Ep 002: Kate Greene
…begin transmission…
Caitlin McShea: Hi Kate, how are you?
Kate Greene: I'm good. How are you?
CM: I'm good. I'm living in 2020 as you are.
KG: Yeah, so “good” is maybe more relative than ever.
CM: I was thinking about how 2020 makes me, and I think most everyone else, a perfect audience for your essays because it's like the closest thing to a Mars simulation that any ordinary American is going to experience.
KG: Yes, it was really strange to reread some of them and recognize how similar an experience it was to, especially in my early days. Last spring, just knowing that so many of us were going to be holed up and not really able to go outside without wearing protective equipment, was a very strange kind of Deja vu that I never could have anticipated.
CM: But as a result, now you have an audience that can (at least in some immediate way) relate, which you might not have had in 2019.
KG: Yes, it was completely unexpected.
CM: So, let me take a moment to introduce the interview episode and yourself. This is Alien Crash Site. It is a new interview series from the InterPlanetary Project at the Santa Fe Institute. My name is Caitlin McShea, I'm your hostess. With me today is Kate Greene, who among being kind of a Martian proxy is a science journalist, a scientist come essayist/poet who just published a beautiful book of essays called Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars, and she did!
I should also say for our InterPlanetary audience that Kate was on our InterPlanetary steering committee. She had a hand in directing how the Santa Fe Institute would approach the InterPlanetary Project and participated in our very first panel in 2017. I will link that below. Kate also participated in our very first festival in 2018 on a panel about Autonomous Ecosystems.
Kate, how have you been since we last saw each other in 2018?
KG: Mm, well, a lot's happened: the book came out, there's a global pandemic and a political situation that feels somewhat unstable in this country and elsewhere. I guess I'm just in all of that, too. I'm doing my best to hold on to what I can and keep relationships strong. I think that's important, and just trying to see what happens next, honestly.
CM: We're all kind of stewing in it and for a while InterPlanetary, and this podcast interview series, is based obviously in science fiction and those literary touchstones. But it feels kind of like “pre-dystopia right now, so I'm a little worried about what's to come, but I choose to be optimistic.
KG: It's so rare that the dystopias are so distributed, as it is today. I would say it's almost more evenly distributed than ever in most of our lifetimes. Usually dystopias crop up in pockets depending on where you are, who you are and depending on what sort of experiences you've had in the world, then you can truly experience a real dystopia. But now I think it's a little bit more of the conversation. That said, if you look around and pay a little bit of attention, you can tell that it's not as bad for many people. So that's really an interesting thing. I've just been thinking a lot about the distribution of technologies and then also the distributions of experiences in terms of utopia or dystopia.
CM: Unfortunately, though, it seems the disproportionate way with which certain populations are experiencing the dystopia, today mirror how that's always seemed to be the case, or always was predicted to be the case. It's not surprising, but it’s still totally disappointing. So, would you mind giving our audience a kind of brief spiel on what it was like to be a Martian for a few months?
KG: Okay, to be a Martian for a few months? Back in 2013, I saw a call on an NPR article I was reading online for would-be astronauts. Essentially, pretend astronauts participate in a simulated Mars mission for four months funded by NASA. It seemed like a wonderful opportunity because I had always wanted to be an astronaut as a kid. I was a science writer at the time, and feeling pretty much like the astronaut dream wasn't going to be realized, though I had gone through school, gearing my educational track toward it, getting degrees in chemistry and physics. I then went into science writing and NASA isn't really looking for science writers to send to space so here was this opportunity where potentially, I could qualify for this and as it turns out, I did!
I packed my bags and in April 2013, I moved to a geodesic dome on the side of Volcano called Mauna Loa. There were 6 of us in the crew total, at 8,000 feet and together we donated our collected psychological, sociological and physical data to NASA, to potentially build a better mission to Mars. As you know, researchers are really interested in what sort of situations cause strife amongst individuals in the team. Our collected data can help them prepare for the true challenge of sending a crew of people further from Earth than anyone's ever been on a mission that would be more than two years, and with communication delays – complete isolation, like not even being able to call home to have a real-time phone conversation– it would be so extreme. So that's the sort of stuff that NASA wants to know about. How those conditions affect people.
CM: From what I gathered, both from your participation in the InterPlanetary Festival in 2018 and in the start of this essay collection, is there seems to be a lot of focus on how food might psychologically prepare this crew to succeed as best as possible for this very long duration mission to another planet. So, you guys were kind of doing some interesting experiments with recipes, prepared versus not-so-prepared foods. Is that right?
KG: Oh, absolutely. So often when we think about space exploration, we think of the operational environment, the systems, the engineered systems. But when you put people in an operational environment that creates all sorts of different challenges, how do people behave? How do they interact with each other and what do they need? Well, we have human bodies, we need to eat. So, space food is actually also a system that engineers need to consider. But instead of thinking about the control panel, or the way the seat is molded to your back, this was about what sort of features of the food do you need to consider? I mean, obviously you think about tastes and texture, but what about the psycho and sociological factors that food can bring up in a gender and a crew? Kim Binsted and Jean Hunter who are the PIs on the HI SEAS project wanted to look at how food affected crew cohesion. They had some hunches that it was pretty important and maybe there should be some concessions made so that a crew could potentially cook meals together. This is something that's unheard of because on the ISS you have just “add-water-and-heat” pouch meals, and sometimes you get Shrimp cocktail.
CM: Mmmm…sounds good!
KG: It's actually delicious according to astronauts, they love it because it comes with a horseradish sauce that is spicy and clears their sinuses. But, like, what is it to be able to cook novel meals or celebratory meals? That's a really important idea when you're so far away from home, to be able to share some recipes from where you came from and bringing those to Mars. Those were the sort of questions that Kim Binsted and Jean Hunter were asking with this very first HI-SEAS mission. What that meant practically was: we had meals that we ate, like astronauts do just “add-water-and-heat.” These are actually backpacking foods that we use, so you would add water to a canister of macaroni and cheese that you might take on a long backpacking trip. That's one example. But then on other days we were able to prepare our own novel cuisine. So, spam musubi, or beef tajine, or bake a cake from scratch, or have pizza from scratch. We could do all of these things because we were cooking with shelf stable ingredients, these are foods that require less packaging. All the water is sucked out of it, and you just rehydrate it and mix it all together. So, you land on Mars, you have gravity and it's a little bit like Earth…can you can cook again? You wouldn't want to do this on the way to Mars because of the lack of gravity problem, but once you land you might want to celebrate with a cake or some tacos. I mean, the idea is that it's a completely novel question. It was really exciting that this is what launched this five-year HI SEAS project to study human factors, and isolation for long duration space exploration.
CM: And, so did your stint in 2013. If the HI SEAS mission is taking this and exploring it through five years, and we’re here in 2020, might we already know the results if they've been evaluated from 2018 say? Are there any conclusions? How does payload have any kind of impact on which shelf stable ingredients you do get to take, like our cake ingredients? Did they make the cut?
CM: Right! So, there are no hard conclusions from the food study quite yet because it's an absolute trade-off of resources and time. And as you mentioned, the payload question. Frankly, any mission to Mars right now is truly hypothetical. Getting down to the nitty-gritty of, “can we deal with dehydrated broccoli instead of like some regular meal that an astronaut might already eat?” That's the sort of question that is actually a little bit further into the future. But the idea of it, thinking that maybe there should be some concessions for being able to create novel foods and respecting the power of gathering around a table – the proverbial hearth and allowing astronauts to have some creativity in their culinary experience – I think like those raising those questions, it's something that now people are thinking about a lot more seriously.
CM: I think that's truly a human consideration. I've never been the courageous space type. I'll let someone else explore space for the sake of this Earth, for which I am very much a citizen. I'm very much Earth bound and hoping to preserve it for as long as possible. But something that I take as like a creature comfort, and I'm very privileged in this capacity, is eating. Eating is a luxury and something that I truly enjoy. Cooking is something that I spend a lot of time doing, more so now that I can't enjoy the luxury of going to a variety of places that mean something to me in terms of taste and experience. So it was for me, in the 2018 panel, you discussed how important it turns out cake might be for ceremony, whether certain tests had just been concluded or for birthdays, or when someone was down… just the idea of a celebratory collaborative sharing of a meal seems to do a lot of good for this crew. In the essay that you wrote in this book, I think it's the first one, “On Gastronomy,” there's also something about a ritualized individualism that food provides. I thought that was a really novel thing to explore. You're already in isolation in the simulation, but in isolation with five others, and yet you still need like “iso-isolation” and food was a method for you to explore that.
KG: Right! Isolation is a tricky thing and especially in an exploration context. Generally, most people don't go on solo expeditions, although you can, but in our case in any space expedition you're not going to go solo. What that means is you're isolated from the world, but you are in closer contact with the people that you're traveling with then you've probably ever been with any other people in your life. So, you're in the size of a small van traveling to Mars with three to five other people.
And I think it might be a crew of four that might make the most sense starting out. But that is for eight months. There are no road stops, and no pit stops.
CM: Ah…
KG: I think that you're going to want to try to find some alone time. For me, I really enjoyed Sunday mornings. We ate every meal together. We did a lot of things together. We were in each other's space all the time. We had our own bedrooms about the size of a walk-in closet, and that was a great place to be, but there was some concern that people would self-isolate to the detriment of the crew. If you're always in your room, that's a bad thing because then crew cohesion can really fall apart. So, people were kind of aware of that. We wanted to look out and make sure that we kept to the same sleep schedule. We kept to the same meal schedule. But what that meant was we were around each other a lot. But on Sundays, when the first thing we had to do together as a crew that day was dinner that night, we actually had the full day to ourselves.
That's when I discovered that I really loved waking up, and it wasn't even early, but for some reason I was one of the only one who ever came down to the kitchen. I would sit there and eat an omelette that I had made with powdered eggs, and drink some Earl Gray tea. I have to tell you; those were some delicious meals. I remember those meals extremely fondly, and this sort of calm in me and the crew and the mission.
I would sit there and look out our single porthole window and look at the red rocks out there and think, is this Mars?
CM: Yes! What a fitting setting too. I would imagine that if it weren't there, they would just kind of plaster over the window with an image to sort of simulate the alien landscape. Ok, you say they're delicious, I'm skeptical, RE: powdered eggs.
KG: I also wrote a piece about this for a book called All About Eggs that was published by the magazine,Lucky Peach. I really go into detail about how this company, Ova Easy, makes the powder and it's a very specialized process. Most egg powder is made by a flash dehydrating in large vats and what happens is they use heat to do that and it denatures the proteins and eggs. So, when you reconstitute it , it doesn't taste, right. It's kind of crumbly and the flavor isn't there, but this brand, Ova Easy, I highly recommend because they do a sort of small batch, slow dehydration process where the egg liquid is scrambled. Then the liquid is spread out very thinly over this conveyor belt. Then it goes through this long oven. It takes forever to dehydrate, but when it comes out the other end it's a very fine crystalline powder that reconstitutes so beautifully. I don't mean to be a commercial for them, but those eggs made a huge difference to me because I love eggs. I was so happy that this powdered egg, this like space egg option, was as delicious as it was.
CM: And that “Ova Easy,” is it available to like earth civilians?
KG: Yeah. I mean, you can get it at REI, or order it online.
CM: Ok, I will link it below. I mean, I definitely want to try it. It's funny, this book came to me at a perfect time, for reasons I won't get into. But my husband and I had been in a big Elizabeth David phase, and of course her compendium is Omelette and a Glass of Wine. We've been eating a lot omelettes in the evening, because there's something that's very luxuriant and rich about them, but they're also somewhat simple to produce, and you can be very flexible with the ingredients that you introduce. I imagine you didn't get to enjoy a glass of wine with yours, just the Earl Gray, but I literally had an omelette the night that I began reading this book. I was like, “ah!” So, it was perfect.
KG: Totally. I love that. I love that.
CM: It makes me a little more comfortable with the idea of traveling for such a long duration. Another thing I wanted to talk to you about is how your experience simulating Mars may have changed your perspective on space writ large. There's a fabulous essay in here, I think it's called “Dreams of Mars, Dreams of Moon.” Where basically, if I'm going to put it bluntly, Mars was not your jam. Mars was not the planet for you.
KG: Yeah, well, growing up it didn't necessarily have the allure that it does for a lot of people now. I like it now, but I kind of had to catch up. When I was a kid, I mean, I just really liked Jupiter a lot. You know I thought that the moons of Jupiter were so amazing and to have that planet in your sky, and the sun, that just seems so alien. You know, there's something about Mars that seems like you can go to an Earth desert and you're kind of on Mars, but there's the sky on a moon of Jupiter, I think it would just be such a trip.
So anyway, my kid imagination took me more to Jupiter. Although that radiation field is impossible, so practically speaking, that's not so easy. I had some catching up to do. A lot of people love Mars and I came to definitely appreciate it. I've been asked the question, “Would you go to Mars?” and it's kind of a moot point. NASA doesn't choose from so-called analog astronauts. People who have done these simulated missions, NASA doesn't choose from that pool for their astronaut candidates. It's just not something that would happen. But if I had my choice, I would actually love a mission to the Moon, just because of the timing of it. Two weeks away seems about right. I really do think that a longer than two-year mission to Mars would be very harrowing. I think it's not an easy thing to do at all for sure. Also the psychological element does seem like a pretty big challenge and it would take not just special individuals, but a very special crew because you have an emergent personality that comes when you put people together in a situation like that, and that's something that clearly NASA would account for during the selection and the training.
I just imagine it's like roughly a two-and-a-half-year mission, but you're going to be working with these people for probably years in advance of the mission, simulating all sorts of elements of the mission unit, mostly practical engineering things. It’s not just being together with these people for two-and-a-half years, it's more like being so tightly bound to these people for four or five years. That's an incredible commitment. And, I think that Mars still seems pretty far away to me, I have to say.
CM: I mean, that's fair. I think we kind of keep our eyes returned to the Moon anyway because there's this wonderful thought to reprise that trip. It seems like a good first step on the way to Mars, and it's so proximal. It's right there! In the grand scheme of things, a lovely day trip, I think.
I'm surprised to hear you say that NASA doesn't choose from their kind of proxy astronauts or their simulators. Is that by policy or has that just historically been the case, because it seems to me if a crew perfectly succeeded or maybe there was one stellar individual in that crew, it would mitigate a little bit of risk to select them? I don't know. It's just a surprising thing to hear.
KG: Yeah. Well, I think that NASA is using some of the data that HI-SEAS has produced in terms of crew selection to fine tune their own astronaut selection criteria. What sort of personalities to watch out for, which might be detrimental on a long mission, etc. But in terms of selecting from the HI-SEAS population that just hasn't happened. I guess there are other simulations that NASA does and sometimes astronauts do those but they've already been selected.
And there's a chance that there have been astronauts selected who have done some of those, like there's a simulation called HERA and there's a simulation called NEMO, so they're these like standing simulations and it's very possible that those are people who have been selected but because the selection of the HI-SEAS crew members were kind of outside of the NASA selection process. I just don't think that it's a pathway to being an astronaut.
CM: Right! It seems from the description that your crew was quite cognitively diverse and capable of collaboratively tackling all of these requirements for the study. It seems like you were almost Captain's Log. You were kind of keeping track of all of the happenings, including your sleep schedule and perhaps how food impacted that. And then you read about how all of your other colleagues contributed in various ways. It was kind of like a perfectly puzzle-pieced, six-party team, but it doesn't seem necessarily that that will be exactly replicated in…whatever mission. Apparently, you say a four-person crew, it looks like.
KG: Yeah, it could be, it could be a four-person crew. So, the interesting thing about our crew was that we're the first ones to do this project, so we had this big incentive to do it right. Also, when we got in there, there wasn't a ton of training ahead of time. We had a big incentive to behave well to do our best because this was the first mission and we didn't want it to be the last one. So, we were motivated, I think a lot for our conscientiousness in that regard. We were nominally kicking the tires of this whole project trying to figure out what was going to work and what wasn't and report back and let them know what could be done better in the future. So, we had a lot of jobs to do not just the surveys and the studies that we were conducting and the outside researchers were conducting on us but we're also trying to make sure that the entire project could fly.
CM: For the sake of the future of the next four years of the mission…no pressure!
KG: Yeah, just do your best.
CM: So, I guess this is a pre-counterfactual, but this mission rested in what could actually “be” for a Mars mission from Earth, realistically, right? I don't know if this is too far a jump into the fictional aspect that this podcast kind of occupies, but I know that there were some crew members who would don the suits, and exit and collect specimens and bring them back. Was there any element of your time in this simulation that considered the possibility of like discovering life on Mars?
KG: Okay, hold on. Let me think about that for a second. One of the cool things that some of my crew members did that I didn't do was a very exciting expedition to one of the vents in the volcano that was nearby, and to lower down a camera into that vent. So, imagine one person on one side of the caldera; another person on the other side with a rope in between them and a camera in the middle being lowered down, recording as you go lower and lower, and seeing that vegetation shows up. You're actually seeing this dry rocky landscape sort of transition into some kind of rainforest, where there are ferns down there. It just makes you think about what is actually going on in the caves of Mars. Subsurface Martian activity is very real in terms of the lakes that were just discovered. We have a lot of potential for some pretty exciting discoveries on Mars when it comes to life. I think that if you go a little bit deeper than the surface of Mars, you're going to find some pretty cool stuff. And so, we were simulating that in a way by lowering this camera down into this volcano and just seeing that the ecosystem completely changes. Here was this lush verdant part of the world that wasn't accessible to us here on the rocky surface…
CM: …buried inside of this explosive, dangerous and complete dreadful mountain. Yeah.
KG: I mean, you get different gases, you get a completely different temperature environment. Everything's different down there so why wouldn't that be similar on Mars?
CM: That's wild. That's so cool. Yeah, I guess so I asked you on because you are an odd and specific and wonderful interlocutor for this because I think everyone else hasn't had the experience of going to Mars when attempting to answer this question. Which is essentially like something from Mars or elsewhere coming to us. Although there was that great story about how one of your crew members shaved and for a moment you didn't recognize him. It was like an alien invasion.
KG: Excuse me, what are you doing here, stranger?
CM: Seriously! You're like locked in this pod, so that's maybe a little similar. I think it would be interesting to see what the inverse opinion from Kate Greene might be as we kind of get into the Alien Crash Site question.Oh, but before we do, may I read a small passage from one of your essays? Because it's a perfect segue, and I think you know why.
KG: Sure.
CM: This is from “On Correspondence.” It begins with a recounting of Shannon Lucid’s collection of books that she took up to the MERS, and then further on you say; “Like Lucid, I also bought a box of books, titles included but were not limited to, Alfred Lansing's, Endurance, Mark Jarman's poetry collection, Bone Fires,Alison Bechtel's graphic novel, Are You My Mother? And that stack of old New Yorkers. I didn't know what I'd be in the mood for and when I found it mostly wasn't anything from the box I bought eBooks to read on my phone, like the Sci-Fi classic Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.” Yes, Kate! Perfect!
This whole premise is stolen from Roadside Picnic and as you said early, “There aren’t pit stops to Mars,” well maybe there might be. So, the idea I think is to consider that we live in this post-visitation world, and…
…at the risk of all of the physical dangers that become of the Stalkers like imprisonment or even death, what object might you risk your life for in an effort to uncover in the Zone, recover from the Zone, maybe decrypt and utilize…that's the basic premise?
…you are a third person to answer this question. So, I should probably let you know what others have said.
KG: Yeah, I am curious to know how other people approach this question. Because it's an excellent premise. I love the idea that, of course whoever visits earth will have a lot figured out that we don't yet have figured out. And of course, it can't just be an easy grab. It can't just be an easy technology transfer.
CM: Right? Exactly. We don't have the universal dongle.
KG: It has to be some sort of adventure to retrieve it with some amount of danger which makes it worth so much. What would other people say?
CM: (So our very first episode was with David, and this of course is his premise. It's so very David Krakauer. He came up with the AADQ, which stands for the Antikythera, Aleph, Dynamic Quasi Crystal. So now I'm going to do my best to try to explain all of that. And this was good, because it gave a good kind of pathway into exploring how people might answer this question.
The Aleph comes from a Borges short story called The Aleph. And the aleph essentially is owned by this mediocre poet who writes these fabulous explorations of cultures from all over the world, and expertly so. As you're reading them, you recognize that there's a truth in them, but this particular person, the protagonist, can't understand how this totally mediocre poet succeeds in that endeavor. But he discovers that in his basement, he possesses this thing called an aleph which is essentially a lens that has access to every point in space. So, this poet is kind of cheating by observing every point in space when he writes. That's one device. The Antikythera mechanism was this really rusted up old thing that was uncovered in the 18th century from the sea. It's got gears and is almost like a pre-astrolabe. It clearly does a lot of navigational calculation but it's completely unknown how that was made, at least by the western finders at the time that it was dated, which was like 200 AD. So, this is kind of like a “how did they have the intelligence to do that then when we barely have the capacity to understand it now” device, and that speaks to this disconnect between the species that leaves an item behind and the species that discovers it. And then he said Dynamic Quasicrystal, because he liked the idea of this object being materially unrecognizable. It kind of takes on this very strange shape that can't be easily and immediately understood by its finder and is capable of doing processes that we couldn't recognize, so therefore it’s a bit of a puzzle. I'm not sure that the AADQ actually serves a function, but to David it's this really delicious alien puzzle that he would hope to resolve almost like a Rubik's cube and in so doing, perhaps some fabulous resolution would emerge that you could share with humanity. For him, it's this gorgeous, unknown, mysterious puzzle, the AADQ. So that was David's answer.
Then we interviewed Ashton. He is a two-time gold medalist in the decathlon at the Olympics. And he was in the Living in Space panel in the 2018 Interplanetary Festival. He's a great guy and he picked something that I was so reminded of reading your essays. It's called the Ansible. It has an appearance in Ursula Le Guin’s book, Rocannon’s World. The Ansible is a play on the word “answerable.” And there's something about this device that allows for the complete collapse of time in communication. So, if someone on Jupiter needed to send a communique to someone on earth, they wouldn't have to wait the distance that light or sound travels, it's instant dynamic communication. And so, I was thinking about you because of the “On Correspondence” essay, and this feeling of isolation being rooted mostly to the lack of capacity to communicate immediately. So that was his answer, the Ansible.
KG: Yeah, that 40-minute delay. That's great. Good to know that what I was thinking hasn't been touched on. I need to preface that my Sci-Fi background is not extensive. If you read extensively enough in Sci-Fi, anything that I'm going to say, anything that anyone says, has already been devised by some genius Sci-Fi writer. I’m interested in something like a universal communicator and obviously this exists on like Star Trek and any number of sci-fi shows. Instead of a simple language communicator that just translates back and forth, it has the ability to instantly provide emotional context.
So, it's almost like an empathy transference. It's like a point to point, one-on-one empathy transfer and that allows you to instantly understand exactly the experience of where this person is coming from, what they're saying, how they're behaving and then they can do that for you, too. I thought it would be nice if this was always on. That we all had this all the time but I think that's too many channels and might produce too much noise and overwhelm the system. It really should be a universal communicator.
That just one-on-one way allows for this, and it can be turned off and turned on, but its default setting is on so you don't necessarily need to always have yourself exposed. Presumably, if you're living in a world where this is a device that is evenly distributed, that everyone's aware of, then it can do something to allow for an understanding of where people are coming from at all times.
CM: Okay, so I think that's actually something that would be very helpful now, especially in the land of 2020, zooming and textual communications. How often I've sent what I thought was an innocuous message to someone and was completely misunderstood, and how much goes missing in transmission. I think that's huge. Do you think that it would extend beyond humanity or is it something that only we would employ? Like if whatever this device is was left behind by a more sophisticated species, perhaps you found it and the Institute decrypted it and could utilize it, it seems like it would do a lot of good for humanity, which is kind of the purpose of this task. But I wonder if it might grant us connection to whatever that littering species was.
KG: Oh, absolutely. I think that that's such an excellent point. Because it does feel like this is something that's maybe lacking in humanity at the present moment, a lack of trust, lack of understanding. I think that is something that's been lacking for a very long time, a lack of trust, and lack of understanding for non-human species on this planet. So like of course, aliens. If you have alien visitors, this would be a way to communicate with them, but also a way to empathize and to not fear the differences so much. But getting back to Earthlings, I do think that in the past few years, we've just seen so many books about trees; so to be able to understand a tree, its perspective, to be able to understand the perspective of blue whales, to be able to understand the perspective of mosquitoes or the fly that gets stuck in your apartment…
CM: Wait, can you hear that? That’s so funny.
KG: No, I didn’t know.
CM: There is literally a fly buzzing around, but good!
KG: That’s great. No. I’ve had a friendly fly in my apartment for like a day. Like, “Hey, man, I can help you out. Let me show you the way.”
But, yea. I guess this is a pretty non-technological, not so complicated description, but just like more of a humanitarian and Earthling-centric technology. I really would like to know even what we think of as inanimate objects. I think about what is emergent intelligence and consciousness? And so, we have the emergent intelligence of a swarm of bees or a swarm of anything, there's the murmuration, is there something instead of just an individual communicating with a bird in a murmuration, to communicate with whatever the emergent experience of that would be pretty cool. In terms of consciousness too, computer simulations show that even inanimate objects start to be given certain conditions, start to behave in a way that exhibits a sort of consciousness, like a goal setting or like motivated behavioral activity. And so, I just wonder what would it be like to communicate with a consciousness of something like a set of waves crashing against the ocean? You know, what would that do to the way that human beings have exploited this planet so much? So, I think of it in terms of objective, and then just wondering what it could enable when we saw things a little differently. But do we need a technology to do that? I don't know.
CM: I mean, I think we might. Certainly, this idea of diverse forms of intelligence is something that has been researched a lot at SFI. And I'll admit completely before I was this proximal to that research, I kind of subconsciously existed in this anthropomorphic notion of comparative intelligence. “We are dominating this planet; therefore we have dominant intelligence,” as though like our logos was the most explicit expression of what intelligence can be. But then you learn about swarming and collectives or distributed neuro systems like in cephalopods, or you read Richard Powers’s book about connected, the kind of mycelial structure of trees. It's so easy to continue this almost colonial, Baconian takeover if you don't recognize otherness as equitable, as equal. Scientists who study this can scream at the public “there's intelligence everywhere, you just don't recognize it.” That might not work as well as this lovely little device that is default “on.” And suddenly, in proximity to another animate or inanimate object, I can recognize some wonderful, formerly invisible thing about them. I think that's beautiful. And I think it would cause us to be a little more peaceful in all of our endeavors.
KG: Yeah. I would hope so. Or just like more of a collective, because it would reveal the collective nature of everything.
CM: So, you said that it could be turned off and I guess maybe that's because between humans and domesticated species, there's like a little nuance, like a little level of separation that you might want to maintain. But I guess I want to push that a bit. I wonder why, I wonder if it can be turned off, if it's at risk of being weaponized somehow. I don't know. But why wouldn't you want this communion always?
KG: I think that the idea of weaponization is always on. But it's true thinking about it in terms of like two modes, when you have multiple modes, there's a risk of exploitation. Maybe more than if it's a single mode. Is that true? Just thinking about it now, that there should be an option to not use it as well, mostly coming from the idea that isn't relevant if it's always on, but the idea of autonomy and the ability to choose for oneself. What one wants to experience or what one wants to have, what one wants to experience from you. If this is less a device and more like an overarching reality, then it wouldn't make sense to turn it on and off because the idea of autonomy wouldn't exist, but in a world where autonomy does exist, I think it does need to have some allowance for people to not have themselves accessed or to not access others in that way. And when I say people, I mean everyone.
CM: Right. No, I understood. You would hope that the agency was mutual in this overarching system.
KG: Well, the problem I think when you have a toggle is the distribution problem, again, because then who has access to it being on? Who has access to it being off? Who can choose? That will always be a question. So, there are just so many very complicated questions around it. I would hate to have a device that everyone had access to, but it was like mandated that it be used in a particular way. That really bothers me, but that is coming from a perspective where autonomy reigns supreme and that's where we all are right now. A more collective mentality is not as easy to find here, in the Western world in particular. It would be interesting to see how it would be used by different groups of people, different cultures in the world, too. That would be so very interesting. I almost think about like how healthcare has emerged throughout the world and its very strange ways. How the US has this really terrible healthcare system that emerged from the last century, with the idea that it was tied to your employment and your employers took over part of that, whereas it could have been otherwise. There are just a few things that led us down this path and it's led to this healthcare industry that along the way has been incentivized to be a health insurance business, and not actually motivated by caring for people's health. Whereas you think of the way that health systems have developed in Canada, the UK, Europe or South America, everyone's kind of doing their own thing differently. Like, here's a system of caring for people's health, and it's evolved in a particular way. I do think about what if this object lands in various cultures? How it evolves, and its usefulness within those cultures is kind of an open question and would be an interesting thing to track.
CM: It might be like, let's say the Zone for instance was in the United States and Kate unearthed this object that achieves this manifestation of a kind of mutual consciousness. And that news travels and some culture elsewhere captures this device, but nothing really changes for them because they were already so much more engaged in that notion that for them it’s like “Oh, what a bummer” or “We were here already.” There could be a cultural divide between its utility because some people might already not need it.
KG: Yeah, exactly. And some people might reject the idea of a device needing to do that anyway. I mean, it would be argued that there are chemical substances that allow for this in particular ways now so recognize the connectedness. Why does it have to be a device?
CM: It doesn’t have to be a device, it could be an object. I think it’s our task to try to figure out how this thing, this capacity, would be embodied in an object. But as you said, it could be an organic chemical compound that when consumed, succeeds in providing this insight. That’s interesting to imagine.
KG: It could be a plant that could be grown and propagated and harvested. And that's the thing that allows it to like a shared dose.
CM: Right. So that's interesting, to think about a botanical throw away from some sophisticated alien species, because of course I've so far imagined, based on the framework of Roadside Picnic, odd little metal things that don't seem familiar. Again, this goes back to the question, “What do I consider to be life?” “What do scientists consider to be life?” Perhaps this living botanical thing that produces these minerals doesn't look like a plant, but is one from its place of origin. I don't know. I liked the idea of you accidentally unearthing something alive that succeeds and propogates here.
KG: Well, I mean, that gets to the challenge of distribution, as well. So, a single object could be a thing that could be propagated, which would be pretty exciting.
CM: Yeah, totally. Especially if it's self-replicating! Already that resolves a huge problem. In the last interview with Ashton, in terms of discovering this Ansible, you're already struck with a problem if you want to learn more about this thing, because we have to risk destroying it in an effort to open it up, with the greater intent of reverse engineering it for mass distribution. The moment you remove the “objectness” from it, or presume that it might be – it seems like it should be – a replicating something or other, then this issue about distribution is resolved. So that's pretty clever.
KG: Yeah. Huh? I don't know. It doesn't have a name though.
CM: Oh, we have to name it. We have to attempt that. We can blubber on for 40 minutes, and then I'll just fast forward through until we get to the name.
KG: EROS?
CM: Let's do it. Yeah, exactly. We can do like the policy thing where it's just like the “Friendship Law” but then like you fill all the letters in: Financial Restoration Initiative for Employment, and so on.
KG: So, Empathy. Rendering, Object.
CM: “Object” plural. Little “s”
KG: Okay. So, E-Empathy. R-Rendering. O-Object, plural. E.R.O.S..
CM: Well if that's the name, and it can self-replicate, it seems only natural it would spread pretty quickly. Haha. That's good. EROS. Hmm. It's funny, too, because it's got this kind of fiery connotation, but if utilized for good then, hey, it's like the conflagration of consciousness. That's great! See that was quick. I knew you had it in you.
KG: Yeah. It's something. I don't know. I don't know if that's the right. I might have to go through committees.
CM: That's true. There are a lot of layers before it's named. Like, so for instance, if you uncover this thing, you know it will have gone through 900 meetings at the Institute of Extraterrestrial Culture before it’s named E.R.O.S., But E.R.O.S. might be right.
KG: I appreciate your confidence.
CM: I was thinking when you came in 2017, and again, we just exploited your experience in HI-SEAS, like “Tell us all about it,” there was a journalist there, Eric Mack from CNET who just completely zoomed in on the moment when you almost didn't have toilet paper for a bit. So, I was like, “Is this object going to be like an infinite toilet paper roll?”
CM: That's so funny. That was true. Yeah. The quote, “definitely have as much toilet paper as you possibly can.” And that's like 2020 all the way, with the run on toilet paper. I thought about that and the huge stacks of toilet paper and paper towels that we had in the side of the dome and how comforting it was to see that. On the very first night of the mission I looked and I was just like, “You know what? We are set. I don't have to run out to CVS and get any toilet paper for the next four months. This is amazing.” And then when stuff was going down in March, April, May of 2020, I was just thinking about that toilet paper a lot. Yeah, that's a system that you want to make sure you have some redundancy, and your food.
CM: It's just so wild for me to imagine you measuring time from the quantity and inventory that's in the little pod. Just to know what four months looks like in the unit of toilet paper rolls.
CM: That's such a great point, to know what four months looks like. And we saw that in microwavable bacon, because that was shelf stable bacon, so like boxes and boxes. We saw that in coffee, we saw that in Mayonnaise. I mean, all sorts of things. Like what does four months for six people look like in toilet paper and bacon? It's a really strange visual. There's this great picture in Time Magazine of all the food that we had for those four months spread out and a bunch of us are sitting around and we're doing the inventory, but we're just surrounded by all of our food for four months. It's not something you see every day.
CM: Ooh, I’ll share that photo here for our audience. You also, in 2017 sent me a kind of schematic image of what the pod would look like, and where it was. Do you mind if I share that with the audience? I wasn't sure if they were available freely, so I didn't want to assume.
KG: Yeah.
CM: I think if you think about the toilet paper, especially since, I mean, I guess you had your Sunday routine, everyone did, if you all shared dinner together, but it seems like it's almost a reverse advent calendar. Instead of opening things and finding candy closer to the end, it's like, “Oh, we're getting close.” Like maybe desperation, like, “Oh no, there's only two rolls left, I guess we’re near the end!”
KG: You know, we never came close to running out of toilet paper. For that, we can thank Kim, because she was an over-preparer in that regard. And I felt lucky that we weren't worried about that. I really felt like I knew the mission was coming to an end when we ran out of chocolate powder for chocolate milk. I hadn't been drinking it a lot. I was kind of like saving it up for, I don't know what, but it was a shared, communal food. So, I also wasn't keeping track of how much was there and then like about three weeks before the end of the mission, I went to get some chocolate milk after I'd done a run on the treadmill and there was just a dusting of chocolate powder at the bottom. I was furious! I was so mad! It really broke me that moment. I knew who ate all of the chocolate. I knew because I had watched him dump it into his coffee every morning, multiple scoops. I confronted him and he seemed to not really be bothered by my confrontation and then I was like, “Well, what's the point? What can we do? I guess let's just have to wait three weeks, and then I'll have some chocolate.”
CM: So, for our mystery solvers out there, if you purchase this book of essays, you can learn more about the other crewmates and you can try to deduce who the chocolate powder thief was. That's great! Well, maybe not. What would you say was the most coveted item on the mission? Food stuffs, I mean?
KG: It didn't seem like an obvious thing, but there was a Nutella incident that was reported. And then I had my chocolate powder situation. So, there was really something to it. You know, we all had snack boxes. There were cookies and sweets and candies and popcorn, but also like dried fruits and nuts and all sorts of things in these snack boxes. And we all interacted differently with our snack boxes, which is so interesting to me. This is just another way that food is playing an unsung role in the social dynamics.
So, for instance, I was more of a hoarder. I barely touched my snack box, because I was just like, “I don't know, I might really want it more someday than I want it right now, So I'm not gonna dive in.” There was a crewmate who just had the snack box open sitting next to his chair at the computer, and like all day was eating everything from it. Within a few weeks, everything was gone. It was just wrappers. And then like at a certain point it was used for bartering. I'll give you these snacks, that sort of thing.
CM: Like prison!
KG: So, it created its own economy. It makes sense if you read about Shackleton's crew, because there were a lot of people doing that. You'd have people who would just squirrel away pieces of cheese in their cuffs, the cuffs of their sleeve. Or you had like the sugar cubes that everyone would like pool at the end of the week. So, you could have a lot of sugar, you wouldn't take all of your ration so that at the end of the week, there's a chance that you might get more. I mean, it's just really interesting what happens with food in these isolated environments. And I think a lot of people are seeing that now in 2020, I mean think about the way that people are cooking new meals for the first time, baking for the first time. I know I'm just rambling right now, but yeah, the King Arthur Flour company; there's this great article that I came across saying that they had to completely revamp their manufacturing and distribution facilities because there were no longer large bakeries that were taking the huge bags of flour. Instead people, like individual people, were buying more and more.
So if you went to the grocery store and you saw really strange looking bags of flour, like a month into the pandemic when things started to get more stocked up, that was because they were, on the fly, trying to figure out how to take these huge bags of flour and convert it into one pound or two pound bags of flour. And then the other thing that they were doing operationally, which was so interesting to me, was that a lot of the folks who had been working on a lot of the production lines were sent to deal with callers, customer service. And so, there was a lot of on the fly training to get these people up to speed on how to deal with customers who are calling because they are first time bakers. People who had no idea that they even needed to use yeast were calling to make their first loaf of bread. And so, there were so many customer service people from King Arthur that were like walking people through their first loaves of bread. And I think that's really sweet, actually. And it's an interesting story of baking for comfort, baking for community. But then seeing on the operational side of things, how that organization, which had been so finely tuned to lean operations had to suddenly adjust and almost put more of its effort into a community facing role, as opposed to something that's more mechanical. So, it became more organic in the process of the pandemic.
CM: Like you say ,for a moment in like pre-COVID systems, King Arthur had succeeded at a very streamlined, optimal, and kind of hands-off approach, because they were making large quantities sold to experts and therefore, they never had explain, and they never had to worry about “chunking” the flour in the right way. But now everything's changed. And so, this kind of customer service story seems a little like an E.R.O.S. to me. It's like, okay, how can we put the consciousness of the Baker out there in the community? How can we make this “other” understand, for everyone’s sake?
KG: I love that. And it's distributed so well, too.
CM: A little bit of hand holding goes a long way in times like these.
KG: Yeah. I have been interested in the role of customer service in these times, too, because there are so many more people who aren't talking to people as they used to. So I've had a few exchanges on the phone that have felt somehow a more genuine connection than I would have expected before, and it's a genuine connection. It's hard to tell, but you can actually have a good time talking to someone while you're trying to get your car insurance sorted out. And I did, I just thought like, “What's happening now? Is there more patience, is there more of a desire to connect with people, just in general?” And of course, this isn't happening all the time. There's less patience in many areas, and people are really struggling with a lot of things. But, I do wonder if there's something about these times that’s cracking something open communication-wise between people. Being so far apart and then like actually embracing the technologies that do allow us to communicate to let it be.
CM: I think so! I mean, I think there is this kind of unprecedented capacity we have to suddenly easily communicate more so often than we had prior. And that's because of the technologies that we're exploiting right now, but it’s not quite there yet. There is something about the phone call. I mean, you can't make eye contact from a phone call. I'm barely capable of making eye contact with you right now. But I've experienced this recently, too. I had car troubles last week and essentially, I have to get rid of my car, and that's fine. But everyone that I spoke to could have used the opportunity, as they might have in 2018 or 2019, to exert what little power they could for the profit of the company or what have you. And instead, it’s like “everyone's having a hard time right now, she's having a harder time. I'm in a position to be helpful. And what a luxury it is to be lovely to someone in 2020.”
KG: Yeah, exactly. I can offer some grace. I mean, that's a really wonderful thing, grace.
CM: I think grace is very well put, we might, after this call, take a beat just to figure out another acronym for your object. G.R.A.C.E.
KG: Yeah. Grace would be the most perfect one. We’ve got to figure that out.
CM: Well, there's already an “e,” so we could put empathy or empathizer or something like that there.
KG: Empathizer is really good. So “global relations…Global Relationships Access
CM: Consciousness?
KG: So, Access or Accessibility. Let's see. Global something Accessibility... Maybe not…Global Relationship Augmentation. Augmentation? Augmentatory? Augmented?
CM: Augmentatory? **Laughs**
KG: Is that not a word?
CM: It is now!
KG: Global Relations Augmentatory…
CM: Collective?
KG: Collective Empathizer. There's something a little bit much about it, I like it.
CM: I like that. I like the idea that this whatever device is augments one's capacity to empathize.
KG: So, it's a Global Relations…
CM: Let’s think about Global. Is it Global? If its an alien technology, it could be more like General
KG: General, I like General. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Yes. That's so good. It should be General. So, General Relations Augmentatory Collective Empathizer.
CM: Wow. That's a great answer, Kate. Thank you!
KG: Thank you! This was a very collaborative process, and I'm really glad to be doing it with you.
CM: That was like a preliminary practice of G.R.A.C.E.. I think that's a lovely place to stop. I hope that all of our listeners reflect a little bit more on how wonderful things would be if only Kate discovers G.R.A.C.E. in the Zone.
KG: That would be so good.
CM: Ok, thank you so much for joining us.
KG: Well, Caitlin, thank you very much for having me in for this fun concept and conversation.
CM: It's nice and light, but I love it too because I have the opportunity to spend an hour talking about dreams and inventions and imaginations that distract me a little bit from what I see quite often, elsewhere. So, this is quite the luxury.
KG: Yeah. It's really nice. And your background is so fantastic. It looks like you are floating above it all. Like you're doing the backstroke through the lower atmosphere as astronauts do.
CM: Of course, this is the site of HI-SEAS one, but maybe I'm coming back from HI-SEAS six, right? Let's say it's HI-SEAS 2020, and I'm actually simulating the return to Earth.
KG: Whoa!
CM: …descending down to Mauna Loa.
KG: It's quite the view and it looks lovely, what you're doing.
CM: Just floating! Yeah, well, thank you. I wouldn't have chosen it if it weren't for you.
KG: Great! Well, good luck with your car stuff.
CM: Thank you. I think it'll be fine. Maybe I’ll upgrade to a spaceship and prepare for bigger and better things.
KG: That sounds great.
CM: Right? Ok, cool. Have a lovely week Kate. It was nice to talk to you.
KG: You too. Thank you.