Seth Houts

Since their launch from Earth in 2003 not he back of a Delta II rocket I have followed the trials and tribulations of the twin Mars Rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Each Rover was designed to last 90 Sols on cold and desolate Martian surface. It is only now, 15 years later, that we are saying goodbye to Opportunity.

The Spirit rover was the first of the two to land on Mars in January of 2004 and the first to be declared end of mission in 2011 after getting stuck in soft Martian soil and having an unfavorable angle toward the sun for the solar panels to charge its batteries.

The Opportunity rover landed a few weeks after Spirit in late January 2004. Opportunity now holds the record for longest operating rover on Mars. After traveling over 26 miles during its 5,352 Sols (5,498 Earth Days) on Mars, Opportunity was declared end of mission on February 13, 2019. Putting an end to one of the greatest Mars missions to date.

While the true impact of the information that each rover has collected will take years to be processed and analyzed there are two images, one taken by Spirit and the other by Opportunity, that I believe are the most important of the whole mission. It goes beyond science and taps into the human perspective.

The first image is one that Spirit took as it looked up at what appeared as a bright evening star. That star was in fact Earth.

As I look at this image I am reminded of the words of Carl Sagan and an excerpt from his book “Pale Blue Dot”.

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

While Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot” was inspired by the image of Earth from the Voyager space craft looking back at our solar system it still resonates with Spirits image as well. It should remind us of prospective and while humanity has done great things we should be humbled by our place in the universe.

The second image was taken by the Opportunity rover. After driving across the sandy plains of Meridiani Planum, Opportunity looked back and took a picture of the tracks it left in the sand.

As a people we tend to constantly look forward, ignoring what is behind us, and go blindly into the light. This image should be a reminder to stop, take a minute, and look back at where we’ve been. All of those dunes we’ve climbed, some harder than others, some getting us a little stuck, but always that persistent push forward.

It is becoming more and more evident that privacy is dying. With all of the data breaches in the last decade it is almost impossible to thing that the majority of us have not been effected in some way. This brings up the unavoidable question of how important is privacy in our tech-centric world?

Advocates of privacy and right to be forgotten laws continually push for greater regulation and safe guarding of PPI (personal private information). Where these laws have hit hardest is on the financial and medical sectors. Between HIPAA and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, medical and financial institutions have major guidelines and laws to follow on how to manage and safeguard PPI. While it isn’t 100% fool proof it has hardened into the daily operations of these institutions. What isn’t so cut and dry is how other FAANG type companies should handle customer data. (FAANG stands for Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google). Mark Zuckerberg even testified in front of congress to plead Facebooks privacy case after a massive data breach.

The newest in a string of public privacy concerns is the US cellular providers giving access to customer locations to third party companies and data aggregators. These companies and aggregators can go so far as to allow for “bounty hunters” to have access to customer locations. So for a price your location is up for grabs. All of the major carriers are now publicly announcing the winding down of their selling of location information to these third parties, most state they have either already stopped or will stop sometime this year. The intended use for this information started with giving access to third party road side assistance companies and has snowballed from there. Many advocates that support the use of this information cite the “you have nothing to worry about as long as you aren’t doing anything wrong” statement as well as raise public safety concerns since police use this information to track criminals without having to go through the proper legal channels.

As a society we have become almost blindly trusting of the companies that provide us with the technological services we crave and depend on for day to day life. Even car companies such as Tesla log every turn, break, and acceleration your Tesla vehicle makes. Is it wrong to want more anonymity or is it impossible in this day and time? I believe that as the IoT (Internet of Things) becomes more intrenched into our lives it is unavoidable that we will be giving up more and more of our privacy for convenience. We are still in the early age of big data and privacy controls cannot keep up with the growing demand for more information about every user. While many companies have tightened up their privacy policies and use of customer data there is a long way to go before we will truly be able to have the right to be forgotten.

Seth Houts

Seth Houts

The Spirit of Prospective and the Opportunity to Look Back

Privacy No More!