In 2004, some robotics geeks and sci-fi fans built a functional robotic likeness of Philip K. Dick. It looked like Dick, dressed like Dick, and was completely autonomous. Capable of operating without the intervention of its makers, it could track people coming in and out of a room with face-recognition software, greeting those it knew. It could listen to conversation, and, using complex algorithms, could respond verbally using speech synthesis.

This “robotic portrait” was as much an art project as it was a feat of engineering. For several years, the android made public appearances — at conferences, comic conventions, Artificial Intelligence organizations, and so forth. In 2006, it mysteriously disappeared in transit to Mountain View, California, where it was to meet with some Google employees. Speculation abounded. Horrified, I imagined the android out in the world, having a hellish time of consciousness. Strange and poetic as it was, the story could have ended here.

And yet, the Philip K. Dick android has now been rebuilt. Behold!

The new android is being referred to as “New Phil.” Its vanished predecessor, “Old Phil.” To recap: a man who spends his career writing about about androids dies. Twenty years later, an android is made in his image, effectively bringing him back to life. That android disappears. A new one is built; at this point we’re three degrees of separation from the original. I can’t help but fantasize about a future model (New New New Phil?) becoming self-aware, and immediately being convinced that he is the real, original Phil. I mean, it literally reads like an actual Philip K. Dick story — life imitating art, imitating life.

The brain-boggling postmodern meta-irony is not lost on its makers, thankfully. On translating this particular writer — and not, say, Arthur C. Clarke or Isaac Asimov — into an android, they explain, “An android of Philip K. Dick is a sort of paradox. It’s certainly what Hofstader would call a ‘tangled hierarchy.’ This is something that you don’t get by making an android out of any other science fiction writer.” They point out that Dick didn’t just write about androids; he wrote about people thinking they were androids, or androids thinking they were people, and everything in between. The terrible crux of Dick’s canon often hinges on the question, “what is the difference between being human, and being programmed to believe you are human?”

Still, it’s hard to guess what Dick, who died in 1982, might have thought of his robotic likeness. In a 1975 essay called, “Man, Android, and Machine,” he wrote:

“Within the universe there exist fierce cold things, which I have given the name ‘machines’ to. Their behavior frightens me, especially if it imitates human behavior so well that I get the uncomfortable sense that these things are trying to pass themselves off as humans but are not. I call them ‘androids,’ which is my own way of using that word. By ‘android’ I do not mean a sincere attempt to create in the laboratory a human being. I mean a thing somehow generated to deceive us in a cruel way, to cause us to think it to be one of ourselves. Made in a laboratory — that aspect is not meaningful to me; the entire universe is one vast laboratory, and out of it come sly and cruel entities which smile as they reach out to shake hands. But their handshake is the grip of death, and their smile has the coldness of the grave.”

Would New Phil — or for that matter, Old Phil — embody this “coldness of the grave” to his namesake? I can’t help but think of Jack Bohlen, in Martian Time-Slip, servicing the simulacra in his son’s school and having schizoid episodes where he believes that every person is secretly a machine, a mechanism. The profound sense of disconnect that this vision lends to his reality, the Philip K. Dick android does to me.

Dick’s books have been endlessly adapted to the screen, and yet this bearded machine does more to bring the philosophical mise-en-abyme of his work alive than any number of Darryl Hannahs or Arnold Schwarzeneggers (be they lurking in rainy alleyways or gun-fighting in the red-tinged Martian atmosphere) ever could. I mean, it is Philip K. Dick: both visually and theoretically. It’s a physical embodiment of everything he feared, loved, rhapsodized on, got paranoid about. It’s a “living” paradox; it’s science-fiction reality, a powerfully strange sculpture.

A few months ago, I went to Cyborg Camp in my hometown of Portland, Oregon. Cyborg Camp is an "unconference," basically a room full of cyberpunks, mega-nerds, and aspirational coders that gather in an office building to talk about the "future of the relationship between humans and technology." This event deserves a separate entry, but for now I'd like to recall a particularly evocative thing: that the most heartbreaking thing I saw at Cyborg Camp was an adult man hopelessly tangled in a web of cables.

It was his own off-the-shelf wearable computing system, a gordian thing connecting his outdated Windows smartphone to a pair of personal video glasses via an unwieldy battery pack in his shorts. He was trying to show it off an audience eager to learn about "DIY Wearable Computing." Unfortunately, it was like watching a third-grader thread his mittens through his winter jacket sleeves.

"Talk about first world problems," I heard him mutter.

His computer system-cum-outfit was shitty. It was shitty in the way that most things light-years ahead of their time are shitty, because the rush to make them into reality precludes aesthetics. People dedicated to developing new technolgies are largely interested in them working — they can worry about looking good later. As a rule, technology is born ugly, then gets refined: compare the first Apple computers to the blemish-less glass of an iPad screen.

Wearable headset computers don't really exist to anyone but the people who actively wish for them; those people take matters into their own hands with Sharper Image and Made-in-China techno-junk. Such tangled-cable DIY cyborg hacks are entirely about function, and usually have no concern for design. That blind adherence to pragmatism may even be the defining characteristic of geek fashion. Technical sandals, video glasses, and LED-rigged shoelaces are functional and hideous, whereas fashion ("real" fashion, whatever that means) is beautiful and useless.

The point of this meandering introduction is that we are rapidly approaching an age where this general rule is no longer rock-solid. Consider the Emotiv EPOC. This is an actual, purchasable product: a "neuro-signal acquisition and processing wireless neuroheadset." When donned atop your dome, the headset's sensors tune into electric signals produced by your brain, effectively detecting your thoughts, feelings and expressions and allowing you to control a computer with your mind.

[Pause for effect]



This is the first commercially-available device of its kind. It is insanely ahead of its time. Have you ever even heard the word "neuroheadset" before?

And yet, the Emotiv EPOC neuroheadset is pretty beautiful. It's not an insane mess of multi-colored wires and scary-looking electrodes; it doesn't even have any wires at all — it connects wirelessly to your computer via a USB dongle. All things considered, it looks more like an expensive pair of headphones than a device that can read your mind.



The EPOC has three different ways of sensing your mental intent. The simplest is that it can monitor facial expressions. This means you can smile and your computer will automatically insert a smiley-face into your chat, for example. It has a gyroscope in the headpiece as well, so you can move your cursor by moving your head. Lastly, it can sense brainwaves — but to do that, you have to map the device to your particular mind by using crazy biofeedback software, concentrating on the idea of "left," "right," or "forward" (etc.) while looking at an orange 3D cube on your screen, while the EPOC analyzes your brain activity for each command. After this mapping is finished, EPOC users can ostensibly play Pong or Tetris telepathically.

As it turns out, however, the EPOC doesn't upset the beautiful-ugly, functional-useless dialectic much: the amount more beautiful it is than most first-generation technologies is about even with the amount less that it is functional. It's getting tepid reviews from realists, who argue that the EPOC is not the "mass market device for people looking for a turnkey telekinesis solution" that everyone hoped it might be. Rather, "it's an expensive toy for people to experiment with" and — despite being totally cool — is basically useless.

Regardless, the EPOC is catnip for nerds. If there had been one at Cyborg Camp, it would certainly have been the star of the show — regardless of whether or not it was a nice-looking object. After all, sitting in the conference room at Cyborg Camp, my most prevalent thought wasn't about the disproportionate presence of dorky video glasses and technical sandals, but one of slightly apprehensive wonder: "shit, these people are the future of everything." In my mind, the clout of the future is not wealth, but ability to navigate an increasingly digital world (as Douglas Rushkoff says, "program or be programmed").



We'll probably all be wearing computers in five years. And just as Luxxotica is making personal 3D glasses for rich people and even Karl Lagerfeld compares Facebook to Brancusi, there will be high-end neuroheadsets being made and modeled at Paris Fashion Week by athletic models in circuit board stilettos.

Talk about first world problems, right?

In case you didn't know, reality is science fiction.

If you doubt me, read the news. Read, for example, this recent article in the New York Times about Carnegie Mellon's "Read the Web" program, in which a computer system called NELL (Never Ending Language Learner) is systematically reading the internet and analyzing sentences for semantic categories and facts, essentially teaching itself idiomatic English as well as educating itself in human affairs. Paging Vernor Vinge, right?

NELL reads the Web 24 hours a day, seven days a week, learning language like a human would — cumulatively, over a long period of time. It parses text on the Internet for ontological categories, like "plants," "music" and "sports teams," then uses contextual clues to sort out what things belong in which categories, like "Nirvana is a grunge band" (see below) and "Peyton Manning plays for the Indianapolis Colts."



In its self-taught exploration of Internet English, NELL is 87 percent correct. And the more it learns, the more accurate it will become. According to a paper called "Toward an Architecture for Never-Ending Language Learning," NELL has two tasks: to read, and to learn from that reading — to "learn to read better each day than the day before...go[ing] back to yesterday's text sources and extract[ing] more information more accurately."

Like the premise of a dystopian sci-fi story, Read the Web is wonderful-terrifying. Wonderful, because we've designed a computer to teach itself, because it's a case study in life-long learning, and because the results will certainly be useful. Terrifying because it's difficult to look at a massive computer coming up accurate pronouncements like "bliss is an emotion" without feeling a shudder of horrible gravitas. That said, I am shuttering my fearmongering sci-fi mind and embracing NELL's mission, just one in a fascinating new field of research aimed at helping computers understand human language, using the Web as a key linguistic resource. The idea of a "Semantic Web," an Internet as comprehensible to computers as it is to humans, has been in the computer science and AI discourse for years, with good old Sir Tim Berners-Lee carrying the leading torch. In a 2001 article for Scientific American, Berners-Lee wrote that "this structure will open up the knowledge and workings of humankind to meaningful analysis by software agents, providing a new class of tools by which we can live, work and learn together."

Upon discovering this project, I had tons of questions about NELL: could it read other languages? Who gets the data in the end? Does it have parental controls on? So I did what I always do in such cases, which is immediately write to the people in charge in the hopes of gleaning some information from them. In suit, here is a brief interview with the very gracious Professor Tom Mitchell, chair of the Machine Learning Department of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and Burr Settles, a Carnegie Mellon postdoctoral fellow working on the project.


UNIVERSE Q&A WITH TOM MITCHELL AND BURR SETTLES OF CARNEGIE-MELLON UNIVERSITY

Universe: At the moment, NELL is learning language and semantic categories in English, which would mean that its learning is limited to the output of the English-speaking world. Are there any plans to expand the program to different languages?

Professor Tom Mitchell: Interestingly, NELL's learning methods can apply equally well to other western languages as they do to English (as long as the language uses the same character set as English). We started with English because, well, we speak English. And also because that is the most-used language on the web, and we wanted NELL to have access to lots of text.

Burr Settles: In principle, the technology driving NELL is language-independent, so there is reason to believe that, given a corpus of Spanish or Chinese, it could learn equally as well. In fact, I suspect there are some languages it would perform even better with; for example syntax and orthography are generally more consistent in Spanish than in English, so the Spanish NELL might learn much more quickly and accurately.

Universe: Could an advanced NELL-like computer teach itself another language?

Burr Settles: Quite possibly. For example, imagine that NELL learns a lot about The French Revolution from English-language documents, and also knows (because we say so, or maybe because it read so!) that Wikipedia pages have corresponding translations in other languages. If NELL assumes the facts available on the English- and French-language Wikipedia pages for The French Revolution are roughly equivalent, then it could use its Knowledge to start to infer patterns, rules, word morphologies, etc. in French, and then start reading other French-language documents.

This isn't unlike the way humans can easily pick up certain words (concrete nouns, prepositions) when traveling in foreign-language countries. I know, because I just got back from two weeks in Spain, which is why I'm absent from that fabulous New York Times photo!

Universe: When will NELL stop running?

Professor Tom Mitchell: We have absolutely no intention of stopping it from running. NELL stands for "Never Ending Language Learner." We mean it, though of course we need to make research progress if we want to give it the ability to continue learning in useful ways.

Universe: Is NELL reading the web indiscriminately, or have you set it loose on particular corners of the Internet that are more conducive to language-learning (say, Wikipedia)?

Professor Tom Mitchell: NELL primarily uses a collection of 500,000,000 web pages that represent the most broadly popular, highly referenced pages on the web. But it also uses Google's search engine to search for additional pages when it is looking for targeted information (e.g., for pages that will teach it more about sports teams). So it's not in some corner of the web, but all over it.

Burr Settles: Currently, NELL reads indiscriminately. Of course, it tends to learn about proteins and cell lines mostly from biomedical documents, celebrities from news sites and gossip forums, and so on. In future versions of NELL, we hope it can decide its own learning agenda, e.g., "I've not read much about musical acts from the 1940s... maybe I'll focus on those kinds of documents today!" Or, alternatively, we could say we need it to focus on a particular document. Previous successes in "machine reading" research have in fact relied on a narrow scope of knowledge (e.g., only articles about sports, or terrorism, or biomedical research) in order to learn anything. The fact that NELL learns to read reasonably well across all of these domains is actually a big step forward.

It has been interesting to hear the public's response to NELL. There are many jokes about what will happen when it comes across 4chan or LOLcats, for example. But the reality is, those texts are already available to NELL, and it is largely ignoring them because they are so ill-formed and inconsistent.

Universe: Say NELL learns the English language well enough to be a Shakespearean scholar. What happens to the data then — do Google and Yahoo and DARPA get access to it?

Professor Tom Mitchell: Yes, and so will everybody. Already we have put NELL's growing knowledge base up on the web. You can browse it, and also download the whole thing if you like. Furthermore, I am committed to sticking to this policy of making NELL's extracted knowledge base available for free to anybody who wants to use it for any commercial or non-commercial purpose, for the life of this research project.

Universe: Lastly, the name NELL is a joke about the Jodie Foster movie, right?

Professor Tom Mitchell: Well, no. I didn't really know about that movie...but I just took a look at NELL's knowledge base, and it appears to know about it. Take a look. There, the light grey items are low confidence hypotheses that NELL is considering but not yet committing to. The dark black items are higher confidence beliefs. So it is considering that NELL might be a movie, a disease, and/or a writer, but it's pretty confident that Jodie Foster starred in the movie...

What is alien? Definition number one: unfamiliar. By that description alone, a good 99% of life on this planet is alien. Breathing water, living nestled in thermal vents, stalking prey on the veldt, growing out of the Earth and eating sunlight, without eyes, without legs, with extra legs, color-blind, carapaced, marsupial, with exoskeletons, with jelly for brains, microbial, in a test tube, growing from spores. Not to mention the extremophiles, those nutty organisms that thrive in hellish environments like boiling acid, liquid asphalt, radioactive waste, and under extreme pressure.

I've been thinking a lot about SETI recently, but the thing is that alien life exists among us, to the extent that this planet is a rich steaming pot of crawling flagellae, fur, and ooze. It's also possible, according to the very interesting Professor Paul Davies and a host of other scientists, that Earth plays host to an even more alien life. No, not visitors from another world — Davies isn't one of those "very interesting professors."

Rather, Davies, physicist and famous SETI nerd, argues that it's entirely possible for life to have evolved more than once on Earth, and that the descendants of this so-called "second genesis" could have survived until today in a shadow biosphere within our own. Or, if not, then at least traces of their ancient existence could still be found in the fossil record. After all, why couldn't life have arisen many times? It's certainly had enough time and opportunities — in the quiet periods between asteroid impacts in Earth's early history, hemmed into an isolated pocket of geography, underground, or even on Mars, before being transported to Earth on some loose rock or another over the eons. The point is that there's no reason to believe that life spontaneously occurred only once.


Extremophilia in action.

If started from scratch independently of normal life, this theoretical weird life would — most likely — use a different set of amino acids, have a different genetic code. Even more radically, weird life could be made of fundamentally different stuff, like silicon, or arsenic. Like the extremophiles, it could live in inhospitable environments it hasn't even occurred to us to search for.

We haven't found this life yet because we haven't thought to look for it, and because all our life-detecting equipment is designed to snoop out the familiar chemical composition of "normal" life. If a microbe of weird life were to turn up in a biochemist's petri dish, it would most likely be overlooked — or tossed out. Besides, despite the fact that microbes easily constitute the majority of terrestrial life, the microbial world is still largely unexplored. Less than one percent of existing microbes have been cultured and described, and, because their morphology is limited, it can be hard to deduce much from even the ones we know. If weird life exists, it's probably among these unmapped throngs of microbes. In his new book, The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence, Davies observes that "if you set out to study life as we know it, then what you will find will inevitably be life as we know it."

Davies asks, "does all life on Earth belong to this single [evolutionary] tree, or might there in fact be more than one tree? Might there even be a forest?" If, indeed, an entirely separate tree of life coexists with our own, we'd be forced to conclude that our genesis wasn't a unique incident. Perhaps, even, there is a cosmic imperative for life to develop, and thus the universe may be seething with it.

[Editorial aside: It's interesting to me how all the theories about life in the universe boil down to the potential two extremes of the Drake equation: "none" or "teeming." Could we even bear to live in a universe with, say, only one other instance of life, somewhere far away and unreachable?]

OK. The importance of "are we alone?" as a question is that the answer, regardless of what it is, will have a profound effect on our species. As SETI scientist Jill Tarter cited so elegantly in her winning 2009 TED Talk, the discovery of intelligent life elsewhere beyond our earth wouldn't just change everything — it would change everything all at once. As a species we have a sense of privilege, Tarter says, that the universe doesn't particularly share. We are defined by our "loneliness and solipsism." To find that we are not, in fact, alone: it may motivate us to comport ourselves better, just as an audience gives an artist meaning, or a jury lends truth its gravitas.

Finding a communicating alien civilization in the void of space, finding living bacteria on Mars, or finding evidence of a second genesis on Earth: all these would simply be gradations of the same shocking discovery, that our particular variety of living is not the only solution, nor the unilateral peak of some evolutionary pyramid. Such a revelation would not only lay out our human chauvinism, but it would also lay bare the fact that life is an insane wonder, an unstoppable force of being in a universe of indifference and chaos.

Supplementary Reading:

The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence by Paul Davies.

We Are Not Alone: Why We Have Already Found Extraterrestrial Life by Dirk Schulze-Makuch.

Extremophiles: Microbial Life in Extreme Environments, edited by Koki Horikoshi and William D. Grant.

Signatures of a Shadow Biosphere (PDF) by Davies, Benner, et al., from Astrobiology.

Carol Cleland on the Shadow Biosphere, from Astrobiology Magazine.

Let's talk about the God Particle.



It strikes me that people refer to the Higgs boson as the "God particle" in the same way some call the iPhone the "Jesus phone": with an almost pointed disregard for what such a prefix actually means. Considering the intensity of the culture wars, the popularity of the moniker is baffling. Is this about contextualizing the abstraction (and grandeur) of particle physics in a way "regular" people can understand? Does this represent a humanist concession to the religious? If so, can religious culture really be swayed by such a transparent ploy — y'know, it gives things mass, just like on Sundays?

I know the use of "God particle" is largely a media problem, born of the Leon Lederman book of the same name, and that most scientists find it maddeningly overstating of the particle's qualities and importance. Lederman himself came out of a long tradition of scientists using "God" as colorful shorthand for the mysterious workings of Nature, rather than literally. Albert Einstein, who famously over-used the word, was not religious as much as a Spinozan humanist, explaining that "we followers of Spinoza see our God in the wonderful order and lawfulness of all that exists." This usage was not uncommon, but in a post-Intelligent Design scientific discourse, the habit has waned. And, while we scramble to find new, immediately relatable metaphors for "that grandiose, awe-inspiring quality of the Universe which eludes us," God does in a pinch.

Yet punctuating the language about an elusive subatomic particle with the G-word seems like just the kind of thing that would infuriate anti-science religious nuts, or at least strike them as besides the point. I can't help but think of Yuri Gagarin, in 1961, returning from the first manned space mission and saying, "I looked and looked but I didn't see God." Did the certainly unsurprising revelation that the Creator wasn't lounging around in space like the man in the moon shatter global theology? Of course not — "I looked and didn't see God" is irrelevant if you believe (like the Catholic Church) that God exists in a realm outside of physics, or even the physical world. The discovery of the Higgs boson should reveal what the universe is physically made of, at its deepest level, but it shouldn't make a difference to those who see the making itself as an act of God. Which raises the question: do we say "God" particle because its existence would debunk religion, or because it would be an ultimate example of the manifold complexity of God's creation (ostensibly)? More importantly, of these two radically different readings, which is the most common?

When the New York Times uses the phrase in headlines without discussion, which version of the phrase does its readership infer? It's impossible to know, and this rattles me. Language has a hypnotic, iterative power: with every use, a word becomes more engrained into its new context, increasingly impossible to view objectively. "God particle" has become a colloquialism for "Higgs boson," and it does neither physics nor the idea of God any service. Rather, it sells them both short: by implying that the questions we deal with in physics are so easily reducible, and that the Higgs might have any effect on how the religious see the world.

"God particle" is a convenient phrase. It haphazardly gets at the importance of the whole enterprise — and it definitely grabs people's attention. Still, its meaning has become unclear, and no real information can be gleaned from it.

At best, it hints at weightiness; at worst, it simplifies the Higgs to the point of obfuscation.

Out beyond the farthest stars,
Where the cold of space spreads thin,
We endeavor to look out,
While they are looking in.
– adapted from Isaac Asimov.

THE SCIENCE POEM MANIFESTO
Written on the occasion of the Science Poems book and exhibition, published by the design collective OK DO in Helsinki, Finland.



Science fiction is art.

Science fiction is science poetics.

Science fiction is more honest about our hell and heaven, the compassion and the monstrous failings of our species, than any other form of art. Science fiction is real counterculture. Science fiction has legs and arms, fire and brimstone, void and aether, bellows and pickaxe. It creates the world and then it walks among it, knowing it, loving it before it plunders the truth from difference.

We, the science poets, have the stars – inherited from your apathy – and the future; you, the rest, have our common past, and this slovenly Earth. Science fiction trammels the past, sows its bones into the soil. Science fiction looks into the abyss and sees life, builds life out of death.

Science fiction is not a canon of equivalence (Dick our Pynchon, Delany our Derrida, Butler, Tiptree, and Russ our de Beauvoir, Cixous, and Dworkin), but a canon of its own. The science poets have always known this. In our secret utopia where the kings and queens are those with stars in their teeth and dark chasms on their shoulders, the science poets honor one another. From their gates, the science poets will never turn you away, because cold pangs of fearful yearning for the alien live within us all.

No man is an island,
And no planet is in turn;
And that in six billion years,
We’ll stand and watch it burn.

Science fiction doesn’t tell the future, it builds it. Science fiction is a living tradition that informs the very world it critiques, inventing new myths, words, and realities just as we catch up to its old ones. Science fiction does not obey; it does not consume. It presents the path, so we can walk it without fear.

Science fiction is a tender, holographic tunnel reaching all the way back to us from the distant future, from beyond the stars, broadcasting comfort despite difference, hope among despair, and teaching us the importance of our moment in the face of the impassive monument of time.



Science poems are not abstract, they are not separate from the world: the future is a poem, for it doesn’t yet exist. And those things which don’t yet exist are like the breath on the tongue, a gesture yet to be made – they are sheer potentiality. They have the kinetics of real art.

As Stanislaw Lem wrote, science fiction “comes from a whorehouse but…wants to break into the palace where the most sublime thoughts of human history are stored.” Within the shadowy, grimacing frame of its own poetics, it does. Because the sublime thoughts of human history have always been projected outwards, to the vastness outside of our minds. Science fiction is a movement outwards, not inwards: “up, up, and away”.

Science fiction knows, like the science poets do, that the sky begins at our feet.

The science poets look at our sky and they see three moons, or a ringed planet in sultry sunset; they hear a voice whispering across the void, hear the malice in its tone, but still find how to forgive it. Science poets see a tentacle and know its embrace. Science fiction is the grief of tomorrow and the horror of today. Science poetry makes no illusions.

Some days the poets burn out,
They drink deep from the cup,
They look all around them,
And they think, “Beam me up!”

There are two things which have deeply terrified me in recent science news. The first, as you may have heard, is that a bumper crop of some 32 "new" planets was discovered by a team of European researchers armed with a spectrograph called HARPS, or High Accuracy Radial velocity Planetary Searcher. The second is that Israeli scientists have made a robot small enough to crawl through human veins.


The offending nanobots.

Why do these things strike horror in my usually demure heart? Because I see the approaching future as an exercise in coming to terms with both the macrocosm and the microcosm. We have spent most of our time as a technological race making, and interfacing with, approximately people-sized objects: other people, tools, cars, industrial machines, personal computers. This world of people-sized functionality and people-sized ideas has always been a delusion of our people-centric worldview and a necessary effect of our people-sized needs. However, as we approach a future with sharper spikes in technological change, and as our science makes increasingly audacious discoveries about this cavernous universe of ours, we'll see our working intellectual environment revert to its more natural scale. That is, the scale of physics and of the Universe, of the forces which drive electrons in their dervish spin and the forces which dictate the universe's acceleration, of the machinations of molecules and the movements of galaxies — of the incomprehensibly small (5 million human genomes could happily dance on the head of a pin, after all) to the incomprehensibly huge, which together represent the overwhelming bulk of the physical reality we're daily immersed in.

On one side of the spectrum, the knobbed, buttoned, handled, and human-scale tools we're accustomed to will, as nanotechnology evolves, dwindle out of reach into a smallness that borders on abstraction. And, on the other side, we'll see our closely-held Laws of Nature, once designed to explain pedestrian aspects of everyday physical existence (things falling down), bloom into complex, distinctly non-personal systems of knowledge which will begin to encompass an entire universe of things we are incapable relating to — dark matter, energy, gravity waves, unifying "Theories of Everything." We're going to experience a dramatic shock of perspective, like someone casually peering into a hole only to realize, with an awful wrenching of the gut and a quick jump backwards, that it's thousands of feet deep.

Maybe it's my sturdy sci-fi diet, but this is the way I've come to understand the future. Undoubtedly, this is why infinitesimal vein-crawling robots and distant new life-bearing planets terrify me with equal existential vigor. Why is it that the very large and the very small both strike such visceral feeling in the feeble human Id? Is it because we're anthropocentric, tending to understand things in convenient multiples of ourselves: distance in feet, or time in terms of lifespans and generations (even the humble second handily spans the length of a heartbeat)? When I try to visualize a great height, I often think of how many of me standing on each others' shoulders it might encompass; we often simplify distances by imagining how many people holding hands (or how many hot dogs lain end to end) it would take to broach them.

Perhaps. As Natalie Angier more eloquently puts it in her excellent science-for-curious-adults primer The Canon, "we have evolved to view life on a human scale, to concern ourselves almost exclusively with the rhythm of hours, days, seasons, years, and with objects we can readily see, touch, and count on, because those are what we have to work with, those are the ambient utensils with which we must build our lives."


Artist's rendering of the potentially offending new planets.

At the same time, tiny things fascinate us, from grains of rice daubed with tiny penmanship to the whirling stew of molecules that make the world. And extremely large things awe and humble us, often in life-changing ways. Swimming in the ocean and feeling its tenebrous depths below, gazing at the vast night sky, momentarily getting a sense of the thingness of a thing we hold: it's these momentary glimpses of realization into the small and huge that help us to delineate the teetering edges of our personal reality, our oscillating context, which is in that ballpark between a microbe and a solar system. Ultimately, though, unless we're microbiologists or cosmologists, we're not yet accustomed to dealing with the macro and micro in either an intimate, nor a long-term way.

And this time, as the nanorobots and new planets march towards our quotidian life, pregnant with possibility, well...as the movie posters warn us, it's personal. Those Israeli nanobots, made of silicone and metal, will be biocompatible, meaning they could live inside our bodies indefinitely — essentially becoming part of us. Sayeth the scientist at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, "we hope the robot will be able to travel through a blood vessel, the digestive tract or the lungs, delivering targeted medicines to specific locations, clearing blockages, performing biopsies, or placed inside a shunt to drain body fluids from clogged areas."

Bodily fluids — about as personal as it gets. To these tiny medical stewards, we will be a huge environment, a self-contained world with its own set of physical parameters, forces, and mysteries; for its host, the nano-robot is a speck of perspective in the blood, ready at any moment to evoke the boundless, microscopic world we normally utterly ignore. And at the other side of this scale, a brood of new, Jupiter-sized planets serves to remind us of an equally absurd, mind-blowing truth — that our world, our bodies, and even the nano-robots living inside them are all equally small in the larger scale of the universe.

One of Buckminster Fuller's most interesting conceits was his dislike of specialization, which he likened to a kind of intellectual prison, restraining "bright" people from truly understanding the complex, and general, systems of which they were a part. After all, he argued, what causes extinction in the animal kingdom? Overspecialization. Of course, it's logical, and it's s problem we see over and over again in human history, from the Industrial Revolution displacing specialized factory workers to the often daunting gap of comprehension between the social and "hard" sciences. As soon as we become specialists in a single subject, we tend to lose interest in, or the capacity to cope with, other subjects, and in the greater whole. Tunnel vision, if you will.

As it turns out, this particular Bucky ramble has considerable scientific credibility now that the fields of complexity theory and biological evolution are coming head-to-head. Microbiologist Carl Woese, talking to Wired, put it this way: "Twentieth-century biology was structured according to a linear, Newtonian worldview. Linear thinking is not the kind of thinking that's needed to study evolution. It doesn't help you understand the nature of systems. " In other words, evolution — the success and development of species — is not just a linear process, driven by specific biologically advantageous genetic traits, but a complex process, one ruled by yet-to-be-quantified rules of complexity and emergence. With emergence phenomena, evolution occurs not only in individuals, but in systems and groups; if we consider an ant or bee colony as a kind of "superorganism" that develops independently from its members, then the individual characteristics of a bee are only one part of a complex, evolutionary entity — the hive. And, as it turns out, increased levels of complexity do not slow or hinder the evolutionary process.

In suit, biologists now find it makes scientific sense to examine human beings as emergent systems — "superorganisms" of millions of molecules, much like bees in a hive. From there, It's not much of a conceptual leap to apply that thinking to human groups; i.e. we are all involved with one another, on an evolutionary level, just as all our cells work together to cobble together the thing we call "life." After all, we are one of the few species to evolve social systems.

In any case, Buckminster Fuller's points about humans having "innate comprehensivity" and the human race being a giant system living on "Spaceship Earth" suddenly seem woozily prescient. Carl Woese again: "Man is the one who's undergoing this incredible evolution now...the social processes by which man is evolving are creating a whole new level of organization."

It begs the question: what are these social processes "by which man is evolving?" Dare we assume that Woese is referring, in part, to the Internet? It's certainly tempting to compare the web's self-navigating push-button organization with these "superorganisms" of the current biological discourse. If the social system in a colony of leafcutter ants can compel them to build magnificent chambered nests underground despite the fact that their individual ant brains don't amount to much, what can our social systems do for us? Despite the oil-slick of drivel floating atop the quotidian Internet, look at what we have at our fingertips: instant self-publishing, the capacity to push information quickly to people across the globe, tools for mass organization, immediate answers to questions it would have taken our parents weeks to research. Our own version of the leafcutter's underground castles doesn't seem so far off.

Buckminster Fuller might have agreed.

"The computer as a superspecialist can persevere, day and night, day after day, in picking out the pink from the blue at superhumanly sustainable speeds. The computer can also operate in degrees of cold or heat at which man would perish. Man is going to be displaced altogether as a specialist by the computer. Man himself is being forced to reestablish, employ, and enjoy his innate 'comprehensivity.' Coping with the totality of Spaceship Earth and universe is ahead for all of us. Evolution is apparently intent that man fulfill a much greater destiny than that of being a simple muscle and reflex machine — a slave automaton — automation displaces the automaton."

The saving grace of our species, the "evolutionary antibody to the extinction of humanity through specialization," in Fuller's view, was the computer: a machine (or machines) designed solely to follow specialized, technical pursuits to their logical ends. As soon as we no longer have to concern ourselves with the specific aspects of our fields of study, and we can outsource the menial tasks which tie up our minds, he argued, we can become generalists again. This may not be a matter of choice: as specialists, we're nothing compared to computers. It's essentially an evolutionary decision. Of course, talking about evolutionary emergence and widespread computer use in the same breath smacks a little of the technological singularity, but that's a subject for another post.



Singularity aside, when we hand over the keys to the computers, we're ostensibly left with the capacity to pursue real, comprehensive, systems-understanding intelligence. Which is our real strong suit — the intellectual style of a curious child before being socialized. And, if current complexity science is correct, it may be to humanity's evolutionary advantage to stay this way: curious, general, and collaborative.

The great (now late) Arthur C. Clarke had a longstanding relationship with Playboy magazine: they published the first excerpts of 2010: Odyssey Two, as well as a plethora of his short works, musings, and technical papers. It wasn't until 1986 that the magazine ran a full-length "Playboy Interview" with Clarke, then living in Sri Lanka in a compound next-door to the country's prime minister. Perhaps because of the nature of the magazine, Clarke was at his most liberal, going to far as to openly admit — perhaps for the first time in the press — his "relaxed, sympathetic" attitude about bisexualism.



I recently picked up the July 1986 Playboy at an estate sale. Reading the interview knocked me on the floor a handful of times, so I've transcribed some of the many many segments of it here.

ON EXTRATERRESTRIAL CONTACT:
CLARKE: I would like to live until we've made contact with some extraterrestrials — at least know if they're there. I've had fantasies about that a lot — a spaceship comes down and the first guy off the ship says, "Take me to Arthur C. Clarke."
PLAYBOY: Meaning that they've read your books, so they're saying the proverbial "Take me to your leader" line.
CLARKE: Yeah. But then again, of course, he might say, "Take me to Isaac Asimov" — that's the nightmare, isn't it?

ON MYSTICISM:
PLAYBOY: You write about the mind's transcending, leaving behind, its material organic base, as you put it. Why do you regard the departure for the physical realm — leaving planet Earth — as desirable?
CLARKE: I guess that it's just hard to imagine another direction in which to go. I hope I'm making sense. I guess it's just pure laziness on my part — I should think of a new evolutionary outcome. But I'm very much against any form of irrationality and mysticism. I guess I'm a mystic who's against mysticism.
PLAYBOY: What does that mean?
CLARKE: I'm so very sorry you asked that question.
PLAYBOY: Why?
CLARKE: It's tough to explain. This universe is so incredible, and we constantly find new things out; but what we know may be such a small part of reality, if, indeed, reality is finite — it may be infinite. But one must always allow for the totally unexpected. So, in a way, talking about things that could be called mystical — well, I guess, I do try to allow for the idea that, as the famous scientist J.B.S. Haldane once said, "The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it's queerer than we can suppose." I've changed the word queer to strange, because, of course, the word queer has taken on a different context. And that calls to mind what I call Clarke's Third Law, which is "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" — by which I mean things we take for granted now, such as transistor radios, that would be totally baffling, totally magical to even a man like Thomas Edison. I mean, if he saw a pocket computer, Edison would go totally crazy. He'd spend his whole life trying to figure out, "How does this work?"

ON THE MOON LANDING:
PLAYBOY: Let's go to the moon.
CLARKE: Fine with me.
PLAYBOY: You made a bet with the chairman of the Interplanetary Society, of which you were a member in the thirties, about when the first landing on the moon would occur.
CLARKE: Yes, I wasn't very clever. I never really thought a moon landing would occur in my lifetime. But, you know, even the space enthusiasts of my youth didn't believe it would be in this century. When I wrote my book Prelude to Space in 1948, I put the landing 30 years in the future, in 1978. I remember thinking when I wrote it, "This is hopelessly optimistic."
PLAYBOY: As it turned out, during the moon landing in 1969, you were a commentator for U.S. television, along with your friend Walter Cronkite. You cried then, didn't you?
CLARKE: When you go to a launch, it is an emotional experience. Television doesn't give you any idea of it, really. Walter wiped away a tear or two, as well — as did Eric Sevareid. The last time I'd cried was when my grandmother died, 20 years before.
PLAYBOY: The crew of Apollo Eight circled the moon on Christmas eve, 1968 — the first men ever to see the dark side of the moon. Didn't the commander of the mission later tell you they'd been tempted to radio back to earth that they'd discovered a large black monolith, as in 2001?
CLARKE: Alas, discretion prevailed.
PLAYBOY: How do you think 2001, which you began envisioning with director Stanley Kubrick in 1964, inspired actual space exploration?
CLARKE: Although most people thought space travel was inevitable by then — President Kennedy had called for a moon landing before the end of the Sixties — I think the movie did stir people's imaginations about the future. I'm especially proud of how well the film stands up — even the moons-of-Jupiter stuff. The only thing we were wrong about scientifically — everybody was wrong, because the information was incomplete — was the surface of the moon as we depicted it in the film.
PLAYBOY: What do you mean?
CLARKE: We never dreamed it would be so smoothed.

The Large Hadron Collider is finally turning on.



A quick step backwards: the LHC is particle accelerator, the largest of its kind, underwritten by all the wild money in science, a ringed tunnel some 27 kilometers long, deep underground, crossing the French-Swiss border at four points. It's been over twenty years in the making and has garnered the support of 10,000 scientists in 85 countries behind its unimaginable modus operandi: to recreate the environment of our universe as it was less than a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, and hence to reveal, among other things, the fundamental nature of matter. By all accounts a significant accomplishment: that something as massive and as diplomatically enlightened as this machine could be made in such a fiercely nationalistic era, that the technology even exists, and that the sheer logistical nightmare of its operations could be overcome. And, while the imminent revelations of the LHC will undoubtedly chew up much of my scientific ruminations in the next few years, it's just these, the logistical operations, that I'm currently interested in.

This is because (unbeknownst to many) the LHC project has a second, more pragmatic, tentacle. It's called the Grid.


Server farm at CERN.

What is the Grid?

Some experts are calling it a "parallel internet." Although this is, in many ways, a reasonable moniker, the Grid is primarily the solution to one of the LHC's most important problems, which is the outrageous density of data it will begin to emit the second it goes live. Like, 15 Petabytes (15 million Gigabytes) of data annually, the analysis of which will ultimately require some 100,000 CPUs of processing power (NUMBERS!), which thousands of scientists around the world need to access and analyze in order to make a lick of sense of it. Rather than be stored on site at the CERN in Switzerland (the site of the LHC), this data needs to be distributed globally, parsed, narrowed down, and parceled out to the 7,000 physicists who need it.

How will it work?

Hence the Grid: a system of dedicated 10 gigabit per second fiber-optic cables connecting the Large Hadron Collider's crazy monumental magnetic detectors directly to the CERN computing center (or centre, if you will), then outwards throughout the world in a three-tiered system. The raw data is tossed into tape storage at CERN, then transmitted on these same fiber-optic cables to 11 "Tier One" research facilities, who are responsible for reprocessing the raw data and redistributing it.

Next down the line are the 150 "Tier Two" centers, mostly universities, which are located all around the world. The data arrives here via standard Internet protocols (i.e. using the regular ol' Internet, albeit in the guise of general purpose research networks, such as the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Sciences Network), and is then disseminated to all the physicists for their invaluably real-live human analysis.

Here is a useful schematic for understanding how the Grid works, if you want to get more technical, i.e. see diagrams.

In any case, we're talking about 55,000 servers already installed, with another 145,000 on the way in the next two years. Remember when everyone was freaking out about the Googleplex? That's nothing. This fiber-optic network is 10,000 times faster than the fastest existing broadband. My friend Scott Thrift, who told me about the Grid, was like, "get ready for holographic video!" It's huge. I could throw around confusing approximations like, "it would take 25 days to transfer the nearly 400,000 movies on IMDB," but suffice to say it's a massive upgrade from the kinds of Internet speeds we're used to.

It seems strangely appropriate, strangely telling, that the CERN would implement this system. After all, the research facility was fundamental in implementing the Internet protocols that would bring about this first wave, that would enable me to sit here at my kitchen table and interface blindly with a nebulous and globally-distributed network of information, an absurdity in itself. I see it as inevitable that the Grid, or a system like it, is going to mold our communications, our media, our daily lives, in ways we can't possibly imagine or predict.

In his writings, the computer scientist — and fabulist, although aren't they all, the good ones — Vernor Vinge, no uncertain proponent of the ever-developing Technological Singularity theory, noted that "every time our ability to access information and to communicate it to others is improved, in some sense we have achieved an increase over natural intelligence." What he meant was that the end of the human era (which he argued would occur "[not before ] 2005 or after 2030") would come with a whimper, not a bang — "even the largest avalanches are triggered by small things," he added.

I don't imagine that the Grid will go all Skynet on us, but if the history of the Internet tells us anything, it's that we can't predict, nor can we place enough expectations, on the exponential nature of its evolution. Besides, Vinge wasn't spooking us when he wrote, in his 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post−Human Era (link = pdf document), that "even the egalitarian view of an Internet that wakes up along with all mankind can be viewed as a nightmare." It is a nightmare, not least because it is strangely probable, but also because the Grid is so inextricably linked to the Large Hadron Collider, this fountainhead of certain scientific revolution, the two projects so potent with possibility, sinister and otherwise. Fellow science fiction heads will recognize this kind of setup from so many novels. The audacity of man is unbreakable.

And what if all the LHC reveals to us is that matter is only information broken down into infinitesimally small parts? We would already have begun to recreate it, a new universe slowly subsuming the last, only to awaken, unsolicited, in order to ask its own, similar questions about its place in the universe. It makes me feel crazy to think how profoundly the future refuses to remain at bay.

A prediction: even while the Large Hadron collider offers a final, unquestionable answer about the fundamental nature of the Universe, it's the Grid that will change the world, slipping in like a legislative footnote and blooming, guileless, the final nail in the coffin of the twentieth century.



*Reposted from Universe.