Atlantis Dispatch 008:
in which ATLANTIS contemplates space mavericks.
Edmund Hillary & Tenzing Norgay after successfully completing the first ascent of Mount Everest in 1953.
August 17th, 2021
…begin transmission…
Billionaires in space! Between Richard Branson’s flight on July 11, 2021, and Jeff Bezos’s lift-off nine days later, Atlantis has been jittery with the controversy surrounding the launch of private space tourism. When the Tweets began to fly past us as fast as the VSS Unity itself, we found ourselves so off-kilter that our ship nearly split right through the hull!
On the starboard side, we’ve been excited, at least for Branson, to find his way up with his crew to see that immaculate view of Earth that can only be called sublime. Branson’s launch seems like an extension of all of the neato things he’s brought to the world, like Virgin Records, Virgin Atlantic, and now Virgin Galactic. The old founder almost looked as cool as Mick Jagger when he told the world from above that he thought that his own path could inspire young people to imagine the bigger things they could do with their lives. What could be cooler than dedicating a lifetime to the development of a technology that would allow you (and eventually thousands of others) to achieve a seemingly impossible dream? Who says you can’t always get what you want?
A few people on Jeff Bezos’s flight had their wishes granted too, especially the most inspiring passenger of all: Wally Funk, the eighty-two-year-old astronaut, who, after decades of persisting through sexist maneuvering in American space programs, showed us that sometimes some of us get to live the dream fifty years later. Forget about the glass ceiling, Wally burst through the glass atmosphere, and Atlantis couldn’t be happier.
We got excited, reader, and we started to ponder the maverick kind of thinking that paves the way for others to see the world from an unprecedented vantage.
On the port side, however, we started to keel over, because we couldn’t ignore the energetic impact, environmentally and culturally speaking, of those brief sallies past the Karman line. We recalled that, at least for now, this transcendent experience – firing oneself sixty miles up to look down at our burning planet for four very expensive minutes – is only available to those who can drop a quarter mill on a space seat without blinking.
We found ourselves imagining a universe of space travel in which we would send civilians, or, say, poets, to get those psyche-altering views of the blue planet and send word back to the groundlings down here cleaning up our oceans, fighting fires, and pursuing radical science.
In our ennui, we recalled the ill-fated Challenger mission, with schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe on board, who died before the shuttle left the atmosphere. We wondered what the world would be like if she had been able to get up there thirty-five years ago. If she had been the first civilian in space, we’d bet that she would not have provoked the same calls for tax reform and wealth redistribution that Bezos, Branson, and this other brat inspired. Now why is that?
Well, it seems to be a question about what kinds of mavericks we want to put at the helm of our space ventures. Do we want these guys? Or some other kind of fearless leader?
What Altantis agrees upon, wholeheartedly, is that we love moonshots, and we loath cynicism. We love the Ernest Shackletons, the Jonas Salks, and the Wright Brothers of this world. We started to think, however, that if we were to create, say, a Shackleton-mometer for true mavericism, that the billionaire astronauts wouldn’t shoot the mercury up very high. We know, we know…Shackleton accomplished his treacherous ventures with the support from wealthy elites, and yay for those men who now have mountain ranges named for them in the austere Antarctic landscape. But those rich men didn’t presume to trek across the tundra themselves, and that’s the point. We know that innovation and courageous exploration is expensive. But something’s up with these billionaires putting themselves in that space…and into space. It seems to be something about how the whole thing was executed. Something about how the space-shot was delivered to the world. Poor PR indeed.
So, what is a maverick? Well, technically, it’s an unbranded calf, which, umm, doesn’t quite fit the bill for this particular space set. But more figuratively, a maverick is a certain kind of individual, a rare minded individual, one who does something great, something truly impactful for all of humanity, because he or she thinks about the world in an unorthodox way.
And just when we were about to sail forth and contemplate unorthodox thinking in the land of space tourism, another kind of thinking pulled us back down to Earth. For there was a deeper question that began to emerge through the ether of cool new science. And, the question caught our attention because it has everything to do with the essence of the “maverick”—it is a reconsideration of individuality.
Now, what is an individual, biologically speaking? The audacious complexity scientists at the Santa Fe Institute would have us examine the question all the way down. In a recent paper in Theory in Biosciences (featured, also, in Quanta), a team of SFI researchers, (which includes SFI President David Krakauer, SFI Professors Jessica Flack, Melanie Mitchell & Chris Kempes, and SFI External Professors Manfred Laubichler & Eric Smith) delves into this biological truth: many biological entities, like ant colonies and slime molds, and megafauna are made up of individual organisms that could not thrive without the group and habitat in which they live. Aggregations of organisms and their habitats often seem to be the more fundamental unit of living things than the discrete organisms themselves.***
Consider the humble spider in her web, for example. It is the web that allows the spider the full expression of her life. It captures her food, it scares predators, it seduces mates, it provides housing, it aids in aeronautic explorations (no, really!) and even serves as an external memory frame for complex computation. There would be no complete Charlotte without a web, and no Wilber either, any more than there would be a complete Ada Lovelace without the Jacquard loom.
In more technical scientific terms, the researchers argue that biology needs a new notion of the individual that accounts for this ecological fact. As they write, “we propose that individuals are aggregates that preserve a measure of temporal integrity, i.e., ‘propagate’ information from their past into their future.” If we look to the way that our living systems propagate information (and themselves) into the future, what exactly do we start to see? Well, we start to see biological entities in a much more comprehensive and dynamic way.
Atlantis ran a theoretical experiment. We sailed way out, beyond the sixty-mile radius that marks the fading path of our recent foray into space tourism and began to look at the whole world as a living system. From that view, we saw those little shots that blasted out of our atmosphere for a brief jaunt off the mortal coil. We saw the waves of smoke, which are starting to look like a great ocean extended across North America. We saw the blue green swirl of forests, grasses, lakes, and oceans. In other words, we saw the whole more-or-less alive, more-or-less persisting system…the most beautiful individual of all: Earth.
And then it struck us, that in these flashes up to space, the camera focused primarily on the billionaires’ faces and not on the face of the planet that they risked their lives to see. If the claim that space tourism will ultimately unite us in the preservation of our planet (because the experience of viewing Earth from space is a transformative one—one that supposedly reminds us that we’re all a part of something much larger than ourselves) why didn’t we terrestrial Earthlings get a sustained view of Earth, too? Yay for you, Richard, but really, what’s up with that? Atlantis could have done without the lovely ladies bouncing around in zero gravity while the camera’s locked squarely upon your smiling face. Like it or not, you’re not Mick Jagger, and this isn’t a Rock & Roll music video. This was supposed to be a revolutionary feat for the benefit of all mankind.
The true mavericks, we realized, much like the true biological individuals, are the living entities that imitate the generative power of the great globe itself, which, it turns out has not dissolved just yet, and may be far more resilient than any cynic would acknowledge. True mavericks understand that their individuality comprises an ecosystem, which is to say correctly. At least that is our hope, reader. So we decided that we need a new mission to seek out those maverick individuals, human or otherwise, who persist in holding life systems together amidst the exhaust of the false mavericks’ blustering attempts. We shall hoist our jolly roger anew and set sail in search of other grand unifying pursuits.
***David Krakauer and Chris Kempes go on to suggest that such a conception of individuality might also point to a new framework for seeking out Life’s Origins.
Tune in next time when ATLANTIS contemplates the price tag for manipulating history…