Highlights

☕ I read the most in the morning

💌 I subscribed to 2 new Substacks

📽️ I watched 1 minute of video

❤️ I liked 4 posts

💬 I left 2 comments on posts

📜 I scrolled 33 meters in Notes

🕵️ I discovered 3 new posts via Notes

Top Substacks

Popular Information by

Independent accountability journalism.

Top post this summer: A guide to the coming attacks on Kamala Harris

Software Design: Tidy First? by

Software design is an exercise in human relationships. So are all the other techniques we use to develop software. How can we geeks get better at technique as one way of getting better at relationships?

Top post this summer: Start Presentations on the Second Slide

A1 Engineering by

Deconstructing the very best of Engineering

Top post this summer: Why having opinions matters

Share your own Summer Recap

You can see your own summer recap in the Substack app. I’d love to see what you’ve been reading.

Get my Recap

So I thought this would be a good time to reintroduce myself and preview what’s coming up next.

I totally understand the overwhelming amount of information, newsletters and commentary out there. The firehose of information is way too much to keep up with. So I appreciate any time you spend reading this during your busy day!

Why I started writing?

From the beginning I wanted to write about a topic that was interesting to me and I knew others would find it interesting as well. That topic clearly was Space. Or more specifically — Astrophysics. Everything about it fascinated me. The historical figures, its role in human conflict, our robotic ambassadors and the future of human spaceflight. Even the obscure topics like Black Holes and Gravitational Waves fascinated me. I was like a kid discovering a new passion.

To top it off, my writing coincided with very public successes for the scientific community. Like the first detection of Gravitational Waves by LIGO in 2016, first picture of Black Hole by EHT in 2018 and Artemis launch to the Moon in 2022.

I had front row seats to the groundbreaking scientific achievements and in some way, participated in it by doing science communication.

I recently extended that coverage with a new podcast series that highlights scientists and other science communicators.

Software Engineering & Space Exploration

As a software engineer by trade, writing about Space gave me something else to think about outside of work. I also thought there were plenty of sources for software engineering related content. But as I have published more articles, I am now more comfortable sharing lessons from my professional experience. What better topic to talk about than the industry I have spent more than a decade in!

One interesting thing about software engineering is that it applies to multiple industries.

I have been lucky to see how it benefits the financial and healthcare domains. Its applicability in the space industry is also not a stretch. Starting with when Margaret Hamilton and her team wrote the on-board software for Apollo missions that allowed humankind to land on the Moon. Or more recently the critical software that is autonomously controlling rovers on Mars. Or doing data processing on a colossal scale for various astronomy projects.

Beyond applicability, both fields have strong overlaps as both are technical, need teamwork and depend on planning. Then there’s “science fiction”, which both sets enjoy.

So as a software engineer, it wasn’t a big leap to share my interest in space.

What’s next?

Well “sky’s the limit”. For now, I’ll stick to writing about these two topics more regularly. I might stretch to cover human conflict, climate hope or my travel experience. All of that will go in the ‘Random Tidbits’ bucket.

What I won’t be doing is moving my accounts across platforms or making my writing harder to find. I want to connect where you are and not worry about missing features on one platform or the other.

So I hope you’ll continue to support me by coming along for this journey!

Looking at what I wrote last year, my goal was to cover the main story line of important missions and their costs — funding our curiosity. The year started with wrapping up of the Voyager series —

But that plan took a diversion as someone asked a straightforward question — “Why should we care about space now?”. Which seemed like a good opportunity to answer that question in more depth. So “Why care about space” became the main topic —

After wrapping that up, it seemed like I needed to get back to the main topic. NewHorizons and Pluto became the next priority —

Next I would have moved to writing about LIGO or some other mission. But 2023 had other plans. Humanity took a step back — Climate change broke all-time records and yet we decided to open old wounds.

Now I plan to get back to the main series, with few diversions in between. Hope 2024 is a happy and productive year for everyone.

Edited On (Jan 12th) — “What does a collective reset look like?”

Recent global events have triggered a shared sense of shock and sorrow. After haphazardly consuming news updates, we eventually put those events into our personal context and move on. Despite the differing details, these incidents appear remarkably similar. The common thread is that an ancient hatred bubbled over and the two sides had justification for further escalation.

The other commonality is that it’s now collectively accepted that with the right push, these cold conflicts will eventually ignite. There’s not much the world’s “hall monitors” can do. The UN is often seen as a toothless bureaucracy setup to fail on purpose and do the bare minimum.

So let’s examine human conflict by considering its context, understanding the actual cost, and exploring our potential long-term solutions.

The Human Context

From ancient times our primary way of surviving as a group has been to tell stories. Learnings passed down generations that provided common wisdom and connection to each other. 

Homo sapiens rules the world because it is the only animal that can believe in things that exist purely in its own imagination, such as gods, states, money, and human rights. — Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens)

Over time our stories evolved & we developed a keen sense of being in or out of a group. Mainly to get control over some limited resource, which led to rivalries. Eventually one tribe prevailed and gained control. Even our more recent history is ripe with examples of European colonizers building their empires over less fortunate tribes.

21st Century Context

We have come a long way in our understanding of the world. Science has given us tools to control energy, split the atom, land on the Moon, map our genome, cure incurable diseases and send our robotic ambassadors beyond the solar system. Globalization has brought us even closer.

What hasn’t caught up is the collective wisdom of the human race. We still cling to minute differences that our ancestors cared about. Even though science tells us that we are actually not very different from each other.

Cosmic Perspective

No one can present the Cosmic perspective better than Carl Sagan. Here he is talking about the global balance of terror during the last big Cold War and the need for being one planet  — 

Why Do We Still Fight?

Let’s take the obvious “generational conflicts over resources or religion” off the table. The next obvious answer is “outside interest”. There are various types of interests here but the two main that rise to the top and feed into each other are  —  “Political” and “Corporate” (ahem MIC).

It is still remarkably easy to divide people into camps. Outside interest groups understand it, practice it and benefit from it. The old strategy of “divide & conquer” could not be more appropriate in this digital world. Elections can be swayed, opinions can be changed and most importantly, doubts can be sowed by a click of a button.

On top of that, we have incentivized a closed-system that creates extreme winners and losers. The top 1% believe in survival of the richest, instead of common good ().

So ask yourself —  who really benefits from this chaos? 

Real Cost

Let’s again put the obvious answers like “pain & suffering” aside. The one thing that doesn’t get talked about is the distraction all this causes from existential crises like Climate Change. That’s one issue that impacts everybody. Our future generations cannot survive it without a collective and focused action now. 

Climate change will also make these conflicts more intense as natural resources disappear and weather patterns become more extreme & unpredictable. This has happened before and will happen again.

Outside interest groups don’t really want us to talk about these real costs. Every little distraction helps. Hot wars help the most.

Our Options

I have no illusions that these ancient conflicts can be solved by next Monday. As a parent, the world is about the same (if not more) hate-filled as the world my parents lived through. Technological progress has made it brittle. Nuclear proliferation has made it dangerous. Climate change is making it volatile.

In SciFi terms, we are more likely to live out the hatred depicted in The Expanse than the dream of curious explorers from Startrek.

So how do we improve the odds of our kids living in a better world by the next decade? My two cents here are to collectively aim higher — a collective reset. Without it, we’re primed for a repeating circle of violence at the whims of external influences.

What does a collective reset look like? (Updated)

We need an internal reset first to examine your biases towards others. Do those biases even matter now? More importantly, is it worth passing those to your children?

The external reset is how you analyze the information that comes to you. Is it coming from a reliable source? Does it have any additional context? Can you recognize verifiable facts?

Putting these together, hopefully it ignites your curiosity to learn more and dig deeper into important topics. Instead of relying on sound-bite analysis prevalent on the news these days.

A good use case is any news around Climate Change. There are plenty of sources of information on it and multitudes of opinions. Can you identify denialism vs doomism? Does climate action sound like the right thing to do?

Wrapping Up

We are a long way from accepting that we are all the same race  —  the Human race. Can we begin to find some common ground, become one tribe and tell new stories? Stories of climate renewal, compassion, equity and scientific literacy.

Perhaps those stories can begin to pass hope to the future generation, rather than the hate of our past. “Every child begins the world again (Thoreau)”  —  only if we let them!

Subscribe now

With ChatGPT rolling out, you can now use a language model to have a conversation, for free. So I thought about throwing it a curve ball— “why would a lawyer care about space?”

In about 5 seconds of asking the question, it blurted out this —

TBH the answers aren’t that far-off from what I would have guessed.

To ask something even more odd, my next question was “why would a News Organization care about space?”. Even those answers were not that far-off!

Don’t know where this AI revolution is leading us, but I am all for experimentation!

List of what I written so far and what I plan to add 

History & Background

• 1: Traveling long distance — Humanities journey into Space

• 2: Start with Why? — Goals, hopes & blueprint

• 3: Skeptics & Agnostics — Cultivating our scientific curiosity

• 4: Past — We took to the sky

• 5: The Dancing Traveller — Democratizing air travel

• More basic concepts

Great Minds

• 6: Inquisitions & Two Societies — Galileo

• 7: Newton & his Orbits

• 8: Traveling Alongside A Beam of Light with Einstein — Beginning to Special Relativity

• 9: Free Fallin’ With Einstein — General Relativity to Einstein’s influence on our daily lives

• Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

Funding Our Curiosity

• 10: $Price of Discovery — Funding our curiosity

• 11: Voyager Missions ($865 Million) — Objects humanity has thrown the furthest

• 12: Voyager Missions (Contd.) — Our messengers to the Cosmos

• New Horizons

• LIGO

• Space Shuttle

Future

• Artemis - The Hunt Begins

• More to come!

No doubt I have made it this far with a lot of support & encouragement. There have been few surprises. Going into this project, I knew it was going to be difficult picking specific pieces from the long form story I had been writing for a while. As I realized later, anything over 5 minute read isn’t consumable by most readers. Then, there were parts of the story that I had not put together completely. So I spent more time rewriting and researching than I originally expected.

The biggest thing has been finding my voice. Writing for an unknown reader is a daunting challenge for any writer. Creating and maintaining a coherent story throughout the series is another challenge. I don’t know if it all makes sense, direct feedback from a few has been invaluable. Mainly from my wife, who has edited almost all of the articles.

Wishing everyone a happy, healthy & joyful year ahead 🥂

Abhinav's Space

I write about Science & space programs with the ultimate goal of highlighting their importance.

By Abhinav Yadav

To be clear, it wasn't so much about if either one of us believed in climate science or not. More so about climate education. Specifically, one of us recalled being in the company of a climate change denier and how convinced they were in their denial. The debate centered around if this person should have been confronted with facts or left alone in their ignorance.

Being a skeptic has always been an important role in our society. Scientific method is built on theories standing up to challenges and being scrutinized publicly. When we get the same results after repeated tests, the debate is considered settled and we move on to the next unknown. If the results only hold in special conditions, then the theory isn’t complete and we keep working to complete it. That’s regardless of authors stature. Even Einstein had to abandon his static universe model and support Edwin Hubble’s conclusions of expanding universe after red shifts were repeatedly measured.

Debating scientific theories, confirming their results and scrutinizing any predictions is at the very heart of scientific revolution and our successful civilization.

Just look at your phone — 1000s of research hours have resulted in 100s of individual components and software magic that make it a triumph of human ingenuity. All fitting nicely in your hands, with a promise of further improvements in the future.

Most common climate denials I have heard are variations of — humans simply cannot cause global climate change, there was an ice age before and humans didn’t cause it, everybody is being an alarmist, and my favorite, we can’t trust the scientist or the climate proponents because they fly in jet planes.

This denial is similar to the flat earth or moon landing debate. More knucklehead stuff that can be easily disproved, but also is so dumb that you can’t bother to correct it. The current climate denial lobby most closely reminds me of the cigarette lobby where we casually ignored the harmful consequences of their product. The media and our political system was rigged to look the other way or worse, paid to actively discredit the scientific work. All for a profit motive.

Scientists have spent years collecting data on the ground and from high above. Only by building capabilities to monitor our weather (including our Sun) and sending out probes to understand atmospheric evolution of other planets, have we been able to complete Earth’s climate model. This has led to two major conclusions — Earth is not unique in its climate and human activity is directly responsible for its destruction. Only scientific illiteracy would lead anyone to believe that we can escape this reality, or even worse, deny it.

The most concerning part now is that we have gone past the time of having these debates. We are already seeing adverse effects of climate change and most predictions show we are on an accelerated path to more frequent and violent disasters. We cannot afford to ignore scientific consensus on this. Listen to the experts 👇

So you might ask again what was this debate about? Reflecting back, it wasn’t really a debate. Perhaps I expected my close friends to be better prepared about tackling climate deniers. But part of me also questioned the usefulness of convincing any climate deniers. The futility of it all became overwhelming.

Of course they were right. Even if one person can be convinced to take climate change seriously, they might make changes to their own lifestyle, influence others or even better — actively work to elect climate science leaders to take bolder action. There is still space between freaking about climate change and giving up on climate education.

To bring this long thread to a close, I offer couple of pieces of advice

• Talk to your family & friends about climate change. It’s not the most juicy topic, but it will require you to learn few things — believe me, it will be worth it.

• Don’t get drowned by the futility of it all. We are not done yet and giving up is not an option. I say that for our kids and future generations.

RSS Feed

I have two parts to this blog —

Traveling Through Space 🚀 is my main series on Space exploration and our society’s role in it!

Random Tidbits 🔭 is everything outside of that!

I also publish on Medium or on Twitter

I recently received an email from Medium telling me that I had earned “Top Writer” in the Space section. It was surprising to receive this and I am not totally certain what the minimum requirement is. But I won’t dwell on it too much. One thing is for certain, my writing is connecting with some of you and I am deeply appreciative of that.

Medium Top Writers in Space

This also serves as fuel for me to continuing writing. Look forward to more engagement and feedback.

P.S. Help spread the word to -

1. Follow on Medium

2. Subscribe to this

3. Follow my Twitter

Subscribe now

Share

I finally decided to click Publish on Medium & here on SubStack. I had been writing, correcting & adding more words to my story for past 6 years. Not really knowing when I was done. At some point during that time, I decided to convert my scribblings into a book. This is the story of why I moved here instead.

Unsurprisingly, writing a book requires a lot of work. You need structure, a minimum word count, an editor to review, and a publisher willing to take a risk. Most of all, you need time. With a growing family & job change, this was not an easy task. With constant love & support from my wife and family, I continued writing though.

Then I found various blogging platforms. It made writing fun. I didn’t really need to worry about completing a book. In 1000 words or less, I can tell a piece of that story. I can add images, paragraph breaks and focus on a specific topic.

Importantly, I can focus on growing an audience and understanding which pieces they want more or less of. This is not something you can do when you are writing a book. I can now field test specific topics or crowdsource multiple ones much more easily.

Another key aspect is that getting feedback from my closest supporters is easier. They are also part of the audience, but they know me personally and can give more direct feedback. Asking this group to give a feedback on entire book, is not fair to them.

Best of all, it is helping me in writing better and hopefully, telling a more cohesive story. The biggest issue I faced, as an amateur writer, was to maintain a logical flow when writing the book. As you’d expect, there are many ways you can tell a story. Think of it as a puzzle, where each topic is a puzzle piece. You can cut a piece many different ways to assemble your final picture. Now by focussing on a specific topic, I can add different details to it and get more specific feedback on it — enhance it shape. Finally, when I take a step back, I can make sure the pieces fit together and add any missing links.

Since this is a Space blog, another analogy is the gravity assist maneuvers for a spacecraft. These maneuvers are meant to take advantage of the gravitational pull of an astronomical object, like a Planet, while the spacecraft is headed on a long journey. Instead of going directly to the ultimate destination, like that spacecraft, I can now conserve fuel, investigate further, course correct, before progressing on to the next leg of the journey. Each story is now an opportunity for me to take advantage of those gravity assists. Completing that book remains my mission, but I can get there without running out fuel.

Medium has a ton of resources on writing maintained by Medium Staff & community, like Medium Creators. Since Medium has its barriers, I’ll be maintaining this space too.

So, with all of that, my first story is out there in the world. I clicked publish and immediately sent that link to my family & friends. Now, I am on a mission to add more content, spread the word and perhaps, inspire budding writers as well. Excited to see where this goes. Right now I am happy to write about the topic that matters to me the most.

Thank you for being a part of this journey! Let’s fly 🚀

A version of this story was posted as tweet here —