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The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken Feb. 14, 1990, by NASA’s Voyager 1 at a distance of 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) from the Sun. The image inspired the title of scientist Carl Sagan’s book, “Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space,” in which he wrote: “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.” NASA/JPL-Caltech

As Voyager 1 was journeying out of our solar system, the famous planetary scientist Carl Sagan suggested that it should turn around and take one last picture of Earth—the “Pale Blue Dot”. I was first introduced to this photograph in high school. My physics teacher played our class a video that showed the “Pale Blue Dot”, backed by audio of Sagan’s writings on it. Sagan articulated how this picture captures the entire history of Earth, everyone who has ever lived on it, and the idea that there is no other home or species out there that can save us. I remember the video affecting me profoundly—it made life on Earth feel insignificant against an infinitely large universe, yet so wildly unique and meaningful in comparison to what else is out there. This video, and that physics class, instilled in me an insatiable desire to understand the universe—to quantify its bounds, to answer the unanswered questions, to philosophically contemplate what our cosmic isolation implies for the meaning of life. My teacher recognized my passion and curiosity and encouraged me to pursue engineering. After all, “we always need more women in STEM”, and I had heard that finding a high-paying job right out of college was easier with an engineering degree.  

In May of 2024, I graduated with my B.S. in Aerospace Engineering and minor in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences from the University of Colorado, Boulder. As I reflect on my four years there, I cannot help but think of how much I have learned, particularly about myself. While my engineering studies have given me the technical knowledge I will need to perform as journey in understanding fulfillment and where to find it.   

Entering college, I initially resented the idea of having to satisfy my humanities requirements because, although I enjoyed those classes in high school, I could not understand why I would have to “waste my time” taking courses that did not seem immediately relevant to my future in engineering. These sentiments continued with me until the second semester of my freshman year, when I started taking ENES 1010, a writing course on the Human Condition, taught by Dr. Lisa de Alwis through the Herbst Department of Engineering, Ethics, and Society. Despite my initial negativity and the class being entirely virtual (this was Spring 2021, so COVID-19 restrictions were still in place), this course became one of the most impactful classes I have taken. It helped me to understand the continued relevance of the humanities to me, both as a person and as an engineer. Studying the Human Condition with my classmates—through topics including feminism, theology, enlightenment, existence, oppression, and love—allowed me to explore the interconnectedness of our experiences on this “Pale Blue Dot”. Works like The Island of Dr. Moreau prompted me to consider how, as an engineering student, the knowledge I would gain in pursuit of my degree would give me power—power to innovate, and through innovation, power to impact lives for better or for worse. My new appreciation for the humanities was followed by a shift in my attitude towards education altogether. Aside from teaching career-oriented skills, education should also inspire students to ask themselves, “Who am I on this “Pale Blue Dot”? Who do I want to become? What kind of life do I want to live?”  

If my views on the humanities and education were changing, so was my perspective on engineering. As I continued my studies, I found myself confronted with ethical questions relating to my chosen field of aerospace engineering. An optional ethics activity in one of my sophomore year aerospace classes was especially eye-opening, as I participated in surveys and discussions that gave me a deeper understanding of the military industrial complex. This new information contradicted the interests and personal values I started to explore and cultivate in my principles. My freshman year Global Engineering professor introduced me to the realm of remote sensing, and after looking into it, I felt inspired to involve myself in the field of aerospace dedicated to monitoring and mitigating climate change. However, as the difficulty of my engineering courses increased, and my efforts in finding opportunities on this side of the industry proved unfruitful, I started to lose sight of why I chose this major at all.  

Caspar David Friedrich – Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1817): the landscape is thought to evoke the feeling of the sublime in the painting’s subject

Looking to revive my excitement for learning, I pursued a couple of independent studies with Dr. de Alwis on the philosophical concept of the sublime. In his Critique of Judgment, Immanuel Kant refers to the sublime as “great beyond all comparison” (Kant, 2005). In the descriptions of many philosophers, the sublime is that feeling one might get when observing a starry night, or a particularly powerful storm over the ocean. The sublime, if it can be properly described at all, is the profoundly moving feeling that comes from realizing the immense grandness of something being experienced (perhaps a piece of music, a work of art, or a scene in nature), without being able to fully comprehend its totality. It is as if the mind is trying to put what it is experiencing in a box that will never be correctly shaped or sized. This idea of bounding the infinite—defining the indefinable—is really what I was after when I chose to pursue aerospace engineering. I think my experience with the “Pale Blue Dot” in high school was unknowingly also my first introduction to the sublime. Studying the sublime and its connections to the humanities have allowed me to continue nurturing that overwhelming curiosity I developed in high school that I thought would be satisfied in my pursuit of aerospace engineering.   

All this time I spent taking classes with Dr. de Alwis made me eligible for the Herbst Certificate in Engineering, Ethics, and Society. That certificate then gave me the opportunity to apply for the Herbst Fellowship, where engineering students choose an ethical issue to research. I chose to investigate the role of ethics in the engineering curriculum: the result is this article, but also an ongoing learning process as I continue to reflect on these issues.  

Ever since the sophomore year ethics activity, my peers and I have continued to discuss the need to incorporate ethics more fully into the engineering curriculum. The importance of addressing engineering ethics is seemingly recognized by students and professionals alike. The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET)—who evaluate and accredit engineering programs around the world—even dedicate an entire student learning outcome to it. When I first started researching engineering ethics, there seemed to be a divide of how it is talked about in a curricular context. One way of making sense of this divide is through attention to how, in his paper on teaching engineering ethics, Joseph R. Herkert describes the apparent pattern in frameworks: “Engineering ethics can be viewed from three frames of reference— individual, professional and social—which can be divided into “microethics” concerned with ethical decision making by individual engineers and the engineering profession’s internal relationships, and “macroethics” referring to the profession’s collective social responsibility and to societal decisions about technology” (Herkert, 2005). Microethics pertains to the building of safe products, not accepting bribes, and the like. Macroethics is more concerned with product liability and sustainable development, and the social responsibility of engineers (Herkert, 2005).  

Electrical engineering professors Dr. Cynthia Finelli from the University of Michigan and Dr. Susan Lord at the University of San Diego recently worked to pilot an easy-to-adopt layout for engineering professors to incorporate macroethics into their undergraduate coursework. In their paper “Integrating Sociotechnical Issues In The Introduction To Circuits Course'', Finelli and Lord describe their methods of addressing the ethics concerning the procurement, sustainability, and disposal of electrical components and the materials that make them up.  activities that addressed the use of conflict minerals in electronics and electric vehicle battery life cycles (Finelli & Lord, 2023).

While, evidently, work is being done to rectify this, Herkert highlights that the macroethical lens has often been excluded in engineering ethics curriculum. In his article “Teaching engineering ethics: a dissenting voice”, Rob Lawlor notes that the case study approach that is commonly employed in a microethical frame mainly focuses on the individual engineers’ decisions, neglecting broader ethical issues. The ethical dilemmas presented in case studies seem to value a “right answer” or solution that students are expected to arrive at. Like Herkert, Lawlor recognizes that this approach should not be rejected altogether; rather, it should be supported with macroethical material. Exclusively teaching engineering ethics on a microethical level is limiting in that it fails to challenge the institutions and professions themselves. This, in turn, prevents the profession from strengthening (Lawlor, 2021).  

If incorporating macroethics into an engineering curriculum is seemingly so important, how is it currently being done? In addition to Finelli and Lord’s efforts in electrical engineering, the University of Colorado’s own aerospace department has also been working to incorporate macroethics into its curriculum. The ethics activity that I took part in was the second time that the macroethics lesson was taught in the aerospace coursework at ����������. In 2020, a group of upper-level aerospace students, along with some of their professors, collaborated to design an ethics course to address department culture and promote a more welcoming environment. The methods and reasoning used to design the activity are outlined in the paper “Developing and Implementing an Aerospace Macroethics Lesson in a Required Sophomore Course”. Derived from different literature, including the article by Herkert, the lesson was prepared such that three different macroethical topics were offered for students to learn about and discuss with their peers. The topics included space sustainability and orbital debris, space settlement and resource extraction, and the military industrial complex. The lesson format discussion in whichever of the three topics the student chose from. The first half introduced students to ethical frameworks, stakeholders, and positionality, and helped them identify their own personal values to provide a strong foundation going into the discussion portion. As defined by Luis Sánchez, positionality is “the notion that personal values, views, and location in time and space influence how one understands the world. [...] Consequently, knowledge is the product of a specific position that reflects particular places and spaces” (Benham et al., 2021). I had previously been introduced to positionality in ENES 1010 as Dr. de Alwis emphasized that each of us students come to class ready to discuss our own thoughts on the assigned material. The reasoning was that there was no “right answer” she was looking for as a professor. We all have unique lives that shape the way we might interpret different works, and the most interesting discussions come out of our ability to share our experiences through how we find different meaning in things. This same approach works well when applied to macroethics in engineering because it provides context that helps facilitate respectful discussion of what can be controversial matters.  

The second half of the activity is also strong because it imitates the case study approach in emphasizing student participation and discussion, while providing topics of discussion that de-emphasize a “right answer” approach. The topics of the aerospace macroethics lesson covered aspects of the industry that are complex, controversial, and might not align with students' personal values. The microethical case study approach Lawlor references focuses on ethical dilemmas that result from power structures internal to a company or corporation, whereas the topics in the macroethics lesson allow students to contemplate the power structure of the entire industry itself.  

In addition to these productive aspects of the lesson, it was also designed with student surveys being given before and after their participation in the activity. Benham et al. note that “one criticism from students was that the lesson was too brief, and more of these discussions there is an awareness of and desire among aerospace engineering students to engage more with the macroethics of the industry.  

There are a variety of engineering ethics classes offered at The University of Colorado, Boulder, but none are explicitly required. As we see technology rapidly changing and advancing, this is a crucial time to be discussing ethics in engineering. Evidently, there is a need and desire for macroethics to be incorporated throughout the engineering curriculum. Students should not just learn about the macroethical state of the industries they will enter into; they should also be given resources to grapple with how these ethics align with or diverge from their own values. I encourage both students and professionals to get involved and take part in these kinds of discussions with professors, peers, mentors, and managers. While it may seem controversial and a little daunting, no industry will strengthen or improve unless we start analyzing education’s role in upholding and reinforcing the current power structures and dynamics that dominate the industry. The framework Finelli and Lord present, as well as the methods used in creating the aerospace macroethics lesson, provide a starting point for seamlessly integrating engineering ethics into the curriculum without adding on additional requirements to students’ degrees.  

I am hoping that by sharing my own experience in shaping my undergraduate education, other students might be inspired to do the same, challenging engineering curriculum for the better, and gaining a deeper understanding of who they are on this “Pale Blue Dot”. My exploration of the sublime and interrogation of the current state of ethics in engineering programs, while seemingly unrelated, have provided me with a sense of fulfillment that I found myself longing for in college. In his Critique of Practical Reason, Kant famously said, “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. […] I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my the ability of these studies to open my eyes more to the world around me. They are the link  between my studies in engineering and my human existence on this “Pale Blue Dot”.   

References  

ABET. “” 

Benham, Andrew et al., "Developing and Implementing an Aerospace Macroethics Lesson in a Required Sophomore Course," 2021 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), Lincoln, NE, USA, 2021, pp. 1-9, doi: 10.1109/FIE49875.2021.9637172.  

Benham, Andrew, R. Fotherby, A. W. Johnson and C. L. Bowen, "Student Perspectives of Aerospace Engineering Macroethics Issues and Education," 2022 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), Uppsala, Sweden, 2022, pp. 1-5, doi: 10.1109/FIE56618.2022.9962654.  

Finelli, Cynthia and S. Lord, “Integrating Sociotechnical Issues In The Introduction To Circuits Course.” 51st Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI). Dublin: 2023. DOI: 10.21427/2C7Z-7398. 

Herkert, Joseph R. “Ways of thinking about and teaching ethical problem solving: Microethics and macroethics in engineering.” Science and Engineering Ethics 11, 373–385 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-005-0006-3  

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Translated by John Henry Bernard. New York, NY: Barnes & Noble, 2005. 

---. Critique of Practical Reason. Translated by Mary Gregor and Introduction by Andrew Reath. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.  

Lawlor, Rob. “Teaching engineering ethics: a dissenting voice.” Australasian Journal of Engineering Education, 26 (1) 2021, 38–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/22054952.2021.1925404