I'd like to give a brief summary of Mae Jemison's life and also reflect on the speech she gave, which primarily focused on her current endeavor, 100 Year Starship (https://100yss.org/).
Mae Carol Jemison was born October 17, 1956 in Alabama, but grew up in the southside of Chicago. As a young girl, she always assumed she would get into space. Her parents were supportive of her interests, but when learning that she wanted to be a scientist, her kindergarten teacher said "Don't you mean a nurse?" But no, she wanted to become a scientist and a scientist she became.
Jemison entered Stanford University at the age of 16, and graduated in 1977 with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and the requirements for a B.A. in African and Afro-American Studies. She had issues being a black woman majoring in engineering, with some professors just ignoring her completely, but credits her "I'm going to do this and I don't give a damn" attitude.
She obtained her Doctorate Degree in Medicine from Cornell in 1981 and worked as a general practitioner in Los Angeles. Then, in 1983, she joined the Peace Corps and served as the Medical Officer until 1985, serving in Liberia and Sierra Leone.
After Sally Ride's flight in 1983, Jemison decided to apply to NASA. She was also inspired by African-American actress Nichelle Nichols who portrayed Lieutenant Uhura on Star Trek. In 1987, she was selected as one of fifteen candidates out of 2,000 applicants. Prior to her shuttle launch, she worked on launch support activities and verified the Shuttle computer software.
From September 12 to 20, 1992, Jemison flew her only space mission on Endeavour as a Mission Specialist on the 50th shuttle mission. She was the co-investigator on a bone cell research experiment and conducted experiments on weightlessness and motion sickness. With this flight, she became the first African-American woman in space.
She resigned from NASA in 1993 to pursue her interest in how social sciences interact with technologies.She has been a professor at both Dartmouth College and Cornell University. In 1993, she founded the Jemison Group that researches, markets, and develops science and technology for daily life. In 1999, she founded BioSentient Corp to develop a portable device to allow mobile monitoring of the involuntary nervous system. And then, in 2012, she became the principal for the 100 Year Starship organization.
One last thing before I discuss her lecture: in 1993 she became the first real astronaut to ever appear on Star Trek, as Lieutenant Palmer on Star Trek: The Next Generation.
The main thing Mae talked about was how we need to get people from more varied backgrounds into the sciences, because perspective really matters. For instance, she remembers hearing doctors say "you can't just go cutting stuff off" when they discussed treatment for testicular cancer, yet the most common treatment for breast cancer at the time was a mastectomy. So we need lots of different people at the table to interpret the data differently.
This is reflected in her team at the 100 Year Starship project, which has the goal of making the capability of human travel beyond our solar system a reality within the next 100 years. There is a need to not only have people from different races, genders, and places across the globe, but also to have people from various different disciplines working on these ideas. For instance, someone who is going to figure out the key to getting enough energy to go interstellar (whether fission, fusion, or antimatter) may not be the best person to determine what clothes the voyagers should be wearing or what food they can grow on their trip that will last years and years if it ever ends at all. And currently some of the better people to work on data compression issues are those who work in the video game industry. So it won't just be scientists and astronauts who will figure this out, but everyone who has something to bring to the table.
Another interesting point was that the technology needed to go interstellar will greatly benefit our own world. Figuring out how the astronauts can be self-sufficient will help humanity stay self-sufficient. This has already happened; a lot of the technology we use today was originally developed for space travel. So we should be putting money and effort into both developing the technology for space travel, and just learning about space, as this will only benefit life on earth.
Mae said that one thing we need to come to terms with is that we are all Earthlings, first and foremost. And we are already all in space. So a lot can be learned about our own planet and sun and solar system by studying other planets and suns and solar systems. Perhaps we can learn more about where we came from, and, more importantly in my opinion, where we are going. At the end of the day, MOST of us are going to be staying on this planet for the rest of our lives. So we need to be better about working together so that we can do something bigger as a whole.
Finally, one last quote from Mae's talk that made me laugh: "[Going interstellar] is not impossible in terms of the physics... but the engineering is rough."
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mae_Jemison
https://100yss.org/mission/team
http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/jemison-mc.html
http://www.biography.com/people/mae-c-jemison-9542378
http://www.makers.com/mae-jemison
No comments:
Post a Comment