One of Buckminster Fuller's most interesting conceits was his dislike of specialization, which he likened to a kind of intellectual prison, restraining "bright" people from truly understanding the complex, and general, systems of which they were a part. After all, he argued, what causes extinction in the animal kingdom? Overspecialization. Of course, it's logical, and it's s problem we see over and over again in human history, from the Industrial Revolution displacing specialized factory workers to the often daunting gap of comprehension between the social and "hard" sciences. As soon as we become specialists in a single subject, we tend to lose interest in, or the capacity to cope with, other subjects, and in the greater whole. Tunnel vision, if you will.

As it turns out, this particular Bucky ramble has considerable scientific credibility now that the fields of complexity theory and biological evolution are coming head-to-head. Microbiologist Carl Woese, talking to Wired, put it this way: "Twentieth-century biology was structured according to a linear, Newtonian worldview. Linear thinking is not the kind of thinking that's needed to study evolution. It doesn't help you understand the nature of systems. " In other words, evolution -- the success and development of species -- is not just a linear process, driven by specific biologically advantageous genetic traits, but a complex process, one ruled by yet-to-be-quantified rules of complexity and emergence. With emergence phenomena, evolution occurs not only in individuals, but in systems and groups; if we consider an ant or bee colony as a kind of "superorganism" that develops independently from its members, then the individual characteristics of a bee are only one part of a complex, evolutionary entity -- the hive. And, as it turns out, increased levels of complexity do not slow or hinder the evolutionary process.

In suit, biologists now find it makes scientific sense to examine human beings as emergent systems -- "superorganisms" of millions of molecules, much like bees in a hive. From there, It's not much of a conceptual leap to apply that thinking to human groups; i.e. we are all involved with one another, on an evolutionary level, just as all our cells work together to cobble together the thing we call "life." After all, we are one of the few species to evolve social systems.

In any case, Buckminster Fuller's points about humans having "innate comprehensivity" and the human race being a giant system living on "Spaceship Earth" suddenly seem woozily prescient. Carl Woese again: "Man is the one who's undergoing this incredible evolution now...the social processes by which man is evolving are creating a whole new level of organization."

It begs the question: what are these social processes "by which man is evolving?" Dare we assume that Woese is referring, in part, to the Internet? It's certainly tempting to compare the web's self-navigating push-button organization with these "superorganisms" of the current biological discourse. If the social system in a colony of leafcutter ants can compel them to build magnificent chambered nests underground despite the fact that their individual ant brains don't amount to much, what can our social systems do for us? Despite the oil-slick of drivel floating atop the quotidian Internet, look at what we have at our fingertips: instant self-publishing, the capacity to push information quickly to people across the globe, tools for mass organization, immediate answers to questions it would have taken our parents weeks to research. Our own version of the leafcutter's underground castles doesn't seem so far off.

Buckminster Fuller might have agreed.

"The computer as a superspecialist can persevere, day and night, day after day, in picking out the pink from the blue at superhumanly sustainable speeds. The computer can also operate in degrees of cold or heat at which man would perish. Man is going to be displaced altogether as a specialist by the computer. Man himself is being forced to reestablish, employ, and enjoy his innate 'comprehensivity.' Coping with the totality of Spaceship Earth and universe is ahead for all of us. Evolution is apparently intent that man fulfill a much greater destiny than that of being a simple muscle and reflex machine -- a slave automaton -- automation displaces the automaton."

-Buckminster Fuller

The saving grace of our species, the "evolutionary antibody to the extinction of humanity through specialization," in Fuller's view, was the computer: a machine (or machines) designed solely to follow specialized, technical pursuits to their logical ends. As soon as we no longer have to concern ourselves with the specific aspects of our fields of study, and we can outsource the menial tasks which tie up our minds, he argued, we can become generalists again. This may not be a matter of choice: as specialists, we're nothing compared to computers. It's essentially an evolutionary decision. Of course, talking about evolutionary emergence and widespread computer use in the same breath smacks a little of the technological singularity, but that's a subject for another post.

Singularity aside, when we hand over the keys to the computers, we're ostensibly left with the capacity to pursue real, comprehensive, systems-understanding intelligence. Which is our real strong suit -- the intellectual style of a curious child before being socialized. And, if current complexity science is correct, it may be to humanity's evolutionary advantage to stay this way: curious, general, and collaborative.

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!

Let's try a thought experiment.

This one comes via Buckminster Fuller: imagine you have a length of nylon rope, which you splice into a length of cotton rope, then into another length of hemp rope. If you tie an overhand knot in the rope, and push it down, through all three kinds of ropes, the knot remains a knot. The material is irrelevant, because the knot is just a pattern that has a specific set of guidelines for itself. Fuller wrote that "a pattern has an integrity independent of the medium by virtue of which you have received the information that it exists." That is to say, if you push the knot all the way to the end of the rope, until it falls off the end, there's no more knot, but the pattern integrity of "knot" remains the same.

People, Fuller argued, are the same way: our cells constantly regenerate, leaving us rarely made up of the same stuff from one moment to the next. Our pattern integrity -- our identity, if you will, or our personhood -- never changes, even if the material substrate does: "every human is a unique pattern integrity temporarily given shape by flesh." I suppose this could be construed as a kind of "soul" for those who swing that way, but it's more fun to extrapolate it to technologies that even Bucky couldn't anticipate.

Computer graphics, for example. A cursor, as it circulates the operating environment, has no clearly definable boundaries: it is not a self-contained object. Rather, like the knot in Buckminster Fuller's rope, it's a pattern moving through an conducting material -- pixels, in this case. Every pixel has the potential to become part of the current embodiment of "cursor," but no specific set of pixels can be delineated as being solely "cursor." All pixels are potential, and every graphic element on a computer screen -- from text to YouTube videos -- has a patten integrity all its own.

We are habitually fooled by our computer screens into believing that the things we see on them are discrete objects. However, it's a necessary illusion: if we thought of our cursors as simply a set of pixels temporarily embodying the form of "cursor," and our screens as a flood of potential units, we wouldn't be able to see the forest for the trees -- just like when you pressed your nose up against the TV screen as a kid and saw it all as lines of red, green, and blue.

Thinking about this has led me to wonder if there is a future beyond pixels. Pixels, surprisingly, have an interesting past (did you know we were one smart neologist away from forever calling them "Bildpunkt"?), and they were a somewhat logical entrée into the world of computer graphics: "Little pieces making up a big picture? What, like the real world? OK, we can wrap our heads around that."

As our standards for realism demand more and more pixels, smaller and smaller subtleties, will we ever break through completely? Of course, we have vector graphics, which store image information as a set of scalable mathematical relationships rather than a simple assemblage of resolution-dependent pixels. Vector graphics, in style and substance, come closer to the Bucky Fuller approximation of "pattern integrity:" they literally store images as a set of patterns completely independent of their display, and amenable to any display. The image remains the same -- the pattern integrity remains the same, if you will -- regardless of the size, position, or resolution of the display.

Traditional (Raster) graphics, with their DNA of fixed pixels, can be zoomed into and seen, understood, in the same way we can zoom into objects in the real world and understand that they are made of atoms. This seems logical to us, correct. But it's the pattern-respecting Vectors that are truer to the nature of the "real" world, for they seem to have caught onto something more ephemeral and hidden about reality.

Still, these are just pixels used differently. What if screens moved beyond the pixel entirely, presenting images in a kind of infinitely subtle gradient of tones? At this point, the pattern integrity of "knot" (or "cursor") would remain the same, but what will have happened to the rope?

In a grand new tradition of using Universe as lodging for really interesting "supplemental material," I present to you the history (and mystery) of g-speak, an incredible new spatial operating environment, as told to me by John Underkoffler, chief scientist at Oblong Industries. Underkoffler designed the fantasy computer systems in Minority Report, then made g-speak, an almost frighteningly futuristic interface that will throw the proverbial brick through the computer screen. Check out the video above to get a sense of it in its full, dizzying glory.

My full article about g-speak is over at GOOD Magazine.

"We've built g-speak from the ground up to be a completely general computing environment -- the idea is that anything you might want to do with a computer can be done as a dialog between you and g-speak. The really interesting thing is that what it looks like on screen, what it feels like to your hands and your mind, is radically different from the GUI [Graphical User Interface] that you're used to."

"Every bit of the on-screen experience that we've all come to regard as basic or elemental over the last twenty-five years is predicated on one thing: the mouse. The whole semi-overlapping-windows scheme, and all the little gewgaws that come along with it (pulldown menus, little nubs you click on to close or bloat windows, sliders, scrollbars, etc.) were designed to accommodate the mouse. Once you replace the mouse with something vastly more capable -- i.e. unfettered human hands -- the stuff that's usually on screen is immediately inappropriate. One of the exciting breakthroughs for us has been to show that many of those artifacts are necessary because you can't see enough at one time: consider what a scrollbar does and why that's necessary. But if you can imbue the operating environment with a more fundamental way of navigating around, a way that's implicit in how you already interact with the world, then it's not like you replace the scrollbar with a gestural equivalent. You fundamentally don't need the scrollbar any longer."

"I'm afraid that I'm the Minority Report culprit. I'd been building human-machine interface stuff like this for years as part of my work at MIT (in the Media Laboratory), and when a kind of advance team (principally Alex McDowell, the brilliant production designer) showed up at the lab to "scout" technology ideas for the movie, the HMI [Human Machine Interface] work seemed to resonate. So I became the science advisor for the film and slightly adapted what I'd been building at MIT -- and that's what you see in the various scenes in which the characters are doing police forensics work on giant screens. The screens were blank for shooting (we didn't have time to actually build the system), but the actors really knew the gestural language, so when we shot the gestural scenes they weren't making anything up. In a way, they were genuinely operating a g-speak system. There's no question for me that that shows vividly when you watch the movie."

"Once the movie came out, we'd built g-speak twice: once in an academic lab, which has certain constraints and lacks others, and once in an extremely visible piece of popular media, which works a completely different way. Audiences really responded to those scenes -- you could tell, talking to people about it, that they felt like they'd seen something that either was real or should be. And since we're most of us engineers and couldn't stop building things if we wanted to, it was inevitable that we'd return to the lab and the workbench and build this stuff a third time. This time, though, it was clear it had to be in the context of a company making a commercial product. That's the only way to get the stuff out there into the world as broadly as we intend. We sincerely believe that the entire world will use their computers this way at some point down the line. Could be six years; could be ten; but it has to come. The interface we've been using for a quarter of a century just isn't keeping up, mainly because of the giant gap that's opened between what the computer (with its incredible processors, giant memory, profound graphics, and networked view of the world) can express and what the mouse and windows GUI allows us humans to express."

"For some information problems, there's no real alternative to g-speak. To comprehend and then be able (in real time) to act on such volumes of data takes more than visualization alone; eyes aren't enough. You have to enlist another giant chunk of the human brain, the part that deals with muscles and muscle memory and proprioception and all that. That chunk of brain knows as much about space as the human visual system does, and they're actually evolved to work together. That's why were all such experts at getting around and manipulating the real world. So it seems clear to us that computers should work the same way -- and that's what g-speak is. It engages both parts of your brain to let you get at digital information the same way you get at the real world. That means reaching into data; stretching it; pointing at it and poking it; spinning it around."

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.

It always tickles me when people email me to ask my opinion of pressing science issues, and I've decided to start posting selected exchanges for the benefit of all my readers. Remember, if you have any questions, concerns, or just want to jaw at me about all things science, feel free to write.

On Sep 9, 2008, at 4:39 PM, Christian Oldham wrote:

Hi Claire,
I'm wondering what your opinions are on the whole idea of the Large Hadron Collider and the possibility of the creation of miniature black holes.

<5,
Christian Oldham

On Sep 9, 2008, at 4:53 PM, Claire Evans wrote:

Hi Christian,

How awesome of you to ask me.

I think that the LHC is the most important and exciting thing to happen in science since quantum mechanics. I think a lot of enthusiastic things about it, but I definitely don't think that it's going to cause any miniature black holes. Tens of thousands of scientists all over the world wouldn't support something so whole-heartedly if there was the remotest chance it might destroy the entire planet, and billions of dollars would not have been spent. Human beings don't normally do things this extravagant in large numbers, working together in spite of war and economic recession, if they think they're going to kill us all. Obviously, right? But I guess I understand the romance of doomsday; it was pretty fun to get all worked up about Y2K, too. But, like, the Earth isn't flat, and we need to take a big step into the unknown every once in a while if we're going to find out about this Universe of ours.

I for one feel incredibly blessed to have been born when I was, so that I would the age that I am when this is happening.

Besides, the whole point of the LHC is to recreate an environment like that of the Universe mere moments after the Big Bang. If a black hole is what happens when that environment is created, then we wouldn't be here in the first place. Feel me?

Love,
Claire L. Evans
Universe

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):

SETI Institute
SETI@Home
SETI League

The Large Hadron Collider is finally turning on.

A quick step backwards: the LHC is a particle accelerator, the largest of its kind, underwritten by all the wild money in science, a ringed tunnel some 27 kilometers long, deep underground, crossing the French-Swiss border at four points. It's been over twenty years in the making and has garnered the support of 10,000 scientists in 85 countries behind its unimaginable modus operandi: to recreate the environment of our universe as it was less than a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, and hence to reveal, among other things, the fundamental nature of matter. By all accounts a significant accomplishment: that something as massive and as diplomatically enlightened as this machine could be made in such a fiercely nationalistic era, that the technology even exists, and that the sheer logistical nightmare of its operations could be overcome. And, while the imminent revelations of the LHC will undoubtedly chew up much of my scientific ruminations in the next few years, it's just these, the logistical operations, that I'm currently interested in.

This is because (unbeknownst to many) the LHC project has a second, more pragmatic, tentacle. It's called the Grid.

What is the Grid?

Some experts are calling it a "parallel internet." Although this is, in many ways, a reasonable moniker, the Grid is primarily the solution to one of the LHC's most important problems, which is the outrageous density of data it will begin to emit the second it goes live. Like, 15 Petabytes (15 million Gigabytes) of data annually, the analysis of which will ultimately require some 100,000 CPUs of processing power (NUMBERS!), which thousands of scientists around the world need to access and analyze in order to make a lick of sense of it. Rather than be stored on site at the CERN in Switzerland (the site of the LHC), this data needs to be distributed globally, parsed, narrowed down, and parceled out to the 7,000 physicists who need it.

How will it work?

Hence the Grid: a system of dedicated 10 gigabit per second fiber-optic cables connecting the Large Hadron Collider's crazy monumental magnetic detectors directly to the CERN computing center (or centre, if you will), then outwards throughout the world in a three-tiered system. The raw data is tossed into tape storage at CERN, then transmitted on these same fiber-optic cables to 11 "Tier One" research facilities, who are responsible for reprocessing the raw data and redistributing it.

Next down the line are the 150 "Tier Two" centers, mostly universities, which are located all around the world. The data arrives here via standard Internet protocols (i.e. using the regular ol' Internet, albeit in the guise of general purpose research networks, such as the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Sciences Network), and is then disseminated to all the physicists for their invaluably real-live human analysis.

Here is a useful schematic for understanding how the Grid works, if you want to get more technical, i.e. see diagrams.

In any case, we're talking about 55,000 servers already installed, with another 145,000 on the way in the next two years. Remember when everyone was freaking out about the Googleplex? That's nothing. This fiber-optic network is 10,000 times faster than the fastest existing broadband. My friend Scott, who told me about the Grid, was like, "get ready for holographic video!" It's huge. I could throw around confusing approximations like, "it would take 25 days to transfer the nearly 400,000 movies on IMDB," but suffice to say it's a massive upgrade from the kinds of Internet speeds we're used to.

It seems strangely appropriate, strangely telling, that the CERN would implement this system. After all, the research facility was fundamental in implementing the Internet protocols that would bring about this first wave, that would enable me to sit here at my kitchen table and interface blindly with a nebulous and globally-distributed network of information, an absurdity in itself. I see it as inevitable that the Grid, or a system like it, is going to mold our communications, our media, our daily lives, in ways we can't possibly imagine or predict.

In his writings, the computer scientist -- and fabulist, although aren't they all, the good ones -- Vernor Vinge, no uncertain proponent of the ever-developing Technological Singularity theory, noted that "every time our ability to access information and to communicate it to others is improved, in some sense we have achieved an increase over natural intelligence." What he meant was that the end of the human era (which he argued would occur "[not before ] 2005 or after 2030") would come with a whimper, not a bang -- "even the largest avalanches are triggered by small things," he added.

I don't imagine that the Grid will go all Skynet on us, but if the history of the Internet tells us anything, it's that we can't predict, nor can we place enough expectations, on the exponential nature of its evolution. Besides, Vinge wasn't spooking us when he wrote, in his 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post−Human Era, that "even the egalitarian view of an Internet that wakes up along with all mankind can be viewed as a nightmare." It is a nightmare, not least because it is strangely probable, but also because the Grid is so inextricably linked to the Large Hadron Collider, this fountainhead of certain scientific revolution, the two projects so potent with possibility, sinister and otherwise. Fellow science fiction heads will recognize this kind of setup from so many novels. The audacity of man is unbreakable.

And what if all the LHC reveals to us is that matter is only information broken down into infinitesimally small parts? We would already have begun to recreate it, a new universe slowly subsuming the last, only to awaken, unsolicited, in order to ask its own, similar questions about its place in the universe. It makes me feel crazy to think how profoundly the future refuses to remain at bay.

A prediction: even while the Large Hadron collider offers a final, unquestionable answer about the fundamental nature of the Universe, it's the Grid that will change the world, slipping in like a legislative footnote and blooming, guileless, the final nail in the coffin of the twentieth century.

A few months ago, in homage to the last puffs of summertime breeze to caress the Pacific Northwest, I visited the largest computer in the world. Not exactly beach blanket bingo, and I probably could have found a more youthful way to celebrate the dog days of summer, but this monument to computational power, too, is unorthodox. Built on a 30-acre plot of land bordering the Columbia River gorge -- a place, up until now, known solely for its excellent windsurfing -- it kicks back 10 million watts of power yearly and hooks into the largest direct DC current in the world, a backbone of fiber optic cable stretching almost the entire length of the Western seaboard. To say nothing of it, this kind of machinery is quite a novelty in the sleepy ex-mining town of The Dalles, Oregon, the type of place you wouldn't have trouble imagining the Internet not even getting to yet.

However, as I discovered on my nerd holiday, the Internet has gotten to The Dalles -- in a major way, actually, because this computer is no hard drive with delusions of grandeur. Rather, we're talking about a highly secretive collection of servers and who-knows-what that might change the way people all over the country use the Web. Why? Because it was built by Google.

From the outside, the structure that locals lovingly refer to as the 'Googleplex' looks fairly nondescript: boxy and silver-paneled, it appears imposing only because of the generally shrubby beigeness of the surrounding landscape. Surrounded by empty parking lots and slipshod construction trailers, it certainly has a long way to go until it hits its information-processing peak. Still, there is something striking about the mystery of the project; it's so mysterious, in fact, that Google insisted city officials sign a non-disclosure agreement and will not allow the facility to be indicated by any kind of sign. For now, the signs dotting the area all say particularly oblique, Michael Crichton-style things, such as PROJECT 02 SITE.

For all its mystery, however, it has had a hell of an effect. The head reporter at the charming Dalles Chronicle confided in me that the housing market has exploded, the community college is boosting its engineering programs, and -- gasp -- people from California are starting to move to the arid hamlet. On one level: business as usual in terms of real estate. Big money attracts more money. It is interesting, on the other hand, to imagine that the growing worldwide demand for instantaneous information, web-based computing and banal activities like G-chatting have snowballed, causing a physical stir in a place as remote as The Dalles. That the citizens of an isolated region in Central Oregon should have their lives changed by the popularity of a website such as Google is remarkable. We really are becoming more interconnected, in ways most of us might never have anticipated.

Of course, it isn't just some fortuitous social networking that brought this community and the Internet so closely together. Central Oregon's proximity to cheap hydropower and existing fiber-optic cable, not to mention huge parcels of undeveloped land, also has a lot to do with it. The explosion of Web-based computer use that we are now experiencing has a heavy, panting, physical counterpart: an explosion of demand by companies like Google for cheap power to serve their growing computer networks. The Googleplex, dependent as it is on the Columbia River's bountiful energy reserves, serves as a good reminder of how real this is. We so often forget that the Internet, which can be abstract and seemingly formless in its daily use, has a serious physical presence in the world. It takes up real space, not to mention a whole lot of energy, which powers the servers that run our frivolous Google image searches. In suit, rising energy costs will inevitably have an effect on our future Internet use. No one's saying that global climate change is going to melt our email, but then again, that isn't as crazy an idea as you might think.

If nothing else, I brought home from my summer daytrip the understanding that nothing in this breathlessly techno-sleek world of ours is as isolated as it seems. Our computers are not islands. As our web use becomes defined by interconnectivity in a new era of tagging, networking, and navigating, we must try to remember that our physical world is also profoundly affected in much the same way.

Or, In which two primary concepts of modernity are introduced, batted around, and compared, without much of a resolution to speak of.

In the year 2000, Stephen Hawking wrote that the "next century will be the century of complexity." Of course, he wasn't referring to political quagmires or environmental degeneration, although he might as well have been, because all that shit is getting brambly. "Complexity" is a theoretical term, referring to systems whose behavioral phenomena cannot be easily explained by any conventional analysis of their constituent parts. Buckminster Fuller called it "synergetics:" the output of a system not foreseen by the sum of its parts. In practical application, there's not much worth mentioning, except for the continually unprovable String Theory; in the sciences in general, the term "complexity" is a common metaphor, referring to those systems -- physical, biological, economic, even social -- that operate in a region between order and complete chaos. Despite its ambiguity, it has come to be a buzzword in many disciplines, spanning most dimensions of the socio-scientific-cognitive sphere.

Certainly, many things in our world are inherently complex: the delicate balance of the ecosystem, for example, or the subjectivity that shrouds history, not to mention what happens inside of your brain whenever you look at an object. The prevailing cultural ontology represented in the media, too, is of a world culture defined by its increasing complexity: as though instant communication and the floodgates of information thrust open by the Internet were the harbingers of a new, uber-complex world. Assuredly, the structure of our social lives is experiencing an overhaul; buddy lists, speed dial, and Myspace comments are the new benchmarks of a successful social life, while popularity is often measured by the size of one's email inbox.

However, it does seem a little facile to immediately peg the "Web 2.0" -- you know, that second-generation of web-based services that let users connect on a more peer-to-peer basis -- as a figurehead of a new sociality of complexity. We are easily fooled by social networking websites like Myspace and Friendster, which joyfully show us our place within a whole structure of seemingly intricate relationships; they lead us to believe that we are part and parcel of an intimately interconnected social fabric. In concrete terms, what we're really intimate with are our computers themselves.

Part of me thinks that the reason we decorate and coddle our computers is that we're priming them to represent us out there in the digital sphere, the same way parents dress and educate their children. They're really the ones we're interacting with, blindly anthropomorphizing. I think more people than we realize think their computer is watching them somehow; we're all guilty of speaking forthrightly to our machines. I myself used to tenderly pet and soft-talk my modem so that it would go faster.

Furthermore, although the web is increasingly a social experience, every person views it in a singular way. Browsers, operating systems, connectivity: all these things influence how we use the web, on phenomenological level. What with the fervent, and highly personalized, organization of one's own "Bookmarks" and "RSS Feeds," the community of user-based web sociality is dependent a profoundly personal relationship with the portal to it all: the computer itself.

In theirexcellent piece in the New Scientist, Liz Else and Sherry Turkle -- science columnist and MIT professor, respectively -- point out that although "we insist that our world is increasingly complex...we have created a communications culture that has decreased the time available for us to sit and think." What Else and Turkle bravely point out is that, despite our "breathless techno-enthusiasm," our newly web-based, socially-networked society often cuts short the full breadth of our feelings. Instant communication brings with it less time to think about the subject at hand; when a response is demanded by an instant message, it must be handed out immediately, in the form of a quick text-byte. We no longer have the time to have emotions; rather, we must negotiate our relationships through emoticons. On-always communications devices enable us to embrace the complexity of social connectivity, while simultaneously abridging the depth of our relationships. At least, that is the risk.

Turkle and Else point out that, yes, we are in the thick of a communications culture, but this isn't "a culture that contributes to self-reflection...self-reflection depends on having an emotion, experiencing it, taking one's time to think it through and understand it, but only sometimes electing to share it."

Perhaps what is happening is that we are struggling to find a sense of self which can fit into the emerging model of the "social network;" certainly that anthropomorphic codependency many of us experience with our laptops is evidence that we're becoming plugged into social existence through technology. The Internet -- the Web 2.0, whatever -- is entangling us in a new framework of complexity, one that will become quickly irrelevant if we prove to be incapable of importing the full nuance and depth of our ideas, feelings, and relationships into it.

Relevant Asides:

1) If you are a Universe reader (or "Universist") and live in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Tijuana, the greater New York Area, or (potentially) Toronto or Burlington, VT, you may be interested in attending a pretty inaugural multimedia/ Power Point tour in which I am in the throes. Subjects discussed above given life through song, light, video, the whole gamut. More information here and here. It would nice to get meta-textual with you.

2) I am in the market for a new publisher. Contact universe@urbanhonking.com for more information.