In the early 1990s, William Gibson wrote Agrippa (A Book of the Dead), a 300-line autobiographical poem saved on a 3.5″ floppy designed to erase itself after a single use. The book version accomplished the task in analogue: its pages were treated with photosensitive chemicals, which began gradually fading the words and images from the book’s first exposure to light. The text was about memory, and the idea was that a reader would experience it as such, with the words becoming memories as they were consumed. Like a conversation, like a moment experienced in direct time, one could never recall it precisely, or command it–as on a computer–to return. It was simply lived, then faded away.

Although Agrippa was engineered to be ephemeral, it committed one cardinal error: it was written at the dawn of the free information age. Almost immediately after the poem’s initial “Transmission” (a complex affair involving illusionist Penn Jillette and a vacuum-sealed sculptural magnetic disk) enterprising hackers pirated the text and disseminated it online, on USENET groups and listservs. Since Gibson didn’t use email at the time, fans faxed him pirated copies of the text in droves. If Agrippa had been undertaken today, I can only imagine the full text would have been leaked before it even made it into the art gallery. The project was, in short, a failure: not because it was a bad idea, or poorly-executed, but because there simply is no such thing as a transitory memory anymore. When someone tries to artificially construct one, our networked technological milieu literally wrests it away and commits it, permanently, to the cloud.

We no longer serve one another sensory impressions, live largely felt experiences; we no longer conjure up the past through a patchwork of fallible nodes of thought, ever-shifting, foggy and surreal. It’s difficult today, perhaps impossible, for an artist to make something with the qualities of pure memory: intangible, subjective, and yet with real emotional affect. In an age of hyper-documentation, of consistent quantifiability, every click leaves a trace.

Which, of course, may have been the very point Gibson was trying to make. Agrippa, in attempting to emulate natural memory, was an impossible object. By being technological, it was inherently destined to assimilate itself into a greater collective cache of experience. In his new collection of essays, Distrust That Particular Flavor, he addresses this more succinctly: technology, in a sense, is memory.



In Gibson’s view, our technology is–always has been–an direct extension of our humanity. He argues that the moment we began began taking photos, making films, externalizing the human experience with so-called “mass” media, we set into motion an immeasurably vast prosthetic memory for the race. What we can’t remember, or live directly, we can now conjure up through images, films, and data; we can remember second-hand, often losing touch with the difference between our memories, truth, history, and the experience of others. We can view things at a distance, things which happened before we were born, we can watch the dead talk: ghosts have been walking among us since the first image was recorded. Of film, Gibson writes, “we are building ourselves mirrors that remember–public mirrors that wander around and remember what they’ve seen,” adding, ”that is a basic magic.”

Only briefly does he make what I think is a crucial leap to extending the argument beyond the parameters of 20th century technology. The prosthetic memory of the human race isn’t just quantifiable in archives of film, living networks of interconnected conversation, and endless bytes of media data. It’s also a different kind of information: mesopotamian clay tablets, cave paintings, the printed word, anything, in fact, that is capable of representing a fragment of ineffable experience in physical form. Of course, this isn’t Gibson’s territory, the cyberprophet, the calm-and-bemused voice of techno-truth, but he tackles it:

“Our ancestors, when they found their way to that first stone screen, were commencing a project so vast that it only now begins to become apparent: the unthinking construction of a species-wide, time-defying, effectively immortal prosthetic memory. Extensions of the human brain and nervous system, capable of surviving the death of the species. The start of building what would become civilization, cities, cinema.”

While media is an “extended nervous system we’ve been extruding as a species for the past century,” art is a complex memory we’ve been collaboratively creating for much, much longer. It’s too big for a single individual–or a single machine, hopefully– to experience it all at once, but it’s the central project of the human race. And it can’t be pirated, or destroyed: only lived, and added to, often thoughtlessly, by succeeding generations of increasingly technological human beings.

Is poetry a driving force of Oceanography?
Read Rimbaud!
- Phillipe Diolé

I've written many times, although not recently, about the ocean.

When I first began Universe in 2005, it was practically a ship's log: meandering pieces on narwhal tusks, the accidental poetics of my hero, Rachel Carson, and adolescent screeds on the perils of the Mariana trench. At some point in my career, I ported my energies outward to the cosmos, reasoning, as the ancient alchemists did, that "As Above, So Below."

The movement from the deep to the distant, from sea to space, seemed like a sensible evolution. I saw parallels then, as I do now. They are both cold, forbidding, strange, contain tremulous mysteries, and do not give their secrets readily. Tales of their early exploration contain feats of unspeakable audacity, as well as tragedy. Solitary heroes stand out: Yuri Gagarin in his Vostok spacecraft, Jacques Cousteau developing the Aqua-Lung in order to push deeper underwater, the elite few men and women who have dared venture far above, far below. Listen to a veteran diver discuss the sea and an astronaut space: you'll hear the same hushed tones, the same fearful, learned respect.

After all, what experience does this planet offer us more phenomenologically similar to spacewalking than floating in a deep ocean? Water is the best environment for spacewalk training on Earth; substituting neutral buoyancy for microgravity, NASA Astronauts train at the Neutral Buoyancy Lab in Houston, a giant swimming pool. I've always been delighted by images of this place; if you squint just right, and ignore the scuba divers, it almost looks like outer space is robin's egg blue and dotted with bubbles.



In spite of our egotism, the human organism is delicate. We're only built to tromp around the accommodating portions of the Earth. The moment we're submerged in the ocean, or we ascend too high a peak—to say nothing of outer space—we're out of our league. Yet, in our incorrigible hubris, we've long used technology to wander beyond our territory. Aristotle wrote of diving bells, and (apocryphally) even Alexander the Great explored the deep ocean—in a submarine of white glass, where the fish gathered 'round to pay homage—and returned to pronounce of his experience, "the world is damned and lost." Mercury spacecraft and the early Soviet Vostok capsules may as well have been diving bells; they were so small, it's said that they were worn, not ridden.



"The sea," Captain Nemo pronounces, in one of literature's more glamorous depictions of the deep, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, "does not belong to despots. Upon its surface men can still excercise unjust laws, fight, tear one another to pieces, and can be carried away with terrestrial horrors. But at thirty feet below its level, their reign ceases, their influence is quenched, and their power disappears. Ah! Sir, live—live in the bosom of the waters! There only is independence! There I recognise no masters! There I am free!"

This sentiment, an inverted Overview Effect, sounds familiar. Astronauts consistently speak of the irrelevance of borders, even nations, on a planet viewed from space. It's probably the most consistent revelation of spaceflight, the majestic panorama of a whole planet, seen without its despots and ideologues. The Soviet cosmonaut Gherman Titov, only the second man in space and the first to be there for more than 24 hours, described the experience of seeing the Earth from space as "a thousand times more beautiful than anything I could have imagined." After orbiting the planet over a dozen times, Titov replied a call from mission control with the elated cry: "I am Eagle! I am Eagle!"

An Eagle, of course, has no masters.

Today, in cramped cockpits and bathyspheres, astronauts and their aquatic counterparts lie contorted in the same metal cabins, surrounded by death, peering from thick windows into empty, hostile landscapes. Cloaked in metal, they transport light where there has never been any—to what James Cameron, after his much-ballyhooed recent dive to the Challenger Deep, called a "barren, desolate lunar plain," or (more viscerally) which William Beebe, passenger in the world's first bathysphere, described as "the black pit-mouth of hell itself."



This "black pit-mouth" is what interests me. Essentially every culture has a mythological history which includes primal undifferentiated formlessness. The abyss, as much topless as it is bottomless. And the abyss, figuratively speaking, is neither distinctly maritime nor interplanetary. Rather, it's a little of both: Tao, the primal ocean upon which Vishnu slumbered, amorphous being, chaos preceding time. Is this because the ancients knew on a symbolic level what our scientists empirically know now: that the abyss—in both worldly forms—is the seat of our lineage? We are, as Carl Sagan said, "made of starstuff." We're also risen from the sea. The salt in our veins is testament.

Beebe, one of the greatest American explorers, in his book Half-Mile Down, a record of his dive to 3,028 feet in 1934, wrote that it seems "a very wonderful thing, to walk about on land today, vitalized by a bit of the ancient seas swirling through our body. It is somehow of a piece with stars and time and space-something to be very quiet and thoughtful about, and proud of." Indeed, while beneath the waters lies a cruel landscape, and while the cosmos is vast and unforgiving, they are both our birthright. Our impulse to travel far below and above our limits is precisely that of children striving to return to the womb, only to discover that birth is as great a nothingness as death.



Between coral/Silent eel/Silver swordfish
I can't really feel or dream down here

In 1977, NASA sent a pair of unmanned probes named Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 into space. Among the infrared spectrometers and radio receivers included on each probe were identical copies of the same non-scientific object: the Voyager Golden Record.

Sheathed in a protective aluminum jacket, the Record is a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images chosen to portray the diversity of life on Earth: bird calls, whale songs, the sounds of surf, wind, and thunder, music from human cultures, and some 55 greetings in a range of languages, alive and dead. Like lonely time capsules, the records, aboard their still-functioning hosts, have long since left our solar system. The official Voyager 2 Twitter reports that the probe is currently at 13 hrs 38 mins 08 secs of light-travel time from Earth, which makes it the farthest man-made object from Earth.

According to the unofficial mythology, the Voyager Golden Record was compiled by two people in love: the astronomer Carl Sagan, and Ann Druyan, the creative director of the project, who he would later marry. Druyan confided on WNYC's Radio Lab program in 2007 that she recorded the sounds of her own body-the electrical impulses of her brain and nervous system, her heartbeats-for the album, which were the sounds of a woman swept away: by a man, by ideas, by the power of sending their love out into eternity, her human pulse synched to the hollow ebbing of a pulsar. Love, golden, close to eternal, flying at impossible speeds through the heavens.



The Golden Record's panoply of information, including those 55 greetings, was intended for an unknowable audience of spacefaring extraterrestrials. They are chatty, almost unserious: preposterously, one, in Amoy, even asks if the aliens are hungry. These recordings ostensibly represent a united voice of mankind addressing the cosmos. Of course, however, each greeting is a world of its own, embodying its own set of cultural and historical attitudes about life in space, time, infinity, and consciousness. The phrasing shifts from one recording to the next, revealing dramatic shifts in perspective. While the Arabic speaker calls extraterrestrials "friends in the stars," the Zulu and Sotho recordings address "great ones." What space is, what it represents, is not a consistent variable.



And neither, of course, are we.

As a species, the messages we've sent into space are piecemeal. For every concerted effort towards reasoned transmission, millions upon millions of radio-hours of information have leaked out into space from our planet haphazardly, beginning with that famous Nazi Olympic broadcast in 1936. Which, as it turns out, may be a better way for an extraterrestrial species to know us.

We're warring, inconsistent. We love, and embarrass ourselves. We create technologies seemingly at random, often beyond our ability to understand, let alone legislate. We live in bodies eminently susceptible to the slightest intrusion. Only a few of us are even fleetingly concerned with the impression we might make on our alien brethren. And yet, flawed, we are, our whole tumultuous history an opaque question mark in the darkness.

Reaching out by virtue of our idle transmissions, waiting.

The Record is a present we gave to ourselves, or rather that Sagan and Druyan gave to the rest of us, an object that delivers the entire emotive impact of the human race in a polished package. According to the Golden Record, we're groovy. We don't murder each other over inconsequential abstractions, or defile our planet for material gain. We're friendly, sending warm "hellos" out into the Universe, playing Bach, playing Chuck Berry to our new friends. It's freshman year of college, a cocktail party exaggeration: an invention designed to impress. But impress who?



It's likely an extraterrestrial intelligence would take the Voyager Golden Record for a piece of space garbage; the obsolescence of records aside, we can hardly assume its alien discoverers would have ears, let alone understand sound waves as information, or carved etchings as meaning. I'm not the first to posit that the Voyager Golden Record, with all its naive bombast, was more an exercise in summing ourselves up to ourselves than it was a pragmatic solution for first contact. Carl Sagan himself called it a "symbolic statement rather than a serious attempt to communicate with extraterrestrial life." In compiling the Record, its creators ran a comb over the tangle of ideas, languages, and cultures that make up the human race and parsed it into something cohesive, simple-even neat.

Is it beautiful? Beyond expression. Does it represent the human race and its position in the cosmos? No, of course not. No single such compendium could. Our reality is utterly subjective, our languages merely sandcastles held together by history and mutual consent. When NASA welded plaques depicting a man and a woman onto the Pioneer probes in 1972, conservatives in the United States objected to the nudity in the now-iconic image. We deny and contest our own bodies, the intrinsic animal nature of our personhood. Can we know what we are?

Personally, I'm an animal, but also a space zealot; I believe that a proper understanding of our place in regards to the universe is an elusive, but ultimately transcendent, tool. A clearer sense of our position (simultaneously precious and irrelevant) may be the most powerful aftereffect of the space programs of the late 20th century. Simply the image of the planet in perspective, a marble in the void-or, to quote Sagan again, a "mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam"-has altered global culture in ways we've yet to accurately measure.

The writer Frank White, whose essays on the subject of cosmic scale should be canonical, refers to a shift in perspective called the "Overview Effect." White's estimation, supported by accounts from those in the unique position of having seen the Earth from space, is that such an overview has a penetrating, complex effect. It triggers a singular insight: sudden awareness of life's interconnectedness and the frailty of our planet.

For those of us on the ground, gazing up into space can be a mutable experience. To some, it's a horror of the Lovecraftian variety: a deep abyss, out of which some undefinable and eldritch ancientness threateningly emanates. To others, the blackness of space represents a kind of anattā, direct evidence of the non-self. While the former escape to light-polluted urban centers and live their lives in denial of the vast beyond, the latter meditate under the stars. And yet all of us, no matter our impulses, are at least dimly aware of the significance of our planetary position: we hang suspended in an incomprehensible void.

In my interview with Frank White, he pointed out:

"I find it somewhat puzzling that when we talk about problems on Earth, such as the so-called 'population problem,' we never include the dimension of our larger environment, i.e., the solar system and beyond. And when we talk about the 'energy problem,' only a few people are willing to even consider the promise of satellites that could beam solar energy to the Earth. We discuss almost every major human problem as if we were confined to one planet, rather than being on 'Spaceship Earth,' which is a part of the solar system, galaxy, and universe."

I made the video, Greetings from the People of Earth, to be screened at a panel discussion about the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) at the World Science Festival in New York. Aside from serving to remind the audience that American space bureaucracy had once produced an act of remarkably poetic thinking, it was intended to show that the frail human voices strapped to a spaceship aboard the Voyager Golden Record had originated on a spaceship, too: the Earth.

Dr. Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute, who spoke on the World Science Festival panel, often compares the scope of her organization's research to date as being merely one tablespoon of water from the sea. No one would pronounce the ocean devoid of life after inspecting such a small portion; if anything, the ratio inspires hope. My collection of voices from the Voyager Golden Record, juxtaposed with the night skies above their respective nations, is similar: a spoonful of life in the infinite vastness of space. There's still so much left to explore, and one day-perhaps tomorrow, perhaps hundreds of years from now-we might discover a flicker of life, as silvery and pure as a darting fish, in a nearby puddle of the cosmos.

"I read this book. It's pretty good even if they made it in a week. Worth the fifty bucks, easy."

— Bruce Sterling


In February of this year, I had the distinct pleasure of being invited to the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, a zygote of an institution nestled between departments at Carnegie Mellon University, to work on a strange collaborative project called a "booksprint." A booksprint, I discovered, is a fairly new practice, derived from the world of open-source software "codesprints." In this version, a group of writers work exhaustively for a week on a shared project, which is then made into a book at the conclusion of their session. In seven days, our group of sprinters turned an idea—"let's write a book about the intersection between art, science, and technology!" —into a 190-page, full-color, nattily-designed compendium of the current moment in art/science affinities.


The book in its developmental stages.

We wrote collaboratively in shared, networked documents, ensuring that the finished book would have no single author. Of course, we all have our specialities: Régine Debatty the international new media blogger was our encyclopedia of projects, Andrea Grover the project leader our thesis synthesizer, Pablo Garcia the image-hounding art history scholar, and, well, you can see my pawprints all over the sections on science fiction, utopian architecture, and visionary philosophy.

We worked passionately, discussed endlessly, enlisted the research assistance of dozens of interns, and the finished project emerged (relatively) without incident. I still can't believe that a group of erstwhile strangers could so swiftly and seamlessly brainstorm, structure, research, and design something of such substance from nothing.



That said, it's been many months since we left Pittsburgh to return to the hectic pace of our normal lives. What was created in a week has taken nearly a year to fine-tune, but I'm immensely proud to announce that we're finally finished. Behold, NA/SA: New Art/Science Affinities, a book about the intersection between art, science, and technology.

The book includes meditations, interviews, diagrams, letters and manifestos on maker culture, hacking, artist research, distributed creativity, and technological and speculative design. Sixty international artists and art collaboratives are featured, including Agnes Meyer-Brandis, Atelier Van Lieshout, Brandon Ballengée, Free Art and Technology (F.A.T.), Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, The Institute for Figuring, Aaron Koblin, Machine Project, Openframeworks, C.E.B. Reas, Philip Ross, Tomás Saraceno, SymbioticA, Jer Thorp, and Marius Watz. It also has the gall to posit some categories for thinking about art in a scientific context, or vice-versa, breaking up a massive (and by definition undefinable) movement in the arts into functional blocks with poetic names like "Artists in White Coats and Latex Gloves" and "The Overview Effect."

NA/SA was designed as it was written by Jessica Young and Luke Bulman of Thumb Projects. Immeasurable credit is due to them for organizing the endless flow of text into readable, beautiful documents at the end of each workday. To anyone thinking about organizing a booksprint—really, I can't speak enough for the uncanny efficacy of the process, given the right people—consider bringing designers on board from the beginning. Doubtless we would've had an arduous time marshaling our ideas had Thumb not been involved; their approach to layout had us feeling like we were creating a book (as opposed to a giant text file) from day one.

More about the book and its process at Carnegie Mellon University's Miller Gallery website. New Art/Science Affinities can be bought printed on demand at Lulu.com, or you can download a free, full-text PDF of the book right here. I encourage you to browse, study, and print the free PDF, but the tactile book is a joy to hold.

A couple of months ago, I wrote a piece exploring the ideas of the futurist Gerard K. O'Neill, who designed far-out but ultimately quite pragmatic environments for human habitation in space in the mid-1970s. In that article, I touched briefly on the notion of the "Overview Effect," a phrase coined by the writer Frank White to describe the profound insight — characterized by a sudden awareness of life's interconnectedness and the frailty of our planet — experienced by astronauts gazing down at the Earth from space.

Frank White is the author of The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution, a book that has completely changed the way I think about our planet and its position within the larger systems of the Universe. The book is an amalgam of space history, environmentalist philosophy, and starry-eyed futurism; it weaves White's observations about the nature of systems, the future of space travel, global communications, and cosmic spirituality with interviews with dozens of astronauts from all over the world. In short, it should be mandatory reading for all passengers aboard the Spaceship Earth.

Frank White was gracious enough to lend his time and considerable mind to a battery of my questions, the full transcript of which is below. It's long, but I promise it will blow your mind.

[I'm greatly indebted to Jonathan Minard, of deepspeed media and the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University, for his help in brainstorming many of these questions.]

Part One: The End of the Space Age

Universe: Following the retirement of the shuttle program this summer, some have labeled this the "end of the space age." Others argue that it's simply the age of human exploration that's over, and that robots are the path forward. How do you respond to these assessments?

Frank White: I would suggest that both assessments are incorrect. Space exploration is a global enterprise with increasing private involvement, and the end of one program for one national space agency is neither the end of the "space age," nor of human exploration.

Media reports have linked the shuttle program with space exploration in a way that obscures some of the more positive aspects of the new US space policy. For example, it encourages more private investment in space at a time when more private companies, like Virgin Galactic, are making those commitments. It also encourages more international cooperation, extends the life of the International Space Station, and sets our sights on Mars, which many space advocates consider the most logical next objective for human exploration.

The dichotomy between human and robotic exploration is also unnecessary. The two complement one another, especially if we want to not only explore but also begin to create human communities off the Earth. It is not an either/or choice.

Universe: The establishment of permanent habitation in space is no longer a question of technical feasibility, but political and social will. There are those who believe humans must explore space to avoid extinction and those who deem it foolish to waste resources on projects distracting us from our responsibilities at home. How do you see the two sides of the argument for and against space settlement?

Frank White: I understand the two sides of the argument, but I consider human evolution to be the imperative behind our expansion into the universe, and I think it will continue. By this, I mean evolution in terms of politics, sociology, economics, and other aspects of human society, not just biology. The key to the question is, "What do we consider our home?" If it is the solar system and beyond, then space settlement is not a distraction. And even if our home is the Earth alone, there are many elements of space exploration and settlement that have already been beneficial to the Earth. For example, most people would agree that the Overview Effect triggered or at least enhanced the environmental impulse. This has proven to be beneficial to the Earth in ways that would have been difficult to predict in advance. The same can be said of how the Overview Effect has influenced our views on war and peace, also to the benefit of the people on Earth.

I find it somewhat puzzling that when we talk about problems on Earth, such as the so-called "population problem," we never include the dimension of our larger environment, i.e., the solar system and beyond. And when we talk about the "energy problem," only a few people are willing to even consider the promise of satellites that could beam solar energy to the Earth. We discuss almost every major human problem as if we were confined to one planet, rather than being on "Spaceship Earth," which is a part of the solar system, galaxy, and universe.

Universe: Are the goals of caring for the biosphere on the one hand, and on the other of establishing artificial ecospheres in space, necessarily mutually exclusive?

Frank White: No...this is a choice as well. In my book, I talk about the Human Space Program as a "central project" for all of humanity. It involves establishing a planetary civilization with a high priority on protecting the biosphere as well as a commitment to exploring the universe as a global (rather than national) enterprise. The Human Space Program could become a unifying force for humanity as we expand beyond Earth. We can create any future that we choose to create as a species. Caring for the biosphere can be in conflict with creating new ecospheres, or the two goals can be in harmony with one another.



Part Two: The Whole Earth Image

Universe: Do you think the Overview Effect might be less potent for a generation of people raised on the "Earthrise" image, which by now has been reduced to a symbol? Would a second generation of voyagers need to travel further afield to experience the same impact as the original Apollo astronauts did — is it just the shock of the utterly new perspective that jars us, or something essential about seeing the home planet?

Frank White: Here, it depends on what we mean by Overview Effect, i.e., is it a seeing a picture or is it having a direct experience? As my colleague at the Overview Institute, David Beaver, points out, the two are not the same, and we have perhaps been lulled into believing that they are. In my book, I quote one of the astronauts (Alan Shepard) pointing out that he had studied many pictures before he flew, but nothing could have prepared him for what he actually saw. I personally recall the moment when the Apollo 8 crew turned their camera back to show us the Earth, and the impact was tremendous. So pictures and videos did have an enormous impact in the 1960s that perhaps is not the same today. However, I believe that the direct experience and high-quality simulations of it will still be powerful, even for the younger generations who take Apollo missions and Earthrise for granted.

I should also mention something that Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell pointed out to me when I interviewed him for my book: those who are most open to the experience will benefit the most from it.

Part Three: "We Are One Species With One Destiny"

Universe: Do you believe it's necessary for us all to experience the Overview Effect for ourselves? What would happen if everyone on Earth had chance to undergo this experience? How would our culture be changed?

Frank White: I would like so see as many as people as possible have the experience, either directly or through simulations. According to innovation theory, you only need about 20 percent of a population to adopt an innovation to create significant change, so I don't think everyone needs to have the experience to trigger a paradigm shift. Once that occurs, I believe we would be much more environmentally aware, see ourselves more as citizens of the universe, rather than of different nations, and be far more committed to building a peaceful planetary civilization. I suspect that if astronauts' experiences are any guide, those who have the experience directly will also want to go back into space.

Universe: The Overview Effect is often compared to spiritual experience, to the altered states of consciousness experienced by people in various modes of spiritual trance or religious ecstasy. Do you see a relationship between the Overview Effect and more terrestrial transcendence? Is the Overview Effect a shortcut to a state it might take a meditator a lifetime to achieve? Further, if these distinctions are blurred, is space a religion?

Frank White: This is an area of great misunderstanding, in my opinion, and it is something that I covered in some detail in my book. There is nothing automatically spiritual about going into Low Earth Orbit or to the moon, any more than there is anything automatic about going into a great cathedral. In both settings, there is certainly an opportunity for a spiritual experience, but no guarantee, and I don't think it is a shortcut to the kind of permanent transcendence that a meditator might achieve. One of the astronauts whom I interviewed for my book (Don Lind) specifically took issue with the idea that going into space is a religious experience, and I dealt with that at some length.



We find that when the Overview Effect is characterized as a euphoric experience that produces an epiphany, it is most often linked with Edgar Mitchell's Apollo 14 flight. Edgar is a member of the Overview Group and is an advocate of better understanding of the Overview Effect, so he is definitely connected with the Overview Effect.

In writing my book, I was so impressed with his description of his experience that I gave it a different name, i.e., the Universal Insight. While the Universal Insight is similar to and related to the Overview Effect, in that it is a change in awareness that results from space exploration, it is different in that it refers to an identity of oneness with the universe, rather than the planet.

Those of us working on this issue at the Overview Institute think that a shift in cognitive understanding regarding the Earth is by far the more common experience. For example, the realization that there are no borders or boundaries on the Earth seems typical, as does heightened environmental awareness.

Universe: Some scholarship suggests that so-called "near-death," or "out of body" experiences can be effectively triggered by gravity-induced loss of consciousness. Does the Overview Effect have a relationship to gravity, or any other physical force?

Frank White: Yes, it is definitely related to zero gravity. While we have focused our attention primarily on the view of the Earth from space and in space, the fact that this perspective happens while the person is in zero gravity is an integral part of the experience. Most of the astronauts I interviewed for my book commented on the lack of gravity as being central to the uniqueness of their experience. In fact, one of them, Charlie Walker, specifically related the lack of gravity to the feeling of euphoria that he and other astronauts did have in orbit. We need to conduct more studies of this aspect of the Overview Effect.

Universe: The Overview Effect has, by virtue of our space programs' inherent brevity, only been experienced as a short-term revelation. How do you imagine the Effect might manifest, develop, or sustain in an individual living in a space colony or station for an extended period of time? In someone born in space?

Frank White: That question actually began my quest to understand the Overview Effect. As I recount in the book, I was flying cross-country and gazing out the window at a time when I was extremely interested in O'Neill's space settlement ideas. It occurred to me that people living in space settlements would always have an "overview." They would know intuitively what philosophers and sages have been trying to tell us for millennia: we are one species with one destiny. The borders and boundaries we draw on our planet are really in our minds, not on the Earth itself. After that flight, I resolved to write the book, and to interview as many astronauts as possible, to determine if there was indeed, an "Overview Effect."

The Effect is clearly going to be stronger for a person who has spent more time experiencing it, and especially someone born in space. They are clearly going to have far less of an identity with places on the surface of the Earth, and they are also likely to experience the next stages in evolution in consciousness, which I call the "Copernican Perspective" (identification with the solar system) and "Universal Insight" (identification with the universe).

Universe: Do you believe that there's a teleological argument to be made to explain humanity's diaspora into deep space? Does nature preordain us to become spacefaring?

Frank White: I have no scientific or empirical evidence for this, but I do think human beings are predisposed to explore, and I have called it the "exploration imperative" elsewhere. I link that with evolution, because evolution happens when a species explores. Biologically, it occurs when a species is isolated from the main gene pool so that mutations can gain a foothold. I think the same thing can be said for social evolution, as we see with settlements in North America, South America, and Australia. New political forms and social norms evolved as a result of exploration and settlement in those cases.

More generally, I have advanced the "Cosma Hypothesis," which is a broader version of the "Gaia Hypothesis." By that, I mean that if the Earth is a living system (Gaia) then so is the universe (Cosma). As humans move out into the universe and evolve, then the universe evolves. Insofar as we are part of an evolutionary process, there is a teleological basis for space exploration. Perhaps we are designed to spread life and mind where life and mind are scarce.

I would also mention that this has been another "aha moment" for me. I have come to realize that we usually tend to justify space exploration in terms of how it benefits humanity. I believe we should also ask ourselves how it benefits the universe as a whole. As we have become more environmentally aware, we have gone from exploiting the Earth to thinking that we ought to care for it and be good stewards of it. If we had that attitude toward the larger environment of the universe, it would be much easier to justify.

[Mr. White would like to emphasize he speaks for myself as author of The Overview Effect, rather than on behalf of the Overview Institute.)

Learn More:

Frank White is cofounder and project manager of the The Overview Institute, a nonprofit organization that seeks to share the experience of the Overview Effect with as many people on Earth as possible. The Institute's "Overview Declaration" is worth reading.

Mushrooms and their mycelium are quiet allies that are essential for our healthy existence. They are enigmatic, have a sense of humor, and socially as well as spiritually, bond together all that admire them. They have much to teach us.
-Paul Stamets

If the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of the Transcendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from the sense of self a part of nature's larger whole.
-Terrence McKenna

A few weeks ago, I was sitting at my kitchen table, having coffee, when I suddenly noticed a new development in my bonsai plant. At the foot of the pygmy pine was sprouting, of all things, a mushroom. The physical recoil this realization triggered in me is beyond description. I nearly spilled my drink in my impulse to first spring away — then draw towards — this fungus. How had this happened? My god, how do mushrooms work?

As it turns out, the soil of my potted bonsai was rich with mycelium. Mycelium is the fungal "root," if you will, the vegetative body of the organism, which can net, spread, propagate, and convey nutrients over great distances, eventually sprouting fruiting bodies — mushrooms. This meant that no matter how many little brown mushrooms I plucked out of my houseplant, more popped into place. Thus began my journey into mycophilia.

Being a fickle bedroom hobbyist, I sacrificed the bonsai, relinquishing 1,000 years of Japanese history to my fungal visitor. After all, what is more ancient, more venerable, than a mushroom? Fungi were the first organisms to come to land, and survived the cataclysmic asteroid impacts of geological history — visitors to our planet 420 million years ago would have encountered a landscape dominated by 30-foot-tall prototaxites, fungal pillars dwarfing the surrounding landscape. And, lest you think this kind of cyclopean 'shroom has gone the way of the dinosaurs, the largest known organism on our planet today is a 2,400-year old, 2,200 acre honey mushroom mycelium in Eastern Oregon.

Furthermore, we're more closely related to these behemoths than you might imagine: even though the animal kingdom branched off from its fungal counterpart some 600 million years ago, we still share over half our DNA with fungi. Historically, culturally, and biologically, we are incredibly close to mushrooms. That closeness can be exploited to our benefit: many powerful antibiotics against bacteria come from fungi, while anti-fungal antibiotics tend to harm us, precisely because of our intimately interlinked relationship with mushrooms. Some scientists posit reorganizing traditional biological classification to include a animalia-fungi superkingdom called "Opisthokontum."

Far-out scholar Terrence McKenna, in his book Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge, took this connection further, arguing that the so-called missing link between our ancestors and language-using, symbol-toting Homo Sapiens (or Homo Spiritualis, as he puts it) is not an evolutionary phase but an interaction with entheogens — namely, "magic" mushrooms. McKenna argued that early man, foraging for food in the African grasslands, would have inevitably consumed varieties of fungal hallucinogen, triggering the semiotically complex transcendence (and the various perceptual advantages) of the psychedelic experience. It's this psychosymbiotic mingling with the "vegetable mind" of the natural world that triggered those things which separate us from the animals: use of symbols, language, ritual, and abstract representation. Over centuries, this experience would have been ritualized, this dip into the howling Tao codified; what remains today are merely symbols, hidden in plain sight in many of the religious traditions of the world. This theory, now dubbed the "Stoned Ape Theory of Human Evolution," is fascinating — and I whole-heartedly recommend McKenna's book, which is essentially a natural history of the human relationship to drugs.

American mycologist Paul Stamets, in his 2008 TED Talk, Six Ways Mushrooms Can Save the World, argues that the structure of mycelium is a neuromicrological network with universal properties. In the image below, I've placed an electron micrograph of fungal mycelium next to an image of dark matter. Beneath that, a visualization of the network structure of the Internet by Hal Burch and Bill Cheswick, courtesy of Lumeta Corporation.





Can you tell the difference?

Stamets, who calls mycelium "Earth's Natural Internet," puts it this way:

I believe the invention of the computer Internet is an inevitable consequence of a previously proven biologically successful model. The earth invented the computer internet for its own benefit, and we, now, being the top organism on this planet, [are] trying to allocate resources in order to protect the biosphere.

Going way out, dark matter conforms to the same mycelial archetype. I believe matter begets life, life becomes single cells, single cells become strings, strings become chains, chains network. And this is the paradigm that we see throughout the universe.

Stamets, being a mycologist, understands the fundamental structure of information, of the physical universe itself, as adhering to a "mycelial archetype." To him, everything is mushroom — while McKenna, his visionary counterpart, reads the history of human culture through a mycophilic lens. Of course, both men experimented extensively with the mental states associated with ritualized consumption of a certain variety of mushroom, but this shouldn't lessen the impact of their profound, macrocosmic reading of the humble fungus (although it's interesting to think of mushrooms as doing their own psychedelic PR).

Mycelium, an intertwined network of cells permeating virtually all land masses of Earth, is not something to take lightly. It literally engulfs the soil beneath us in a sentient web, rising up beneath our footsteps, hungry for nutrients. There is something beautiful and horrifying, ancient and keenly technological about these organisms, a complexity it may take a psychedelically-informed, non-institutional mind to fully appreciate.

In any case, it beats a tiny tree.

"All things move and nothing remains still" — Heraclitus



The history of astronomy can be read as a story of better and better vision. Over the centuries, we have supplemented our vision with technology that allows us to see further and more clearly; while ancient astronomers, who relied only on their naked eyes to perceive the universe, managed to make star catalogues and predict comets, Galileo, pressing his to a telescope, saw all the way to the moons of Jupiter.

Optical telescopes and the human eye are fundamentally limited; early astronomers were forced to gaze into telescopes for hours on end, waiting for moments of visual stillness long enough to allow them to quickly sketch drawings of the features they were simultaneously trying to understand. Between a telescope (incidentally, "telescope" is Greek for "far-seeing") and the celestial bodies beyond, the Earth's atmosphere itself is in turbulence, the optical refractive index bleary — which presented early astronomers with a view of the universe that was blurred, twinkling, always in flux. This is because the sky is not transparent. Thermal currents passing through the Earth's atmosphere cause air density (and hence the refractive index of air) to vary, to warble like a desert mirage. Light does not pass through this unaffected. Quite the opposite, in fact — thermal currents are like thousands of lenses floating around in the air. We call this phenomenon "astronomical seeing," and it's why stars sparkle, why even the moon seems to be swimming in water when peered at through an optical telescope.

It wasn't long before Galileo and his fellows had seen as far as their technology — and their vision — could reach. In the years to follow, new far-seeing tools popped up as needed: X-ray telescopes, gamma ray telescopes, high-energy particle telescopes, even telescopes floating in space. As time progressed and our science grew more refined, we tried wavelengths previously unnoticed; we paid attention to new qualities; when we thought we'd seen it all, we looked again, our vision evolving beyond biology as we began to "see" with technology.

The inevitable result was that though the physical universe never changed, we did, because we looked differently.



This different-looking triggered perhaps the most important conceptual leap in the science of the 20th century: the realization that there is more to reality to what can be seen. The years between 1880 and 1930* saw massive upheavals in the way science was conducted — during this period, we moved from the strict empiricism of Newton to the reliance on unobservable and theoretical constructs that dominates the discipline today. We began to peer into previously unseen worlds; we parsed the structure of the atom and discovered elementary particles. Once we were there, our physics no longer had bearing. We needed to invent and codify new ways of seeing, ways not dictated by observable phenomena; and so our understanding of time and space gave way to general and special relativity, quantum mechanics, and alternative geometries. The intellectual legacy of this radical change — and its relevance to my point here — is in the primacy it lends to subjectivity, to not only the instruments of seeing, but those who peer into them.

Astronomy, too, zygoted in the early 20th century. Photography solved the problem of hand-drawing findings between patches of blurry sky. Infrared, radio, X-ray, and finally gamma-ray astronomy came to prominence, filling our coffers with surreal images of a previously invisible world. We used spectroscopy to study stars; our sun was found to be part of a galaxy, and the existence of other galaxies was settled by the great Edwin Hubble, who identified many others, rapidly receding from our own, at impossibly large distances. We created the model of the Big Bang. We stumbled upon cosmic microwave background radiation. All of a sudden, the story of the universe as we knew it vaulted out of the visual world and into a rich and million years-long narrative of unseen forces and galaxies so distant they bordered on theoretical abstractions. Like science itself, visual perception of the cosmos evolved from the physical to the theoretical; when we speak of "seeing" astronomical images, we're talking about a highly mediated experience, captured by mechanical sensing devices, where invisible qualities are color-coded into something the human eye can register as information.

The eye is almost universally a symbol of intellectual perception; in Taoism, in Shinto, in the Bhagavad Gītā, the eyes are the sun and moon. Is it any wonder that the ancients conflated astronomy and astrology? That those who look out at the universe have so often been mystics, seekers, and seers? We speak of "visionaries" in all fields as people who are capable of seeing furthest — beyond the blurred intermediary of the physical world and straight to the heavens.


Optical, radio, X-ray, and WMAP all-sky images. Images via online sources, animated GIF by yours truly.

*As an interdisciplinary aside: this period was simultaneous with the rise of modernism and abstraction in the arts. Could this movement from the pragmatic and visible to the invisible and conceptual be attributed to a common zeitgeist? Could it be that the early 20th century saw an unprecedented amount of cross-pollination between the arts and sciences, leading to a moment of cultural fertility?

Ed: This is an essay I wrote for my friends at the World Science Festival, riffing on the central themes of this years' event. If you prefer, you can also read this piece on the World Science Festival site. And, if you're in New York between the first and fifth of June, you could do much worse than popping into the Festival and getting a load of panel discussions like The Dark Side of the Universe, or Science & Story: The Art of Communicating Science Across All Media.



Science communication is difficult.

It can be crippled by the complexity of its own subject matter. It can be steeped in jargon, too dense for its readership, or, conversely, too simplistic to satisfy its critics in the scientific community. It can lack warmth, or be too paranoid about its empirical rigor to engage in the metaphoric flights — the quick shifts from microcosm to macrocosm — that cue readers to an emotional engagement in any subject. The problem may lie in an inescapable tautology: to fully understand a scientific, taxonomic, objective conception of the natural world is to be so steeped in scientific idiom that poetics become impossible.

And yet, there are those who are capable of communicating the invisible phenomena of science to the public. These people are essentially bilingual. The Sagans, the deGrasse Tysons, the E.O Wilsons; Angier, Attenborough, Carson and Greene; the radio producers, writers, filmmakers, documentarians, and public speakers; these are our human bridges, our storytellers, fluent in both big and small. It's a specific skill, to be a gifted science communicator — that rare person who can straddle two divergent worlds without slipping into the void between the so-called "Two Cultures," someone with hard facts in their mind and literary gems in their rhetoric. They must accomplish the humanization of abstract ideas without pandering, make science poetry without kitsch. Even at their best, they can be silly — think of Carl Sagan, in his burgundy turtleneck, proclaiming, "in order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." It may seem absurd to draw such a huge subject down to Earth in such a literal way, but what Sagan taps into is the necessity of these seemingly silly flourishes.



See, science is big. It's driven by the desire to understand everything!

The immensity of such a project necessitates that science be undertaken not by one group of men and women in one time, but all men and women for all time. The final goal always eludes us: to understand this, we must first understand this, but to understand that, we must understand this, ad infinitum. Scientific knowledge is won by climbing the shoulders of giants; but these giants are a never-ending stack of matryoshka dolls. In fact, the very notion of there being a final point in science has become so abstract as to be almost irrelevant; the more we know, the more we know that we do not know, and the end of the game is nowhere to be seen. And, perhaps, there is no end game.

To a scientist, this endless narrative satisfies. The balance of properties and theories that define the natural world, the physical Universe, or the underpinnings of mathematical reality are elegant and stirring; knowledge, and the search for more of it, is a raison d'être. For those of us not wired the same way, the greater narrative of science can be overwhelming, if not inscrutable. We need stories with beginnings, middles, and ends. We need things to relate to, objects to hold onto, characters to laugh and cry with. We need to synthesize abstract ideas through allegories, metaphors, and images.

Popular science communication is defined by such literary gestures. For years, students of astronomy struggled with the concept of an expanding universe without a center (a notion which violently bucks against reason). Cosmologists, however, came up with an image — a metaphor — which lightens the load: imagine that the universe is an expanding balloon, and the stars and objects in space are dots drawn on the surface of this balloon. From any one star's vantage point, all the other objects in space are moving away from it, but without any perceivable pattern. The more distant points would appear to be moving faster. Apart from being a devastatingly simple image that conveys more information that entire astronomy textbooks, it's also an elegant metaphor. It accomplishes the same things as the most successful of literary metaphors: a world of feeling and information, the very chaos of physical reality, in one image. It translates profound abstraction (the universe) into something we can imagine holding in our hands (a balloon).



Good science communication molds complex ideas into human-scale stories. It turns a discussion of the cosmos' impossible scale into inflating balloons. Or into Sagan, sitting at his dinner table like a medieval king in corduroy, a steaming apple pie at the ready.

The moon is a rock.

But it's also Selene, Artemis, Diana, Isis, the lunar deities; an eldritch clock by which we measure our growth and fertility; home of an old man in the West and a rabbit in the East; the site of countless imaginary voyages; a long-believed trigger of lunacy (luna...see?). It's another world, close enough to our to peer down at us; to it, we compose sonatas. It can be blue, made of cheese, a harvest moon; we've long fantasized about its dark side, perhaps dotted with black monoliths or inhabited by flying men.

The moon is a totem of great importance in all religions and traditions; in astrology, it stands for all those things which make this fine scienceblogs readership develop facial tics: the unconscious, parapsychology, dreams, imagination, the emotional world, all that is shifting and ephemeral. According to the Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, as the light of the moon is merely a reflection of the light of the sun, "the Moon is the symbol of knowledge acquired through reflection, that is, theoretical or conceptual knowledge."

All of this to say that while the moon is a rock, it's also an idea.

And, as an idea, it appeals to artists. The moon, however, remains beyond the reach of artists by virtue of what makes it interesting to them: namely, its moon-ness, a perfect storm of mystery, opacity, and unreachability.



So just how do you implement the moon in your practice when it's 240,000 miles away? As an artist, how do you stake a claim somewhere inside of the patriotic military-industrial research bureaucracy that controls the purse strings, and thus access to our nearest celestial bodies? There doesn't seem to be a direct entry. If you're part of the original Moon Museum posse, you go in the back door, sneaking your work illicitly onto the heels of a lunar lander. If you're Belgian artist Paul Van Hoeydonck, you meet astronaut David Scott at a dinner party.

Van Hoeydonck is responsible for the only piece of art on the moon, a tiny memorial sculpture called "Fallen Astronaut." The piece is interesting for several reasons. For one, it presents us with a clear understanding of the kinds of technical limitations that moon artists must work under. Limitations, of course, can be instrumental to an artist's practice — a broke Basquiat painted on window frames and cabinet doors — but space art's parameters border on the draconian. In the design of the piece, Van Hoeydonck was restricted to materials that were both lightweight and sturdy, as well capable of withstanding extreme temperatures. Since it was to be a memorial to deceased astronauts, it couldn't be identifiably male or female, nor of any ethnic group. The somewhat questionable result: what looks like a metal Lego lying face-down on Mons Hadley.

Like the Moon Museum, Fallen Astronaut was an unofficial venture; the statuette was smuggled aboard the Apollo 15 lunar module by the astronauts themselves — Scott and Jim Irwin — without the knowledge of NASA officials. Its "installation" was unorthodox: in laying down the sculpture and its accompanying plaque, Irwin and Scott performed a private ceremony on the lunar surface. "We just thought we'd recognize the guys that made the ultimate contribution," Scott later said. Notable: "the guys" include eight American and six Soviet astronauts, a surprisingly apolitical act of solidarity in the midst of the Cold War.



Scott and Irwin were committed to the sanctity of their memorial; when Scott plopped the piece onto the lunar dust, Irwin covered the act with inane radio chatter to Mission Control, and they didn't announce the memorial until after their return to Earth. Even then, the astronauts kept Van Hoeydonck's name private, hoping to avoid any commercial exploitation of the piece. Van Hoeydonck, undoubtedly hoping to further his career, later violated the unspoken sacredness of Fallen Astronaut by attempting, in 1972, to sell hundreds of signed replicas of the piece at $750 a pop. We'd all recoil in horror if Maya Lin tried the same thing with the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial, but I'm almost tempted to give Van Hoeydonck a pass. After all, the Fallen Astronaut itself is just a totem, and a toylike one at that.

I see this story as something of an inversion of the usual artist-scientist dialectic. Van Hoeydonck, here, was essentially an engineer. All he did was design a tin man to technical specifications, but it was Scott and Irwin who made the visionary decision to perform an unnecessary act of beauty on the chunk of rock orbiting our own. It was the astronauts who snuck the statuette all the way to the moon and secretly installed it. They understood that beyond being a rock, the moon is an idea, and that actions performed on the moon by human beings are instantly imbued with meaning, historical significance, and some kind of indefinable holiness. Scott, Irwin and NASA balked at Van Hoeydonck's commercial enterprise, and the artist eventually retracted it, instead donating various replicas of Fallen Astronaut to museums and keeping the rest to himself, un-monetized.

While it's ordinarily the artists who defend the formal importance of ideas for their own sake, on Apollo 15 it was, well, not the scientists — but the military-trained, engineer-pilot, non-artist astronauts who did. Which perhaps goes to show that the experience of space, the perspective-altering transcendence of the so-called "overview effect," ultimately turns us all into poets.

This is the first in a series of posts about art, the moon, and art on the moon. You would think this would be a fairly limited subject, but...



Art on the moon has been happening for a long time.

In 1969, a coterie of American contemporary artists devised a plan to put an art museum on the Moon. When NASA's official channels proved too dauntingly bureaucratic, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, David Novros, Forrest "Frosty" Myers, Claes Oldenburg, and John Chamberlain weren't deterred. Instead, they managed to sneak their "museum" — in reality a minuscule enamel wafer inscribed with six tiny drawings — onto the leg of the Apollo 12 mission's landing module, Intrepid. Of course, NASA has no official record of this intervention, but the New York Times ran the story several days after Apollo 12 took off.

The museum, which looks like a paleo-modern computer chip, includes a drawing of a wavy line, courtesy of Rauschenberg, a doodle of a mouse by Oldenburg, John Chamberlain's template pattern, and a piece by Warhol that the Times in '69 called a "a calligraphic squiggle made up of the initials of his signature," but is obviously a penis.



It seems to me that the artistry of this "museum" is as much about the gesture of sneaking it, illicitly, onto the leg of the lunar lander, as it is about the drawings themselves. The Moon Museum is a cosmic happening, an outer-space intervention, a performance piece with no human (or Selenite) witnesses. Whether or not it even exists is a point of contention; it bears a mystique that an official NASA presence would have irrevocably squelched. Which is perhaps what separates artists from those who seek the cosmos for scientific or technological reasons. To them, the objective may not necessarily be about the quest for knowledge, but rather the desire to play with and articulate Mystery, capital-M. Space inspires awe, feeling, and perspective — the currency of the arts.

As much as the fierce nationalism of space history would suggest otherwise, space also belongs to no one. No nation, no species, and no ideological subcategory of humanity. Obviously astronomers, scientists and engineers have had the most serious crack at the interpretation of the vast impersonal Universe beyond our atmosphere — but mystics, myth-makers, and shamans were at it for centuries beforehand. Of course the prevailing rhetoric since the Enlightenment has been to distance the rational sanctity of science from the taxonomy-barren mish-mash that came before it, but our interdisciplinary age, it seems, should allow us to appreciate the importance of one without devaluing the other. This isn't a new idea: even NASA gave Laurie Anderson an artists' residency.

As we expand our boundaries beyond the limits of our planet, the idea of "Moon Arts" or "Space Arts" won't seem any more sci-fi than regular old Terrestrial Art. Reality is fodder for exploration and creativity, so who's to say that artists, once they secure passage to orbit, the moon, Mars, and beyond, shouldn't have as much of a say in our understanding of space as the people who sent them there?

Footnote:

Incidentally, the Moon Museum wasn't the only rogue intervention on the Apollo 12 Mission. Pranksters back at Cape Canaveral snuck laminated, fire-proof Playboy Centerfolds into astronauts' Al Bean and Pete Conrad's checklist booklets. The bunnies, which had captions like "Seen any interesting hills and valleys?" and "Survey — her activity," were the first American women in space.