atlas(t)

decolonized area rapid transit

the amazing poet, graphic designer, and cultural worker Kenji Liu (who is on the board of Kearny Street Workshop, where I work) just decolonized BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) with this map above, which he created by committee on Facebook. Click here to see the discussions (in comments) on version one, and here for version two.

Kenji has been involved in the Occupy Oakland movement for a while now. It was he who produced the meme-ing postcards about the central Oakland square, called Frank Ogawa Plaza, which Occupy Oakland renamed to "Oscar Grant Plaza" after the young man who was shot by a policeman while facedown on the ground, causing protests and riots in January 2009. His postcards pointed out that Frank Ogawa, a legislator, was also interned during WWII, and his being deposed from his post by Oscar Grant wasn't necessarily an example of historical justice.

Kenji's also producing a series of images, which you can see on his Facebook design page, relating more directly to the Occupy movement.

But you know me: it's the politically motivated toponymy that really gets my juices flowing. I know from experience to expect from Kenji this quality of political/cultural critique in the form of innovative art projects. But it's how OWS is getting the creative juices gushing all over the place that really tells me this movement has legs. I think urban toponymy and memorialization -- and especially the discussions that surround them -- are markers of a healthy, active, living polity. That is, a polity composed of engaged citizens, who are engaged with their environment in the broadest sense of the word: geographical, ecological, political, and cultural.

Kenji's map has also made clear to me something I hadn't thought of before: that OWS is a political movement that takes metonymy -- basically a system of geographical metaphors -- at utterly face value. Wall St -- the concept, as opposed to "Main Street" -- is the center of power. "Wall Street" the center of power is inaccessible to them. So protesters made the geographical location into a reverse metonym for "Wall Street" the banking industry, and occupied it. They can't access the center of power, so they occupy its physical symbol. This is why the locations of the various occupations are so important to both sides. And why a physical occupation is so important to the movement at this stage.

It's important for more than just this reason, of course. The failure of broad-based political movements over the past decade or so, and especially during wartime; the transferance of our base of cultural communications to the internet, and the attempt to organize people politically on the internet -- an only moderate success; and the accession of a new generation of young adults who have never engaged in political movements, have all made face-to-face, real-time, real-place politics exciting and essential.

And in the wake of the worst wave of defaults, repos, and evictions since the Great Depression, moral ownership of place is profoundly emotional. I haven't seen anyone considering this (although I'm sure many have) but for the first time since the colonization of North America, we have a generation reaching adulthood with a seriously questionable prospect of land ownership. In the same way that you see homeless people walking slowly across busy streets, forcing traffic to slow and stop for them, OWS is forcing a momentary ownership of public space by people who mostly don't own space.

More thinking needed on this.

But in any case, Kenji is still refining his map, so go visit the Facebook posting and contribute ideas!

sanborn maptcha

way cool!

Somebody took the Sanborn insurance atlas of San Francisco from 1905 (before the earthquake and fire) and is mapping it, page by page, onto a contemporary map of the city. It's a big job so they need help. And yes, you can help, too, by going to the website and looking up intersections, then orienting and sizing each page to match map to map.

Can't wait to see the end result!

the connected states of america

via Bernice Yeung, an interactive map of how connected via cell phone the US is, by county.

Click on a county to see which other counties it connects with most. Then explore the site to look at the beautiful and cool visuals and vids they made from analyzing aggregated cell phone data.

I'm so glad they got the memo about science can also be beautiful.

edward glaeser on the daily show

edward Glaeser loves him some city. Check it out.

mta.me

via Pireeni, this lovely map tracking trains in New York's subway system as they leave and course through the city. As each line crosses another, it "plucks" it like a string, and you hear a thoughtfully chaotic music. Subway art. Enjoy.

foreclosures: then and now

then:

Via.

Via.

Via.

Via.

Via.

Via.

now:

Via.

Via.

Via.

Via.

Via.

Via.

the silent evolution

awesome. This artificial reef was created by artist Jason deCaires Taylor in Mexico out of environmentally friendly materials. It comprises 400 sculptures cast from members of the local community.

I saw this and thought: now that's some reparative terraforming! It's one of the less grandiose things we can do to reverse the damage we've done to our biosphere (although I think it's plenty grandiose as it is) but it hits a lot of buttons.

First of all: who doesn't love a reef? There are already schools of colorful, curious-looking fish taking in the sights. And seaweed hanging off the cement people's faces.  Who doesn't love a reef?

Secondly: it's an invasive/noninvasive project. I mean, yeah, the guy did just plunk down tons of concrete into the ocean where no concrete was before. The fish might find that invasive, particularly during installation. But no one is actually seeding chemicals or changing the terrain, or blocking the sunlight or anything. Just dumping concrete.

And then there's that whole aesthetic issue: i.e. the non-issue until you ask yourself why. Why isn't terraforming aesthetic? I mean, if all the stuff discussed during the conference is really as science fictional and underfunded as all that, why can't they play around with more aesthetic attempts at a fix?

I love that the figures are looking around in wonder at the fish surrounding them. It's cheesy, but effective. I can't wait to see what they look like a few years from now, wreathed in kraut and crusted with molluscs.

This could very well get me to learn to dive.

liveblogging: emerging terraformations: consequences

and now, for the final installment (once again, will post now and correct later):

Michael Light (photographer and pooky)
Not a scientist or historian, but a visual artist. feels like a journalist, in that he can do everythign but not in great depth. Conference is a heavy load, taking away alot. As artists, atrracted to very vast spaces. Practices invlves two starins. One is looking at images that have been alread made by others. Going through archives. The other is making his own images, mostly aerial. Is a pilot.
Photo: of Mike in cockpit of his plane with his 20 pound 4x5 camera. Planetary images, vast desert landscapes.
Explorer of what we as a people are doing to our landscapes. Settleed and unsettled landscsapes. larger project called SOME DRY SPACE.
Makes books. Large book projects, book as a project. They're the beginning of the project, handmade artists books.
2003 100 suns book.
Meditative look at the view from the imperial veranda. Images from 100 nuclear detonations. Came to it from a landscape perspective.
Edward Teller, dark grandfather laughing at us all. Image of first hydrogen bomb detonation. Changes everything. Up til that point the sublime was the province of the gods, until now humans ignited their own small stars. Arguably the greatest moment of civilization, tool-bearing humans setting off their own stars. We are the architect of our own sublime. Immense implications.
Becomes possessive of photos other people made.
Pilgrimage to Bikini Atolll, image of Mike detonation.
Image of bravo detonation, largest test we ever detonated. 15 megatons. Bikini remains uninhabitable from Bravo blowback.
Creepy, tropical, only evidence left is the undersea craters.
Briefly Full Moon, 1999.
Used NASA apollo archive to view the moon not as an event but as a place. Truism what we really got out of apollo was perspective on Earth.
Aerial work
Bingham Mine/Garfield Stack
from helocopter
Bingham Mine is largest human excavation. Outside of Salt Lake City, metaphor for geomanipulation.
Planet now utterly geomanipulated. It's now a human park. No more wilderness. Gardening? Anthropocene. Humans are larger force than erosion and rain.
Snow articulates architecture. City in reverse. Roman amphitheater. Mine was capitalized by Guggenheims, in metals. copper.
Often shoots into the sun, comes from lunar work, and meditations on the bomb.
vaginal mine, tailings looking like a glaciar.
Garfield stack, largest free standing structure west of what? Image shows highwater mark of great salt lake.
Big book, on automobile infrastructure in L.A.
More recent work over Phoenix, Sun City, first planned retirement community.
A kind of terraforming. A kind of lunar or Martian colony.
Importnat for artist to hang on to feeling of being alien on this planet, viewin thrings from an alien eye.
Helicopter work. Hard to photograph. Corporate purpose-built communities dropped wholesale.
Sacred architecture, cloverleaf pass.
Trailer park with date palms. and the other end of socio economic scale, Camelback mountain.
Architecture as a reflection of people's views on the sublime.
Newest work. Phoenix and Vegas are stepchildren of L.A. shooting now in Vegas. Lake Las Vegas, artificial lake.
Connection between mining and extractive industries, and residential and inhabiting stuff. Same processes.
A kind of geomanipulation.

Gregory Benford (astronomer and sf writer)
Observations about geoengineering
20th anniversary of National Academy of Sciences report on geoengineering.
first time somebody tried to suppress a publication after it had been issued. B/c they felt it was wrong. Huge battle.

2 major issues:

• Climate change itself
• Acidification of Oceans.

These things will take place w/in a few decades to a half century

Carbon restriction will fail. The time to turn around fossil fuel industry is about a century. Economics: $30-50 trillion, a major fraction of world GDP. Has to be replaced by something else, and will cost a lot.

War on alcohol failed (15 years) war on drugs has failed (39 years), war on carbon is not going to be won for a long time. Most people don't feel bad when they get into their car. Asking for an enormous change in a short time.

War metaphor is limited. If you keep thinking it's a moral problem and addressing it with policies, but it has a large engineering component. Must be thought of as an engineering problem.
Arctic: thawing permafrost releases methane. About a thousand gigatons of methane in arctic tundra.

Projections always have a come-to-Jesus moment in about 20 years. Tragedy of commons writ large. Dealing with a substance which, until recently, was fine with everyone.

If you could decrease the sunlight by 1%, you would solve the warming problems for about a century. Unnoticeable to ordinary eye.
the only planes that could carry aerosols are the fighter jet refuelers. But we have a great number of them. This craft can fly into the stratosphere in the arctic, and it's built to take fluids. We don't have an aircraft that can fly into stratosphere in tropics. This all means U.S. has a horse in this race.

Policy: climate change is a national security issue - new declaration? Seven nations in the Arctic circle. Governance is going to be a big problem because of coal burning in India. India will quadruple its coal burning by 2020.

He's in favor of doing labwork now, b/c we don't know when we'll need it. We're running out of time. dithered for two decades and gotten nowhere. He thinks case for geoengineering has become obvious. No other real option. Others think carbon restriction is the way to go. The adversary is the natural world. the problem comes from the biosphere, which is reacting to what we've been doing. There's no way to interact with the biosphere. It doesn't want what we want.

Boy oh boy, he couldn't have modeled the male dominant attitude any better.

Andrew Matthews (anthro UCSC)
Gathering threads of the last two days.
Use the word "imagination":

• Ways imagination works for us
• Imagination -> politics
• Value of the worst kind of imaginations

The kind of imaginations that go into successful modeling. Ken Caldeira. Surprising quality of the world. Writing is also a surprising business. Importance of writing that kind of surprise and resistance. Commonalities imagination, surprise, resistance.

Power of imagination. Just thinking about geoengineering gets ppl scared. Just saying has the possibility of escaping the particular place and getting out into the larger world. Questions of when it becomes reasonable to collaborate. In policy, it makes no sense to commit to carbon reduction, b/c they pay the cost, others get the benefit. But in a geoengineering world, it makes sense, b/c you deploy the technology, get the benefit, and maybe don't even pay the cost. New form of rationality.

Who has power? Assymetry of imagination. Some people's imaginations matter and some don't. It's good to think about who is "we"? When we have more kinds of imaginations going in, more is coming out. When we construct knowledge about the world, we're also constructing some kind of authority/agency that will control the world we have described. Anytime we're constructing knowledge but not thinking about that other half, we run grave risks. Legitimacy of state in the face of climate change. Construct the kind of political authority that could respond to climate change in that way. Political imagination at work among deniers and skeptics. Sees the state itself as fundamentally illegitimate. Imagining a state that speaks to more people, and more kinds of imaginations.

Nightmares. s.th. different between scientists of 50s and now. Scientist like Ken Caldeira speaking about divided heart is a new thing. Sheila Jassinov? Technologies of humility. We do know that we're not going to get it right right away. How do we keep an eye open for unforeseen consequences? Retaining humility about technologies. Legitimacy of science. Nobody's going to trust us if we say "trust me, It'll be alright." Grave decline of legitimacy of state as a result of nuclear testing.

Gardening and terraformations. Soil radiation management comes from failed air conditioning. Maybe environmental justice, family planning etc. Geoengineering coming from above vs. gardening. But we do need a way to sign up for big projects that are not horrible and destructive.

We tend to think about the ways citizens and publics are excluded from decisionmaking. Instead let's think about the ways they are included. The public attitudes are already present and having an effect on how these technologies are discussed and made.

Open discussion.
I'm going to sign off here, because my hands and wrists hurt. Conclusions from me later.

liveblogging: emerging terraformations: speculations

aaaand we're back. Posting now, cleaning up later.

Format: having speakers sit in audience so they can see slides.

Ira Bennett (ASU, Cosortium for Science, Poicy and Outcomes, Ctr for Nanotch in Society, chemist, policy wonk)
"Science Fiction as Technology Assessment"
Where does public policy have something to add to sf?
Is there a value in sf-inspired approaches to public policy?
Anticipatory governance

• Not givernment but governance
• not "do" or "ban"
• Wide array of mechanisms

components

• foregsight: how to appropriately speculate on future tech
• engagement: inform the public and the reserach endeavor
• integration

Foresight: sf potential model, human experience
100 mil Americans read or have read sf.

Integration: Get scientists to read and write sf. Enabled to tell stories about own work.

Engagement: technology assessment for the rest of us. Enjoyable.
Engagement with Participation:
Participatory Technology assessment: supplement expert opinions with input from public. Democracy in action. Voices not usually heard.
Why:

• A matter of democratic right: lay citizen ethically entitled to direct participation in tech decisions. One of the outcomes has to be that it might not happen.
• Social values: Publics good at articulating ethical issues.
• Broader knowledge base
• Expedited conclusions

CNS "scenes" not just scenarios, but more strong images. Vetted by scientists for plausibility.
Eg: living w/ brain chip, barless prison
Have them turned into graphic novels. Collection of consensus statements from each site. How these techs should and should not be used.
Project with HS students in D.C. about cloud whitening. Able to talk to experts online. 4 week process. Created consensus document and presented it to a mock Congressional panel.

Elliott Campbell (UC Merced, Engineering)
"Bioengineering: Terrestrial Options"
Focusing on stratospheric options: timescale is short, quick result. Could also back out of it quickly -- unintended consequences. Other options:

1. Natural sequestration
2. Forests
3. Crop Management
4. Bioenergy and Storage

Natural sequestration: photosynthesis, plant respiration, ocean exchanges. Land surface takes up carbon more than ocean. Engineering solutions that mimic or speed up these processes. Concern that terrestrial environment is becoming saturated, absorbing more carbon than it can release. Drought in areas has caused decrease in uptake. Very little data-driven estimates.

Forests: Prevent deforestation, commit aforestation. Not a bad idea. We're in a land crunch, have to double the food supply over the next fifty years, more people eating more affluent diets. Increasing intensity of agriculture: more food with less land. Important historically. Intensive agriculture led to: Fertilizer production, soil emissions. but without this, there's massive land conversion, which leads to more emissions.
3 important processes:

• reflected sunlight
• evaporation
• transmitted heat

These can be more important than carbon emissions. So in some conditions we can do more for climate by removing forests.

Crop management: so that more carbon is stored in soils. Reason that soil carbon has decreased over time has to do with how we work the land, not THAT we work the land (fertilizer, for example.)

Bioenergy + storage: you can reduce amount of carbon in atmosphere.
biochemical + storage: sugars into ethanol
thermochemical + storage: underground storage heat, convert to gases
combustion + storage: you can store more carbon here.

In this case, what does "storage" mean?

Competition between food and fuels. Increase price of food? We now use a quarter or third of corn harvest for ethanol, but hasn't offset much.

Big issue: how much land is available. We appropriate a quarter of Earth's photosynthesis for other needs.

Greg Rau (UCSC, Laurence Livermore, Carbon research)
"Carbon-Negative Energy Or How to Produce Fuels or Electricity While Re-terraforming the Earth"
Is it possible to re-terraform Earth that allow us to consume rather than generate CO2.
We are currently unterraforming Earth by emitting CO2.

• Carbon positive energy: fossil fuels
• Carbon neutral energy: gereen energy: hydro win, solar, biomass, foss with 10% CCS,e tc.
• Carbon negative: super green eneggy, incorporates net OC2 remval it usable neergy production
• biomass omustion with CCS
• nofossil powered electrolytic hydrogen production with enhanced mineral weathering

Why mineral weathering?

• primary way excess atmosphere co2 is consumed on goelogic time scales (natural and effective but er slow)
• avoids constly and risky concentration and storage of molecular CO2 (carbon capture and storage, ccs)
• return alkalinity to the ocean, which can offset ocean acidification

Mineral hydroxides: CO2 readily consumed by hydroxides.
Production of hydroxides - very energy intensive.

Lots of formulae here and various chemical talk, all of which I'm ignoring. I'm not going to try to understand this next part, because it'll wear me out and I won't understand it completely anyway. I'll see if I can find the ppt. and post it.

In spite of myself, I'm getting the gist of this: it's a cycle system that simultaneously produces energy while cleaning up the ocean. But it has way too many components, each with a different process, for lay people to understand. A hard sell, b/c it's not easily understandable, like wind energy or wave energy.

Is this entertaining sf (no) or a useful tech?
further R&D needed

Discussant Margaret Fitzsimmons (UCSC environmental studies, "making ecology work" book)
Martha Kenney, not listed.

Margaret Fitzsimmons: addressing the question of global change. Issue of sf adds rich poss. of speculation blah blah blah.
Sf extremely useful in teaching. Rattles off list of books she uses, including Robinson, The Dispossessed, Woman on the Edge of Time, and C.J. Cherryh.
Do you guys know how often you say "we"? Who is "we"? Assumption that "we" have a problem is an immense assumption. Question asked in anthropological sf constantly. Reminds people of historical processes, geographical discovery, etc.
Engineering vs. gardening. Gardening, parliament of things, having to negotiate with other species. Ability to live or not with other forms of life.
Can I just say here: why does it have to be woman who says this?

Martha Kenney: Glad she didn't have to be token feminist. Feminist science and technology studies.
Speculation about guessing and making things up. Heard a lot of big stories here, scales are amazingly huge. All of past, future, planet, Mars, humankind. Stakes are very high. Engaging in speculation at this scale is exciting and scary. Seem to be all or nothing decisions.
Politics make her uncomfortable. Exclude people and possibilities, smaller scales and other ways of knowing.
Teaches article by LeGuin about power of origin story. "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction"
Not man as hunter, but man as carrier; not the spear but the carrier bag. Includes both sexes. Have heard the stories of poking tools, but not stories of containers.
Her question: how can we learn to tell stories that are smaller, more details, more complexity, join with stories of others? Stories that maintain the willies, but not triumphal or tragic?
Panel: which sf stories are we telling? Can we tell stories that are different from problem/solution? What kind do we want to tell?

Elliott: agricultural intensification is just one quick solution, not the whole thing.
Then he goes off to praise the feminist pov. Argh. It's true it's true! Rights for women are important!

Ira: we are getting to the point where the stories do get more nuanced.
Martha: what sf are you reading and having others read? How do stories affect policy decisions?
Ira: Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. Vonnegut's Player Piano.

Greg: We're living in nonfiction tragedy. Feels there needs to be some action of some sort. Need to make some intelligent decisions. Requires experimentation on a small scale. Dude, you totally missed the point.
That's a particular concern here, size of scales needed to test these out. Smaller scales, relatively safe, much less invasive. We could include other opinions on how it's to be done. But we don't have a lot of time here. Wow, really missed the point.

Q&A

Q: Me, I'm a feminist. Technologies of humility? Huh? Uses Greg's examples of small scale experiments. Humility of working scientist. Another one who missed the point. Oh well.
Martha: didn't mean her response as critique to the papers that we've seen. What Greg said a second ago: the idea of a nonfictional tragedy, when tragedy has a specific fictional history. Tragic hero is a particular kind of story, as well as the one of salvation. Worry about largeness of scale and narratives that we're grafting our humble projects onto. get out of giant western stories that seem like reality b/c they're part of our shared culture. Hear hear.
Margaret: worried about coming across as feminist in under-womaned audience. Her department is natural science, interdisc. that is willing to work out misunderstandings about power and so forth. What she hears most often from scientists: We're doing the science, why can't you policy it up? She and Martha are trying to answer that question. Create a circumstance in which everyone can hear what other people are saying is urgent. She hears when ppl say climate change is urgent. Trusts a lot of the Cassandra concerns, why she's an environmentalist. We've gone in a direction that has taken us into difficulty and that's not natural. The root problems are humanist problems. We're all involved in the same project, tools used are very different. Study of processes of human institutions.

Q: Struck by two comments: what Robinson said yesterday about restoring planet to homeostasis. what Slawek said today about planetary scientists' main issue being stopping the use of fossil fuels. Sounds like trying to bail out a boat instead of plugging the hole. What Margaret said about gardening. We have a model of fixing the planet that's about to go into cardiac arrest. One side that wants to do a quadruple bypass, the other side says we should eat right, exercise, etc. the latter doesn't make as good a story. Solving a huge problem all at once vs. slowly.
Video: "the Story of Stuff" After showing a linear way of thinking about resource extraction, missing people and all kinds of stuff. So many points of intervention. Great way to encourage ppl,

Q: Thanks for the mammaries. Everything is up for revision. Vexed by need for reconfiguration, but the potential for violence of this reconfiguration. Thoughts about who will be included/excluded in these conversations?
Elliott: we're going to have violence. We see it in Africa, climate change leads to all kinds of violence, sexual violence. Important to realize that it's going to happen one way or another.
Margaret: now you see the violence inherent in the system. Need to get over the idea that bringing violence into the discussion is not objective or scientific. We need a more generalized sense of the purpose of science, that it is not focused on war. Many of the great scientific advancements come about as a result of militarization.
Ira: voices, here in our democracy, there are too many voices. really? Threat of violence can promote drastic action from the top.

Q: spend a lot of time fighting off ppl who are acting out of ignorance. Noise. Most scientists are strict prohibitionists (carbon prohibition) but economists say that's not possible. Aren't we moving towards a point where we will need to move fast in an emergency. You really can dither away your future.
Margaret: example: in 70s enacted environmental laws, concordance of ecology and economics. goal = zero discharge. Internalizing externalities. Then let the market decide if this tech is viable (within welfare economics.) Also the greatest intrusion into the decisionmaking of business since the 1930s labor laws. Reagan reversing agreements, been under attack ever since. Haven't done any more than protect those things put in place in the 70s. Partly a problem of language. Survey, evolutionary science most trusted theory among scientists and food safety the least.
Ira: Americans' attitudes toward different careers. Scientists second most respected careers. Don't think the lack of trust is true.
Martha: pubic dissonance out of ignorance. Who gets to say what is rational and what is ignorant? Ken Caldeira's emotional and rational brain. Can we reconcile these?

Q: If you use sf as technology assessment, how do you deal with the other goals embedded in sf? Advertising, politics, wish fulfillment etc?
Ira: you have to be careful. You have to educate. Develop a baseline of knowledge for the whole group. then introduce particular types of fiction. They are going to go back to the emotional state of their first experience with sf. Is there a way to bring in the passion of the sf community to work with scientists?

Q: Thanks for the mammary perspective. We really have to challenge the male dominated narratives. Reading Louis Mumford on the city. Wrote about cities as containers. Daniel Quinn, leavers and takers, we have become a culture of takers.
Lovely how he relates to this non-male-dominated challenge by referencing two white males.
Also comment on Joe's presentation.
Joe: films stopped being addressed to the public around Vietnam and Watergate. Consciousness of having lost the public trust. but there was still a program of public perception management. Skeptics and deniers - amount of money that goes into clouding and confusing debate.

This is going on so long because the lunch food delivery has been delayed. I'm checking out, even though they're still talking about Joe.

liveblogging: emerging terraformations: scenarios

welcome back to the second day of the Emerging Terraformations conference.

I have to say that, although very interested in what's been going on here, the emphasis on air, rather than earth, which is the basis of my fetish, has left me feeling a little ... unfulfilled. Call me single-minded. But I'm learning a lot and I imagine that's what really counts. I'm also starting to change my view, or my understanding, of what is encompassed by "earth" or "geo-" ... I suppose that, although I have very little interest in air as a symbol or element, it's part of the landscape. Not just as a force that shapes the landscape (I always found it singularly uninteresting as such, far less interesting than water) but as a force that enables the life that perceives landscape as necessary or sublime. Maybe that's a stretch. Still considering. But anyway.

We're about to begin, so I'm going to shut up now. Will post now and clean up later.

Scenarios

Jake Metcalf (post-doc fellow in science and justice)
How we can think of sci models and futures as fiction, as a way of coping with risk and hostile futures.

Chris McKay (NASA Ames, astrogeophysics, planning for future Mars missions, human settlements)
"Let there be life: a long term goal for astrobiology"
Mars: far away and ppl don't get upset when you talk about geoengineering on Mars
Provides context for considering it on Earth
Why consider these things? What's the point? On Earth it's survival. On Mars the point is not so obvious. His argument: the point is life.

Astrobiology: study of origin evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe. Future is whatever we make of it. Element of human choice.
Propose that overall goal: enhance the richness and diversity of life in the universe.
Implied activities: search for and suport a second genesis of life on other worlds and expand life from Earth.

Implications:

• search for a second genesis-biologically reversible exploration
• determine if life from earth can grown on mars
• determine if mars can be restored to habitability

Mars: don't send humans because they will contaminate Mars before we have a chance to determine if it has life and its potential for life. First have to sort out this logical mess. But we've already contaminated Mars. Viking and previous missions were sterilized, but since then they no longer needed to sterilize spacecraft. WHY? Each carry on average 100k Earth bacteria. We know where all these pieces are and know that they haven't contaminated. Survives only inside the craft where untouched by UV

3 possibilities for past life on Mars

• no life on Mars, no worries
• realted to Earth life, common origin, few worries
• was a second genesis unrelated to Earth, could be worries

All earth life shares genetic common ancestor. Alien doesn't share common ancestor. Used to mean from a different planet. No longer the case. Now it doesn't share our genetic and biological unity.

Why preserve a second genesis?

• fundamental ethical principles realated to the value oflife and value of diversity in life
• utilitarian benefit from direct study of second genesis
• restoring life and a biosphere to a dead world is a worthy goal for a space-faring people. (looks good on our resume?)

Should microbes have standing: no brush your teeth and wash your hands. On Earth, no. But yes if they're the only reps of a second genesis of life.

Assigning moral status:

• Moral agents are rational - self assigna nd unitary
• moral status is variable and assigned by moral agents based on pain, complex behavior and communication; membership in a set
• examples of set thoery human beings that ar not ration have th same moral stauts as ration humans but they ar enot moral agents, life is sacred.
• two current sets: human, life

Now there are three sets: human, life, life2

Biologically reversible exploration: must continue that.
Do it on the Moon first.
Keep contamination on Martian surface where it's bathed in UV light

Can we restore water on Mars? Fundamental problem to warm up the planet - but we know how to do that. Greenhouse effect.
Could warm it in 100 years, could produce O2-rich atmosphere in 100K years.
We don't know if Mars has the resources to make a habitable biosphere. Probably water and carbon, but maybe not nitrogen.

Two new ethical questions:

• Second genesis
• Life is better than no life?

ON earth life=nature but not on mars
Assigning to Life "intrinsic Worth"
Trying to create another biosphere helps us understand Earth.

Slawek Tulaczyk (Earth and planetary science UCSC, glacial geology)
"Halting Glacial Retreat"
Reason we study ice on Earth is to control it - but this idea is badly received by physical scientists.

1. Why he wants to talk about subject
2. Evidence from recent geologic past that warmer climates birg higher sea level
3. some glaciers melt but he biggest ones lose mass by sliding into the ocean and melting at the ice-ocean interface
4. there are specific actions that may help slow down global sea level rise.

Why I study nature: love nature
historically we study nature to control it

What happpend during the last global warming? 20K - 15K years ago.
Sea level rise when planet warmed by 5 degrees C. Rose by 4 cm/year.
120k years ago, last time planet was temp it will be soon. Global sea level is 8 meters higher than it is now. We'll lose major ice sheets.

We don't really know how ice sheets behave under warming conditions.
To get the real sea level rise you have to affect the poles.
So are glaciers melting? Some are (the small ones) but the polar ones the effect is minor. Doesn't lose mass by melting on surface. Ice gets pushed into the ocean and gets warmed by water. That's how it really loses mass.
Most of mass lost at ocean boundary in small areas - valleys and fjords

Globally:

1. 1/3 o glacial ice lsot o surface melting
2. 50-60% slide into the ocean or is melted by ocean heat

much of recent acceleration is because of increase in 2.
                                        
If you can stop glacial sliding and melting from ocean heat. So how can you do this?
Ice flow in ice sheets organized into flows like rivers. Under ice sheet, water streams. Carry snow toward oceans. If you can slow down pathways you can slow down the melt. Streams sometimes naturally shut down. So maybe we can do that. How?

Specific actions:

• drill bore holes through ice and pump liquid nitrogen (what happens when this melts?)
• build underwater dams where warm water has access to the ice sheets -- in discrete places

Easier than managing CO2

• vulnerable parts of ice sheets are small
• interventions are reversible with limited long term consequences
• relatively deserted regions - limited impact on cultures and biology

Take home points:

• most ice is lost due to iceberg calving and ocean melting, not melting on surfaces
• if we can dam up internal rivers of ice and shut ocean melting o fice then ew could slow down sea level rise by up to 3 feet in 100 years
• things that could be done (see above)
• can we afford to do it? can we afford not to do it?
• Easier than management of CO2

Joe Masco (Anthro, U of Chicago, book on cold war)
"Nuclear futures"
Projects that coordinate human activity (nuclear technology), coordinating academy, science, economics, politics, can this be done with climate?
How do we think about potentialities?
Walk back to mid-20th and look at ways we've actually done it.
Nuclear weapons changed temporality, ways we thought about future:

• Possibility of no future
• Possibility of utopia, control nature on all scales from subatomic to planetary

US nuclear complex involved in global engineering: atmospheric nuclear tests in 50's and 60's - planetary events (were they intended to be?)
Nuclear contamination created permanent dystopian spaces
Film clips:

1. Disney speculation about future tech 1959: countering negative images of nuclear tech with positive images, militarized response to control weather.
2. ABC projects mid-60s, project reports: excavating with nuclear explosives, plowshare program
3. Canal project elsewhere in Central America, with nuclear explosives

Plowshare program, atoms for peace, during nuclear test moratorium, positive spin on nuclear tech, clean nuclear device.
Imagination for doing large scale engineering has been with us for a while
Power narratives deployed: diff btw scenario, thought experiment, advertising campaign, etc.
Promotional culture apparent - energized science, also a created backlash as ppl understood limitations of these projects.

Changed the way americans think about deep future

• immediate future
• oversold promises of nuclear science - already utopian scenarios before it was achieved

Tech optimism is now left to corporations as a result of all this

If this optimism can be restored?
A terraforming project is happening whether we acknowledge it or not, how can we make a public narrative around it?
If narrative precede public mobilization: what kind of nonmilitarized vision of geoengineering can we produce? what would work?
Have to overcome legacy of these campaigns, skeptical public, when our ideas about tech and future become so naturalized that we can see outside them anymore.

Wow, this conference is a total sausage factory. Bratwurst.

Discussants:
Jamie Wetmore (Science Studies ASU)
Peter Alagona (Environmental History, UCLA)

Jamie:
to McKay: skeptical of scientist who can do ethics, but impressed that McKay gave a standing to microbes.
One talk doesn't change the world. Ethics of astrobiology will be created by groups. Everyone has ethics, inherent in decisions made.
Are you alone in this or are there conversations about ethics? Is it informal or formal? What role does the public play?
McKay: presented his own view. Astrobiology community has engaged in discussion, partic over past 10 years. Dates back to 1997 NASA HQ issued call for papers about the future, ppl formed committees and created symposia, etc. Ppl with backgrounds in ethics, religion, sociology involved. This is informed by a broader discussion. Point that ethics created collectively. Committee on space research, space treaty, planetary protection.

to Slawek: Why aren't UCSC's climate scientists here? If they can't get into sf, what will they get into? Do they see geoengineering as dangerous or fringe?
Slawek: considers self planetary scientist. Minimal perception, minimal commitment of funding. Why climate scientists aren't here? Only one acceptable solution among climate scientists is to stop driving cars/using fossil fuels. Modify lifestyles. Anything else is seen as a detraction from this, not just a waste of time but an enemy. Grew up in communist system, hates self-censorship.

to Joe: Loved the videos. Reaction of audience is laughter because the vision is terrifying. Images aren't as vivid when ideas are presentd today. Was this an image that the scientists bought into or were those scientists also a little fearful. Has an image of individuals with no humility. today, even the most vociferous proponents of geoengineering will express their fear of it.
Joe: Laughter. We have actually wreaked havoc on the planet. Laughter is complex. Awareness, nervousness from a wider understanding of our impact on the planet. Important thing but also nervous thing. Represses thinking about militarism.
(God, the way this guy talks is so humanities! About half his words are jargon that don't need to be there. "organize thinking" "privileged" "craft narratives" "national imaginary" etc.)
50's is era of narrative, but also the era where we start accumulating data sets. What's the diff betw marketing program, scenario, science fiction?

Peter: doesn't have a problem with scientists talking about ethics, but rather with ethicists ignoring the povs of others. Wants to talk about unintended consequences. Environmental History: doom and gloom = declension narrative. Unintended consequences are inevitable and likely to be severe.
Eg.: city on river, constructs levees to protect from floods, then buys increasingly expensive solutions, muddled by weak governance. When the flood eventually comes, it will be worse, and more people will be in its way.
Bathroom break. Missed how this turned out.

Q&A
Jake Metcalf: Missed his question
McKay: How can we manage a biosphere b/c we'll never know everything? Unintended consequences. Doctor treating himself. Blah blah, saying obvious things. Terraforming Mars expectations lower. What would be a success? Maybe create something that's not like Earth but has its own value.
Slawek: unintended consequences, conversation stopper. So what? Everything we do has unintended consequences. Are these manageable?
Joe: Openness is crucial, secrecy deforms project over time. Funding moved out of Homeland security and into NSA.
Jamie: today is a product of cross-discipline discussions. Much of this is needed. Duh. UCSC, not only are disciplines in different buildings, but they are protected from each other by miles of forest.
Peter: history itself is unintended consequences. ??