Made famous in 1995 by NASA’s [US National Aeronautics and Space Administration] Hubble Space Telescope, the Pillars of Creation in the heart of the Eagle Nebula have captured imaginations worldwide with their arresting, ethereal beauty.
Now, NASA has released a new 3D visualization of these towering celestial structures using data from NASA’s Hubble and James Webb space telescopes. This is the most comprehensive and detailed multiwavelength movie yet of these star-birthing clouds.
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A June 26, 2024 NASA news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, provides detail about the pillars and the visualization, Note: The news release on EurekAlert has its entire text located in the caption for the image,
“By flying past and amongst the pillars, viewers experience their three-dimensional structure and see how they look different in the Hubble visible-light view versus the Webb infrared-light view,” explained principal visualization scientist Frank Summers of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, who led the movie development team for NASA’s Universe of Learning. “The contrast helps them understand why we have more than one space telescope to observe different aspects of the same object.”
The four Pillars of Creation, made primarily of cool molecular hydrogen and dust, are being eroded by the fierce winds and punishing ultraviolet light of nearby hot, young stars. Finger-like structures larger than the solar system protrude from the tops of the pillars. Within these fingers can be embedded, embryonic stars. The tallest pillar stretches across three light-years, three-quarters of the distance between our Sun and the next nearest star.
The movie takes visitors into the three-dimensional structures of the pillars. Rather than an artistic interpretation, the video is based on observational data from a science paper led by Anna McLeod, an associate professor at the University of Durham in the United Kingdom. McLeod also served as a scientific advisor on the movie project.
“The Pillars of Creation were always on our minds to create in 3D. Webb data in combination with Hubble data allowed us to see the Pillars in more complete detail,” said production lead Greg Bacon of STScI. “Understanding the science and how to best represent it allowed our small, talented team to meet the challenge of visualizing this iconic structure.”
The new visualization helps viewers experience how two of the world’s most powerful space telescopes work together to provide a more complex and holistic portrait of the pillars. Hubble sees objects that glow in visible light, at thousands of degrees. Webb’s infrared vision, which is sensitive to cooler objects with temperatures of just hundreds of degrees, pierces through obscuring dust to see stars embedded in the pillars.
“When we combine observations from NASA’s space telescopes across different wavelengths of light, we broaden our understanding of the universe,” said Mark Clampin, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “The Pillars of Creation region continues to offer us new insights that hone our understanding of how stars form. Now, with this new visualization, everyone can experience this rich, captivating landscape in a new way.”
Produced for NASA by STScI with partners at Caltech/IPAC, and developed by the AstroViz Project of NASA’s Universe of Learning, the 3D visualization is part of a longer, narrated video that combines a direct connection to the science and scientists of NASA’s Astrophysics missions with attention to the needs of an audience of youth, families, and lifelong learners. It enables viewers to explore fundamental questions in science, experience how science is done, and discover the universe for themselves.
Several stages of star formation are highlighted in the visualization. As viewers approach the central pillar, they see at its top an embedded, infant protostar glimmering bright red in infrared light. Near the top of the left pillar is a diagonal jet of material ejected from a newborn star. Though the jet is evidence of star birth, viewers can’t see the star itself. Finally, at the end of one of the left pillar’s protruding “fingers” is a blazing, brand-new star.
. The base model of the four pillars used in the visualization has been adapted to the STL file format, so that viewers can download the model file and print it out on 3D printers. Examining the structure of the pillars in this tactile and interactive way adds new perspectives and insights to the overall experience.
More visualizations and connections between the science of nebulas and learners can be explored through other products produced by NASA’s Universe of Learning such as ViewSpace, a video exhibit that is currently running at almost 200 museums and planetariums across the United States. Visitors can go beyond video to explore the images produced by space telescopes with interactive tools now available for museums and planetariums.
NASA’s Universe of Learning materials are based upon work supported by NASA under award number NNX16AC65A to the Space Telescope Science Institute, working in partnership with Caltech/IPAC, Pasadena, California, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Jet Propulsion Laboratory, La Cañada Flintridge, California.
The media advisory/news release about Aluula and its role in NASA’s (US National Aeronautics and Space Agency) proposed moon habitat was received via email back in June 2024. I’m glad I waited as I found a very detailed story by Devin Coldeway about the proposed moon habitat that wasn’t published until late July.2024.
First, some early news about Aluula and NASA, from an April 22, 2024 article by Nelson Bennett for Business in Vancouver,
A Victoria [British Columbia, Canada] composite materials company that developed a super-strong, lightweight polyethylene material used in a range out outdoor recreation equipment could soon be used by astronauts in space in inflatable space habitats.
Max Space, an American company that is developing expandable space habitats, is now incorporating composite materials made by Aluula Composites (TSX-V:AUUA).
Aluula’s innovation was developing a heat fusion process for working with ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene (UHMWPE) to make a super-tough lightweight material.
It is being used as part of a custom laminate that adds strength and durability to structural elements to the Max Space habitat, “making it possible to create a large living and working area at a fraction of the weight and transport costs of traditional crew modules,” Aluula said in a press release.
NASA announced Tuesday [January 2, 2024] updates to its Artemis campaign that will establish the foundation for long-term scientific exploration at the Moon, land the first woman and first person of color on the lunar surface, and prepare for human expeditions to Mars for the benefit of all. To safely carry out these missions, agency leaders are adjusting the schedules for Artemis II and Artemis III to allow teams to work through challenges associated with first-time developments, operations, and integration.
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With Artemis, NASA will explore more of the Moon than ever before, learn how to live and work away from home, and prepare for future human exploration of the Red Planet. NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) rocket, exploration ground systems, and Orion spacecraft, along with the human landing system, next-generation spacesuits, Gateway lunar space station, and future rovers are NASA’s foundation for deep space exploration.
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The June 20, 2024 Aluula media advisory/news release (received via email) describes the company’s involvement this way,
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A small company on Canada’s west coast is playing a big role to help astronauts return to the moon in 2026.
ALUULA Composites recently signed an agreement with Max Space, an American company, to use its innovative composite material to build space habitats on the moon. The company’s ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene (UHMWPE) laminate will be used to create a large living and working area for NASA’s astronauts when they return to the moon in September 2026.
The innovative material was selected because it has eight times the strength-to-weight ratio of steel and is extremely durable, which is ideal for space travel.
The first Max Space inflatable space habitat is slated to launch with SpaceX in 2026. The Max Space inflatables can be delivered into space in very small packages and then unfolded and expanded to create a much larger work space.
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Emily Mertz’s July 16, 2024 article for Global TV news provides a few more details, Note: Links have been removed,
A small West Coast company is helping astronauts return to the moon in 2026. ALUULA Composites has signed on to provide its durable, lightweight fabric to build space habitats.
The Max Space inflatables can be transported in very small packages and then expanded to create a much larger workspace.
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“It [Aluula’s ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene (UHMWPE) laminate] was actually originated by a bunch of engineers, chemists and wind sport enthusiasts. When you’re on the water, using a kite or a wing, you need something that’s very durable and very light and it was developed in that context.” [said ALUULA president and CEO Sage Berryman]
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The B.C. company, which is fairly young — it started in 2020 — is also committed to sustainability.
“It’s the first material that’s been done as a composite not using glues, so that also allows it to be recycled at the end of its useful life, which is pretty different in a material that’s polyethylene — plastic-based,” Berryman said.
“Our goal is to make products that are able to be fully circular and that’s an exciting thing as well.”
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“Having these opportunities to have these unique materials in unique applications is really exciting. And when you start talking about a project that’s not a huge project for us, but it’s huge in its meaningfulness, when you’re working with Max Space that’s working with NASA that’s going up on SpaceX, it is exciting,” she said.
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Mertz’s July 16, 2024 article contains some news videos and about the project and related space information.
Space habitat details
Devin Coldeway’s July 27, 2024 article for TechCrunch and republished yahoo! news tells a fascinating story about space habitats with a special emphasis on the one being developed for NASA’s Artemis campaign, Note: Links have been removed,
Max Space reinvents expandable habitats with a 17th-century twist, launching in 2026
Working and even living in space has shifted from far-off fantasy to seemingly inevitable reality, but the question remains: what exactly will the next generation of space habitation look like? For Max Space, the answer is clear, and has been for decades — centuries, even. A new generation of expandable habitats could offer both safety and enough room to stretch your legs, and the first one is going up in 2026.
The startup is led by Aaron Kemmer, formerly of Made in Space, and Maxim de Jong, an engineer who has studiously avoided the limelight despite being the co-creator of expandable habitats like the one currently attached to the International Space Station.
They believe that the breakout moment for this type of in-space structure is due to arrive any year now. By positioning themselves as a successor to — and fundamental improvement on — the decades-old designs being pursued by others, they can capture what may eventually be a multi-billion-dollar market.
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Expandable habitats go back a long ways, but their first real use was in the TransHab project at NASA in the 1990s, where the fundamental approach was developed.
Contrary to their appearance, expandables aren’t just big balloons. The visible outer layer is, like with many spacecraft, just a thin one to reflect light and dissipate heat. The structure and strength lie inside, and since Transhab the established convention has been the “basket weave” technique.
In this method, straps of kevlar and other high-strength materials are lined up in alternating directions and manually stitched together, and upon expansion form a surface like a woven basket, with the internal pressure distributed evenly across all the thousands of intersections.
Or at least, that’s the theory.
De Jong, through his company Thin Red Line Aerospace, worked successfully with Bigelow Aerospace to develop and launch this basket-weave structure, but he had his doubts from the start about the predictability of so many stitches, overlaps, and interactions. A tiny irregularity could lead to a cascading failure even well below safety thresholds.
“I looked at all these straps, and as a field guy I was thinking, this is a cluster. As soon as you’re over or under pressure, you don’t know what percentage of the load is going to be transferred in one direction or another,” he said. “I never found a solution for it.”
He was quick to add that the people working on basket-weave designs today (primarily at Sierra Nevada and Lockheed Martin) are extremely competent and have clearly advanced the tech far beyond what it was in the early 2000s, when Bigelow’s pioneering expandable habitats were built and launched. (Genesis I and II are still in orbit today after 17 years, and the BEAM habitat has been attached to the ISS since 2016.)
But mitigation isn’t a solution. Although basket-weave, with its flight heritage and extensive testing, has remained unchallenged as the method of choice for expandables, the presence of a sub-optimal design somewhere in the world haunted De Jong [sic], in the way such things always haunt engineers. Surely there was a way to do this that was strong, simple, and safe.
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Mylar and Bernoulli
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As he [de Jong] balefully contemplated the helium-filled Mylar, something about it struck him: “Every volume that you can put something in has load in two directions. A kid’s Mylar balloon, though… there are two discs and all these wrinkles — all the stress is on one axis. This is a mathematical anomaly!”
The shape taken by the balloon essentially redirects the forces acting on it so that pressure really only pulls in one direction: away from where the two halves connect. Could this principle be applicable at a larger scale? De Jong [sic] rushed to the literature to look up the phenomenon, only to find this structure had indeed been documented — 330 years ago, by the French mathematician James Bernoulli.
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This was both gratifying and perhaps a little humiliating, even if Bernoulli had not intended this interesting anomaly for orbital habitation.
“Humility will get you so far. Physicists and mathematicians knew all this, from the 17th century. I mean, Bernoulli didn’t have access to this computer — just ink on parchment!” he told me. “I’m reasonably bright, but nobody works in fabrics; in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king. You have to be honest, you have to look at what other people are doing, and you have to dig, dig, dig.”
By forming Bernoulli’s shape (called an isotensoid) out of cords, or “tendons,” every problem with expandables more or less solves itself, De Jong [sic] explains.
“It’s structurally determinant. That means if I just take a cord of a certain length, that will define all the geometry: the diameter, the height, the shape — and once you have those, the pressure is the PSI at the equator, divided by the number of cords. And one cord doesn’t affect the others, you know exactly how strong one cord needs to be; everything is predictable,” he said.
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It’s stupidly simple to make.”
All the important forces are simply tension on these cords (96 of them in the prototypes, each rated to 17,000 pounds), pulling on anchors at either end of the shape. And as you might guess from suspension bridges and other high-tension structures, we know how to make this type of connection very, very strong. Gaps for docking rings, windows, and other features are simple to add.
The way the tendons deform can also be adjusted to different shapes, like cylinders or even the uneven interiors of a Moon cave. (De Jong [sic] was very excited about that news — an inflatable is a highly suitable solution for a lunar interior habitat.)
With the pressurized structure so reliable, it can be skinned with flight-tested materials already used to insulate, block radiation and micrometeoroids, and so on; since they aren’t load bearing, that part of the design is similarly simple. Yet the whole thing compresses to a pancake only a few inches thin, which can be folded up or wrapped around another payload like a blanket.
The biggest inflatables anyone has made, and we did with a team of five people in six months,” De Jong [sic] said — though he added that “the challenges of its correct implementation are surprisingly complex” and credited that team’s expertise.
What De Jong [sic] had done is discover, or perhaps rediscover, a method for making an enclosure in space that had comparable structural strength to machined metal, but using only a tiny fraction of the mass and volume. And he lost no time getting to work on it. But who would fly it?
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Thin Red Line has seen plenty of its creations go to orbit. But this new expandable faced a long, uphill battle. For spaceflight, established methods and technologies are strongly favored, leading to a catch-22: you need to go to space to get flight heritage, and you need flight heritage to go to space.
Falling launch costs and game investors have helped break this loop in recent years, but it’s still no simple thing to get manifested on a launch vehicle.
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… Max Space, a startup built specifically to commercialize the new approach — the name is both a reference to having more space in space, and a tribute to (Maxim) De Jong, whom Kemmer [Aaron Kemmer, cp-founder] thought deserved a bit more recognition after working for decades in relative anonymity (“which suits me just fine,” he noted).
Their first mission will launch in 2026 aboard a SpaceX rideshare vehicle, and act as a proof of concept so they can get flight heritage, which is one advantage extant expandables have over isotensoids.
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If you have the time and the interest, Coldeway’s July 27, 2024 article is a good read with a lot of informative images such as this one
Caption: The 20-cubic-meter habitat deflated to a 2-cubic-meter pancake, or “planar configuration.” Credit: Max Space? [downloaded from https://ca.news.yahoo.com/max-space-reinvents-expandable-habitats-150000556.html]
We are excited to announce that ALUULA Composites is supporting Thin Red Line Aerospace in the development of leading-edge application hardware for future NASA lunar and Mars missions.
“Their unique range of technical attributes combined with impressive strength to weight ratio specifications, make ALUULA Composite materials very well suited to the demanding requirements of technology in space.” Stated Thin Red Line Aerospace President, Maxim de Jong.
“We continue to find new and exciting ways in which our process enables and enhances composite materials to satisfy very specific technical objectives, and our work with Thin Red Line is another great example of what is possible with our materials and unique expertise.” Said ALUULA Composites COO, John Zimmerman.
The Eagle Nebula (also known as M16 or the Pillars of Creation) was one of the 3 cosmic objects sonified and used in the study. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/INAF/M.Guarcello et al.; Optical: NASA/STScI [downloaded from https://www.frontiersin.org/news/2024/03/25/communication-nasa-scientists-space-data-sounds]
Apparently, it’s all about communication or so a March 24, 2024 Frontiers news release (also on EurekAlert but published March 25, 2024) by Kim Arcand and Megan Watzke suggests, Note: Links have been removed,
Images from telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope have expanded the way we see space. But what if you can’t see? Can stars be turned into sounds instead? In this guest editorial, NASA [US National Aeronautics and Space Administration] scientists and science communicators Dr Kimberly Arcand and Megan Watzke explain how and why they and their colleagues transformed telescope data into soundscapes to share space science with the whole world. To learn more, read their new research published in Frontiers in Communication.
When you travel somewhere where they speak a language you can’t understand, it’s usually important to find a way to translate what’s being communicated to you. In some ways, the same can be said about scientific data collected from cosmic objects. A telescope like NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory captures X-rays, which are invisible to the human eye, from sources across the cosmos. Similarly, the James Webb Space Telescope captures infrared light, also invisible to the human eye. These different kinds of light are transmitted down to Earth packed up in the form of ones and zeroes. From there, the data are transformed into a variety of formats — from plots to spectra to images.
This last category — images — is arguably what telescopes are best known for. For most of astronomy’s long history, however, most people who are blind or low vision (BLV) have not been able to fully experience the data that these telescopes have captured. NASA’s Universe of Sound data sonification program, with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and NASA’s Universe of Learning, translates visual data of objects in space into sonified data. All telescopes — including Chandra, Webb, the Hubble Space Telescope, plus dozens of others — in space need to send the data they collect back to Earth as binary code, or digital signals. Typically, astronomers and others turn these digital data into images, which are often spectacular and make their way into everything from websites to pillowcases.
The music of the spheres
By taking these data through another step, however, experts on this project mathematically map the information into sound. This data-driven process is not a reimagining of what the telescopes have observed, it is yet another kind of translation. Instead of a translation from French to Mandarin, it’s a translation from visual to sound. Releases from the Universe of Sound sonification project have been immensely popular with non-experts, from viral news stories with over two billion people potentially reached according to press metrics, to triple the usual Chandra.si.edu website traffic.
But how are such data sonifications perceived by people, particularly members of the BLV community? How do data sonifications affect participant learning, enjoyment, and exploration of astronomy? Can translating scientific data into sound help enable trust or investment, emotionally or intellectually, in scientific data? Can such sonifications help improve awareness of accessibility needs that others might have?
Listening closely
This study used our sonified NASA data of three astronomical objects. We surveyed blind or low-vision and sighted individuals to better understand participant experiences of the sonifications, relating to their enjoyment, understanding, and trust of the scientific data. Data analyses from 3,184 sighted or blind or low-vision participants yielded significant self-reported learning gains and positive experiential responses.
The results showed that astrophysical data engaging multiple senses like the sonifications could establish additional avenues of trust, increase access, and promote awareness of accessibility in sighted and blind or low-vision communities. In short, sonifications helped people access and engage with the Universe.
Sonification is an evolving and collaborative field. It is a project not only done for the BLV community, but with BLV partnerships. A new documentary available on NASA’s free streaming platform NASA+ explores how these sonifications are made and the team behind them. The hope is that sonifications can help communicate the scientific discoveries from our Universe with more audiences, and open the door to the cosmos just a little wider for everyone.
Every once in a while I get an email from a lawyer (Gale P. Eston) in New York City who specializes in the art and business communities. How I got on her list is a mystery to me but her missives are always interesting. The latest one was a little difficult to understand until I looked at the Venice Biennale website and saw the theme for this year’s exhibition,
Courtesy: Venice Biennale [downloaded from https://www.labiennale.org/en/news/biennale-arte-2024-stranieri-ovunque-foreigners-everywhere]
Biennale Arte 2024: Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere
The 60th International Art Exhibition, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, will be open from Saturday 20 April to Sunday 24 November at the Giardini and Arsenale venues.
The 60th International Art Exhibition, titled Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, will open to the public from Saturday April 20 to Sunday November 24, 2024, at the Giardini and the Arsenale; it will be curated by Adriano Pedrosa and organised by La Biennale di Venezia. The pre-opening will take place on April 17, 18 and 19; the awards ceremony and inauguration will be held on 20 April 2024.
Since 2021, La Biennale di Venezia launched a plan to reconsider all of its activities in light of recognized and consolidated principles of environmental sustainability. For the year 2024, the goal is to extend the achievement of “carbon neutrality” certification, which was obtained in 2023 for La Biennale’s scheduled activities: the 80th Venice International Film Festival, the Theatre, Music and Dance Festivals and, in particular, the 18th International Architecture Exhibition which was the first major Exhibition in this discipline to test in the field a tangible process for achieving carbon neutrality – while furthermore itself reflecting upon the themes of decolonisation and decarbonisation
The Exhibition will take place in the Central Pavilion (Giardini) and in the Arsenale, and it will present two sections: the Nucleo Contemporaneo and the Nucleo Storico.
As a guiding principle, the Biennale Arte 2024 has favored artists who have never participated in the International Exhibition—though a number of them may have been featured in a National Pavilion, a Collateral Event, or in a past edition of the International Exhibition. Special attention is being given to outdoor projects, both in the Arsenale and in the Giardini, where a performance program is being planned with events during the pre-opening and closing weekend of the 60th Exhibition.
Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, the title of the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, is drawn from a series of works started in 2004 by the Paris-born and Palermo-based Claire Fontaine collective. The works consist of neon sculptures in different colours that render in a growing number of languages the words “Foreigners Everywhere”. The phrase comes, in turn, from the name of a Turin collective who fought racism and xenophobia in Italy in the early 2000s.
«The expression Stranieri Ovunque – explains Adriano Pedrosa – has several meanings. First of all, that wherever you go and wherever you are you will always encounter foreigners— they/we are everywhere. Secondly, that no matter where you find yourself, you are always truly, and deep down inside, a foreigner.»
«The Italian straniero, the Portuguese estrangeiro, the French étranger, and the Spanish extranjero, are all etymologically connected to the strano, the estranho, the étrange, the extraño, respectively, which is precisely the stranger. Sigmund Freud’s Das Unheimliche comes to mind—The Uncanny in English, which in Portuguese has indeed been translated as “o estranho”– the strange that is also familiar, within, deep down side. According to the American Heritage and the Oxford Dictionaries, the first meaning of the word “queer” is precisely “strange”, and thus the Exhibition unfolds and focuses on the production of other related subjects: the queer artist, who has moved within different sexualities and genders, often being persecuted or outlawed; the outsider artist, who is located at the margins of the art world, much like the self-taught artist, the folk artist and the artista popular; the indigenous artist, frequently treated as a foreigner in his or her own land. The productions of these four subjects are the interest of this Biennale, constituting the Nucleo Contemporaneo.»
«Indigenous artists have an emblematic presence and their work greets the public in the Central Pavilion, where the Mahku collective from Brazil will paint a monumental mural on the building’s façade, and in the Corderie, where the Maataho collective from Aotearoa/New Zealand will present a large-scale installation in the first room. Queer artists appear throughout the exhibition, and are also the subject of a large section in the Corderie, and one devoted to queer abstraction in the Central Pavilion.»
The Nucleo Contemporaneo will feature a special section in the Corderie devoted to the Disobedience Archive, a project by Marco Scotini, which since 2005 has been developing a video archive focusing on the relationships between artistic practices and activism. In the Exhibition, the presentation of the Disobedience Archive is designed by Juliana Ziebell, who also worked in the exhibition architecture of the entire International Exhibition. This section is divided into two main parts especially conceived for our framework: Diaspora activism and Gender Disobedience. The Disobedience Archive will include works by 39 artists and collectives made between 1975 and 2023.»
«The Nucleo Storico gathering works from 20th century Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Much has been written about global modernisms and modernisms in the Global South, and a number of rooms will feature works from these territories, much like an essay, a draft, a speculative curatorial exercise that seeks to question the boundaries and definitions of modernism. We are all too familiar with the histories of modernism in Euroamerica, yet the modernisms in the Global South remain largely unknown. […]. European modernism itself travelled far beyond Europe throughout the 20th century, often intertwined with colonialism, and many artists in the Global South traveled to Europe to be exposed to it […].»
In the Central Pavilion three rooms are planned for the Nucleo Storico: one room is titled Portraits, one Abstractionsand the third one is devoted to the the worldwide Italian artistic diaspora in the 20thcentury.
«The double-room named Portraits, includes works from 112 artists, mostly paintings but also works on paper and sculpture, spanning the years of 1905 and 1990. […] The theme of the human figure has been explored in countless different ways by artists in the Global South, reflecting on the crisis of representation around the that very figure that marked much of the art in 20th century art. In the Global South, many artists were in touch with European modernism, through travels, studies or books, yet they bring in their own highly personal and powerful reflections and contributions to their works […]. The room devoted to Abstractions includes 37 artists: most of them are being exhibited together for the first time, and we will learn from these unforeseen juxtapositions in the flesh, which will then hopefully point towards new connections, associations, and parallels much beyond the rather straightforward categories that I have proposed. […]»
Artists from Singapore and Korea have been brought into this section, given that at the time they were part of the so-called Third World. In a similar manner, Selwyn Wilson and Sandy Adsett, from Aotearoa/New Zealand, have been brought into this Nucleo Storico as they are historical Maori artists.
«[…] A third room in the Nucleo Storico is dedicated to the worldwide Italian artistic diaspora in the 20thcentury: Italian artists who travelled and moved abroad developing their careers in Africa, Asia, Latin America, as well as in the rest of Europe and the United States, becoming embedded in local cultures—and who often played significant roles in the development of the narratives of modernism beyond Italy. This room will feature works by 40 artists who are first or second generations Italians, exhibited in Lina Bo Bardi’s glass easel display system (Bo Bardi herself an Italian who moved to Brazil, and who won the 2021 Biennale Architettura’s Special Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in Memoriam).»
«Two quite different but related elements have emerged – underlines Pedrosa – rather organically in the research and have been developed, appearing as leitmotivs throughout the International Exhibition. The first one is textiles, which have been explored by many artists in the show in multiple, from key historical figures in the Nucleo Storico, to many artists in the Nucleo Contemporaneo. […] These works reveal an interest in craft, tradition, and the handmade, and in techniques that were at times considered other or foreign, outsider or strange in the larger field of fine arts. […] A second motif is artists—artists related by blood, many of them Indigenous. […] Again tradition plays an important role here: the transmission of knowledge and practices from father or mother to son or daughter or among siblings and relatives.»
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There’s a lot more about this huge art exhibition on the Venice Biennale website but this is enough to give you a sense of the size and scope and how the work Eston describes fits into the 2024 exhibition theme.
Gale P. Eston‘s April 12, 2024 email announced an exhibition she curated and which is being held on site during the 2024 Venice Biennale (Note 1: I’ve published too late for the opening reception but there’s more to Eston’s curation than a reception; Note 2: There is an art/science aspect to the work from artist China Blue),
Hospitality in the Pluriverse, curated by Gale Elston during the 60th edition of the Venice Biennial from April 16 to May 4, 2024.
The Opening Reception will be held April 16th, 2024 from 5-7 pm
HOSPITALITY IN THE PLURIVERSE
JEREMY DENNIS
ANITA GLESTA
ANN MCCOY
WARREN NEIDICH
ILONA RICH
Corte de Ca’ Sarasina, Castello 1199, Venezia, IT, 30122
April 16 to May 4, 2024
OPENING RECEPTION: April 16, 5 to 7 PM
Gallery hours: Tuesday-Saturday 10-6 PM
Performances by CHINA BLUE curated by Elga Wimmer
April 16, 18 and 19 at 6 PM
RAINER GANAHL, Requiem, performed April 17 at 6 PM
This exhibition includes five artists who explore the political, historical, aesthetical, physical, and epistemological dimensions of hospitality and its’ conflicts. Based upon the analysis of Jacques Derrida, in his Of Hospitality, this exhibition scrutinizes the reaction of the host to alterity or otherness.
Each artist examines various questions surrounding the encounter of a foreigner and their host sovereign using a variety of media such as painting, photography, sculpture, and animation.
In discussion with Adriano Pedrosa’s exhibition Foreigners Everywhere, the exhibition Hospitality in the Pluriverse understands the complexity of immigration and begs the question of what hospitality is and when and how should it be extended to the stranger, the foreigner, the “other”.
On the one hand the devastating effects of global inequality, climate change (climate refugees) and the political pressures created have led to mass migration and political and chaos. In opposition, the richness of the contributions of the other in the form of cultural and epistemological multiplicity is invaluable.
Jeremy Dennis, First Nation artist and Tribal Member of the Shinnecock Indian Nation in Southampton, NY, uses staging and computer assisted techniques to create unusual color photographs which portray indigenous identity, culture, and assimilation. His photographs challenge how indigenous people have been presented in film in America Westerns as well as empowering them through the use of a haunting Zombie trope establishing the power of ancestral knowledge as a means of resistance.
Ann McCoy, a New York-based sculptor, painter, and art critic, and Editor-at- Large for the Brooklyn Rail includes a new drawing from her recent Guggenheim Fellowship exploring the fairy tale of a wolf in her father’s silver, gold and tungsten mill. The fairy tale is based on an historic site of many Irish immigrant workers’ deaths and expresses the tragedy using Jungian and alchemical references.
Warren Neidich’s work Pluriverse* engages with the concept of cognitive justice. As Bonaventure de Sousa Santos has said there can be no social justice without cognitive justice. Cognitive which includes the right of different traditions of knowledge and the cultural practices they are engaged with to co-exist without duress. Especially relevant for us here are those forms of knowledge that have evolved in the so-called enlightened global North, Indigenous Knowledges and those in the subaltern global South and Asia. Pluriverse is an expression that is inclusive of these diverse epistemologies. We don’t want to live in a normative, homogeneous Universe but rather a heterogeneous and multiplicitous Pluriverse.*
Anita Glesta, depicts the non-human foreigner (a corona virus moving through the body like a bug or a butterfly) set to a soundtrack from Hildegard von Bingen, the abbess and composer from the medieval ages. Glesta’s video was developed on a Fellowship with The ARC Laureate Felt Experience & Empathy Lab to research how anxiety affects our nervous system. As an extension of the pandemic series her animations invite the viewer to experience how humans process fear and anxiety in their bodies.
Spanish artist Ilona Rich work continues the theme of what it is to be a foreigner on a psychological level. Her colorful sculptures describe a dystopian view of the commonplace and the everyday.
Her work shows us a person who feels like a stranger in their own skin, anxious, precarious, not normative. Her dogs have two heads and the many feet of a centipede. Her sculpture Wheel of Fortune will be displayed which posits that fate is contingent on chance and our roles as host or foreigner are subject to rapid unexpected change.
The exhibition offers a dizzying study of alterity, on the biological (Glesta), the social (Dennis), the historical (McCoy), cognitive (Neidich) and personal levels (Rich).The viewer will come away with an expanded and enriched view of what it means to be a foreigner and asks what contingencies, if any, should accompany hospitality.
— Gale Elston
China Blue, Saturn Walk: Embodying Listening during the 2024 Venice Biennial with (Re)Create [emphasis mine]
Project Space Venice, curated by Elga Wimmer.
US/Canadian artist China Blue creates art performances that give a physical expression to sound based on her interest in connecting through art and science.
For her 2024 Venice exhibition, Saturn Walk: Embodying Listening by China Blue, performers and visitors walk in a labyrinth to a composition created by her and Lance Massey. This is a work based on the sonics in Saturn’s rings that China Blue and Dr. Seth Horowitz discovered as a result of a grant from NASA to explore Saturn’s rings.
In Saturn Walk: Embodying Listening for the (Re)Create Project Space Venice, the artist invites viewers to experience the sound walk following the dance performance. The dancers include Andrea Nann and Jennifer Dahl, Canada, and Laura Coloman, UK. A trace of China Blue’s performance, an artwork, Celestial Pearls, based on 16 of Saturn’s 100+ moons, will remain on view at (Re)Create Project Space Venice.
Austrian artist Rainer Ganahl performs his work, Requiem in memoriam for Russian dissident Alexei Navalny.
It seems like you might need the full seven months to fully appreciate the work on display at the 2024 Venice Biennale.
I received an April 5, 2024 University of British Columbia notice (via email) about a public viewing of the upcoming solar eclipse,
UBC [University of British Columbia] department of physics and astronomy researchers will host a public solar eclipse viewing event outside the UBC Bookstore on April 8 [2024], weather permitting, or otherwise, in the UBC Robert H. Lee Alumni Centre lobby.
Members of the public can borrow eclipse-viewing glasses to safely view the eclipse. The event will also feature two solar telescopes, edible pin-hole cameras for children and a live feed of NASA’s eclipse coverage.
A solar eclipse occurs when the moon passes between the sun and Earth, completely blocking the face of the sun for viewers along a specific path, the path of totality.
Viewers in B.C. are not in the eclipse’s path of totality, which means it will not be safe at any point of the eclipse to look directly at the sun without special protective eyewear. People in B.C. are likely to see a crescent ‘cut out’ move across the sun, from about 10:40 a.m. PT, peaking at 11:40 a.m. and finishing about 12:20 p.m. The maximum ‘bite’ taken out of the sun will be 28 per cent of the solar disk.
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Date/Time: Monday, Apr. 8 from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.PT
Location: UBC Bookstore exterior, 6200 University Blvd., Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4 (map) or if weather is inclement, Robert H. Lee Alumni Centre lobby, 6163 University Blvd, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1 (map)
Parking: University Boulevard Lot, 6131 University Blvd., Vancouver, BC V6T 2A1 (map)
An April 5, 2024 posting by Rebecca Bollwitt on the Miss604 blog mentions both the UBC public viewing and one at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre, along with these viewing safety guidelines and other tips,
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Safety is the number one priority when viewing a solar eclipse and NASA [US National Aeronautics and Space Administration] has issues these safety guidelines – eye protection being a top priority. Viewing any part of the bright Sun through a camera lens, binoculars, or a telescope without a special-purpose solar filter secured over the front of the optics will instantly cause severe eye injury.
* View the Sun through eclipse glasses or a handheld solar viewer during the partial eclipse phases before and after totality.
* You can view the eclipse directly without proper eye protection only when the Moon completely obscures the Sun’s bright face – during the brief and spectacular period known as totality. *NOTE we will not observe totality in Vancouver so do not do this!
* As soon as you see even a little bit of the bright Sun reappear after totality, immediately put your eclipse glasses back on or use a handheld solar viewer to look at the Sun.
An April 2, 2024 news item on phys.org is, in fact, an open invitation to participate in data collection for NASA during the April 8, 2024 eclipse,
On April 8, 2024, as the moon passes between the sun and Earth, thousands of amateur citizen scientists will measure air temperatures and snap pictures of clouds. The data they collect will aid researchers who are investigating how the sun influences climates in different environments.
Among those citizen scientists are the fifth- and sixth-grade students at Alpena Elementary in northwest Arkansas. In the weeks leading up to the eclipse, these students are visiting the school’s weather station 10 times a day to collect temperature readings and monitor cloud cover. They will then upload the data to a phone-based app that’s part of a NASA-led program called GLOBE, short for Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment.
The goal, according to Alpena Elementary science and math teacher Roger Rose, is to “make science and math more real” for his students. “It makes them feel like they’re doing something that’s important and worthwhile.”
The GLOBE eclipse tool is a small part of the much broader GLOBE project, through which students and citizen scientists collect data on plants, soil, water, the atmosphere, and even mosquitoes. Contributors to the eclipse project will only need a thermometer and a smartphone with the GLOBE Observer app downloaded. They can access the eclipse tool in the app. [emphases mine]
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An April 1, 2024 NASA article by James Riordon, which originated the news item, provides more information about the GLOBE program and the hopes for the April 8, 2024 eclipse initiative,
This is not the first time the GLOBE eclipse tool has been deployed in North America. During the 2017 North American eclipse, NASA researchers examined the relationship between clouds and air temperature and found that temperature swings during the eclipse were greatest in areas with less cloud cover, while temperature fluctuations in cloudier regions were more muted. It’s a finding that would have been difficult, perhaps impossible, without the assistance of numerous amateur observers along the eclipse path, said Marilé Colón Robles, a meteorologist based at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, and the GLOBE project scientist overseeing the cloud study portion of the project.
GLOBE program volunteers across North America uploaded data coinciding with the July 21, 2017 event to this map. A high concentration of observers make the path of totality in the western part of the U.S. stand out.
Credit: NASA Globe program
The number of weather stations along this year’s eclipse path is limited, and while satellites give us a global view, they can’t provide the same level of detail as people on the ground, said Ashlee Autore, a NASA Langley data scientist who will be conducting a follow-up to the 2017 study. “The power of citizen science is that people make the observations, and they can move.”
It’s still unclear how temperature fluctuations during a total eclipse compare across different climate regions, Colón Robles said. “This upcoming eclipse is passing through desert regions, mountainous regions, as well as more moist regions near the oceans.” Acquiring observations across these areas, she said, “will help us dig deeper into questions about regional connections between cloud cover and ground-level temperatures.” The studies should give scientists a better handle on the flow of energy from the Sun that’s crucial for understanding climate.
In many areas, citizen scientists are expected to gather en masse. “We’re inviting basically all of El Paso to campus,” said geophysicist and GLOBE partner John Olgin of El Paso Community College in Texas. The area will experience the eclipse in near totality, with about 80% of the Sun covered at the peak. It’s enough to make for an engaging event involving citizen scientists from the U.S. and Juarez, Mexico, just across the Rio Grande.
Just a few minutes of midday darkness will have the long-term benefits of increasing awareness of NASA citizen science programs, Olgin said: “It’s going to inspire people to say, ‘Hey look, you can actually do stuff with NASA.’”
More than 30 million people live along the path of the 2024 eclipse, and hundreds of millions more will see a partial eclipse. It will be another 20 years before so many people in North America experience another total solar eclipse again.
With this in mind, Colón Robles has a piece of advice: As the Moon actively blocks the Sun, set your phone and thermometer aside, and marvel at one of the most extraordinary astronomical events of your lifetime.
Visit NASA’s Citizen Science page to learn how you can help NASA scientists study the Earth during eclipses and all year round. The GLOBE Program page provides connections to communities of GLOBE participants in 127 countries, access to data for retrieval and analysis, a roadmap for new participants, and other resources.
For anyone who wants to experience all of the ways that NASA has made their citizen science April 2024 eclipse projects accessible there’s NASA’s ‘general eclipse’ webpage.
I received a January 8, 2024 announcement (via email) from Waterloo’s Perimeter Institute about an AI event (free tickets available on Tuesday, January 9, 2024, more about that below the announcement),
TRuST Scholarly Network’s Conversations on Artificial Intelligence: Should It Be Trusted?
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 17 [2024] at 7:00 pm ET
Artificial Intelligence and big data are dramatically transforming the way we work, live and connect. Innovators have begun designing AI solutions to advance society at a rapid pace, but often, new technologies bring both promise and risk. How can we trust AI and safeguard society from unintended consequences to ensure a safe and human-centred digital future?
Join the University of Waterloo in partnership with the Perimeter Institute for the TRuST Scholarly Network’s Conversations on lecture series, where technology leaders from UWaterloo, Google and NASA will discuss how AI is transforming society and if we should trust these technologies.
Don’t miss out! Catch the livestream on our website or watch it on YouTube after the fact
If you are interested in attending public events in person, please fill out the waiting list form to receive updates on the availability of free tickets.
Speakers Introductions by: – Donna Strickland, Nobel Laureate, Professor, University of Waterloo and board member at the Perimeter Institute – Ashley Mehlenbacher, Professor, University of Waterloo and Canada Research Chair in Science, Health and Technology Communication – , Dean of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Waterloo
Moderator: – Jenn Smith, Engineering Director and WAT Site co-lead, Google Canada
Panelists: – Lai-Tze Fan, Professor of Sociology and Legal Studies and Canada Research Chair in Technology and Social Change – Makhan Virdi, NASA researcher – Anindya Sen, Professor of Economics and associate director of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute – Leah Morris, Senior Director, Velocity Program, Radical Venture[s]
Please, if you are feeling unwell, help keep our community healthy by watching the live webcast at home rather than joining us in person. If you need to cancel your tickets, please go to CANCEL FREE TICKETS.
Attendance to the lecture is free, but advance tickets are required.Our lectures consistently sell out. As a courtesy to our waiting list guests, your ticket will be honoured until 6:45 PM only. If you have not arrived by 6:45 PM your reservation will be filled by another guest, and you will be asked to join the end of the waiting line.
For the curious, you’ll find more information about the TRuST Scholarly Network on its webpage on the University of Waterloo website.
The people behind the European Union’s Graphene Flagship programme (if you need a brief explanation, keep scrolling down to the “What is the Graphene Flagship?” subhead) and the United Arab Emirates have got to be very excited about the announcement made in a November 29, 2022 news item on Nanowerk, Note: Canadians too have reason to be excited as of April 3, 2023 when it was announced that Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen was selected to be part of the team on NASA’s [US National Aeronautics and Space Administration] Artemis II to orbit the moon (April 3, 2023 CBC news online article by Nicole Mortillaro) ·
Graphene Flagship Partners University of Cambridge (UK) and Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB, Belgium) paired up with the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC, United Arab Emirates), and the European Space Agency (ESA) to test graphene on the Moon. This joint effort sees the involvement of many international partners, such as Airbus Defense and Space, Khalifa University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Technische Universität Dortmund, University of Oslo, and Tohoku University.
The Rashid rover is planned to be launched on 30 November 2022 [Note: the launch appears to have occurred on December 11, 2022; keep scrolling for more about that] from Cape Canaveral in Florida and will land on a geologically rich and, as yet, only remotely explored area on the Moon’s nearside – the side that always faces the Earth. During one lunar day, equivalent to approximately 14 days on Earth, Rashid will move on the lunar surface investigating interesting geological features.
The Rashid rover wheels will be used for repeated exposure of different materials to the lunar surface. As part of this Material Adhesion and abrasion Detection experiment, graphene-based composites on the rover wheels will be used to understand if they can protect spacecraft against the harsh conditions on the Moon, and especially against regolith (also known as ‘lunar dust’).
Regolith is made of extremely sharp, tiny and sticky grains and, since the Apollo missions, it has been one of the biggest challenges lunar missions have had to overcome. Regolith is responsible for mechanical and electrostatic damage to equipment, and is therefore also hazardous for astronauts. It clogs spacesuits’ joints, obscures visors, erodes spacesuits and protective layers, and is a potential health hazard.
University of Cambridge researchers from the Cambridge Graphene Centre produced graphene/polyether ether ketone (PEEK) composites. The interaction of these composites with the Moon regolith (soil) will be investigated. The samples will be monitored via an optical camera, which will record footage throughout the mission. ULB researchers will gather information during the mission and suggest adjustments to the path and orientation of the rover. Images obtained will be used to study the effects of the Moon environment and the regolith abrasive stresses on the samples.
This moon mission comes soon after the ESA announcement of the 2022 class of astronauts, including the Graphene Flagship’s own Meganne Christian, a researcher at Graphene Flagship Partner the Institute of Microelectronics and Microsystems (IMM) at the National Research Council of Italy.
“Being able to follow the Moon rover’s progress in real time will enable us to track how the lunar environment impacts various types of graphene-polymer composites, thereby allowing us to infer which of them is most resilient under such conditions. This will enhance our understanding of how graphene-based composites could be used in the construction of future lunar surface vessels,” says Sara Almaeeni, MBRSC science team lead, who designed Rashid’s communication system.
“New materials such as graphene have the potential to be game changers in space exploration. In combination with the resources available on the Moon, advanced materials will enable radiation protection, electronics shielding and mechanical resistance to the harshness of the Moon’s environment. The Rashid rover will be the first opportunity to gather data on the behavior of graphene composites within a lunar environment,” says Carlo Iorio, Graphene Flagship Space Champion, from ULB.
Leading up to the Moon mission, a variety of inks containing graphene and related materials, such as conducting graphene, insulating hexagonal boron nitride and graphene oxide, semiconducting molybdenum disulfide, prepared by the University of Cambridge and ULB were also tested on the MAterials Science Experiment Rocket 15 (MASER 15) mission, successfully launched on the 23rd of November 2022 from the Esrange Space Center in Sweden. This experiment, named ARLES-2 (Advanced Research on Liquid Evaporation in Space) and supported by European and UK space agencies (ESA, UKSA) included contributions from Graphene Flagship Partners University of Cambridge (UK), University of Pisa (Italy) and Trinity College Dublin (Ireland), with many international collaborators, including Aix-Marseille University (France), Technische Universität Darmstadt (Germany), York University (Canada), Université de Liège (Belgium), University of Edinburgh and Loughborough.
This experiment will provide new information about the printing of GMR inks in weightless conditions, contributing to the development of new addictive manufacturing procedures in space such as 3d printing. Such procedures are key for space exploration, during which replacement components are often needed, and could be manufactured from functional inks.
“Our experiments on graphene and related materials deposition in microgravity pave the way addictive manufacturing in space. The study of the interaction of Moon regolith with graphene composites will address some key challenges brought about by the harsh lunar environment,” says Yarjan Abdul Samad, from the Universities of Cambridge and Khalifa, who prepared the samples and coordinated the interactions with the United Arab Emirates.
“The Graphene Flagship is spearheading the investigation of graphene and related materials (GRMs) for space applications. In November 2022, we had the first member of the Graphene Flagship appointed to the ESA astronaut class. We saw the launch of a sounding rocket to test printing of a variety of GRMs in zero gravity conditions, and the launch of a lunar rover that will test the interaction of graphene—based composites with the Moon surface. Composites, coatings and foams based on GRMs have been at the core of the Graphene Flagship investigations since its beginning. It is thus quite telling that, leading up to the Flagship’s 10th anniversary, these innovative materials are now to be tested on the lunar surface. This is timely, given the ongoing effort to bring astronauts back to the Moon, with the aim of building lunar settlements. When combined with polymers, GRMs can tailor the mechanical, thermal, electrical properties of then host matrices. These pioneering experiments could pave the way for widespread adoption of GRM-enhanced materials for space exploration,” says Andrea Ferrari, Science and Technology Officer and Chair of the Management Panel of the Graphene Flagship.
Caption: The MASER15 launch Credit: John-Charles Dupin
A pioneering graphene work and a first for the Arab World
A December 11, 2022 news item on Alarabiya news (and on CNN) describes the ‘graphene’ launch which was also marked the Arab World’s first mission to the moon,
The United Arab Emirates’ Rashid Rover – the Arab world’s first mission to the Moon – was launched on Sunday [December 11, 2022], the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center (MBRSC) announced on its official Twitter account.
The launch came after it was previously postponed for “pre-flight checkouts.”
The launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the UAE’s Rashid rover successfully took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
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The Rashid rover – built by Emirati engineers from the UAE’s Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center (MBRSC) – is to be sent to regions of the Moon unexplored by humans.
What is the Graphene Flagship?
In 2013, the Graphene Flagship was chosen as one of two FET (Future and Emerging Technologies) funding projects (the other being the Human Brain Project) each receiving €1 billion to be paid out over 10 years. In effect, it’s a science funding programme specifically focused on research, development, and commercialization of graphene (a two-dimensional [it has length and width but no depth] material made of carbon atoms).
You can find out more about the flagship and about graphene here.
With the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST; Webb Telescope) on December 25, 2021, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has been all over the news for over a month as the telescope has unfolded itself to take its position in space.
In celebration of the Webb Telescope’s successful launch and unfolding process, NASA has announced an art/science (also known as, art/sci or sciart) has issued an extension to an art/sci challenge (I don’t know when it was first announced),
NASA’s biggest and most powerful space telescope ever launched on Dec. 25, 2021! The James Webb Space Telescope, or Webb, will be orbiting a million miles away to reveal the universe as never seen before. It will look at the first stars and galaxies, study distant planets around other stars, solve mysteries in our solar system and discover what we can’t even imagine. Its revolutionary technology will be able to look back in time at 13.5 billion years of our cosmic history.
Show us what you believe the Webb telescope will reveal by creating art. You can draw, paint, sing, write, dance — the universe is the limit! Share a picture or video of you and your creation with the hashtag #UnfoldTheUniverse for a chance to be featured on NASA’s website and social media channels.
How to Participate
1. Use any art supplies you’d like to create art. The art could be a drawing, song, poem, dance or something else! Check out the resources linked below for inspiration.
2. Take a picture of you holding your art, or film a less than one-minute video of you describing or performing your art.
3. Share your photo or video on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram using #UnfoldTheUniverse for a chance to be featured on NASA’s website and social media accounts!
4. If your submission catches our eye, we’ll be in touch to obtain permission for it to be considered for NASA digital products.
Deadline for Submissions EXTENDED: Good news! We will now keep the #UnfoldTheUniverse art challenge open through the return of our first science images, expected to be about six months after launch. Keep your submissions coming – we love seeing your creativity!
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a space telescope and an international collaboration among NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).[8] [emphasis mine] The telescope is named after James E. Webb,[9] who was the administrator of NASA from 1961 to 1968 and played an integral role in the Apollo program.[10][11] It is intended to succeed the Hubble Space Telescope as NASA’s flagship mission in astrophysics.[12][13] JWST was launched on 25 December 2021 on Ariane flight VA256. It is designed to provide improved infrared resolution and sensitivity over Hubble, viewing objects up to 100 times fainter than the faintest objects detectable by Hubble.[14] This will enable a broad range of investigations across the fields of astronomy and cosmology, such as observations up to redshift z≈20[14] of some of the oldest and most distant objects and events in the Universe (including the first stars and the formation of the first galaxies), and detailed atmospheric characterization of potentially habitable exoplanets.
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Features
The James Webb Space Telescope has a mass about half of Hubble Space Telescope’s, but a 6.5 m (21 ft)-diameter gold-coated beryllium primary mirror made of 18 hexagonal mirrors, giving it a total size over six times as large as Hubble’s 2.4 m (7.9 ft). Of this, 0.9 m2 (9.7 sq ft) is obscured by the secondary support struts,[45] making its actual light collecting area about 5.6 times larger than Hubble’s 4.525 m2 (48.71 sq ft) collecting area. Beryllium is a very stiff, hard, lightweight metal often used in aerospace that is non-magnetic and keeps its shape accurately in an ultra-cold environment[46] – it has a specific stiffness (rigidity) six times that of steel or titanium,[47] while being 30% lighter in weight than aluminium. The gold coating provides infrared reflectivity and durability.
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Former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper was very interested in space and the aeronautics industry and, accordingly, his government invested in the JWST.
The ‘metaverse’ seems to be everywhere these days (especially since Facebook has made a number of announcements bout theirs (more about that later in this posting).
At this point, the metaverse is very hyped up despite having been around for about 30 years. According to the Wikipedia timeline (see the Metaverse entry), the first one was a MOO in 1993 called ‘The Metaverse’. In any event, it seems like it might be a good time to see what’s changed since I dipped my toe into a metaverse (Second Life by Linden Labs) in 2007.
(For grammar buffs, I switched from definite article [the] to indefinite article [a] purposefully. In reading the various opinion pieces and announcements, it’s not always clear whether they’re talking about a single, overarching metaverse [the] replacing the single, overarching internet or whether there will be multiple metaverses, in which case [a].)
The hype/the buzz … call it what you will
This September 6, 2021 piece by Nick Pringle for Fast Company dates the beginning of the metaverse to a 1992 science fiction novel before launching into some typical marketing hype (for those who don’t know, hype is the short form for hyperbole; Note: Links have been removed),
The term metaverse was coined by American writer Neal Stephenson in his 1993 sci-fi hit Snow Crash. But what was far-flung fiction 30 years ago is now nearing reality. At Facebook’s most recent earnings call [June 2021], CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the company’s vision to unify communities, creators, and commerce through virtual reality: “Our overarching goal across all of these initiatives is to help bring the metaverse to life.”
So what actually is the metaverse? It’s best explained as a collection of 3D worlds you explore as an avatar. Stephenson’s original vision depicted a digital 3D realm in which users interacted in a shared online environment. Set in the wake of a catastrophic global economic crash, the metaverse in Snow Crash emerged as the successor to the internet. Subcultures sprung up alongside new social hierarchies, with users expressing their status through the appearance of their digital avatars.
Today virtual worlds along these lines are formed, populated, and already generating serious money. Household names like Roblox and Fortnite are the most established spaces; however, there are many more emerging, such as Decentraland, Upland, Sandbox, and the soon to launch Victoria VR.
These metaverses [emphasis mine] are peaking at a time when reality itself feels dystopian, with a global pandemic, climate change, and economic uncertainty hanging over our daily lives. The pandemic in particular saw many of us escape reality into online worlds like Roblox and Fortnite. But these spaces have proven to be a place where human creativity can flourish amid crisis.
In fact, we are currently experiencing an explosion of platforms parallel to the dotcom boom. While many of these fledgling digital worlds will become what Ask Jeeves was to Google, I predict [emphasis mine] that a few will match the scale and reach of the tech giant—or even exceed it.
Because the metaverse brings a new dimension to the internet, brands and businesses will need to consider their current and future role within it. Some brands are already forging the way and establishing a new genre of marketing in the process: direct to avatar (D2A). Gucci sold a virtual bag for more than the real thing in Roblox; Nike dropped virtual Jordans in Fortnite; Coca-Cola launched avatar wearables in Decentraland, and Sotheby’s has an art gallery that your avatar can wander in your spare time.
D2A is being supercharged by blockchain technology and the advent of digital ownership via NFTs, or nonfungible tokens. NFTs are already making waves in art and gaming. More than $191 million was transacted on the “play to earn” blockchain game Axie Infinity in its first 30 days this year. This kind of growth makes NFTs hard for brands to ignore. In the process, blockchain and crypto are starting to feel less and less like “outsider tech.” There are still big barriers to be overcome—the UX of crypto being one, and the eye-watering environmental impact of mining being the other. I believe technology will find a way. History tends to agree.
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Detractors see the metaverse as a pandemic fad, wrapping it up with the current NFT bubble or reducing it to Zuck’s [Jeffrey Zuckerberg and Facebook] dystopian corporate landscape. This misses the bigger behavior change that is happening among Gen Alpha. When you watch how they play, it becomes clear that the metaverse is more than a buzzword.
For Gen Alpha [emphasis mine], gaming is social life. While millennials relentlessly scroll feeds, Alphas and Zoomers [emphasis mine] increasingly stroll virtual spaces with their friends. Why spend the evening staring at Instagram when you can wander around a virtual Harajuku with your mates? If this seems ridiculous to you, ask any 13-year-old what they think.
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Who is Nick Pringle and how accurate are his predictions?
… [the company] evolved from a computer-assisted film-making studio to a digital design and consulting company, as part of a major advertising network.
By thinking “virtual first,” you can see how these spaces become highly experimental, creative, and valuable. The products you can design aren’t bound by physics or marketing convention—they can be anything, and are now directly “ownable” through blockchain. …
I believe that the metaverse is here to stay. That means brands and marketers now have the exciting opportunity to create products that exist in multiple realities. The winners will understand that the metaverse is not a copy of our world, and so we should not simply paste our products, experiences, and brands into it.
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I emphasized “These metaverses …” in the previous section to highlight the fact that I find the use of ‘metaverses’ vs. ‘worlds’ confusing as the words are sometimes used as synonyms and sometimes as distinctions. We do it all the time in all sorts of conversations but for someone who’s an outsider to a particular occupational group or subculture, the shifts can make for confusion.
As for Gen Alpha and Zoomer, I’m not a fan of ‘Gen anything’ as shorthand for describing a cohort based on birth years. For example, “For Gen Alpha [emphasis mine], gaming is social life,” ignores social and economic classes, as well as, the importance of locations/geography, e.g., Afghanistan in contrast to the US.
To answer the question I asked, Pringle does not mention any record of accuracy for his predictions for the future but I was able to discover that he is a “multiple Cannes Lions award-winning creative” (more here).
In recent months you may have heard about something called the metaverse. Maybe you’ve read that the metaverse is going to replace the internet. Maybe we’re all supposed to live there. Maybe Facebook (or Epic, or Roblox, or dozens of smaller companies) is trying to take it over. And maybe it’s got something to do with NFTs [non-fungible tokens]?
Unlike a lot of things The Verge covers, the metaverse is tough to explain for one reason: it doesn’t necessarily exist. It’s partly a dream for the future of the internet and partly a neat way to encapsulate some current trends in online infrastructure, including the growth of real-time 3D worlds.
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Then what is the real metaverse?
There’s no universally accepted definition of a real “metaverse,” except maybe that it’s a fancier successor to the internet. Silicon Valley metaverse proponents sometimes reference a description from venture capitalist Matthew Ball, author of the extensive Metaverse Primer:
“The Metaverse is an expansive network of persistent, real-time rendered 3D worlds and simulations that support continuity of identity, objects, history, payments, and entitlements, and can be experienced synchronously by an effectively unlimited number of users, each with an individual sense of presence.”
Facebook, arguably the tech company with the biggest stake in the metaverse, describes it more simply:
“The ‘metaverse’ is a set of virtual spaces where you can create and explore with other people who aren’t in the same physical space as you.”
There are also broader metaverse-related taxonomies like one from game designer Raph Koster, who draws a distinction between “online worlds,” “multiverses,” and “metaverses.” To Koster, online worlds are digital spaces — from rich 3D environments to text-based ones — focused on one main theme. Multiverses are “multiple different worlds connected in a network, which do not have a shared theme or ruleset,” including Ready Player One’s OASIS. And a metaverse is “a multiverse which interoperates more with the real world,” incorporating things like augmented reality overlays, VR dressing rooms for real stores, and even apps like Google Maps.
If you want something a little snarkier and more impressionistic, you can cite digital scholar Janet Murray — who has described the modern metaverse ideal as “a magical Zoom meeting that has all the playful release of Animal Crossing.”
But wait, now Ready Player One isn’t a metaverse and virtual worlds don’t have to be 3D? It sounds like some of these definitions conflict with each other.
An astute observation.
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Why is the term “metaverse” even useful? “The internet” already covers mobile apps, websites, and all kinds of infrastructure services. Can’t we roll virtual worlds in there, too?
Matthew Ball favors the term “metaverse” because it creates a clean break with the present-day internet. [emphasis mine] “Using the metaverse as a distinctive descriptor allows us to understand the enormity of that change and in turn, the opportunity for disruption,” he said in a phone interview with The Verge. “It’s much harder to say ‘we’re late-cycle into the last thing and want to change it.’ But I think understanding this next wave of computing and the internet allows us to be more proactive than reactive and think about the future as we want it to be, rather than how to marginally affect the present.”
A more cynical spin is that “metaverse” lets companies dodge negative baggage associated with “the internet” in general and social media in particular. “As long as you can make technology seem fresh and new and cool, you can avoid regulation,” researcher Joan Donovan told The Washington Post in a recent article about Facebook and the metaverse. “You can run defense on that for several years before the government can catch up.”
There’s also one very simple reason: it sounds more futuristic than “internet” and gets investors and media people (like us!) excited.
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People keep saying NFTs are part of the metaverse. Why?
NFTs are complicated in their own right, and you can read more about them here. Loosely, the thinking goes: NFTs are a way of recording who owns a specific virtual good, creating and transferring virtual goods is a big part of the metaverse, thus NFTs are a potentially useful financial architecture for the metaverse. Or in more practical terms: if you buy a virtual shirt in Metaverse Platform A, NFTs can create a permanent receipt and let you redeem the same shirt in Metaverse Platforms B to Z.
Lots of NFT designers are selling collectible avatars like CryptoPunks, Cool Cats, and Bored Apes, sometimes for astronomical sums. Right now these are mostly 2D art used as social media profile pictures. But we’re already seeing some crossover with “metaverse”-style services. The company Polygonal Mind, for instance, is building a system called CryptoAvatars that lets people buy 3D avatars as NFTs and then use them across multiple virtual worlds.
Since starting this post sometime in September 2021, the situation regarding Facebook has changed a few times. I’ve decided to begin my version of the story from a summer 2021 announcement.
On Monday, July 26, 2021, Facebook announced a new Metaverse product group. From a July 27, 2021 article by Scott Rosenberg for Yahoo News (Note: A link has been removed),
Facebook announced Monday it was forming a new Metaverse product group to advance its efforts to build a 3D social space using virtual and augmented reality tech.
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Facebook’s new Metaverse product group will report to Andrew Bosworth, Facebook’s vice president of virtual and augmented reality [emphasis mine], who announced the new organization in a Facebook post.
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Facebook, integrity, and safety in the metaverse
On September 27, 2021 Facebook posted this webpage (Building the Metaverse Responsibly by Andrew Bosworth, VP, Facebook Reality Labs [emphasis mine] and Nick Clegg, VP, Global Affairs) on its site,
The metaverse won’t be built overnight by a single company. We’ll collaborate with policymakers, experts and industry partners to bring this to life.
We’re announcing a $50 million investment in global research and program partners to ensure these products are developed responsibly.
We develop technology rooted in human connection that brings people together. As we focus on helping to build the next computing platform, our work across augmented and virtual reality and consumer hardware will deepen that human connection regardless of physical distance and without being tied to devices.
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Introducing the XR [extended reality] Programs and Research Fund
There’s a long road ahead. But as a starting point, we’re announcing the XR Programs and Research Fund, a two-year $50 million investment in programs and external research to help us in this effort. Through this fund, we’ll collaborate with industry partners, civil rights groups, governments, nonprofits and academic institutions to determine how to build these technologies responsibly.
Rebranding Facebook’s integrity and safety issues away?
It seems Facebook’s credibility issues are such that the company is about to rebrand itself according to an October 19, 2021 article by Alex Heath for The Verge (Note: Links have been removed),
Facebook is planning to change its company name next week to reflect its focus on building the metaverse, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter.
The coming name change, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to talk about at the company’s annual Connect conference on October 28th [2021], but could unveil sooner, is meant to signal the tech giant’s ambition to be known for more than social media and all the ills that entail. The rebrand would likely position the blue Facebook app as one of many products under a parent company overseeing groups like Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, and more. A spokesperson for Facebook declined to comment for this story.
Facebook already has more than 10,000 employees building consumer hardware like AR glasses that Zuckerberg believes will eventually be as ubiquitous as smartphones. In July, he told The Verge that, over the next several years, “we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company.”
A rebrand could also serve to further separate the futuristic work Zuckerberg is focused on from the intense scrutiny Facebook is currently under for the way its social platform operates today. A former employee turned whistleblower, Frances Haugen, recently leaked a trove of damning internal documents to The Wall Street Journal and testified about them before Congress. Antitrust regulators in the US and elsewhere are trying to break the company up, and public trust in how Facebook does business is falling.
Facebook isn’t the first well-known tech company to change its company name as its ambitions expand. In 2015, Google reorganized entirely under a holding company called Alphabet, partly to signal that it was no longer just a search engine, but a sprawling conglomerate with companies making driverless cars and health tech. And Snapchat rebranded to Snap Inc. in 2016, the same year it started calling itself a “camera company” and debuted its first pair of Spectacles camera glasses.
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If you have time, do read Heath’s article in its entirety.
An October 20, 2021 Thomson Reuters item on CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) news online includes quotes from some industry analysts about the rebrand,
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“It reflects the broadening out of the Facebook business. And then, secondly, I do think that Facebook’s brand is probably not the greatest given all of the events of the last three years or so,” internet analyst James Cordwell at Atlantic Equities said.
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“Having a different parent brand will guard against having this negative association transferred into a new brand, or other brands that are in the portfolio,” said Shankha Basu, associate professor of marketing at University of Leeds.
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Tyler Jadah’s October 20, 2021 article for the Daily Hive includes an earlier announcement (not mentioned in the other two articles about the rebranding), Note: A link has been removed,
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Earlier this week [October 17, 2021], Facebook announced it will start “a journey to help build the next computing platform” and will hire 10,000 new high-skilled jobs within the European Union (EU) over the next five years.
“Working with others, we’re developing what is often referred to as the ‘metaverse’ — a new phase of interconnected virtual experiences using technologies like virtual and augmented reality,” wrote Facebook’s Nick Clegg, the VP of Global Affairs. “At its heart is the idea that by creating a greater sense of “virtual presence,” interacting online can become much closer to the experience of interacting in person.”
Clegg says the metaverse has the potential to help unlock access to new creative, social, and economic opportunities across the globe and the virtual world.
In an email with Facebook’s Corporate Communications Canada, David Troya-Alvarez told Daily Hive, “We don’t comment on rumour or speculation,” in regards to The Verge‘s report.
I will update this posting when and if Facebook rebrands itself into a ‘metaverse’ company.
***See Oct. 28, 2021 update at the end of this posting and prepare yourself for ‘Meta’.***
Who (else) cares about integrity and safety in the metaverse?
In technology, first-mover advantage is often significant. This is why BigTech and other online platforms are beginning to acquire software businesses to position themselves for the arrival of the Metaverse. They hope to be at the forefront of profound changes that the Metaverse will bring in relation to digital interactions between people, between businesses, and between them both.
What is the Metaverse? The short answer is that it does not exist yet. At the moment it is vision for what the future will be like where personal and commercial life is conducted digitally in parallel with our lives in the physical world. Sounds too much like science fiction? For something that does not exist yet, the Metaverse is drawing a huge amount of attention and investment in the tech sector and beyond.
Here we look at what the Metaverse is, what its potential is for disruptive change, and some of the key legal and regulatory issues future stakeholders may need to consider.
What are the potential legal issues?
The revolutionary nature of the Metaverse is likely to give rise to a range of complex legal and regulatory issues. We consider some of the key ones below. As time goes by, naturally enough, new ones will emerge.
Data
Participation in the Metaverse will involve the collection of unprecedented amounts and types of personal data. Today, smartphone apps and websites allow organisations to understand how individuals move around the web or navigate an app. Tomorrow, in the Metaverse, organisations will be able to collect information about individuals’ physiological responses, their movements and potentially even brainwave patterns, thereby gauging a much deeper understanding of their customers’ thought processes and behaviours.
Users participating in the Metaverse will also be “logged in” for extended amounts of time. This will mean that patterns of behaviour will be continually monitored, enabling the Metaverse and the businesses (vendors of goods and services) participating in the Metaverse to understand how best to service the users in an incredibly targeted way.
The hungry Metaverse participant
How might actors in the Metaverse target persons participating in the Metaverse? Let us assume one such woman is hungry at the time of participating. The Metaverse may observe a woman frequently glancing at café and restaurant windows and stopping to look at cakes in a bakery window, and determine that she is hungry and serve her food adverts accordingly.
Contrast this with current technology, where a website or app can generally only ascertain this type of information if the woman actively searched for food outlets or similar on her device.
Therefore, in the Metaverse, a user will no longer need to proactively provide personal data by opening up their smartphone and accessing their webpage or app of choice. Instead, their data will be gathered in the background while they go about their virtual lives.
This type of opportunity comes with great data protection responsibilities. Businesses developing, or participating in, the Metaverse will need to comply with data protection legislation when processing personal data in this new environment. The nature of the Metaverse raises a number of issues around how that compliance will be achieved in practice.
Who is responsible for complying with applicable data protection law?
In many jurisdictions, data protection laws place different obligations on entities depending on whether an entity determines the purpose and means of processing personal data (referred to as a “controller” under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)) or just processes personal data on behalf of others (referred to as a “processor” under the GDPR).
In the Metaverse, establishing which entity or entities have responsibility for determining how and why personal data will be processed, and who processes personal data on behalf of another, may not be easy. It will likely involve picking apart a tangled web of relationships, and there may be no obvious or clear answers – for example:
Will there be one main administrator of the Metaverse who collects all personal data provided within it and determines how that personal data will be processed and shared? Or will multiple entities collect personal data through the Metaverse and each determine their own purposes for doing so?
Either way, many questions arise, including:
How should the different entities each display their own privacy notice to users? Or should this be done jointly? How and when should users’ consent be collected? Who is responsible if users’ personal data is stolen or misused while they are in the Metaverse? What data sharing arrangements need to be put in place and how will these be implemented?
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There’s a lot more to this page including a look at Social Media Regulation and Intellectual Property Rights.
I’m starting to think we should talking about RR (real reality), as well as, VR (virtual reality), AR (augmented reality), MR (mixed reality), and XR (extended reality). It seems that all of these (except RR, which is implied) will be part of the ‘metaverse’, assuming that it ever comes into existence. Happily, I have found a good summarized description of VR/AR/MR/XR in a March 20, 2018 essay by North of 41 on medium.com,
Summary: VR is immersing people into a completely virtual environment; AR is creating an overlay of virtual content, but can’t interact with the environment; MR is a mixed of virtual reality and the reality, it creates virtual objects that can interact with the actual environment. XR brings all three Reality (AR, VR, MR) together under one term.
If you have the interest and approximately five spare minutes, read the entire March 20, 2018 essay, which has embedded images illustrating the various realities.
Here’s a description from one of the researchers, Mohamed Kari, of the video, which you can see above, and the paper he and his colleagues presented at the 20th IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR), 2021 (from the TransforMR page on YouTube),
We present TransforMR, a video see-through mixed reality system for mobile devices that performs 3D-pose-aware object substitution to create meaningful mixed reality scenes in previously unseen, uncontrolled, and open-ended real-world environments.
To get a sense of how recent this work is, ISMAR 2021 was held from October 4 – 8, 2021.
The team’s 2021 ISMAR paper, TransforMR Pose-Aware Object Substitution for Composing Alternate Mixed Realities by Mohamed Kari, Tobias Grosse-Puppendah, Luis Falconeri Coelho, Andreas Rene Fender, David Bethge, Reinhard Schütte, and Christian Holz lists two educational institutions I’d expect to see (University of Duisburg-Essen and ETH Zürich), the surprise was this one: Porsche AG. Perhaps that explains the preponderance of vehicles in this demonstration.
Space walking in virtual reality
Ivan Semeniuk’s October 2, 2021 article for the Globe and Mail highlights a collaboration between Montreal’s Felix and Paul Studios with NASA (US National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and Time studios,
Communing with the infinite while floating high above the Earth is an experience that, so far, has been known to only a handful.
Now, a Montreal production company aims to share that experience with audiences around the world, following the first ever recording of a spacewalk in the medium of virtual reality.
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The company, which specializes in creating virtual-reality experiences with cinematic flair, got its long-awaited chance in mid-September when astronauts Thomas Pesquet and Akihiko Hoshide ventured outside the International Space Station for about seven hours to install supports and other equipment in preparation for a new solar array.
The footage will be used in the fourth and final instalment of Space Explorers: The ISS Experience, a virtual-reality journey to space that has already garnered a Primetime Emmy Award for its first two episodes.
From the outset, the production was developed to reach audiences through a variety of platforms for 360-degree viewing, including 5G-enabled smart phones and tablets. A domed theatre version of the experience for group audiences opened this week at the Rio Tinto Alcan Montreal Planetarium. Those who desire a more immersive experience can now see the first two episodes in VR form by using a headset available through the gaming and entertainment company Oculus. Scenes from the VR series are also on offer as part of The Infinite, an interactive exhibition developed by Montreal’s Phi Studio, whose works focus on the intersection of art and technology. The exhibition, which runs until Nov. 7 [2021], has attracted 40,000 visitors since it opened in July [2021?].
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At a time when billionaires are able to head off on private extraterrestrial sojourns that almost no one else could dream of, Lajeunesse [Félix Lajeunesse, co-founder and creative director of Felix and Paul studios] said his project was developed with a very different purpose in mind: making it easier for audiences to become eyewitnesses rather than distant spectators to humanity’s greatest adventure.
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For the final instalments, the storyline takes viewers outside of the space station with cameras mounted on the Canadarm, and – for the climax of the series – by following astronauts during a spacewalk. These scenes required extensive planning, not only because of the limited time frame in which they could be gathered, but because of the lighting challenges presented by a constantly shifting sun as the space station circles the globe once every 90 minutes.
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… Lajeunesse said that it was equally important to acquire shots that are not just technically spectacular but that serve the underlying themes of Space Explorers: The ISS Experience. These include an examination of human adaptation and advancement, and the unity that emerges within a group of individuals from many places and cultures and who must learn to co-exist in a high risk environment in order to achieve a common goal.
There always seems to be a lot of grappling with new and newish science/technology where people strive to coin terms and define them while everyone, including members of the corporate community, attempts to cash in.
The last time I looked (probably about two years ago), I wasn’t able to find any good definitions for alternate reality and mixed reality. (By good, I mean something which clearly explicated the difference between the two.) It was nice to find something this time.
As for Facebook and its attempts to join/create a/the metaverse, the company’s timing seems particularly fraught. As well, paradigm-shifting technology doesn’t usually start with large corporations. The company is ignoring its own history.
Multiverses
Writing this piece has reminded me of the upcoming movie, “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” (Wikipedia entry). While this multiverse is based on a comic book, the idea of a Multiverse (Wikipedia entry) has been around for quite some time,
Early recorded examples of the idea of infinite worlds existed in the philosophy of Ancient Greek Atomism, which proposed that infinite parallel worlds arose from the collision of atoms. In the third century BCE, the philosopher Chrysippus suggested that the world eternally expired and regenerated, effectively suggesting the existence of multiple universes across time.[1] The concept of multiple universes became more defined in the Middle Ages.
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Multiple universes have been hypothesized in cosmology, physics, astronomy, religion, philosophy, transpersonal psychology, music, and all kinds of literature, particularly in science fiction, comic books and fantasy. In these contexts, parallel universes are also called “alternate universes”, “quantum universes”, “interpenetrating dimensions”, “parallel universes”, “parallel dimensions”, “parallel worlds”, “parallel realities”, “quantum realities”, “alternate realities”, “alternate timelines”, “alternate dimensions” and “dimensional planes”.
The physics community has debated the various multiverse theories over time. Prominent physicists are divided about whether any other universes exist outside of our own.
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Living in a computer simulation or base reality
The whole thing is getting a little confusing for me so I think I’ll stick with RR (real reality) or as it’s also known base reality. For the notion of base reality, I want to thank astronomer David Kipping of Columbia University in Anil Ananthaswamy’s article for this analysis of the idea that we might all be living in a computer simulation (from my December 8, 2020 posting; scroll down about 50% of the way to the “Are we living in a computer simulation?” subhead),
… there is a more obvious answer: Occam’s razor, which says that in the absence of other evidence, the simplest explanation is more likely to be correct. The simulation hypothesis is elaborate, presuming realities nested upon realities, as well as simulated entities that can never tell that they are inside a simulation. “Because it is such an overly complicated, elaborate model in the first place, by Occam’s razor, it really should be disfavored, compared to the simple natural explanation,” Kipping says.
Maybe we are living in base reality after all—The Matrix, Musk and weird quantum physics notwithstanding.
To sum it up (briefly)
I’m sticking with the base reality (or real reality) concept, which is where various people and companies are attempting to create a multiplicity of metaverses or the metaverse effectively replacing the internet. This metaverse can include any all of these realities (AR/MR/VR/XR) along with base reality. As for Facebook’s attempt to build ‘the metaverse’, it seems a little grandiose.
The computer simulation theory is an interesting thought experiment (just like the multiverse is an interesting thought experiment). I’ll leave them there.
Wherever it is we are living, these are interesting times.
***Updated October 28, 2021: D. (Devindra) Hardawar’s October 28, 2021 article for engadget offers details about the rebranding along with a dash of cynicism (Note: A link has been removed),
Here’s what Facebook’s metaverse isn’t: It’s not an alternative world to help us escape from our dystopian reality, a la Snow Crash. It won’t require VR or AR glasses (at least, not at first). And, most importantly, it’s not something Facebook wants to keep to itself. Instead, as Mark Zuckerberg described to media ahead of today’s Facebook Connect conference, the company is betting it’ll be the next major computing platform after the rise of smartphones and the mobile web. Facebook is so confident, in fact, Zuckerberg announced that it’s renaming itself to “Meta.”
After spending the last decade becoming obsessed with our phones and tablets — learning to stare down and scroll practically as a reflex — the Facebook founder thinks we’ll be spending more time looking up at the 3D objects floating around us in the digital realm. Or maybe you’ll be following a friend’s avatar as they wander around your living room as a hologram. It’s basically a digital world layered right on top of the real world, or an “embodied internet” as Zuckerberg describes.
Before he got into the weeds for his grand new vision, though, Zuckerberg also preempted criticism about looking into the future now, as the Facebook Papers paint the company as a mismanaged behemoth that constantly prioritizes profit over safety. While acknowledging the seriousness of the issues the company is facing, noting that it’ll continue to focus on solving them with “industry-leading” investments, Zuckerberg said:
“The reality is is that there’s always going to be issues and for some people… they may have the view that there’s never really a great time to focus on the future… From my perspective, I think that we’re here to create things and we believe that we can do this and that technology can make things better. So we think it’s important to to push forward.”
Given the extent to which Facebook, and Zuckerberg in particular, have proven to be untrustworthy stewards of social technology, it’s almost laughable that the company wants us to buy into its future. But, like the rise of photo sharing and group chat apps, Zuckerberg at least has a good sense of what’s coming next. And for all of his talk of turning Facebook into a metaverse company, he’s adamant that he doesn’t want to build a metaverse that’s entirely owned by Facebook. He doesn’t think other companies will either. Like the mobile web, he thinks every major technology company will contribute something towards the metaverse. He’s just hoping to make Facebook a pioneer.
“Instead of looking at a screen, or today, how we look at the Internet, I think in the future you’re going to be in the experiences, and I think that’s just a qualitatively different experience,” Zuckerberg said. It’s not quite virtual reality as we think of it, and it’s not just augmented reality. But ultimately, he sees the metaverse as something that’ll help to deliver more presence for digital social experiences — the sense of being there, instead of just being trapped in a zoom window. And he expects there to be continuity across devices, so you’ll be able to start chatting with friends on your phone and seamlessly join them as a hologram when you slip on AR glasses.
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D. (Devindra) Hardawar’s October 28, 2021 article provides a lot more details and I recommend reading it in its entirety.
