The Long View

Merry Christmas!

 

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What caught my attention this week:

• The Mediterranean as testing ground for future ecological systems (or absence thereof): Wired Magazine
• Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata - and the Maldives - under the sea by 2100? Times of India
• Long (re)-live Soviet Russia: CCCP TV propaganda footage on the Internet

 Jellyfish - Photo: Wired Magazine

Welcome to the moon. Would you like to taste our local water?

On 9 October 2009, the NASA LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) Impactor caused a stir in the dust of a lunar crater. Preliminary data indicate that water exists in a permanently shadowed lunar crater Cabeus near the Moon's South Pole.

You can also watch a full (scientific) panel discussion with images of the impact. Infrared impact pictures around 53-59 min into the video.

For a full history of lunar water exploration you can rread Paul Spudis's blog post on AirSpaceMag.

So, water on the moon, And, according to first accounts, quite a bit of it. To put this into perspective, let's not forget that transporting 1 litre of water to the moon costs about $50,000. 

Implications?

• Learn how to live in space (for those for whom that holds attraction)
• Opportunity to establish a permanent base for further space explorations (Captain Kirk, are you still around?)
• A boon for a new kind of travel agent (Virgin Galactic possibly?)
• Emigration for some brave (or just rich) citizens of Earth
• Renewed power play around who owns how much of it (let's hope they don't find oil as well…)
• Competition in the super-premium segment for the Earthian bottled water industry
• A new mental frontier for human colonisation (yeepee, here we go again…)

Invitation to brainstorm:

Let me know if you can think of any other implications you can think of.

PS: Regardless of the short or medium feasibility - have you noticed how many paradigms and conventional items of wisdom are being swept away at the moment? After Digital (abstract), Nano (the super tiny), now the outward reach (Mega-Big) has gained new traction and focus.

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Irony of the week:

On Wednesday nobody knows Herman van Rompuy and Catherine Ashton. Now, Europe has a President and a Foreign Minister. The leading powers chose two Unknowns, yet by this choice alone, they generated so much media buzz that the proposition became self-defeating. The underdogs have every opportunity to surprise. Go for it, you will be closely watched!

What caught my attention this week:

• 1 billion people are hungry, and no G8 leader was at this year's FAO conference. Mind you, the pope was there. 
• India needs to import rice for the first time in twenty years: Times of India
• American National Debt has exceeded $12,000B ($12,039,319,107,488.80 on 17 November 2009, to be exact): Treasury Direct
• Population of Germany to drop from 82M to 62-70M by 2060. One in seven inhabiants will be over 80. Federal Office of Statistics

Also:

• 360m long, 6,360 passengers, construction cost: $1.3BB. The world's largest ocean liner: Oasis of the Seas. Pretty it is not 8see picture), but the passengers will have enough to eat, no doubt.

Unfriends

Unfriend: Oxford University Press (USA) word of the year.

An unfriend is someone who you used to be your friend on a social networking site and who you no longer want in your network.

Click of a button, and hop: you have created an unfriend. Facebook, Twitter, Myspacey…

To unfriend is also a transitive verb (meaning you can unfriend someone). It does not mean you hate them, just that you do not want them around your (digital) network anymore. To be unfriended is a serious test of your ego (and also a measure of your perceived propriety in any given network). 

I have a Twitter account and whenever I do not update on a regular basis (which does happen on a regular basis) I notice that my follower count goes down. Some people unfriend you automatically if you have not interacted on the site.

How unfriendly is that?

What is real?

Screenshot from the Second Life homepage 

"One of the things that our grand-children will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real… in the future that will become literally impossible." (William Gibson, writer)

That is the size of the revolution we are going through. We may not even have begun to grasp the significance of the current transition. 

Yesterday I watched an online talk at the Long Now Foundation by Philip Rosedale, the founder of Second Life, an online digital world that has become a proper place over the past few years. (On Second Life, real life countries have real embassies; real life companies have real presence; real life schools have real courses). He said that in the digital realm, we might find it much easier to fulfil some of our aspirations, fantasies, dreams and relationships. In some ways.

Right or wrong, that's not the question at this point.

What matters, however, is that the digital realm will become part and parcel of our every day lives, way beyond anything we can even begin to imagine today. 

Really, if you can forgive the pun, in a world where we can create movies whose special effects are so special that we cannot distinguish them from a naturally filmed scene, we have potentially just cloned the world. And much more than that- we can extrapolate our existence into the digital dimension way beyond our physical world and, - without harming it.

Just think of this banal greeting exchange of the future: 

"How are you today?"

"Really I am fine, but digitally I just got dumped."

We are mutants. We are merging with our avatars. 

Get ready.

A new Berlin Wall

For the 20 year celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a new one is being built. Only to be knocked over again. 

From the Mauerfall website:

2Since March 2009, youths in Berlin have been invited to take part in the Domino Action to be held at the Festival of Freedom on 9 November. (…) young people have the opportunity to design some 1000 dominos measuring 2.5 metres in height. (…)

On 9 November, the dominos will feature in a live performance, which will include the designers of the Domino Action, politicians, contemporary witnesses and guests from all over the world. The former German Foreign Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, and the Nobel Peace Laureates Kofi Annan, Muhammad Yunus and Mikhail Gorbachev will be among the guests.

The Festival of Freedom will begin with an open-air concert at Pariser Platz by the Staatskapelle Berlin conducted by Daniel Barenboim. After the concert, the fall of the Berlin Wall will be symbolised by knocking over the designed dominos, which will be broadcast live in ZDF from 19.25 until 20.15. (…)"

A map of global warming

The UK  Government posts an interactive map on global warming, showing the impact of a 4°C  (7°F) rise in temperature on the following aspects of planetary life as well as the (hair raising) number of people affected in a set of worst case scenarios:

• Forest fires
• Crops 
• Water availability
• Sea level rise 
• Marine life
• Drought
• Permafrost
• Tropical cyclones
• Extreme temperatures
• Health

Here a screenshot. Visit the site in the run-up to the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference:

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What caught my attention this week:

• Freedom of the press regresses (again) in France (43rd out of 175 countries listed - thank you dear Government), in Italy (49th, thanks to you too, Mr Berlusconi), and bizarrely in Luxembourg dropped from 2nd in 2008 to 21st place in 2009 … Hmm?). Reporters sans frontières

Also:

• 10 million • Number of people imprisoned worldwide, most of them in unacceptable conditions. (United Nations report, October 2009)
• Best quality of life on Earth is in Norway according to a UN report

Mars Exploration - a bumpy ride

Since 1950 there have been about 40 national an international space missions to Mars. This graphic gives a graphical interpretation, complete with success and failure states. 

We just have to keep trying some more.

Found on Flowing data. Origin of the image currently unknown. Update 100115: Mike Solita writes: "This originally appeared in the June 2009 issue of IEEE Spectrum. I worked on this graphic with Mark Montgomery and Joe Lertola at Bryan Christie Design."

Thanks Mike for letting me know! It's well worth checking out some of the other designs on Bryan Christie Design.