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There’s not a thing wrong with what Fehrnstrom said. Adjusting your message to address a different audience is the right thing to do. Everyone knows it, and every campaign manager counts on it. What Fehrnstrom didn’t say, but could have, was that the electorate itself is like an Etch-a-Sketch. The voters themselves have views and passions that change from moment to moment and can be easily erased. This truth is based in natural human forgetfulness–and it is exploited by campaign managers, who gain by getting us so absorbed in the present instant that we have no room to reflect on the differences between this instant and a previous one. Campaigns like to address the sort of human being–call him Punctual Man–who is always right on time and always in the present because he has no time to recall the past.

Facebook also likes Punctual Man. Its business model is built on getting you to devote as much of your time as you can to finding out what everyone else is saying right now. Please load all your attention and passion into something immediate, leaving you no time to think about how something used to be different in the past, or could be better in the future. Such comparisons between the present and the past or future require time and space. This space for reflection is the space of privacy–it’s the room you need to compare things, evaluate them, and draw conclusions of your own.

Facebook is very clear about its opinion that you don’t need any of that–they’ve even reformulated their former “Privacy Policy” as a “Data Use Policy.” To Facebook there’s nothing about you that is “an individual” except in the sense that there’s only one of you. Rather, you’re one of these dot-beings that they manage on their datafarm. The data is like wool; they just have to get it off of you. Many Facebookers have objected to the new policy, but in the same less-than-sincere spirit of the people pretending amazement at Fehrnstrom’s purported gaffe. They claim to reject the policy changes because of violations of privacy yet don’t reject Facebook itself. They like Facebook’s immediacy but don’t care to acknowledge that immediacy and exposure are the same thing–and the opposite of privacy.

Which works out fine. The job of remembering is being contracted out to other interested agencies: the National Counterterrorism Center has new guidelines allowing it to retain private information on you for five years–up from six months–and that’s for those of us who aren’t terrorists. Do you remember what you were clicking on five years ago? They will. And because it’s them, not you, who will retain that perspective connecting your past to your all-engrossing present, it’s them, not you, who get to determine the meaning of the connections they’ll algorithmically discover. And the more you click right now, the more connections they’ll be able to make for the next five years.

Our politics and economy encourage you to reduce your self to an attentive dot, while our government takes over the curation of the private space that you’re relinquishing. So who owns the rights to your self? For that matter, where is there such a thing as “you”?

Clarke Cooper is a writer living in Brooklyn.

*Photo courtesy of Pindec.

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There is little doubt that Mr. Gingrich believes in big ideas. Unfortunately, however, there is a difference between big ideas and good ideas. After all, being a visionary doesn’t mean abandoning practicality altogether but rather harnessing it creatively to make new things happen.

Put aside that Gingrich was speaking in Florida, the state most invested in space exploration and, by happenstance, the next up on the Republican primary schedule. Let’s consider cost first. The Apollo missions to the moon cost in excess of $100 billion in current dollars. In 2005, NASA administrator Michael Griffin estimated the cost of a program to land four astronauts on the moon by 2018 (as was then planned), at $104 billion.

Now, four astronauts is not a permanent colony on the moon. To have a permanent colony, you would have to manufacture housing, most likely underground, or at least under significant shielding, since there is no atmosphere and no magnetic field to shield against the harmful effects of cosmic rays for an extended period. Not to mention the need to build facilities for waste recycling, plus food storage and preparation. That is, unless we continually provide food and other provisions for pilgrims from Earth, creating a non-self-sustaining colony. But Gingrich has already made it quite clear, in his attacks on President Obama, that he would not like to be remembered for championing any such sort of government-sponsored food program.

So, to truly embark on such an endeavor within a decade, we would have to spend somewhere between a few hundred billion and a trillion dollars. Whether we could develop the necessary technology for such a task within a decade is an open question, although for a sufficiently large investment, it might not be impossible. However, Gingrich is vying for leadership of a party whose major rallying cry is an end to big government programs and make-work projects to stimulate the economy.

Gingrich might argue that we need not rely on government for the investment. However, without a clear business plan, it is hard to imagine private money investing $1 trillion in a program with no clear commercial goal.

Yet he did not explain precisely what he wanted to do with such a colony, or what it might achieve, besides potentially populating a new 51st state. Certainly the goal would not be a scientific one, since there is little scientific gain to be made that would justify the cost, and one could populate the whole solar system with unmanned spacecraft that could explore all the planets and their moons for this cost, as well as send up satellites that could map the heavens on unprecedented scales.

So is manufacturing his goal? But what would we manufacture on the moon that we could not do on Earth for a fraction of the cost? It is true that there may be significant otherwise terrestrially rare isotopes like helium-3 in the lunar soil, and some have argued that this would be useful for fusion power here on Earth. But since we don’t yet know how to produce fusion power on Earth, it seems a little premature to rush out on a trillion-dollar adventure to gather up potential fuel.

Perhaps we could put mirrors on the moon to beam sunlight to Earth for power. But given that currently 10,000 times the total energy used by humanity on a daily basis falls on the Earth from the sun, it is not clear that we need to go to the moon to harness more of it.

Gingrich also said during this same address that he envisions a vibrant commercial near-Earth space program for the purposes of science, tourism, and manufacturing. Once again, he didn’t bother to explore precisely what sort of program one might envisage here. It took more than $100 billion to manufacture a white elephant in near-Earth orbit called the International Space Station, a large, smelly metal can that to date has produced no science, no manufacturing, and tourism that only billionaires could afford. Perhaps Gingrich imagines a vibrant Earth-surveying program that might help monitor climate change? No, probably not.

Not content to merely colonize the moon in a decade, Gingrich has also promised to develop a viable Mars program to begin human space exploration of that planet within the next decade. It is hard to imagine why he didn’t also promise an intergalactic starship in this timeframe as well, as long as he was being visionary.

Finally, Gingrich may not be aware that the current U.S. flags on the moon don’t mean we own it, any more than those on U.S. research stations in Antarctica mean we own that continent.

But I suppose if one is willing to suspend reality to imagine creating an imaginary new expensive, and expansive, space program from nothing in a mere decade, without raising the taxes to do it, anything is possible. It certainly seems easier to imagine populating the moon in this way than actually solving the very real problems we face on Earth today.

Lawrence M. Krauss is director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University, and the author of the new New York Times best-selling book A Universe From Nothing (Free Press, 2012). Zócalo is a partner of the Future Tense program, the New America Foundation, and Slate Magazine, for which this essay was produced.

*Photo courtesy of bre pettis.

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