About a decade ago, when I left the Houston Chronicle newspaper to write about space full-time for Ars Technica, I also started a website focused on local weather. Our purpose was clear: In an era of sensationalized storm coverage, Space City Weather would provide no-hype information about weather impacting the lives of people in Houston. We stuck to that, and when giving public talks, I often joke, “Boring is our brand.”
But in a world awash in clickbait and shouting, the quiet work we have done with Space City Weather still resonated with people. When storms threaten the community, it turns to us—because it trusts us. For many Americans, there remains a hunger for credible, evidence-backed news and information. Of course, if you’re reading Ars Technica, you share such a hunger already. But you are not alone.
I spend most of my days writing about space, and I’ve met so many good people in this industry working to extend humanity’s reach to the Moon, to Mars, and to worlds beyond. Courageous and ingenious people build satellites to spy deforestation on Earth, to gather sunlight for energy rather than burning fossil fuels, to connect people around the world, and to secure resources from asteroids and other worlds so we need not strip-mine our own planet. Not all of this will succeed, and not all of these actors are heroes, of course. But if you want to find faith that humanity can still build toward a brighter future, you could do worse than spend a little time on the space beat.
More generally, much of my life has been spent writing about science. I revere the people who gather insights about our universe and attempt to tease out new secrets from nature. It has been a dark time for science, with the White House attempting to slash science funding across federal agencies, undermining “woke” research, and setting ridiculous health policies over vaccines. But even here, where the damage is being done gleefully and wantonly, the US Congress has stood up to these funding cuts in a bipartisan manner. For most Americans, knowledge is not yet the enemy.
