Public Engagement in Deep Space

by Paul Gilster | Jun 11, 2013 | Culture and Society | 29 comments

Congratulations to Icarus Interstellar, which with five days to go has easily surpassed its goal of raising $10,000 on Kickstarter. The campaign supports the Starship Congress to be held in Dallas August 15-18 at the Anatole Hilton Conference Center. It is described on the Kickstarter page as “…a forum where scientists, physicists, engineers, researchers, urban designers, representatives from international space programs and present-day commercial space operators, as well as popular and well-known interstellar speakers and space journalists share their visions for how the future of spaceflight and interstellar exploration is to unfold.”

The Kickstarter description also includes a quick refresher on Project Icarus itself, the main goals of which are:

• To design a credible interstellar probe that is a concept design for a potential mission this century;
• To allow a direct technology comparison with Daedalus and provide an assesment of the maturity of fusion-based space propulsion for future precursor missions;
• To generate greater interest in the real term prospects for interstellar precursor missions;
• To motivate a new generation of scientists to be interested in designing space missions that go beyond our solar system. [our emphasis]

Crowdsourcing a Space Telescope

And while we’re on the subject of Kickstarter, which raises public money through donations small and large, I’m seeing 19 days to go on the ARKYD space telescope project from Planetary Resources. Kickstarter works by letting you run a campaign with a definite time limit — the project is funded only if the goal is reached within the deadline. Planetary Resources already has $851,000 pledged toward a goal of $1 million in the service of a publicly accessible space telescope. It’s clear the funding mission will succeed, as have 43,000 other projects since Kickstarter’s 2009 launch, involving 4.2 million people in over $650 million in donations.

Image: The ARKYD 100 is the first private space telescope and a stepping-stone to near-Earth asteroids. This space telescope, utilized in low Earth orbit, represents the next milestone on our technology development roadmap. Credit: Planetary Resources.

With a 2015 launch in prospect, the ARKYD 100 makes Planetary Resources’ hunt for asteroids a reality to the public, some of whom, for a pledge of $99, will be able to use it to look at the object of their choice. A wide variety of rewards are available for pledges at many levels, including the prospect of having an asteroid named after the benefactor. But the real kick is to put public contributions large and small together to get a working scientific instrument into space. A $25 pledge nets you an image of yourself displayed on an ARKYD viewscreen as it orbits the Earth.

With a Web and mobile app on the way to handle photo uploading and retrieval as well as mission tracking, Planetary Resources has done a superb job of anticipating what it will take to energize students and build careers. But I like especially the philosophical aspect behind the project. The ARKYD 100 shows us that all of us can become a part of an ongoing effort to develop space resources, with contributions from all over the planet. I can see why there’s a rush to get this project funded as phase 1 of the larger goal of asteroid mining.

Currency and Deep Time

I can’t leave the subject of fundraising for worthy science without mentioning The Long Now Foundation’s ongoing effort to raise $495,000 in support of its Salon building project. Long Now is transforming its existing museum at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco into a showcase for the long-term projects it supports. Already the home of receptions and other small events, as well as a steady stream of students, tourists and other visitors, the museum now needs renovation to create a gathering space that incorporates Long Now artifacts, a two-story crowd-curated library, and an updated A/V system to support its public outreach.

Image: The dial of prototype 1 of the 10,000 Year Clock, a vital part of the effort to expand human thinking to time-frames well beyond a single lifetime. Credit: Long Now Foundation.

The donation rewards here, like those for ARKYD, range across the price spectrum and include everything from exotic teas to flasks with the Long Now logo and a variety of unique spirits. What projects like these illustrate, though, isn’t easily captured in a material reward. For much of the public and for too long a time, science and exploration have become matters done by others, things to read about or watch on the news. Crowdsourcing is one way to get the public involved not through an obligatory tax but a voluntary contribution chosen out of personal interest in the subject.

We have many signs all around us that dedicated individuals can do things and make a difference in science. Maybe the most obvious example is the ongoing work of amateur astronomers who, with off-the-shelf equipment, are making a serious contribution to the exoplanet hunt not only through their own observations but also by working with images and light-curves made available on the Internet for close scrutiny by volunteers. Now through crowdsourcing, young people with a few dollars and genuine enthusiasm can feel themselves to be a part of this wave of public engagement. Exciting projects like these are well worth their attention.

Iain Banks: An Appreciation

by Paul Gilster | Jun 10, 2013 | Culture and Society | 19 comments

The all too early death of Iain Banks conjures up so many images from his books that I can’t begin to list them all here. Grant his sly word-play, his wit, his deft management of character and you’re still left with a sense of gratitude for the sheer poetry of his landscapes. In Look to Windward, a character named Kabe walks the streets of blacked out city, down along a dark canal whose quayside is softened by snow. Then he looks up and the universe rotates:

The snow was easing now. Spinwards, over the city center and the still more distant mountains, the clouds were parting, revealing a few of the brighter stars as the weather system cleared. A thin, dimly glowing line directly above — coming and going as the clouds moved slowly overhead — was far-side light. No aircraft or ships that he could see. Even the birds of the air seemed to have stayed in their roosts.

Spinwards… We’re on one of Banks’ ‘orbitals,’ space habitats formed as enormous rings millions of kilometers in diameter, its inhabitants living in an environment shaped by technology but fine-tuned to produce benign climates and often jaw-dropping visual juxtapositions. In the post-scarcity world of Banks’ Culture, Orbitals vie with Ships containing sentient minds, some utterly enormous, as are the General Systems Vehicles that can reach 200 kilometers in length. Here, too, we are dealing with artifacts that are entire worlds amidst a society in which the limits of material needs have been transcended and creative use of time is the imperative.

Anyone familiar with Banks knows he loved giving his ships absurd names, and thus we move among vehicles like ‘So Much for Subtlety’ (The Player of Games), ‘Very Little Gravitas Indeed’ (Use of Weapons) and ‘Just the Washing Instruction Chip in Life’s Rich Tapestry’ (The Hydrogen Sonata). Each of these ships, possessing an artificial intelligence of its own, becomes a character, and often a significant one, in the action.

If Banks had his playful side, he was often demanding, his wit leavening a style that could be tense and baroque. Here’s a passage from The Hydrogen Sonata that puts readers to work:

At sunset above the plains of Kwaalon, on a dark, high terrace balanced on a glittering black swirl of architecture forming a relatively microscopic part of the equatorial Girdlecity of Xown, Vyr Cossont — Lieutenant Commander (reserve) Vyr Cossont, to give her her full title — sat performing part of T. C. Vilabier’s 26th String-Specific Sonata For An Instrument Yet To Be Invented, catalogue number MW 1211, on one of the few surviving examples of the instrument developed specifically to play the piece, the notoriously difficult, temperamental and tonally challenged Antagonistic Undecagonstring — or elevenstring, as it was commonly known.

In this, a novel as dense with ideas as any Banks wrote, getting to know Vyr Cossont is only a small part of the challenge as the author describes space-faring species brought together in common interest over what could be described as the philosophical ‘suicide’ of an important fellow civilization. No more details — read the book and immerse yourself in a far future that’s as different from most such visualizations as it is possible to be. Remember, this is a universe without material want, but we certainly find out early that it is not one without conflict.

I have Centauri Dreams readers to thank for introducing me to Banks years ago, and I’ve worked my way through most of his science fiction, though not yet his well regarded mainstream work, novels like The Wasp Factory or Canal Dreams. If the dazzling inventions of an Arthur C. Clarke or Isaac Asimov were fuel for his imagination, I can also see why he listed Brian Aldiss and M. John Harrison as literary influences. The latter, in particular his Viriconium stories and novels, surely awakened Banks’ instincts. He found there an enigmatic, lush, highly textured prose that turned the remotest futurity plausible.

Thinking about Banks, as I did much of the weekend, I realized that the science fictional enterprise transcends the limits of what we’ve come to call ‘futurism.’ Self-styled futurists tend to get the facts wrong because they rely on something akin to prophecy. How could they do anything else? We cannot know what knowledge waits to be uncovered, and that makes projections of the future all too often pessimistic, based as they are on an extrapolation of current trends without any off-setting new information. Read David Deutsch for more on this. His The Beginning of Infinity is suffused with an innate optimism that draws on the fact that problems are solved through new knowledge in a process without foreseeable end.

Within the limitations of our own place in time, we cannot know what that new knowledge will be. Iain Banks, in the tradition of our best science fiction writers, takes us into futures that have already found it. His outcomes are rich because they challenge our understanding of ourselves. His is a future that is and is not familiar, one compounded of our aspirations and our fears. I’ll close with this fine passage from The Player of Games, a personal favorite. Again we’re on an orbital, at the close of a novel that has taken us all the way to the Magellanics:

He stood on the snow-covered balcony, gazing at the dark trees descending in uneven rows to the glittering black fjord. The mountains on the far side shone faintly, and above them in the crisp night dim areas of light moved on the darkness, occluding star-fields and the farside Plates. The clouds drifted slowly, and down at Ikroh there was no wind.

Gurgeh looked up and saw, among the clouds, the Clouds, their ancient light hardly waving in the cold, calm air. He watched his breath go out before him, like a damp smoke between him and those distant stars, and shoved his chilled hands into the jacket pockets for warmth. One touched something softer than the snow, and he brought it out; a little dust.

He looked up from it at the stars again, and the view was warped and distorted by something in his eyes, which at first he thought was rain.

Philosophy of the Starship: A Report

by Paul Gilster | Jun 7, 2013 | Culture and Society | 31 comments

Stephen Ashworth’s April essay at Astronautical Evolution deals with a question of considerable scientific interest: When will Voyager 1 leave the Solar System? But writer, researcher and jazz saxophonist Ashworth also has a philosophical streak, writing articles so far this year on the prospects for a technological singularity, the role of space in a society threatened with ecological disruption, and the business model best suited for manned spaceflight. In this essay, Stephen brings us a report from a recent seminar that mixes philosophy and starships, with consequential questions about autonomous technology, the role of discovery in combating intellectual stagnation, and the geopolitics of deep space exploration.

by Stephen Ashworth

The Institute for Interstellar Studies plans to run a symposium annually at the British Interplanetary Society‘s headquarters in London. The first of these events took place on 29 May, dedicated to the philosophy of the starship, and was organized by Kelvin Long and Rob Swinney. It follows several interstellar meetings at the BIS in the past few years, including one on warp drive concepts, one in which the Icarus project was formally launched, and in 2011 a reopening of the case for worldships [see Colonizing the Galaxy Using World Ships].

The title of Wednesday’s meeting, the “philosophy” of the starship, was left as broad as possible, I think deliberately, in order to encourage a variety of different angles, which worked well. Long’s own talk focused on Leonardo da Vinci, the Italian Renaissance polymath and artist (1452-1519). Not normally regarded as an astronautical pioneer, his significance was that he developed ideas which were centuries ahead of their time, including designs for flying machines. We now find ourselves facing a similar leap into the future of imagination-driven technology, and Long sketched out possible technology roadmaps towards that future.

Image: Underway at the BIS. This and the other images in this essay courtesy of Stephen Ashworth and Kelvin Long.

Keith Cooper discussed how self-replicating Von Neumann probes spreading through the Galaxy might fit into a philosophy for interstellar exploration [see Robotic Replicators for more of Keith’s ideas on the subject] . He pointed out that autonomous probes, based on nanotechnology, 3D printing and artificial intelligence, would be very useful for creating industrial infrastructure in space. But their autonomy could lead to unpredictable evolutionary changes in their behaviour, and could also sour a first contact scenario with extraterrestrials if those probes trespassed on the aliens’ own resources.

Cooper linked this topic with Fermi’s infamous question, or paradox, about which everybody has strong views but minimal supporting observational evidence. The Fermi question inevitably captured the resulting debate. I quietly suggested that future symposia ought to have a ground rule that the words “Fermi” and “paradox” should not be allowed to appear in the same sentence, in order to avoid these fruitless arguments which have been going on for half a century now, but this did not strike the organisers as a very good idea.

Bob Parkinson, one of the original Daedalus team, revisited several of his papers from the 1974-1975 period. He described how social and technological conditions had changed in the four decades since Daedalus. One person was now able to do the work which then had required a large team, thanks to the power of the Internet, and to the calculating power of specialised software.

Image: Daedalus designer Bob Parkinson speaks, looking back on an earlier paper in which he examined starships as part of a continuum that began with Renaissance voyages of discovery.

While this may seem to be all to the good, I had a discussion with Richard Osborne about the prospects for the further global application of increasingly capable machines to routine work currently performed by people. Driving road vehicles is a case in point: a massive source of employment at present, yet crying out for automation, with cars, buses and trucks already increasingly computerised. The danger is of large-scale unemployment leading to social unrest. This problem has of course been seen before, but is set to become increasingly acute as computers running expert systems become able to take over intellectual work, such as that performed by the medical profession.

This question ought to be of increasing interest in interstellar research. One is prone to forget that the very technologies which we assume will be available for interstellar spaceflight imply massive social and economic changes, and these will need to be managed successfully if society is to continue to be able to advance further out into space.

Image: A break for lunch and discussion at the BIS.

After lunch, Ian Crawford discussed interstellar discovery as an antidote to intellectual stagnation, drawing on an article of his published in a special issue of JBIS entitled “The Impact of Space on Culture” (Nov. 1993). He was in fact responding to Francis Fukuyama’s notorious “end of history” thesis, in which the end of ideological conflict also entails an end to human creativity and achievement.

Crawford referred also to John Locke, who in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding argued that we cannot imagine genuinely new things, but must discover them. In order to avoid the fate which Fukuyama predicted, we therefore need to keep pressing outwards and discovering new things. But this was disputed by Martin Ciupa, who rejected Locke’s view. Quite a debate resulted on the relation between physical reality and the human mind.

In his own presentation, Martin Ciupa focused on science fictional representations of contact between humans and intelligent aliens. A selection of posters from 1950s movies demonstrated the obsession at the time with aliens carrying off our womenfolk. The theme of using interstellar travel to illustrate our unconscious fears in the present was continued in Forbidden Planet. Ciupa then considered the Star Trek Prime Directive, representing what some would now regard as an ethical approach to managing our relations with aliens, and contrasted it with the interventionism shown by the Monolith in 2001, and by Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still.

This ethical choice is no theoretical abstraction, but a future version of a choice which is with us today: should the developed countries of the world intervene in cases such as the civil war in Syria?

Frederik Ceyssens offered his thoughts on geopolitical scenarios relevant to deep space exploration. Three broad futures were sketched out: one in which world governments tended to integrate into a unified global governing institution, one in which the current situation of several major power blocs continued, and one where political institutions were eclipsed by non-state actors such as multinational corporations, and the implications of these alternative scenarios were discussed.

As it would entail less short term competition and conflict, the former scenario was seen as more beneficial for government backing of long-term visionary projects such as launching an interstellar probe, but could also entail stagnation and complacency. The other scenarios would entail a more dynamic world, in which there could be actors sponsoring such projects albeit with a lower amount of resources. In any case, advocacy of a scientifically credible project was seen as important.

Image: Stephen Ashworth, standing at right, addresses the symposium.

My own contribution during the morning session took a broader philosophical approach: what are the key features of a social philosophy conducive to large-scale civil space engineering up to and including starships? I demonstrated that in every case, a philosophical stance which the interstellar community regards as true or virtuous is regarded by other groups in society as false or damaging. Even within the sphere of interstellar thought, there are several points of fundamental disagreement (the answer to Fermi’s question being a case in point).

Three years ago the BIS was in fact treated to a debate with two Marxist academic sociologists who rejected the propositions that space exploration as currently practised was beneficial or that it ought to be accelerated. I believe that we need to keep in mind views that contrast strongly with our own, and engage with them where possible.

The day wound up with a discussion, led by Kelvin Long, of possible ways to demonstrate laser-sail propulsion in space on a low budget. It is planned to pursue this further under the title Project Dragonfly, intended to complement the existing work (Project Forward) being led by James Benford into microwave beam-sail propulsion.

In the best BIS tradition, many of the 30 participants afterwards adjourned to a local pub to continue discussions over a pint or two.