WORMHOLES
I feel like this is a bigger deal than just some Collgehumor video.
Electronic Tattoo Display runs on Blood
Remember getting your mind really blown by new technology?
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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Book Review: A Cosmic Samizdat
Archived From December 26, 2007 (1) Comments
In our increasingly worldaround world, it is a rare, if not obsolete, occurrence for two wildly disparate and equally sophisticated cultures to meet for the first time. That's probably for the best, of course, because when it did happen in spades, during the centuries on Earth before instantaneous global communication, all bets were off, and what went down was almost always marked with catastrophe (as with the indigenous people of North America) or powderkeg-and-a-match mutual distrust (as with the first United States naval expeditions to Japan in the 1850s, a cultural collision that is beautifully explored in Charles and Ray Eames' 1972 film The Black Ships).
There are, of course, exceptions to this grim surmisal. When such a meeting takes place on a smaller scale, and is filtered through the lens of a profound -- and autonomous -- common interest, only good can come of it. This is a roundabout way of getting at the nucleus of my new favorite book, Jacques Vallée's UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union: A Cosmic Samizdat, which documents the first meetings between Soviet and Western UFO researchers at the dawn of Gorbachev's policy of glasnost, a period of transparency in Soviet politics which effectively lifted the Iron Curtain from decades of underground paranormal research and samizdat dissemination of literature.
This is what happened: In 1990, one of the world's most respected and most rigidly scientific ufologists -- Vallée -- was invited by a Soviet press agency, Novosti, to visit the USSR in the wake of one of the country's most controversial waves of UFO activity, the infamous Voronezh sightings. On arrival, Vallée discovered a rich community of well-organized researchers, the ironic result of censorship itself forcing Soviet ufology into unofficial underground networks, where it flourished. On this unusual result of the Iron Curtain, Vallée is almost nostalgic: "It was obvious that knowledge was revered here to a degree that our information-saturated world had forgotten...Russia has never had a distribution system...ideas percolated among students, scholars, and private groups who created a verifiable cult around the books that influenced them."
Whether or not you buy into UFO research, particularly Vallée's especially tinfoil strain of non-extraterrestrial hypotheses ("I am a heretic among heretics," he is known to lament), this book is a fascinating cultural document. Before glasnost, the broad-reaching and colorful world of Soviet UFO research was completely isolated from the West, forced to depend on non-institutional research bodies, catalogued with a uniquely Russian strain of manic order, and often effectively shut down by the government or by prevailing cultural opinion. At this moment in 1990, however, ufologists were free to pontificate at will to Vallée, a Western scientist, about Tunguska explosion of 1908, the Voronezh incidents, the rampant UFO activity in the Perm region of Russia, and about the widespread Soviet technique of "biolocation," kind of biological-field dowsing -- all this for the first time. Before Vallée's trip to Moscow, no Soviet ufologists had ever compared notes with a Western scientist or researcher. I mean, imagine the mind-fuck that this represents, especially when someone from the West says to you, "yes, we have reports of alien abductions, too." This accidental control group created by Soviet isolation seems, at face value, like a solid corroboration that we are really in the midst of legitimate visitations.
Vallée's speculations about the Soviet scene are intimate and fascinating. He often reflects on the abject cultural misery of the USSR, its inescapable sense of pervading gloom; he is also struck by the tenacity and vibrancy of its paranormal research. After a roundtable conference with Muscovite scientists, he notes, "the Soviets...still regard the future with the somewhat naïve passion of a Jules Verne or an H.G. Wells," an observation that resounds strongly when you consider the average Soviet witness'
description of an extraterrestrial being: 10 feet tall, silver boots, three eyes.
This, incidentally, is one of the most interesting aspects of the cross-cultural summit: that the Russians, unbeknownst to the West, have been experiencing the same kinds of crazy unexplainable phenomena as we have, forever, totally isolated from our singular conception of the extraterrestrial or paranormal as being necessarily "grey" or "little green man" in persuasion. The result is a manifestation of the unknown that is perhaps more fantastic than Vallée might have anticipated, and certainly as alien -- pun wholly intended -- to our worldview as these phenomena themselves.
The big question, of course, remains unanswered. While the Soviet data is replete with well-documented sightings, none of them bear any resemblance to the Western data. Instead of saucers, we see glowing spheres; instead of almond-eyed gangly creatures, we encounter robots and headless giants. Does this mean that UFO phenomena are simply irrational experiences heavily filtered through our cultural conceptions? Are we even talking about the same thing? With so many varieties of manifestation, the UFO problem becomes almost semantic, especially in the case of this glasnost-fueled conference, for we lack a common language.
I'm tempted to read this as a version of the kind of cultural catastrophe that usually results from the communication of two formerly isolated groups; with a lack of shared language, and the only common ground being a commitment to the fantastic and conspiratorial, the Soviet-Western ufology conference might have spelled a death knell to the whole movement. Vallée is more hopeful, however, and that is the eternal asset of the UFO movement: "These developments," he concludes, "give us hope that a fruitful, long-term dialogue might be opening at last between researchers in the Soviet Union and their Western counterparts...it is only through such dialogue that the UFO mystery will eventually be solved."
11:29 AM | Permalink | (1) Comments
Happy Birthday, Mr. Clarke!
Archived From December 11, 2007 (2) Comments
HAPPY 90th BIRTHDAY,
ARTHUR C. CLARKE!
I'm personally indebted to Mr. Clarke for so many reasons: his profound optimism, particularly about our race as a unified system and our inevitable future contact with extraterrestrial life, has bolstered my ability to think globally; his unshakable commitment to the popularization of science and the dry elegance of his books have always left me echoing with dewy wonder. I pretty much consider the moment in 2001: A Space Odyssey when David Bowman proclaims, ""The thing's hollow — it goes on forever — and — oh my God! — it's full of stars!" to be a seminal moment in my relationship with science fiction as an intellectual commitment, and as a genre. Happy Birthday, Arthur; may your own rendezvous with Rama not take place for many more years.
Celebrate this day, Internauts. Learn something new about space today. Watch Arthur C. Clarke's musings on turning 90 (above), which he bookends with a startling quotation from Kipling: "If I have given you delight/ By aught that I have done,/ Let me lie quiet in that night/ Which shall be yours anon." After that, head over to the Sri Lankan Astronomical Association's special Clarke-Birthday-Blog and wish the great man some good tidings of your own!
11:12 AM | Permalink | (2) Comments
UFO Maps
Archived From December 5, 2007 (4) Comments
I'm surprised that I haven't come across this before: a Google-maps rendering of UFO sightings in the US, dynamically updated as-it-happens. Preliminary perusal seems to indicate that UFOs tend to stay away from the landlocked mountains, preferring to pop by the Pacific Northwest, the California coastline, and, in droves, the East Coast and the area immediately around the Great Lakes. For those of us who "believe" that even a fraction of these sightings may be the real deal, this map is an interesting asset and may tell us some valuable things about our visitors; for those of us who don't, this is a powerful illustration of human folly, and that's pretty compelling, too.
10:18 AM | Permalink | (4) Comments
Evacuate Myspace Before It Recycles
Archived From November 4, 2007 (7) Comments
Evacuating Myspace Before It Recycles from universe on Vimeo.
1:10 PM | Permalink | (7) Comments
Creatures of the Cosmos
Archived From September 4, 2007 (5) Comments
"We are one planet. We know who speaks for the nations, but who speaks for the human species? Who speaks for Earth?"
-- Carl Sagan
2:05 PM | Permalink | (5) Comments
Conclave of Light
Archived From September 3, 2007 (3) Comments
Long-time readers of this blog will be familiar with my tenderness for the Unarians, a UFO cult-cum-Renaissance science foundation that has been based in El Cajon, California since the 1960s. In 2006 I made something of a pilgrimage to their compound and left with a profound sense of mystified pity, or pitiful mysticism, which was ultimately a kind of admiration for the pastel dreamscape of their cosmology.
In any case, I occasionally receive the "Unarius E-Flash," an enlightened e-mail newsletter. In its better moments it makes glowing pronouncements about the Unarius public-access television production studio going HD or the re-release of "Infinite Perspectus" on MP3. Today, I received the email I've been waiting for since my El Cajon visit: a flyer advertising the much-awaited Unarian celebration, "The 24th Interplanetary Conclave of Light." If I weren't otherwise occupied in the month of October, I would be there with my turquoise sweat-suit on. Is there anyone I can wrangle into a little investigative reporting?
If you have any doubts, this pictorial tour of the 2005 conclave and video (sorry, Realplayer) of the dove release (FROM A UFO) into the blazing San Diego sky might change your mind.
11:00 AM | Permalink | (3) Comments
Book Review: The Black Cloud
Archived From August 31, 2007 (3) Comments
I once said that 2007 on Universe would include many new features, one being an occasional review of a work of science fiction. Hello!
The Black Cloud is a 1957 science-fiction novel written by British astronomer Fred Hoyle. Like the novels of Carl Sagan, and, often, Arthur C. Clarke, it's something of an extrapolation of the author's deeply-held scientific conceptions. Because it was written by a scientist, further, it's almost overwhelmingly dry at times; the narrative often gives way entirely to pages full of mathematical formulae, diagrams, and lengthy expository footnotes.
The premise is such: teams of scientists around the world simultaneously discover the presence of an inexplicable mass moving steadily through the solar system, seemingly dead-set on hitting the Earth. After some pontification, it turns out to be a highly dense dark cloud, unlike any cosmic dustball ever observed. Cue a panic attack and the deft warning of heads of state.
As the cloud's erratic behavior proves to be impossible to predict scientifically, the scientists -- British stodgies at Cambridge, Americans lolling around Cal Tech and Mount Wilson -- realize the cloud might be some kind life-form in itself. Terrified that the being will block the Earth from the Sun's rays, unwittingly or otherwise, they attempt to communicate with it, a venture which, to their surprise, proves to be successful.
The black cloud turns out to be a startling, non-organic superorganism that is -- and this is an excellently clever turn of events -- completely surprised by the existence of life-forms other than itself. The cloud even claims to have always existed; "Wait until the Big Bang hears about that!" one of the scientists exclaims.
Our author, Fred Hoyle is an interesting character: he was the director of the Institute for Cosmology at Cambridge, but rejected the Big Bang theory because he found the idea of the universe having a beginning, and thus a cause, philosophically troubling. He was a notable feminist, pioneered the steady state theory, and even went against the commonly-held theory of chemical evolution, arguing rather that life on Earth was seeded by a steady influx of bacteria arriving from outer space on comets.
It's no surprise, then, that The Black Cloud is such an interesting, and fundamentally marginal, book. I originally picked it up because Hoyle's ideas -- particularly about the nature of life and its cosmic origins -- kept popping up in my reading: in footnotes, in passing, in complexity theory, particularly lauded by cosmic eschatologists like Freeman Dyson, who really do believe human life might evolve into conscious, interstellar dust clouds.
In a terrifyingly topical example of science imitating art, an international team of physicists have literally just discovered that under the right conditions, particles of inorganic dust (like that making up Hoyle's "black cloud") can become organized into corkscrew-shaped structures, which, under the right circumstances, can then interact with each other in ways that are usually associated with organic compounds and, ahem, (holy shit!) life itself.
These helical strands behave in a totally counterintuitive way, like attracting like, and can perform biological feats usually reserved for primordial stew: they can divide and form copies of identical structures, or "evolve" into more complex systems, for example. According to the researchers, who just published their finding in the New Journal of Physics, (an interesting action in itself, since the NJP is an open-access, online journal) nonorganic life is a definite possibility, and clouds of interstellar dust can likely self-organize, intuit, reproduce, and evolve.
The relationship between reality and fantasy in the realm of science fiction is in a constant state of evolution. Things which seem fantastic in 1957 can become scientific reality decades later; who are we to say if any speculation is too outlandish?
To quote the literary critic Robert Scholes, whose mid-1970s books on science fiction are among the rare few intelligent critical analyses of the genre, "because we know that the unexpected happens continually in the history of science itself, fiction...has a license to speculate as freely as it may, in the hope of offering us glimmers of a reality hidden from us by our present set of preconceptions."
12:30 PM | Permalink | (3) Comments
Universal Images
Archived From June 16, 2007 (4) Comments
Occasionally, a friend or associate tips me off to a particularly interesting manifestation of the word "Universe." Some are more interesting than others; some are really in line with what this manifestation of Universe is all about, and those blow me away the most. This one -- all shadowy polygons, flowers, and color fields -- comes from Greg Davis, who once discovered a rare old Unarius film completely independently of me, and at the same time. Thanks, Greg!
11:17 PM | Permalink | (4) Comments
Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl
Archived From November 8, 2006 (2) Comments
The Explorer's Club is an American Institution founded in New York City in 1904 by the survivors of Frederick Cook's 1894 arctic expedition. Although its members are infamously eccentric (L. Ron Hubbard, for example, who carried the Club flag with him on several yachting expeditions) they have been responsible for some of Exploration's greatest firsts: the summit of Mount Everest, the deepest point in the Ocean, the surface of the moon. Of the 202 Club flags which have journeyed into the world, some have flown at both poles, the lunar surface, and the highest peaks on Earth. It is perhaps one of the least-known, best-traveled symbols in the world.
The flag's color-coding is fairly obvious: the red band represents courage, and the blue fidelity. The club's initials (E.C.) and a compass rose adorn the white median, representing the institution's worldwide influence. Of course, this association was most ideologically powerful when there were parts of the planet still left to be explored; these days, the EC mostly sponsors field research and projects which advance the "ideal that it is vital to preserve the instinct to explore."
What does Exploration mean today? Sure, there's NASA's "New Vision," the roar of commercial space-travel, the wild card that is the Internet, the new-psychedelia revival's emphasis on inner travels. I don't know how much these things really represent Exploration, that spirit of penetrating into a place that has never before been experienced. There's an altruism and purpose inherent in the idea that perhaps these modern adaptations lack.
I think real Exploration now has a lot to do with "dépaysement," a French word that I like and that doesn't have a clear English translation. Literally, it means "dis-country-ment;" it's the feeling of being outside of your own country, or shifted slightly outside of a recognizable place. What's interesting about dépaysement is that it doesn't necessarily refer to being literally outside of your own country, only that you have a completely new understanding of a familiar place. For example, every time I look at the photographs that Voyager 1 took of the other side of Saturn, I can't even deal with the idea of living on a street, in a house. It's all context. AsFrank O'Hara wrote, "I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life."
Maybe we should be bringing the Explorer's Club flag with us to the supermarket and into our own bedrooms, or at least be making an effort to recontextualize our habitual environments, even if it's just by watching BBC's The Planets. Even if we're in the same place as we always are, or even doing the same old things in a different place, we should be aware that there's more than one way to experience our immediate environment.
Interestingly, albeit totally irrelevantly, the Explorer's Club flag bears a striking similarity to the French flag. The similarities end there, however, since the tricolore's scheme has something to do with the old Parisian coat of arms (red and blue) overpowering the traditional color of the monarchy (white).
In this spirit, I propose two auditory dépaysements. The first is an excellent lecture by Brian Eno (that I found thanks to the always topical Momus blog) on Steve Reich, slow music, ribbons around the Earth, and the Long Now. The second experience is another first for Universe: an mp3 mix compiled by "yours truly" of music that is completely incongruous with my current environment, which is a very crisp and wintry Paris. It's also a little present for you, reader. You can download it here (26 MB and about 28 minutes, for what it's worth). Here is the tracklist:
International Harvester - Sommarlåten (The Summer Song)
(Little Loopy Chant Interlude)
Lau Nau - Pyha Vuori
Brigitte Fontaine - Le Gougron
Van Dyke Parks - Sweet Trinidad
Gong - Flute Salad
Kemialliset Ystavat - Heavy Aura
King Sunny Adé - Ma Jaiye Oni
Spectrum - Mother Nature
Any discourse on the state of human Exploration, how to succeed with your own versions of dépaysement, or a good place for an Explorer's flag is welcome.
1:36 PM | Permalink | (2) Comments
Reptilian Agenda
Archived From October 31, 2006 (14) Comments
This just in from the NASA news wire: 11,000 light-years away from Earth, in the constellation Sagittarius, a massive galactic snake is slithering across the Universe. Of course, it isn't a real lizard (the appellation is just some weird NASA Halloween humor) but the core of a sooty cloud larger than a dozen of our solar systems, which happens to be shaped sort of like a snake. Disappointing, I know; it would be nice, for once, to have something more interesting than dust, gas, and cold rocks bobbing around in the great beyond.
What if, maybe, outer space just isn't where the action is? The human race has been glued the stars for centuries, eagerly seeking out radio bursts, blobs of light, and little green dudes; most of us feel the inevitability that if anything ever happens, it will come from the cosmos. This makes sense, of course: for all our textbooks about neutron stars and dark matter, we basically know diddlysquat about space, besides that it's completely unlike anything we have down here.
In my daily research, I have recently come across a whole underworld of conspiracy theorists and alternative knowledge gurus who are convinced that outer space is so ten years ago. No no, they argue, in quest of the answer to the age-old question (Are We Alone?) we must not look to the outer reaches of the Universe, as we have been conditioned to do, but rather into the belly of our own seemingly benign planet. Space, they propose, is a 'classic magician's distraction.' The real higher intelligence ain't sending flying saucers from Zeta Reticuli or using its advanced star maps to navigate to Earth and mind-probe us; rather, it lives under the Earthen surface, in thousands of miles of underground tunnels, caverns and cave systems that date back from dinosaur-times.
Who are these higher beings? Not skinny, almond-eyed, bobble-headed aliens, which, incidentally, are referred to as 'Greys' in the Ufology community. They're not little green men, Space Brothers, Venusians, Nords, or Pleiadeans, either. They are, according to a staggeringly large subset of the conspiracy theory Universe, reptilian humanoids. Right: intelligent, supernatural, and highly developed reptile-human hybrids, or Reptoids, which are capable of shape-shifting and allegedly control all the major secret societies, royal bloodlines, and governments on Earth.
Fuck space, right? Seven foot-tall subterranean-dwelling lizards are a galaxy more interesting.
The main proponent of this theory, or at least the most colorful one, is the impressively deadpan David Icke, who is somehow both a former professional soccer player and the former head of the UK Green Party. Icke, in a slew of books, speaking tours, and videos, claims that reptoids are the driving force behind a Da Vinci Code-style worldwide conspiracy that controls humanity. Not one to just dip his toe in the pool, he takes the concept all the way to the deep end, contending that everyone from George W. Bush (most believably, really) to the British Royal family are blood-drinking lizards with extra-terrestrial origins. Sure, it isn't a huge stretch to imagine the entire Republican Party as a scaly crew of reptilian bastards (actually, it's kind of fun), but the Queen of England as a minion of the lizard lords? Come on, the woman is not exactly a party animal.
Icke, for whom the reptoid/reptilian thing is only part of a much larger world view involving global conspiracies, borderline anti-Semitism, CIA mind-control, Masonic rituals, and general New-Age philosophy, claims he put together this theory after people world-around confided to him their experiences witnessing powerful political figures morph into lizards and back again. In a particularly lengthy and in-form interview, Icke declares, "I keep meeting people who tell me that they've seen people shape-shift into bloody reptiles."
The second important subset of Reptoid Research falls under the jurisdiction of the slightly more moderate conspiracist John Rhodes, who was the first to seriously investigate and publicly present claims of reptilian-humanoid sightings by founding the Reptoids.com (seriously, check it out) Research Center in the late 90s. Rhodes contends that these cryptozoologic mysteries are not extra-terrestrial in nature, nor do they have anything at all to do with world governments. That kind of talk is just some knee-jerk collective fear of the current global political climate. His lizard men, rather, are evolved from dinosaurs. Yeah! Think about it: if any dinosaurs somehow survived the supposed meteorite impact that doomed their species, and if evolution were for real, then wouldn't these survivors have evolved into something else? OK, forget about how birds are allegedly evolved from the dinosaurs. Imagine if they became bipedal humanoid intelligences instead! Imagine they still live in ice caves far from human contact! Can you wait until the polar ice caps melt? There will be a whole generation of dinosauroids wandering around, needing refugee housing. What a hell of a drain on the economy: we better call in the seven-foot blood lizard lords to take care of things. Come to think of it, we might as well just stick to the stars, right?
Still, on a sincere note, I know it's easy to poke fun at the lizard men. I research these things as though they were fiction -- it makes it easier, searching for the most salient points -- and write about them as though they were truth, earnestly trying to get the point across. Still, I know it's bullshit: I believe that the world is a feelingless rock with energies and the Universe is a ground for infinites, and nothing more. Sometimes, though, when I'm doing other things, I'm blindsided by the thought that some people really do believe in lizard people, for example, and that for them the world is a darkly malevolent, but purposeful place. This is what devastates me the most.
3:02 AM | Permalink | (14) Comments
A Sound Of Thunder
Archived From September 7, 2006 (0) Comments
Of all the storied elements of our great folkloric misunderstanding of Chaos Theory, the Butterfly Effect has undoubtedly suffered most from popular conception. It was born innocuous, a slight allegory to explain how changes in a mathematical situation's beginning coordinates have an unprecedented effect on its outcome, and yet the Butterfly Effect has somehow mutated into a beloved believe-it-or-not tenet of pop science. A butterfly flapping its wings on a balmy midwestern afternoon, many of us believe, can cause typhoons on the coast of Japan. The image is lovely, of course, and gives us a world that is wildly interconnected, multifarious, and dangerous. However, any mathematical concept which finishes its career as the title of an Ashton Kutcher movie should be immediately fact-checked.
Although the Butterfly Effect is mathematically, conceptually, solid as a rock, the actual dusty-winged butterfly is only an image, and nary more. The term, some say, comes from a short story about time travel penned by the wonderful Ray Bradbury, a science fiction novelist; others claim it is derived from a 1963 paper by Edward Lorenz for the New York Academy of Sciences, in which he posited, "One meteorologist remarked that if the theory were correct, one flap of a seagull's wings could change the course of weather forever." Would the image have so much popular appeal if it were a briny seagull beating its wing instead of the more poetic butterfly? Hardly.
This introduction is anecdotal. Mostly, I am trying to use the hackneyed Butterfly metaphor to get at the science-news events of the last few months, which, in case you've been hiding under a piece of Kuiper belt debris, are the equivalent of 1,000 Japanese typhoons. As Kate Becker put it in her Seed Magazine piece, "Best Week Ever," the last few weeks have seen huge announcements in a wide swathe of scientific disciplines "with a cross-disciplinary synchronicity that belies the isolation of their fields."
For one, astronomers -- any many other well-meaning residents of the Solar System -- were all aflutter about Pluto's demotion from its long-standing planet status. Cosmologists, on the other hand, also did their part to rewrite the textbooks, and found evidence of the existence of dark matter, the stuff which makes up 96% of the Universe and, until last week, was unaccounted for. By observing the collision of galaxies in a "bullet cluster," scientists found that most of the post-collision mass lay outside of any observable gas, a phenomenon which is, apparently, impossible to explain without the existence of dark matter. What dark matter (and its counterpart in the Standard Model, dark energy) is actually made of is still mysterious as all get-out, but this is the most compelling evidence to date that it's actually there, and that we don't have to rewrite Newton's laws to explain the visible Universe. Cool!
As if Pluto's booting and Dark Matter's arrival weren't enough, stem cell researchers at the biotechnology firm Advanced Cell Technology figured out a way to make a new stem cell line out of an eight-cell, i.e. pre-sentient, embryo. Important stem cell research without any of the pro-life claptrap? I'd gladly trade an icy old asteroid for that! Although it's probably prudent not to get too excited, this development could have profound implications for the current ethical and legal dilemmas that have limited this critical work in this country. Of course, the Bush administration may yet stick to its clammy guns on the issue of human embryos in any kind of scientific research. Still, the fact that a line of stem cells can be derived from such a basic organism is pretty awe-inspring, considering how complex a human being is.
I have the creeping feeling that these kinds of announcements -- enormous, discipline-altering discoveries -- are only going to be hitting the news more and more often. Maybe butterflies, somewhere, are fervently batting their wings; maybe we're just getting better at wresting Nature's secrets from her gnarled and starry limbs. The question that matters, to me, is whether or not we're ready to have all the answers. After all, it's the act of seeking which has defined the sciences since their inception: the metaphor of the perpetual search for completeness, in all its progressive linearity, has come to serve as a model for how science is understood and practiced. Once we have all the planets lined up, the Universe's components weighed and measured, and the complexity of human cells used to our medical advantage, will we be ready to open our umbrellas and await the typhoon of whatever comes next?
3:57 PM | Permalink |
Reassurance
Archived From July 27, 2006 (3) Comments
"It is to be remembered that despite the fact that you are accustomed to thinking only in dots and lines and a little bit in areas does not defeat the fact that we live in omnidirectional space-time and that a four dimensional universe provides ample freedom for any contingencies."
-- Buckminster Fuller
2:16 PM | Permalink | (3) Comments
To Understand and Protect our Home Planet
Archived From July 23, 2006 (2) Comments
This is upsetting.
NASA has deleted from its mission statement the phrase "to understand and protect our home planet."
This edit was made in conjunction with the Bush administration's new Vision for Space Exploration, whose primary objective is to shift NASA's emphasis (and public attention) away from Earth-bound issues (ie, global warming) and towards flashy manned Moon and Mars missions.
From the New York Times article on the subject:
"...the change comes as an unwelcome surprise to many NASA scientists, who say the 'understand and protect' phrase was not merely window dressing but actively influenced the shaping and execution of research priorities. Without it, these scientists say, there will be far less incentive to pursue projects to improve understanding of terrestrial problems like climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions."
NASA scientists have suffered from a great deal of unsettling censorship recently, including attempts by former Bush appointee George Deutsch -- who lied about graduating from Texas A&M (and, incidentally, told a Web designer to add the word "theory" to any mention of the Big Bang) -- to silence climate scientists such as James Hansen from speaking out about global warming. The NOAA is suffering from similar problems.
The omission of this all-important phrase is such an elegant act of symbolic destruction that it's almost Orwellian. The issue of "climate change," as its called in Bush doublespeak, is much more important than the government's petty desire to evade responsibility for it.
Nothing is more important than understanding and protecting "our" home -- which is home, of course, to millions of varieties of life for whom we have no right to make decisions. It's an ugly irony to pretend to be forward-thinking enough to slough off our commitment to this planet, when this represents, rather, an absolute lack of foresight.
12:37 AM | Permalink | (2) Comments
Synergetic Earth Language
Archived From July 21, 2006 (4) Comments
Every day, under our noses, obsolete scientific ideas run rampant. I'm not talking about the maddening sabotage of science constantly perpetuated by ideological conservatives -- that, although a daily frustration, is not unnoticed. This is a transgression that we all unknowingly commit.
Although everyone with a first-grade education knows that the Earth is a sphere -- the general belief in a flat Earth died out, of course, in the Middle Ages -- we still use the term "worldwide" to describe things on a global scale. The Earth's dimensions can be measured in volume, for one, and area; the word "wide," however, describes a proportion -- width -- that we have known for centuries that our planet doesn't have. Moreover, our use of the words "sunrise" and "sunset" stems from a long-outdated pre-Copernican model of the cosmos, one which places the Earth at the center of the sun's revolutions. Of course, the sun doesn't rise or set: rather, it is our position relative to it which defines how it appears to move on the horizon. We've known this since fancy horse-war times, and yet we continue to reiterate an archaic version of the human world-view in our anachronistic everyday language. Since most modern words are intuitive (automobile, for example, is pretty self-evident), lending the English language a false appearance of clarity, deeply-engrained use of obsolete terms can only result in a misunderstanding of the world.
The visionary American architect Buckminster Fuller (who, among other utopian achievements, invented the geodesic dome) argued that the unthinking use of these kinds of terms detracts from and misleads intuition -- if the words we use to describe concepts are counterintuitive, then our understanding of the reality of these concepts is weakened. Hell-bent on the debunking of phrases like "wordwide," "sunset," and "sunrise," Fuller proposed more truthful, albeit strange, analogues: "worldaround," "sunsight," and "sunclipse," respectively. Sure, it sounds silly, but language is a porous and ever-changing thing that can easily adapt to a culture's changing needs; "blog" wasn't even a word, let alone a concept, until a few years ago.
Fuller's involvement in shattering long-held conceptions didn't stop with "sunclipse," however. Frustrated with the inaccuracy of world maps -- how they sacrifice the relative size of countries in the process of representing a sphere (as we established earlier, the Earth is not flat) on a two-dimensional plane -- he set out to create a world map which wouldn't prolong cultural bias. Traditional maps, still in use, attempt to fit the world's curved surface onto a flat sheet, thus distorting its true layout. Areas far from the equator, for example, are generally distorted or exaggerated in size; on many maps, Greenland is presented as being roughly as large as Africa, when in fact Africa's area is approximately 13 times that of Greenland. That doesn't do much for Africa's status in our cultural consciousness.
Further, almost all maps place North at the top and South at the bottom, implicitly privileging the Northern countries as being somehow superior. These psychological implications are subtle, of course, but we must remember that the division between North and South is pretty arbitrary on a sphere floating through space. There's no up, no down, in the long haul.
I know that I'm always harping on this. However, we have the misfortune of living in the most severely polarized era of planet Earth. Fuller, in his essential text, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, wrote that "despite our recently developed communications intimacy and popular awareness of total Earth we...are as yet politically organized entirely in the terms of exclusive and utterly obsolete sovereign separateness." He wrote that in 1969; our country has only become more an more of an ideological island in the years since.
Incidentally, that first Appollo 8 image of the Earth from space was titled "Earthrise," which goes to show that scientific neologisms can be beautiful and worthy of adoption.
Bucky Fuller called us residents of "Spaceship Earth," fervently espoused this planet's synergetics, and designed his world map accordingly. The Dymaxion map (short for Dynamic Maximum Tension, a hybridized word applied to many Fuller structures) projects the global sphere onto the surface of a polyhedron, which is then unfolded in many different permutations and flattened to form a two-dimensional map. Sounds counterintuitive, but the Dymaxion map retains more of the planet's relative proportional integrity than any other global map. There is no right way to look at one of these maps, and no North or South to speak of. If you peel the triangular faces of the shape apart in one way, it reveals a view of an almost contiguous giant land mass including all of Earth's continents, as opposed to the groups of continents divided by oceans that we are accustomed to. If you configure the map differently, however, you can come to a view of the world dominated by connected oceans.
There is no correct way to view a Dymaxion map simply because there is no correct way to view our planet. All of the rules we impose on our world-view -- those barriers of incorrect language, the geometric divisions of border whose relevance we so often ignore -- are as arbitrary as a flat-Earth map. The first step towards rectifying these gross global fallacies is to recognize the effect that they have on our understanding. With that kind of lucidity in tow, human beings are pretty much unstoppable; we made up the rules, and we are perfectly capable of changing them. Why not change the way we speak, or the way we represent our planet to ourselves?
5:47 PM | Permalink | (4) 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
Clumper'd in balls of clouds
Archived From March 19, 2006 (2) Comments
Despite the completely irrational nature of the rainstorms that have been sporadically whipping Los Angeles, we on Earth are lucky, weather-wise. We don't have to deal with rains of sulphuric acid droplets, nor infinite giant hurricanes like those which make up Jupiter's red spot or the dark spot on Venus, which, until the mid-1990's, consisted of storms larger than our entire planet. We don't have helium condensation dripping on our heads, or oceans of ethane blanketing our meteor-battered landscape. Our atmosphere isn't blisteringly hot and poisonous, nor freezing and whipped with unforgiving winds, as seems to be the norm in the rest of the galaxy, on all the other planets which stubbornly continue to exist and be strange, despite how much I can't handle thinking about them.
Rather, denizens of Earth are privy to a soft blueness, which is generally forgiving, and a rational flow of water particles, which result in the pillowy white puffs we call "clouds." Our clouds, too, are only condensations of water vapor -- not swirls of ammonia and methane. They're not as psychedelic and colorful as the dense clouds of surging ammonia ice which blanket Saturn, but at least we can see the sky through them most of the time.
Our sky is big, of course, so big as to warrant something aviation specialists call "Big Sky Theory" -- the idea that the sky is so big that two bodies traveling through it have a near-zero probability of ever colliding. This is good news for the air-travel-phobic, of course, but it also renders much more impressive the fact that human beings have managed to pose an environmental threat to something so massive that even the clouds can't cover it all.
Of course, we are steadily screwing our sky up, and though I'm sure the runaway greenhouse gases on Earth are never going to trap carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as thoroughly as they do on Venus (where temperatures are 460 degrees celsius all of the time) our sky is still in danger of overheating. Fossil fuel emissions raise the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by a terrifying 4% every year; we'd have to get to virtually zero emissions in the next two decades if we wanted to stop climate change in its tracks, a literal impossibility in a world where environmentalism's marketable cool factor has been irrevocably destroyed by the movie "Bio-Dome" and people who drive cars that look like Nazi tanks.
The notion of weather control is certainly not new, at least on a human time-scale. Scientists have certainly always fantasized about harnessing the power of the atmosphere, for both hostile and good-natured means. There was a devastatingly good article in Harper's two months ago about this (recommended to me, like many things, by my awesome friend Dean Bein, and is a recommendation I pass on to y'all, if you can find it), called "Owning the Weather," by Ando Arike which I feel profoundly inadequate even referring to, so I won't dally on the subject long.
In any case, I tripped out pretty hard recently when I learned that "cloud seeding" is a fairly common, albeit only tenuously worthwhile, practice. By dispersing into clouds chemicals which allow water droplets or ice crystals to form more easily, climatologists can change the amount of precipitation a cloud yields. While reduced cloud cover is pretty visibly achieved, it's impossible to know if cloud-seeding works to, say, make more rain, because it's impossible to know how much precipitation would have occurred had the cloud not been "seeded" in the first place, which is kind of a cool little Zen koan. The practice is used today to increase precipitation in drought areas, to reduce the size of hailstones that form in thunderstorms, and to reduce the amount of fog in and around airports.
Interestingly, the use of silver iodide as the primary chemical in the seeding of clouds was discovered by an atmospheric scientist called Bernard Vonnegut, the brother of (the novelist) Kurt Vonnegut. As an aside, Vonnegut (Kurt, that is) used some of Vonnegut's (Bernard, that is) ideas about ice crystallography in Cat's Cradle, which, satisfyingly, makes for another nice synaptic connection between the arts and sciences in history.
Many physicists believe that the end of the Universe may come in the form of something they call "The Big Chill:" as the Universe continues to slowly expand, all the stars might, one by one, dim out, the black holes would evaporate, and everything else, generally, would disintegrate into a dilute sea of particles. If this kind of "Chill" happens, life as we know it -- human life, sexy life, life with furry things and airplanes -- could not persist. It would be too cold, for one thing, not to mention the fact that the space-time continuum would be stretched beyond recognition. Humanity could not exist in a Universe so dispersed that it is effectively a void.
Consciousness may well continue, in altered forms. The wholly legitimate physicist Freeman Dyson, father of the discipline of cosmic eschatology (good vocabulary word, eschatology: the study of the end of the Universe), believes that "all conscious life will take the form of interstellar dust clouds," as "an ever-expanding network of charged dust particles, communicating by electromagnetic forces, has all the complexity necessary for thinking about an infinite number of novel thoughts." These clouds, spread over billions of light-years of space, could continue to think an infinite amount of thoughts using the finite amount of left-over energy by spending a large percentage of their existence in a kind of atmospheric hibernation.
The consciousness of inorganic sentient clouds sounds insane, of course, but so does human life, after all -- carbon and water-based lumps of bipedal flesh, powered by the few square inches of protoplasm inside of delicate skulls? Life as we know it has only been on this planet for a couple hundred thousand years, and, though we humans have a hell of a lot of temerity in the face of even our own atmosphere -- boldly shooting rockets and airplanes through our nice clouds, burning holes in the ozone layer with cans of hairspray, puffing fossil fuel emissions into the atmosphere -- we are perhaps only the inauspicious debut to the the millennial reign of eschatological brain-clouds. The fact that we may someday turn into clouds ourselves seems to me like a cosmic table-turning scenario.
If that's not a good enough reason to stop driving Hummers, I don't know what is.
3:33 PM | Permalink | (2) Comments
String Theory, Part Three
Archived From January 31, 2006 (14) Comments
Definitely the final essay in this series. And no more politics.
In a Universe first, I received in my cool email "box" yesterday a piece of rebuttal about the political implications of the tokes on String Theory in my last essay. What my correspondent pointed out to me was that my comparison of Intelligent Design and String Theory gave me away as an unabashed leftist (duh), and that, furthermore, positing ST as the intellectual's antithesis to ID is only a detriment to critical thinking, since all I am doing is enacting a typically American (my correspondent is a European) structure of polar ideological binaries. And since, incidentally, String Theory is perhaps as unfounded and illogical a postulation as Intelligent Design is, I am just as much a pseudo-scientific loon as those who champion the latter.
I'm glad. I had originally been very hesitant to raise the Intelligent Design point for many reasons: a) I didn't want to take part in the media orgy on the subject, b) I am generally misinformed politically (there, I said it), and c) I was worried someone might call me out as accurately as my above correspondent did. As it stands, I have few rebuttals. I am an unabashed drum-circle hackey-sack leftist. But I think the new Universe that String Theory proposes is much more exciting and conceptually problematic than what Intelligent Design offers us -- I mean, Creationism is pretty hackneyed.
However, I will cede this point. Godly evolution and Multiverses have one thing in common: neither are examples of hard science. The thing which I think is fundamentally interesting about String Theory, for our purposes here, is that there have been no experiments yet devised that can viably test it. No observations, either, can relate to the properties it discusses -- Strings are so profoundly subatomic that we can never see them. On the same token, G-o-d remains as elusive.
Scientific theories, even when admired for their logic and symmetry, are by definition hypotheses awaiting experimental evidence. Both Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity are celebrated because they can be used to make (thus far) infallible empirical predictions. Furthermore, we know that gravity, electromagnetism, and the nuclear forces exist -- be they in the form of forces or elementary particles. But Strings? They're literally so small that we will probably never see them as entities.
What String Theory is, it seems, is a field of non-experimental physics -- physics, being, of course an inherently experimental and observational science. Many physicists differentiate themselves disdainfully from String Theorists, who are seen as a radical offshoot group. Supporters argue that this group is revolutionizing the science and opponents consider them mere philosophers. Not to say that philosophy is a radical step down from experimental physics on the chain of legitimacy, but it is certainly a different discipline. If String Theory, after all this, is just philosophy -- albeit a mathematical philosophy -- then no one, particularly not me, can pronounce it either a necessary ideological and cultural shift nor an intellectual capstone, at least not on the platform of it being a particularly factual development.
The reason that next time you see me I won't be holding up cardboard signs in the street and handing out flyers, however, is that there is a clear line between philosophical speculation and religious proselytizing. Sure, maybe String Theory is masquerading at science in the same way that Intelligent Design is and with the same fervor -- but at least it doesn't have an agenda.
8:42 PM | Permalink | (14) Comments
The Man Whom The Trees Loved
Archived From December 24, 2005 (6) Comments
People might as well be trees. The only difference, sometimes, between the swathe of humans plodding across this earth and the equal amount of botanical life foliaging its way across it is a question of time.
It seems to me that we often forget -- or never knew -- that plants, like ourselves, live linear lives. Trees are born, become saplings, experience puberty and growth, mature, and then die standing. They just do it in a much longer and much less mobile time frame than we do -- so much so that I recently found myself legitimately wondering if trees die, at all. Before you scoff, consider: aside from environmental factors, fire, erosion, lightning, lumberjackism, what would kill a mighty oak? If left alone, could a tree keep on growing forever? The answer is, I always assumed, "HYPOTHETICALLY, YES." I always assumed, "Trees are scary and silent and will keep growing forever unless we or Nature kill them."
This absurd notion was probably borne in me by the late Algernon Blackwood, who, like H.P. Lovecraft and Poe, was one of the rare masters of supernatural story-writing. Blackwood I've always found to be sexier than the rest because his stories have no skullfaced tentacle monsters to ruin their mystique (a la Lovecraft). He pretty much reinvented botany with The Man Whom The Trees Loved, a story which chillingly articulates the (I think) latent feeling most people have that trees are inherently scary.
![The Man Whom The Trees Loved](http://www.leftfield-psi.net/ghosts/images/fgh/blackwood.jpg"){kind=link}
In this story, a man begins to "listen" to the forest and ends up overtaken by the dark winds which blow across the thick silence of branches. It's never clear what happens to him, but it has the warm muffle of wet leaves and it is terrifying. The forest in the story, a crowded mass of rooted life, begins to seem like a mob. Blackwood gives the trees a hint of malice and all of a sudden you have to look twice at the elm in the backyard: is it closer than it was yesterday?
"And in the distance," writes Blackwood, "the roaring of the Forest."
Blackwood realized that trees were scary, because he understood that trees have both permanence and transparency. They are so immobile and quiet that they never remind us that they are alive at all, and we, of course, take them for granted. We see through them. They are so ubiquitous and anonymous that we treat them like strangers, passerby. On some level, this constant and seemingly endless presence is frightening; it lulls us into a false feeling of security, makes us smug in our imaginary knowledge of our coniferous colleagues. Of course, we have no such knowledge: we ignore trees completely, even if we claim to love them. They are our constant counterparts, but they are on a completely different trip than us, existing on an almost evolutionary time scale. What's more frightening than something you always considered to be reliably benign, wrapping a slowly tightening branch around your neck?
If it's any comfort, trees do not live forever, and, as far as I know, do not spend their time plotting our demise. Trees are just woody plants which continue growing until they die (the study of tree age is called Dendrochronology and it is practiced by Dendrologists.) Trees have different lifespans from one another -- some a measly 40 years*. There is a Huon pine in Tasmania that is allegedly 40,000 years old. No matter the lifespan, however, there comes a time in each tree's life, after it passes maturity, when decay begins to set in. The tree overmatures. It dies, but since it is so rooted, it remains standing (a "snag," foresters call this). Snags are considered valuable parts of a forest's health and it is generally recommended that foresters preserve at least three snags per acre, as insects and birds tend to burrow in their cavities. Snags totter around until erosion or the weather knocks them down to "log" status, technically the last stage of a tree's life.
And logs can't hurt us.
*I heard that all the palm trees in LA, having been planted around the same time in the 1950's, are all going to die soon. Does anyone know if this is true?
12:53 AM | Permalink | (6) Comments