Posts Tagged ‘astronomy’
“Men have become the tools of their tools”*…
Visionary philosopher Bernard Stiegler argued that it’s not our technology that makes humans special; rather, it’s our relationship with that technology. Bryan Norton explains…
It has become almost impossible to separate the effects of digital technologies from our everyday experiences. Reality is parsed through glowing screens, unending data feeds, biometric feedback loops, digital protheses and expanding networks that link our virtual selves to satellite arrays in geostationary orbit. Wristwatches interpret our physical condition by counting steps and heartbeats. Phones track how we spend our time online, map the geographic location of the places we visit and record our histories in digital archives. Social media platforms forge alliances and create new political possibilities. And vast wireless networks – connecting satellites, drones and ‘smart’ weapons – determine how the wars of our era are being waged. Our experiences of the world are soaked with digital technologies.
But for the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, one of the earliest and foremost theorists of our digital age, understanding the world requires us to move beyond the standard view of technology. Stiegler believed that technology is not just about the effects of digital tools and the ways that they impact our lives. It is not just about how devices are created and wielded by powerful organisations, nation-states or individuals. Our relationship with technology is about something deeper and more fundamental. It is about technics.
According to Stiegler, technics – the making and use of technology, in the broadest sense – is what makes us human. Our unique way of existing in the world, as distinct from other species, is defined by the experiences and knowledge our tools make possible, whether that is a state-of-the-art brain-computer interface such as Neuralink, or a prehistoric flint axe used to clear a forest. But don’t be mistaken: ‘technics’ is not simply another word for ‘technology’. As Martin Heidegger wrote in his essay ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (1954), which used the German term Technik instead of Technologie in the original title: the ‘essence of technology is by no means anything technological.’ This aligns with the history of the word: the etymology of ‘technics’ leads us back to something like the ancient Greek term for art – technē. The essence of technology, then, is not found in a device, such as the one you are using to read this essay. It is an open-ended creative process, a relationship with our tools and the world.
This is Stiegler’s legacy. Throughout his life, he took this idea of technics, first explored while he was imprisoned for armed robbery, further than anyone else. But his ideas have often been overlooked and misunderstood, even before he died in 2020. Today, they are more necessary than ever. How else can we learn to disentangle the effects of digital technologies from our everyday experiences? How else can we begin to grasp the history of our strange reality?…
[Norton unspools Stiegler’s remarkable life and the development of his thought…]
… Technology, for better or worse, affects every aspect of our lives. Our very sense of who we are is shaped and reshaped by the tools we have at our disposal. The problem, for Stiegler, is that when we pay too much attention to our tools, rather than how they are developed and deployed, we fail to understand our reality. We become trapped, merely describing the technological world on its own terms and making it even harder to untangle the effects of digital technologies and our everyday experiences. By encouraging us to pay closer attention to this world-making capacity, with its potential to harm and heal, Stiegler is showing us what else is possible. There are other ways of living, of being, of evolving. It is technics, not technology, that will give the future its new face…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Our tools shape our selves,” from @br_norton in @aeonmag.
Compare and contrast: Kevin Kelly‘s What Technology Wants
* Henry David Thoreau
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As we own up, we might send phenomenological birthday greetings to Immanuel Kant; he was born on this date in 1724. One of the central figures of modern philosophy, Kant is remembered primarily for his efforts to unite reason with experience (e.g., Critique of Pure Reason [Kritik der reinen Vernunft], 1781), and for his work on ethics (e.g., Metaphysics of Morals [Die Metaphysik der Sitten], 1797) and aesthetics (e.g., Critique of Judgment [Kritik der Urteilskraft], 1790).
But Kant made important contributions to mathematics and astronomy. For example: his argument that mathematical truths are a form of synthetic a priori knowledge was cited by Einstein as an important early influence on his work. And his description of the Milky Way as a lens-shaped collection of stars that represented only one of many “island universes,” was later shown to be accurate by Herschel.
Act so as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, at all times also as an end, and not only as a means.
“It is impossible to contemplate the spectacle of the starry universe without wondering how it was formed”*…
Paul Constance on how Chile, a country riven by inequality and political conflict, has become a global sanctuary for the long science that drives astronomical discovery, and on the questions that raises…
… The next era of astronomy will depend on instruments so complicated and costly that no single nation can build them. A list of contributors to the James Webb Space Telescope, for example, includes 35 universities and 280 public agencies and private companies in 14 countries. This aggregation of design, engineering, construction and software talent from around the planet is a hallmark of “big science” projects. But large telescopes are also emblematic of the outsized timescales of “long science.” They depend on a fragile amalgam of trust, loyalty, institutional prestige and sheer endurance that must sustain a project for two or three decades before “first light,” or the moment when a telescope actually begins to gather data.
“It takes a generation to build a telescope,” Charles Alcock, director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a member of Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) board, said some years ago. Consider the logistics involved in a single segment of the GMT’s construction: the process of fabricating its seven primary mirrors, each measuring 27 feet in diameter and using 17 metric tons of specialized Japanese glass. The only facility capable of casting mirrors this large (by melting the glass inside a clam-shaped oven at 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit) is situated deep beneath University of Arizona football stadium. It takes three months for the molten glass to cool. Over the next four years, the mirror will be mounted, ground and slowly polished to a precision of around one millionth of an inch. The GMT’s first mirror was cast in 02005; its seventh will be finished sometime in 02027. Building the 1,800-ton steel structure that will hold these mirrors, shipping the enormous parts by sea, assembling the telescope atop Cerro Las Campanas, and then testing and calibrating its incommunicably delicate instruments will take several more years.
Not surprisingly, these projects don’t even attempt to raise their full budgets up front. Instead, they operate on a kind of faith, scraping together private grants and partial transfers from governments and universities to make incremental progress, while constantly lobbying for additional funding. At each stage, they must defend nebulous objectives (“understanding the nature of dark matter”) against the claims of disciplines with more tangible and near-term goals, such as fusion energy. And given the very real possibility that they will not be completed, big telescopes require what private equity investors might describe as the world’s most patient risk capital.
Few countries have been more successful at attracting this kind of capital than Chile. The GMT is one of three colossal observatories currently under construction in the Atacama Desert. The $1.6 billion Extremely Large Telescope, which will house a 128-foot main mirror inside a dome nearly as tall as the Statue of Liberty, will be able to directly image and study the atmospheres of potentially habitable exoplanets. The $1.9 billion Vera T. Rubin Telescope will use a 3.500 megapixel digital camera to map the entire night sky every three days, creating the first 3-D virtual map of the visible cosmos while recording changes in stars and events like supernovas. Two other comparatively smaller projects, the Fred Young Sub-millimeter Telescope and the Cherenkov Telescope Array, are also in the works.
Chile is already home to the $1.4 billion Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), a complex of 66 huge dish antennas some 16,000 feet above sea level that used to be described as the world’s largest and most expensive land-based astronomical project. And over the last half-century, enormous observatories at Cerro Tololo, Cerro Pachon, Cerro Paranal, and Cerro La Silla have deployed hundreds of the world’s most sophisticated telescopes and instruments to obtain foundational evidence in every branch of astronomy and astrophysics.
By the early 02030s, a staggering 70 percent of the world’s entire land-based astronomical data gathering capacity is expected to be concentrated in a swath of Chilean desert about the size of Oregon.
Collectively, this cluster of observatories represents expenditures and collaboration on a scale similar to “big science” landmarks such as the Large Hadron Collider or the Manhattan Project. Those enterprises were the product of ambitious, long-term strategies conceived and executed by a succession of visionary leaders. But according to Barbara Silva, a historian of science at Chile’s Universidad Alberto Hurtado, there has been no grand plan, and no one can legitimately take credit for turning Chile into the global capital of astronomy…
“Stumbling Toward First Light,” from @presentbias and @longnow.
* Henri Poincaré
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As we look up, we might recall that it was on this date in 2001 that NASA launched the Mars Odyssey, sending back stunning images from its tv cameras during its fiery ascent. Odyssey traveled 286 million miles before entering orbit around the red planet the following October.
Its mission was (and is– at 22-and-a-half years, it’s the longest-serving spacecraft at Mars) to use its spectrometers and a thermal imager to detect evidence of past or present water and ice, as well as study the planet’s geology and radiation environment in a quest to help answer the question of whether life once existed on Mars and to create a risk-assessment of the radiation that future astronauts on Mars might experience. (As a bonus, it acts as a relay for communications between the Curiosity rover [and previously the Mars Exploration Rovers and Phoenix lander] and Earth.)
“Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future”*…
But, as Dylan Matthews reports, some are better at it than others…
The question before a group made up of some of the best forecasters of world events: What are the odds that China will control at least half of Taiwan’s territory by 2030?
Everyone on the chat gives their answer, and in each case it’s a number. Chinmay Ingalagavi, an economics fellow at Yale, says 8 percent. Nuño Sempere, the 25-year-old Spanish independent researcher and consultant leading our session, agrees. Greg Justice, an MBA student at the University of Chicago, pegs it at 17 percent. Lisa Murillo, who holds a PhD in neuroscience, says 15-20 percent. One member of the group, who asked not to be named in this context because they have family in China who could be targeted by the government there, posits the highest figure: 24 percent.
Sempere asks me for my number. Based on a quick analysis of past military clashes between the countries, I came up with 5 percent. That might not seem too far away from the others, but it feels embarrassingly low in this context. Why am I so out of step?
This is a meeting of Samotsvety. The name comes from a 50-year-old Soviet rock band — more on that later — but the modern Samotsvety specializes in predicting the future. And they are very, very good at it. At Infer, a major forecasting platform operated by Rand, the four most accurate forecasters in the site’s history are all members of Samotsvety, and there is a wide gap between them and fifth place. In fact, the gap between them and fifth place is bigger than between fifth and 10th places. They’re waaaaay out ahead.
While Samotsvety members converse on Slack regularly, the Saturday meetings are the heart of the group, and I was sitting in to get a sense of why, exactly, the group was so good. What were these folks doing differently that made them able to see the future when the rest of us can’t?…
The “secrets” of superforecasters: “How a ragtag band of internet friends became the best at forecasting world events,” from @dylanmatt in @voxdotcom.
(Image above: source)
* Niels Bohr
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As we contemplate change, we might recall that it was on this date in 1781 that William Herschel discovered Uranus. The first planet to be discovered with the aid of a telescope, he initially thought that it was a comet.
And on this date in 1930, Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto. Originally designated the ninth planet, it has been “demoted” to minor (or dwarf) planet status.
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