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Hans Bernhard on why UBERMORGEN.COM are not activists, but ‘actionists - in the communicative and experimental tradition of viennese actionism - performing in the global media, communication and technology networks’ continue

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Pity those science fiction writers who adapt too slowly: many labor with tools invented for a 1950s version of the genre that no longer makes sense; they’re still dreaming heroic rocketcar dreams when the future is scrambling towards carbon-free distributed car-sharing for Indian slums. Nothing decays faster than an old future, and most writers are lucky to find one unique vision of how things might be, much less find a new one when their first wears out.

Bruce Sterling, though, is not most writers. He seems to take joy in churning through not just new scenarios for his ideas, but whole new futures about which to think. It’s a pretty wild thing to be on top of your game for 30 years, especially when your game is staying tapped into the zeitgeist. (He is also a good friend of this site, Ally #1 as we call him, having run the Viridian list which was one of the inspirations for our founding, and having written the introduction to our first book.)

Of course, Bruce’s secret is that, like all good science fiction writers, futurists and strategy gurus, he isn’t predicting the future, he’s predicting the present. He’s using dramatic extrapolations of hidden forces at work today to build a future that magnifies those forces into ideas we can wrestle with. So it should perhaps come as no surprise that Bruce’s latest novel The Caryatids pumps some very powerful forces up into cinematic size — forces that most of us are just still beginning to understand.

The basic plot of The Caryatids doesn’t twist too much: seven test-tube siblings, born to a renegade Serbian scientist, are scattered to the winds and struggle to find meaning and purpose in a world that, in 2060, has plunged deep into crisis. That crisis is barely kept from becoming an apocalypse by three competing global power blocs — the networked, emergent Acquis, the wired, best-practicing Dispensation, and the last nation-state, China — and the sisters line up on opposite sides. Mayhem arrives as expected, including pop-stardom empire-building, Antarctic terraforming, archaeological microbiology, Chinese bubble ecospheres and desert firefights.

That’s all well and good. But where Bruce shines here is in tapping directly into two of the largest emerging trends on our planet, which remain nonetheless obscure to most people: what we might call the atmospheric singularity and the social singularity. The future here, takes place on a planet that has erupted into ecological chaos (of a sort that might be ripped fresh from the pages of the latest panicked scientific papers on climate, oceans and biodiversity — the Earth, seen from space, reveals “its tainted skies, its spreading deserts, and its long romantic plumes of burning forests.”), among people who have swallowed a whole new generation of social technologies, and grown new cultures to match.

As such, one of the most riveting aspects of this terrific story is, oddly enough, the competition between completely different sets of social responses to a global ecological crisis. This is disaster-recovery fiction, and it rocks:

“The Acquis were global revolutionaries. They got results in the world. They did some strange things, yes — but they never stopped trying. …The wounded island was healing before their eyes. Innovation was coming thick and fast, amazing insights, new services, new techniques. Transformations were bursting from her little island that were fit to transform the world.”

or

“Order, unlike war, required unglamorous skills such as political savvy, business sense, and rugged logistics. Restoring order required a crisp, succinct articulation of the big picture and why one’s efforts mattered in that regard. It required a tremendous knowledge of details. It needed the patience to build a long-lasting, big-scale enterprise that would not collpase instantly from guerilla attacks. And it needed a cold-blooded ability to make firm choices among disgusting alternatives.”

Much of the book is about how people in the worst of situations can connect to something hopeful, something worth striving for, some sort of legacy to give themselves over to. It’s a Mother Courage sort of future, but one with technological lightning in its fists and a black sense of humor (”What’s small, dark and knocking at the door? …The future of humanity.”).

The Caryatids is my favorite of Bruce’s novels since Holy Fire, and frankly one of the best science fiction books I’ve read in years. It’s a book redolent with not only the future, but the concerns of a particular kind of future that is very much of interest to those of us engaged with worldchanging work.

“Los Angeles was a crowded, polyglot mess of a place, trapped between a killer desert and a rising ocean. The city of Los Angeles had blown more climate-wrecking fumes out of its tailpipes than most nations. If there were any justice in the global mayhem of Extinction 6.0, Los Angeles should have been the first place to die: the first city in the world to drown, convulse, starve, riot, black out, and burn right to the ground. Yet there was no justice in the climate crisis. Not one bit of justice. The climate crisis was not concerned with justice: it was about poverty, stench, hunger, floods, fires, thirst, plague and riots. So, although Los Angeles did burn in many places — Los Angeles had always burned, in many places — Los Angeles grew much faster than it burned. If this tormented world had a world capital, this was it.”

Catastrophe is not the end. Unless you are a monster, the future we’ve inherited will break your heart. But broken hearts can be mended; life goes on, and when it does, a fierce beauty is sometimes born. The world, when all is said, is always remade by broken people who refuse hopelessness, who refuse to be overcome with sorrow, who refuse to pass on that which broke them.

As we come to grips with the awful fact that we are already committing ourselves to centuries of crisis, loss and burning, we can hew close to the knowledge that while disaster is our inheritance, transcendence can yet still be our legacy. We are all Caryatids now, and we can all dare to hope for the best.

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Originally by Alex Steffen from Worldchanging: Bright Green

Posted under reblog innovation

This article was written by Jeremy Faludi in October 2007. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

Biomimicry — getting ideas from nature for the way we make or do things — isn’t just for robots and velcro. Plant leaves and sea sponges are inspiring researchers and companies to invent better photovoltaic cells; one by building the cells the way nature does, the other by having photovoltaics work more like photosynthesis.

Built Like Nature

Daniel Morse at the University of California Santa Barbara has been getting inspiration from sea sponges to make efficient solar cells. Manufacturing silicon solar cells is currently done the way all semiconductor devices are made; the process requires very high temperatures, plasmas and vacuum chambers, and many nasty chemicals. Sponges, on the other hand, self-assemble complex nano-structured silicon materials (their skeletons) out of protein and seawater at ambient temperature and pressure. And there’s no need to worry about wafer shortages: As a university write-up of the research says, “Nature produces silica on a scale of gigatons.” The sponge’s secret is molecular templating, which Morse and colleagues are learning to imitate. Technology Review reported that “Morse and colleagues have made more than 30 types of semiconductor thin films and tested their photovoltaic properties. They are now working to incorporate the semiconductors into functional solar cells.”

Works Like Nature

In status-quo photovoltaic cells, incoming light hits a doped semiconductor material, knocking electrons out of lower orbits into a free state, where they can be carried off by metal wires. New electrons come and fill the old holes via the same wires, so the material can absorb new photons. Pushing electrons around from one place to another like this is what generates a current.

The material properties require a tricky balance. The more conductive a material is, the harder it is to hold electrons in shells that are ready to be conveniently popped up by incoming light. But the less conductive a material is, the harder it is to get the electrons out to become useful electricity. In 1991, Michael Graetzel and colleagues developed what’s now called the Graetzel cell (listed in Wikipedia as a dye-sensitized solar cell), which works more like photosynthesis in plants. It splits the process into three different steps and three different materials, using a little more chemistry than just solid-state physics. As explained on the web site of the Institute of Chemical Technology in Croatia,

In [a] natural solar cell the chlorophyll molecules absorb light (most strongly in the red and blue parts of the spectrum, leaving the green light to be reflected). The absorbed energy is sufficient to knock an electron from the excited chlorophyll. In the further transport of electron[s], other molecules are involved, which take the electron away from [the] chlorophyll. In [a] Graetzel cell, the tasks of charge-carrier generation and transport are also assigned to different species.

The “Graetzel cell” uses a thin coating of ruthenium and organic bipyridine molecules for light absorption, kicking electrons up into higher orbits but not quite all the way to being free electrons. This coating sits on a framework of titanium dioxide nano-crystals that carry the electrons away. A separate electrode replenishes the coating with more electrons (so it can absorb more photons), with the electrons carried from the electrode to the coating by a liquid electrolyte of dissolved iodine in which the entire coated framework sits.

These cells are not very efficient yet. However, they’re far cheaper than silicon solar cells, because even though they are not manufactured in a biomimetic way (like Morse’s cells), they also do not require the high vacuum and plasma and other difficulties of traditional PV manufacturing. We’ve mentioned before that the company Konarka has been selling these cells by the roll as “Power Plastic” since 2002, and have even made PV fabric. Power Plastic is currently about 3-5 percent efficient according to Machine Design, but they are hoping to jump to 20 percent efficiency by combining Graetzel cell technology with organic solar cells. Maybe at some point they’ll combine their devices with the templating methods used by Morse to create PV cells that not only work more like plant leaves, but are made more like them as well.

Image Credits: UCSB’s Convergence Magazine, Konarka

Biomimetic Solar Cells is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we’ll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 11:58 AM)

Originally
from Worldchanging

by WorldChanging Team


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from Worldchanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog innovation

This article was written by Alex Steffen in October 2007. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” - Winston Churchill, speaking of the turning point battle of El Alamein,1942

Al Gore and the IPCC winning the Nobel Peace Prize symbolizes more than just a head-nod towards some eco-fad — it shows that sustainability has finally moved from the outskirts of activism to the most central halls of authority. Concern for the planetary future is now as credible as it is possible to get. The beginning of the struggle to save ourselves from ecological catastrophe has come to an end and we can begin to see the outlines of the next stage of the struggle.

Those of us who’ve spent our careers advocating a saner approach to the future can be forgiven a few moments of smugness, for these are sweet days. There is no longer any reasonable debate about whether or not we need to move with all possible speed towards a different way of living on this planet. To argue the contrary is now to prove oneself morally bankrupt.

Of course, the morally bankrupt can still be found in some numbers in the corridors of commercial and political power, but we don’t need to worry too much about them. They are the leaders of the past: their influence wanes by the moment, as leader after leader steps up to call for big changes.

Consider, for example, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s call this week for a global system of carbon regulation and pricing to be in place by 2012:

Merkel insisted that only by establishing limits on carbon dioxide output per individual around the world — suggesting about 2 tons per head — could the fight to stop global warming be effective. … Her suggestion would mean drastic cuts: Germany has a carbon dioxide output of some 11 tons per person per year, while the U.S. is at around 20 tons per person.

Similar proclamations — which would even five years ago, been perceived as beyond the pale of realistic debate — can be heard from corporate CEOs, retired generals and religious leaders. (These conversions are coming none too soon. There’s been a spate of disturbing news of late, including NASA climate expert Jim Hansen’s latest paper (PDF) estimating that we are moving towards an increase of six degrees Celsius rather than three, and that drastic observed effects (like the rapid melting of the polar ice cap) may be evidence that we are on the verge of hitting climate tipping points.)

Winning the debate doesn’t mean we’re winning the war, yet. But the fight has changed. Now that we have an increasingly broad consensus that we face a major planetary crisis, we can start in on the next step. Now we move from spreading the word to setting the agenda, from handing out pamphlets to drawing blueprints. The future we’re inheriting is broken. People all over the world know it. Now it’s time to design a future that works.

This campaign will be no easier.

For one thing, in order to create real solutions, we have to avoid certain traps, like carbon blindness. It’s going to be difficult to help the world see more clearly that climate change is a symptom of our lack of sustainability, not its cause. We must find ways of showing that climate chaos, environmental degradation, economic inequity and political corruption are all part of the same problem. We simply cannot solve any of those problems without working to tackle them all.

Others will call for “moderation,” which in this context actually means totally insufficient half-measures. Because we know that we’re dealing with the hard reality of merciless trends here, we’ll have to be strong and demand more than timid steps and vague pronouncements. We’ll have to demand commitment to the bold timelines necessary and hold our leaders accountable to them. To take baby steps now is to fail, however good our intentions.

We’ll also have some work to do explaining why the developed world needs to lead the way. We in the North have a moral responsibility to go first, of course, both because we bear the historical guilt for the situation in which we find ourselves and because others have the same right we do to expect reasonable prosperity and we will not earn their cooperation (which we need) without acknowledging that. But we also face the practical reality that it is our governments, universities and businesses that have the research capacity to forge the new solutions people everywhere will need. If we want the whole world using these new solutions by 2050, we’d better start inventing and implementing them here, now.

But there’s an even more fundamental challenge facing us, I believe: we don’t know what the future we want to build looks like.

We are coming to understand the kinds of radical challenge we face — cutting our impact on the planet on the planet by perhaps a factor of 20 over the next 25 years or so, while delivering sustainable prosperity to many more people — but the truth we rarely speak in public is that we really have no idea how to get there.

We don’t know what our cities will look like, how our energy will be created and delivered, how we’ll get from place to place, how our food will be grown, how we’ll manufacture our consumer products and make our clothing, or even how we’ll recreate and relax. Yet we will need revolutions in each of these fields — and in the cultural interactions between them, the policies regulating them, and in the businesses which deliver them.

Up to now, we have been a movement whose purpose was to raise awareness of the dangers of a broken future; education and persuasion will continue to be part of our job, but now our central mission must evolve into creating a networked movement of people and institutions who are working together to imagine, describe, plan and build a sustainable society. We have shown people the need for change; now we need to become capable of mass-producing it. Our business now is vision.

It’s common, among certain of our allies, to try to avoid seeming like radicals by reassuring people that a sustainable world won’t be all that different from the world we live in now. It’s time for us to stop saying that.

It’s time for us to stop saying that because it’s not true: the kind of world we will be building will have to include what are, from today’s perspective, some truly massive changes. We won’t be living the same way in a couple decades, either because we’ve undergone some relatively profound transformations, or because the consequences of failing to change our ways will be coming home to roost in a series of utterly predictable disasters.

But it’s time to stop downplaying the changes needed for another reason: if we do our jobs right, life will get better. The systems we currently rely on don’t just destroy the environment, they limit our happiness. We do not live in the best of all possible worlds. We know it is possible to create lives which are not only profoundly more sustainable, but more prosperous, comfortable, stylish, healthy, safe and fun. If we do our jobs right, a bright green future will be downright sexy.

Our task now is to envision those lives, envision them with such practical clarity that we gain the power to build them.

Getting to a bright green future is going to involve quite a long journey. The storms of bad news won’t stop coming in the meantime, and we can expect the seas to be choppy along the way. But this will also be a grand adventure and we can take heart in the message the Nobel committee has sent: look to your sails, the tide has turned.

Al Gore, the Nobel Prize and the End of the Beginning is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we’ll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 11:39 AM)

Originally
from Worldchanging

by WorldChanging Team


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from Worldchanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog environment, reblog innovation

This article was written by Jeremy Faludi in July 2007. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

You can’t do green design without green materials, and material innovations tend to come from chemists. Chemists also produce many products in their own right: paints, adhesives, cleaning products, whole industries. So what are chemists doing to save the world?

There’s currently one famous green chemist in the world: Michael Braungart (founder of EPEA, co-founder of McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry and co-author of Cradle to Cradle). The world needs about a hundred more.

We’ve written before about legislation (mostly in the EU) tightening standards for toxics, and about the huge strides needed to close today’s three critical gaps: knowledge (not only in the general public and governments, but in the chemical industry itself), safety (prioritizing hazards and enacting limits), and technology (developing safer, greener alternatives). But legislation can be slow and fickle, and the industry has a huge amount of inertia; many well-funded groups such as the American Chemistry Council lobby for the status-quo. What are chemists doing to lead?

They’re doing a lot of things, as it turns out. Some researchers are developing alternative plastics that don’t use petrochemicals, some associations are prioritizing green within their members, whole green-chem institutes are being founded, and groups are trying to teach chemists to green their processes. Sustainable chemistry is a baby, born thirty years ago but just now starting to crawl; let’s help it get up on its feet.

Greener Plastics

What if that “new car smell” were the smell of fresh-baked potatoes or toasted corn? In the last five years, several bio-plastics manufacturers have come to market, and more are in the lab. Rodenburg Biopolymers in the Netherlands makes potato-starch plastic for disposable cutlery and packaging, and several companies in China sell corn-starch or potato-starch cutlery; enough that it has a buzzword, “spudware”. NatureWorks PLA has a solid enough toe-hold in the market to be old news to many. A less-well-known competitor is PHA by Mechabolix. PHA has much better engineering properties than PLA (you can’t make a cell phone case out of pure PLA, but you could make it out of PHA); however, it has two serious downsides. According to this excellent year 2000 Scientific American article (re-posted on mindfully.org), manufacturing PHA “would consume even more fossil resources than most petrochemical manufacturing routes.” The second downside is that manufacturing it cheaply requires genetic modification of the corn crops.

Last year, Richard Wool at the University of Delaware created chicken feather and soy composite circuit boards. Not only do they replace the non-recyclable, energy-intensive fiberglass and epoxy materials, they are “a lighter, stronger, cheaper product with high-speed electronic properties.” This is especially relevant because the circuit board often has the highest ecological impact of any part in a computer or other consumer electronics device–more than the plastic case, and sometimes more than the electronic components on the board. The chicken feather / soy composite could also be used as a structural material for other applications. For years, the university’s ACRES team (Affordable Composites from Renewable Sources) has been researching different chemical pathways and feedstocks to determine the highest-performance and lowest-cost ways of making plastic out of soy.

Perhaps the most exciting is making plastic that sequesters CO2. Two years ago, Geoff Coates’s lab at Cornell University developed a polystyrene-like plastic made out of CO2 and orange peels. Now he has a small startup company, Novomer, to commercialize it. As his Cornell group website says, “Although it is estimated that Nature uses CO2 to make over 200 billion tons of glucose by photosynthesis each year, synthetic chemists have had embarrassing little success in developing efficient catalytic processes that exploit this attractive raw material.” The pages go on to describe the catalysts they found, which allowed them to achieve their breakthroughs. Keep an eye out in the next couple years for PLC (Polylimonene Carbonate), as well as the other polymers and catalysts that Novomer is making.

Associations and Institutions

Some big-name organizations are starting to push green chemistry. There are green chemistry institutions and networks in over 20 countries around the world; the ACS Green Chemistry Institute in the US has a decent list of them. The British government’s Chemistry Innovation Network has a strong sustainability initiative called the “Crystal Faraday partnership”. They make the importance of their mission clear:

“In the developed world, it is recognised that only 7% of production materials used in a process end up in the final product and that 80% of products are discarded after a single use. It is essential, therefore, that we seek to reduce material resources and ensure that any materials released to the environment are not toxic, harmful or persistent.”

One of the largest and most respected groups of chemists, the UK’s Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE), is celebrating its 50th year, and its 2007 Jubilee report “is not merely a report of past successes. It is much more a call to arms”. The IchemE’s chief executive said, “Over the next decade, chemical engineers’ work will be crucial as we tackle global issues such as climate change, waste reduction and access to clean water.” The report is all about the progress being made in environmental safety, energy, water, and other sustainability issues. Aimed at laypeople, it’s sprinkled with success stories and challenges. For instance, produce bags that allow the fruits or vegetables to ‘breathe’, increasing shelf life; this doesn’t sound exciting until they point out that “Longer life means produce can be transported by sea rather than road transport (which produces 228 times more CO2 emissions) and air freight (which produces 90 times more).” Another nugget: “Cafeteria food waste has a biogas production potential nearly ten times that of animal manure, making it an interesting potential source of renewable energy.” And even some biomimicry: they mentioned a new, safer method of industrial bleaching, based on an enzyme from a microbe discovered in Yellowstone National Park.

Training and Guidance

Currently there is little more than a trickle-down of green chemistry knowledge between companies, governments, NGOs, and universities. Companies’ chemical information is proprietary, and many environmental impacts have never been measured, much less publicized. Some universities and government agencies have data on a few specific chemicals, but lack a centralized clearinghouse of information. MBDC may have the best database of chemical environmental data, but it is private and expensive information. Opening up the faucets of these knowledge flows, and getting them all in one tub big enough to splash in, may be the most important step for the industry right now. Several groups are trying to crank the taps.

Britain’s Chemistry Innovation Network has a roadmap for sustainable technologies, including trends and drivers, specific needs of the industry, the business case, a review of technologies, and case studies. These are aimed at everyone in the chemical industry. UC Berkeley’s Framework for California Leadership in Green Chemistry Policy recommends policy directions for lawmakers. For consumers, the Ecology Center put together a consumer guide to toxic chemicals in cars, HealthyCar.org. The site ranks over 200 vehicles in terms of indoor air quality, as well as rating child car seats for brominated flame retardants, and explaining what chemicals to be concerned with and why.

Chemists looking to learn should check out the EPA’s 2002 textbook, Green Engineering: Environmentally Conscious Design of Chemical Processes. There’s also a newer EPA tool, the downloadable Green Chemistry Expert System. It’s a piece of software that “allows users to build a green chemical process, design a green chemical, or survey the field of green chemistry.” For a less technical introduction, they have a web page listing their Twelve Principles of Green Chemistry:

1. Prevent waste
2. Design safer chemicals and products
3. Design less hazardous chemical syntheses
4. Use renewable feedstocks
5. Use catalysts, not stoichiometric reagents
6. Avoid chemical derivatives
7. Maximize atom economy
8. Use safer solvents and reaction conditions:
9. Increase energy efficiency
10. Design chemicals and products to degrade after use
11. Analyze in real time to prevent pollution
12. Minimize the potential for accidents

Most of these principles are aimed at being less bad. Michael Braungart argues convincingly that we need to shoot higher than that, we need to aim to be good. Zero is not a positive outcome. But some of them are positive goals, and for those that aren’t, even if less-bad is as good as we can do for now, we need to keep a longer-term positive goal in mind.

Some awards are even being given for green chemistry: Britain’s Green Chemistry Network has had awards for seven years under various names with the IchemE. The US EPA has a Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award. The Royal Australian Chemical Institute also has a Green Chemistry Challenge Award.

The Future of Chemistry

Will the chemical market start to go green by itself, as a few industries are starting to do? Not yet. Michael Wilson, a researcher at UC Berkeley, told me that “green chemistry entrepreneurs have a difficult time breaking into the market because there are fundamental data gaps in chemical toxicity that prevent buyers from choosing safer chemicals… The market is therefore operating very inefficiently and will require corrections through public policy.” He said “by requiring that producers generate and distribute standardized, robust information on chemical toxicity (for use by downstream industry, business, consumers, workers) we will open new markets for green chemistry entrepreneurs.” This is the knowledge gap mentioned at the beginning, which the groups described above are working to close.

Wilson was hopeful about green chemistry entrepreneurs he knows, which “have some brilliant products supported by solid data - that reduce costs significantly and also make a substantial environmental contribution.” (For instance, Advanced Biocatalytics, and Novozyme.)

But before the market will steer itself towards green, we need to also close the safety gap: “regulations (such as RoHS, WEEE and the REACH) [need] to force clean technology change (that won’t happen any other way).” And finally, he argues “state investment in green chemistry research, education, technical assistance, and training will be essential.” Such a combination — new regulations, targeted research and bold commitments to innovation — will close the technology gap, giving us alternatives and kick-starting new industries on the right path to a bright green future.

Creative Commons Image Credit

Green Chemistry: Changing An Industry is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we’ll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 11:24 AM)

Originally
from WorldChanging

by WorldChanging Team


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from WorldChanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog innovation

This article was written by Alex Steffen in June 2007. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

We find ourselves, as I wrote a bit ago in an essay called The Empire of Crime, without a contemporary sense of our immediate surroundings or much of a model for a working future.

This lends an air of surreality to our thinking. Like the hero of William Gibson’s story The Gernsback Continuum, we are shadowed by visions of a future not our own:

Mercifully, the whole thing is starting to fade, to become an episode. When I do still catch the odd glimpse, it’s peripheral; mere fragments of mad-doctor chrome, confining themselves to the corner of the eye. There was that flying-wing liner over San Francisco last week, but it was almost translucent. And the shark-fin roadsters have gotten scarcer, and freeways discreetly avoid unfolding themselves into the gleaming eighty-lane monsters I was forced to drive last month in my rented Toyota. And I know that none of it will follow me to New York; my vision is narrowing to a single wavelength of probability. I’ve worked hard for that. Television helped a lot.

Indeed, we’re irrationally hung up on the past’s visions of the future. Check out Gareth Branwyn’s photo tour of steampunk hobbyist artifacts:

Retro-futurism is all the rage these days: antique computers, 8-bit game art, classic cases for modern gear, anything to make the onslaught of new technology less disposable. The yearning for timelessness in a constantly renewing tech culture has led to a spike in interest in the steam-powered, brass-encrusted world of steampunk.

Henry Jenkins, echoing William Gibson, calls this sphere of anachronistic futurism “The Tomorrow That Never Was”:

Amateur archivists have assembled digital reproductions of the covers of pulp science fiction or popular science magazines, cataloging the various technological wonders or predictions by which an earlier generation sought to understand the directions their society was taking. Others have gathered together home movies, post cards, and every other available media artifact to construct detailed tours of the 1939 fair, showing every building inside and out. Such activities blur the line between private collections and shared archives as hobbyists become curators to show off their own holdings and to educate others into the lore of retro culture. Some of these experts will go on to construct beautifully illustrated coffee table books (of the kind that Gibson described in his short story) which in turn can be sold to niche publics of consumers via sites like Amazon. And small companies will use the web to sell lower-cost reproductions of historical toys and souvenirs for those who lack the resources to purchase the original: the digital tour of the 1939 World’s Fair, for example, has its own gift shop where one can buy a whole range of retro goods.

It is well known that the baby boom generation uses sites like eBay to reassemble stuff their mothers threw away when they left for college (old toys, comics, baseball cards, and other junk). But these same web 2.0 platforms allow us to collect together information or accumulate artifacts from our parent’s and grandparent’s generation. Relatively few of the people who are trading in memorabilia for the 1939 World’s Fair are old enough to have actually attended the event. Rather, they are fascinated with images of a future that had already started to fade from consciousness before they were even born, suggesting a variation on Stephen Greenbelt’s claim that history writing involves a fascination with speaking with the dead.

Of course, the dead with whom we are speaking when we engage in this nostalgic futurism are the dead visions of an earlier age, and they compel us so strongly precisely because our own visions elude us, offering as yet only terrifying glimpses of a ruined planet. When we look ahead, the skies darken, and we see not aluminum cities of flying cars, but a “global Somalia.”

No wonder, then, that we cling like a monkey with a wire-brush mama to the idea of a future in which engineering conquers the human condition, where we can leave off serious worrying about the planet until the godlike AIs get here, and in which, in any case, we can always jump ship and scuttle off to another planet if things get too hot.

Unfortunately, wishing doesn’t make it so. Indeed, more and more of our best futurists, science fiction writers and big thinkers are trying to get us to dump our threadbare inherited tomorrows into the recycler, if only so we can start to think seriously about the real challenges we face today. A great example is Charlie Stross’ brilliant post The High Frontier, Redux, in which he eviscerates the whole idea of space colonization:

Historically, crossing oceans and setting up farmsteads on new lands conveniently stripped of indigenous inhabitants by disease has been a cost-effective proposition. But the scale factor involved in space travel is strongly counter-intuitive.

Here’s a handy metaphor: let’s approximate one astronomical unit — the distance between the Earth and the sun, roughly 150 million kilometres, or 600 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon — to one centimetre. Got that? 1AU = 1cm. (You may want to get hold of a ruler to follow through with this one.)

The solar system is conveniently small. Neptune, the outermost planet in our solar system, orbits the sun at a distance of almost exactly 30AU, or 30 centimetres — one foot (in imperial units). Giant Jupiter is 5.46 AU out from the sun, almost exactly two inches (in old money).

We’ve sent space probes to Jupiter; they take two and a half years to get there if we send them on a straight Hohmann transfer orbit, but we can get there a bit faster using some fancy orbital mechanics…

The Kuiper belt, domain of icy wandering dwarf planets like Pluto and Eris, extends perhaps another 30AU, before merging into the much more tenuous Hills cloud and Oort cloud, domain of loosely coupled long-period comets.

Now for the first scale shock: using our handy metaphor the Kuiper belt is perhaps a metre in diameter. The Oort cloud, in contrast, is as much as 50,000 AU in radius — its outer edge lies half a kilometre away.

Got that? Our planetary solar system is 30 centimetres, roughly a foot, in radius. But to get to the edge of the Oort cloud, you have to go half a kilometre, roughly a third of a mile.

Next on our tour is Proxima Centauri, our nearest star. …But Proxima Centauri is a poor choice, if we’re looking for habitable real estate. While exoplanets are apparently common as muck, terrestrial planets are harder to find; Gliese 581c, the first such to be detected (and it looks like a pretty weird one, at that), is roughly 20.4 light years away, or using our metaphor, about ten miles.

Try to get a handle on this: it takes us 2-5 years to travel two inches. But the proponents of interstellar travel are talking about journeys of ten miles.

Charlie goes on to quote Ally #1 Bruce Sterling’s comments on space colonization:

I’ll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes “Gobi Desert Opera” because, well, it’s just kind of plonkingly obvious that there’s no good reason to go there and live. It’s ugly, it’s inhospitable and there’s no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it’s so hard to reach.

To which Charlie responds, “Colonize the Gobi desert, colonise the North Atlantic in winter — then get back to me about the rest of the solar system!”

Space ain’t the final frontier. The physical frontier is closed — as Norman Mailer puts it “shut, damn shut, shut like a boulder on a rabbit burrow” — and we live now, and probably forever (at least in culturally meaningful terms) in a world of physical limits. And despite promises of medical immortality, it looks like we may not live forever after all, while the smart robots don’t seem to be coming to save us.

Some see, in the loss of this Machine Age dream of the conquest of nature and all natural limits, the loss of possibility. That seems silly to me: the possible still lies stretched out all before us. I believe, in the core of my being, that H.G. Wells was right when he said “”All the past is but the beginning of the beginning: all that the human mind has accomplished is but the dream before the awakening” If we survive this crisis, humanity has ahead of it vast seas of time to create and grow and deepen. We may even one day find the technological equivalent of the alchemist’s stone, and bend the physical stuff of the universe to our purposes (hopefully without destroying ourselves in the process) — but in the meantime, we’re at home on Earth and staying here, and all good work needs to respect the limitations a single planet places upon our endeavors.

There is still plenty of room for heroic ingenuity. Just because we disdain the possibility of magical, consequence-free technofixes doesn’t mean we don’t admire and seek good tools (in fact, quite the opposite, if we’re sensible — realizing that the task is much harder than thought by the technofixers, we realize we’ll need every tool we can get our hands on). Similarly, recognizing that space colonization is no answer to our planetary problems doesn’t mean that we don’t want to explore space, and learn as much about our planet and its surroundings as possible (the whole Greens in Space argument). Indeed, with the explosion of private space tourism efforts, we need to begin thinking seriously about space law. A sustainable civilization will be even more technologically advanced than our own, and remarkably more sophisticated in its thinking about science, technology and progress.

And that’s just the point: change has accelerated, just not in the direction our grandparents and great-grandparents expected. We still need to think ahead. Learning to see the shortcomings in these antique tomorrows we’re still dragging around with us may make us more intelligent creators of new visions. If we can let go of the way the past saw the future, we may be able to think anew about what is to come.

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Limits and Brilliance is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we’ll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 10:33 AM)

Originally
from WorldChanging

by WorldChanging Team


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on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from WorldChanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

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