Design curator and museum director Tulga Beyerle borrowed the term Invasive Design from Robert Stadler, the designer who coined it, to define her mentorship’s topic. “[Invasive Design] describes how design is not always as clear, functional, or positive as it pretends to be” she says.
Chinese filmmaker stuns Cannes Film Festival with documentary revealing horrors of Mao’s gulags
Clocking in at more than eight hours, Wang Bing’s latest outing, Dead Souls, is probably one of the longest films to have taken a bow at the Cannes Film Festival, where it premiered on Wednesday, in two parts, with an hour-long intermission in between. The work’s length is, in a way, a reflection of Wang’s own odyssey in completing the documentary. Based on interviews and footage he gathered over 13 years, Dead Souls reconstructs the pain and suffering of those condemned to “re-education” – a euphemism for hard labour – in a gulag in northwestern China at the start of Mao Zedong’s Anti-Rightist Campaign, in 1957.
At first glance the bias in favor of unlimited speech and information seems perfectly reasonable and even unassailable. What arguments could be brought against it? An answer to that question has been offered in recent years by a small, but growing, number of critics. In a 2009 essay in The New Republic titled “Against Transparency,” the law professor Lawrence Lessig (known as an apostle of openness), asked, as I just have, “How could anyone be against transparency?” Lessig responds to his own question by quoting a trio of authors who in their book “Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency” observe that by itself information doesn’t do anything; its effects depend on the motives of those who make use of it, and raw information (that is, data) cannot distinguish between benign and malign appropriations of itself. Misunderstanding and manipulation are always more than possible, and there is no way to assure that “new information is used to further public objectives.” Another way to put this is to say that information, data and the unbounded flow of more and more speech can be politicized — it can, that is, be woven into a narrative that constricts rather than expands the area of free, rational choice. When that happens — and it will happen often — transparency and the unbounded flow of speech become instruments in the production of the very inequalities (economic, political, educational) that the gospel of openness promises to remove. And the more this gospel is preached and believed, the more that the answer to everything is assumed to be data uncorrupted by interests and motives, the easier it will be for interest and motives to operate under transparency’s cover.
One of our great errors in thinking — another aspect of that unfortunate idea of human exceptionalism that makes it so hard for us to be at home in this world — is that the natural and the man-made are distinct entities. Like all other parts of the branching experiment, we make and are made by the living environment, and we have done so since before we were us. Without the forests of the Santa Cruz mountains, there would be no Silicon Valley. But Silicon Valley will make or unmake the forests of the future. No nature story, no account of environmental struggle would be complete without bringing on-stage all the human technologies that are to us what the invention of flowers and nuts and chlorophyll and mycorrhizal networks are to the forest superorganism. Just as the emergence of tree intelligence forever changed the planet, so the emergence of consciousness (which long predated humans) forever changed the nature of evolution. Cultural transmission is orders of magnitude faster than genetic transmission, and digital transmission has accelerated the speed of culture a hundredfold or more. We may soon seem, to our artificial intelligence offspring, as motionless and insentient as trees seem to us. And here we live, trying to make a home between our predecessors and our descendants.
Dyed isopropyl alcohol atop a thin layer of acrylic medium spreads in a fractal fingering pattern. Although the shapes are reminiscent of the viscous fingers seen in in the Saffman-Taylor instability, these patterns are most likely a result of surface tension. The lower surface tension of the alcohol causes Marangoni forces to pull it outward. The branching shapes indicate an instability, likely driven by surface tension, but the details of the mechanism behind it are unclear. (Image credits: J. Nahabetian)
Carole Cusack’s Invented Religions is a scholarly survey of several key examples of the phenomenon that I once labeled “meta-religions”–where the sense of meta– is “beyond” or “after.” Such cultural configurations use religious tropes and advance religious claims, but they violate conventional (Christianity-based) religious definitions by rejecting solemnity, theological coherence, singularization of religious identity, and/or pre-modern historical narratives of validation. Cusack wants to grant the unqualified status of “religion” to such transgressors of religious norms, rather than treating them as pseudo-religions or “parody religions” as had been done in those rare cases where academics had previously deigned to notice them at all.
Her cardinal case studies are the Discordian Society, the Church of All Worlds, and the Church of the SubGenius. I have sympathy and somewhat more than anecdotal experience with all three of these, and I think that Cusack’s treatments of them are quite sound on the whole. She recounts their actual origins and development, itemizes their principal doctrines, and characterizes their practices. In brief, Discordia is the cult of Eris, goddess of Chaos; the Church of All Worlds is a neopagan sodality inspired by Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land; and the SubGenii are seekers of Slack and heralds of the OverMan.
In addition to these three exemplars (begun respectively in the decades of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s), Cusack supplies a further chapter on “Third-Millennium Invented Religions” that treats Jediism, Matrixism, and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. These are all less than twenty years old, and their long-term social resilience and cultural fecundity is relatively untested. Moreover, they have largely germinated through the instrumentality of the Internet, and critics often doubt whether the dilute social fabric of ‘net-mediated associations can support durable religious development. Finally, all three express a far lower tension with the larger “host” culture than the Discordians, SubGenii, or CAW do. Jediism and Matrixism are rooted in corporate-owned mass-media cinema properties, and thus mired in a consumer-fan identity. Jediism as census-protest and the Church of the FSM both oppose themselves to establishment religion, but neither offers any resistance to the ethos of rational secular liberalism.
In a remark at the outset of her concluding chapter, Cusack proposes that earlier examples of “invented religions” might include the Victorian Theosophical Society, if we are to suppose that the Mahatmas or their teachings were a product of Madame Blavatsky’s imagination (141). But why pick on Theosophists? Surely such skepticism could as easily be trained on Joseph Smith and the angel Moroni for the Latter Day Saints, on Muhammad and Gabriel for Islam, or on Paul and Jesus Christ for Christianity. A far better example of occultist meta-religion from the end of the long nineteenth century can be found in Aleister Crowley’s “Liber LXI vel Causae A∴A∴” point 7:
“Some years ago a number of cipher MSS. were discovered and deciphered by certain students. They attracted much attention, as they purported to derive from the Rosicrucians. You will readily understand that the genuineness of the claim matters no whit, such literature being judged by itself, not by its reputed sources.”
This “proof of the pudding” attitude dovetails perfectly with Cusack’s repeated observation that invented-religionists are “more likely to ask ‘does it work?’ than ‘is it true?‘” (9-10) The empirical prioritization of result ties into her theoretical framework regarding modernity and secularization. Invented religions are deliberately in-credible, typically advancing their outrageousness in contrast to traditional “faiths” that expect belief as a fundamental condition–an insistence largely originating in Protestantism, as Cusack notes (46). Instead of qualifying adherents through belief, invented religions, like most religions known to scholars, qualify them through practices and experiences.
Cusack’s theoretical considerations use invented religions to demonstrate the imagination as a religious faculty, and she does go some way towards connecting this faculty to the religious function of narrative and (by implication, at least) to the essentially fictive nature of most specifically religious “beliefs.” Despite her application of a Situationist idea of “counter-spectacle” to the Church of the SubGenius (84ff.), she does not go as far as she might have in terms of connecting the religious imagination with visionary experience.
In any case, Invented Religions does not claim to be an exhaustive study, but simply an inaugural one. It comes very close, in fact, to being exactly one of the books I imagined writing when I aspired to the ivory tower of religious studies academia. It should form a valuable point of departure for further studies of these important cultural phenomena. [via]
Posted by Yaniv Leviathan, Principal Engineer and Yossi Matias, Vice President, Engineering, Google
A long-standing goal of human-computer interaction has been to enable people to have a natural conversation with computers, as they would with each other. In recent years, we have witnessed a revolution in the ability of computers to understand and to generate natural speech, especially with the application of deep neural networks.
Still, even with today’s state of the art systems, it is often frustrating having to talk to stilted computerized voices that don’t understand natural language. In particular, automated phone systems are still struggling to recognize simple words and commands. They don’t engage in a conversation flow and force the caller to adjust to the system instead of the system adjusting to the caller.
Today we announce Google Duplex, a new technology for conducting natural conversations to carry out “real world” tasks over the phone. The technology is directed towards completing specific tasks, such as scheduling certain types of appointments. For such tasks, the system makes the conversational experience as natural as possible, allowing people to speak normally, like they would to another person, without having to adapt to a machine.
One of the key research insights was to constrain Duplex to closed domains, which are narrow enough to explore extensively. Duplex can only carry out natural conversations after being deeply trained in such domains. It cannot carry out general conversations.
Here are examples of Duplex making phone calls (using different voices):
Duplex scheduling a hair salon appointment:
Duplex calling a restaurant:
While sounding natural (((sort of))) these and other examples are conversations between a fully automatic computer system and real businesses.
The Google Duplex technology is built to sound natural, to make the conversation experience comfortable. It’s important to us that users and businesses have a good experience with this service, and transparency is a key part of that. We want to be clear about the intent of the call so businesses understand the context. We’ll be experimenting with the right approach over the coming months…. (((etc etc talking donkey etc)))
The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Jamie Williams and Lena Gunn have drawn up an annotated five-point list of questions to ask yourself before using a machine-learning algorithm to make predictions and guide outcomes.
The list draws heavily on two essential recent books on the subject: Cathy O'Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction and Virginia Eubanks’s Automating Inequality, both of which are essential reads.
The list’s five questions are:
1. Will this algorithm influence—or serve as the basis of—decisions with the potential to negatively impact people’s lives?
2. Can the available data actually lead to a good outcome?
3. Is the algorithm fair?
4. How will the results (really) be used by humans?
5. Will people affected by these decisions have any influence over the system?
Our notions of what it means to have a mind have too often been governed by assumptions about what it means to be human. But there is no necessary logical connection between the two. There is often an assumption that a digital mind will either be, or aspire to be, like our own. We can see this at play in artificial beings from Pinocchio to the creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL to Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation. But a machine mind won’t be a human-like mind — at least not precisely, and not intentionally. Machines are developing a separate kind of interaction and interrelation with the world, which means they will develop new and different kinds of minds, minds to which human beings cannot have direct access. A human being will never know exactly what it’s like to be a bot, because we do not inhabit their modes of interaction.
“Done with the utmost of improvised, joyous spirit the two pieces seem to be restrained by absolutely nothing. This total freedom results in something that becomes completely and deeply compelling, a true joy to behold.”
“Employing a greater deal of noise and chaos, Farmers Manual ratchet up the tension to unfathomable degrees while layers veer right into pure cacophony. Distortion layers on top of itself, resulting in an ornate series of patterns. By the latter half Farmers Manual only lets the distortion and noise take over, with any trace of humanity fully scrubbed out.”
“Always ready for a spot of fun, Farmers Manual ensures that they destroy everything in their path. The tension they employ throughout results in a surprisingly great deal of joy, the way they allow everything to burst forth in a tremendous almost flowering of sound. Very much in the noise realm of things, they make sure that the song’s unpredictability allows for a few jump scares, while they increase the volume into uncomfortable degrees. Outright amazing, they prove exactly how to allow sound to completely lose it while documenting the results.“
“Something particularly unique to Farmers Manual, they never make a grand entrance. Their emphasis relies on a steady patience, one that allows a stream of consciousness approach to songwriting, or textural exploration. It feels quite natural what they do, allowing their sound to speak for itself. Over the course of the piece this proves to be true for they take a light touch the sound, only gently nudging it when absolutely necessary. For the most part, it is the sound that does most of the work, growing with an unrealized kind of potential. About halfway through the piece the pulsing rhythm starts to truly assert itself, allowing for a great deal of madness right on the periphery to gain considerable clout. When the piece becomes unruly, it truly becomes all-encompassing, offering no escape from the onslaught.”
“Is Farmers Manual, after years of relaxing at art exhibits, finally about to become normal? Considering this particular piece’s main description is“farmersmanual dropped some bluish green squares on the floor”
the answer is thankfully no. One of the more unique and sorely missed groups of extreme computer musicians, there is something quite intense about what they do. Rhythms are mangled, textures warped, and any discernible reference point to actual genres a mere accident.”
“Jagged little edges and crackles introduce the piece. From there the tiny textures have a near-funk like element to them. Noise emerges until it virtually collapses upon itself.“
“With “Stat = Conjecture Pirayune Snart
” Farmers Manual prove they are the oddity of all oddities, a group that remains committed to the most abnormal of sonic explorations.”
“Amazing indeed. Viral Hippo, the BuzzFeed News–created Instagram account that used Fuelgram to rack up more than 1,500 likes on a photo of a black square, netted almost double that on a photo of a yellow square. It pulled in 1,400 likes on a diagram of the human sinus, and more than 1,200 on an accidentally shot photo of a hubcap.”
Wind, water, and gravity are great sculptors of our world. This false-color satellite image shows the Ga’ara Depression in Iraq, which formed some 300 million years ago beneath a shallow sea. The steep cliffs along the southern edge of the depression continue moving southward as they’re eroded by wind and run-off. When infrequent but intense rains pour down the channels of the southern cliffs, it carves away sediment which the water carries onward. In the flatter basin, these sometimes-rivers slow and spread out, eventually dropping the sediment they carry into sandbars. The build-up of sandbars causes the slower-moving water to shift its course back-and-forth over time, creating the alluvial fans seen along the southern and western borders. (Image credit: J. Stevens, via NASA Earth Observatory)
It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom,
it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief,
it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light,
it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope,
it was the winter of despair …“
So begins Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities,” and what a great articulation it is of the transformative time we live in. We’re in an era of great inspiration and possibility, but with this opportunity comes the need for tremendous thoughtfulness and responsibility as technology is deeply and irrevocably interwoven into our societies.
Computation Explosion
The power and potential of computation to tackle important problems has never been greater. In the last few years, the cost of computation has continued to plummet. The Pentium IIs we used in the first year of Google performed about 100 million floating point operations per second. The GPUs we use today perform about 20 trillion such operations — a factor of about 200,000 difference — and our very own TPUs are now capable of 180 trillion (180,000,000,000,000) floating point operations per second.
Even these startling gains may look small if the promise of quantum computing comes to fruition. For a specialized class of problems, quantum computers can solve them exponentially faster. For instance, if we are successful with our 72 qubit prototype, it would take millions of conventional computers to be able to emulate it. A 333 qubit error-corrected quantum computer would live up to our name, offering a 10,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000x speedup.
There are several factors at play in this boom of computing. First, of course, is the steady hum of Moore’s Law, although some of the traditional measures such as transistor counts, density, and clock frequencies have slowed. The second factor is greater demand, stemming from advanced graphics in gaming and, surprisingly, from the GPU-friendly proof-of-work algorithms found in some of today’s leading cryptocurrencies, such as Ethereum. However, the third and most important factor is the profound revolution in machine learning that has been building over the past decade. It is both made possible by these increasingly powerful processors and is also the major impetus for developing them further.
The Spring of Hope
The new spring in artificial intelligence is the most significant development in computing in my lifetime. When we started the company, neural networks were a forgotten footnote in computer science; a remnant of the AI winter of the 1980’s. Yet today, this broad brush of technology has found an astounding number of applications. We now use it to:
understand images in Google Photos;
enable Waymo cars to recognize and distinguish objects safely;
significantly improve sound and camera quality in our hardware;
understand and produce speech for Google Home;
translate over 100 languages in Google Translate;
caption over a billion videos in 10 languages on YouTube;
improve the efficiency of our data centers;
suggest short replies to emails;
help doctors diagnose diseases, such as diabetic retinopathy;
discover new planetary systems;
create better neural networks (AutoML);
… and much more.
Every month, there are stunning new applications and transformative new techniques. In this sense, we are truly in a technology renaissance, an exciting time where we can see applications across nearly every segment of modern society.
However, such powerful tools also bring with them new questions and responsibilities. How will they affect employment across different sectors? How can we understand what they are doing under the hood? What about measures of fairness? How might they manipulate people? Are they safe?
There is serious thought and research going into all of these issues. Most notably, safety spans a wide range of concerns from the fears of sci-fi style sentience to the more near-term questions such as validating the performance of self-driving cars. A few of our noteworthy initiatives on AI safety are as follows:
I expect machine learning technology to continue to evolve rapidly and for Alphabet to continue to be a leader — in both the technological and ethical evolution of the field.
G is for Google
Roughly three years ago, we restructured the company as Alphabet, with Google as a subsidiary (albeit far larger than the rest). As I write this, Google is in its 20th year of existence and continues to serve ever more people with information and technology products and services. Over one billion people now use Search, YouTube, Maps, Play, Gmail, Android, and Chrome every month.
This widespread adoption of technology creates new opportunities, but also new responsibilities as the social fabric of the world is increasingly intertwined.
Expectations about technology can differ significantly based on nationality, cultural background, and political affiliation. Therefore, Google must evolve its products with ever more care and thoughtfulness.
The purpose of Alphabet has been to allow new applications of technology to thrive with greater independence. While it is too early to declare the strategy a success, I am cautiously optimistic. Just a few months ago, the Onduo joint venture between Verily and Sanofi launched their first offering to help people with diabetes manage the disease. Waymo has begun operating fully self-driving cars on public roads and has crossed 5 million miles of testing. Sidewalk Labs has begun a large development project in Toronto. And Project Wing has performed some of the earliest drone deliveries in Australia.
There remains a high level of collaboration. Most notably, our two machine learning centers of excellence — Google Brain (an X graduate) and DeepMind — continue to bring their expertise to projects throughout Alphabet and the world. And the Nest subsidiary has now officially rejoined Google to form a more robust hardware group.
The Epoch of Belief and the Epoch of Incredulity
Technology companies have historically been wide- eyed and idealistic about the opportunities that their innovations create. And for the overwhelming part, the arc of history shows that these advances, including the Internet and mobile devices, have created opportunities and dramatically improved the quality of life for billions of people. However, there are very legitimate and pertinent issues being raised, across the globe, about the implications and impacts of these advances. This is an important discussion to have. While I am optimistic about the potential to bring technology to bear on the greatest problems in the world, we are on a path that we must tread with deep responsibility, care, and humility. That is Alphabet’s goal.
“An image is drained of its force by the way it is used, where and how often it is seen. Images shown on television are by definition images of which sooner or later, one tires. What looks like callousness has its origin in the instability of attention that television is organised to arouse and to satiate by its surfeit of images. Image-glut keeps attention light, mobile, relatively indifferent to content. Image-flow precludes a privileged image. The whole point of television is that one can switch channels, that it is normal to switch channels, to become restless, bored. Consumers droop. They need to be stimulated, jump started, again and again. Content is no more that one of these stimulants. A more reflective engagement with content would require a certain intensity of awareness - just what is weakened by the expectations brought to images disseminated by the media, whose leaching out of content contributes most to the deadening of feeling.”
“Our educational system is like an automobile which has strong rear lights, brightly illuminating the past. But looking forward things are barely discernible.”
“She was a mysterious serial killer known as the “The Woman Without a Face” and detectives across Europe spent more than 15 years doing their utmost to bring her to justice for at least six brutal murders and a string of break-ins. Yesterday, however, they were forced to admit that she probably didn’t exist. The only clues that “The Woman Without a Face” left behind at 40 different crime scenes were DNA traces. These were collected on cotton swabs, supplied to the police in a number of European countries. Now police investigators have established that in all probability the DNA had not been left by their quarry but by a woman working for the German medical company supplying the swabs, who had inadvertently contaminated them. German police who had been leading the hunt said they had probably been involved in one of the longest and most perplexing wild goose chases in criminal history. “This is a very embarrassing story,” admitted police spokesman Josef Schneider.”
When North Korean leader Kim Jong-un meets with his South Korean counterpart this week to talk peace on the peninsula, he’ll also be getting a history lesson in inter-Korean relations as told through gastronomy. As the leaders prepare to meet on April 27 at the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), Seoul’s presidential Blue House today (April 24) released the menu for the post-summit dinner. The ingredients used represent meaning to those attending the summit, and also honor those who have worked to reunify the Koreas in some way, according to the Blue House
On August 6, 2014, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft officially entered orbit around the comet 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko (let’s call it ‘67P’ for short). For the next two years it moved around the comet, taking incredible images, sent down an ill-fated lander, and expanded our knowledge of these icy solar system visitors hugely.
Twitter user landru79 saw an opportunity. They took some of the data, cleaned it up a bit, and then created a video that is as mind-blowing as it is jaw-dropping.
Two years ago, former NASA climate scientist James Hansen and a number of colleagues laid out a dire scenario in which gigantic pulses of fresh water from melting glaciers could upend the circulation of the oceans, leading to a world of fast-rising seas and even superstorms.
Hansen’s scenario was based on a computer simulation, not hard data from the real world, and met with skepticism from a number of other climate scientists. But now, a new oceanographic study appears to have confirmed one aspect of this picture — in its early stages, at least.
The new research, based on ocean measurements off the coast of East Antarctica, shows that melting Antarctic glaciers are indeed freshening the ocean around them. And this, in turn, is blocking a process in which cold and salty ocean water sinks below the sea surface in winter, forming “the densest water on the Earth,” in the words of study lead author Alessandro Silvano, a researcher with the University of Tasmania in Hobart.
This Antarctic bottom water has stopped forming in two key regions of Antarctica, the research shows — the West Antarctic coast and the coast around the enormous Totten glacier in East Antarctica.
These are two of Antarctica’s fastest-melting regions, and no wonder: When cold surface water no longer sinks into the depths, a deeper layer of warm ocean water can travel across the continental shelf and reach the bases of glaciers, retaining its heat as the cold waters remain above. This warmer water then rapidly melts the glaciers and the large floating ice shelves connected to them.
In other words, the melting of Antarctica’s glaciers appears to be triggering a “feedback” loop in which that melting, through its effect on the oceans, triggers still more melting. The melting water stratifies the ocean column, with cold fresh water trapped at the surface and warmer water sitting below. Then, the lower layer melts glaciers and creates still more melt water — not to mention rising seas as glaciers lose mass.
Vehicles await auction on a large lot in Manheim, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1945, this facility is the world’s largest wholesale auto auction, handling around 8 million vehicles per year at more than 100 locations worldwide. The lot seen in this Overview is approximately 500 acres (200 hectares) in size.
The sound of ants communicating with each other by scraping their legs on their bodies.
The echoes under the surface of a small freshwater pond.
The sound of a pine forest dying.
These are just a few of the sounds David Dunn has investigated in his decades as a composer, musician, acoustic ecologist and audio engineer. His compositions, soundscapes and other projects fuse art and science, inviting us to pay close attention to nonhuman activities and environments that usually pass beneath our notice.
Recently Dunn has applied his bioacoustical research to the problem of dying pine forests. For almost two decades, pine trees across the American west have been decimated by bark beetles, whose populations have exploded due to warming temperatures. The beetles have destroyed over 45 millions of acres of pine trees, disrupting ecosystems and altering landscapes — and they show no signs of stopping. Dunn and his collaborators have been awarded a patent for technology and protocol that uses sound to disrupt key behaviors and life stages of bark beetles to slow the devastation of pine forests.
UC Santa Cruz music professor David Dunn has received a patent to help fight bark beetles ravaging Western forests, killing millions of trees throughout the West. Here’s a video explaining his bioacoustic research in the context of bark beetles and Western forests.
Cuckoos, spotted flycatchers, fieldfares, hobbies, woodlarks, skylarks, lapwings, house sparrows, lesser spotted woodpeckers, yellowhammers, woodcock, red kites, sparrowhawks, peregrine falcons, all five types of British owl, the first ravens at Knepp in the past 100 years — the list goes on and on. The speed at which all these species — and many more — have appeared has astonished observers, particularly as our intensively farmed land was, biologically speaking, in dire condition in 2001, at the start of the project. The key to Knepp’s extraordinary success? It’s about surrendering all preconceptions, and simply observing what happens. By contrast, conventional conservation tends to be about targets and control, and often involves micro-managing a habitat for the perceived benefit of several chosen species.
Scientists are exploring changes underway in the Greenland Ice Sheet as a result of global warming. Algae, dust and soot, a short-lived climate pollutant also known as black carbon, are exacerbating melting. Credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Excerpt:
In the high-stakes race against sea level rise, understanding what’s causing the Greenland Ice Sheet to melt is critical. The problem isn’t just rising temperatures: soot from ships, wildfires and distant power plants, as well as dust and a living carpet of microbes on the surface of the ice, are all speeding up the melting.
Right now, predictions for sea level rise range from about 1 to 10 feet by 2100—a wide difference for coastal communities trying to plan seawalls and other protective measures.
The more we understand about how pollutants affect the ice, the more accurate those projections will be. So, let’s take a look at what’s happening on the ice sheet now—and the risks ahead.
First, temperatures are rising in the Arctic at about twice the global average. That causes melting around the edges of the ice sheet each year and reaches across more of the surface during summer heat waves.
In areas near the edge of the ice sheet, things get even more interesting: a carpet of microbes and algae mixed with dust and soot, a short-lived climate pollutant, is darkening the ice sheet, absorbing the sun’s rays and accelerating the melting of the ice. New research shows this dark zone is growing.
“[in 1977] NASA launched Voyager 1, the second of two spacecraft on a grand tour of the solar system and into the mysteries of interstellar space. Attached to each spacecraft is a Golden Record containing Earth’s greatest music, spoken greetings, “Sounds of Earth,” and more than 100 images encoded as audio signals, a technological feat at the time. Technical director Frank Drake had always planned to encode the photos in the audio spectrum for the record. The challenge was finding technology capable of the task. While flipping through an electronics catalog, Valentin Boriakoff, Drake’s colleague at the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center, stumbled upon Colorado Video, a small television equipment firm in Boulder that had built a unique device for encoding television images as audio signals that could be transmitted over telephone lines. Donating their time and expertise to the project, engineers at Colorado Video projected each Voyager slide onto a television camera lens, generating a signal that their machine converted into several seconds of sound per photo. A diagram on the aluminum cover of the Golden Record explains how to play it and decode the images. Four decades later, Ron Barry followed the instructions.”
One of our great errors in thinking — another aspect of that unfortunate idea of human exceptionalism that makes it so hard for us to be at home in this world — is that the natural and the man-made are distinct entities. Like all other parts of the branching experiment, we make and are made by the living environment, and we have done so since before we were us. Without the forests of the Santa Cruz mountains, there would be no Silicon Valley. But Silicon Valley will make or unmake the forests of the future. No nature story, no account of environmental struggle would be complete without bringing on-stage all the human technologies that are to us what the invention of flowers and nuts and chlorophyll and mycorrhizal networks are to the forest superorganism. Just as the emergence of tree intelligence forever changed the planet, so the emergence of consciousness (which long predated humans) forever changed the nature of evolution. Cultural transmission is orders of magnitude faster than genetic transmission, and digital transmission has accelerated the speed of culture a hundredfold or more. We may soon seem, to our artificial intelligence offspring, as motionless and insentient as trees seem to us. And here we live, trying to make a home between our predecessors and our descendants.
“Ecological awareness just means being aware that things happen on a bewildering variety of scales all at once, and that what that looks like on one scale is very different on another scale. What looks like a boiling kettle to my human eyes looks very different from an electron’s point of view: suddenly finding that you’ve teleported to a higher orbit isn’t the same as the smooth, chattery-sounding phenomenon we call boiling. And once you become aware of the idea that there are all these extra scales, you begin to notice that some scales are so big or so small (that also includes “long lasting” or “fleeting” too) that all we can mostly do is report and observe—or, if you like, undergo or endure.”
