Recently in Space Category
A few months ago, I wrote a piece for GOOD Magazine highlighting some of the lesser-known successes of everyone's favorite bloated space agency. Although I intended to write about basic research, good science, and interesting pipeline projects, I ended up stuck in a vortex of awesome open-source software development and interactive art programs.
Doing my research, I came into contact with some incredibly forward-thinking people at NASA who gave me great hope for a post-Bush space administration. One of these people was Nicholas Skytland, founder of openNASA.com, an incredibly earnest, collaborative blog written by employees across the agency. At NASA, Skytland is Project Manager of the EVA Physiology, Systems and Performance Project, a program that seeks to understand human performance during Extra-Vehicular Activity (you know, spacewalks) with the aim of developing safer systems for future missions. At openNASA, he's a blogger and a great proponent of having two-way conversations about the future of our space program.
openNASA.com is representative of a relatively new trend towards transparency within the agency, one spearheaded by plugged-in employees hell-bent on using networked technologies to interact more directly with the public. I know it's relatively dorky at this point to talk about "web 2.0" or "social networking" as radical tools of change, but this is NASA we're talking about -- a hugely beleaguered, bureaucratic government agency with a great deal of power. Late in the game or not, this is massive.
"We have insight into what is and could be happening inside the U.S. space program -- but so do you."
Universe: So why did you start openNASA?
Skytland: openNASA really started as a result of a number of other efforts that were already going on at the time. A number of younger people from around the agency were very interested in blogging -- and some had already started blogging on their own. Many of us converged at a conference at NASA Ames Research Center on February 12-15, 2008 called the "Next Generation Exploration Conference." As is probably typical with most conferences, the discussion didn't really end after the formal program was over. One evening after the conference was officially over, many of the original authors of openNASA were co-working and somehow we got on the discussion of blogging. It was clear that there were a number of blogs that had been started, but there was no silver lining that held them all together. We decided that we would start a "team blog" that anyone from the agency (civil servant or contractor) could participate in. We'd do all the work involved with setting up the site so as to make it as easy as possible for anyone to be an author -- and share their perspective.
We wasted no time. Fortunately, in the room were a number of web developers, coders, designers, and creative spirits (most of whom have normal day jobs as NASA engineers). Within a couple of hours we had the site designed, coded, hosted, and launched.
Ideally, we would have blogged on the nasa.gov website -- but it wasn't ready for us. Not wanting to wait, we launched openNASA as an interim solution. It truly is an experiment in what open and transparent government could look like and it's been a learning experience ever since.
Shortly after the launch of openNASA.com, a number of our community members were invited by the NASA administrator to talk to the Senior Management Council. Our presentation has really resulted in a number of efforts around the agency [Ed: Many similar websites launched after the SMC conversation].
You may also have heard the term "Participatory Exploration." This is something that many of the authors of openNASA feel strongly about. We recognize that we are really fortunate to have the opportunity to work at a place like NASA and we wanted to share that perspective. Maybe more importantly, we wanted to provide an opportunity for all those who do not work for NASA or one of its contractors directly, a chance to participate in the NASA mission. I recently gave a presentation on the subject.
Universe: Tell me more about the authors of openNASA.
Skytland: There are many voices of NASA. NASA leadership, noted scientists, public affairs writers, nobel laureates, Congressional Representatives, Union leaders, your neighbor. To the average person, including our friends and relatives, the image and message gets cloudy and distorted.
This is a collaborative blog written by NASA employees across the agency, and occasional invited guests. We come from a perspective within NASA of transparency, accessibility, risk, honesty, merit, and participation. We have insight into what is and could be happening inside the U.S. space program -- but so do you, and it is something to be shared and discussed. Let's create a space program which stimulates non-governmental activity, excitement and inspiration, and which guides humanity onto a sustainable path into the future. This is the voice of promise and opportunity. This is our voice.
Universe: What has the reaction been among more traditionally-minded people within the agency?
Skytland: When we launched openNASA, we thought we might have some major resistance from within the agency. Turns out, it was just the opposite - we had a lot of support! Although NASA often gets a bad rap outside its walls, in the press, and on blogs, what we experienced was strong support for sharing our voice, our perspective and most importantly the story about the NASA mission. Yes, of course, there are many both inside and outside the community who don't necessarily share a certain perspective of one or more of the authors on openNASA, but in general, even the most "traditionally-minded" person at NASA really wants to talk about what they do. They are passionate about what they do. They'd LOVE to tell you what they are up to. Most are so busy that they just don't have the time to set up their own website or develop a presentation to do so. We developed OpenNASA to be an easy to use conduit for their insights. It's a place to give NASA a voice.
When it comes to actually blogging and putting down in words what we do at NASA, that's where I think we have the most trouble. openNASA is an experiment in communication. As Garret Fitzpatrick eloquently wrote in a post on openNASA, many are worried simply about their words coming back to haunt them. I think this is a fear that many "traditional" people have about blogging in general. We try to eliminate that barrier any way we can -- by helping encourage each other, by writing policies that protect our authors from attacks, and by simply being an example of what this might look like for others.
We have also had a lot of interest from people who work on NASA communications. These people are some of the most brilliant and creative people at NASA. They have an extremely difficult job, if you consider the constraints of government communications, and have been very interested in our ideas and thoughts on how to share the NASA story.
Universe: What are your hopes for the future of NASA ?
Skytland: We see NASA as a leader in true exploration, and subsequently, science and technology. We recognize that a big issue for the United States right now is that we have fallen behind in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education, and other countries have excelled in both education and industry of STEM disciplines. NASA has the ability to lead our nation in continue to innovate, to inspire, and lead the world in exploration -- which is extremely important if our country hopes to remain competitive in today's environment. Our hope for the future of NASA is that we truly embrace a culture around "participatory exploration" in order to leverage technologies, knowledge and information from the public, private sector, nongovernmental organizations and international partners to accomplish our mission.
From the openNASA perspective, blogging is only the first step and we really hope to expand the government into more interactive ways to promote transparency via web technology.
*Images courtesy of NASA's rad new images archive!
For over six months, Veronica McGregor has been Twittering from Mars.
Of course, she's not living among the wind storms and dirt of the red planet herself, but she is the voice of MarsPhoenix, the strangely compelling, first-person, lonely robot Twitter feed that somehow became the official mouthpiece of NASA's Phoenix mission and has catalyzed an entirely new kind of public involvement in science.
MarsPhoenix is followed by over 37,000 people online, and provides daily updates on Martian weather conditions, scientific discoveries, as well as pithy observations about our role in the Universe. It's a rare feat of conviviality for an agency more known for its bureaucracy than its cunning P.R. moves, but such is the power of new media. Today, as the Mars Phoenix mission winds down, NASA's experiment in social networking is not going unrecognized: with recent accolades from Wired and Gizmodo, and a handful of "Twitty" awards under its, err, metal belt, MarsPhoenix is setting the standard for how government agencies like NASA can engage the public.
In conjunction with my most recent article for GOOD Magazine on the subject, I spoke to Veronica McGregor, the "real" MarsPhoenix, about the Internet, WALL-E, and the cinema of micro-blogging.
Universe: How long have you been writing Twitters for JPL missions, and how did they come about?
McGregor: We started the Twitter account in early May, about three weeks before we [the Mars Phoenix mission] landed. My office [the JPL News Office] was trying to do more and more with new media. We've been on iTunes for a while, and we have a channel on YouTube, and we're always trying to push out our material to all these venues. We started doing mission blogs on our own website, and they took up a lot of time -- for those writing it, and then there were the editors, and the web posters. It took three or four people to post one entry on a blog. Not very efficient. But it was very well received, and we got a lot of comments back on our blog.
So, when we got ready for the Phoenix landing, we started thinking about what venues we should use, and someone mentioned Twitter. That was one of my newer employees on staff, actually. She had started her own account, and she wasn't quite sure how to use it, but she mentioned it, and we looked into it. The thing that appealed to us the most about Twitter was that people could actually receive the updates on their mobile devices, and our landing on Mars was going to take place over the three-day holiday weekend, over Memorial Day. I knew from being a former journalist that during a three-day weekend, readership and viewership of news just plummets. People are on vacation, they're not paying attention. So one of the appeals of Twitter was the fact that we could actually post updates for the landing and people could get those anywhere they were, even if they were at a picnic.
Maybe it's the upcoming election and the potential change that it portends. Or perhaps it's the Large Hadron Collider, bogged down with electric failures, that has ceded the science-news space to other subjects. In any case, the last week has seen a slew of exciting, weird, and prescient science news too exciting to ignore, and too varied to all discuss in depth.
For one, the impersonal blackness of space welcomed a new nation as the Chinese launched their much-anticipated Shenzhou VII spacecraft, manned with three "taikonauts" trained for the country's first spacewalk. Technologically speaking, it's not a huge deal -- Russia and the United States conducted their first spacewalks in 1965 -- but for a country that has never dabbled in space exploration before, it's kind of like going from zero to hero. It's a beautifully symbolic, albeit dated, gesture; during the Cold War, space exploration was a status venture, and planting a flag on the moon (which the Chinese plan to do) an iteration of national strength. It's apt that a post-Olympics China is now rediscovering these cachet-earning gestures. I genuinely hope that the Chinese discover the same side effects of national space exploration as we did back in the sixties: awe, fear, hope, and the humility of seeing our tiny pea of a planet from space. We need a good dose of that these days.
On Earth, however, Japan is cobbling together an entirely more ambitious plan, and perhaps one which will eventually eclipse rockets and flag-planting altogether: they are seriously considering building the world's first space elevator. I've written about space elevators before (hey, Brian!), but it seemed like such a theoretical, dreamy concept then ("the space elevator is concrete, as though humankind were reaching its own tentative arm into the great beyond"); now the Japanese are looking at the idea with characteristic pragmatism, talking carbon nanotubes and shuttle payloads, throwing around ideas like "bullet train to space." This is something to watch, scouts.
Meanwhile, NASA is just bungling everything, as usual.
In other exciting news, longtime readers of this website will know that Universe has had several manifestations, both in print and online, as a mutable science column. I'm especially proud to announce that a new such version has arisen (this may explain the recent silence at this URL) over at GOOD magazine's website, where I've been doing a syndicated mini-Universe for the better part of a month, on subjects like commercial space travel, aquanauts, and the Large Hadron Collider. I'm really excited about this collaboration, and I encourage everyone to visit their well-designed website and travel through all the consistently awesome content (and toss a few "GOODmarks" my way).
Dear readership,
As far as I know, I have never used this website as a political platform. I have weakly festered under the steely gaze of a particularly anti-science American administration without uttering much of a peep, but this, however, I cannot let stand.
The Arecibo telescope is the world's largest radio telescope and currently the source of all the data processed and used by various (and already much-maligned) SETI projects, particularly SETI@home. Currently, it's facing massive budget cuts that will effectively end its ability to continue the search for life beyond Earth. The decision to ensure full funding currently rests upon votes in Congress on Senate Bill S.2862 and House Resolution H.R. 3737. These bills, understandably ignored in the midst of pressing social issues and an upcoming election, desperately need more support.
Arecibo is, for all intents and purposes, our eyes and ears to the cosmos. The data it provides is enormously important in all kinds of astronomical science, and to the search for intelligent life in the Universe, which in my opinion is the most significant and noble of the scientific quests, and has far-reaching ramifications for all of humanity. To give up on Arecibo because of benign funding issues is to swaddle our entire race in a cloak of anthropomorphic narcissism, to cease to care if there is anyone else out there, to be so content in our self-serving and destructive worldview as to stop looking for other answers. This is such a huge issue that should never be in the half-assed hands of the U.S. Congress. It's insane.
Please spend ten minutes visiting the SETI@Home site, printing out a letter, and posting it. It's a ridiculously mild expenditure of your time considering the issue at hand. This isn't even politics! It's the HUMAN RACE and our place in the COSMOS we are talking about.
Without the error-correcting machinery of science, we are lost to our subjectivity, to our chauvinism, to our longing to be central to the purpose of the universe. One of science's alleged crimes is revealing that our favorite, most reassuring stories about our place in the universe and how we came to be are delusional.
-- Carl Sagan
More information about SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence):
Earlier this year, I attended a "Star Party" at the MacDonald Observatory in Fort Davis, a venerable institution perched on a hill in the far west Texas desert. The skies out there are, understandably, crushingly big and so teeming with stars that the astronomers guiding the public stargazing events need to aim high-powered laser pointers at the sky in order for anyone to tell one star from another. On the evening of my attendance, our guide was giddy with the news that the International Space Station, formerly an invisible blip in the night sky, had recently been expanded to the point that it might now be visible from Earth. His calculations showed it scheduled for a fly-by that evening, so he ushered a group of us outside to the parking lot and commanded us to look at the horizon. Suddenly, a point of light slightly larger than a star emerged from the night.
There it was.
It shot across the sky in a graceful arc, growing larger as it flew directly above us. No one said a word. It seemed incomprehensible that men and women were up there, in that tiny point of light, swallowing beads of floating water and conducting esoteric experiments. I felt inexplicably proud of this achievement, glad to be implicated in it by virtue of my membership in the human race. Despite the thrill, however, it was humbling: here was a minute dot of light, speeding across the sky as it encircled the Earth. From their vantage point, the astronauts aboard the ISS saw dozens of sunsets a day, saw the world in all its complexity as a blur of browns and blues, felt safe and massive in their technological warren; but from Earth we could see them as they really were, one blip among millions, a hunk of metal shining among massively powerful stars and the vastness of space.
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On an unrelated note, now would perhaps be an appropriate time to announce the soft launch of a new project, Space Canon. I will be reading every important science fiction book ever written and blogging about the process, and it might take years. Any other heads are welcome to follow along in my journey, provide suggestions, and make comments like "After reading Neuromancer, I too think the Wachowski brothers should be sued for plagiarism!"
More data as I gather it.
The search for a Theory of Everything, which is kind of the unofficial M.O. of the scientific establishment, has always been closely guarded. The elements of profound uncertainty involved with such a quest have always primly clipped, safe from the grubby hands of untrained speculation. Relatively sane, brilliant physicists who err too far in the direction of the fabulous are practically shunned, or at least relegated to different class; those who posit that any variant of string theory might bridge the gap are nominally demoted from "physicists" to "string theorists," a nomenclature that smacks of thinly-veiled condescension.
In recent years, however, the tides have changed, at least to the untrained eye of this untoward layperson.
In November, a non-affiliated renegade physicist with a penchant for year-round surfing and Burning Man baffled the scientific community with a surprisingly cogent theory of everything: a testable hypothesis, which, refreshingly, does not require either highly complex mathematics, or any more than one dimension of time and three of space. It's based on the E8, a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points, generally considered to be the most elegant and intricate shape known to mathematics. Quoth the surfer in question, Garrett Lisi, "I think our universe is this beautiful shape." A radically simple Theory Of Everything that could shelve once and for all the quivering postulations of String theorists? Strike one.
This guy?
Furthermore, this month, one of the most prestigious astronomical publications in the world, The Astrophysical Journal, will publish the research of Gerrit Verschuur, who claims that the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite images -- which, since 1992, have served as unfuckwithable empirical evidence of the Big Bang -- depict nearby hydrogen gas clouds in our own galaxy, rather than the structures of the early Universe they are thought to be. A massive paradigm shift that brings us back to square one as far as the origin of the Universe is concerned? Strike two.
There's plenty of contenders vying for strike three. A recent, and much-misunderstood, paper by Laurence Krauss (author, incidentally, of The Physics of Star Trek) of Case Western Reserve University argued that since the Universe originated from a quantum state -- and hence is part of a highly illogical quantum system -- then it's possible that a "probability wave" of reality could be conked out by something as innocuous as an observation. Remember Schroedinger's unfortunate cat? In any case, Krauss' paper ever-so-lightly suggested that a 1998 observation of a supernova, through which scientists deduced the existence of dark matter, could have collapsed a web of probabilities stretching all the way back to the Big Bang, potentially shortening the lifespan of our very universe.
But wait, isn't the Big Bang potentially bunk? Or maybe there's no quantum universe at all; maybe the universe is this glamorous, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern resounding with beautiful and complex symmetries. It's a mess: the quest for a unified front has only led to more and more chaos, illogical syllogisms, and mutually-exclusive theory sets. Meanwhile, astronomers are knee-deep in dark matter, dark energy, new planets, holes in the universe, and ancient textures in the sky.
It seems as though string Theory era has opened the vibrating, 11-dimensional doors to a period of open speculation. We seem to be in the midst of a theoretical free-for-all, a mêlée of ideas, both hackneyed and abstract. Is the scientific establishment really evolving into a multifaceted, fractured, and wildly theoretical community? Are open-source electronic journals and the democratization of information in this self-navigating digital era rending the staid entitlement of science into shreds? Or is it simply the fault of the mainstream press, being more clued in to the hype potential of science than it once was, perhaps enticed by the exoticism of String Theory, the media-savvy of Brian Greene, or the throbbing pulse of the upcoming Mayan apocalypse?
In his 2006 book, "Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Particle Physics," mathematical physicist Peter Woit explains that "particle theory has a long history of being successfully pursued in a somewhat faddish manner...new ideas get a lot of attention, leading in a short period either to significant progress, or, more commonly, to abandonment as the community moves on to the next thing."
Are these recent jabs at the gilded throne of particle physics, as Woit puts it, simply "faddish?" Perhaps string theory's wildly untestable nature has broken this pattern dramatically, thrusting us headlong into an age of uncertainty, an era of radically open scientific discourse, careening along the mandala-like vortices of cosmic shapes or emanating from an uncertain, perhaps quantum, past. Here's hoping, right?
On March 26th, 1997, 39 people in matching black sweatsuits and Nike sneakers were found dead in a rented mansion in the San Diego suburb of Rancho Santa Fe. They were members of a marginal religious group called Heaven's Gate -- a "cult," in the frenzied media parlance of the 90's -- and they had committed suicide, cleanly and methodically, by ingesting large doses of phenobarbital and vodka. Their motive, profoundly misunderstood by pretty much everyone not directly involved with the group, was to hitch a ride to the "Next Level" on a heavenly spacecraft positioned behind the rapidly-approaching Hale-Bopp comet. In a very real sense, they did not believe themselves to be committing suicide; they merely saw themselves as abandoning their fallible physical "vehicles:" a radical extension of a commitment they had spent years developing while living in isolated compounds in Salt Lake City, Denver, and the Dallas Forth-Worth area, before moving to their final resting place in Southern California.
Heaven's Gate is a fascinating group, a religious sect that defies our perceptions of cult-dom in strange and interesting ways. What intrigues me the most about them, however, aside from the controversy and mystique of the suicide, is their complicated relationship to technology. While we all remember the Nike sneakers, what most people don't know about these 38 devotees and their leader, Marshall Applewhite (known to them as "Bo" or "Do"), is that they sustained themselves, financially and socially, by making websites.
From the early 1990s until their deaths, they ran a reasonably profitable web design company called Higher Source, churning out innocuous sites for organizations like the San Diego Polo Club. The Higher Source site (now-defunct, but available on Archive.org if you're feeling industrious) proclaimed -- and this should maybe have been a red "crazies" flag for potential clients -- that "individually and collectively, we have focused on outgrowing the artificial limitations this society has programmed all of us to accept in personal conduct and task efficiency...we can produce at a level of efficiency and quality unequalled in the computer industry." Even more interesting is that although the business was characterized by Heaven's Gate as state of the art, it was, by all accounts, far from cutting-edge.
A technical communications specialist quoted in a 1997 CNN story on the subject put it this way: "They weren't very good Web designers. I don't know what kind of money they were making. They have white outlines on the edges of the text that kind of mooshes it against the background."
When exactly they first became mixed up with computers is unknown, but it must have dated back some years, probably catalyzed by their fascination between emerging communication technologies and space travel. Furthermore, their love of computers became totally absorbed into their idiom and ideology, as well as the way they conceptualized their beliefs. Patricia Goerman's awesome MA thesis, "Heaven's Gate: A Sociological Perspective," delves into this issue in some detail. Goerman points out that in their writings, Heaven's Gate members "discuss their use of 'N.L. (Next Level) Base computer language,' as a way to express their 'higher level' of understanding of Biblical and other ideas as compared with the average human...they say that those who have the same 'computer program' or 'software' will interpret...statement[s] differently than the average human."
It's not surprising that the burgeoning Internet technologies of the mid-1990s could have been so easily adaptable to this kind of cultic mysticism. After all, all great paradigm shifts usually engender some kind of religious sentiment or fervency, either in reactionary fear or evangelical embrace. The web explosion must have seemed like a great harbinger of change, as well as a perfectly suitable -- or alarming -- metaphor for New Age notions of connectivity, to anyone thinking of the big picture.
It seems bitingly ironic that, while the media in the 1990's scoffed at Heaven's Gate's loony dreams of space travel and the Internet, their ideas aren't that far from the truth anymore.
10 years ago, extrapolating the web into the realm of space travel was the rhetoric of purple-shrouded cult members. Now, there is sheer muscle (and brains) behind the development of an interplanetary Internet -- NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSCS), which includes all the world's space agencies as well as 100 industrial heavy-hitters, and even Vinton Cerf, who invented the Earthbound Internet's TCP/IP protocols.
Of course, there are some huge differences between the 1.0 Internet as Heaven's Gate knew it and the interplanetary Internet -- namely, in terms of its difficulties. On Earth, two computers connected to the Internet can only physically be a few thousand miles apart, tops. So, packets of data shooting along fiber-optic cables at 186,000 miles a second only take a paltry few fractions of a second to get from one computer to another. The delay is so infinitesimally small as to be negligible, no matter how much we complain about the download speed of our Office bittorrents.
But when you factor in distances such as, say, the 38 million miles from Earth to Mars, that same little delay doesn't look so negligible anymore. At this point, we're talking several minutes or even hours for a radio signal to reach a receiving station, assuming the line-of-sight isn't blocked by another satellite, an errant meteor, or some floating space junk. In the foreseeable future, an Interplanetary 'net rigged from NASA's Deep Space Network of antennas to all kinds of microsatellites floating in constellations around the planets just won't be able to duplicate the real-time immediacy of the one we have on Earth.
You may rebut, quite reasonably, "Why in the hell do we need the Internet on Mars? That is still a totally insane notion." That is as fundamental a question, however, as "Why do we need a space program?" and the answers are probably wildly relative to your stance on the issue. Still, one look at the Mars Pathfinder mission (which, coincidentally, was big news only a few months after the Rancho Santa Fe suicides) elucidates the technical need. When NASA sent the first rovers to Mars, they gave us a highly-anticipated, detailed look at a long-mysterious planet. However, data from the Pathfinder trickled back at an excruciating rate of about 300 bits per second -- about 200 times slower than even an average computer with decent Internet on Earth can transfer data.
With the advent of interplanetary Internet protocols, however, researchers at JPL's Mars Network think the transfer rate could eventually get up to about 1 Megabyte (8,288,608 bits) per second, allowing us Earthbound lugs to take virtual trips to Mars and other salient spots in outer space.
If only Applewhite and his crew had waited a few years, they might have been able to visit Hale Bopp without ditching their Earthly vehicles.
To aid in the gestation of a new project, I've been watching a whole lot of Carl Sagan programs.
Namely, the 13-part epic of Cosmos, which remains, to me, the most comprehensive survey of the Universe and our place within it ever presented to the lay public. Sagan's devastating empathy, his respect of the viewer's intelligence, as well as his often outrageously optimistic sense of human community, have never been replicated in television. He shifts deftly from dallies in human history to well-diagrammed explanations of evolution, stressing the clarity and self-evidence of science and framing its longstanding opposition -- organized religion, unenlightened government policy, etc -- as natural and understandable human foibles that we must overcome together.
Modern science programs are usually hosted either by flashy, serious-voiced British actors or anonymous narrators; Sagan, however, takes it all on himself. He never conceals the fact that he's a total nerd, a courduroy-jacketed cosmologist from Brooklyn who gets stoked about watching live Voyager feeds from the JPL labs in Pasadena. Rather, he embraces it, presents himself as a helpful authority, someone genuinely invested in the well-being of the human race, happily taking on the enormous responsibility of educating us.
For an example of the moral themes put forth by Sagan (as well as his close collaborators, Ann Druyan and Steven Soter), witness this, an excerpt from his 1994 book, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. I found this while errantly clicking on Google Video (incidentally, Google Moon?!), and came pretty close to losing it.
Few things get me as riled up as the human being's lack of perspective: about our place in the "grand scheme of things," about our longevity, or about the kinds of impact -- damaging and otherwise -- that we have on our planet. We seem terrified of massive perspectival shifts, threatened by our own galactic history or the dark matters that astronomers so often bandy about. There is one trope, I've found, however, that can lead laypeople to safely revel in the sheer minisculity of our race: the Condensed History of the Universe. "Imagine that all of time were to take place in one day," the Condensed History posits, before thrusting the lofty events of cosmic time into moderately-paced succession, relegating all of human history -- all of life on Earth, in fact -- into one fleeting second book-ending the last hour of the hypothetical 24. We've all encountered this metaphor, in high-school science textbooks, gallantly curated natural history museums, educational films, or the conversations of our stoner neighbors.
In any case, I've been dabbling with history. Here is a short film of my authorship where not a lot happens until 13.7 billion years after the Big Bang:
The History of the Universe from universe and Vimeo
"Not only are we not at the centre of the cosmos, but we are alien to it: we are a singularity. The Universe is strange for us, we are strange for the Universe."
PRIMO LEVI, "News From the Sky," from Other People's Trades
