Post-Planetary Design

Post-Planetary is a research seminar exploring all aspects of design at a post-planetary scale. Throughout the semester we will screen scifi films, read bright and dark futurologies, scan, debate, and re-scan critical histories and theories, and ultimately produce a set of 'black papers', short videos and/or interactive projects that speculate on the next 50 to one thousand years of cross disciplinary design.

[post-planetary]

“The name “Russian cosmism” itself is a contested label that was coined during the twilight years of the USSR, when religious and nationalistic tendencies reemerged amidst the decaying Soviet experiment. And while it is clearly indebted to the Christian notions of resurrection and apotheosis, its religious sentiments are largely heretical. Cosmism replaces God and divine providence with human labor and reason as the primary means for realizing eternal life, deification, and universal paradise.“

[post-planetary]

"There are billions of planets and even trillions of small objects floating free in the galaxy, so as we move out in space in a “Pacific” way of traveling, we won’t have to go from star to star, as they are many places in between where we can stop. The point is that if we have a billion different habitats where life can be established, and every place with its own evolution, this will result in a huge variety of ways of living, and most certainly in very different kinds of intelligence."

[post-planetary]

'The title WANDERERS refers partly to the original meaning of the word "planet". In ancient greek, the planets visible in the sky were collectively called "aster planetes" which means "wandering star". It also refers to ourselves; for hundreds of thousands of years - the wanderers of the Earth. In time I hope we take that leap off the ground and permanently become wanderers of the sky.'

[post-planetary]

'Upon its discovery in 2004, Apophis was briefly estimated to have a 2.7% chance of impacting the Earth in 2029. Additional measurements later showed there was no impact risk at that time from the 210-330 meter (690-1080 foot) diameter object, identified spectroscopically as an Sq type similar to LL chondritic meteorites. However, there will be a historically close approach to the Earth, estimated to be a 1 in 800 year event (on average, for an object of that size).'

[post-planetary]

[post-planetary]

SLINGSHOT MOON. http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/j002e3/j002e3d.gif

[post-planetary]

"Perhaps it’s all a question of perspective and time. The virus that is malevolent for the bulb is beneficial in relation to the flower. The code that breaks through one security barrier is also the incentive to develop new lines of defence.  Short-term anomalies can be crucial to long-term stability, and vice versa: at least eight percent of the human genome is composed of retroviruses which would have threatened the body at one time but are now simply part of the code. It depends how far back one is willing to step: perhaps the very fact of digital technology is an anomaly in an analogue world; perhaps the earth itself is an anomaly; maybe humanity, with all its technology, was already anomalous in a tool-free world. "

[post-planetary]

Freeman Dyson talks about near term and long term human travel off planet in his Noah's Ark Eggs and Warm-Blooded Plants lecture at the recent Starship Century conference, A. C. Clarke Center [UCSD] conference.

[post-planetary]

"On June 30, 2004, the Cassini spacecraft entered orbit around Saturn to begin the first in-depth, up-close study of the ringed planet and its domain. As expected, the Saturn System has provided an incredible wealth of opportunities for exploration and discovery. With its initial four-year tour of the Saturn system complete as well as an initial two-year extended mission called the Cassini Equinox Mission, the spacecraft is conducting a second extended mission called the Cassini Solstice Mission."

for more on Cassini: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/science/index.cfm

[post-planetary]

"Where does our Solar System end? If you define it in terms of the Sun's gravitational influence, then it's the edge of the Oort cloud, a collection icy bodies that stretches over two light years from the Sun. You could also place it at the orbit of the last dwarf planet that roams the Kuiper belt. But if you want to define it where the Sun's energy directly affects the environment, then you'd place it at the edge of the heliosheath, where the solar wind and the Sun's magnetic field fall off, and the environment is dominated by the energetic particles of the interstellar medium."

[post-planetary]

'...the point being that for an interstellar beacon to be noticed, it has to transmit for a long period and be energy-efficient as well. By ‘a long time’ I mean potentially eons, because such a beacon might be set up as the final gift to the universe from a dying civilization, and it might not be found for millions of years.'

[post-planetary]

' Complex plasmas may naturally self-organize themselves into stable interacting helical structures that exhibit features normally attributed to organic living matter. The self-organization is based on non-trivial physical mechanisms of plasma interactions involving over-screening of plasma polarization. As a result, each helical string composed of solid microparticles is topologically and dynamically controlled by plasma fluxes leading to particle charging and over-screening, the latter providing attraction even among helical strings of the same charge sign. These interacting complex structures exhibit thermodynamic and evolutionary features thought to be peculiar only to living matter such as bifurcations that serve as `memory marks', self-duplication, metabolic rates in a thermodynamically open system, and non-Hamiltonian dynamics.'  http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/9/8/263/fulltext/

[post-planetary]

[post-planetary]

'Phase IV, the only feature film to be directed by celebrated title designer Saul Bass... it turned out to be a genuine curiosity, a strange mixture of corny 50s style SF and early 70s dystopia. The story concerns the sudden appearance of sentience among some unspecified species of ant... two scientists in a camp out in middle of the Arizona desert study the formation of an ant hive mind, the most explicit expression of this collective intelligence being a series of rectangular monoliths built from sand by the ants. '  from Ballardian

[post-planetary]

ESO's GigaGalaxy Zoom: The Sky, from Eye to Telescope

Through three giant images, the GigaGalaxy Zoom project reveals the full sky as it appears with the unaided eye from one of the darkest deserts on Earth, then zooms in on a rich region of the Milky Way using a hobby telescope, and finally uses the power of a professional telescope to reveal the details of an iconic nebula.

[post-planetary]

'Instead of viewing the various scales of emergent ubiquitous computing technologies as a haphazard collection of individual processes, devices and standards (RFID, cloud storage, augmented reality, smart cities, conflict minerals, etc.), it is more illuminating to model them as components of a larger, comprehensive, meta-technology. The Stack is planetary-scale computation understood as a megastructure. The term “stack” is borrowed from the TCP/IP or OSI layered model of distributed network architecture. At the scale of planetary computation, The Stack is comprised of 7 interdependent layers: Earth, Cloud, City, Network, Address, Interface, User. In this, it is an attempt to conceive of the technical and geopolitical structures of planetary computation as a “totality.”' B. Bratton

[post-planetary]

'“For special events like this, we sometimes go nuclear. So I thought I'd ask whether you'd like to join us.” Cass froze, and stared at him. “Nuclear? How? Has someone solved all the problems?” Femtomachines built from exotic nuclei had been employed as special-purpose computers ever since the basic design had been developed, six thousand years before. For sheer speed, they left every other substrate in the dust. But as far as Cass knew, no one could make a femtomachine stable for more than a few picoseconds; they could perform a great many calculations in that time, but then they blew themselves apart and left you hunting through the debris for the answer. Gamma-ray spectroscopy could only extract a few hundred kilobytes, which was orders of magnitude too small even for a differential memory — a compressed description of experience that could be absorbed by a frozen reference copy of the person who'd actually lived through it. '