Up Close: Steven Dick

By Jeff Koslofsky

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Steven Dick, NASA's chief historian, comes from a small town near Mt. Vernon, Ind. He has been in the Washington area since 1979, when he came to work at the U.S. Naval Observatory. In 2004, Dick and his family moved to Ashburn Village in Loudoun County.

Dick has a wife who teaches high school in Fairfax County, and two sons. One is an assistant professor of geomicrobiology at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. The other is a second-year law student at Stanford.

In this e-mail interview, Dick discusses his job, his interests in science and what he enjoys about living in Loudoun.

Q: What made you want to become an astronomer and science historian? As a young person did you fantasize about becoming an astronaut and going into space?

A: We had dark skies living on the farm in southern Indiana, so the stars were very clear. I had a small telescope from a young age, was influenced by Sputnik at age 7 and by the early U.S. space shots like John Glenn's in 1962, got interested in science fiction, and went to Indiana University in 1967 majoring in astronomy. I definitely did want to be an astronaut and actually applied, but was one of the thousands who didn't make it!

Courtesy of Steven Dick

Steven Dick, a NASA chief historian who lives in Ashburn Village, has written extensively about the history of the debate over extra-terrestrial life.

Q: Tell us about a typical day for you as the chief historian at NASA.

A: This year NASA celebrated its 50th anniversary, and as NASA chief historian the scope of my work covers the entire 50 years of NASA's history. A typical day involves my own research and writing, monitoring contracts for research and writing that we support, seeing NASA history books through the press, answering internal and external inquiries, planning conferences, coordinating the work of my staff, and occasionally traveling to meetings. Among the books we have published recently is a volume on how spaceflight has impacted society and one on the 50th anniversary of the Space Age.

Q: What do you enjoy most about your job?

A: There is a great deal of satisfaction in making things happen, whether books, conferences, or other things. There is always a good deal of excitement being at the center of things at NASA headquarters, seeing the new discoveries from spacecraft come rolling in, monitoring the latest Space Shuttle missions, and just enjoying the ambience of a cutting-edge agency. NASA is the world's foremost agency for exploration, and we are continuing an American tradition of exploration dating back at least to the expeditions of Lewis and Clark.

Q: You are a member of the International Academy of Astronautics' SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Permanent Study Group, and some of your publications discuss the debate over extra-terrestrial life. What sparked your interest in this topic?

A: I think most people have a natural fascination for this subject, a natural desire to know if anyone else is out there. It's a fascinating subject for an historian because it ranges from UFOs and science fiction to the search for life in the solar system and for other planets beyond the solar system. My dissertation was the first history of the extraterrestrial life debate, and my books Plurality of Worlds, The Biological Universe, and Life on Other Worlds cover the history of the debate from the ancient Greeks to the present. Over the course of my career I've been able to attend many meetings in astrobiology and bioastronomy, and gotten to know the leaders in the field. It's a never-ending source of curiosity as new discoveries are made.

Q: After all your research, do you think there are other forms of intelligent life in the universe?

A: Yes, the only question is how rare it is and what it would be like. Our Milky Way Galaxy is 100,000 light years across with 200 billion stars, and it would seem very unlikely that we are the only intelligence. And there are billions of galaxies beyond the Milky Way. People used to say there was no evidence of any planets in the midst of all those stars, but in the last dozen years or so 350 planets have been found, and the Kepler spacecraft launching next month will likely find thousands of Earth-like planets. The origin and evolution of life remain big questions, but the discovery of life in extreme conditions on Earth increases the likelihood of life in the universe. If it evolves to intelligence it may not be anything like us, and probably more advanced. I once wrote a paper arguing that the universe may be postbiological, in the sense that most intelligence may be machine intelligence – that cultural evolution may have gone beyond flesh and blood. Some people think that may happen on Earth in a few generations!

Q: You have a lot of published work out there. What is most challenging about writing a book or writing an article for a scholarly journal?

A: The research is the fun part, the actual writing is harder. When you sit down in front of a keyboard, you realize the infinite ways a story could be written, and you're only going to write it one way, using your distinctive voice. It can seem a daunting task to produce an entire book, but I like to point out to my friends that if you write one page per day, at the end of the year you'll have a 365 page typescript, about a 250 page book by the time it gets printed. So it's one line at a time, one day at a time, and it all adds up. The challenge in these busy and distractive days is to find the time to immerse yourself in the project, which is really what you have to do to produce a coherent book. Since my books have all been non-fiction, I've always been constrained by the facts. I'd like to try my hand at science fiction, but I understand from my science fiction friends that that's not easy either. You have to be somewhat constrained by facts there, or you end up with fantasy, which is another genre, but not my cup of tea.

Q: Before you became chief historian for NASA, you worked for the U.S. Naval Observatory for 24 years. Some of that time you spent working in New Zealand. Tell us about your experiences there.

A: In the mid-1980s we set up an observatory in the Southern Hemisphere so we could chart the Southern skies, which are truly spectacular. You can actually see other galaxies like the Magellanic Clouds with the naked eye, but our job was to set up several telescopes to chart the positions and motions of the Southern stars. We set up those telescopes on a mountaintop on the South Island of New Zealand, the more remote and less inhabited of the country's two islands. For three years I went to work on this mountaintop, which is quite different from the traffic from Loudoun County to Washington! New Zealand is a beautiful country, and an added bonus was the arrival of Halley's Comet in 1986. It was much brighter and higher in the sky than in the Northern Hemisphere. My departure from New Zealand in 1987 was marked by a spectacular and famous supernova, a rare exploding star. Those three years were an unforgettable experience. It was also just at that time that New Zealand wineries were starting up, and New Zealand now produces some of the finest wines in the world.

Q: What do you do to relax? Are there any places in Loudoun, in particular, that you enjoy going to in your free time?

A: My wife and I like to hike, visit Loudoun County wineries, and travel the beautiful back roads of the county.

Q: What are your other passions besides astronomy and science history?

A: I am very interested in ancient civilizations, and like to travel with my wife in search of them. One summer we visited Rome, Athens, Crete, and Mycenae on our own; it inspired us to find out more about how these people lived and how their civilizations died – perhaps with some lessons for current Western Civilization. I'm now reading a book about the Greek historian Herodotus, and Herodotus himself. I'm also interested in the history of religion in its many forms, and am an active member of the Unitarian-Universalists of Sterling, a religion that incorporates the best of all religions, that believes in a continuous search for truth, and that advocates social justice.

Q: What do you enjoy most about living in Loudoun County?

A: It's close to the city, close to the mountains, close to many historic sites, and not that far from the ocean.

Q: Tell us something about yourself that might surprise your friends and colleagues.

A: I once wrote an article on "Cosmotheology", which advocated incorporating what we know about the universe into our theologies. That means including the fact that we are not physically central in the universe, may not be biologically central if extraterrestrial life is common, and that we therefore might not be the center of God's attention, if indeed he exists. That usually gets a conversation going!

Tagged: Ashburn, science, Up Close

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