In 2003 I began work on a research project that has taken me to places that I never imagined: the cultural heritage of space exploration. Now I am determined to bring to light the secrets at the heart of the Space Age.
My offering is about the kinds of data we can access about orbital objects and their cultural meanings. A key part of my argument is based around a brilliant photograph taken by Dr Marco Langbroek, a Palaeolithic archaeologist and astrographer, of a section of geostationary orbit. I look at what the spatial relationship between the satellites says about geopolitics, the spectrum landscape between Earth and space, and even go a bit of Deleuze and Guattari (this surprised me as much as I expect it surprises you).
Here's a taster:
Spectrum is both a driver of satellite
telecommunications technology and an invisible ‘soup’ in which the spacecraft
swim. This makes it very different from
sensory landscapes of human interaction, composed of visible light wavelengths,
sound, and the molecular interactions of smell and touch. It is truly non-human and robotic; our
interaction with it can only be mediated by antennas and signal processors.
And there's much more where that came from.
There are many other fascinating chapters, and we're very excited about the book, which captures the state of the discipline 11 years after the 5th World Archaeological Congress in 2003.
Laika's Ghost is a short story by Canadian science fiction writer Karl Schroeder. Gardner Dozois (I love you, Gardner, best science fiction editor in the world ever) included it in his Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25 (2012). Dozois' introduction says the story 'takes us to a desolate future Russia haunted by ghosts of the Soviet past, where a game is being played for the highest stakes of all'.
Don't worry, there are no spoilers. The following passage, naturally, struck me. One of the characters, Ambrose, laments:
Then when I was twelve the Pakistan-Indian war happened and they blew up each other's satellites. All that debris from the explosions is going to be up there for centuries! You can't even get a manned [sic] spacecraft through that cloud, it's like shrapnel. Hell, they haven't even cleared low Earth orbit to restart the orbital tourist industry. I'll never get to really go there! None of us will. We're never getting off this sinkhole.
In this scenario, human access to space has been closed off by a catastrophic space debris event, killing a vibrant space tourism industry, and with it dreams of Martian settlement. Earth governments or authorities - 'they' - appear helpless, unable or unwilling to initiate a clean-up operation.
The last image is compelling. Ambrose paints the Earth as a sinkhole, a low energy point of stable equilibrium in a dynamical system, that we're stranded at the bottom of. How will we scale the gravity walls to emerge into space now? Outside is the danger of shrapnel, as if it were a WWI trench.
To my archaeologist's mind, another vision comes: the famous sinkhole site in South Africa, Swartkrans, where it was first discovered that our ancestors the Australopithecines were not mighty hunters kick-starting the evolutionary process to modern humans by cooking a few chops, (while defending the female-types cowering back in the cave from leopards), but were rather prey to the carnivores instead.
What is the archaeological signature of a culture that made it into space and then retreated? In this future scenario, Earth becomes Swartkrans rather than Olduvai.
For long-time readers, I'm going to take up the story where I left it in How I became a space archaeologist. As you recall, I was working in Queensland when the idea of investigating the archaeology and heritage of orbital debris came to me one night while on my verandah looking up at the stars. Later that year (2002), I finished the contract I was working on and took up a position as Senior Conservation Officer in the Heritage Branch of the Environmental Protection Agency in the Central Queensland town of Rockhampton. After work and on weekends, I'd sit at my tiny desk with a dial-up connection and surf the web to learn about space. I made tables of spacecraft and launch dates; I read histories of space programs and trawled through sites like Encyclopedia Astronautica. And I became aware, for the first time, that Australia had a rich and diverse space history of its own. I was astonished by how little I knew of events that took place during my childhood.
In these early days, despite my lack of knowledge, themes that have since become dominant in my work started to emerge. Vanguard 1 and the Woomera launch site in South Australia quickly became part of my research pantheon. As my background was Aboriginal archaeology, it was hard not to also look at how Woomera had impacted on the lives of Aboriginal people. I thought about what it was that an archaeological approach could bring to the study of space exploration, and I thought about how you would apply Burra Charter principles to stuff in space, answering the question I had first posed myself back on the verandah of my Queenslander.
December approached: the month in which the big annual Australian Archaeological Association conference took place. I think it was in Townsville that year, and I had funding from the EPA to attend. The conference was a turning point. One of my cousins, Anna Morgan, was there. She made an important introduction. She had studied archaeology at James Cook University with Professor John Campbell. In his classes, she said, he had talked about doing archaeology in space.
What an amazing coincidence! But more was to come. When I sat down with John and talked about what I wanted to do, he informed me that there was a third person who was interested in space archaeology: Beth Laura O'Leary from New Mexico State University. Suddenly I had colleagues! And John was involved in organising a session at the 5th World Archaeological Congress in Washington DC the following year. Would I like to present a paper in it? he asked me.
It seemed the timing was right. I had about five months to prepare: to make my thoughts and ideas coalesce into something concrete enough to present, and to get enough money together for an overseas trip.
And so I continued to spend my weekends at the tiny desk, reading and thinking, and also learning how to use powerpoint. I don't think I had ever used it before this; the pictures I used for my PhD presentations were on overheads and slides. Soon it seemed that one paper wasn't going to be enough to contain all that I wanted to talk about, and I sent two abstracts in. One was about general themes for space archaeology; and the other - I think, I will have to try and find it, was about orbital debris. Both abstracts were accepted.
Now a more serious issue raised its head. Already, I was struggling to access the information I needed with the current incarnation of the World Wide Web, and in the library of Central Queensland University. I was doing this in my spare time, and it wasn't easy to negotiate leave to attend conferences that weren't strictly work-related. I would be taking leave to attend the World Archaeological Congress in April 2003. When I returned, everything would be the same. Was I serious about this research? I searched my soul and decided that I had never been more serious about anything in my life. So if this was the case, I had to accept that living in Central Queensland and working at an unrelated job was not going to further my research. I was going to have to leave.
This was a tough realisation, because I loved my life at that point. Working at the EPA was great; I had excellent colleagues, and I enjoyed the pace of the public service. I loved living in the beautiful coastal town of Yeppoon. I was presenting a world music show on the local community radio station, Radio NAG, and my radio friends were a delight and joy. Every now and then I would escape to Brisbane for a touch of city life. It was all pretty excellent.
But to make my vision of space archaeology happen, I would have to quit my job, leave Yeppoon, and take a leap into the unknown.
So I did. I submitted my resignation, effective from the end of March 2003. I packed up my house and put everything into storage, keeping only one suitcase, my laptop, and some books and papers. I booked my flights to Washington. I registered for the World Archaeological Congress. I worked on the two presentations. I thought about the future endlessly, and I tried not to think about the future.
For some reason, I don't really remember why now, I had decided some media around my papers would be a good idea. One of the journalists at the University of New England (where I was an adjunct) helped me put together a media release. It seemed to strike a chord. With only a few days before I left, the phone ran hot. I think I did around seven radio interviews on my mobile in just one day while I was running around like a headless chook trying to tie up all the loose ends.
Finally all was done. Almost everything I owned was in storage, and it would be seven years before I was able to retrieve it. The house had been cleaned and inspected. I'd had my last day at work, and a farewell party in Rockhampton at my friend Marianne's house. It was time to go.
If you live in Perth, and you love space, you're in luck. The Space Industry Association of Australia (in cooperation with CSIRO Australian Resources Research Centre), is holding its next forum in your beautiful city.
The panellists will talk about projects of local and national significance as well as recent developments in the Australian space sector. They'll share their views on the direction they believe the Australian space industry should be heading in, and the respective roles of government and industry in shaping the future of Australian space.
Last week I flipped over to our nation's sunny capital for a space policy workshop, then on to Sydney to talk at the Nerd Nite.
This was heaps of fun. I met new people, caught up with old friends, and got to have a warm and sympathetic audience for my ideas. No space junk this time - more astronomy and antennas. They had a lucky escape, though - I didn't get started on cable ties ......
No, I said nerding it up, not nuding it up. Shut up down the back there.
Not so long ago, I mused about my last ten years writing Space Age Archaeology. Today, in response to a question posed by Doug Rocks-Macqueen, I'm thinking about the future. What's my vision for the blog?
To be honest, I don't have a plan, and I've never really had one beyond each post. The future consists of the nebulous ideas and lists in my head of things I want to write about. Sometimes I think I should get some professional advice about design and marketing, and then I think it's all too much effort. I don't want to take over the world. It seems enough to have a place where I can write about my ideas with some sense of occasionally reaching other people who are interested, and where I am answerable to no-one but myself.
But maybe there will be outside constraints in the future. As we know, the academic world is now starting to take an interest in social media as a measure of impact. Once upon a time, blogging was a distraction from the main game, a frivolous pastime, and really rather suspect, almost indicative of a personal failing. These views always surprised me when I heard them reported - thankfully no-one has ever expressed them to my face! Now, there's lots of talk about academics being required to engage with the public/community through these avenues, and even more sinister hints of it becoming enforced and monitored.
Now I'm all for communication, obviously, but I don't know how I'd feel about having to meet someone else's expectations, or about the university scrutinising my fluid and organic meanderings around the online world. I think I would NOT LIKE IT AT ALL. I'm not doing this to jump through someone else's hoops.
On the other hand, it's nice to think that an activity I do mainly for pleasure may count in the mad scramble to punt something through the ever-changing goalposts of the academic world.
A couple of years ago, when I was reading around the area of archaeological blogging to prepare a paper for the first ever Digital Humanities Australasia conference, I found that no-one had really studied or written about individual archaeology bloggers. (This may have changed since). Almost all of the papers I came across dealt with institutional blogs based around a university department, a museum, or a project. To date I've seen nothing concrete about how the higher-ups in university administration and policy imagine academic engagement with social media, and I'd be surprised if a great many of them were actively engaged in the Versosphere themselves (I just made that word up - TwitterVERSE + blogOSPHERE. Naturally, it includes everything else). So it's important, I think, to have some data not just about the group blogs but also the individuals.
I also learnt recently, thanks to Noel Hidalgo Tan over at the South East Asian Archaeology Newsblog, that mine is a 'personality-based blog'. I'm not promoting a particular research project, or an organisation, or serving an identified community, so there are no mission statements or policies or performance indicators to consider. (Oh! The freedom!). Perhaps this makes it harder to have a clear vision of where the blog is going. And perhaps it means I don't really need one, either.
One thing is startlingly clear to me, though: we're not in it for the money.
A story I find myself coming back to over and over again is Cordwainer Smith's Scanners Live in Vain (1950). There are many reasons for this, but today I'm thinking more about robots. When Smith was writing this story, it was not known whether humans could survive in space. Or even what space was like - the geomagnetic storms, the plasmas, the corrosive atomic elements, the radiation. All this would have to wait for the first satellites.
Smith didn't imagine physical hazards for the first astronauts: he imagined a psychological hazard. (Actually, now that I write this I realise that is how I interpret it. His vision might have been more physical). Anyway, people in space did not die of radiation or exposure: they died of pain, the pain of space. Just to be in space was to endure unimaginable pain. To overcome this, space ship crews were made into habermans: their bodies were surgically severed from their brains and run by machines. As Martel, the protagonist, says,
.....you know what I am. A machine. A man turned into a machine. A man who has been killed and kept alive for duty.
He goes on to say some revealing things about this state of being:
Don't you think I remember what it is to be man and not a haberman? To walk and feel my feet on the ground? To feel a decent pain instead of watching my body every minute to see if I'm alive? How will I know when I'm dead? Did you ever think of that, Luci? How will I know when I'm dead?
The pain of space is almost malevolent, like a surf crashing against a rocky outcrop, trying to get past the blocks to the sentient being within. Any sensation would give it a tiny crack to enter the mind and overwhelm it with pain. The senses have to be obliterated so the mind can withstand the pressure. Martel can't taste, feel, hear, touch. He communicates with his fellow scanners by writing on a tablet. He monitors his physical body with a control box set in his chest, which you can just make out here:
Illustration by Jack Gaughan from the cover of Fantasy Book, 1950
He's not a robot, but he's not quite human either; and as the story unfolds, the ways of thinking that arise from being cut off from the senses become quite important. But I won't go any further in case you haven't read it. (In which case, do .....).
The scanners are the forerunners of many literary explorations of the insertion of human cores of sentience into different types of machine. Normally we would consider, like Martel, that losing our accustomed senses is a sacrifice, something done under compulsion or for the most noble of motives. But it doesn't have to be that way. In the video below, the characters from Sealab 2021 go wild imagining the new worlds of experience open to them in robot bodies:
(Cracks me up every time)
But it's all about the interface, the exact way in which the biological and the technological are meshed. Contemporary late industrial societies have generally inherited an approach to the body in which the skin is coterminous with the individual and more importantly, with the self. What's inside it is me, and what's outside it is not. Things like hair, fingernails, excrement, fluids, are highly dangerous because they transgress the boundary of the skin (see Freud, Mary Douglas, Julia Kristeva and others for more about this). They threaten to overwhelm the sense of self and have to be carefully controlled, socially and ritually. (Think about it).
Other societies in both the past and present have had other ways of understanding the body and the self, and they haven't always mapped directly onto each other. Gatherer-hunter-fisher people, once dominant in the world and now increasingly under threat, frequently have complex logics where boundaries between categories like alive, dead, human, natural, physical and spiritual are drawn in places modern industrial people might not recognise (early colonialists certainly didn't, and used these cosmologies as evidence of 'primitivism'. Another story!). If you grew up with such a worldview, it might not be such a big deal to have, say, your consciousness distributed over numerous sites, or to have a sense translocated somewhere else.
This isn't quite where I expected to end up when I started writing this, but it turns out there is a point here. In the future, biotechnology and robotics might transform what we think of as human, and there is likely to be a lot of human-machine interfacing in radical ways. We already see it in performance artists and the cutting edge of technology. Science fiction writers have gone much deeper into the social and personal consequences of such changes. But, and this is the bit I wasn't expecting, it might be people from marginalised societies with very different approaches to the body who are going to best at this sort of stuff. The distance they have to travel may not be as great as for western industrial people committed to a consuming, desiring, capitalist body. It's going to be important to foster cultural diversity so that humans have the capacity to adapt to the future.
As Martel's friend Parizianski observes in Scanners,
Everybody will be Other.
(Afternote: I never thought my doctoral research on body modification would come in handy when discussing space!)
Friday, February 07, 2014
Dead or alive, the Yutu rover says much about how we relate to robots
This weekend, the moon’s fortnightly rotation cycle turns China’s lunar rover Yutu (the Jade Rabbit) and its solar panels toward the sun once again … but whether the rover wakes up or not remains to be seen, as Yutu already announced its impending death to Earth-based watchers with a series of first-person messages on January 25.
The messages were posted on China’s equivalent of Twitter, Sina Weibo, from an unofficial account believed to be run by a group of enthusiasts.
The rover has been on the lunar surface since December 15, when it was deployed from the Chang’e 3 lander.
Since then, it has covered 100 metres with its six-wheel locomotion.
As space scientists struggled to get Yutu to respond to commands to fold in its solar panels and external equipment, the two-week lunar night descended, plunging the exposed equipment into -150C temperatures without protection.
In 1971, Russia’s Lunokhod 1 similarly failed to make it through to the next dawn, even though it had successfully entered mechanical hibernation.
It’s not impossible that Yutu will survive the night. But it certainly doesn’t look good.
What is different about its probable death, though, is the way that it has been conveyed to the public via the Chinese state news agency Xinhua:
I’ll tell everyone a little secret. I’m actually not that sad. I’m just in my own adventure story, and like any protagonist, I encountered a bit of a problem. Goodnight Earth. Goodnight humans.
More than 6,000 people have responded to the posts with messages of hope and appreciation. (Some, though, thought it “creepy”.)
For them, it doesn’t matter that Yutu is not actually sentient, nor directly responsible for the messages.
Space fandom
Yutu is not the only spacecraft to have a public fan base. Social media such as Twitter and its equivalents play a prominent role in this. Other high profile spacecraft which communicate in first person include @MarsCuriosity and @NSFVoyager2.
But is this a trivialisation of serious scientific endeavours? It could be argued that these engagements are cynical attempts to gain public support for funding space exploration; perhaps a means of glossing over the vast amounts of money spent on space while (in the view of critics, more urgent) terrestrial problems remain underfunded.
However, many of these accounts are not official, but run by fans. This is the case for Yutu’s microblog, as well as @NSFVoyager2 and the popular @SarcasticRover. Unconstrained by communications policies, these accounts sometimes use humour to great effect.
@SarcasticRover in action. Twitter
The question, then, is whether this approach makes for effective science communication. Does following an anthropomorphised spacecraft lead people to engage with the science behind it?
Vanessa Hill, CSIRO’s Social Media Manager, argued in an article last year that:
By personifying the spacecraft in the form of social media accounts we’re characterising spacecraft in an easily accessible way which allows people to connect with specific missions.
Human-robotic interactions
The issue, however, is much broader than it at first appears. We can take this a step further into the field of social robotics.
While the development of the fully humanoid robot has been a longstanding scientific ambition, any human-like feature can be co-opted into building a relationship with machines. We can see this in the natural tendency to see faces in inanimate things.
On rovers like Yutu, cameras and antennas often look a little like necks with a head emerging from the body. It’s enough for us to attribute emotional states to them.
A scale model of the Yutu rover shows its more anthropomorphic attributes. Joel Raupe
In this engagement, whether or not the robot is capable of feeling these emotional states is irrelevant. It’s more whether the robot appears to have them. This is what is commonly known as the Turing Test.
Of course, humans reading emotions into a space robot and conveying them as if they originated from the robot is very different. But perhaps the time when such robots will be designed to translate their mechanical states into statements that they tweet directly is not too far off.
In all of this, though, we are still thinking of “us” and “them”. Even if it’s not actually the case, we like to treat the robot as a separate being with sentience. It makes the communication exciting.
We can even take this a step further. These first-person communications as if from spacecraft bridge the distance between remote and proximate interaction.
Mars: it’s far out (literally). NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), J. Bell (Cornell University), and M. Wolff (Space Science Institute, Boulder)
In remote interaction, humans and robots are separated in space, and even sometimes in time, such as the time lag in communication between Mars and Earth.
In proximate interaction, humans and robots are co-located, for example, in the same room or facility. The physical distance affects how people behave around machines, as well as the robot’s level of autonomy.
What these social media interactions do is make people feel more present in the remote location, collapsing the distinction between near and far. It doesn’t end there, though.
A post-human perspective
If we take a “post-human” perspective, we can look at space robots as extensions of ourselves. We don’t have to anthropomorphise spacecraft: they can actually be our senses. This is how metatechnology researcher Robert Pepperell explained it in a 2004 conference paper:
This state of co-extension requires that we revise our attitude towards human-machine interaction: if technology is now regarded as an extension of human cognition, then the classical model of interaction whereby two distinct entities are interfaced, one sentient and one insentient, is inaccurate. In its place we must posit an exchange of cognitive activity between the sentient user and the cognition embodied in the device.
Yutu’s live microblogging of its own death from the first-person perspective could be seen, on the one hand, as a measure of the extent to which social media have become pervasive in engaging the public with civil space exploration.
But I think it’s something more. Space robots are not yet fully autonomous, as they rely on human commands. As Yutu shows, however, the exchange is not all one way. Even if the machine itself is not generating the posts, there is still an interaction whereby the actions and “experiences” of the rover are translated into a verbal message which elicits human emotional responses.
The public may not be influencing Yutu’s behaviour, but it sure as heck is affecting ours. These kinds of interactions are charting future territory in social robotics. Yutu’s legacy is part of this new cognitive exchange.
By Alice Gorman, Flinders University (Orginally published 29 November 2013)
With India and China planning lunar surface missions, privately-funded space entrepreneurs competing for the US$40 million Google Lunar X Prize and discussions around lunar mining intensifying, working out what to do with our moon’s cultural heritage is becoming urgent.
In an article in the journal Science today, space lawyers Henry Hertzfeld and Scott Pace propose a multilateral agreement at the highest international level, initially between the US and Russia, but open to other moon-faring entities such as China, India and the European Space Agency (ESA).
And while there is much to recommend this, I propose we should consider extending the agreement idea further.
The moon has a rich archaeological record created by nearly 40 missions, from 1959 until the present. Most are robotic, but those that really grabbed the public’s imagination had human crews.
In 1969, at the site of Tranquility Base, humans set foot on another world for the first time. The Apollo 11 astronaut footprints in the thick lunar dust and the controversial flag are among the most iconic images of the 20th century.
More recently, China, India, Japan and the ESA have started crashing spacecraft into the surface of the moon at the end of their mission life.
All up, there are more than 190 tons of artefacts from lunar exploration. Now, these sites may be under threat.
US law to the moon
In 2011, NASA created a set of voluntary guidelines for future missions to avoid damage to Ranger, Surveyor and Apollo sites.
These include measures such as no-go buffer zones, heritage “precincts” and recommendations about how to fly around sites to avoid stirring up destructive dust.
Another proposal, which emerged in July this year, has raised alarm bells. The Apollo Lunar Legacy Act, which is currently before US Congress, aims to declare a National Park on the moon specifically to ensure the protection of US heritage sites.
Space legal experts have pointed out that this is incompatible with the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST), to which the US is a signatory. The Outer Space Treaty forbids territorial claims in outer space, by any means – and this includes indirectly, such as the extension of national jurisdiction to space places, as we see here.
It’s not the first time this issue has come up. In 1999, archaeologist Beth Laura O’Leary, from the State University of New Mexico, and her team, catalogued all the material at the Apollo 11 site for the Lunar Legacy Project funded by NASA.
The Apollo 11 command module on display at the Air & Space Museum in Washington. Image credit: Gouldy99
They proposed designating the artefacts a National Historic Landmark, as they were legally the property of the US under the Outer Space Treaty. Back then, NASA’s response was unequivocal: such a move risked being interpreted by the international community as making a territorial claim.
As well as the legal issues, the Apollo Lunar Legacy Act plays into aspects of US ideology that sometimes cause unease in the international community:
manifest destiny (it is a moral duty of Americans to expand their territory)
American exceptionalism (America is unique among nation states and not bound by the same rules)
the cult of the American flag (the flag as the actual embodiment of the nation rather than just a symbol).
While this is obviously a simplification of more complex ideas, which are by no means universally accepted, elements of all three can be seen in the discourse around the significance of US lunar heritage sites.
All the same, everyone seems to agree that something needs to be done. Is the US bill the best option for the moment? Probably not.
The authors of today’s Science article, Hertzfeld and Pace, argue that a multilateral agreement would not violate the Outer Space Treaty, and would allow the interests of other nations to be represented.
The very sensitive issues around property and resource rights on the moon are side-stepped, leaving the way clear to effectively protect this precious heritage.
I suggest, though, that this proposal could go further. Hertzfeld and Pace limit the agreement to space-faring nations. But if we are to uphold the principle that space exploration is undertaken for the benefit of all humanity, then we need to broaden our view of who has contributed.
Looking Down Under
A replica of the Redstone rocket in Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center in Hutchinson. brentdanley
Let’s look at a couple of Australian examples. In the 1960s, the US used the Woomera rocket range in South Australia to test nose-cones on the Redstone rocket, a precursor of the Saturn V rocket which took astronauts to the moon.
The contribution of the Traditional Owners who were displaced to make way for the range may have been involuntary, but it supported the development of both US and European space industries.
Four of the five successful Apollo missions carried a dust detector experiment, designed by the University of Western Australia’s Professor Brian O’Brien. (The detectors gathered important data which can be used for comparison with new data from NASA’s recently launched LADEE spacecraft.)
No doubt there were many other hardware components designed or manufactured outside the US.
Australia might not be a space-faring nation, but it doesn’t mean we’re not stakeholders in lunar heritage. You can find many similar examples, such as the nations who hosted NASA tracking stations, a critical part of the Apollo programme.
Include more, not less
This kind of approach is consistent with United Nations declarations and principles, which call for space to be more inclusive. It also picks up on the recommendations of the Dublin Principles, created in 2011 by the International Council on Monuments and Sites and the International Committee for the Conservation of the Industrial Heritage. The Dublin Principles emphasise the importance of recognising networks and multiple locations.
A multilateral lunar heritage agreement could also serve as a model to address another issue that is even more urgent – international cooperation on actively removing hazardous orbital debris.
The extraordinary achievements of the US lunar exploration programme are undeniable. But heritage is inherently political. Whoever controls the past will have a huge influence on the shape of things to come.
Ten years ago, when my sister was attempting to explain to a friend what the hell it was I was doing, he came up with the name Dr Space Junk. I liked it and have kept it ever since. Thanks, (the dishy) Andrew!
Dr Space Junk is sort of me and sort of not-me, to use a Zoolanderism. She doesn't have to bow to academic pressures and has some serious hardware at her disposal. She moves somewhat fluidly between the real world and the fictional realm at times. She always stops for afternoon tea.
After all this time, I can't really imagine not having this alter ego who plays a primary role in my online life. In a conference paper a couple of years ago, I mused about the advantages of communicating with an avatar. In December last year, I talked about my experiences in the world of social media at the Australian Archaeological Association Annual Conference.
I found it surprisingly hard to write about this from an academic perspective as it's all so personal. I had no idea what I was doing really when I started blogging in 2004, and I don't really remember what motivated me to start. I do remember very clearly the day I began the blog. I was in Adelaide for the International Space University Summer Space Programme, at which I was giving a guest lecture, and spending much of my free time in the Woomera archives at the Defence Science and Technology Organisation.
On this afternoon, I was in Dr Heather Burke's house, alone in the middle of the day while she was at work. It was warm inside the bluestone terrace, and in the small sitting room, I was surrounded by bookcases and beautiful objects ..... bird's nests, bark paintings, carriage lamps ..... I had my feet on the coffee table, an old traveling case, while I slouched on the sofa with my laptop.
I decided to bite the bullet and just begin. All sorts of decisions had to be made - name, format, design, introductory text, profile. The design templates were fairly limited, and I chose a simple black one to mirror the night sky. (This remains unchanged - every time I play around with new templates I chicken out when it gets to crunch time). At the time I was a bit obsessed with quince tea, and with some research I had been doing around the origins of anthropology and its relationship to theosophy. Thus Dr Space Junk's starship came into being, influenced perhaps also by Gully Foyle .....
I didn't really have much to say in early days. It was the beginning of my space research. I was starting to come to grips with the literature, and a few themes that were very much influenced by my previous work and professional career as a heritage consultant were swirling around in a mass of information. Blogging was also quite new, so the established networks and connections didn't really exist. It felt like it was just me and my brain.
Every now and then someone would stumble across my blog and make a comment. This was very exciting stuff! Then Dr Mick "Cheekbones" Morrison, another early Australian archaeology blogger, recommended that I put a tracker on. Suddenly, I could see that people were actually reading. I was very happy, but it gave me a sort of squirly feeling as well - I felt very exposed, and I realised that previously I had been mainly writing for myself. It took a little mental adjustment to not to censor myself and to regain my voice after this revelation.
Over time, my posts became longer and longer as my research grew and I had more to say. A few years ago, after reading some of the scholarly and beautiful posts written by various friends and colleagues on their blogs, I had a crisis of confidence. Should I be putting more effort into what I wrote? I asked the advice of (by then) Associate Professor Heather Burke, a notorious avoider of social media and a committed cynic. What she said was very wise. 'Think about it', she said to me. 'When do you write and what do you write about?'
'Well', I said, not having really considered this before, 'I suppose it's when inspiration hits me. It might be a few sentences or a few paragraphs. I don't spend hours crafting a post, and I don't really have any sort of plan about it - it just happens when it happens'.
'If you had to sit down and work on a post for hours, and approached it like it was an academic paper, do you think you would post very much?' she said. I thought about this some more. It was true. I probably wouldn't. That might work for some people, but the more spontaneous approach was better for me, and the kind of tangents I was sometimes prone to follow. Heather made me feel comfortable with what I was doing, and for that I thank her.
Having said that, the last six months have been a big hiatus as I've grappled with various tedious technical problems (only just resolved) and numerous changes in the shape of my life. But I feel reinvigorated about the power of the blog after having a post selected in the Science Online Open Lab 2013 anthology. It's not just me who feels the cable tie love!
Now Dr Space Junk is on Twitter (@drspacejunk) and even on Soundcloud as DJ Space Junk. There's a T-shirt design (yet to be realised) and a cocktail concept (ever evolving). For ten years Dr Space Junk has accompanied me on my journey through outer space and the increasingly complex layers of social online space. She's not retiring any time soon.
My esteemed colleague Dr Lynley Wallis is having a Game of Thrones party for her (ahem) 30th birthday, in a few weeks. Great preparations are being made. These include sigils for every guest, using a generator found online. Of course mine has to have a space theme, easier said than done. Here are my two most successful drafts so far. I can't decide which direction to go in, so there may be some more experimentation.
The last few months have brought many things, some anticipated, and some entirely unexpected.
In early April I went to the Society for American Archaeology conference in Honolulu, where my excellent colleagues Dr Beth Laura O'Leary and Lisa Westwood had organised a space archaeology session. Unfortunately, it was on at 8.30 am on the first day of the conference .... but we still had a reasonable turn-out, and a great array of papers, including one from the very dynamic Ann Garrison Darrin, co-editor of the Handbook of Space Engineering, Archaeology and Heritage. I was very pleased to meet new space colleagues Joe Reynolds and Justin Walsh. Space.com reporter Leonard David, always a big supporter of space archaeology, wrote about the session here.
My contribution was, no surprise, on orbital debris (see abstract below).
Gorman, Alice (Australian Cultural Heritage Management)
[13]
Robot Avatars: The Material Culture of Human Activity in Earth Orbit
Since the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957, more than 7000 rocket launches have delivered payloads into space that now are a critical part of the infrastructure of modern life, particularly in telecommunications and navigation. This paper discusses the broad research questions that can be addressed by investigation of the thousands of satellites, rocket bodies, and pieces of junk currently in Earth orbit. Their materials and design reflect the nature of our social and political interactions with space and adaptations to a new environment, a robotic colonial frontier. Factors that contribute to the character of this material record include microgravity, extreme temperature and radiation conditions, national political and scientific agendas, and technological styles through time and across terrestrial cultures. In other words, what can space junk tell us about contemporary life on Earth? However, unlike terrestrial artifacts, satellites in orbit are barely visible to us and are not designed to interact with human bodies in any way. They may represent the beginnings of a technological trajectory that will transform how human cultures relate to time and space.
The slightly cryptic last sentence alludes to Dyson spheres/swarms and Matrioshka brains - not my usual territory, but it seemed to fit, so I went there.
I loved Honolulu. (Someone said to me before leaving, 'But it's just like the Gold Coast', as if that were a bad thing! I love the Gold Coast too. Tacky has its own aesthetic). Mai Tais and Pina Coladas were $4.00 - what's not to love about that? In the spirit (ha ha) of this blog, I offer a Mai Tai recipe to drive away the winter blues. Fittingly, Mai Tai is said to be based on the expression 'Maita'i roa ae', which has been translated by some as 'out of this world'.
The ingredients are in imperial measurements 'cos that's how those kooky Americans do things.
1 oz light rum
1 oz dark rum
1/2 oz lime juice
1/2 oz orange curacao
1/2 oz orgeat syrup (I think you can use Amaretto or other almond liqueurs here)
Maraschino cherry for garnish
Put all the ingredients except the dark rum into a cocktail shaker with ice cubes and shake well. Strain into glass with lots of ice and top with the dark rum. Makes 1.
On the last day of the idyll, I went on a road trip around the island of Oa'hu with Jo Smith and Jordan Ralph, in a Mustang convertible. Does it get any better than that? And - joy oh joy - on the edge of the island, we came across a satellite tracking station.
Of course it was a military one, so I knew I'd never get inside, but I did want to take some photos. This was where things started to go awry. I went up to the guard house to ask permission, and upon leaving it, I missed a concrete step and tore my Achilles tendon at both ends. I didn't fall, as there were two bollards that I grabbed for support, but perhaps it would have been better if I had: more bruises and sprains no doubt, but my calf would not have taken the full brunt of it.
Here's the photo, taken by Jordan Ralph. I could barely walk but was determined not to give in.
It's only just occurred to me that I look a little like I'm attempting the hula here. It's more magician's assistant stance really - ta da! Or: here's one I made earlier!
And so began six weeks of crutches, ice, ultrasounds, physio, visits to the surgeon and lots of lying down. I may yet avoid surgery, but two and a bit months later I still can't walk properly and have a way to go yet.
And when I got back to Oz, in mid-April, I had only two weeks left to prepare for my next big adventure: TEDxSydney. Of that, more in another post.
For many advocates of space exploration, the Solar System is the answer to human woes. As we exhaust our terrestrial resources, face overpopulation and stare down the barrel of rising sea levels, moving off-planet holds as many promises as it does challenges.
Already we have left our cultural footprint in the Solar System, from the teeming satellites in Earth orbit and landing sites on the Moon, Mars and Venus, to the Voyager spacecraft at the edge of the Solar System. And access to space is slowly moving out of the hands of national governments with the rise of commercial spaceflight development, and the growth of the space tourism market.
Why is space different?
In general, we don’t think of the space environment in the same way as Earth’s. There are several reasons for this. One is the common perception of space as a black, empty vacuum. Second, unlike Earth, space is practically infinite — beyond our sun there are billions of others just like it, even in our 'unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy'.
Then there is the absence of life, as far as we know — although there is always hope that this might change with further exploration. Until that happens, there is nothing living to suffer from any human activities in space. Effectively, there is no need to consider human impacts on the space environment seriously.
Historically, space has been seen as the very last frontier, ripe for colonial conquest. Just as on Earth, the motivations for colonisation are not just about curiosity, or an 'urge to explore', but about finding new resources to exploit for terrestrial markets. The unstated rationale behind this draws heavily on Western anthropocentric ideas of the mastery of creation — the assumption that the non-human world is there for our use. This instrumental view is still very prevalent in the way the space industry justifies its activities.
It’s also a matter of 'out of sight; out of mind'. When we look outwards from the surface of our planet at night the things that arrest our attention tend to be the stars of deep space. Unless you know what you’re looking for you might not even identify the other planets in our solar system, let alone the human-made satellites and space stations.
Of course it doesn’t help that so few people have actually experienced space itself. And for many of them, the revelation of space was actually one of Earth. The vision of the 'whole Earth' was first seen by the lunar-orbiting Apollo 8 mission in 1968. The image of the blue-and-white planet, a marble-sized splash of colour in the inky blackness, emphasised the fragility of life on Earth, and was responsible for the growth of a global ecological awareness.
In all of this, the intrinsic values of the space environment, in and of itself, have been frequently overlooked. While the need for an environmental ethics of space has long been recognised, there is little evidence that space industry has moved beyond a purely anthropocentric perspective.
The rights of rocks
On Earth, the concept of 'nature' having value in its own right, independent of human use, is no longer problematic. Australian philosopher Val Plumwood has been at the forefront of a movement to break down moral distinctions between humans and nature. Plumwood argues that nature has its own agency or autonomy, and should be reconceived as a co-participant in human endeavour rather than something on which we are dependent.
Whatever we do to nature is a reflection of ourselves – whether here or on other planets. watsonsinelgin/Flickr
In her view, we pay attention to the resources offered by the environment, and the limits they impose on our activities, 'only after disaster has occurred' and then only to “fix things up”. Dependency appears as a source of anxiety or threat, or as a further technological problem to be overcome'.
Our use of Earth orbit to place the satellites on which we now depend for telecommunications, weather, and navigation has created a seemingly irreversible environmental crisis — space so filled with junk that we are at risk of losing our access to it. Even so, the problem is still framed from an anthropocentric and geocentric perspective: in other words, how it will affect the Earth? The value of this apparently empty space is conceived entirely in terms of human use. Could we argue that it has intrinsic value — and as such is a place towards which we have a moral obligation?
The issue is perhaps clearer when we consider other planets. The view that inanimate celestial bodies have a right to exist undisturbed has been called 'cosmic preservationism'. One of the arguments is that the uniqueness of these planetary landscapes creates intrinsic value. There is no doubt — as human space exploration has repeatedly proven — that each object in space has its own story to tell.
And indeed, we really know so little of the solar system that it is hard to tell what is unique and what is common. However, critics of cosmic preservationism claim it leads to the absurd position of rocks on Mars having rights.
Citizens of the solar system
In order to continue as a space-faring species, and even perhaps to continue to live on Earth, we have to find sustainable ways to use the resources of space to survive. This means water, oxygen and minerals, all of which exist in various quantities spread across planets and asteroids. Already, the technologies and structures we may need to mine the moon and asteroids are being considered.
Our very presence on other celestial bodies, whether in human form or through robot avatars, changes them. They are altered physically, and also conceptually, becoming part of a human cultural landscape in a new way. We cannot land, sample, build colonies or mines and whisk away as if nothing happened — our chemical and mechanical traces are now part of the planet. At this stage of human space exploration such impacts are minimal, and no doubt acceptable. But this won’t always be the case.
Already, the international geological community is heralding the arrival of a new epoch – the Anthropocene. Human impacts on the Earth have reached the scale where they are defining a distinct geological layer. Will we have the same level of impact on the rest of the solar system too?
Perhaps the answer is to take up Plumwood’s challenge and abandon the opposition of nature and culture. This allows an acknowledgement of intrinsic value in the space environment that need not take priority over human interests, but can be managed by a critical assessment of competing interests. An ethic of respect for the wonders of the Solar System of which we are an integral part should not be that hard to achieve.
As usual, some of the most prescient and perceptive treatments of the archaeology of the contemporary past are to be found in literature. In The Woman who Died A Lot (Jasper Fforde 2012), an asteroid impact on Earth is predicted for the year 2041. In the passage below, our heroine Thursday Next discusses the likelihood of this event actually occuring, and how archaeological evidence works in the context of time travel.
We were currently at 34 percent likelihood, and this figure was derived from many sources - astronomical observation, computer modelling, level of divine concern, guesswork and archaeology - future archaeology. Artefacts from the future had been found, but dating was contentious as it is difficult to say when something was to be invented or built. Of course, something with a date on it beyond 2041 would be conclusive, but the fossil record - both forward and back - is sketchy at best and, so far, nothing like that has turned up.
Despite Fforde's confusion of archaeology and palaeontology (*sigh* ... this happens elsewhere in the book also), the difficulty of distinguishing the future from the present, or even the past, on the basis of artefacts, is a point well made.
The present could be seen as a thin ephemeral layer on the surface of the Earth, with probabilities multiplying exponentially both forwards and backwards. The material remains of future and past, as Fforde notes, are equally fragmentary. Taphonomy works in both directions.
Of course I am thinking about this in the light of my current task, which is to write my presentation for the Society for American Archaeology conference in Honolulu next week. I'm thinking about what we can learn from investigating the totality of orbital debris, not just interesting individual items within it. I've often talked about the value of the cultural landscape of orbital space, and now I'm trying to figure out what it means.
My half-articulated thoughts are about the breakdown of relationships between objects which were once connected (ie part of the same spacecraft, or launched on the same flight) but now, through orbital evolution, appear unrelated. Their original states cannot be retrodicted from their current position, unless they are being actively tracked. So it's about taphonomy, entropy and dynamical systems.
When orbital debris falls to Earth, it's falling into its own future, and our present. The tricky bit is recognition.
References Fforde, Jasper 2012 The Woman Who Died a Lot. London: Hodder & Stoughton Papaerback edition 2013, p 180
This is my abstract for an upcoming session on the Anthropocene at the Theoretical Archaeology Group conference in Chicago. No, alas, I'm not going to be there in person; I will be presenting in Skype mode. None of the conference registration and travel costs, but none of the conference partying either ......
A characteristic of what many are now calling the
Anthropocene era is the redistribution of elements and minerals in patterns
recognisable as the result of human interventions. Since 1957, the year Sputnik
1 was launched, approximately 6000 tons of human materials have been injected
into Earth orbit, and more is thinly spread in various locations throughout the
solar system. Mineral signatures rarely seen beyond the terrestrial sphere are
now colonising interplanetary space. Their contribution to the estimated 40 000
tons of material from space that falls to Earth every year, including meteoroids
and dust, is increasing. With the predicted acceleration of asteroid and lunar
mining, the human impacts on space are likely to grow. However, the idea of the
Anthropocene as constituted in an Earth/Space system has barely been explored.
In this paper I draw on Nigel Clark’s concept of 'ex-orbitant globality' to situate
the Anthropocene in a multi-gravity environment, moving away from the
geocentrism that has dominated both archaeological and environmental approaches
to understanding what space means.
References
Clark, Nigel
2002 Ex-orbitant globality. Theory,
Culture and Society 22:165-185 Gorman, A.C. 2014 The Anthropocene in the Solar System. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 1(1):87-91
This article was originally published at 
This article was originally published at 
