Manifest Future

A recent bit on Motherboard detailing a new spacesuit design by Dava Newman at MIT reminded me of  recent glimpses of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. But AICN posted a couple new stills from the film and astutely dated the form-fitting space suit back to early pulp comics, describing a suit that proved unrealistic in the 1960′s when space programs actually needed to keep people alive in space. Now, perhaps, we can have style, or at least less obtrusive lighter mechanics.

The Guardian reports that Google’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt are teaming up with James Cameron to mine asteroids.  The plan is to harvest asteroids cruising by Earth, and not to venture all the  way to the Asteroid Belt. By 2020 they want to have an orbiting fuel station using raw materials from asteroids. Says former astronaut Thomas Jones: ”It is the stuff of science fiction, but like in so many other areas of science fiction, it’s possible to begin the process of making them reality,” Larry Page is currently a trustee member on the board for the X Prize for private space travel.

Why not use pink plastic or green…? It would seem that white is the most futuristic color. They could have even gone the blatant route and made it orange like Samus. Maybe then we could work toward interstellar space suits for bounty hunters.

[via Motherboard]

New from iRobot, the company that brought you the floor scrubbing Roomba and Scooba, comes a human-sized “standing” robot that rolls around and dutifully accepts orders via an iPad or other tablet computer mounted where its face would be. It’s name is Ava. The New York Times reports that after falling sales of bomb-hunting robots to the US military and a lack of demand from other world military powers, iRobot is focusing on its most popular efforts with consumers: “When are you going to clean my floors?”. IRobot chief executive Colin M. Angle says that Rosey (seen above in a bizarre juxtaposition curtsey the NYT) “kind of set expectations that robots were the future”. Besides chasing the ideals painted by the Jetsons in the 1960′s, Angles company took its name from a Phillip K. Dick story and has by my eyes come the furthest towards the goal of integrating robots into everyday life. When we are surrounded by “smart” technology everyday, and many of the functions in out homes and infrastructure are automated by programs – what then makes a robot a robot? It would seem that failing any real AI, we can settle for machines that simply appear human or have the ability to move around on their own accord.

Here is the “Ava Brochure” as provided by the company’s website, where this classic image was found.

Besides looking hilariously awkward in all of the hypothetical settings (security, nursing, sales), Ava exemplifies how futurism has come to manifest itself in the twenty first century. The iPad and its predecessors are clearly indebted to the legacy of Science Fiction that has preceded them: taking cues from the pristine curvilinear environments of  Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and miming the portable wonder-gadgets of Rodenberry’s Star Trek . Now, Apple’s tablet is functioning front and center on a (vaguely) humanoid robot that is obviously seeking to exploit Western culture’s desires for the World of Tomorrow and trying to make them real. Will we settle for crude imitations using existing consumer hardware? Fitting such lofty dreams to the mold of a bottom-feeder of the imagination seems crude but tellingly descriptive of technology’s place today.

Of course, in other robot news, those tiny cooperative heli-drones should be all clear to fly missions through your bedroom window once the local police have some incentive to do so.

Word on the web is that Google is working on some augmented reality glasses, attempting to extend the so far superficial novelties of AR Iphone Apps to ubiquitous vision. As reported by 9to5Google (even the Google press corps have juvenile names), the product suspected to exist since December has been determined to resemble the already existing Oakley Thumps (pictured above, and apparently part of the Men’s department). The actual screen is “ only for one eye and on the side. It is not transparent nor does it have dual 3D configurations, as previously speculated”, which makes one curious about how a small screen would fit into the corner of one’s eye, and why Google isn’t going for the seemingly inevitable full-coverage approach as seen in experimental contact lenses. With scrolling and clicking cleverly controlled with tilts of the head and motion sensors – yet still maintaining the traditional interface of computers – users would probably look appropriately out-of-it, but not enough for the New York Times to ignore concerns about privacy. While having a camera built into inconspicuous glasses would allow people to record their neighbors, there also seems to be a greater risk of Google’s ubiquitous data-tracking. Connecting to the Web in the same way as a smart phone, individuals will have content and visual advances piped onto their eyes in an unprecedented way. One bright note, however, is that rather than viewing the technology as mere product, Google is interested in releasing the device to other companies and engineers to develop extensions and hopefully alternatives.

Below is a take on the subject from Motorola:

While 9to5Google accompanied their report with a clip from Terminator, I think a better comparison would be to the many takes on virtual reality that have been written around goggles or glasses, locking their users’ bodies into stasis while their eyes and minds travel elsewhere. I’m thinking of the VR equipment used by characters in William Gibson’s Neuromancer and sequels, in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash or in the less out-there and more recent Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. Incidentally, Google had an aborted entry into the VR realm in 2008 with Google Lively, a somewhat cartoonish Second Life knock-off. Will the Goggles inspire a more successful VR realm, or will users be content to have the locations of the nearest Starkbucks conveniently pointed out over their field of vision? Either way the idea of having a display directly over one’s eyes seems to keep popping up in Science Fiction and digital hardware manufacturers.  It is both intriguing for its complimentary nature with the body, and terrifying for its strong urge to totally obscure reality.

The author of the awesome AfroCyberPunk blog, Jonathan Dotse wrote a great piece at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (“a center for voices arguing for a responsible, constructive, ethical approach to the most powerful emerging technologies”) on African SciFi authors. Dotse describes himself as one of the many “raised on Nigerian movies and kung-fu flicks; Hindi musicals and gangster rap; Transformers, Spider Man, and Ananse stories; BBC, RFI, and Deutsche-Welle TV; the Nintendo/Playstation generation” – in short a generation particularly affected by the cycloning progress of technology.  Recognizing the potential for social change from recent technologies (citing the Arab Spring as one example), and astutely judging those changes as “unimaginable” only a handful of years ago, Dotse recognizes the importance of creative talent in shaping public attitudes toward technology and the future.

One particularly striking passage:

My own novel-in-progress began as a cyberpunk thriller set in a future North America, simply because whenever I tried to imagine an African future I found myself having to deal with issues I wished someone else had already dealt with; having to answer questions I wished someone else already had. I realized that I had no groundwork; no foundation whatsoever, and that to imagine a future Africa I would have to begin from scratch.

Problematic for a young author, sure, but others  should be so lucky as to “start from scratch” in imagining their future.  The following is a trailer for an unrelated Nigerian film Kajloa.

A recent find.

One of contemporary Sci Fi’s important voices, Cory Doctorow reflects on the cultural and political duty of the author:

Cory Doctorow: A Vocabulary for Speaking about the Future

It is encouraging to see an author taking his responsibility seriously, as even the geekiest blooger-cum-novelist can affect – or “inspire”, as Doctorow put it – the actual world. We here at The Rebellion for Autonomous Future frequently decry such prescriptions from the authors of mass media, but the line between individual creative effort and the mass media is growing as foggy as that between the reader and the author. Today anyone can publish and distribute their work around the world (eg. this blog), and the phenomenon of influence is no longer a one way street. It seems to me that a consumer is as likely to engage in active production of ideas as they are to passively receive them, likely they will do one in response to another. This, at least is a state I hope for.

Doctorow points out that besides acting as a top down example for real-world design – “Motorola’s engineers were trekkers” – Sci Fi provides important vocabulary for assessing the future. Is this useful, or do the limitations inherent in creating a framework outweigh the benefits?  By citing the term Orwellian, Doctorow doesn’t so much provide an example of literature providing footing for discussion, as one of literature providing a catch-all term for inserting an author’s ideas into reality. By throwing around such a word, writers are avoiding descriptive thought in favor of referencing a favorite book. The treacherous ability of fiction to influence fact is one that will not be easily grasped and one that should inspire much more discussion. The above article does acknowledge the phenomenon, and whether it is understood as a weapon against free thought or a framework for progress is up to the reader.

John Sission’s impressive collection of space-themed illustrations from “1930-1975″: Dreams of Space – Books and Ephemera (I wonder about those years…)

[via Boing Boing]

I just read Geoff Manaugh’s extensive interview with designer Nicholas de Monchaux on BLDGBLOG, having found it on a 2011 round-up of science articles. Posted last April on the occasion of  de Monchaux’s recent (and dramatically titled) book Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo, the conversation links subjects as disparate as conceptual architecture and women’s underwear. De Monchaux provides the refreshing description of the iconic Apollo suit as a “21-layered messy assemblage made by a bra company”, which as it turns out, it was. Playtex’s “soft and pliable” spacesuit trumped the competing hard-shell designs in the 1960′s, giving the history books a figure with looks to match its heady philosophical implications. As the Apollo spacecraft brought humans into space, the suits carved out a piece of it for the individuals who took the first steps. I am excited to rethink the spacesuit with an eye towards fashion, but the suit’s design was in the end managed by practicality.  De Monchaux recalls that their was another argument at the time for biologically engineering humans for space travel, or altering the alien territories for life-support. These ideas were found impractical – though they still rattle around the contemporary conversation on space travel – and were ultimately replaced with the complex process of outfitting men and women for survival in the most inhospitable of places.  De Monchaux better renders the debate on cyborgs and air-bags:

For instance, the word cyborg originated in the Apollo program, in a proposal by a psycho-pharmacologist and a cybernetic mathematician who conceived of this notion that the body itself could be, in their words, reengineered for space. They regarded the prospect of taking an earthly atmosphere with you into space, inside a capsule or a spacesuit, as very cumbersome and not befitting what they called the evolutionary progress of our triumphal entry into the inhospitable realm of outer space. The idea of the cyborg, then, is the apotheosis of certain utopian and dystopian ideas about the body and its transformation by technology, and it has its origins very much in the Apollo program.

It seems then, that in dragging a bit of  the Earth’s environment with them, the early astronauts were also preserving a bit of humanity as well. Turning away from the technological aspirations of cyborgism, places what was likely an unintentional emphasis on the faulted human condition.  Should we compromise ourselves to arrive at a destination? This firey question of biology is well represented in the 1960′s space programs. The suits, like their inhabitants were complex, pliable and fragile. Made of cloth and bearing a “hand-crafted nature”, the suits became symbols of space travel for generations, determining how  writers and filmmakers would imagine the world (de Monchaux). If the spacesuit took a concrete reality in those years, how was it imagined before then? A flurry of designs existed during the 60′s, but the idea of a spacesuit existed before the money and technology was there to build them. Georges Méliès depicted air-breathing travelers to the moon in his 1902 film A Trip to the Moon, but prior to that famous eye-poking Garrett P. Serviss described a spacesuit in his 1898 Edison’s Conquest of Mars:

…since it was probable that necessity would arise for occasionally quitting the interior of the electrical ships, Mr. Edison had provided for this emergency by inventing an air-tight dress constructed somewhat after the manner of a diver’s suit, but of much lighter material. Each ship was provided with several of these suits, by wearing which one could venture outside the car [spaceship] even when it was beyond the atmosphere of the earth…Provision had been made to meet the terrific cold which we knew would be encountered the moment we had passed beyond the atmosphere—that awful absolute zero which men had measured by anticipation, but never yet experienced—by a simple system of producing within the air-tight suits a temperature sufficiently elevated to counteract the effects of the frigidity without. By means of long, flexible tubes, air could be continually supplied to the wearers of the suits, and by an ingenious contrivance a store of compressed air sufficient to last for several hours was provided for each suit, so that in case of necessity the wearer could throw off the tubes connecting him with the air tanks in the car…Inside the headpiece of each of the electrical suits was the mouthpiece of a telephone. This was connected with a wire which, when not in use, could be conveniently coiled upon the arm of the wearer. Near the ears, similarly connected with wires, were telephonic receivers…When two persons wearing the air-tight dresses wished to converse with one another it was only necessary for them to connect themselves by the wires, and conversation could then be easily carried on.

Between 1934 and 1935 American aviator Wiley Post built himself a pressurized suit for high-altitude flying. Underwater diving suits were being developed around the same time.

As the Space Age approached Heinlein’s Have Sapce Suit – Will Travel helped spell out the technology that would come in the following decade. After the actualization of the Spacesuit by NASA and Soviet programs, the practical issues of space travel and the visual symbol of the suit itself became household ideas that have appeared in countless films, books, etc…