The 2021 Year in Review, Part 1
Scott tests an elevated platform in preparation for the Astroworld Festival. Photo: Instagram
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Travis Scott’s Astroworld Festival Turns Deadly
By ANEESA IQBAL and SALOME CHACHKUNASHVILI
Travis Scott’s Astroworld Festival left ten people dead, starting at the age of just nine years old, in Houston on November 5, 2021. Although Scott’s concerts usually promote raucous behavior, nothing like this had happened before. The crowd was extremely large, even during a pandemic, containing about 50,000 people. At least 3,000 to 5,000 people were “not scanned” and were not supposed to enter the venue. About 30 minutes into the concert, videos and images posted on social media showed the large crowd surging toward the stage, resulting in people being stepped on and struggling to breathe. Police reported several unconscious victims in the crowd and a possible need for CPR. Now Scott is on the receiving end of multiple lawsuits.
Many people were quick to put the responsibility on Scott. However, the security and crew were more to blame. Videos posted on TikTok and Instagram showed Scott did pause his performance when he noticed a boy was down and asked security to help him out. If he was more aware of the situation in the crowd, he would have done more to pause or end the show. From his point of view on the stage, it was difficult to see exactly what was going on in an overpopulated crowd. On the other hand, another clip of the concert shows a young girl going up to a member of the stage crew yelling for help, but he just signals for her to get down. An operations plan obtained by CNN stated the executive producer and festival director were the only people allowed to stop the concert.
If more security and safety precautions were put in place, the concert might not have been as bad as it was. To start with, Scott and his management should not have allowed for such a large crowd to gather together, especially during the pandemic. If they did want the large crowd, however, more health professionals should have been present. This was a devastating experience for anyone who was there or knew someone who was affected, but the blame does not lie with Travis Scott.
This is what the James Webb looks like when fully unfolded. Image: NASA, Adriana Manrique Gutierrez
NASA Launches the James Webb Space Telescope
By JEFFENIQUE RICHARDS
On Christmas Day, 2021, one of the biggest astronomical projects ever was finally launched into space after over 25 years of work. The James Webb Telescope, named after the leader of NASA’s Apollo program from 1961 to 1968, is an enormous infrared telescope launched by NASA and the European Ariane 5 rocket. The largest and most powerful telescope ever built, it will be able to tell what the universe was like 200 million years after the Big Bang, capturing images of some of the first galaxies that formed. The telescope can look into dust clouds, allowing it to see where new planets and stars are forming while examining the atmospheres on other planets. The James Webb uses infrared radiation to detect objects in space and observe celestial bodies that can’t be viewed through visible light.
Construction started in 1996 and cost $10 billion. When launched December 25, the James Webb had to travel thirty days to get to its destination, Lagrange Point (L2), which is one million miles away from Earth. It made it there January 24. To fully deploy, the telescope had to go through over 344 points of possible failure to unfold the five layers on its sun shield.
To a future aerospace engineer, this is an amazing achievement. It is exciting because the telescope can find habitable planets while making huge advancements in the space research industry. Also, it's important to humanity because it shows the progress we are making in space exploration and the amazing capability of our engineers, who made the telescope so flawless that it could pass hundreds of points of failure while sailing through space with no one there to fix it. Anything could’ve gone wrong at any moment, and the mission would’ve failed – a total loss. But so far, it's made it through all the doubts and obstacles. This telescope is truly something that gives future astronomers something to look up to.
Police officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty on all counts and sentenced to over 22 years in prison.
Derek Chauvin Is Found Guilty of Murder
By SOLIEL MINZIE
George Floyd, 46 years old, was one of dozens of unarmed African American men who have died at the hands of police officers over the last five years, but the legacy of his case has been more impactful than most. On May 25, 2020, Minneapolis police officers arrested Floyd after a corner store employee called 911 when Floyd bought cigarettes with a fake $20 bill. After struggling with the police, Floyd was pinned to the ground with his hands cuffed behind his back. One officer, Derek Chauvin, a white man, restrained Floyd by placing his knee on the back of Floyd’s neck. Bystander video shows that he kept his knee there for over eight minutes as Floyd called out for help and then went limp. The day after the incident, Chauvin was fired, and on May 29, 2020, he was charged with third degree murder and second degree manslaughter. Soon after, a second degree murder charge was added as well. His trial took place from March 8 to April 20, 2021, when he was found guilty of all charges, and on June 25, 2021, Chauvin was sentenced to 22.5 years in prison.
All of this could have been avoided if Chauvin had simply removed his knee from Floyd’s neck. It was unnecessary for him to take action the way he did – he didn’t seem to care about Floyd’s safety, even as he was crying out for help. I wonder: How can you be in that position on someone’s neck for almost nine minutes and not be concerned about their well being? Even when the paramedics showed up and tried to find a pulse, Chauvin was still on Floyd’s neck when it was obvious that he was out cold. It seems clear that race played a huge role in the incident. If Floyd were white, it’s doubtful he would have been treated that way. If there were no bystanders or video evidence, would the police department have said he died in some kind of accident? The verdict in Chauvin’s trial was definitely the right one.
This case’s decision was so important because African Americans have dealt with many challenges in this country. Seeing the guilty verdict come down showed that there is hope for things to change for the better. Police departments across the country should incorporate more training for their officers to prevent situations like these from happening. No one should have to worry about the safety of their life in the hands of police officers. I’m optimistic that this trial will be used as a precedent for other cases of police brutality in the future.
This image, "CryptoPunk 7804," sold for $7.5 million in Ethereum. Via Larva Labs
The NFT Boom (and Why It Is Incredibly Stupid)
By ALVIN YAN
An NFT, or non-fungible token, is essentially a digital piece of artwork that you can purchase a certificate of ownership for. NFTs are embedded into cryptocurrency transfers, predominantly through the Ethereum network and its coin, Ether. Anything can be an NFT, as long as it is minted onto Ether as lines of code in the form of metadata, containing information such as its owner and a link to the artwork. While this technology was first developed in 2014, it started to gain traction in 2021, and eventually came into the mainstream to become one of the hottest topics on the internet. Some well known NFTs such as “Nyan Cat” (a cat with a Pop-Tart body) and the screenshot of the first ever tweet, sold for $600,000 and $2.9 million respectively. The most expensive NFT ever, digital artist Pak’s “The Merge,” sold for a record breaking $91.8 million.
While the concept and technology behind trading digital art is quite fascinating, it's incredibly stupid the amount of money people shell out just to jump on this bandwagon. As mentioned before, when you purchase an NFT, you are merely buying the lines of code embedded into a single Ether. You don’t own the artwork – you own the claim that you own the artwork. Additionally, if the link to the artwork in the lines of code ever stops working, then you’ve effectively lost the ability to prove ownership of the NFT. People can also just right-click and save the jpeg file of “your” artwork on their own computer completely for free, which defeats the purpose of buying it in the first place.
On top of being a golden toilet for rich people to flush their money down into, the NFT market has also had an adverse environmental impact. The process of minting and trading NFTs requires an astronomical amount of computing power, and with that comes an equally astronomical power consumption. The amount of electricity required to create a single NFT is estimated to be on par with how much an average home uses in two months. Taking into account the entire industry, its yearly power consumption exceeds the entirety of Argentina’s. In a time where collective efforts are being made for the sake of the planet, NFTs are incredibly wasteful both economically and environmentally.