#I feel extra foolish for having nearly fallen for it considering my grandfather's history as a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists

[maeamian]

When I was a young excited physics student I went down to my advisor and asked for a job in a lab. Those of you who are in the sciences may recognize this as exceedingly common, most schools with science departments will hire undergrads for their labs both to give the undergrads experience and to have someone comparatively cheap to do the least skilled labor in those labs.

For me, the lab I was sent to was one doing cool photonics projects and I was assigned to a guy who was doing the theoretical modeling for them and I got put on a side project for them to develop a method to double check their results using Monte Carlo simulations.

Put bluntly, I toiled away in the little cubicle they had me in for about half a year before I transferred to a different school without ever having produced anything of any particular value other than a Monte Carlo simulation whose temperature readings were not taking into account the existence of a heat sink and therefore got overwhelmed by thermal photons in a completely inaccurate and unhelpful way.

Ultimately, many tasks, farmed out like this in a speculative way to undergrads, fail, certainly it's not exceptional that mine did and I learned a lot about the process in the process, so it wasn't wasted time for me, but it produced absolutely nothing the lab could use to further its results.

This is where it turns from a little anecdote about my work history into a morality tale, because what I have thus far deliberately failed to tell you is that the lab I was assigned to is a provider of radar services to the US Military. Had I produced anything of any value whatsoever the work I did would have been used by the US military to help with its capacity to deliver bombs. This is, unfortunately, as those of you who are in the sciences may recognize, also exceedingly common. Luckily, and through no foresight or moral thinking of my own, simply the inexperience of youth, I produced nothing of value but view the path they tried to set me down as a grim warning of what might have been.

I'm not asking for forgiveness, the harm I might have done was not done by me, although I'm also sure was done without my help. They didn't need it to be me they just needed someone with basic calculus knowledge who wouldn't think too hard about the connection between the work and the world, and they were happy enough that particular warm body was me.

So this is my plea, if you're young and getting involved in the sciences because you're passionate about knowledge and understanding our place in the universe. When you go to get that job in that lab that's such a good stepping stone to the next thing you want to do, take a second and look into where that lab's funding is coming from. If it turns out it's the military, maybe then take another second and really deeply consider what kind of thing your work can be used to do and if you would like some of the most bloodthirsty people on the planet to be able to do that thing because of your help.

I got lucky that I didn't help, but I'm hoping that with this warning you might be able to not help on purpose which is a greater moral good than what I managed.