Common ground is hard to find in today’s politics. In a society teeming with irreconcilable political perspectives, many people have grown frustrated under a system of government that constantly demands compromise. More and more on both the right and the left have come to blame the Constitution for the resulting discord. But the Constitution is not the problem we face; it is the solution.
Blending engaging history with lucid analysis, conservative scholar Yuval Levin’s American Covenant recovers the Constitution’s true genius and reveals how it charts a path to repairing America’s fault lines. Uncovering the framers’ sophisticated grasp of political division, Levin showcases the Constitution’s exceptional power to facilitate constructive disagreement, negotiate resolutions to disputes, and forge unity in a fractured society. Clear-eyed about the ways that contemporary politics have malfunctioned, Levin also offers practical solutions for reforming those aspects of the constitutional order that have gone awry.
Hopeful, insightful, and rooted in the best of our political tradition, American Covenant celebrates the Constitution’s remarkable power to bind together a diverse society, reassuring us that a less divided future is within our grasp.
Yuval Levin is the director of social, cultural, and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he also holds the Beth and Ravenel Curry Chair in Public Policy. The founder and editor of National Affairs, he is also a senior editor at the New Atlantis, a contributing editor at National Review, and a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times. His previous books include The Fractured Republic and A Time to Build. A former member of the White House domestic policy staff under George W. Bush, he lives in Maryland.
Shermer and Levin discuss:
“Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything—high and low and, most especially, high—lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away.” —Charles Krauthammer, Things That Matter, 2013
“A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.” —John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859
“But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” —James Madison, Federalist Paper No. 51
In Federalist No. 10, Madison outlined the problem with competing factions in a direct democracy (“a landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest…”):
“[A] pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party. Hence it is, that democracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”
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For over ten years, the ESA’s Gaia Observatory has monitored the proper motion, luminosity, temperature, and composition of over a billion stars throughout our Milky Way galaxy and beyond. This data will be used to construct the largest and most precise 3D map of the cosmos ever made and provide insight into the origins, structure, and evolutionary history of our galaxy. Unfortunately, this sophisticated astrometry telescope is positioned at the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange Point, far beyond the protection of Earth’s atmosphere and magnetosphere.
As a result, Gaia has experienced two major hazards in recent months that could endanger the mission. These included a micrometeoroid impact in April that disrupted some of Gaia‘s very sensitive sensors. This was followed by a solar storm in May—the strongest in 20 years—that caused electrical problems for the mission. These two incidents could threaten Gaia‘s ability to continue mapping stars, planets, comets, asteroids, quasars, and other objects in the Universe until its planned completion date of 2025.
Micrometeroids are a common problem at the L2 Lagrange Point, roughly 1.5 million km (932,057 mi) from Earth, so engineers designed Gaia with a protective cover. Unfortunately, the particle was traveling at a very high velocity and struck the cover at precisely the wrong angle, causing a breach. This has allowed stray sunlight to interfere with Gaia’s ability to simultaneously collect light from so many distant stars. Gaia‘s engineering team was addressing this issue the moment the solar storm hit, adding electrical issues to their list of problems.
Gaia’s all-sky view of our Milky Way Galaxy and neighboring galaxies, based on measurements of nearly 1.7 billion stars. Credit: ESAMission controllers first noticed signs of disruption in May when Gaia began registering thousands of false detections. They soon realized that this may have been due to the solar storm that began on May 11th, which could have caused one of the spacecraft’s charge-coupled devices (CCDs) to fail, which converts light gathered by Gaia’s billion-pixel camera into electronic signals. The observatory relies on 106 CCDs, each playing a different role. The affected sensor was vital for Gaia’s ability to confirm the detection of stars and validate its observations.
While the spacecraft was built to withstand radiation, it has been operating in space for almost twice as long as originally planned (6 years) and may have been pushed to its limits. As Edmund Serpell, Gaia spacecraft operations engineer at ESOC, explained in an ESA press release:
“Gaia typically sends over 25 gigabytes of data to Earth every day, but this amount would be much, much higher if the spacecraft’s onboard software didn’t eliminate false star detections first. Both recent incidents disrupted this process. As a result, the spacecraft began generating a huge number of false detections that overwhelmed our systems. We cannot physically repair the spacecraft from 1.5 million km away. However, by carefully modifying the threshold at which Gaia’s software identifies a faint point of light as a star, we have been able to dramatically reduce the number of false detections generated by both the straylight and CCD issues.”
Meanwhile, the Gaia teams at ESA’s European Space Operations Centre (ESOC), the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC), and the European Space Astronomy Center (ESAC) have spent the past few months investigating these problems. They have also worked closely with engineers from Airbus Defence and Space (the spacecraft’s manufacturer) and payload experts at the Data Processing and Analysis Consortium. Thanks to their efforts, the Gaia Observatory recently returned to regular operations.
Illustrated effects of Space weather. Credit: ESA/Science OfficeIn addition, the engineers used the opportunity to refocus the optics on Gaia’s twin telescopes one last time, which has led to some of the best-quality data Gaia has ever produced. As a result, we can expect that Gaia’s final Data Release (DR5)—which will include the full mission data—will be even more poignant!
Further Reading: ESA
The post Gaia Hit by a Micrometeoroid AND Caught in a Solar Storm appeared first on Universe Today.
Here, to end the week on a high note, is a 24-minute video of animals who have been captive their whole lives but are now freed. It’s very heartening. The only reason to keep wild animals in captivity is to rehabilitate them for release or to grow an endangered species to the point when it can be released.
Have a great weekend! I got my seventh Covid shot yesterday and have no reaction save a sore arm. (I got it for traveling to South Africa.) I’m one of the few people I know that hasn’t caught the virus.