uncanny valley

I, Kosmonaut

A book which I have loved reading as part of the research for Kosmonaut Zero is Two Sides of the Moon, by Alexei Leonov and David Scott. 

One of the reflections common to both men was that their mission profiles gave them no time to themselves, no break in which they could appreciate what it was they were actually doing - being the first man to walk in space and one of the 12 to land on the moon respectively. Leonov took paper and crayons to space so that he could sketch what he saw and recommended that future space missions should include a poet who could record the emotional impact of the experience for all humankind.

Mission Control would constantly ask for status updates and biological data, give them endless tasks to perform so that virtually every minute of each mission was occupied. The act of taking time to experience the wonder of what they were doing was just not part of the schedule.

Here on Earth 40 years on, the space race is forgotten and new technologies take precedence. Web 2.0 platforms proliferate - Twitter, Facebook, YouTube - all based on the premise of 'sharing' - photos and videos, experiences and perspectives.

It's as if we are all now in astronaut mode - document, record, share - giving realtime updates to a faceless global mission control, eviscerating all our activities, no matter how trivial or inane. Privacy is willingly forgotten as we seek to share/express/opine about everything and nothing.

For technology to develop, of course it must be democratic. But which of us are making history like Leonov and Scott - and which of us are merely filling space and time?

New Story Synchronicities

According to Wired.co.uk, some mad scientist seeks an astronaut to make a one-way trip to Titan. Apparently the ad specifies: “someone unique that has always wanted to see the universe first-hand and has perhaps a terminal view on life here at home." Well, that's one way of putting it. More.

And the lovely False Maria, the robot from the 1927 film Metropolis, is on display in Paris. In case you can't get there, go here instead.

Explanations of the connections between these obscure links soon enough.

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

Mine is just one of 1.6 million names printed on a microchip inside the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) that is currently orbiting the moon. Kind of a nice feeling, especially with the Apollo 40 hoo-ha this year. kinda odd that when I filled in the online form at www.nasa.gov over a year ago, I had no idea that I'd be in the middle of writing a novel all about a mission to deep space by the time the craft finally launched.

As described elsewhere on this blog, the new story is set in the late 1960s and what's coming out of all the research on the era is that we used to envision the future in terms of grand projects - orbiting hotels, lunar bases, supersonic travel, capitalist or communist utopias. Perhaps we don't dream anymore... the 21st century reality is a future of small artefacts and intimate details - ever more wondrous handheld gadgets feed us our media and enable us to post the minutiae of our lives on social networks. The future in 140 characters or less, trickle-down celebrity makes everyone a star, rolling news shrinks the world ever smaller...

Space isn't as cool as it was but the LRO thing is important because it's a glimpse of what's outside the thin band of atmosphere that keeps us all alive. NASA are sending a robotic mission, named Curiosity, to Mars in 2011. Click here and your name could go too.

Concorde, Cold War Modern & Japan Car

Three exhibitions this year have proved quite revealing in what they have to say about global attitudes towards the future. Most recently, I caught the Concorde exhibit at Manchester Airport. The Great Bird is parked in a hangar, elegant and poised. All dressed up but with nowhere to go. Rather than criss-crossing the world as it is still capable of doing, the plane is grounded by that good ol' one-two punch - bad economics and lack of imagination. Concorde's future is lost, for now at least.

A quite different experience with the brilliant Cold War Modern show at the V&A in London at the turn of the year. That show looked at the period from 1945-70 from a design perspective, detailing some amazing products and structures - from the mundane to the awe-inspiring - as well as a whole host of artefacts that never came to be. Cyborg technology, immense Soviet architecture, Buckminster Fuller's domed cities and space stations all shone briefly on the drawing board and then came to nothing. It was a glimpse into other worlds - one that I grew up in, and one that might have been, both shaped by the splitting of the atom.

Japan Car at London's Science Musuem was a look at more likely futures - one where cars are either inspired by the kei car concept or are capable of zero emissions. It featured the Honda FCX Clarity, the unbelievably kawaii Toyota IQ and some interesting GPS-data-as-art from Tokyo.

Past trips to the US revealed that Cog and Kismet, two innovative social robot projects from MIT in the 90s and early 2000s, are already exhibited at the MIT Museum just outside Boston. At times it seems as if our future utopias are really destined to be just future museum exhibits. Relics of eras that falter once past the concept stage. One can easily imagine that we might find ourselves wandering through exhibits in 20 or 30 years, marvelling at Asimo or the Repliee androids, contemplating another world that might have been.

Concorde

Toyota iQ

Toyota iReal

Tomorrow beckons, fragments of utopia in a long winter.