My name is Kyle Trevett and I am a student at The George Washington University. It's August 31st, 2015, and I am interviewing Dr. David Berube for the 2015 NASA Astrobiology Debates. Dr. Berube is a Professor of Communications at North Carolina State University. He has been principal and co-principal investigator for $5 million in NSF grants to study risk communication and emerging technologies. He has served on the steering committee for the International Council on Nanotechnology. Furthermore, he manages and owns the Center for Emerging Technologies LLC, which recently completed a major contract with a multinational food corporation. He has recently won the Entman Award for Excellence in Communication Research.
Kyle:
Thank you for joining us, Dr. Berube. It is great to have you here interviewing with the NASA Debate Interview Series. If possible, would you be able to summarize very shortly, the experience that you are bringing to the question.
Dr. Berube:
I was an intercollegiate debate coach for a quarter of a century, so long enough. When I transitioned out, I transitioned into science and technology communication. I spent a lot of time at the intersection between policy discussion and scientific claims of arguments.
Kyle:
Well, this is definitely the forum for that experience, given the policy considerations of NASA and the questions of scientific risk brought up by the resolution. You say that you are a scholar of risk, or at least scientific risk.
Dr. Berube:
I spent most of the last 20 years working with the risks in nanoscience and synthetic bio. I am sort of the emerging science guy. When you have a lot of uncertainty any you don’t have really good quantitative ways of making sense of risk profiles, then I try come up with new ways of doing it.
Kyle:
That makes quite a bit of sense. As an economics major, I know a little bit about risk, but without the numbers that makes it an interesting challenge, to say the least.
Dr. Berube:
It’s wild.
Kyle:
Moving on to talking about the topic. There is a quote from Carl Sagan in the Interview Packet, which argues that we should not be colonizing other planets because of the risks to microbial life that might live there.
My first question is whether the probability of certain risks necessitates certain kinds of moral action?
Dr. Berube:
Most people who work in the philosophy of science and technology and even in the risk mechanics of science and technology would say that is true. That depending upon certain sets of probability certain sets of reasoning get kicked in where you are making ethical and moral judgments.
I spend most of my time debunking really bad debates on the precautionary principle. Which is pretty much, if there is any risk with a high unknown then we should engage in some level of precaution, which ranges from moratoria to more laissez-faire ways of regulating.
Kyle:
Building on that and getting an initial opinion on this topic, do you think that a laissez-faire or a more restrictive approach is most appropriate, in regards to microbial life on other planets?
Dr. Berube:
It depends on the qualities of the risk. One of the illustrations we give is based on the reversibility principle. Once a risk is irreversible, the risk profile doesn’t have to be as substantial as one that is reversible. Any risk that you can reverse, you can accommodate, any risk that isn’t, you can’t. So if we are talking about irreversible risks the stakes are much higher. The way we look at things like genetic engineering, the reversibility principle comes into play. When you extinguish an entire microbial population, you completely eliminate an entire gene line from history.
Kyle:
Would you say that these risks to certain beings are comparable in certain ways? So let’s say as an example, that you have a certain number of humans and a certain number of microbial populations. Even with irreversibility, can we compare the value of these lives in terms of these risks?
Dr.Berube:
This argument typically gets reduced to where humanity is a threshold point. Even if I can’t explain to you why a few dozen generations of microbes might be important in a way that doesn’t involve humanity…what people have tried to do in the philosophy of science is reduce it all to a human factor. The reason microbials become important is that microbials involve certain genetic factors where they’ll eventually be highly substantial, but not so to humankind. The thing is, all life tends to evolve, so the microbial death you’re creating today can’t just be evaluated in terms of the present, but all the future generations of that microbe.
We continually hear that humans are endlessly creative, and that this creativity will allow us to solve new problems. So you’ll hear that your children and children’s children will have new solutions for the problems we’re creating today. So that’s the weird debate that takes place. When you start pushing out the human factor, that’s where it gets weird. You have to predict the capacities of a future non-human germ-line and what they’ll bring to the table. Maybe, they’ll even be an entire competitive species, even superior to the human species. Human beings aren’t very good at this. We’re lazy. We’re rhetorically lazy people, and cognitively, we’re misers. Trying to determine the value of a microbe against a human is very complex. For most people, the solution is one which is incredibly simple, but this solution is one which involves some sort of bias.
I’ve had a strange lecture idea recently, which is to claim that the reason it was so hard to provide civil rights to African Americans living in the United States wasn’t because it wasn’t the right thing to do, but because we weren’t positioned well to do it. This is because we had already dehumanized them, then we had to re-humanize them so that we could provide them rights that had previously been reserved for white landowners. That was incredibly hard thing to do. What ended up happening was that it took a hell of a lot longer than it should have. You’ll likely see the same thing happening here, which is that it will take so long, and it will be so complicated to get the public to concede that a non-human species may have something to offer that may even be superior to the human species, that they will revert to a set of heuristics and biases that we’re talking about being incredibly long-term. There are some algorithms that attempt to deal with this by plotting out how many generations it will take us to develop philosophically to the point where we can have these moments of change.
I write algorithms and work with the NSA right now, so we do a lot of this stuff.
Kyle:
That is terribly interesting. When we get something with the NSA, I will be sure to let you know. Whenever they feel like doing a public debate series.
Dr. Berube:
That may be a while.
Kyle:
Drawing on your discussion of how human beings tend to over-simplify problems and focus on the solution that is easiest for themselves. Looking from a standpoint that is unbiased towards us, is there an obligation to assume that standpoint when evaluating these risks. As you were saying, there may be benefits of these microbes, but there may also be possible harms. Should we evaluate that in an unbiased manner?
Dr. Berube:
Obligation may not be the right word, but there may be a moral duty to do that. Humanity at the dawn of homo erectus, was probably not a species to be overly excited about. If we could travel back in time, I’m not sure we’d be impressed with homo erectus. We would still be obligated to consider what that species has the opportunity to become if our action would impede the evolution of the species. If it had been done to homo erectus, we probably wouldn’t be here. If ancient aliens came and saw homo erectus and went “what the hell” and thought that other animals had a more advantageous evolutionary path, they would just stomp on us. That’s where moral duty kicks in. That’s where if you don’t extend it one species, then you wouldn’t have it extended to you. Then you’re questioning your own existence. I’m sort of creating a Mobius strip here. Ultimately, we are provided a moral duty towards other species.
Kyle:
You’re either creating a Mobius strip or a very good sci-fi novel premise.
Dr. Berube:
I do those too.
I think that you could make the argument that there is a moral duty. Otherwise, you have to question your own existence. The question “Why?” then becomes very deep.
Kyle:
I’m pretty certain that the public, seeking to determine policy would not want to go through that calculus and would prefer a simpler approach.
Dr. Berube:
We’re probably going to focus on a human-centric way of doing that. That approach hasn’t produced the best policy, you know that. I’ve been working on nanoscience for decades and we’re still not entirely sure on the environmental implications of that. High bio-availability of small structures, which we’re talking about using in medicine a lot these days, makes this path very uncertain.
If a nano-particle gets through the blood-brain barrier, then we can use it to deal with those very difficult proteins that cause Alzheimers and other diseases, but we also don’t know what happens to those particles once they do what they do. I mean, where do they end up, the spleen, the pancreas, parts of the body where they should not be? If we put them in water, what happens then? What happens when we urinate them out, they go into the water supply, and they kill the bacteria that we use in a wastewater treatment facility? It is a never-ending cycle. You have pull yourself out of human centrism, when you don’t, you’re always going down that really weird trail, where it’s going to end up biting you in the butt, and you find out you’re going to end up getting crushed by it anyways. Human-centrism is a really weird issue, it just tends to eat it’s own tail. When you talk about microbial populations and alien life-forms, it’s like this. With a human-centric approach, you can predictably conclude that we’ll fall into the same bad pattens that we’ve fallen into in the past.
Kyle:
You’ve worked in nanoscience for years. We’re still dealing with the advent of these risks. Does your experience with that field have anything to inform the endeavor that we’re considering in this topic?
Dr. Berube:
It comes back to the fact that we’re going to have to develop a whole new way to consider this. When I develop probabilities and risk profiles, there’s a whole bunch of tools. I don’t know if you know anything about fuzzy set theory, where you take phenomena as a whole and break it down into separate categories. If you have uncertainty about which category it should go it, in order to cover your bases, you put some in category 1 and into category 2, such that one dribbles into another and in the end, N is greater than one, which really screws up the math. You’re not going to have a simple algorithm that will give you a switch, you have to come up with a new way of doing it, and that’s what you’re dealing with here.
The synthetic bio is even more relevant to this discussion. In synthetic biology, we’re building life forms that didn’t involve on this planet. There you’re taking a bacteria, removing some of it’s genome and substituting a genetic cartridge of your own and letting it go with that. In synthetic biology, you’re talking about those that are researching life that never evolved on this planet. That’s closer to the question that you’re exploring on the NASA Astrobiology debates, because we are dealing with microbes that never evolved here that we’re using for all kinds of different things. For example, using algae to produce energy, all the way through different kinds of sensor and monitors that we’re creating. The interesting question about the synthetic biology question is that the folks at NASA will have to start looking at this in regards to species that have fundamentally different architecture than the ones that we know.
Kyle:
Continuing on that, when we’re approaching these plans on microbes, you talk a lot about the potential we can get from synthetic bio or nanoscience. In regards to synthetic bio, you could build energy-producing algae, or you could produce synthetic smallpox. Is there a possible two-pronged relationship here? It is fantastic to protect these microbes if they are benign or neutral, but in the event that they pose harm human centeredness might justifiably kick in at a certain threshold of risk.
Dr. Berube:
That’s pretty astute. Here’s the story. There were a bunch of smart kids going through graduate school that decided they didn’t need to go to school anymore (you do get to a point in your graduate education where you’re pretty much just going through the process). They decided to pull themselves out of classes and start their own bio-firms. The reason behind this is that a family member might have a weird disease that a big medical firm wouldn’t research because there was no profit in it, but they wanted to figure out how to solve it and help their cousin or aunt. So they started to create these do-it-yourself bioplaces throughout the planet. They’re generally a pretty nice bunch of folks, but the government is concerned and the FBI is concerned that this could lead to a whole bunch of implications. When you look at things like PTBs, Poly-chlorinated biphenols, which we created to make our lives a little easier, they never really evolved from the planet. They’re not natural. What ended up happening, there are no checks on them. When we try to get rid of them, the environment can’t figure out what to do with them. These people say the answer is: we have to create new organisms to deal with them. They see themselves as jigging the evolutionary process up to deal with current issues. The biggest area of this right now is the climate folks, who want to find a way to deal with climate issues by rejigging evolution by using bio-engineered machines. Folks in agriculture, folks in energy are talking about this, but, you’re right, there’s a dark side to this. The only good news about the dark side is that it is expensive. If someone was going to do something really malicious, they’d likely use something much cheaper. What it’s done is introduced a whole series of questions that need to be answered in new ways. Microbial populations may have their environment polluted to such an extent that it might implicate the evolution of the microbes. That question is not one we are accustomed to asking. Science is getting closer and closer to asking these questions, but that’s only going to happen once we figure out how to do it. I think that’s the big question. If we impose human-centric reasoning on those sorts of problems, then we tend to get the answers wrong. It’s no different from a hard Southern Baptist saying you’re playing god. It’s this clash of thinking that’s taking place. You have to resolve it by coming up with a whole new way of evaluating risk. Nano is really the first time this happened. Is it because it was so small that it was a problem? Or was it because it’s chirality, it’s electrical charge? Nobody knew. Now genetic machines are popping up and it’s the new question. That’s why you’re getting people like Hawking and a bunch of others, going, ‘We have to answer these questions before we keep going on, because if we keep going on in this laissez-faire manner, what’s going to happen is that we’re going to tend to produce incredible crises.’ I have a lecture called Thalidomide and the Titanic. We thought we knew everything but we simply did not have the tools, and the tool building is what is going to have to happen first. That’s hard. You have the folks that say, ‘We don’t have the tools? Ban it’ and the folks that say, ‘We don’t have the tools, let’s use the tools we’ve used in the past, they’ve worked pretty well.’ We have to find a path between 100% laissez-faire and 100% precaution.
Kyle:
Talking about that kind of middle road, how can we do this certain kind of harm by altering or interacting? That’s why we have the Prime Directive, right? Do you think that middle road is sitting on the side of ‘We don’t wipe out the organisms’, or on the side of ‘We need to leave the organisms to do their own thing’?
Dr. Berube:
If we had to sit down and look at the relationship, we have with alien microbias, if we had to draw a line, and at one end of the line is the absolute destruction of them and at the other end of the line is the absolute progression of them, our interface is going to have to do something here. I’m not sure of the probability of our interaction destroying their evolution, there’s an argument that it may actually kickstart it. We don’t actually know. We know microbes, bacteria and viruses are peculiar little things. They do weird things, live in weird environments, and they do change. We’d have to map out all of those interactions and think of what those interactions may be and sample along the continuum. We’d then run an algorithm which has 20 or thirty entries for data sets and run variations of this data set over and over again. The Rand Corporation loved to do this back in the 70s. They liked to run these algorithms over and over again with slight variations. Google also does this. There’s ways of doing this. It takes a lot work, it takes a lot of people, a lot of mind-time and a lot of whiteboards. We ultimately have to think of a better way of understanding this. Ultimately you’re thinking of policy. I don’t know what else you can do.
You can send in experts and they could tell you what to do, but they are often wrong. I’m writing an article right now called “The End of Expertise”, it’s going to be done by the end of September. We did a study where we asked experts what the public was afraid of, we asked the public to predict what the experts thought they were afraid of, we asked the public to tell us what they were afraid of, and we asked the experts to tell us what they were afraid of, and there was no connection. As the world becomes more and more cross-disciplinary, we get this population of marginal experts, who are experts but aren’t really experts. I studied nanoscience for 15 years before I started talking about it. You really have to work at this to get it right. For marginal experts, research has been conducted showing they’re the ones who think they’re most expert when they’re least expert. When they’re giving their opinions regarding how we’re going to act in the future, they’re probably wrong. Then there’s the statistic that 95% of what you discover will be reversed or mitigated in the future, so whenever you’re trying to do a study, there’s a high likelihood you get proven wrong. It makes you wonder about these experts making all of these predictions where they’re probably wrong.
Right now my research is focusing on ways to get information which might be just a little bit more reliable. That’s why you’re dealing with this microbial issue because we don’t have a risk profile at all. What will we compare it to? The introduction of smallpox in North America in the 15th-century, when the white folks came over and gave smallpox to Native Americans? You can come up with hypotheticals, but there are not a lot of them.
Kyle:
That would certainly be a brutal realization of our research. Certainly, this is also a part of what we’re talking about. We’re not talking about the risks we’re used to, but risks that are so out of this world that we’re not equipped to deal with them. It’s difficult to accommodate it into a calculus. Obviously, the Native Americans we’re not prepared for smallpox and that was the major cause of their death.
Dr. Berube:
That is another example where we have done incredibly stupid things. Think of the mass proliferation of rabid species in Australia. This is a good example, where we brought in a bunch of species and they are everywhere. The local ecosystem is being crowded out. This is a methods of measurement issue. What method would we use to do this? For a human looking at a microbe, we spend most of our time destroying them. We nuture them on if we can use tyhem, but we don’t have much respect for something that is microbial. However, we were once microbial. We’re not prepared to extend this duty to a microbial species with no qualifications. This is a quandary at least, and a sci-fi episode.
Kyle:
In terms of policy, if you were leading the risk segment of a NASA expedition to a microbially inhabited planet, how do you think that the beginnings of a risk assessment would be conducted? Is this a theoretical endeavor, or do you think this is something we would need to be on the ground for? How do you think risk assessment could or should be conducted in a policy space?
Dr. Berube:
We know a few things through the bacterial fossils on Mars. We’ve learned a lot in biotech and bio-engineering, that has left many individuals ready and primed for questions like this. We understand how to deal with a lot of those risks. We know that we had better come up with some better way of dealing with this before we get there. While we are preparing to go to Mars, we have to discuss the implications of going to Mars. I hope that when the expedition take place, folks have thought about it enough and introduced enough of the right questions. I assume that our folks with be hermetically sealed in a million different ways. Mars is not a nice place to live. It is pretty, but it is not a nice place to live. For that reason, much of those unintentional releases will be controlled. However, if our microbes interact with alien microbes, that could be quite complicated. That is not getting into the huge discussion of prions, viruses, and the whole bunch of interesting ways that bacteria and viruses and interact with other bacteria and viruses. We don’t want to deal with that. It would be awful to send people to Mars and realize that we can’t bring them back, and that’s something to think about. If there’s a microbial infection that occurs, then we can’t bring them back because we can’t be sure about the infection and the possible implications of returning to the environment. That’s a hell of a commitment for someone to make to engage in exploration. I’ve been consulted quite a bit by the NSF over the last couple of decades. We talk a lot about investing in and trying to understand the societal implications of what we do. We should invest in both. Let the scientists do what they do, and let us social scientists, like my colleagues and I follow very closely.
Kyle:
That’s referring to a division of labor.
Dr. Berube:
We bring a lot to the discussion that they have not thought of before.
I teach a course on “Risk Communication”. We stand up so many times at the end of this course and ask, ‘What’s the right way to evaluate risk given data sets that are so incomplete that are so incomplete’. The probabilities that we are right are so low. No serious statistician would work with these data sets because they are so insignificant. There are too many probabilities there where you simply have to come up with something. I have worked with many studies where we were trying to generate data and we just did not have it.
Kyle:
When we generate data, when we have some of this data, do you think we have a moral obligation to act with significantly more caution when we are working with these incomplete data sets? Does a data set need to be full and complete before we make a call?
Dr. Berube:
What we’ve been doing with genetic engineering issues, is looking at different sets of data that we can correct. For each set we are assigning an uncertainty value and weighing the data. Some sets of data are weighing more heavily than others because we are more certain of the data set. We are also weighing it in terms of how important that data is. If it’s about extermination of all life on the planet, then it’s pretty damn important. If it’s about what might change the shades of grass from deep green to medium green, then it’s less important. You get provisional results when you’re doing that. When you do the math at the end, it isn’t multiplicative. It’s more corroborative. Each of the sets may have a special relationship so they corroborate a bit. It is not ‘50% this is true’ and ‘50% this is true’ and only 25% of both being true at once. There is an instant relationship between data sets. I often tell the story to my students: the probability of me using the f-word is not nonexistent; the probability of me slapping my elbow on the table is not nonexistent. The probability of the two coming together is more significant than the change that they will happen separately. That corroborative feature enhances the significance. The data sets often bleed into each other. If they bleed into each other, you weight them based upon the level of certainty, you weight them based on how significant they might be as sets of data, and you end up with something that gives you a value. That value will at least be educative. For policymakers, that is often all they get. When Truman made the decision to bomb Japan, no one knew what was going to happen. They had to make a decision and educate themselves as best they could. That is what you are looking for.
In Boston at the end of September, at the Heinz Auditorium, they are having an event called the international genetic engineering competition. It’s wild. I was there last year and we won our division, it is a small division. I’m going to be one of the judges this year. This is composed of high school students, undergraduates, graduates and prize-bid research firms that bring their newly discovered genetic engineering machines. I’m going to be the stick in the mud asking them questions like “Why is this such a good idea?” It is going to be instructive; it is really going to be an education. They are from every continent and every major university and they are all bringing their little toys to this thing. It is fascinating. They are taking E.coli and putting in these bio-bricks and turning E.coli, which is fairly innocuous and turning it into a sensor or turning it into a way to cure disease. This is the wet part of robot competitions. These are the kind of people who could produce whole new species. The only reason I am spending a whole week there is I want to find out how they answer the questions.
I talked to some people from another country working with a certain set of bugs, who had changed the genetic behavior to make the bugs less pest-y. They were doing it in an environment where they had released them. They created a pest, which had not evolved on the planet, and then released it. I was like “geez, weren’t you concerned”. The last thing you want is it going out there producing a next generation of species where you are not sure if it is going to crowd out the other generations or cause the problem to become worse. Many people are doing mosquito research that is just scary. I mean, I understand it would be a great idea if mosquitos were not able to carry dengue fever, but I am not quite sure the best way to do this is to genetically re-engineer them and then release them into the environment. It is the same big question. When you change microbes, or change bacteria or produce a lifeform and turn it out on an ecosystem where it never existed before…if we turn it out on an alien ecosystem, who knows. Do they grow at astronomical rates? Who knows? That is why you need those crazy folks in methods and measurement to come up with algorithms to do that work. They are not that expensive, they are just smart people with a lot of time who want to do this stuff.
Kyle:
Do you think there is value in disrupting that environment in some respects? When we take drugs from the rainforest, when we add them to the medical supply, ultimately we are changing something about our environment. Might we be able to use microbes from these environments to benefit us? Do you think that is of value to us? Is that an ethical thing to do?
Dr. Berube:
That is two questions. Whether it is of value to us? Probably. Whether it is ethical is a completely different issue.
One of my other hats I wear is that I am on the risk advisory board of the Food and Drug Administration. We know that the side effects of drugs are very significant. There are about sixty drugs out there with very significant, nasty side effects that come with very detailed warnings. Most of the drugs we have created do not work very well. A 20-40% success rate is very good. You sort of take a drug hoping it will work, and there’s no drug designed for you. Some day in the future there will be a drug designed for you. We’ll know enough about your genome and what’s wrong with you that we’ll be able to adjust the drug, its structure, its chirality, everything to do the work for you. That is great. The question becomes whether our trip to Mars becomes an adventure in bio-piracy or not. Bio-piracy is a weird thing because the implication of it in our planet is that we go to other places, we find natural products, we derive chemical substances or products from them that go into medications, and we sell that to people who are from the same rainforest we got the original plant. That is an impact: take their stuff and sell it back to them. The whole implication of going to Mars in order to cultivate and farm their microbes…I know some very wild people in my job and I am sure I could find people that would say that might be a good idea. However, we have no idea what is there. I am not sure we would have to do that. The drug we use for Malaria used to come from a plant, now it is just produced chemically. I am not sure we need to farm out microbes, honestly, we can just create them. That what a lot of these bioengineering folks are doing. Could it help? Quite possibly, but there are so many possible interactions, positive or negative, that could influence the microbes. I have this image of our initial image of our explorers going there sealed away in our little laboratories, similar to those used in serious bioresearch today. If you are working with pathogens today, you are going to need a secure lab environment. I see this with Mars or any other planet we could colonize. I do not see us simply interacting with the environment. The probability we find a planet that has evolved and would be kind to the human species is very slim. I have not thought that one out. That would be a very big whiteboard. Now we are going in a circle, where we are getting back to our need to use new methods and avoid human-centrism on this topic. Human centrism justifies us taking nasty production facilities and shipping them over to South Asia and producing products there and shipping them back to the United States when they’re finished because the folks over there are a lot poorer than the folks over there so we have to pay them a lot less to do it. The same thing, the same human centrism, is what is just wrong in this situation. I work with a person who does Rhetoric of Plants, I might have to ask him.
Bruno Latour is a famous author who talks about agent-network theory. In his early writing, he talks about the many different actors that influence the decisions we make. In his early years, he may have included microbes as one of those actors. He is still alive, living in Paris at Sciences-Po. He is a little bit reticent to go back to his old theory…but I wonder whether microbes should have a rhetorical space. I am not sure how many people in the debate community have discussed microbial rhetoric.
Kyle:
I would say it is a long time coming, but I have seen many strange things in debate.
Dr. Berube:
It has changed quite a bit in the last couple of decades. At this point in my life, all I am working on is in bizarre methods. I am the Social Science Editor to the Journal of Nanoparticle Research. I sit around and figure out whether the methods make sense or not. That is where your career sometimes goes. You are an economics major, just wait!
Kyle:
I believe we’re reaching the end of the interview. I would like to thank you for your participation in this interview. You’ve added points that we’re both informative and engaging. Are there any final comments that you’d like to add?
Dr. Berube:
I think we have covered it all. I think my perspective entails coming up with a new kind of thinking. We cannot be human centric, we must come up with something else. If I were teaching my graduate course in algorithms, this would be a great thing to put up on the board. Though we may not be able to collect all of the data into sets of brackets that might be relevant, just trying to figure out what they might be is often entertaining. It is probably due. We realized with emerging sciences, that we are not even close to being ready. We look at products, we look at the probability, we look at the probability that people will interact with the products and we figure out how dangerous the products are. That mathematical calculation is okay when you are dealing with things you know about, but when you are dealing with things with high levels of uncertainty that just does not work. You are dealing with ranges of probability versus ranges of probabilities. You are an economics major; you know that gets really complicated! They do not sum well together. If I was involved this, I think I would look at methods to evaluate microbes that are not human centric. I would really like to figure out if they deserve a voice or not, if there is a rhetorical space for them. We have talked about that with endangered species, if there is a rhetorical space for them, but I do not think people have gotten to the microbial and bacterial levels yet.
Kyle:
What we know about a bunch of concerns regarding the microbes in our environment is an opportunity to open that rhetorical space and an opportunity to open that space for those in radically different environments.
Dr. Berube:
If we sat down for a couple of hours, we could come up with a top ten list of worst instances of the use of human centric value systems to try to understand new things. It would not take long to put that case together and to create a powerful argument that we need to do something else.
Kyle:
That is a fantastic summation of what we are talking about. Thank you for deciding to be interviewed as part of the NASA Debates Interview Series. We will be using your interview as research when we are making arguments on this. We would like to thank you for all your help. This was an excellent discussion and I hope I interviewed you as well as this topic deserves.