The Post-Technological Future Imagery of Simon Stålenhag

Simon Stålenhag's artwork is beautiful, dark, and suggestive of a post-technological dystopian future where robotics and high-tech have fallen and people are putting the pieces back together. I feel like I can see a story evolving out of every image that he's created. Check out the pictures below for some more, but also visit his website for lots and lots more!

The Modular Body

Those who know me certainly also know that I'm a sucker for sci-fi and horror films that consider what the futures of biotechnology and genetics may bring. Especially when we consider the flawed or even non-existent educations our citizens are receiving in ethics. We're building a future where tinkering with biology will become too easy, while not enough people will question the morality of those tinkerings before they're conducted.

Splice (2012)

Films like eXistenZ and Splice are definitely in this realm. The former considers the future of gaming and our interactions with the worlds we create through our technology, while the latter film considers what might happen in organismal biotechnology research when we're driven by our desires for success to the point of losing our morality. In eXistenZ, we're brought to wonder if we may be able to biologically develop gaming systems that can interact with our minds to put us into virtual worlds. While Splice gives us two young scientists on the cutting edge of medical biotech in developing new model organisms; these two young scientists jeopardize their careers when they create an organism that includes human DNA (and they create one awesome organism).

Now, Floris Kaayk is working on something a bit startling and intriguing that might make us wonder what the future of biotech holds. Kaayk recently came to some internet fame after creating an online "media art project" called Human Birdwing, which included a video of a man flying with artificial wings. Unfortunately, a lot of people didn't realize that the video was not real and consider it more of a hoax than art.

Human Birdwing (by Floris Kaayk)

Kaayk's newest media art adventure is something called The Modular Body, and it's pretty trippy. As reported in DesignColumn: "Developments in the field of 3D-printed organs inspired Kaayk to think about a future in which our body parts could be divided into separate modules. Because the body would be made up of small blocks, it would be easy to alter its composition. We would be able to change certain modules in our bodies simply by plugging them in. For sporting activities you could plug in stronger limbs, while at night you would need only your brain, lung and heart modules" Sounds promising, but also potentially terrifying. For instance, in this video, a "scientist" is unveiling to the world the modular organism Oscar:

It's too bad this one isn't being turned into a full film, but it's pretty cool to see Kaayk turning this into a media art project. I'm sure a bunch of people will take this seriously as well, but maybe we're at a time where this seems believable enough given the current state of our world.
The very potential for little Oscar and other such modular beings could be the stuff of nightmares. Or, maybe, Kaayk's vision need not be so terrible. Maybe the development of such modular bodies really could change the nature of the human form. Might we one day have our brains in one module, while all of the other modules of our bodies could be moved around, or some things added or removed? Can you imagine meeting someone with 10 pairs of legs who walks like a centipede? Could we create limbs that allow us to walk along walls like spiders? I can think of so many possibilities for such modular forms, some amazing and some most terrible. What do you think?

Why aren't the rest of us living in space yet?

Space art from NASA made in the 1970s (find more here)

We've read and seen stories and films for decades now that suggest a future where humans will live in space. From colonizing other planets to traveling through interstellar space, many people have dreamed of a human future beyond Earth. So why hasn't it happened yet? 

After sending twelve men to the Moon in the 1960s and 1970s and supporting ventures of government organizations to send astronauts into low Earth orbit (LEO) since that time, we still don't live in a world where the rest of us can easily get into space. Of course, a large part of the argument for why this hasn't happened comes down to economics and initiative, but there are also many who would argue that we're not yet ready for it. Some may say that we need to figure out how to be better citizens of the Earth before we try to be citizens of space. 

That may seem like a flawed argument to space exploration advocates, but it's an argument that I've heard many times. I'm going to start working on another article considering what it will take to advance our human future in space, but I'd like some community input before I do that. Comment on this post or hit me up on Twitter or Facebook with your ideas about whether or not we should venture into space and why. Also, I'd like to know the reasons people suspect for why the past dreams of our future in space have not yet come to fruition. Please, tell me:

Why aren't the rest of us living in space yet?

The Blue Marble: The importance of seeing our world in its entirety

This image of the Earth was taken by the crew of Apollo 17 on their trip to the Moon on the 7th of December, 1972. It is one of the most famous images in recorded history and has come to be known as The Blue Marble. 

Not only is the image significant as it was taken by the last human beings to travel to the Moon (something that will hopefully soon change), but The Blue Marble is one of the first images that captured our world as a whole, without any of the borders we've been told to imagine between nations and cultures. The image shows the place of birth of every human being who has ever lived. The Blue Marble shows land, sea, clouds, vegetation, and ice. Just like the Earthrise and Pale Blue Dot images, The Blue Marble gives us pause to reflect upon our connections to one another and to the rest of our biosphere. Seeing our world as a whole set amongst the background black of space should remind us that we're all in this crazy thing called life together and that our world is only one amongst what we now know to be a very great many.

Seeing the World We've Made

All is Fair in Love and War, by Bugspray609

Any thoughtful person who takes the time to regard the known history of our species must assuredly, at least sometimes, take some pause when considering the dichotomy of how well and how bad we have treated each other. For all of the beauty we have created in our music and art and literature and architecture, we have have created just as much destruction and pain through our acts of selfishness and fear. I think any person who seeks a better life in this world for everyone has to admit to and understand the atrocities that have occurred in human history while working to stop such atrocities from occurring again (whether through direct or indirect means).

In the 1937 preface to his science-fiction story, "Star Maker", Olaf Stapledon wrote of the direct and indirect approaches to overcoming the crises of human suffering while commenting on the foreseen terror of the rise of fascism in Europe. He pointed out the importance developing the "self-critical self-consciousness of the human species" (something I see as the capability for us to review our actions and work to improve the world for future generations by improving our actions). Although written over three decades before The Blue Marble image was produced, Stapledon had the foresight to point out the potential importance of seeing our world as a whole:

"...Perhaps the attempt to see our turbulent world against a background of stars may, after all, increase, not lessen, the significance of the present human crisis. It may also strengthen our charity to one another."

Stapledon even attempted a guess in Star Maker at what the Earth may look like from space:

"...The sheer beauty of our planet surprised me. It was a huge pearl, set in spangled ebony. It was nacrous, it was an opal. No, it was far more lovely than any jewel. Its patterned colouring was more subtle, more ethereal. It displayed the delicacy and brilliance, the intricacy and harmony of a live thing. Strange that in my remoteness I seemed to feel, as never before, the vital presence of Earth as of a creature alive but tranced and obscurely yearning to wake."

Olaf Stapledon couldn't have known it at the time of that writing, but the first official image taken of the Earth from space would be collected from a weapon of war, a V-2 rocket, less than a decade after the writing of Star Maker.

Earth from Space 

Taken from a V-2 Rocket in 1946, this is the first picture of Earth from space

Since the atmosphere of the Earth doesn't actually have a perfectly defined edge or separation that can tell you when you're still on Earth or when you're in space, a border called the Kármán Line was agreed upon for this purpose at 100 km above the surface of the planet. Theodore von Kármán, the namesake for the Kármán Line, was the first person to realize that it is around this altitude that the gases of the atmosphere become too rarified for aeronautical flight. As such, it's also this altitude that separates the study of aeronautics from the study of astronautics.

The first image of Earth taken by a camera that had passed the Kármán Line was taken on the 24th of October in 1946. This camera was riding along with a V-2 rocket, a weapon of war that was the progenitor of the rockets that took the first American astronauts into space and which took the first people to the Moon. It's somewhat ironic that one of the arguably most important pictures in history, one which has the power to captivate our wonder and to show us that we really are all in this together, was captured from an implement of death and destruction.

You can find more information about the first picture of Earth from space in this article from Air & Space Magazine.

Capturing the Blue Marble

There have been lots of pictures taken of the entirety of the Earth from spacecraft since that first one in 1946, but The Blue Marble remains as the first full shot of our world fully lit by the sun. 

Still, there are a lot of other great images from spacecraft of the Earth that have been released. Here, for example, are satellite composite images of Earth released by NASA in 2001 and 2002:

Composite images of the Earth from space, developed by NASA

Another fantastic image of our world is one known as The Blue Marble 2012. In the first week after its release, the Flickr page for the image garnered over 3 million views and now stands at almost 6 million views total. It's a fantastic composite image of our world that was taken from the Suomi NPP satellite:

The Blue Marble and similar images are testaments to our technological and scientific progress as a species. I think everyone should take a moment, at least once in their goings about in their daily lives, to consider the importance of seeing our world as a whole. 

Capturing images and videos of our Earth gives us a chance to look at our entire biosphere as though it is one living entity. Just as all humans are composed of human cells and cells of microorganisms that work together in one large system, our world can be viewed as one entity with one biosphere composed of many trillions of trillions of organisms that all function together as one whole (think: Gaia Hypothesis). It's especially intriguing to watch video, like the ISS Ustream Live Feed, that shows some of the dynamic processes on Earth that can be seen from space.

There's no knowing yet if biology is itself a cosmological imperative or if maybe life as we know it on our little Blue Marble is just the happenstance of chemistry and physics in one place and in one time. Many of us think the former is more likely, especially given the vastness of our universe and the myriad worlds we now know to exist outside of our own, yet we won't know more without further exploration. 

When I see The Blue Marble, it reminds me that all of our technological and cultural advancement over the last two hundred thousand years may just be the beginning of our advancement as a cosmologically conscious species. The Blue Marble, as an image, couldn't have been taken without our first taking those minuscule steps into space. If we continue working together to advance ourselves, technologically and philosophically, then maybe one day The Blue Marble will be an icon for how we first took to the heavens to know more about our world and its place in the cosmos.

Update (10 June 2015):

For more information about the importance of seeing our world from space, check out this article published in Space Policy in 2010 by my friend, Sanjoy Som. He discusses the importance of The Blue Marble and has proposed that we create a world flag with The Blue Marble at its center to support future exploration for all of our species and all of our biosphere. If you're interested in getting involved in spreading the word about The Blue Marble, check out One Flag in Space as well.

Book Review: The Science of Avatar

I just finished reading The Science of Avatar by British scientist and science-fiction author Stephen Baxter. It was a most excellent read and definitely a book worth talking about.

Avatar

The film Avatar blew the socks off audiences worldwide back in 2009. Some people were even noted to have become depressed over not being able to personally experience the world that the film created. You've probably seen Avatar. If not, go watch it. You'll be happy you did, but here's a brief overview anyway:

Quick Summary: Avatar is a story about an ex-marine who travels to a world called Pandora to take control of an avatar, a genetically engineered organism that can be linked to a human "driver's" mind, so that he can interface with the indigenous, intelligent alien species (on whom the avatar is mostly based; though there are human components as well). This indigenous species are a humanoid group who call themselves the Na'vi (they are very reminiscent of various ancient Native American tribes). The ex-marine, Jake Sully, not only interfaces the Na'vi, but befriends (and eventually falls in love) with one of them. The conflict of the story is developed through the exploitation of Pandora's resources and disregard for the Na'vi and other wildlife by a company called RDA (Resources Development Administration) and their militarized force of employees (similar to our modern Private Military Contractors). The story develops as Jake Sully sides with the Na'vi in a battle against RDA and their "offense" forces. This is just a brief review of the story. If you haven't seen the film, go watch it. If you haven't seen it in a while, go watch it. I'll be here.

Seen it? Awesome!

I remember the first time I saw Avatar in the theater and thought to myself, "What a fantastical alien environment they've created here for the audience." I was stunned by the visual beauty and depth of the alien world, Pandora, and its similar-yet-alien biosphere (let's face it, most viewers would have a hard time watching the film if Pandora were truly alien - and so there are creatures that are very similar to life as we know it, and that's okay). I also really liked the story. 

It's a fairly typical story of the technologically-advanced bully wreaking destruction upon the indigenous ecology; we've seen this time and again. Many people made associations between the story of Avatar and that of stories such as Ferngully and Dances with Wolves. The blog Madatoms went as far as to create a rather humorous diagram showing some of the basic comparisons between Avatar with Dances with Wolves, Pocahontas, Dune, and Ferngully:

"Avatar Dances in Ferngully's Dune" from Madatoms

Sure, the story of Avatar was not exactly new, but I think James Cameron and the other creators of the film did an excellent job telling the story within the world they created. They gave us a thrilling look at a possible dystopian future for Earth (briefly), interstellar travel, a new biosphere on an alien world, genetically engineered surrogate organisms that we can literally control with our minds, a possible role of mercenaries in future warfare, and, probably coolest of all, a biosphere where organisms can neurologically link together (thus giving the entire biosphere a "brain/mind" of its own). 

Stephen Baxter did a fantastic job reviewing some of these key points in his book on the science of Avatar. I thought I'd share a few of his ideas as well as mine for each of the major sections of the book. 

Science fiction is often inspired by scientific discovery (and vice versa); The background is a painting by willroberts04 on Deviant Art

The Science of Avatar

Stephen Baxter is a fantastic author of hard sci-fi stories. He has a background in mathematics and engineering, but has made a name for himself by writing science fiction stories with alternate history and future history slants. His approach to The Science of Avatar comes from someone who understands sci-fi but who also has a great bearing on modern science. 

The primary sections of Baxter's book are "Earth", "RDA", "Venture Star", "Pandora", "Hell's Gate", "Living World", "Na'vi", and "Avatar"; these sections discuss the possible future of Earth, the resources extracted from Pandora, interstellar travel, the planetary science related to Pandora, the potential future of human colonization of other worlds, the biology developed for Pandora, the tribe of the Na'vi, and finally the nature of the avatars.

By breaking down the film into some key points, Baxter made it easier to tackle some of the more intriguing ideas that were developed by the film's creators. The book considers everything from the ecology of Pandora to the nature of the fictional resource "unobtainium" (which appears in various science fiction stories and in various forms; in Avatar, unobtainium appears to be a mineral that serves as a superconductor at room-temperature).

Credit: Dylan Glynn

We're only given a brief glimpse of the dystopian future of Earth in Avatar, although Jake Sully gives us an idea of what it might be like: "See, the world we come from, there's no green there. They've killed their mother..." Yes, that's a little vague, but it leads us to imagine a future Earth that has succumbed to global pollution, climate change, and sprawl such that ecosystems have been destroyed globally. 

An early draft of Cameron's Avatar screenplay had intended a bit more detail of future Earth: "Jake stares upward at the levels of the city. Maglev trains whoosh overhead on elevated tracks, against a sky of garish advertising... Most of the people wear filter masks to protect them from the toxic air... It is a marching torrent of anonymous, isolated souls." This sounds like a sad future for Earth, but it is by no means unheard of with regard to science fiction. There have been plenty of sci-fi stories that have considered dystopian futures for Earth (including the films Automata, Mad Max, Blade Runner, 12 Monkeys, Cloud Atlas, Elysium, Looper, and WALL-E). 

The future of Earth in Avatar appears to be one where industrial pollution and overpopulation have finally driven the Earth to the verge of global collapse. However, the real industrial trouble we see in the film is the extraction of resources (namely unobtainium) from Pandora without any regard for the ecosystems or intelligent species who live on that world. 

We currently extract an exceedingly large amount of raw material from the Earth each year to support our industrial, technological, and commercial infrastructure and to provide for the lives that many of us enjoy. It's hard to find good estimates of the actual amount of material we mine, but most numbers I've seen range in the billions to hundreds of billions of metric tons (around 60 billion metric tons of raw material each year sounds like a reasonable estimate). Although some nations have implemented various forms of regulation on mining operations to avoid industrial pollution or the devastation of ecosystems, mining across the globe still causes deforestation, acid mine drainage, and a range of other environmental impacts.

This is the Bagger 288. Like the other Bagger mining vehicles, this sucker is one of the largest land vehicles on the planet.

The Resources Development Administration (RDA) plays the "bad guy" in Avatar. They're developed to fit with the stereotypical image of a mining company or tech company that develops their product with little to no interest for the wellbeing of the ecosystem from which they take their goods. In The Science of Avatar, Stephen Baxter does a fantastic job of considering whether or not this is a potential future for resource development. Baxter mentions some of the current plans for resource development in our solar system, especially from asteroids. Given the potential for resource development organizations to act humanely and with vested interest in more than just profits, it's sad to admit that many times in the history of our species we have pushed forward for our own gain without regard for the rest of the natural world. Maybe our future of exploring new worlds will involve companies like RDA, though I hope by that point we'd learn to act better, especially when encountering new worlds.

The Hallelujah Mountains from Avatar

One of the cooler story points in Avatar is the nature of the Hallelujah Mountains. Much like the the floating island of Laputa in Jonathan Swift's Gullivers Travels, the Hallelujah Mountains fit with a common fantasy of islands floating in the sky, but in Avatar they give these floating mountains a scientific basis. The Hallelujah Mountains are composed mostly of the mineral unobtainium. The creators of Avatar built a backstory for the origination of unobtainium along with the formation of the moon Pandora and the planet it orbits (Polyphemus, in the Alpha Centauri system) - an object (either a planetary body or maybe a neutron star) impacted Pandora early in its formation causing an enrichment in the moon with the mineral unobtainium. As Stephen Baxter points out in the book, though, with a back-of-the-envelope calculation one could see that the magnetic field required to raise the Hallelujah Mountains into the air is thousands of times greater than the magnetic field here on Earth (not only that, but it would be far stronger than the magnetic fields produced by our Sun). Although the film's creators have built a Polyphemus and Pandora system with intense gravitational fields, it's still not likely to be enough to raise the Halleljuah Mountains. However, sometimes the fun of merging science fact with science fiction is having the creative license to push the boundaries of truth a bit. Which might be what the film does with the idea of the avatars.

Jake Sully checks out his avatar in its amino tank

The avatars are pretty sweet. It's not unthinkable that we may be able to port ourselves into created bodies in the future. We're already pushing into more immersive media with improved 3D films, steps towards better virtual reality with tech like the Oculus Rift, and developing CAVE systems (I had the chance to try one of these immersive systems at the Desert Research Institute some years ago). With increasing interest in virtual worlds (like Second Life), I can definitely see people in the future looking to find ways to take on new personae, possibly through the control of another body in the real world. In fact, a pretty fun movie came out not too long ago looking into just that: Surrogates is a 2009 film featuring Bruce Willis which portrays a future where nearly everyone interacts in the real world through surrogate robots. But will we get to the point where we can take control of a biological form like that of an avatar?

Baxter points out in The Science of Avatar that the basic biological structure of the organisms of Pandora does not utilize DNA/RNA and proteins the way that Terran life does. This means that to make an avatar requires an understanding of Pandoran biology to the point of genetically engineering organisms, but, moreso, it requires that the scientists who create the avatars are capable of appropriately decoding human and na'vi heritable traits (not so hard for the human side these days) but then that they be able to logically code these two forms of life together to make a third form that becomes the avatar. It doesn't seem too outlandish, but it definitely would be a huge marvel of science to attain that level of biological engineering. It seems to me that if we were to get to that point then we could easily have fixed Jake Sully's paralysis or even may finally develop gene therapy to the point where we could make it so that human colonists could live naturally on the Pandoran surface.

Avatar ends with Jake Sully having his conscious self fully transitioned from his human body into his avatar body. It's an interesting idea, for sure. Although there really isn't a good reason to believe in dualism (the idea that our physical minds and our conscious selves are different), a lot of people have been wondering lately if we may be able to upload our brains to computers in the near future (neuroscientist Randal Koene wants to see this happen, though there are other who doubt it's even possible). The 2014 film Transcendence, starring Johnny Depp, is one of the more interesting takes on this idea in recent media. Not only does Avatar force us to question whether we could create a newly biological form like an avatar but also whether it would be possible to code everything from the structure of our brains into the brains of one of these organisms. A very intriguing consideration.

The Science of Avatar considers all of these points and more. For instance, Baxter goes into what we currently know about the possibilities for life beyond Earth, the relativistic effects of near speed-of-light travel, the history of rocketry, what we currently know about exoplanets, the potential for terraforming, and more. The Science of Avatar was definitely a fantastic read. It's inspired me to watch the film again (but this time paying a little bit closer attention to the world of the film). I think Baxter could have filled the book with so much material as to make it a tome of information, but he wrote it so that it's accessible to just about anyone and can be read in as little as one sitting. Now that I'm finished writing about the book, I think it's time to watch Avatar again. 

In case reading this hasn't inspired you to watch Avatar again yourself, maybe having a listen to the film's soundtrack will help: