Shut Up and Finish Your Meal

"We completely understand the public's concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population, but that is not our mission"

- 22 July 2009 - New Scientist

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Dont Let Me Hear You Say Life's Taking You Nowhere

On my iPod today:

"Golden Years"

David Bowie "Station to Station" (1976)

Sometimes Reality Is Too Complex

"...in life, one can only know the present. No one's lived in the past, or will ever live in the future"

Natasha Vonbraun to Lemmy Caution

Alphaville (1965)

Sharing The Risk

40 years ago this month, I remember staying up late with my family to watch Apollo 11 land on the moon. What I recall most vividly was not the scratchy, black and white video images, but the surreal caption NBC ran at the bottom of the screen: "Live From The Moon."

Four days later the crew splashed down in the Pacific. When the recovered astronauts were choppered to the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Hornet, they greeted the cameras and cheering crowd wearing respirators and hazmat suits, before ducking into an Airstream trailer that had been retrofitted into a mobile quarantine facility. This quick dash into quarantine wasn't for the astronaut's protection: it was for the explicit protection of everyone on Earth.

In the years leading up to manned expeditions to the moon, there was broad (but not unanimous) scientific consensus that the lunar surface was lifeless: that the absence of atmosphere and continuous exposure to hard radiation alone rendered the moon perfectly sterile. But with empirical evidence to support this assumption unavailable, scientists could not guarantee the Apollo crew (and their lunar samples) would not return to earth with an extraterrestrial organism. In their report ("Conference on Potential Hazards of Back Contamination from the Planets, July 29- 30, 1964”. More background here), the advisory committee stated that "...negative data will not prove that extraterrestrial life does not exist; they will merely mean that it has not been found." The characteristics and behaviors of a hypothetical extraterrestrial organism, if introduced into the earth's biosphere, were as unknown as the consequences.

Should the hypothetical organism prove pathogenic, the committee hypothesized that contemporary science would likely be catastrophically ill-equipped to deal with the occurrence. With admirable actuarial precision, they calculated that the instant the returning Apollo 11 capsule's hatch was opened to the earth's atmosphere, the statistical risk of catastrophic (or possibly lethal) global contamination multiplied by 1,191,600,000 (using a formula they succinctly, if melodramatically, termed "the logarithmic order of death" and factored by the sum of the world's population, circa 1964).

The precautions taken by NASA to minimize a "back contamination" event were considered unnecessary by most experts, and arbitrary and incomplete by others. Most prominently, they included the construction of the now almost completely forgotten Lunar Receiving Laboratory: a high-containment facility where the lunar soil and rock samples could be studied in isolation much as we would Ebola or some other dangerous terrestrial pathogen. The LRL served as partial inspiration for one of Michael Chrichton's earlier best sellers, The Andromeda Strain, about a scientific team struggling to deal with a deadly extraterrestrial organism brought back to earth by a returning spacecraft (see the striking Robert Wise-directed 1971 original and not the flaccid, stupefying A&E network miniseries adaption of a few years ago).

With Apollo 11's landing on the lunar surface, the entire world watched that century's most perilous technological high-wire act from the safe distance of a quarter million miles. A few days later, upon the spacecraft's return, that same global audience --along with the earth's entire biosphere-- participated fully, if unwittingly, in a far riskier gamble. If the advisory committee’s logarithmic order of death was to be trusted, the odds against such an occurrence were better than a trillion to one, and as it happened, no pestilence returned with the astronauts. But when they cracked opened the hatch, all of us were along for the ride.

Carport 1979

The Radioactive Wasps Have Come Home To Roost

For over 40 years, the U.S. Government and its civilian industrial partners enriched plutonium for America's nuclear arsenal at a remote, sprawling facility in Hanford Washington (background here and here). It was steady work, at least until peace broke out briefly in the 1990s and the Hanford Site was revealed to be one of most stupendously, mind-bogglingly contaminated places on the planet. Contamination of decommissioned nuclear weapons facilities has proven to be one of the most durable leftovers from the Cold War (by durable we're talking the tens-of-thousands-of-years kind of durable) and Hanford's the worst of the whole sorry lot.

Lately things at the Hanford Site have taken a distinctly Toho Studios turn: wasps that have nested in the contaminated ground have become seriously radioactive, giving Hanford's seemingly endless environmental train wreck a fresh B-movie dimension. The New Scientist has a thorough and relatively straight-faced account here.

None of the afflicted wasps have grown to Mothra-like proportions but there's still room for hope.

A Territory to Ridicule

I've been having a lot of fun lately with Burroughs and Gysin's cut-up method. Although a good case could be made that most everything that comes out of Sarah Palin's mouth sounds like it's already been thoroughly massaged by a cut-up machine, I couldn't help but wonder what running the first few paragraphs of her resignation speech through the process would yield. Using one of the many online cut-up engines, here's the appropriately sinister and mildly hilarifying results:

"Faith and family: nothing's more important for our state. Vast riches, beauty, and strategic placement --remember the adversaries scoffed, calling this help the United States.

Hi Alaska.

Know that besides me, Alaskan's grasp what can be purchased in this great land and globe, mocking "Seward's Folly". Secure Alaska, so Alaska could the people serve. Our beloved Alaska I want serving boldly as a territory to ridicule."