Universe

Friends, Universe has been called up!

The exceptional community of science writers and eggheads at the scienceblogs network, which I've long counted on my daily index of essential sites, has made a little space for me. It is a huge and irrefutable honor, and so it is with a hopeful heart that I leave the five-year petri dish that has been my home on Urbanhonking. Thank you all for taking part in Universe, and I hope you'll follow me over to scienceblogs, where I am contractually obligated to blog one hundred times more frequently than I currently do.

In 2005, when I began writing Universe, it was purely a vanity project, a noodle, an excuse to keep my grey matter engaged beyond my college years. In the years since, it has taken on various incarnations: briefly as a print column in the now-defunct LA Alternative, which earned me the closest I've ever come to "accolades" (these breezed quickly past), then as a micro-blog for GOOD Magazine. I've chugged along, long-tailing myself into a very tidy niche ("unread science blogs"), and parlayed my nominal status as science writer into conversations with people like Dr. Oliver Sacks, James Gardner, and the science fiction writers Thomas A. Day and Mark von Schlegell, as well as schmoozing myself into lecture gigs, writing jobs, and more intertextual projects than I can really list here. I've written about the reptilian agenda, the interdimensional Bigfoot, space-jumping, NASA, gravity waves, cryogenics, and complexity.

Obviously, I'm beyond thrilled to join the ScienceBlogs world. Five years of Universe entries have been ported over to this new home, so it will be like the same old blog over there. Over the last week, I've been posting some Universe highlights, favorite entries, and video projects for my new audience, and the debate is already lively.This is a new era, one with a sheer gauze of professionalism wrapped around it, and I intend to do my duty with vim and vigor. This means more interviews, more videos, more complex and long-winded essays about the psychedelic temperament of computer screens, better research, and higher aspirations -- the real deal, basically. Dear readers, thank you again for your patronage, comments, and succor over the years. Change your bookmarks, and come with me!

There are two things which have deeply terrified me in recent science news. The first, as you may have heard, is that a bumper crop of some 32 "new" planets was discovered by a team of European researchers armed with a spectrograph called HARPS, or High Accuracy Radial velocity Planetary Searcher. The second is that Israeli scientists have made a robot small enough to crawl through human veins.

The offending nanobots.

Why do these things strike horror in my usually demure heart? Because I see the approaching future as an exercise in coming to terms with both the macrocosm and the microcosm. We have spent most of our time as a technological race making, and interfacing with, approximately people-sized objects: other people, tools, cars, industrial machines, personal computers. This world of people-sized functionality and people-sized ideas has always been a delusion of our people-centric worldview and a necessary effect of our people-sized needs. However, as we approach a future with sharper spikes in technological change, and as our science makes increasingly audacious discoveries about this cavernous universe of ours, we'll see our working intellectual environment revert to its more natural scale. That is, the scale of physics and of the Universe, of the forces which drive electrons in their dervish spin and the forces which dictate the universe's acceleration, of the machinations of molecules and the movements of galaxies -- of the incomprehensibly small (5 million human genomes could happily dance on the head of a pin, after all) to the incomprehensibly huge, which together represent the overwhelming bulk of the physical reality we're daily immersed in.

On one side of the spectrum, the knobbed, buttoned, handled, and human-scale tools we're accustomed to will, as nanotechnology evolves, dwindle out of reach into a smallness that borders on abstraction. And, on the other side, we'll see our closely-held Laws of Nature, once designed to explain pedestrian aspects of everyday physical existence (things falling down), bloom into complex, distinctly non-personal systems of knowledge which will begin to encompass an entire universe of things we are incapable relating to -- dark matter, energy, gravity waves, unifying "Theories of Everything." We're going to experience a dramatic shock of perspective, like someone casually peering into a hole only to realize, with an awful wrenching of the gut and a quick jump backwards, that it's thousands of feet deep.

Maybe it's my sturdy sci-fi diet, but this is the way I've come to understand the future. Undoubtedly, this is why infinitesimal vein-crawling robots and distant new life-bearing planets terrify me with equal existential vigor. Why is it that the very large and the very small both strike such visceral feeling in the feeble human Id? Is it because we're anthropocentric, tending to understand things in convenient multiples of ourselves: distance in feet, or time in terms of lifespans and generations (even the humble second handily spans the length of a heartbeat)? When I try to visualize a great height, I often think of how many of me standing on each others' shoulders it might encompass; we often simplify distances by imagining how many people holding hands (or how many hot dogs lain end to end) it would take to broach them.

Perhaps. As Natalie Angier more eloquently puts it in her excellent science-for-curious-adults primer The Canon, "we have evolved to view life on a human scale, to concern ourselves almost exclusively with the rhythm of hours, days, seasons, years, and with objects we can readily see, touch, and count on, because those are what we have to work with, those are the ambient utensils with which we must build our lives."

Artist's rendering of the potentially offending new planets.

At the same time, tiny things fascinate us, from grains of rice daubed with tiny penmanship to the whirling stew of molecules that make the world. And extremely large things awe and humble us, often in life-changing ways. Swimming in the ocean and feeling its tenebrous depths below, gazing at the vast night sky, momentarily getting a sense of the thingness of a thing we hold: it's these momentary glimpses of realization into the small and huge that help us to delineate the teetering edges of our personal reality, our oscillating context, which is in that ballpark between a microbe and a solar system. Ultimately, though, unless we're microbiologists or cosmologists, we're not yet accustomed to dealing with the macro and micro in either an intimate, nor a long-term way.

And this time, as the nanorobots and new planets march towards our quotidian life, pregnant with possibility, well...as the movie posters warn us, it's personal. Those Israeli nanobots, made of silicone and metal, will be biocompatible, meaning they could live inside our bodies indefinitely -- essentially becoming part of us. Sayeth the scientist at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, "we hope the robot will be able to travel through a blood vessel, the digestive tract or the lungs, delivering targeted medicines to specific locations, clearing blockages, performing biopsies, or placed inside a shunt to drain body fluids from clogged areas."

Bodily fluids -- about as personal as it gets. To these tiny medical stewards, we will be a huge environment, a self-contained world with its own set of physical parameters, forces, and mysteries; for its host, the nano-robot is a speck of perspective in the blood, ready at any moment to evoke the boundless, microscopic world we normally utterly ignore. And at the other side of this scale, a brood of new, Jupiter-sized planets serves to remind us of an equally absurd, mind-blowing truth -- that our world, our bodies, and even the nano-robots living inside them are all equally small in the larger scale of the universe.

Recently, Rhizome.org invited me to contribute a long-form article to their Rhizome Writer's Initiative, a new program designed to give emerging and established writers the opportunity to pontificate on the world of new media arts. I was glad to do it, especially when I realized that the exhibition I was to review is called "Beam Me Up" and that the themes it dissects coincide neatly with my recent re-appreciation of Star Trek. I include my finished article here on Universe because I think some of the ideas discussed in it dovetail well with the recent topics here--systems, complexity, isolation in the face of emergent technologies and computer screen disbelief. If you'd rather, here is the article on the Rhizome site.

"Beam Me Up" is the ultimate call for oblivion.

From Star Trek's transporter room to the tractor beams of our most fervent UFO nightmares, the very notion of "beaming" -- of dematerializing only to reappear somewhere else, somewhere potentially unknown -- represents a complete relinquishment of control, as well as a pure acknowledgment of the subjective, relativistic nature of human reality. After all, if you can spontaneously "beam out" of danger, or "beam in" to the frightful recesses of an alien craft, what is there to be said about the here and now? Or the me? To beam is to temporarily cease to exist in space and time, to blink into suspension, and, invariably, to invert the accepted order.

Besides being its namesake, "Beam Me Up" is a very apt starting point for Xcult.org's ongoing global exhibition about space, recently curated by Sarah Cook of CRUMB, the Curatorial Resource for Upstart Media Bliss. Beam Me Up takes place online, an alternative space which, perhaps incidentally, is probably the international human headquarters for the entire "beam me up" sentiment--that fervent, and often delusional, reach toward dreams of conspiracy, government mind control, and alien visitation ("I want to believe!").

True to the medium, some of the pieces featured in Beam Me Up seem directly referential of, if not complicit with, the web's endless bounty of accidental art and outré ideology: spiri-technical 3D video of Tibetan mandalas, hyper-imagist Second Life performances, and video clips of a nude Arnold Schwarzenegger (as the Terminator) traveling through time. As such, they speak cogently to the culture-as-file shuffle of everyday web surfing, and to the wild proliferation of that browsing, Tumblr blogging aesthetic of decontextualized online ephemera.

The rest of Beam Me Up, despite the exhibition's labyrinthine navigation and the fumbling translation of many of the essays, compellingly runs the gamut of potential angles on the notion of space, from the literal (Jayanne English's beautiful, scientific animation of cold hydrogen gas in the Milky Way galaxy) to the profoundly figurative, as with Joe Winter's "Progressive Scan Studies" series, images all derived from a flatbed scanner's earnest attempts to make sense of a moving picture. It's clear that the project as a whole is uninterested in categorization -- all of the pieces are offered identically regardless of theme or format -- and willing to forego the traditional notion of "space" as being a uniquely physical, or even measurable, quality.

Image: Joe Winter, "Progressive Scan Studies" series, 2009 (Still)

Much of the work in Beam Me Up plays with a particular koan of the online: that any attempt to project an identity onto the Web is a twofold battle between intentionally presenting (and, more importantly, representing) the self to the space, and somehow representing the space convincingly to the self. Some, like the anarchist theorist Hakim Bey, might argue that despite the immediacy, or Being There-ness, of a digital-spatial environment (such as a first-person shooter game, or one's position within a social network), a localization of the self anywhere other than in contiguous physical reality can only be representational. The problem, in this view, is that you simply can't be "beamed up;" as a user of the Internet, a Second Lifer, or a traveler through outer space, you still have to exist--to be somewhere. You can't blink into oblivion. With this in mind, the question of Beam Me Up becomes, does freedom -- or free space -- exist if the subject at hand is purely representational, or avatar?

Beam Me Up offers many strategies for this kind of spatial transcendence. Wild performances in Second Life, such as in Alan Sondheim's insanely visually complex piece, are one; however, these are still 2D, and are still housed in a network of intentional fantasy that is inherently dissociated with any kind of real metaphysical experience (Sondheim's work also speaks largely to a post-Transformers II aesthetic sensibility). Reinhard Storz' authoritative "Beyond The Borders: Film Clips for the Getting Over of Space-Time Order" serves as an incomplete catalogue of filmic materialization and de-materialization, from the obvious namesake of Star Trek's quasi-mystical "beaming" to the transubstantiation of Jeff Bridges from animal to avatar in 1982's Tron.

Jeff Bridges in transition from animal to avatar, Tron

The best suggestion, however, comes from English, who has glibly titled her outer space animation, "Cosmic Sites: Remote Space and Personal Perception Meet at the Monitor." English's subtle conception of the computer monitor -- that ostensible scenic viewpoint from which all of these pieces are witnessed -- as the necessary nexus between two modalities of experience is key to this particular reading of Beam Me Up.

It's possible that the aim of an exhibition of this nature might not be to clearly delineate the substantive differences between physical space and what we call "Cyberspace." In fact, as Dr. Guillaume Bélanger of the European Space Agency rhapsodizes in one of Beam Me Up's best essays, "Space, Experience, and Perception," the real question is not where any finite space is but rather "where do any one of these spaces begin and where do they end? Where can we find any border, any separation? What do we really know? What do we really understand? Everything is so interlaced and so intermingled."

Perhaps the goal, then, is only to postulate about transcendence, and try to simulate that blink of oblivion between different manifestations of space; if we could be beamed from place to place, what would the moments between dematerialization and re-materialization look and feel like?

Certainly, it speaks to a question many people (myself included) might ask themselves while watching reruns of Star Trek: what is it like to be beamed? What happens? Where do you go between the transporter room and the surface of the hostile planet? The interesting moment is neither the departure nor the arrival but those nano-instants when the body has been annihilated and is floating through the ether in microscopic fragments. Beam Me Up aims to address this issue by presenting the viewer with their own tool for transportation, their own "beam": as English observed, the monitor. The monitor, which is mirror, proscenium, the in-between itself. The computer monitor is both meeting point and sounding board; it becomes the conjunction between the mind and the rest of the whirling, chaotic world; it's also where the answers, the emails, and the vitriolic conspiracy theories are all pounded out. In a sense, it is practically hallowed ground. In every sense, it is the titular "beam" of this exhibition.

As it turns out, the transcendence of being "beamed" is not about being projected onto another place (with laser guns or transponders in hand), but rather is something experienced through the beam itself, our very screens. The screen, after all, is the gateway of our era. Every time we boot up our computers we are beaming up. We're beaming up because we are temporarily buying into the reality of image as it moves through a sea of pixels on screen -- a quotidian suspension of disbelief.

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.

In 1976, NASA Administrator James Fletcher noted that "The question, 'What is feasible?' can be finally answered only by future historians." He was talking about the elaborate plans for space habitats the agency had spent a summer noodling over, but the same remark could have been made to the incredulous before the first moon landing, for example -- or before the birth of transoceanic voyages in the 14th and 15th Centuries.

So begins of one of my favorite pieces of utopist NASA detritus, a document called Space Settlements: A Design Study, made over the course of a 10-week workshop at the Ames research center in 1976. Among those involved: Gerard K. O'Neill, physicist and author of High Frontier, a very groovy (and seminal) book about space colonization. The study, under O'Neill's leadership, proposes all kinds of wild and wooly space environments, from Bernal spheres to giant spinning cylinders, with acres of plants and false clouds hanging halfway in the sky, massive windows and mirrors to catch the sun, green capsules in the black depths of space.

What's particularly interesting about the 1976 study is not the fantastically romantic schematic drawings (although those are a plus), but the rare attention the team paid to what they called "psychological and cultural considerations." The engineering constraints of a functional space colony are overwhelming, but technically achievable -- while delicate psychological imbalances can destroy an extra-terrestrial community from the inside out. Look at what happened with the Biosphere 2, for example. And that was on Earth!

According to the NASA study, one of the fundamental problems posed to survival in an outer-space colony environment is the general feeling of un-reality of the whole operation. As a species, we are far from being flexible enough to normalize the feeling of floating in space; a space colony is the kind of environment which could trigger our brains to feel that everything is a dream and nothing outside of our own mind is real. Psychologists call this dissociative mental state "solipsism syndrome," and it occurs in people who live in strenuous psychological environments, like the Arctic winter. Waking up every morning to dazzling vistas of interstellar space might produce the same effect, with day-to-day life becoming an unending dream with no tether to waking reality. Quoth the study: "this state of mind can be easily produced in an environment where everything is artificial, where everything is like a theater stage, where every wish can be fulfilled by a push-button, and where there is nothing beyond the theater stage and beyond an individual's control."

A fantastic problem.

Is it possible to trick our brains into getting over it?

The NASA study suggests a variety of options, from factoring controlled unpredictability into everyday life to ensuring that everyone feels able to contribute to something which grows (namely children and vegetables). Most importantly, however, the illusion that life is taking place inside of a kind of self-contained "theater stage" must be shattered: "it is important to have 'something beyond the horizon' which gives the feeling that the world is larger than what is seen." In fact, again and again, the study emphasizes the need for a long line of sight, for a sense of massive space and openness, to counter the claustrophobia and bring the erratic (and hence reassuring) processes of nature into clear view.

These three factors -- unpredictability, growth, and mystery -- could define the psychological needs of the human Id in a nutshell, right?

Check out Space Settlements: A Design Study here.

Universe has a firm "No Skepticism" policy.

Don't get me wrong, I dig empirical knowledge. And I like the ancient, Pyrrhonian school of Skepticism founded by Pyrrho of Elis (365-275 B.C.); Pyrrhonian skeptics believed that nothing could be known, not even "this" (i.e the very statement that nothing could be known) and strived for a constant state of inquiry as a source of pleasure. Since absolute knowledge is unattainable, the Pyrrhonian Skeptics felt that their end was: "In opinionatives, indisturbance; in impulsives, moderation; and in disquietives, suspension," which is essentially agnosticism, as I understand it. From Manly P. Hall's The Secret Teachings of all Ages (deeply recommended): "Those who suppose they have found truth are called Dogmatists; those who think it incomprehensible are the Academics; those who still seek are the Skeptics." Even Socrates adhered to this worldview: I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.

It's contemporary "scientific" or "activist" skepticism that I have a problem with.

Although the foundational epistemology of science is skeptical (prove everything), contemporary "scientific skepticism" has become shorthand for "debunking," namely those claims and theories beyond mainstream science. Unlike scientists, who are primarily concerned with verifying and falsifying hypotheses within their own fields, self-named scientific skeptics focus their criticism on claims they believe to be a priori implausible, which is to say all the great acronyms: UFOs, ESP, etc. While I respect some debunkers (even hard-assed James Randi has saved countless fools from the trappings of psychic surgery), the general conceit bothers me, as it essentially pits the unqualified against the unqualified in a kind of endless boring flame war. Certainly skeptics uncover the "truth" of some matters -- i.e. that there was no ghost, no alien, no demon -- but it brings nothing new to the table. In our heart of hearts, even the most starry-eyed among us know that there are probably no ghosts nor demons, and that we are alone on our giant rock, bitching amongst ourselves. Is pragmatically destroying the imaginative convictions of conspiracy buffs and New-Agers a worthy practice of one's time on this lonely Earth?

Yes, UFOs are probably not real. Yes, a man who claims he was abducted by aliens (or slipped through another dimension, or saw a ghost) probably has other shit going on, lucidity-wise. And yet, does he pose a threat to buttoned-up society? Does he throw the fabric of the everyman's cosmology into whirling disarray? The answer is, of course, a resounding n-o, no. In fact, the everyman has no idea of the astounding breadth, fervor and variety of the UFO-man's idiosyncratic belief system, nor does he have an inkling of the profound multitude of others like the UFO-man. Nor does he care, because he is entirely concerned with his own psycho-social-religious worldview, which might arguably be as bonkers as the rest. And yet, here come the debunkers anyway, to firmly tell everyone that it was all just a glimmer of light, reflected on some swamp gas.

I have a firm "no skepticism" policy not because I don't believe in good science -- which is rooted in a firm tradition of questioning -- but because I love the unloved margins of pseudoscientific thought. This blog has played host to myriad bogus theories, from the inter-dimensional Bigfoot to Unarius and the Omega Point. I've never intended to showcase these things out of fey exoticism, or to belittle them. Rather, I believe we can only truly understand where the wobbly lines between science and the rest of the world lie if we don't intellectually humor all the extremes. The rational mind doesn't exist without the irrational mind, and I believe in learning through difference.

Most of all, however, I consider myself a Skeptic in the old school, which is essentially a hopeful position. We don't know anything, but we can dream.

In middle school, my friends and I secretly referred to athletic jocks as "creationists." The joke was, of course, that they -- with their neanderthal postures, fixation on brute strength and obsession with the less decorous emissions of the human body -- were "less evolved." Of course, this is before teaching evolution in schools was made illegal (or whatever).

It is in this spirit of snickering precociousness that I offer my birthday greeting to Charles Darwin, who would have been 200 years old today. Thanks, old chap! Many accolades are due; in your honor, and at the behest of SEED Magazine, I've put together a little video detailing the Evolution of Life in 60 Seconds. You can check it out in context here, as part of SEED's radically multimedia Darwin Day online celebration.

Big thanks to the very supportive and enlightened folks at SEED for the vote of confidence, and happy Darwin Day, everyone!

Edit: Good gracious, the video got picked up by Pharyngula! Thanks for the kudos, PZ!

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."