A favorite pastime for me is to lay on the bare paint-chipped wood of my mom’s back porch and gaze up into the sky. When I stare at birds, planes and clouds as they breeze by, I can’t help but be fascinated by the way they move. And a lot of people feel similarly, which is why a fundamental motivation behind aerospace is that we can unlock such freeing and fascinating methods of movement with our minds. Other things in the pro column are the potential benefits like connecting the world, discovering new technologies, and a bunch of other cool things. But let’s emphasize that these are all cool things, not inherently good things, a distinction that I don’t think is made often enough. And this brings us to the key problem with aerospace: it’s too cool.
Aerospace is so cool that people are willing to ignore the con column for the sake of the pro column, and that makes it both cool and dangerous. We talk about these pleasant sounding pros like they are the main driving force, but in reality the main driving force is to continue consolidating power. The biggest indicator of this is the distribution of aerospace technology around the world. Looking around, we see the same nations that have been gaining influence through imperialism boasting the most success in aerospace and using that success to further their imperialist reach, which is riddled with violence and conflict. And the nations on the other side of this reach are coincidentally the ones that benefit the least from the technological developments we, as engineers, make in aerospace.
So, if we continue to pretend the biggest pro for aerospace today isn’t the military power it enables but instead the great solutions aerospace could offer humanity, we must at least accept that the only people that will be experiencing the benefit of those solutions are the ones that live in privileged and comfortable countries. Two prime examples are the internet and GPS, two technologies that are born from innovation within the aerospace industry.
Internet and GPS are incredibly convenient technologies that have made information available to millions almost instantly. I use the internet almost hourly, GPS daily, and both have become a cornerstone of humanity’s technological developments. But does the benefit we have from this small subsection of aerospace really offset all of the oppression that aerospace as an industry has contributed to over the past 80 years? I say no, based solely on the fact that many more people have been hurt or inconvenienced by aerospace, as an extension of the military-industrial complex that drives it, than those that have benefited from the internet and GPS. The internet and GPS are luxuries that can be acquired through a paywall, how can a luxury offset all the oppression?
And what does it look like to offset this oppression? What’s the conversion rate from civilians killed to Google searches and directions to the nearest open McDonalds? I know that these technologies contribute much more than the mundane, but even considering all of the research and discoveries that the internet enables, how can we begin to quantify offset? Especially when it comes to environmental impact, a field that we could probably quantify if we put time and resources into learning how, or lives lost, where each is invaluable.
So while I stalk the birds as they fly above and jump from perch to perch, I quickly become overwhelmed trying to understand and think about aerospace’s role as a tool for humanity. There have certainly been an unignorable amount of lives lost and oppression due to the aerospace industry that continues even today. And while I agree there is a lot of potential, does that excuse the unignorable? It’s a lot to think about, and I wish that my experience in the classroom helped me think about this stuff but there are only a handful of classes offered that bother to touch on this for at least one class session. Why don’t professors teach us how to think about this stuff? I can count on one hand the number of class sessions I’ve had that covered these critical topics, and my schedule has not allowed me to take either of the two MatSci classes that critically discuss systemic oppression in our engineering supply chains.
We need to have these conversations and introduce frameworks to think about these real and pervasive problems. As an ECE student, why is there no required class that teaches me about the impact of electrical engineering? That teaches about where our rare earth metals and other materials come from, and whose hands mine them from the ground, and how we contribute to that system. Is it not critical to understand how dirty your PCBs and components are if you are going to try to make something good out of them? This is a specific example, but one exists for every major and every class, regardless of how technical the subject is. If we don’t incorporate these crucial conversations into the classroom, then are we problem solvers or just consumers?
