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Clive Thompson on Science Fiction
"If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best — and perhaps only — place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas."
Have you ever wondered what space smells like? Yeah, me neither.
NASA beams the Beatles into space
NASA broadcast "Across The Universe" into outer space using the Deep Space Network. Asked to comment, Paul McCartney wisely noted, "Amazing! Well done, NASA! Send my love to the aliens."
The Environmentally Non-Disturbing Under-ice Robotic Antarctic Explorer (ENDURANCE) is a $2.3 million project funded by NASA's Astrobiology Science and Technology for Exploring Planets Program. It's autonomous underwater vehicle designed to swim untethered under ice, creating three-dimensional maps of underwater environments, and ostensibly is a test for exploring Europa, the icy Jovian moon that just might harbor life.
The Archive of Scientists' Transcendent Experiences: as amazing as it sounds.
Literally!
I love it when the New York Times gets all tripped out on science stuff.
Hugest Black Hole Ever Discovered
18 billion times the size of our sun!
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The Omega Point loves us
Archived From April 26, 2006 (5) Comments
I heard recently on BBC World Service that the Malaysian space program, itself a weird offshot of a 900 million dollar defense deal Malaysia recently struck with the Russians, is beginning to take shape. The 854 applicants to the program have been narrowed down to four, two of which will start training for a journey to the Internation Space Station in Russia's Star City this summer.
A subject of debate is how these new cosmonauts, three of which are Muslims, will manage the daily rituals of Islam while in orbit. Worship, quite simple on Earth, is a huge inconvenience in outer space (like most accidentals of human life). Of course, this hasn't usually been much of an issue in the past -- "Western" astronauts, generally, have seperated their faith from their work. However, Islamic prayer necessitates a series of important observances. The Malaysian space program, Angkasa, is the first to grapple with the implications of ritual in space: a subject which will only become more relevant as we begin to broaden space programs internationally. The issues at hand, however, are perplexing. How can one face Mecca when Mecca is only a tiny point on a planet thousands of miles below? Further, prayer is determined by the movements of the Earth in relation to the sun -- one prays five times throughout the day including sunset, sundown -- yet in orbit, the sun rises and sets over a dozen times in the span of one "day." Do you pray 60 times?
I can't help but think of Yuri Gagarin, in 1961, returning from the first manned space mission and saying, "I looked and looked but I didn't see God." This statement represents the classic first foray into outer space theology. "I looked and didn't see God" is of course irrelevant if you believe, like the Catholic Church, that God exists in a realm outside of physics, of the physical world. However, If you define the Universe as the totality of all that exists, the totality of reality, then (by definition) if God exists, (S)He either is the Universe or is part of it. I'm no theologian -- my own spirituality is limited to severely dubious notions of New-Age connective crystal orgone meta-energies, or whatever -- but this notion, presented here (to me) by Frank J. Tipler, a cosmic eschatologist and mathematics professor at Tulane, might become pressing in a world where faith and science are perpetually butting heads.
Of course, Tipler takes it to a weird place. In his 500 page book, "The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God, and the Resurrection of the Dead," which I read so that you don't have to, he posits that theology and physics become quite entangled when we begin to think about the ultimate fate of our Universe. Clearly, Tipler argues, our planet is not immortal -- the sun will destroy it sooner or later. If we are -- or rather, if life is -- to survive past this point, we/it must find a way to adapt itself to conditions outside of planet earth. This much is not particularly revolutionary. Tipler, like many left-field physicists before him, hyphothesizes a future scenario in which humans send self-replicating robot probes (known as Von Neumann probes) out into space, which would seed human life, plant colonies, and eventually engulf the entire Universe with life. However, if the Universe is finite (this is called the "Tipler Scenario," as opposed to the "Dyson Scenario" of an infinitely expanding Universe), then it will recollapse into a Big Crunch after a finite amount of time.
Life, which by this time will have completely abandonned Earth (or "Gaia" if you're a space-hippie), will be forced at this moment of critical mass to adapt and restructure itself to the imminent Big Crunch. Tipler suggests a whole series of insane things at this point:
1. Right before the Universe reaches its maximum size, life will have coalesced into a unified whole of undifferentiated artificial and human intelligence, called the "Omega Point," computationally powerful enough to control the differential collapse of the Universe. The Omega Point will be omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent, and, further, will use the Universe's collapsion as a source of energy.
2. If, while controlling the collapse, this unified whole of life-consciousness can use its energy to accelerate the speed its mental processes accordingly, it can experience a subjective infinite time during the last stages of the collapse -- which is to say, there will be (in some form) eternal life.
3. Since the computational capacity of life will be accelerating exponentially faster than time runs out (futurists call this the "singularity," which is epic), a massive and unified conscious computer could, hypothetically, run a simulation of the Universe including all human beings alive and dead forever, even though the actual Universe the computer is in lasts only a finite time. This all-powerful artificial intelligence will ("must," claims Tipler, if life is to survive) provide us with "virtual time." The Omega Point will be capable of running computer simulations of all intelligent life that has ever lived in the history of our Universe, effectively ressurecting the dead.
4. The Universe-Computer, run by the artificial intelligence that is the Omega Point, will be both personal and benevolent. It will be, or is, God.
Tipler (above), sort of summing it up: "the Earth itself must be transferred from what I shall call 'ulimate reality,' into a virtual reality, from real space into a cyberspace in the computer's memory. If this is not done before the Sun leaves the main sequence, not only will much of the Sun's total energy reserve be wasted, but the Earth will be completely destroyed by the expanding sun to no purpose. The Earth's annihilation in real space is certain."
Theories like Tipler's aren't, essentially, that much weirder than half of the shit I wholeheartedly believe in: Nikola Tesla being responsible for the Tunguska event, for example, or even String Theory. In fact, I sort of appreciate the Omega Point Theory because it is so destined to join the ranks of hundreds of other, great, fully marginal theories which made a similar attempt to find "scientific" justifications for matters of pure human subjectivity, such as religion. I'm thinking of Wilhelm Reich's theory of Orgone Energy, or the archaic (even occult) "noosphere" theory ofTeilhard de Chardin, who, incidentally, coined the phrase "Omega Point." Or Tesla. Or, you know, all the astronomers before Copernicus.
Whether any of these ideas ever held any ground or ever will is almost irrelevant; they come and go, their science always shaky and devastatingly earnest. What matters, it seems, is their pressing desire to remind us of the urgency of our cosmology, or lack thereof. Tipler is probably wrong, or at least partially wrong, but I admire physicists who have the courage to completely betray their discipline in favor of a much grander, more beautiful, worldview. The really tripper Web-pundit Anders Sandberg, a Swedish Ph.D of Computer Science, wrote of the primary failing of Tipler's theory that "Tipler has made the mistake of not only taking his theory seriously but also to believe in it. Belief in a theory tends to make us blind to all the assumptions which underlie it, and take them for granted, since the theory is 'obviously reasonable.'"
Sandberg is probably saying that physicists must be objective in their postulations (rarely the case) but I think he's also raising the point that belief, in all its ramifications, becomes complicated as soon as we leave the safety of our planet, which is so (obviously) central to our metaphysics. In any case, it makes trying to figure out how to do ritual Islamic ablutions while in zero-gravity with limited water supplies seem completely beside the point.
10:34 AM | Permalink | (5) Comments
Nature's Bling
Archived From April 22, 2006 (8) Comments
The Natural History Museum of LA County has its share of gems. A whole room of them, in fact. Hundreds of rubies, topaz, opals, obscure formations of marvelous multi-colored rocks and minerals -- even asteroids -- a veritable pageant of dramatically lit geological psychedelia. There are gems on top of gems, gems growing out of one another; there are glow-in-the-dark gems, gems carved into shapes, there's a gem called "Hambergite," a whole panoply of vibrant pinks, emerald greens, ghostly whites, and over 300 pounds of natural gold. The darkness of the room in comparison to these glowing wonders only hyperbolizes the feeling of having walked into a galactic spiral arm. It reminds me of a pretty ludicrous quotation I picked up once from a Timothy Leary book called "The Politics of Ecstasy," which described the LSD experience as "crystal palaces soaring thousands of miles into a velvet void." If I am making this place sound like some kind of stone-sober Grateful Dead dreamscape (seriously, all it lacks is the roses and dancing bears) it is because it is. Believe the hype!!
However, your average Deadhead, though equipped with a thorough knowledge of crystal healing, may not know much about the universe of gemology displayed in the Natural History Museum Hall of Gems and Minerals. Frankly, for most of us, knowledge of gems is limited to the five types of stones traditionally considered to be precious: diamond (of course), ruby, sapphire, emerald, and amethyst. These five, long referred to as the Cardinal Gems, occupy a pretty arbitrary position in the upper echelons of value; there are, after all, thousands of varieties of gems, a great deal of which share characteristics with the top five. In current usage by gemologists, all gems are considered precious, although four of the five original Cardinals are usually, but not always, the most valuable. This is because they are the most famous, the most generally durable, and because their quality is pretty consistent. And, above all, because the homies are shiny.
Humanity is an advanced race: one that has seen its planet from outer space, that has been trying since the 17th century to organize all of the other creatures on earth, that can breathe underwater, and that has invented things as insane as lasers and raves. The fact we still really like putting shiny rocks around our necks is difficult to understand in the context of our progress. After all, we break our backs (or rather, we break the backs of other people) mining them from their nests of stone; throughout history, people have been spending their lives panning muddy rivers just for a chance at finding something lustrous. The history of the state of California would have been irrevocably different without the Gold Rush, while Sierra Leone would not be so apocalyptically screwed if it didn't have any diamonds. On the other end of the market, rich consumers ever since Egypt-times have been forking over fortunes for these fancy rocks. Lauren Bacall doesn't ever appear in a movie or television show without a real diamond necklace. Hippies trade crystals at Phish concerts with a reverence rarely seen since ecclesiastical ritualism.
This is even more impressively strange given the fact that artificial production of almost every kind of gemstone has been possible since the 1900s: the French chemist Auguste Verneuil revealed his process of creating synthetic rubies from crystals of aluminum oxide in 1902. Simulating the chemical processes that form real minerals has only become progressively more developed and feasible ever since. The General Electric Company has been producing small synthetic diamonds for industrial purposes since about 1960, while synthesized emeralds that are more durable and often just as valuable as real emeralds have been on the market since the 1930s. The Natural History Museum has a large collection of these synthetic gems in its gem vault, all of which are virtually indistinguishable from the real thing, because they have the same chemical composition as the real thing. There is nothing wrong with making synthetic gems, in the eyes of the industry, yet trying to pass one off as natural is highly illegal and bears severe penalties. This is due, in part, to the threat they pose to deeply engrained monopolies which large diamond cartels like De Beers have on the gem market.
Why this mania? Why do we exploit one another and demand exorbitant prices for these beautiful little freaks of nature? One answer might be found in a quotation from the Roman scholar and statesman Pliny the Elder, which adorns the main wall of the Natural History Museum Hall of Gems. The words stand boldly over the room, quelling the doubts of cynical visitors like myself:
12:52 AM | Permalink | (8) Comments
I am Eagle! I am Eagle!
Archived From April 7, 2006 (4) Comments
In the lucid 1960's, the futurist Stewart Brand began a public campaign for NASA to release a satellite image of the whole Earth taken from space, an image which was at the time only rumored to exist. Brand, forever the "big-picture" thinker, noted that "this little blue, white, green and brown jewel-like icon amongst a quite featureless black vacuum," would serve both as a potent symbol for humanity and as a firm kick-start for a legitimate environmentalism movement.
With the rapid progress of the Apollo program, NASA eventually did release such an image -- though whether this was due to Brand's haranguing is debatable -- and has been steadily churning out increasingly crystalline photographs of outer space ever since. A quick visit to the NASA online photo archives inevitably leads to a psychedelic visual assault of purple nebulas, sun flares, and mighty cosmic rings, all decked out in surreal dusky pinks and muted greens. It's enough to make one forget how recently we first saw our whole planet -- round, mostly blue, and swampy with clouds -- lying amidst a field of stars and darkness. Further, it seems impossible, now that we have access to such a panoply of space images, to conceive of what it would have been like to see such an image for the first time.
It's hard to imagine living somewhere without knowing what it looks like, although humankind did exactly this for millennia; yet the photograph of Earth from space has become so omnipresent that we can't envision a time before it. This picture, in the relatively short span of time between the 1960's and now, has somehow become devastatingly banal. In iconographic terms, the photograph of Earth has become so ubiquitous, so completely subsumed into popular culture, that we have managed to separate it from what it actually represents. With alarming postmodern flair, I find that I immediately associate this image more with Earth Day t-shirts and children's science projects than with its real correlative -- which is, of course, the very pile of rock on which we all stand.
To a certain extent, that picture of Earth from space is the most important photograph in history. After all, we're all in it, regardless of our self-imposed notions of "country" or "border." It's the ultimate family portrait, and perhaps it is this massiveness -- the literal size of the planet as well as the image's philosophical implications -- which has caused us to quickly, and possibly in self-defense, dull this ideologically threatening image. At this point, not very much can shake us from this unwarranted apathy. Not very much, that is, except being shot into outer space ourselves.
Of course, seeing a photograph of Earth is one thing, but seeing our planet -- the very foundation of all our understanding about existence -- shrink to the size of a pea first-hand is something else entirely. The particularly phlegmatic Russian cosmonaut Gherman Titov, only the second man in space and the first to be there for more than 24 hours, described the experience of seeing the Earth from space as "a thousand times more beautiful than anything I could have imagined." After orbiting the planet over a dozen times, Titov replied a call from mission control with the elated cry: "I am Eagle! I am Eagle!"
Neil Armstrong, seemingly the master of withering space quotes, once said, "It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small."
Although the US Space program alone has logged more than 58 person-years in outer space -- and heaven knows how much time the Russians have been spending up there, considering that their Soyuz ships still hold the record for the most consistently successful human-to-cosmos ferrying -- being acquainted with outer space is still a perfectly rare characteristic for a person to have. Only a smattering of people and dogs, despite how routine low-orbit space travel has become, have ever left the planet. Very few humans, then, can understand Gherman Titov's elation, the feeling of human smallness described by Neil Armstrong, or even the wonder of a first encounter with a photograph of the Earth in its lonely entirety.
Stewart Brand was right. We can't let ourselves forget, no matter how much of a mental trip it is, that the "jewel-like icon" on which we live floats alone in the darkness of the cosmos. Bringing home a photograph of this perspective-shattering reality is one of humanity's most powerful achievements.
9:33 PM | Permalink | (4) Comments