Dogon Dance and the Celebration of Death

Just watched a video in my ancient astronomy course today.  The video was about the Dogon people of Mali.  These people have a certain cosmology which is ingrained in their spirituality.  Also, the Dogon people consider all of life to be a dance.  They dance to celebrate life.  

The highlight of the video dealt with the Dogon’s dance for death.  They dance to celebrate death.  They dance people into their death and beyond.  So unlike the modern technological society I am a part of.  In western society, the propagation of the judeo-christian religions brought the idea that suicide was wrong, that death was bad and not a part of life, that death could be dangerous.  Jack Kavorkian was put in jail because he wanted to help people in pain to find their death.  We have forced death as far outside of our realm of thought as we could, as if death is wrong or bad.  I love how the Dogon celebrate death.  I love the idea of dancing our loved ones into their death.  Why should we fear death?  Why should we consider suicide to be wrong?  It makes no sense to fear a natural part of life.  

Of course, the Dogon don’t wish for death or seek it, but they respect death as part of life and they dance in honor of death.  I wish more people in this modern technological culture were open with death and unafraid.  It’s hard to deal with that.  I'd like to be open about death.  I'd like to dance to celebrate death.  And, I hope that when I die someone will dance to celebrate my death.  

Human breeding programs

I'm reading the book "The Science of Dune" right now.  It's a very intriguing collection of essays from scientists of many backgrounds which discuss certain aspects of the Dune saga as they are related to modern science and possible future science.  I've read so far about the possibility for synthetic eyes, about the use of hallucinogenic drugs and if we'll ever have a hallucinogen which also extends life, about the possible biology of the sandworms of Dune, and about the actual physics of the dunes of Arrakis.

The most recent essay I've read was from Carol Hart, Ph.D., concerning the human breeding programs of the Bene Gesserit in the Dune universe.  This society of women with prescience were conducting a 90 generations long breeding program to produce the universe's sueper being, the Kwisatz Haderach.  Of course, for those who've read the book know, the super being Maud'Dib came a generation early and had the unforeseen side-effect of being independent and uncontrollable by the Bene Gesserit sisterhood.

The author of this article does a fantastic, if brief, job of highlighting the fact that we humans have spent the better part of the past 15,000 or more years domesticating wolves to make our household dog, and now we breed dogs for all kinds of traits (some of which, like in the case of the smash face pugs, is really bad for the animal but makes people think it looks cute).  However, we have not been as careful in our own breeding.  Many people will have children regardless of their own genetic pitfalls.  It makes me wonder, if at some point in the future we will need to start directing human breeding so that our species can continue to evolve.  What if we seek to colonize Mars or travel beyond our solar system.  Might it be better for us to selectively breed the type of people who will be biologically optimized for the psychological stress of space travel, or for stronger defense against radiation damage, or even for the ability to breathe less oxygen and still perform well?  This question definitely jumps deep into the realm of bioethics.  Any thoughts?

 

The University Rover Challenge

Last summer I traveled with my buddy Ryan Kobrick (http://www.ryinspace.com/) down to the desert in Utah to help staff the University Rover Challenge (URC).  The URC is an annual international competition hosted by the Mars Society where teams of university/college students compete in Mars-rover style tasks using rovers that the teams have designed and built at their home institutions.  It was great to be a part of the competition.  I'll be heading out there again this coming summer for the 5th annual event.  Should be an awesome time.  I'm sure we'll have some great teams once again.  This time I hope to take some people along with me to make sure we can really get things set up quick and keep the competition rolling smoothly.  I'll be sure to take lots of awesome pictures and share them with all of my friends online.

Clip from Ames Research Center on Astrobiology

"This thing is older than mommy!"

This past Monday evening, I drove down to the Jack Swigert Aerospace Academy in Colorado Springs to share my love of astrobiology with some middle school students and their parents.  The Jack Swigert Aerospace Academy had been a failing middle school, when the Space Foundation stepped in and gave the school a purpose: to teach children the basic american middle school curriculum, using aerospace as a tool for inspiration.  The school is doing much better now.

The Festival of Science is kind of like a symposium for local people involved in the sciences to communicate with students from the school.  There was an astronomical society there, a robotics group, the Cheyenne mountain zoo, the girl scouts, the boy scouts, and several other presenters who had hands on activities and displays to get the students thinking about science.  I went down on behalf of the CU Astrobiology Club.  I also brought two members of CU-SEDS so they could share some cool stuff with the students.

At my Astrobiology Club table, I had some information about the Arecibo radio message that was sent to the M13 star cluster in 1974, a picture of organic molecules found in space, a picture of the ALH84001 meteorite and a micrograph of the debated "martian" in that meteorite that was announced in 1996.  I also had a Giant Microbe version of the "Martian Life" (pretty much a stuffed-animal worm), and I had one of my chondrite meteorites.  It was fun to talk with middle school students about extraterrestrial life and show them some of the things I had brought.

The best part of the evening was when a mother and three young children walked up to my table.  I was talking to the mother about my meteorite, informing her about the current theory of how our solar system formed, and so I told her that my meteorite likely formed over 4.5 billion years ago.  She took in her hand and showed it to her children saying, "Look guys, this thing is older than mommy!"  One of her children went wide-eyed.  I started laughing pretty hard.  She looked at me and said, "I have to put it in their perspective".  I guess everything really is relative when it comes to our understanding of our universe around us.

Need to catch up...

I haven't been maintaining this blog as much as I would like.  Gotta keep up on it :)


Here's a short thought I had that might be the beginning of a story (if I ever choose to write it):

She watched the snow drifting down from behind her glass cage.  The warmth and the light inside were reassuring, yet she felt abandoned and trapped, lost to the world and alone.  She had no means of escape, other than running out into that dark, snow-covered world beyond the glass.  She stared into the falling snow and imagined herself running.  She could see herself, cold and scared, running through the snow.  She imagined herself running further into the cold night as the dim lights of her home disappeared into the surrounding white of the falling snow.  She would disappear into the cold night and no one would know.  She felt a chill sweep down her body as the cold from the window glass reached out and grabbed her.  For a moment she was fully aware of the glass; its hard, vitreous surface, which allowed her to view the outside world, was at war with the energy imbalances between the room inside and the snowy night outside.  She felt herself moving away from the glass.  She couldn’t be part of this battle.  She let the warmth of the room fill her.  She smiled, but the action felt fake, forced.  

Stellar Dreamland

Away and afar
A dream I dreamed
when I was young

A guiding star
A dream I dreamed
My living song

The world, so big
Through a child's eye
The cosmos, so vast
Can we even surmise
The extent of our universe
And our place herein

A speckled night
A dream I dreamed
All my life, all along

HAPI Drum!

My friend Amanda Hayes posted a video on Facebook of this instrumnet called a HAPI drum.  I totally want one.  These steel tongue drums have a super sweet sound.

"The Pale Blue Dot" and "On the Turning Away"



By far one of my most favorite videos on Youtube.

The Thaw

Written and directed by Mark A. Lewis, The Thaw is a 2009 sci-fi horror flick that ran with the blurb "A research expedition to the Arctic discovers that a melting polar ice cap has released a deadly prehistoric parasite."

Val Kilmer and Martha MacIsaac play the lead roles in the film.  Kilmer is Dr. Kruipen, a scientist studying the effects of global climate change in the Canadian high arctic, and MacIsaac takes on the role of Kruipen's daughter, Evelyn, who is estranged from her father and reluctant to share time with him.  While on a research expedition, Kruipen and his team discover a mammoth that had been preserved by glaciers during the last ice-age but has now emerged due to glacial recession.  Very early in the film we learn that the mammoth's flesh bares a dormant parasite which wreaks havoc on Kruipen and his team.  The story jumps rather quickly to the main plot where Evelyn and a group of undergraduate students who have been selected to join Kruipen's research team are flown by Kruipen's helicopter pilot to the expedition base shelter in the arctic.  Upon their arrival they are surprised to discover they can't contact Dr. Kruipen.  Shortly thereafter, one of Kruipen's team arrives by ATV at the shelter, but she can't explain what has happened due a bizarre illness which appears to be getting worse.

That's pretty much the setup for the horror that ensues.  I won't give too much more of the specifics  away.  For a full synopsis, check out the Wikipedia article:
The Thaw on Wikipedia

The movie itself is just slightly better than average for a horror film.  One of the antagonists of the film, a student who is infected with the parasite, kind of destroys the plot.  As a case of bad writing, the character takes control of the group with a rifle which he hangs over his shoulder which is in no way threatening (if myself or a group with at least one or two brave people were involved that kid would have been knocked out, tied up, and gagged rather quickly).  There is a rather enjoyable amputation scene, but otherwise the film is fairly predictable and slow.

The parasite that is killing the characters of the film is a vertebrate organism which functions rather like a parasitic insect.  The male of the species causes a sore on a host which attracts females.  The female will lay eggs within the sore which pass through an egg stage before hatching and crawling into their host for nutrition.  The infected hosts' bodies are eaten inside-out by the insects.  This is a common strategy for life on our planet, especially amongst insects.  I think the idea of such a destructive parasite laying dormant in the flesh of a mammoth is probably why I enjoyed the film.  It is very possible that there are many forms of life which we have no remaining record of which may have had peculiar or unusual metabolic strategies or life cycles.  Also, it's fun to speculate how a biosphere similar to ours would react to the release of an organism or community which had not been active for a time that is long enough to allow the incoming organisms to overwhelm all of the surrounding biosphere, just like an invasive species taking hold of an environment.

I would definitely recommend watching this film if you enjoy sci-fi and horror, though it's definitely not great by any means.