case." Jan Worner, the outgoing general director of the European Space Agency, agrees. "I believe space agencies have to change," he said in an interview. "If you are fixed permanently to the same thing that you did in the past, you will lose." But NASA officials are concerned that much of the future workforce is going to be attracted to a growing number of commercial companies doing amazing things. There is Planet, for example, which is putting up constellations of small satellites that take an image of Earth every day. Or Relativity Space, which is 3-D printing entire rockets. Or Axiom Space, which is building a commercial space station. Or Astrobotic, which intends to land a spacecraft on the moon later this year. The question NASA faces, then, is an urgent one: "How do you maintain that NASA technical expertise?" Jurczyk said. The agency does not know. "It may mean people are hiring more midcareer from industry or having people come to NASA, then go to industry, and come back. Or a different model where maybe you're not coming to NASA and staying for your 35-, 40-year career," he said. "We're still thinking through that." The workforce predicament was not on NASA's mind when it embarked on this road in 2006. That is when it awarded relatively small contracts to see whether the private sector could develop spacecraft capable of taking cargo to the International Space Station. At the time, SpaceX, which won an award, was largely unknown and on the verge of bankruptcy, with just one successful flight to orbit for its Falcon 1 rocket after three failures. Outside of what Musk once called "the weird rebels within NASA," few thought the program would work. It was not taken seriously by the mainstream aerospace industry or even by NASA's leadership. "Let's just give these annoying commercial people enough money so that they can fail, and we can say, 'That was dumb. We don't have to do that again,'" Musk once told The Washington Post. But it did work. And now NASA is relying on the private sector not only to deliver supplies and science experiments to the surface of the moon, but also its most precious cargo — its astronauts — there. Turning over human spaceflight to the private sector was a line many thought NASA would never cross. But last year, SpaceX successfully flew two crewed missions to the space station, and Boeing, the other company with the human spaceflight contract, is hoping to fly its first later this year. NASA has been eager to build on that success and hire private-sector companies to build and operate the spacecraft that would take astronauts to and from the surface of the moon. And while NASA's flagship rocket, the Space Launch System, would be used to fly astronauts to the moon and be the most powerful ever built, it has suffered all sorts of cost overruns and technical delays. A test of its engines that was supposed to last as long as eight minutes was cut short after just one because of a technical problem. And the redo of the test was recently postponed by NASA, which said it was looking into a problem with one of the valves. Recently, the NASA inspector general said the total cost of the rocket would reach $27 billion through 2025. That enormous cost has outraged critics of the space program, who have derided the effort as little more than a jobs program for select congressional districts and dubbed it the "Senate Launch System." Recently, the Bloomberg editorial board called for the Biden administration to "scrap the Space Launch System," asking, "Why is the U.S. government building a space rocket?" "No doubt, the era of government spacefaring had its glories," the editorial read. "But space is now a $424 billion business, with U.S. companies at its forefront. The new administration should embrace this revolution — and bring the power of private enterprise to bear in crossing the next cosmic frontier." Some high-level NASA officials, including former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, have indicated that if the commercial sector can develop lower-cost alternatives, the space agency would have no choice but to consider those instead. NASA has already shifted one major mission from SLS — recently it announced that a commercial rocket, and not SLS, as Congress had mandated for years, would launch the Europa Clipper spacecraft that would study Jupiter's moon. That alone would save NASA "over $1.5 billion compared to using an SLS rocket," according to NASA's fiscal year 2021 budget request. NASA has always relied on contractors to build its hardware — from the Apollo lunar module built by Grumman to the space shuttle, built largely by North American Rockwell. But NASA defined the precise requirements, took ownership of the spacecraft and operated them. That is not the case with many of its programs today. It works alongside the companies to validate their rockets and spacecraft and ensure they meet the agency's safety standards. But the hardware and the launch procedures remain in private hands. The private astronaut mission, dubbed Inspiration4, marks the next iteration in this transition. Isaacman, the billionaire founder and chief executive of Shift4Shop, a payments technology company, paid an undisclosed sum for the SpaceX flight. Isaacman, an accomplished pilot, will occupy one of the four seats. Another will go to Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old physician assistant at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. The third is to be raffled off as part of a fundraising effort for the hospital. And the fourth seat will go to the winner of a competition among entrepreneurs who use Shift4Shop's platform. Isaacman has donated $100 million to St. Jude and hopes the fundraising effort will match that. "We will, of course, coordinate this with NASA," Musk said on a call with reporters earlier this month to discuss the mission. "NASA has been briefed on this and is supportive." But it will be SpaceX and the crew that will determine the flight parameters and training requirements, not NASA. "Wherever you want to go, we'll take you there," Musk said to Isaacman on the call. Meet the people paying $55 million each to fly to the space station That mission will be followed by a second flight made up entirely of civilians — three wealthy business executives, who are each paying $55 million, in addition to the commander, Michael Lopez-Alegria, a former NASA astronaut who now serves as a vice president at Axiom. Instead of spending a few days inside SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft, which has about as much interior room as a large SUV, they will fly to the International Space Station. They will spend eight days there before flying back. Ultimately, Axiom's goal is even bigger — to build a space station of its own. The ISS is getting old and will need to come down at some point. NASA has said that it would eventually get out of the space station business — and outsource that to the private sector as well. Axiom is one of the leading candidates to build the successor. If Axiom is successful, it could then proceed to its ultimate goal: charter missions of private citizens, flying on private rockets to a private space station with little to no involvement from NASA.
1/8/22
JF- Space Col
Tournament: John Edie Holiday Debates Hosted by The Blake School | Round: 3 | Opponent: Minnetonka AJ | Judge: Chang, Curtis
AC – Space Col
Space exploration is essential to the survival of humanity. Two impacts—
First, colonization—
It solves a litany of existential threats – don't put all your eggs in one basket.
Fitzgerald 3/9 ~(Shanon, Assistant Websites Editor at Liberty Fund), "Why Human Space Exploration Matters," March 9 2021, https://www.econlib.org/why-human-space-exploration-matters/~~ TDI While the yields to space exploration and the development of spaceflight technology may appear minimal AND is becoming, if it is not already, one of pure choice.
Tournament: John Edie Holiday Debates Hosted by The Blake School | Round: 2 | Opponent: Eden Prairie AG | Judge: Czyz, Kaya
AC – Exploration Advantage
Space exploration is essential to the survival of humanity. Two impacts—
First, colonization—
It solves a litany of existential threats – don't put all your eggs in one basket.
Fitzgerald 3/9 ~(Shanon, Assistant Websites Editor at Liberty Fund), "Why Human Space Exploration Matters," March 9 2021, https://www.econlib.org/why-human-space-exploration-matters/~~ TDI While the yields to space exploration and the development of spaceflight technology may appear minimal in the immediate future, shifting our perspective to the longer term renders the human situation vis a viz space exploration extremely clear: if humans want to survive in perpetuity, we need to establish ourselves on other planets in addition to Earth. It is as simple as that. And yet we are not doing all that much to make that happen. To be clear, I'm long on Earth, too, and hope that technological improvements will continue to allow our species to get "more from less" right here on the third rock from the sun, enabling us to keep occupying the planet that saw us evolve into consciousness. I like to imagine that the distant future on Earth has the potential to be an extremely pleasant one, as advances in our scientific understanding and bio-technical praxis should hopefully allow our descendants to clean up any of the remaining messes previous generations will have left behind (e.g., nuclear and industrial waste, high amounts of atmospheric carbon, other lingering nasties) and stable-state free societies will hopefully allow all persons (or very nearly all persons) to live free and meaningful lives in productive community and exchange with their fellows. As the previous qualification highlights, the trickiest problems here on Earth and extending to wherever humans end up in the spacefaring age will still be social and political, and their successful resolution will depend more on the future state of our governing arts than our hard sciences. But regarding the negative events that could very well happen to Earth I think we all need to be equally clear: life might not make it here. There is no guarantee that it will, and in the very long run, with the expansion and subsequent death of our sun, we know with near certainty that it will not. Consider just a few possible extinction-level events that could strike even earlier: large meteors, supervolcanic eruptions, drastic climactic disruption of the "Snowball Earth" variety. As SpaceX founder and Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently observed on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, "A species that does not become multiplanetary is simply waiting around until there is some extinction event, either self-inflicted or external." This statement, applied to the human species, is obviously true on its face. As doomsday events go a giant asteroid might be more shocking, since we (people living today) have never experienced one before while concerned atomic scientists warn us about the nuclear bomb all the time, but the odds that we blow ourselves up are still there. Slim, but there. It's more plausible that a severe nuclear war and the nuclear winter it would likely trigger would leave the human population greatly reduced as opposed to completely extinct, but then the question becomes: why is that a risk we would want to take? The bomb is here to stay for now, but there is no reason that 100 of known life in the universe needs to stay here on Earth to keep it company, waiting around for something even more destructive to show up. While we're on that happy subject: Do you have any good intuitions about our collective chances against hostile, or simply arrogant or domineering, technologically-advanced extraterrestrial lifeforms, if and/or when they decide to pay us a visit on our home turf? These scary situation sketches will suffice. At bottom, the core reason I am a believer in the need to make life—and not just human life—multiplanetary is the same basic reason I would never counsel a friend to keep all their money and valuables in one place: diversification is good. Wisdom and experience suggest we store precious resources in multiple safe(ish) places. Diversification limits our exposure to risk, and increases our resilience when bad things do happen. One reserve gets hit, two or three others survive, and you probably feel that the effort to spread things out was worth it. What I'm saying here has strong undercurrents of common sense, yet our approach to the human population itself—the universal store and font of "human capital"—does not currently prioritize diversification to the degree our technological capabilities would allow. The distribution of the human population, and of almost all human knowledge and works, is overwhelmingly local. (Let us set to one side the possibility that aliens somewhere maintain an archive of captured human information.) Establishing outposts at least as large as those we maintain in Antarctica on the Moon and Mars, or other more suitable sites, by the end of this century would be a great first step toward genuinely diversifying the physical locations of the most precious resources known to us: human consciousness and creativity, human love and human soul, the great works in which all these things are displayed. Add also to this list repositories of scientific knowledge and knowhow, seed reserves, and certain materials necessary to re-start the manufacturing of fundamental technologies. Spreading these goods to a few additional locations within the solar system would be a major species-and-civilization-level accomplishment that all living at the time could feel satisfied by, and even take some pride in. And this is something that we seem to be just on the cusp of being able to do, given our recent and rapid technological advances in rocketry, computers, and materials science and engineering, among other important fields for space exploration and settlement. Quickly the uniplanetary human situation is becoming, if it is not already, one of pure choice.
Space col key to innovation,
West 20 Darrell M. West, 8-18-2020, "Five reasons to explore Mars," Brookings, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2020/08/18/five-reasons-to-explore-mars/ TDI The recent launch of the Mars rover Perseverance is the latest U.S. space mission seeking to understand our solar system. Its expected arrival at the Red Planet in mid-February 2021 has a number of objectives linked to science and innovation. The rover is equipped with sophisticated instruments designed to search for the remains of ancient microbial life, take pictures and videos of rocks, drill for soil and rock samples, and use a small helicopter to fly around the Jezero Crater landing spot. Mars is a valuable place for exploration because it can be reached in 6 ½ months, is a major opportunity for scientific exploration, and has been mapped and studied for several decades. The mission represents the first step in a long-term effort to bring Martian samples back to Earth, where they can be analyzed for residues of microbial life. Beyond the study of life itself, there are a number of different benefits of Mars exploration. UNDERSTAND THE ORIGINS AND UBIQUITY OF LIFE The site where Perseverance is expected to land is the place where experts believe 3.5 billion years ago held a lake filled with water and flowing rivers. It is an ideal place to search for the residues of microbial life, test new technologies, and lay the groundwork for human exploration down the road. The mission plans to investigate whether microbial life existed on Mars billions of years ago and therefore that life is not unique to Planet Earth. As noted by Chris McKay, a research scientist at NASA's Ames Research Science Center, that would be an extraordinary discovery. "Right here in our solar system, if life started twice, that tells us some amazing things about our universe," he pointed out. "It means the universe is full of life. Life becomes a natural feature of the universe, not just a quirk of this odd little planet around this star." The question of the origins of life and its ubiquity around the universe is central to science, religion, and philosophy. For much of our existence, humans have assumed that even primitive life was unique to Planet Earth and not present in the rest of the solar system, let alone the universe. We have constructed elaborate religious and philosophical narratives around this assumption and built our identity along the notion that life is unique to Earth. If, as many scientists expect, future space missions cast doubt on that assumption or outright disprove it by finding remnants of microbial life on other planets, it will be both invigorating and illusion-shattering. It will force humans to confront their own myths and consider alternative narratives about the universe and the place of Earth in the overall scheme of things. As noted in my Brookings book, Megachange, given the centrality of these issues for fundamental questions about human existence and the meaning of life, it would represent a far-reaching shift in existing human paradigms. As argued by scientist McKay, discovering evidence of ancient microbial life on Mars would lead experts to conclude that life likely is ubiquitous around the universe and not limited to Planet Earth. Humans would have to construct new theories about ourselves and our place in the universe. DEVELOP NEW TECHNOLOGIES The U.S. space program has been an extraordinary catalyst for technology innovation. Everything from Global Positioning Systems and medical diagnostic tools to wireless technology and camera phones owe at least part of their creation to the space program. Space exploration required the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to learn how to communicate across wide distances, develop precise navigational tools, store, transmit, and process large amounts of data, deal with health issues through digital imaging and telemedicine, and develop collaborative tools that link scientists around the world. The space program has pioneered the miniaturization of scientific equipment and helped engineers figure out how to land and maneuver a rover from millions of miles away. Going to Mars requires similar inventiveness. Scientists have had to figure out how to search for life in ancient rocks, drill for rock samples, take high resolution videos, develop flying machines in a place with gravity that is 40 percent lower than on Earth, send detailed information back to Earth in a timely manner, and take off from another planet. In the future, we should expect large payoffs in commercial developments from Mars exploration and advances that bring new conveniences and inventions to people. ENCOURAGE SPACE TOURISM In the not too distant future, wealthy tourists likely will take trips around the Earth, visit space stations, orbit the Moon, and perhaps even take trips around Mars. For a substantial fee, they can experience weightlessness, take in the views of the entire planet, see the stars from outside the Earth's atmosphere, and witness the wonders of other celestial bodies. The Mars program will help with space tourism by improving engineering expertise with space docking, launches, and reentry and providing additional experience about the impact of space travel on the human body. Figuring out how weightlessness and low gravity situations alter human performance and how space radiation affects people represent just a couple areas where there are likely to be positive by-products for future travel. The advent of space tourism will broaden human horizons in the same way international travel has exposed people to other lands and perspectives. It will show them that the Earth has a delicate ecosystem that deserves protecting and why it is important for people of differing countries to work together to solve global problems. Astronauts who have had this experience say it has altered their viewpoints and had a profound impact on their way of thinking. FACILITATE SPACE MINING Many objects around the solar system are made of similar minerals and chemical compounds that exist on Earth. That means that some asteroids, moons, and planets could be rich in minerals and rare elements. Figuring out how to harvest those materials in a safe and responsible manner and bring them back to Earth represents a possible benefit of space exploration. Elements that are rare on Earth may exist elsewhere, and that could open new avenues for manufacturing, product design, and resource distribution. This mission could help resource utilization through advances gained with its Mars Oxygen Experiment (MOXIE) equipment that converts Martian carbon dioxide into oxygen. If MOXIE works as intended, it would help humans live and work on the Red Planet. ADVANCE SCIENCE One of the most crucial features of humanity is our curiosity about the life, the universe, and how things operate. Exploring space provides a means to satisfy our thirst for knowledge and improve our understanding of ourselves and our place in the universe. Space travel already has exploded centuries-old myths and promises to continue to confront our long-held assumptions about who we are and where we come from. The next decade promises to be an exciting period as scientists mine new data from space telescopes, space travel, and robotic exploration. Ten or twenty years from now, we may have answers to basic questions that have eluded humans for centuries, such as how ubiquitous life is outside of Earth, whether it is possible for humans to survive on other planets, and how planets evolve over time.
Second, Russia—
Deep space exploration is a shared goal that prevents escalation of US-Russia tensions. But privatization threatens it independent of our other internal links
CSIS 18 ~(Center for Strategic and International Studies), "Why Human Space Exploration Matters," August 21, 2018 https://www.csis.org/blogs/post-soviet-post/space-cooperation~~ TDI U.S.-Russian space cooperation continues to be a stated mutual goal. In April 2018, President Putin said of space, "Thank God, this field of activity is not being influenced by problems in politics. Therefore, I hope that everything will develop, since it is in the interests of everyone…This is a sphere that unites people. I hope it will continue to be this way." During his statement at a recent event at CSIS, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said, "~space~ is our best opportunity to dialogue when everything else falls apart. We've got American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts dependent on each other on the International Space Station, which enables us to ultimately maintain that dialogue." The U.S. and Russia both benefit from the ISS partnership. Russia provides transportation to the ISS for U.S. astronauts, from which Russia receives an average of $81 million per seat on the Soyuz (and recognition of its status as a space power). The U.S. also benefits from Russia's technical contributions to the ISS while Russia benefits The U.S. and Russia signed a joint statement in 2017 in support of the idea of collaborating on deep space exploration, including the construction of the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, a research-focused space station orbiting the moon. Through agreements on civilian space exploration, such as the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway or future Mars projects, that have clear benefits to both sides, some degree of cooperation will remain in both countries' interest. The high price tag for pursuing space exploration alone and opportunities for sharing and receiving technical expertise encourages international partnerships like the ISS. However, at least three factors, apart from the overall deterioration of U.S.-Russia relations, threaten this cooperation. First, growth of the private sector space industry may alter the economic arrangement between the U.S. and Russia, and ultimately lower the benefits of cooperation to both countries. The development of advanced technologies by private companies will give NASA new options to choose from and reduce the need to depend on (and negotiate with) Russia. If NASA and its Russian counterpart, Roskosmos, have no need to talk with one another, they probably won't in the face of tense political relations. The U.S. intends to use Boeing and SpaceX capsules for human spaceflight beginning in 2020, and a Congressional plan in 2016 set a phase out date of Russian RD-180 rocket engines by 2022.
It's make or break for the relationship—Ukraine, decline of US moral authority on international affairs puts us at the brink of the end of Russian diplomacy and even war
Weir 21 ~(Fred Weir has been the Monitor's Moscow correspondent, covering Russia and the former Soviet Union, since 1998. He's traveled over much of that vast territory, reporting on stories ranging from Russia's financial crash to the war in Chechnya, creeping Islamization in central Asia, Russia's demographic crisis, the rise of Vladimir Putin and his repeated returns to the Kremlin, and the ups and downs of US-Russia relations). "Worse than the Cold War? US-Russia relations hit new low." Christian Science Monitor 4-20-2021 https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2021/0420/Worse-than-the-Cold-War-US-Russia-relations-hit-new-low~~ TDI Russia's relations with the West, and the United States in particular, appear to be plumbing depths of acrimony and mutual misunderstanding unseen even during the original Cold War. After years of deteriorating relations, sanctions, tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions, and an escalating "information war," some in Moscow are asking if there even is any point in seeking renewed dialogue with the U.S., if only out of concern that more talking might just make things worse. Events have cascaded over the past month. Russia's treatment of imprisoned dissident Alexei Navalny, who has been sent to a prison hospital amid reports of failing health, underlines the sharp perceived differences between Russia and the West over matters of human rights. Meanwhile, a Russian military buildup near Ukraine has illustrated that the conflict in the Donbass region might explode at any time, possibly even dragging Russia and NATO into direct confrontation. With its relations with Washington at a nadir, Russia is eyeing a more pragmatic, if adversarial, relationship with the U.S. in the hopes of getting the respect it desires. President Joe Biden surprised the Kremlin by proposing a "personal summit" to discuss the growing list of U.S.-Russia disagreements in a phone conversation with Vladimir Putin last week. He later spoke of the need for "disengagement" in the escalating tensions around Ukraine, and postponed a planned visit of two U.S. warships to Russia-adjacent waters in the Black Sea. But days later he also imposed a package of tough sanctions against Russia, for its alleged SolarWinds hacking and interference in the 2020 U.S. presidential elections, infuriating Moscow and drawing threats of retaliation. Last month, after Mr. Biden agreed with a journalist's intimation that Mr. Putin is a "killer," the Kremlin ordered Russia's ambassador to the U.S. to return home for intensive consultations, an almost unprecedented peacetime move. Over the weekend, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov suggested that the acting U.S. ambassador to Moscow, John Sullivan, should likewise go back to Washington for a spell. On Tuesday, Mr. Sullivan announced he would do just that this week. And there is a growing sense in Moscow that the downward spiral of East-West ties has reached a point of no return, and that Russia should consider abandoning hopes of reconciliation with the West and seek permanent alternatives: perhaps in an intensified compact with China, and targeted relationships with countries of Europe and other regions that are willing to do business with Moscow. "Things are at rock bottom. This may not be structurally a cold war in the way the old one was, but mentally, in terms of atmosphere, it's even worse," says Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs, a Moscow-based foreign policy journal. "The fact that Biden offered a summit meeting would have sounded a hopeful note anytime in the past. Now, nobody can be sure of that. A hypothetical Putin-Biden meeting might not prove to be a path to better relations, but just the opposite. It could just become a shouting match that would bring a hardening of differences, and make relations look like even more of a dead end." Room for discussion Foreign policy experts agree that there is a long list of practical issues that could benefit from purposeful high-level discussion. With the U.S. preparing to finally exit Afghanistan, some coordination with regional countries, including Russia and its Central Asian allies, might make the transition easier for everyone. One of Mr. Biden's first acts in office was to extend the New START arms control agreement, which the Trump administration had been threatening to abandon, but the former paradigm of strategic stability remains in tatters and requires urgent attention, experts say. "If you are looking for opportunities to make the world a safer place through reason and compromise, there are quite a few," says Andrey Kortunov, director of the Russian International Affairs Council, which is affiliated with the Foreign Ministry. "There are also some areas where the best we could do is agree to disagree, such as Ukraine and human rights issues." The plight of Mr. Navalny, which has evoked so much outrage in the West, seems unlikely to provide leverage in dealing with the Kremlin because – as Western moral authority fades – Russian public opinion appears indifferent, or even in agreement with its government's actions. Recent surveys by the Levada Center in Moscow, Russia's only independent pollster, found that fewer than a fifth of Russians approve of Mr. Navalny's activities, while well over half disapprove. An April poll found that while 29 of Russians consider Mr. Navalny's imprisonment unfair, 48 think it is fair. Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny, shown here during a hearing in the Babuskinsky District Court in Moscow Feb. 12, 2021, is in poor health amid his hunger strike while in prison in Russia. He was recently moved to a prison hospital. Tensions around the Russian-backed rebel republics in eastern Ukraine have been much severer than usual, with a spike in violent incidents on the front line, a demonstrative Russian military buildup near the borders, and strong U.S. and NATO affirmations of support for Kyiv. The Russian narrative claims that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy triggered the crisis a month ago by signing a decree that makes retaking the Russian-annexed territory of Crimea official Ukrainian state policy. Mr. Zelenskiy has also appealed to the U.S. and Europe to expedite Ukraine's membership in NATO, which Russia has long described as a "red line" that would lead to war. But Russian leaders, who have been at pains to deny any direct involvement in Ukraine's war for the past seven years, now say openly that they will fight to defend the two rebel republics. Top Kremlin official Dmitry Kozak even warned that if conflict erupts, it could be "the beginning of the end" for Ukraine. "This is a very desperate situation," says Vadim Karasyov, director of the independent Institute of Global Strategies in Kyiv. "We know the West is not going to help Ukraine militarily if it comes to war. So we need to find some kind of workable compromises, not more pretexts for war." Time to turn eastward? In this increasingly vexed atmosphere, the Russians appear to be saying there is no point in Mr. Putin and Mr. Biden meeting unless an agenda has been prepared well in advance, setting out a few achievable goals and leaving aside areas where there can be no agreement. "Russia isn't going to take part in another circus like we had with Trump in Helsinki in 2018," says Sergei Markedonov, an expert with MGIMO University in Moscow. "What is needed is a deeper dialogue. That could begin if we had a real old-fashioned summit between Biden and Putin, one that has been calculated to yield at least some positive results. We need to find a modus vivendi going forward, and the present course is not leading there." Alternatively, Russia may turn away from any hopes of even pragmatic rapprochement with the West, experts warn. Mr. Lukyanov, who maintains close contact with his Chinese counterparts, says they felt blindsided at a summit with U.S. foreign policy chiefs in Alaska last month, when what they expected to be a practical discussion of how to overcome the acrimonious Trump-era legacy in their relations turned into what they saw as a U.S. lecture about how China needs to obey the "rules-based" international order. "It was the Chinese, in the past, who were very cautious about participating" in anything that looked like an anti-Western alliance, says Mr. Lukyanov. "We are hearing a new tone from them now. Now our growing relationship with China isn't just about compensating for a lack of relations with the U.S. It's about the need to build up a group of countries that will resist the U.S., aimed at containing U.S. activities and policies that are harmful to our two countries."
Space weapons heighten potential for escalation and make perceptions of US-Russia space conflict key.
Alexey Arbatov et al, head of the Center for International Security at the Primakov National Research Institute of World Economy and International Relations, Major General Vladimir Dvorkin, a principal researcher at the Center for International Security at the Primakov National Research Institute of World Economy and International Relations and Peter Topychkanov, fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center's Nonproliferation Program, '17 "Russian And Chinese Perspectives On Non-Nuclear Weapons And Nuclear Risks" Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Publications, https://www.russiamatters.org/sites/default/files/media/files/Entanglement_interior_FNL.pdf Against this background, Russian military and technical experts are currently engaged in efforts to elaborate strategies for fighting an air-space war. The following is an attempt to frame such an integrated doctrine by one of its main theoreticians, Colonel Yuri Krinitsky from the Military Air-Space Defense Academy: "The integration of aerial and space-based means of attack has transformed airspace and space into a specific field of armed conflict: an air-space theater of military operations. United, systematically organized actions of ~U.S.~ air-space power in this theater should be countered with united and systematically organized actions by the Russian Air-Space Defense Forces. This is required under the National Security Strategy of the Russian Federation and Air-Space Defense Plan approved by the Russian president in 2006."6 This document goes on to list the tasks of the Air-Space Defense Forces as "monitoring and reconnaissance of the airspace situation; identifying the beginning of an aerial, missile, or space attack; informing state organs and the military leadership of the Russian Federation about it; repelling air-space attacks; and defending command sites of the top levels of state and military command authorities, strategic nuclear forces' groupings, and the elements of missile warning systems."7 While picking apart in detail the organizational, operational, and technical aspects of the Air-Space Defense Forces (now part of the Air-Space Forces),8 military analysts step around the basic question of what constitutes "the means of air-space attack" (SVKN in Russian, MASA in English). This term and "air-space attack" are broadly used in official documents (including the Military Doctrine) and statements, as well as in the new names of military organizations (such as the Air-Space Forces), and in a seemingly infinite number of professional articles, books, and pamphlets. If MASA refers to aircraft and cruise missiles, then what does space have to do with it? To be sure, various military communication and intelligence, reconnaissance, and surveillance satellites are based in space, but these assets also serve the Navy and Ground Forces without the word "space" tacked onto their names. If MASA refers to long-range ballistic missiles, which have trajectories that pass mostly through space, then this threat is not new but has existed for more than sixty years. There was—and still is—no defense against a massive ballistic missile strike, and none is likely in the future in spite of U.S. and Russian efforts at missile defense. In the past (and possibly now), one of the possible tasks of ballistic missiles was to break "corridors" in the enemy's air-defense system to enable bombers to penetrate it. But with ballistic missiles being armed with more warheads with improved accuracy, and with the advent of longrange air-launched cruise missiles, it is increasingly unnecessary for bombers to be able to penetrate enemy air defenses. Coordination between air and notional "space" systems has apparently moved to the background of strategic planning. Anyway, this tactic was never considered as air-space warfare before now. MASA may be used in reference to potential hypersonic boost-glide weapons, which are discussed below. But their role and capabilities are not yet known, so it would clearly be premature to build the theory of air-space war on them, and even more so to start creating defenses against them. In any case, referring to those weapons as MASA is farfetched: besides a short boost phase, their entire trajectory is in the upper atmosphere at speeds greater than airplanes but lower than ballistic missiles. It is, therefore, even less apt to describe such systems as space arms than it is to refer to traditional long-range ballistic missiles as such. Finally, as for theoretically possible space-based weapons that would conduct strikes against targets on the ground, at sea, and in the air, they do not yet exist, and their future viability is far from clear. Even if the concept of air-space war is ill-defined, the military and technical experts who propound it reach a predictable conclusion with regard to the capabilities needed to fight one. They typically argue that Russia needs "to counter the air-space attack system with an air-space defense system. . . . A prospective system for destroying and suppressing MASA should be a synergy of anti-missile, anti-satellite, and air-defense missiles, and air units, and radio-electronic warfare forces. And its composition should be multilayered."9 Such calls are being translated into policy. Most notably, the air-space defense program, for which the military's top brass and industrial corporations lobbied, is the single largest component of the State Armaments Program through 2020, accounting for about 20 percent of all costs when the program was first announced in 2011—about 3.4 trillion rubles ($106 billion at the time).10 Along with the modernization of the missile early-warning system by the development and deployment of new Voronezh-type land-based radars and missile-launch detection satellites, the program envisages the deployment of twenty-eight missile regiments of S-400 Triumph air-defense systems (about 450 to 670 launchers), and thirty-eight battalions equipped with the next-generation S-500 Vityaz (recently renamed Prometey) systems (300 to 460 launchers).11 In total, the plan is to manufacture up to 3,000 missile interceptors of the two types, for which three new production plants were built. A new integrated and fully automatic command-and-control system is being created to facilitate operations by the Air-Space Defense Forces. The Moscow A-135 missile defense system (now renamed A-235) is being modernized with non-nuclear kinetic interceptors to engage incoming ballistic missiles (previously the interceptors were armed with nuclear warheads).12 The current Russian economic crisis, which has resulted in defense budget cuts in fiscal year 2017, may slow down the air-space armament programs and the scale of arms procurement, but the underlying momentum will be unaffected unless stopped or redirected by a major change in Russia's defense posture. In a sense, Russian policy may be explained by the visceral desire of the military to break out from the deadlock—the "strangulating effect"—of mutual assured nuclear destruction, which has made further arms development, high-technology competition, and supposedly fascinating global war scenarios senseless (indeed, it prompted U.S. and Soviet leaders of the 1970s and 1980s to agree that, as then U.S. president Ronald Reagan put it, "a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought."13) During the four decades of the Cold War, several generations of the Soviet military and defense industrial elite had learned and become accustomed to competing with the most powerful possible opponent, the United States, and such competition became their raison d'être. The end of the Cold War and of the nuclear arms race in the early 1990s deprived them of this supposedly glorious quest, and opposing rogue states and terrorists was not a noble substitute. U.S. and NATO operations in Yugoslavia and Iraq, however, provided a new hightechnology challenge, defined in Russia as air-space warfare, which was eagerly embraced as a new and fascinating domain of seemingly endless competition with a worthy counterpart. Besides, this new dimension of warfare doubtless gave the military and associated defense industries an opportunity to impress political leadership with newly discovered esoteric and frightening threats, justifying the prioritization of national defense, and hence arms procurement programs and large defense budgets. In any case, the Russian strategy for air-space war is directly connected to the problem of entanglement. Astonishingly—and this makes the concept look quite scholastic—its framers shed no light on the single most important question: Is the context for air-space war a global (or regional) nuclear war, or a non-nuclear war that pits Russia against the United States and NATO? If it is the former, then in the event of the large-scale use of ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads (and in the absence of effective missile defense systems), the Russian Air-Space Forces would be unlikely to function effectively. Except for issuing warnings about incoming missile attacks, they would not be able to fulfill the tasks assigned to them by Russia's Military Doctrine, including "repelling air-space attacks and defending command sites of the top levels of state and military administration, strategic nuclear forces' units, and elements of missile warning systems."14 Alternatively, if air-space war assumes a non-nuclear conflict, then the concept raises serious doubts of a different nature. Russian state and military leaders have regularly depicted terrifying scenarios of large-scale conflicts being won through non-nuclear means. Former deputy defense minister General Arkady Bakhin, for example, has described how "leading world powers are staking everything on winning supremacy in the air and in space, on carrying out massive air-space operations at the outbreak of hostilities, to conduct strikes against sites of strategic and vital importance all across the country."15 It is difficult to imagine, however, that such a conflict, in reality, would not quickly escalate to a nuclear exchange, especially as strategic forces and their C3I systems were continually attacked by conventional munitions. Right up until the mid-1980s, the military leadership of the USSR believed that a major war would likely begin in Europe with the early use by Warsaw Pact forces of hundreds of tactical nuclear weapons "as soon as ~they~ received information" that NATO was preparing to launch a nuclear strike.16 After that, Soviet armies would reach the English Channel and the Pyrenees in a few weeks, or massive nuclear strikes would be inflicted by the USSR and the United States on one another, and the war would be over in a few hours, or at most in a few days, with catastrophic consequences.17 After the end of the Cold War, the task of elaborating probable major war scenarios was practically shelved because such a war had become unthinkable in the new political environment. However, strategic thinking on the next high-technology global war apparently continued in secret (and probably not only in Russia). Now, at a time of renewed confrontation between Russia and the West, the fruits of that work are finally seeing the light of day. In all likelihood, the authors of the strategy imagine that over a relatively long period of time—days or weeks—the West would wage a campaign of air and missile strikes against Russia without using nuclear weapons. Russia, in turn, would defend against such attacks and carry out retaliatory strikes with long-range conventional weapons. Notably, in 2016, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu stated that "by 2021, it is planned to increase by four times the combat capabilities of the nation's strategic non-nuclear forces, which will provide the possibility of fully implementing the tasks of non-nuclear deterrence."18 In other words, the basic premise is that the U.S.-led campaigns against Yugoslavia in 1999 or Iraq in 1990 and 2003 (which are often cited by experts in this context) may be implemented against Russia—but with different results, thanks to the operations of the Russian Air-Space Forces, the Strategic Rocket Forces, and the Navy against the United States and its allies. The emphasis on defensive and offensive strategic non-nuclear arms does not exclude, but—on the contrary—implies the limited use of nuclear weapons at some point of the armed conflict. Sergei Sukhanov, one of the most authoritative representatives of the defense industries as the constructor general of the Vympel Corporation, which is responsible for designing strategic defense systems, has exposed the whole panorama of Russia's contemporary strategic logic on the interactions between offensive and defensive systems and between nuclear and non-nuclear systems: If we cannot exclude the possibility of the large-scale use of air-space attacks by the U.S. and other NATO countries (i.e., if we accept that the Yugoslavian strategy might be applied against Russia), then it is clearly impossible to solve the problem by fighting off air-space attacks with weapons that would neutralize them in the air-space theater, since this would require the creation of highly effective air- and missile defense systems across the country. Therefore, the strategy for solving the air-space defense tasks faced in this eventuality should be based on deterring the enemy from large-scale air-space attacks by implementing the tasks facing air-space defense in this eventuality at a scale that would avoid escalation but force the enemy to refrain from further airspace attack.19 (Emphasis added.) In other words, because of the inevitable limitations in Russia's ability to defend against air-space attacks, Sukhanov argues that Russia may have to resort to the limited use of nuclear weapons in order to compel the United States and its allies into backing down. This basic logic is widely accepted in Russia. Judging by the available information, the United States does not have—and is not expected to have for the foreseeable future—the technological means or the operational plans to wage non-nuclear air-space warfare against Russia. However, the fact that a major war with the United States and NATO is seen in contemporary Russian strategic thinking as a prolonged endeavor involving an integrated technological and operational continuum of nuclear and non-nuclear operations, defensive and offensive capabilities, and ballistic and aerodynamic weapons creates a breeding ground for entanglement. The result could be the rapid escalation of a local non-nuclear conflict to a global nuclear war. The remainder of this chapter discusses how new and emerging military technologies might contribute to such an escalation.
Nuke war causes extinction – it won't stay limited
Edwards 17 ~(Paul N. Edwards, CISAC's William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Being interviewed by EarthSky/card is only parts of the interview directly from Paul Edwards.) "How nuclear war would affect Earth's climate," EarthSky, September 8, 2017, earthsky.org/human-world/how-nuclear-war-would-affect-earths-climate~ TDI We are not talking enough about the climatic effects of nuclear war. The "nuclear winter" theory of the mid-1980s played a significant role in the arms reductions of that period. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reduction of U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals, this aspect of nuclear war has faded from view. That's not good. In the mid-2000s, climate scientists such as Alan Robock (Rutgers) took another look at nuclear winter theory. This time around, they used much-improved and much more detailed climate models than those available 20 years earlier. They also tested the potential effects of smaller nuclear exchanges. The result: an exchange involving just 50 nuclear weapons — the kind of thing we might see in an India-Pakistan war, for example — could loft 5 billion kilograms of smoke, soot and dust high into the stratosphere. That's enough to cool the entire planet by about 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.25 degrees Celsius) — about where we were during the Little Ice Age of the 17th century. Growing seasons could be shortened enough to create really significant food shortages. So the climatic effects of even a relatively small nuclear war would be planet-wide. What about a larger-scale conflict? A U.S.-Russia war currently seems unlikely, but if it were to occur, hundreds or even thousands of nuclear weapons might be launched. The climatic consequences would be catastrophic: global average temperatures would drop as much as 12 degrees Fahrenheit (7 degrees Celsius) for up to several years — temperatures last seen during the great ice ages. Meanwhile, smoke and dust circulating in the stratosphere would darken the atmosphere enough to inhibit photosynthesis, causing disastrous crop failures, widespread famine and massive ecological disruption. The effect would be similar to that of the giant meteor believed to be responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs. This time, we would be the dinosaurs. Many people are concerned about North Korea's advancing missile capabilities. Is nuclear war likely in your opinion? At this writing, I think we are closer to a nuclear war than we have been since the early 1960s. In the North Korea case, both Kim Jong-un and President Trump are bullies inclined to escalate confrontations. President Trump lacks impulse control, and there are precious few checks on his ability to initiate a nuclear strike. We have to hope that our generals, both inside and outside the White House, can rein him in. North Korea would most certainly "lose" a nuclear war with the United States. But many millions would die, including hundreds of thousands of Americans currently living in South Korea and Japan (probable North Korean targets). Such vast damage would be wrought in Korea, Japan and Pacific island territories (such as Guam) that any "victory" wouldn't deserve the name. Not only would that region be left with horrible suffering amongst the survivors; it would also immediately face famine and rampant disease. Radioactive fallout from such a war would spread around the world, including to the U.S. It has been more than 70 years since the last time a nuclear bomb was used in warfare. What would be the effects on the environment and on human health today? To my knowledge, most of the changes in nuclear weapons technology since the 1950s have focused on making them smaller and lighter, and making delivery systems more accurate, rather than on changing their effects on the environment or on human health. So-called "battlefield" weapons with lower explosive yields are part of some arsenals now — but it's quite unlikely that any exchange between two nuclear powers would stay limited to these smaller, less destructive bombs.
Privitiation of space exploration kills off public exploration
debris—
Commercial rocket launches produce space clutter—increased debris could reach a tipping point
Thompson 20 ~(Clive, author of Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World, a columnist for Wired magazine, and a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine) "Monetizing the Final Frontier The strange new push for space privatization," December 3, 2020 https://newrepublic.com/article/160303/monetizing-final-frontier~~ TDI "Physics tells us that two things can't occupy the same space at the same time or else bad things happen," Jah said dryly. Indeed, there's already been one collision that produced sprawling orbital pollution. In 2009, a satellite owned by the U.S. firm Iridium slammed into a decommissioned Russian government satellite at more than 26,000 mph. The crash produced 2,300 pieces of debris, spraying off in all directions. And debris is a particularly gnarly problem in space, because when it's traveling at thousands of miles an hour, even a marble-size chunk is like a bullet, capable of rendering a damaged satellite inoperable and unsteerable—the owner can no longer fire its boosters to guide it into a higher or lower orbit. There are currently an estimated 500,000 marble-size chunks up there. Decades of space travel by governments left plenty of refuse, ranging from parts of rocket boosters to stray bits of scientific experiments. One particularly grim vision of the future that haunts astronomers is the "Kessler syndrome," proposed by the astrophysicist Donald Kessler in 1978. Kessler hypothesized that space clutter could reach a tipping point: One really bad collision could produce so much junk that it would trigger a chain reaction of collisions. This disaster scenario would leave hundreds of satellites eventually destroyed, and create a ring of debris that would make launching any new satellites impossible, forever. "Near space is finite—it's a finite resource," Jah said. "So now you have this growing trash problem that isn't being remediated.... And if we exceed the capacity of the environment to carry all this traffic safely, then it becomes unusable." That's why a growing chorus of critics are already making the case that space is the next major environmental area to protect, after the oceans and land on Earth. "People seem to really treat resources in space as being infinite," said Erika Nesvold, an astrophysicist who's the cofounder of The JustSpace Alliance. "As we've seen, people don't really intuitively understand exponential growth." That's the dilemma in a nutshell: The available room in the sky is limited, but the plans for growth are exponential. SpaceX isn't the only New Space firm looking to toss up satellites. Satellite and rocket start-ups are now lining up en masse, atop new waves of investment. There are satellites geared up to connect to "the internet of things" so companies can communicate among proprietary networks of household devices. There are floating cameras pointing down—so as to gather "geospatial intelligence," which is to say data streamed from "the vantage point you get from satellites looking down on Earth and giving us information about our planet," as the venture capitalist Anderson told me. And new forms of satellite vision are emerging all the time, such as cameras that can see at night, or are specially designed to see agriculture. Experiments abound, and so satellite launches will inevitably multiply in their wake. Part of what makes near-Earth orbit so chaotic is that it is, at the moment, remarkably unregulated—not unlike the internet of the early '90s. An American firm has to get permission from the Federal Communications Commission to launch a satellite, but once it's in orbit, there's no federal agency that can compel it to move out of the path of a collision. Satellite owners generally don't like to move if they can avoid it, because their satellites have a limited amount of fuel; any movement decreases their usable lifespan. On top of that, there are dozens of nations shooting satellites into low-Earth orbit—but no international body coordinating their flight paths. Last fall, the European Space Agency realized one of SpaceX's new Starlink satellites was on a dangerously close path to an ESA satellite. SpaceX said it had no plans to move the satellite; so the ESA decided to fire its thrusters and get clear. This high-stakes negotiation was conducted via email. What's more, space debris is extremely hard to source. If a British satellite slams into yours, you can probably figure out who hit you. But if your satellite is wrecked by a random piece of junk, nobody has any clue where that debris came from. It is, in this way, a neat parallel to the problem of C02, where a ceaseless barrage of tiny commercial decisions creates a sprawling problem—one that's all but designed to ensure that everyone who caused it can deny responsibility. And damage is asymmetric: A company with a small $60,000 satellite could smash into a wildly expensive one paid for by U.S. taxpayers. "A National Reconnaissance Office satellite is at least a billion dollars, if not more, so they have a lot more to lose if something hits a satellite," Bhavya Lal, a researcher at the IDA Science and Technology Policy Institute, noted. "As more private activity starts to happen, there's more chances of that loss of control, too." One might dismiss all this anxiety as a sort of sci-fi version of hippie environmentalism—except that even the administrator of NASA is deeply worried about the chaos and destruction likely to be sown by commercial activity in near-Earth orbit. Jim Bridenstine, the Trump-appointed head of NASA, is as pro-market as one can be. He praises SpaceX every chance he gets; he talks about privatizing the space station. But when I asked him about the looming danger of space debris, during a press-conference call, he conceded that it's a huge, unresolved issue.
Space dust wrecks satellites and debris exponentially spirals
Intagliata 17 ~(Christopher Intagliata, MA Journalism from NYU, Editor for NPRs All Things Considered, Reporter/Host for Scientific American's 60 Second Science) "The Sneaky Danger of Space Dust," Scientific American, May 11, 2017, https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/the-sneaky-danger-of-space-dust/~~ TDI When tiny particles of space debris slam into satellites, the collision could cause the emission of hardware-frying radiation, Christopher Intagliata reports. Aside from all the satellites, and the space station orbiting the Earth, there's a lot of trash circling the planet, too. Twenty-one thousand baseball-sized chunks of debris, according to NASA. But that number's dwarfed by the number of small particles. There's hundreds of millions of those. "And those smaller particles tend to be going fast. Think of picking up a grain of sand at the beach, and that would be on the large side. But they're going 60 kilometers per second." Sigrid Close, an applied physicist and astronautical engineer at Stanford University. Close says that whereas mechanical damage—like punctures—is the worry with the bigger chunks, the dust-sized stuff might leave more insidious, invisible marks on satellites—by causing electrical damage. "We also think this phenomenon can be attributed to some of the failures and anomalies we see on orbit, that right now are basically tagged as 'unknown cause.'" Close and her colleague Alex Fletcher modeled this phenomenon mathematically, based on plasma physics behavior. And here's what they think happens. First, the dust slams into the spacecraft. Incredibly fast. It vaporizes and ionizes a bit of the ship—and itself. Which generates a cloud of ions and electrons, traveling at different speeds. And then: "It's like a spring action, the electrons are pulled back to the ions, ions are being pushed ahead a little bit. And then the electrons overshoot the ions, so they oscillate, and then they go back out again." That movement of electrons creates a pulse of electromagnetic radiation, which Close says could be the culprit for some of that electrical damage to satellites. The study is in the journal Physics of Plasmas. ~Alex C. Fletcher and Sigrid Close, Particle-in-cell simulations of an RF emission mechanism associated with hypervelocity impact plasmas~
Privatized space tourism increases collision risks due to orbital debris.
Tehrani 4/1 ~(James, Editor in Chief of Spark Magazine) "Space Junk: A Safety and Sustainability Problem Moving at 18,000 MPH," April 1, 2021, https://sphera.com/spark/space-junk-a-safety-and-sustainability-problem-moving-at-18000-mph/~~ TDI Most of the current debris is found in the low Earth orbit (LEO), which is about 600 to 1,200 miles (1,000 to 2,000 kilometers) above the planet. NASA calls LEO an "orbital space junkyard." The junk isn't sitting idly in a landfill; it is moving around at speeds up to 18,000 mph (29,000 kph), or 23 times the speed of sound. While the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee was designed to coordinate space debris efforts, there are currently no international laws in place regarding removing space debris. Since a single satellite can cost between $50 million and $400 million, the risk of damage from space debris to a satellite is clearly significant. And as more debris is left behind, there is obviously more risk of collisions, especially when space tourism picks up. The orbiting junk was explored in the 2013 film "Gravity," starring George Clooney and Sandra Bullock; it's known as the Kessler Effect. Don Kessler, the former NASA scientist who studied space debris even told the Guardian back in 2011 in regard to formulating a plan to deal with space junk: "The longer you wait to do this, the more expensive it's going to be. … This scenario of increasing space debris will play out even if we don't put anything else in orbit," he said. On that point, the European Space Agency has contracted with a Swiss startup called ClearSpace that plans to launch its first mission to remove space debris in 2025. The Gravity of the Situation Without a doubt, space debris is an Operational Risk; even the International Space Station has to dodge space junk at times. Former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine even tweeted last September that the "Space Station has maneuvered 3 times in 2020 to avoid debris. In the last 2 weeks, there have been 3 high concern potential conjunctions. Debris is getting worse!" Some of the larger debris that doesn't burn up re-entering the atmosphere (about one object per day) even crashes back on Earth. Since most of the Earth's surface is covered in water, it's not surprisingly that most of the junk winds up in oceans, so the risk to humans is statistically very low. That doesn't mean nil though. For example, there is debris from Russian Proton rockets that has been found in Siberia, including that of old fuel tanks containing toxic fuel residue, which can be harmful to plants, animals and humans. The environmental risks of space junk need to be explored further. A piece of space junk floating through the ocean is certainly not nearly as concerning as our plastic problem, but it's nothing to ignore either. LCA Leads the Way Just as more and more companies are assessing the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of their products and services from cradle to grave on Planet Earth, it stands to reason that LCA could be just as important in outer space. That's especially true when you consider space tourism is poised to blast off to become a potential $1.5 billion industry by 2028. The more activity, the more debris.
Increased space debris makes future space exploration impossible
Webb 18 ~(Amy Webb is a professor at the NYU Stern School of Business and is the chief executive of the Future Today Institute, a strategic foresight and research group in Washington, D.C.), "Space Oddities: We Need a Plan to Stop Polluting Space Before It's Too Late" WIRED Science April 12, 2018 https://www.wired.com/story/we-need-a-plan-to-stop-polluting-space-before-its-too-late/~~ TDI Space is our next dumping ground. As many as 170 million fragments of metal and astro debris necklace Earth. That includes 20,000 pieces larger than a softball, and 500,000 about the size of a marble, according to NASA. Old satellites, like Tiangong-1, are the biggest and highest-profile lumps of rubbish, but most of it comes from rocket parts and even lost astronaut tools. Size doesn't always matter—a fleck of paint, orbiting at a high velocity, cracked the Space Shuttle's windshield. This debris will pose a navigation hazard for many centuries to come. At least 200 objects roar back into the atmosphere each year, including pieces of solar panels and antennas and fragments of metal. All of them pose dangers for future astronauts: One plum-sized piece of gnarled space trash traveling faster than a speeding bullet could rip a five-foot hole into a spacecraft. And that collision, then, would hatch its own spectacle of shrapnel, which would join the rushing river of junk already circling the planet. It's not just Americans doing the dumping. China and Russia each have dozens of decommissioned satellites overhead, though the US certainly does it with style. Like everyone, I marveled at the successful launch of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket, whose cargo included Elon Musk's Tesla Roaster and a mannequin driver named Starman. I'll admit, I teared up listening to David Bowie as the rockets separated from the payload. It was an incredible technological achievement, one proving that the system could someday transport people and goods—perhaps real cars, and real people—into space. Now that Tesla and its driver are overhead, in America's junkyard in the sky. To be sure, space is big. Really big. Most debris soars about 1,250 miles above the Earth's surface, so you have better odds scoring a seat on Virgin Galactic's maiden voyage than witnessing Starman crash into your next door neighbor's house. But it's our behavior back here on Earth—our insistence on sending things up, without really thinking how to safely contain or send them back down—that should concern you. We weren't always so short-sighted. Ancient Native Americans lived by the Seventh Generation Principal, a way of long-term thinking that considered how every decision would affect their descendants seven generations into the future. In Japan, Buddhist monks devoted part of their daily rituals and work to ensuring the longevity of their communities, even planting and tending to bamboo forests, which would eventually be harvested, treated and used to repair temple roofs many decades hence. With each new generation, we live life faster than our ancestors. As a result, we spend less time thinking about the farther future of humanity. We now have our sights set on colonizing Mars, mining asteroids for research and commerce, and venturing out to the furthest reaches of our galaxy. Space is no longer the final frontier; we're already exploring it. Our current approach is about getting there, rather than considering what "getting there" could mean for future generations of humans, not to mention other life in the universe. Where all that junk winds up isn't something we can predict accurately. We could be unintentionally wreaking havoc on civilizations far away from Earth, catalyzing future intergalactic wars. Or, we might cause far less scintillating problems. Space junk could start to behave in unpredictable ways, reflecting sunlight the wrong direction, or changing our atmosphere, or impacting the universe in ways that don't fit into our current understanding of physics. Last week—30 years after my friends and I created an imaginary net to capture space debris—SpaceX launched RemoveDEBRIS, its own prototype, an experimental net to collect junk in orbit. It's a neat idea, but even as middle schoolers, we knew it was an impractical one. Individual nets can't possibly scale to address the hundreds of millions of particles of debris already in orbit. The challenge is that all of our space agencies are inextricably tied to national governments and militaries. Seeking a global agreement on how to mitigate debris would involve each country divulging exactly what it was launching and when—an unlikely scenario. The private sector could collaborate to build grand-scale orbital cleaners, but their commercial interests are driven by immediate launches. Given all the planned launches in our near future, we don't have much time to wait. We must learn to be better stewards of our own planet—and commit to very long-term thinking—before we try to colonize any others.
Early warning satellites going dark signals attacks – causes miscalc and goes nuclear
Orwig 16 ~(Jessica, MS in science and tech journalism from Texas AandM, BS in astronomy and physics from Ohio State) "Russia says a growing problem in space could be enough to spark a war," Insider,' January 26, 2016, https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-says-space-junk-could-spark-war-2016-1~~ TDI NASA has already warned that the large amount of space junk around our planet is growing beyond our control, but now a team of Russian scientists has cited another potentially unforeseen consequence of that debris: War. Scientists estimate that anywhere from 500,000 to 600,000 pieces of human-made space debris between 0.4 and 4 inches in size are currently orbiting the Earth and traveling at speeds over 17,000 miles per hour. If one of those pieces smashed into a military satellite it "may provoke political or even armed conflict between space-faring nations," Vitaly Adushkin, a researcher for the Institute of Geosphere Dynamics at the Russian Academy of Sciences, reported in a paper set to be published in the peer-reviewed journal Acta Astronautica, which is sponsored by the International Academy of Astronautics. Say, for example, that a satellite was destroyed or significantly damaged in orbit — something that a 4-inch hunk of space junk could easily do traveling at speeds of 17,500 miles per hour, Adushkin reported. (Even smaller pieces no bigger than size of a pea could cause enough damage to the satellite that it would no longer operate correctly, he notes.) It would be difficult for anyone to determine whether the event was accidental or deliberate. This lack of immediate proof could lead to false accusations, heated arguments and, eventually, war, according to Adushkin and his colleagues. A politically dangerous dilemma In the report, the Adushkin said that there have already been repeated "sudden failures" of military spacecraft in te last two decades that cannot be explained. "So, there are two possible explanations," he wrote. The first is "unregistered collisions with space objects." The second is "machinations" ~deliberate action~ of the space adversary. "This is a politically dangerous dilemma," he added. But these mysterious failures in the past aren't what concerns Adushkin most. It's a future threat of what experts call the cascade effect that has Adushkin and other scientists around the world extremely concerned. The Kessler Syndrome In 1978, American astrophysicist Donald Kessler predicted that the amount of space debris around Earth would begin to grow exponentially after the turn of the millennium. Kessler 's predictions rely on the fact that over time, space junk accumulates. We leave most of our defunct satellites in space, and when meteors and other man-made space debris slam into them, you get a cascade of debris. The cascade effect — also known as the Kessler Syndrome — refers to a critical point wherein the density of space junk grows so large that a single collision could set off a domino effect of increasingly more collisions. For Kessler, this is a problem because it would "create small debris faster than it can be removed," Kessler said last year. And this cloud of junk could eventually make missions to space too dangerous. For Adushkin, this would exacerbate the issue of identifying what, or who, could be behind broken satellites. The future So far, the US and Russian Space Surveillance Systems have catalogued 170,000 pieces of large space debris (between 4 and 8 inches wide) and are currently tracking them to prevent anymore dilemmas like the ones Adushkin and his colleagues cite in their paper. But it's not just the large objects that concern Adushkin, who reported that even small objects (less than 1/3 of an inch) could damage satellites to the point they can't function properly. Using mathematical models, Adushkin and his colleagues calculated what the situtation will be like in 200 years if we continue to leave satellites in space and make no effort to clean up the mess. They estimate we'll have: 1.5 times more fragments greater than 8 inches across 3.2 times more fragments between 4 and 8 inches across 13-20 times more smaller-sized fragments less than 4 inches across "The number of small-size, non-catalogued objects will grow exponentially in mutual collisions," the researchers reported.
I value morality, The value criterion is maximizing well being by promoting pleasure Pleasure and pain are the starting points of moral reasoning. Every impact can be explained as good because it promotes pleasure, or bad bc it promotes pain. We know death is bad, bc it causes massive amounts of suffering, and we know saving lives is good bc it promotes pleasure. Therefore because pleasure is an intrinsic good, we should seek to maximize it in the world, and save the most amount of people possible. Moen '16 – (Ole Martin, PhD, Research Fellow in Philosophy @ University of Oslo, "An Argument for Hedonism." Journal of Value Inquiry 50.2 (2016): 267). Modified for glang Let us start by observing, empirically, that a widely shared judgment about intrinsic value and disvalue is that pleasure is intrinsically valuable and pain is intrinsically disvaluable. On virtually any proposed list of intrinsic values and disvalues (we will look at some of them below), pleasure is included among the intrinsic values and pain among the intrinsic disvalues. This inclusion makes intuitive sense, moreover, for there is something undeniably good about the way pleasure feels and something undeniably bad about the way pain feels, and neither the goodness of pleasure nor the badness of pain seems to be exhausted by the further effects that these experiences might have. "Pleasure" and "pain" are here understood inclusively, as encompassing anything hedonically positive and anything hedonically negative. 2 The special value statuses of pleasure and pain are manifested in how we treat these experiences in our everyday reasoning about values. If you tell me that you are heading for the convenience store, I might ask: "What for?" This is a reasonable question, for when you go to the convenience store you usually do so, not merely for the sake of going to the convenience store, but for the sake of achieving something further that you deem to be valuable. You might answer, for example: "To buy soda." This answer makes sense, for soda is a nice thing and you can get it at the convenience store. I might further inquire, however: "What is buying the soda good for?" This further question can also be a reasonable one, for it need not be obvious why you want the soda. You might answer: "Well, I want it for the pleasure of drinking it." If I then proceed by asking "But what is the pleasure of drinking the soda good for?" the discussion is likely to reach an awkward end. The reason is that the pleasure is not good for anything further; it is simply that for which going to the convenience store and buying the soda is good. 3 As Aristotle observes: "We never ask what heris end is in being pleased, because we assume that pleasure is choice worthy in itself."4 Presumably, a similar story can be told in the case of pains, for if someone says "This is painful!" we never respond by asking: "And why is that a problem?" We take for granted that if something is painful, we have a sufficient explanation of why it is bad. If we are onto something in our everyday reasoning about values, it seems that pleasure and pain are both places where we reach the end of the line in matters of value. Although pleasure and pain thus seem to be good candidates for intrinsic value and disvalue, several objections have been raised against this suggestion: (1) that pleasure and pain have instrumental but not intrinsic value/disvalue; (2) that pleasure and pain gain their value/disvalue derivatively, in virtue of satisfying/frustrating our desires; (3) that there is a subset of pleasures that are not intrinsically valuable (so-called "evil pleasures") and a subset of pains that are not intrinsically disvaluable (so-called "noble pains"), and (4) that pain asymbolia, masochism, and practices such as wiggling a loose tooth render it implausible that pain is intrinsically disvaluable. I shall argue that these objections fail. Prefer— 1 – A just government refers to one that acts utilitarian meaning that a utilitarian framework is key to understand the perspective of the actor in the topic MVO 18' What does a just government mean? ~https://www.mvorganizing.org/what-does-a-just-government-mean/~~ A just government is fair to ALL people that it governs. This includes not only the governed, but also the governors. Subjecting the governors to the same laws as the governed will help to ensure that no one group's interests are served at the expense of others.
Plan text: A just government ought to recognize an unconditional right of workers to strike.
Contention 1 is Climate Change
Climate strike participants get arrested now.
Scanlan 19 ~Quinn. Quinn Scanlan. Voting, campaigns and elections for @ABC. "Jane Fonda arrested in climate change strike outside Capitol". 10-11-2019. ABC News. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/jane-fonda-arrested-climate-change-strike-capitol/story?id=66209415.~~ Academy Award winning actress Jane Fonda, 81, was arrested by police with a AND student climate strikers around the world for taking on this issue so passionately.
Strikes incentivize companies to take climate action seriously.
Companies' influence is the key internal link to passing important Climate Policy while also boosting the economy WRL 19' ~WRI develops practical solutions that improve people's lives and protect nature. Our more than 1,200 staff have deep expertise in policy, research, data analysis, economics, political dynamics and more. We work with partners in more than 50 countries and currently have offices in 12 countries: Brazil, China, Colombia, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, the Netherlands, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States. https://www.wri.org/insights/3-ways-business-must-use-political-influence-champion-climate-ambition~~
Reducing your "carbon footprint" may have qualified your company as a leader on climate change 10 years ago. But today you must do more than that. The definition of leadership has changed—and it increasingly includes responsible, proactive lobbying for climate action that reduces emissions. More than 500 companies have committed to emissions reductions targets based in science, and more than 150 have committed to powering their operations entirely with renewable energy by 2030. Businesses are disclosing their emissions and evaluating their supply chains for climate risks. But checking even these boxes won't be enough to be considered a corporate leader on climate in 2019, and it certainly won't be enough to stop a changing climate's worst impacts. A new report from EDF highlights how most corporate climate leadership rankings overlook policy advocacy, and argues that this is a huge "blind spot" for any true measure of a company's contribution to climate change solutions. They are correct. Companies can and must reduce emissions, but only public policy can elevate these efforts to the scale and pace of emissions reductions needed to mitigate climate change. The political influence of climate-forward businesses with long histories of successful lobbying on other industry-specific issues can lend climate policies the credibility they need to achieve lasting impact. For aspiring firms looking to start real impact at the state and national level, here are 3 important starting points for responsible climate policy advocacy. This is your 2019 corporate climate lobbying checklist: 1. Share Your "Climate Story" Companies have an authentic and credible perspective to share on the long-term threat from climate change to their operations. This perspective is your climate story; crafting an honest, persuasive one is the first step in engaging elected officials. Corporate government affairs teams need to know and show how climate connects to the company's interest areas. Climate change poses real business risks that affect the economy, jobs and the private sector's ability to provide goods and services. The person who knows the company's climate story best and the person who relays it to policymakers may not be the same. Do those who interface with policymakers in your company know what your firm is doing on climate? When sustainability and policy don't interact internally, the result is that most businesses are not getting the credit they deserve for their science-based targets and emissions reduction measures within the halls of government or having influence. When companies can share their "climate story" using data points and anecdotes, it gives policymakers the credibility and confidence to then go and advocate for ambitious policy. When elected officials can be informed by business, it gives them the confidence to speak to climate issues with authority. 2. Meet Policymakers "Where They Are" Most of us want a safe, stable climate, but engaging policymakers while lobbying isn't a conversation that starts with "I want." Government Affairs staff know this, but sustainability practitioners helping to draft talking points for interaction with policymakers may not. Recognizing that elected officials represent constituents with certain needs is an important baseline for drawing a Venn diagram between what responsible business wants and what policymakers want. Understand the local context in order to make compelling cases about whatever your issue is, whether that's procuring renewable energy or buying fleets of electric vehicles. Tailor your advocacy to issues at the core of a district or state's interests, and you are more likely to generate buy-in from elected officials. 3. Push Government to Be Bolder When businesses advocate for climate ambition and send governments clear signals of commitment, this enables governments to be bolder in their own commitments. Likewise, when government sends the private sector clear, long-term signals about climate policy, business can act with the confidence it needs to make low-carbon investments. The Ambition Loop, a paper produced by WRI with We Mean Business and the UN Global Compact, highlights instances where business and government have sent one another these clear signals, which created the enabling conditions for more confident climate action. A few market leaders have begun to harness their influence and engage in thoughtful climate advocacy. Danone North America, Nestle USA, Unilever United States and Mars, Incorporated formed the Sustainable Food Policy Alliance to advocate for public policy in the United States in five key areas, one of which is the environment and climate change. The group focuses on communicating to policymakers their support of policies such as putting a price on carbon, and recently released a set of principles advocating for ambitious action on climate. Time to Lobby Firms on the leading edge must harness their political influence and recognize that climate policy is urgently needed to protect their customers, employees, suppliers and their own business interests. The Global Commission on the Economy and Climate found that bold climate action could deliver at least $26 trillion in economic benefits and generate over 65 million new low-carbon jobs in 2030. One of the most compelling narratives a business can tell comes from the private sector harnessing the potential trillions in economic growth to be had when they do well by doing good. The pressure is on companies to put their lobbying where their climate leadership is, with investors, NGOs, and US consumers increasingly expecting companies to act. Policymakers will need to listen, but companies first must step up with authentic, credible narratives and demonstrate that they are willing to spend their political capital to further climate objectives.
Environmental racism refers to the injustices suffered by marginalized communities in terms of unequal distribution AND damage from typhoons, floods, and landslides of increasing frequency and intensity.
Contention 2 is Democracy
Civic engagement – strikes increase democratic participation which reinvigorates democracy.
McElwee 15 ~Sean; Research Associate at Demos; "How Unions Boost Democratic Participation," The American Prospect; 9/16/15; https://prospect.org/labor/unions-boost-democratic-participation/~~ Justin Labor organizer Helen Marot once observed, "The labor unions are group efforts in AND a broad swath of the middle class largely unrepresented in the political process."
Corruption reduction – the right to strike fights concentration of power while reducing inequality.
IER 17 ~Institute of Employment Rights. The IER exists to inform the debate around trade union rights and labour law by providing information, critical analysis, and policy ideas through our network of academics, researchers and lawyers. "UN Rights Expert: Right to strike is essential to democracy". 3-10-2017. . https://www.ier.org.uk/news/un-rights-expert-right-strike-essential-democracy/.~~ SJVM The United Nations' Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of AND this right, and a negative obligation not to interfere with its exercise."
Democracies are not a monolithic system—even if some democracies are problematic, ones with more accountability and civic engagement are less likely to engage in regional warfare, have armed conflict, etc.
Cortright 13 ~David Cortright, American Scholar and peace activist, director of policy studies at the Kroc Institute for international peace studies at the university of Notre Dame and Chair of the Board of the Fourth Freedom forum, "How State Capacity and Regime Type Influence the prospects for war and peace, https://oefresearch.org/sites/default/files/documents/publications/Cortright-Seyle-Wall-Paper.pdf ~ JJ A recurring trend runs through nearly all of the empirical studies on the democratic peace AND of governance that prevents wars, you should vote aff to increase democracy.
Fires are a huge threat to nuclear explosions—UK is on the brink, Ritchie 14
~Dr Nick Ritchie, 2014, "Nuclear risk: the British case", University of York, https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/78773/1/Nuclear_risk_paper.pdf, date accessed 10-24-2021~ Lex AT Nuclear deterrence is a risky business: it is fallible, its effects are contingent AND nuclear-armed states, would be an important contribution towards this goal.
One explosion escalates,
Roth and Burn 17, 9-28-2017, Matthew Bunn is a professor of practice at the Harvard Kennedy School. A former advisor in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Nickolas Roth is a research associate at the Belfer Center's Project on Managing the Atom at Harvard University."The effects of a single terrorist nuclear bomb," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, https://thebulletin.org/2017/09/the-effects-of-a-single-terrorist-nuclear-bomb/, 3/29/20)ww BJ The scale of death and suffering. How many would die in such an event AND imagine states feeling more certain than ever before that they needed nuclear weapons.
Nuke war causes extinction
PND 16. internally citing Zbigniew Brzezinski, Council of Foreign Relations and former national security adviser to President Carter, Toon and Robock's 2012 study on nuclear winter in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Gareth Evans' International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament Report, Congressional EMP studies, studies on nuclear winter by Seth Baum of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute and Martin Hellman of Stanford University, and U.S. and Russian former Defense Secretaries and former heads of nuclear missile forces, brief submitted to the United Nations General Assembly, Open-Ended Working Group on nuclear risks. A/AC.286/NGO/13. 05-03-2016. http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Disarmament-fora/OEWG/2016/Documents/NGO13.pdfRe-cut by Elmer Consequences human survival 12. Even if the 'other' side does NOT launch in response AND course the immediate post-nuclear results for Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well.
Education is on the decline—STEM is hit hardest, Signal 20
~The Signal, 8-20-2020, "A Closer Look at the Current UK Teacher Shortage", Santa Clarita Valley Signal, https://signalscv.com/2020/08/a-closer-look-at-the-current-uk-teacher-shortage/, date accessed 10-24-2021~ Lex AT Let's take a closer look at the current state of the British education system, AND to re-evaluate how they treat and train the teachers of tomorrow.
Recognition from strikes is key to teacher satisfaction, Weale 21
~StudyUSA, 10-4-2021, "Why Is STEM Important? The Impact of STEM Education on Society", Study in the USA, https://www.studyusa.com/en/a/2157/why-is-stem-important-the-impact-of-stem-education-on-society, date accessed 10-25-2021~ Lex AT Preparation of STEM Experts Who Can Make a Difference STEM education gives people skills that AND only with STEM skills, experiences, and a multi-disciplinary approach.
Climate change destroys the world.
Specktor 19 ~Brandon; writes about the science of everyday life for Live Science, and previously for Reader's Digest magazine, where he served as an editor for five years; "Human Civilization Will Crumble by 2050 If We Don't Stop Climate Change Now, New Paper Claims," livescience, 6/4/19; https://www.livescience.com/65633-climate-change-dooms-humans-by-2050.html~~ Justin The current climate crisis, they say, is larger and more complex than any AND perhaps "the end of human global civilization as we know it."
and immunity from employer lawsuits over breaches of contract and strike damages.
The Unconditional Right to Strike is defined in the NLRA as,
National Labor Relations Board, ~The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is comprised of a team of professionals who work to assure fair labor practices and workplace democracy nationwide. Since its creation by Congress in 1935, this small, highly respected, independent Federal agency has had daily impact on the way America's companies, industries and unions conduct business. Agency staff members investigate and remedy unfair labor practices by unions and employers.~, xx-xx-xxxx, "NLRA and the Right to Strike," No Publication, https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/your-rights/nlra-and-the-right-to-strike NLRA and the Right to Strike The Right to Strike. Section 7 of the AND • Strikers threatening violence against nonstriking employees. • Strikers attacking management representatives.
Covid makes organized strikes impossible—status quo efforts are doomed to fail, Gall 20
~Gregor Gall, 4-16-2020, "Right Now in the UK, Strikes Are Effectively Illegal", Tribune Magazine, https://tribunemag.co.uk/2020/04/right-now-in-the-uk-strikes-are-effectively-illegal, date accessed 10-24-2021~ Lex AT At the moment in Britain, there is no lawful right to strike or take AND which must include a positive right to strike codified in law for workers.