Atlantis Dispatch 004:
in which ATLANTIS contemplates foundation myths and Ingenuity’s first flight.
Mississippi Delta from Space. Image courtesy the European Space Agency
April 30th, 2021
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April 19, 2021 marked a big day for space exploration. Ingenuity took flight! As you may recall, Ingenuity is the tiny, four-pound rotocraft that traveled to Mars in Perseverance’s belly. NASA sent Ingenuity to perform an engineering test: to see if it could be the first aircraft to achieve powered, controlled flight on another planet. That may sound like a small thing, especially for a chopper, which, following the video that NASA sent back, inspired comparisons to an adorable Pixar mosquito. But truly, the little chopper is larger than its teensy frame, and when it took flight, it accomplished not one, but three, giant feats.
In the first place, Ingenuity’s flight was an engineering triumph. It’s kind of hard to fly on Mars, or anywhere like it, since the density of Mars’s atmosphere is super thin — like one-percent of the density of Earth’s. Mars’s gravity is also one-third of Earth’s, so flying a rotorcraft there, even a tiny four pound one, is tough. After a delayed flight, a software update (beamed up from Earth), and a new schedule, no one knew, not even Atlantis, if Ingenuity would crash. It didn’t! Woohoo!
And this made for the second big feat: when it took off, Ingenuity changed the face of space exploration. With autonomous, powered, controlled flight in our space-travel toolbox, we’ll be able to expand our exploration far beyond what humans and robots and space stations can observe. Imagine where we can go now that we have a prototype for a solar powered rotocraft that can fly over the planets we’d like to explore!
That’s a big deal, too. Ingenuity’s flight is a feat that fires up the imagination — which, in our eyes, is Ingenuity’s third big accomplishment. Ingenuity inspires like the Wright Flyer inspired us...right? At least that’s how NASA wants us to think about it. Beneath Ingenuity’s solar panel, NASA tucked a tiny swatch of canvas snagged from the original Wright Flyer. And no small amount of care went into this task. It was almost an engineering feat in itself: a bit of canvas, wrapped neatly in element resistant tape, and attached by a wire to the teensy vehicle. How much does a patch of inspiration weigh? Not much in material terms, but, oh, what a payload of words and myths.
Let’s put it this way. The Wright Brothers’ scrap plants a little story seed, which germinates and tells us that our new flying machine allows us to embark on an entirely new kind of travel. A blimp can only rise so high; an airplane can fly far into Earth’s ether; a rocket can launch into space. But a little drone-like chopper, well, that takes us to new worlds. The most recent of many fantastic firsts!
It’s no coincidence, then, that the flying story surrounding the little Ingenuity also got us thinking about the Martian origin stories cropping up on the ground the Mars robots rest upon. As with all origins, there are new names for things. There’s the Octavia E. Butler Landing site where Perseverance landed (named for the ingenious, dystopian science fiction author). There’s also the forthcoming Rosalind Franklin rover (named for the x-ray crystallographer whose work was essential to the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA, and contributed to the subsequent 1962 Nobel Prize awarded to Watson and Crick). Perhaps a rover on Mars is even better than a posthumous Nobel Prize, since those simply don’t exist.
What are the new stories that will emerge — and be perpetuated — from these beginnings? How will they germinate, and inspire, and replicate?
Some of the work in cultural evolution at the Santa Fe Institute can help us think about that question. It turns out that our stories emerge and replicate in complex cultural systems that bear resemblances to biological systems. Helena Miton, cognitive scientist and postdoctoral fellow at SFI, for example, studies how individuals interact to produce, organize and transmit culture. For Miton, however, the replication of cultural artifacts has this twist: “for culture, it’s actually much harder to maintain stable types because the mutation rates you have are very different from the ones we get in biological systems.” How do we understand this mutation? What concepts do we need to see how our stories will unfurl and replicate?
For SFI President David Krakauer (as he explains in an interview at Nautilus) another way to think about the phenomenon of cultural transmission is to think of culture in terms of a “cascade of influence.” At the moment, we could say that our Mars stories stand at the headwaters, and they’re about to melt into series of waterfalls and pools of meaning. How will we know what stories will emerge by the time the river flows into the delta? We’ll have to continue to understand the ways that patterns interact with the ecosystem of the human imagination. We’re not sure how just yet, but we’re tapping our feet to a new rhythm and wondering if somewhere, down the river, Paul Simon will tell us that the Martian Delta shines like a celestial guitar.
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Tune in next time, when Atlantis contemplates sentimental space litter...