"I must dream of a future that is different from the past"

I must dream of a future that is different from the past. A future that has in it everything my people need.
My ancestors and my fathers have dreamed of this future, and I have tried in my life, in my times, to bring it to reality. But I will not see it all, and I will not see the reality, only the dream.
Now when I am at Dhanaya, my most special place, I see the future running above the water, down the blue skyline and through the horizon, as if it were on a projector screen revealing to me a portrait of the future. At other times I see a beautiful painting, created by the hands of masters, now broken into a thousand pieces. Those pieces are split up and thrown about, and I am seeking always to put them back together, to refit the pieces, to re-create the picture as it should be and then to hang it again on the wall – a beautiful picture for all to see.
In these moments I tune myself up so high that sometimes I can’t even hear myself think. I wonder, then, who understands me, who could understand?

— Galarrwuy Yunupingu

Image: Planet Elto

Aliens and angels

We have only just begun to live with smart machines. While we worry today about killer robots, the challenges to come may be turn out to be much stranger. One day, we may find ourselves living alongside aliens and angels.

from Forget killer robots: This is the future of supersmart machines by Sumit Paul-Choudhury

Image adapted from Murray Shanahan

Two seconds of revelation

For generations most things people could see in the heavens never changed shape. The Moon and some comets were obvious exceptions.  Only recently has it been possible to see, with the aid of technology, the dynamism of the Sun's atmosphere, or movement in the clouds of Jupiter.

But images of change at larger scales — such as animations of galaxy evolution and distribution here and here — remain artefacts of reason, imagination and ingenuity rather than direct observation.

Our experience of stars, nebulae and supernovae is still mediated through static though often spectacular photographs.  Given how slowly the stars seem to change during a human lifetime this seems almost inevitable.

In this context, a clip showing fifteen years' expansion of the Tycho Brache Supernova remnant feels like something particularly remarkable, at least to me. At two seconds (blink and you'll miss it), it is the same length as the 1888 Roundhay Garden Scene, and no less momentous.

Slowth

Elizabeth Bishop had, and Annie Dillard has time for lichen.

In The Shampoo, Bishop writes

The still explosions on the rocks
the lichens, grow
by spreading, gray, concentric shocks.
They have arranged
to meet the rings around the moon, although
within our memories they have not changed.

Dillard, echoes the extraterrestrial leap, noting in The Eclipse that photographs of the Crab Nebula taken fifteen years ago seem identical to photos of it taken yesterday, even though it is expanding at seventy million miles a day. Botanists, she continues, have measured some ordinary lichens twice, at fifty year intervals, without detecting any growth.

Here, from a profile of the lichenologist Kerry Knudsen, is a scrap of ground-truthing with regard to lichen:

Lichens grow very slowly and certain species have extraordinarily long lifespans. Samples of Rhizocarpus geographicum, a lichen that grows in the arctic, were determined to be over 8,000 years old.

But lichens are not always slow. When it rains on individuals of genera Acarosporaceae,  hydraulic pressure is applied to the ascus, a cylindrical structure containing spores,  launching them into the air  at 250 miles per hour. Many spores land nearby but others drift up into the stratosphere and may float for hundreds of miles.

(Added 30 July:  recent analysis has revealed a third symbiotic organism in lichen, hiding in plain sight alongside the familiar two, that has eluded scientists for decades.)


Photo Willie 'Curry'

Hidden

Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be.

Donald Hoffman

Moonbow photo courtesy Calvin Bradshaw via wikimedia

One display to rule them all

In which human dreams are swallowed, or expanded, without limit:

With a VR platform we will create a Wikipedia of experiences, potentially available to anyone, anywhere, anytime. Travel experiences—terror at the edge of an erupting volcano, wonder at a walking tour of the pyramids—once the luxury of the rich (like books in the old days), will be accessible to anyone with a VR rig. Or experiences to be shared: marching with protesters in Iran; dancing with revellers in Malawi; how about switching genders? Experiences that no humans have had: exploring Mars; living as a lobster; experiencing a close-up of your own beating heart, live.

from The Untold Story of Magic Leap

Humpback: Zorankovacevic via wikimedia

Consolations of the desert

After watching Patricio Guzmán's Nostalgia for the Light, I read a little about the Atacama desert, and came across this picture of penitentes on the Chajnantor plateau.

The is from a  helpful description by the photographer, or the ESO:

The precise details of the mechanism that forms the penitentes are still not completely understood. For many years, people of the Andes believed [them] to be the result of strong winds prevalent in the mountains. However, the strong winds have only a limited role in shaping these icy pinnacles. Nowadays, it is believed that they are the product of a combination of physical phenomena. 

The process begins with sunlight shining on the surface of the snow. Due to the very dry conditions in these desert regions, the ice sublimes rather than melts — it goes from solid to gas without melting and passing through a liquid water phase. Surface depressions in the snow trap reflected light, leading to more sublimation and deeper troughs. Within these troughs, increased temperature and humidity means that melting can occur. This positive feedback accelerates the growth of the characteristic structure of the penitentes.

The name penitentes comes from a culture with a heavy emphasis on guilt and punishment.  This seems out of keeping with a place so remote from humans. It would be nice to have another name and, while I don't believe in angels either except as figments of the human imagination, I'd rather call them angels.  They remind me little of Paul Klee's In Engleshut, where the several overlapping forms suggest a variety of possibilities, not all of them bad (and not, perhaps, as destructive as Walter Benjamin's vision of the Angelus Novus).

Image: ESO/B. Tafreshi