 Hi, everybody. Give folks one last minute to grab their beer or cheese or beer and cheese. All right. Good evening, everyone. Welcome to New America, and thank you for coming. You are here for tonight's event, and hopefully you're tuning in online to watch tonight's event. Why should we imagine solar flares taking down international space stations? Which, despite its weirdly specific title, is going to be a wide-ranging conversation on science and science fiction and art and Afrofuturism and astrophysics and alien life and the future of the internet. Post-colonialism here on Earth and the colonization of Mars. So I'm Kevin Bankston. I'm the director of the Open Technology Institute, which is the Tech and Tech Policy Development Wing here at New America. I'm also a big sci-fi fan, which is one of the reasons why I'm excited to be here tonight at this event sponsored by Future Tense. Future Tense, if you don't already know it, is a partnership between New America, Arizona State University, and Slate magazine, which explores emerging technologies and their transformative effects on society and public policy. Central to that partnership is a series of events in New York and Washington, D.C., including events like this one, as well as the Future Tense channel on Slate. And so you can follow the conversation here tonight with hashtag after the flare, and you can follow Future Tense on Twitter at Future Tense now. So without further ado, I would love to introduce our guests for the evening. First, Deji Alakatun. He is the author of the novel Nigerians in Space, and it's new sci-fi sequel after the flare, the inciting incident of which is also the title of this event tonight. A solar flare takes out the ISS and a whole lot of other things besides. He's a fellow at Future Tense. He is the new head of social impact at Sonos, and until recently he worked on the advocacy team of the digital human rights organization Access Now. A team I often have the pleasure and still often do, have the pleasure of working with. Also joining us is Lucien Walkowitz. She is currently, this year for the next year, the Baruch S. Bloomberg NASA slash Library of Congress chair in Astrobiology in the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress where she is, amongst other things, examining the ethics of Mars colonization. She is also astronomer at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago where she studies stellar magnetic activity like flares and their influence on planetary habitability using data from NASA, NASA's Kepler mission. She's also a practicing artist working in a variety of media from oil paint to sound. You can find information about her work as a scientist and as an artist at tangledfields.com including a link to a piece. She wrote for Vox just last year about the damage that a solar flare could cause to the power grid and to the internet. So I'm going to ask for a question about that right after these housekeeping points. Please silence your cell phones. During Q&A, which we will get to in about 45 minutes, please wait for the microphone to ask your questions so the people online can hear you and please ask your questions in the form of a question. And please, we welcome you to stick around after the event for our reception where we will continue with book sales and Deji will be around to sign copies of the book if you like, and we will continue to serve beer and wine and cheese. So, Lucienne, tell us a bit more about what our solar flares and what risk do they pose and what was the Carrington event and what happens if another one happens. Can you tell us about that? During the Q&A our people also allowed to ask four questions in a row. One question, one question at a time. Just giving you a hard time. So solar flares are these really energetic events that launch themselves off the surface of the sun. So our sun is magnetic and has these sort of tangly magnetic fields on its surface that trap like really hot particles in plasma. And sometimes those fields have tension and so they snap, they rearrange. And that can spew these particles, literally particles of the sun out into space towards us. And they also are associated with like big bursts of energy. So normally the light from the sun is mostly in the visible range where our eyes can see it and a little bit in the X-rays and ultraviolet light, more energetic kinds of light. But during flares we get these big bursts of X-rays and ultraviolet radiation. And so that creates all kinds of effects here on earth. Most often it just creates aurora. So the northern lights are the glowing of our own atmosphere as those particles interact from the sun. So most of the time it's totally benign. But occasionally we get these really big flares. And the Carrington event, which you mentioned, is this historical flare from 1859 that is named after a astronomer who was, you know, minding his own business, observing the sun and drawing. So don't look at the sun, but you can project it and draw the sunspots. And that's a very old form of astronomy. Lots of different cultures have had that observations of sunspots throughout history. And he was watching the sun and saw this brightening. And what he had witnessed was this incredibly energetic burst of energy and particles that then created auroras that were so strong they came all the way down. They were seen in the Caribbean. They woke up campers in the Rocky Mountains. Usually, you know, you have to go up north or very far south to see northern or southern lights. But this was something that created a really global effect. It also shorted out telegraphs, which were the dominant technology at the time. And so we looked at this event now as a much more technologically capable, but also technologically reliant society that has all kinds of things that use the power grid. And it's a little bit of a worry that if we had another big event like that, that it could create damage to our technological infrastructure. And so that's why flares are cool and also why flares are dangerous. Like most cool things, they're kind of dangerous. So it's screwed with the telegraph 150 years ago. Today it would screw with the internet. It would screw with the electrical grid. And also satellites. You know, we didn't have anything in space in 1859. And today, you know, your ability to use your phone to map the New America Institute and come to this event relies on things like GPS and all of our communications, rely on satellites, and they're out there in space where they're relatively unshielded from bombardments of solar particles. And this is not out there possibility. In fact, if I'm remembering from reading your article correctly, just a few years ago there was a Carrington level event that we just missed by like a week. Like if we'd just been a little week earlier later in our orbit, we would have gotten this huge flare just a few years ago, right? Yeah, so this is sort of a subtlety that actually works out in our favor, is that these events happen on part of the surface of the sun. So like the whole sun itself doesn't send energy equally in every direction. It's sort of, you know, like throwing a baseball that goes in one direction and has a particular trajectory or path. And so for us here on Earth, we're going around the sun and that means that sometimes these events just miss us. And fortunately, we have lots of space telescopes that are designed to actually observe the sun and watch for those events taking place. So usually we only get about eight and a half minutes between the light arriving from the sun, but particles move a little bit slower. So we have usually a little bit of warning before they arrive. So insurers are pretty woke about climate change because they need to like factor that into their thinking about risk. It turns out they're looking at solar flares as well. There was a Lloyds of London report that indicated how severe this could be. What did that report say? Yeah, so there's actually been a number of different reports. So it's not only insurers, it's also like the U.S. government and other governments look into this as a source of national security, right? And so a lot of those reports do different kinds of estimates on the kind of damage that could result. One of the things about our power grid is that it's very interconnected and so failures in part of the power grid can take down very large spots of the rest of it. And sometimes if it's a minor event, it does the equivalent of tripping a breaker in your house and you just repair the damage and move on. But if it melts down a transformer, well, transformers cost millions of dollars and take a year or two to manufacture. So depending on how severe it is, you have a greater or lesser chance. So there's a number of different reports that go from like a mild gasp to complete pearl clutching about how bad a potential flare would be, but all of them essentially say not good. But one could imagine something like say looking at what happened to the power grid in Puerto Rico from a hurricane but seeing that on perhaps a continental scale. Yeah, absolutely. And you know, the dire situation in Puerto Rico should remind us of how much we depend on energy. And so there are milder examples. So back in like two, I think it was 2003, it might have also been the 1989 flare. But there was a flare that essentially disabled part of the grid in the northeast predominantly affected Quebec, but also a little bit of the northeastern United States. And that was a situation where the power was down for like 24 hours. And so, you know, the damage there was relatively minor, but if you have something that was the level of a Carrington event, you could be looking at, you know, big spots of the continent being totally out. The electromagnetic field provides some protection, but not for our satellites or for our International Space Station, which answers the question of the panel, why should we imagine solar flares taking out the International Space Station? But Deshi, why did you imagine that? You read up, you read some of these same reports, you did some research, and you came up with a science fiction scenario around this science. Tell us why. Well, it is actually somewhat of a trope in science fiction, the solar flare, but I think there was a new current of the conversation that bubbled up when Lucien was going on radio and talking writing her articles. So I think I happened to catch some of that. I was looking for a scenario that could shift the focus from, you know, when you watch your typical science fiction movie, the plot happens, Indians always attack the United States and the resolution is in the United States and if it's not in the United States, it's resolved by the U.S. Air Force or Army or some actor in the United States. So I wanted to use it as a way to shift the global power and have us look at what might happen if instead some parts of the world are taking off the line through an event like this and others are thriving and in this case it's Nigeria and West Africa. So, you know, I was at the Milwaukee airport about three or four weeks ago and I stopped and looked at, I picked up a random collection of books, this series called Tom Swift, which was put out in the 20s and 30s and then again in the 50s and 60s. The first one I opened up was about a solar flare. So that was really interesting because here I had done all this research and I really wish I had had that two-minute explanation that you just gave because that would have saved me a lot of time. But, yeah, so it was really a chance to think about not just, you know, right now I feel like our access and knowledge about what NASA's doing is greater than ever. You can go online and watch live feeds from the space station but then what would happen if some of these things that we take for granted, all the advanced technologies that we're enjoying disappeared and it's a scenario that can be very interesting. You know, in the book, Nigeria stays online. So a lot of... That's because it's on the equator where the... Well, this is the part where I'd love to hear Lucien's thoughts because what I saw was a diagram in the Lloyd's report. If I'm not mistaken, there was a diagram that said the magnetic field would sort of shield the equator and you did write about that a little bit in your article like Cuba. You know, there were some particles seen as close as Cuba, I mean some Northern Lights kind of effects. So the idea was that it might be possible. It could happen and then what would happen is all the technology and all the resources flooded to a region that people typically think of as developing that still has a lot of catching up to do. So what would happen if Nigeria could leapfrog and contribute in that way? Well, one of the things that happened is a reversal of a current political situation where you had a bunch of Americans fleeing to Mexico and Central America. Can you talk a little bit more about the... Before we move on to Africa, what was the sociopolitical situation you sketch in the U.S. after this disaster? Yeah, so I think there has been a lot of great thought about... And I think a lot of it depends on your own personal take on the way humans behave. Do you think we would tear each other apart? There are the preppers, which are communities that prepare for sort of apocalyptic scenarios. They hoard food, you know, wall off their properties, build silos, you know, several stories into the ground. All in preparation for either some religious event or... So, you know, I thought... But there are a lot of people who probably would bend together and support each other. So, you know, in my view, the military would probably still be functioning in some way. So that would be a haven. You know, people with generators would thrive for a while if they weren't shorted out by the flare. So I sort of saw it as enclaves. Silicon Valley becomes an enclave, it has its own exploration. A very exclusive one. Very exclusive. You have to pay to get in. You pay to play and to arrive. You need a permit. And so that's part of it. People who are more communitarian end up in the southwest of the United States. And then on the east coast, you know, people wall themselves off and put up big barriers and hire private security. So I felt like there would be a little bit, a blend of these things, because you see those blends today. There are people who throw up huge walls and hide. And then there are other people who, you know, keep their doors unlocked and open for other, you know, and share with others. So, Lucien, if... What is the likelihood or possibility of an event on the scale of what Deji sketches? How possible is that? And how long would it take us to recover from an event like that? Yeah, so actually a lot of what we learn about from... Well, okay. Let me lead with the good news. It's relatively rare. One of the things that's difficult about studying rare events is that you, you know, we only have, like, the Carrington event, essentially, as one of our observed events on the sun. And so it can be really difficult to describe, like, how frequently those things happen. But this is actually a strength of studying other stars. So instead of waiting for our sun to fry us periodically and then counting how often that happens, we can actually observe other stars and see how often they're flaring and then calculate the probability of that. So that's something that became possible with NASA's Kepler mission a couple of years ago, which was a mission that was a space telescope designed to look for planets around other stars. But it actually was really great at studying stars as well. And the estimates from observing the sun with Kepler are that these events happen, like, every few hundred years. So that means somewhere between, you know, like, 200-ish to 300-ish. They're not periodic. They're chaotic, essentially. And so that doesn't mean that we can be like, well, 1859 was, you know, roughly 150 years ago, you know, we can't time it or predict it in that way. It's really difficult to predict in general. But we can say that probably we will have another event like that in our life. Maybe not our lifetimes, but within, you know, the near horizon of the human race. And so I think that, you know, the chances are pretty good. It's just kind of a matter of when. Yeah. So start saving your money to buy your way into the Silicon Valley enclave. Yeah. So, but moving to Nigeria, part of the the core, the story engine here is the ISS is integrating orbit and it's going to, like, scorch India, and there's someone still up there too. And so Nigeria's space program becomes the center of the rescue effort. And this is set in and around the space port where they are preparing to do this mission. Why Nigeria, other than you being a Nigerian-American, and why a Nigerian space program? Can you talk a little bit, I mean, apparently there is one and could you talk a bit about that? Sure, yeah. I had the opportunity to visit the space program in 2014. And yeah, it exists. It's a real thing. And they have a mission to put person into space by 2030. Other countries also have one. Ghana has a space program. Ethiopia has a space program. And then other developing countries like Malaysia and United Arab Emirates has a pretty ambitious program that this center featured a conversation about. So I think part of it is that countries they're the most compelling argument that I heard was from the founder of Nigeria's space program. His name is Turner Issoon. And he said that people wonder when you have poverty, you have problems with basic potable water. Why would you have a space program? He said, well it helps us shift our solution space. That sometimes the really advanced technology can help us think about our own country in different ways. Look at floodplains, try to protect farmers, help them predict crop yields, do population census. So there are practical values for it. And I think I was really moved by that visit to the program in 2014. Both seeing the potential of it, but then also the very real problems it has which is lack of funding. Most of the funding goes towards satellites, communication satellites, and then developing countries actually do really cool partnerships with other countries and they share the satellite time. It's a way for them to distribute the cost of launching the satellite and using the data. So that was the idea is that there actually is one there and if it was the only one that was still in operation then the world would shift its resources. And the reason why would anyone care the reason in the story is that there's an astronaut who stranded up on the space station and that needs to be rescued. So people just pool their resources and I bring in India because India actually has a very advanced space program. They've sent Rover to Mars and India prides itself on running the most cost-efficient space program. So they're kind of interesting cultural dynamics. The different space programs try to distinguish themselves in different ways. Japan has one. There's a lot of space programs. So that just kind of feeds into the plot. You mentioned struggles with potable water while also struggling to launch people into space. One of the things that struck me about the book and strikes me about Nigeria and you've written about this outside of the context of the book striking contracts between old and new, between technical and natural. Can you talk a little bit more about that contrast or retention and how it impacted your work? I mean, one way it seemed to obviously impact the work is in terms of some of the technology you described. This is in the near future. And so you have these bio-mimicking cell phones, these geckophones that behave like animals. You have these mal flies that are actually like little robotic fly drones that are trying to infect the geckophones. There is a great technology of you take the cowrie which are these shells that have been used as currency for hundreds of years and then integrate them with the blockchain. So there are a lot of great examples of these dichotomies being joined in the context of the tech in your book, but talk more about that. Sure, yeah. I think with the prominence of Silicon Valley and all the amazing innovations that's happening, a lot of people feel that they're just trying to catch up. That feeling also goes to things like jobs that jobs can be taken away by a robot. But in other countries, you know, they want to create opportunities for their own people. So what would happen in the way with the flare, what sets it up so that there is the time and space for Nigeria to innovate on its own and mingle the technology with its traditions. The biomimicry of these kind of animals that are mingled with devices, the idea there is in my father's ethnic group, the Yoruba, there are a lot of proverbs involving animals and because of the history of the culture, it was sort of in the forest and so I was playing with those ideas that it is a stereotype wild exotic animals of Africa, but at the same time it is deeply in the lore and understanding of some cultures. So I wanted to see that. And then in the story, I also contrast that sort of phones mimicking animal behavior with the actual hacking of live animals and so there's some play on that and what the ethics are behind that. You also, one of the interesting sort of fusion technologies is the use of online identities fused with tribal identity. So tribal identity plays a large role in Nigeria. How did you... Tell me a little bit more about that concept and why you integrated that. Yeah and I feel like I should just say, Nigeria is in West Africa. It's the biggest... It's the most populous country in Africa. It's not the biggest by land mass. It's also the wealthiest country in Africa. So just to bring people back who are like, what is Nigeria? If you haven't already Googled it on your phone. Let's repeat that last question. I was asking about the role of tribal identity. Over 250 ethnic groups in Nigeria and there is actually a lot of ethnic harmony especially in cities where people have to get along and they do and they have for hundreds of years. But then there are times where if you're the wrong tribe and the wrong place at the wrong time, you can be killed just for the way you look. So that was based somewhat from my activism work of there was not too long ago Facebook required transgender people to share their real name and I'm not sure you might have been involved in that campaign. We were not particularly active in the shoot. You weren't in the shoot, but Kevin for your work at EFF and so on. So access now campaigned a little bit with other groups on that to try to get Facebook to say some people can't use the real name because they'll get killed or ostracized or harmed or lose their job and my idea of bringing this tribal identity is just in Nigeria the thought is well if you're in the wrong ethnic group at the wrong time that can get you in trouble. But I merged it a little bit with so that if you have you could shift your tribal identity and your actual gestures and behavior changes to the person on the other end and then it has an added security layer that you can access certain parts of the space port network depending on the tribal identity that you've assumed at that time. So it's just kind of playing with some of the real code switching that actually happens every day for a lot of people you know when you read about Africa you say this person is from this tribe that person is from this tribe. In reality a lot of people are actually from multiple tribes even I said my father is from Yoruba he's also a half ebi from a Togo which is a different group and that's a common story in Africa that people have multiple identities that they swap at different times to their advantage. Another echo of an area where our organizations work in the book is the the vulcanization or the splintering of the internet after the flare especially that accelerates countries locking down their internet and in fact Nigeria has its own I forgot what it was called Nigel Webb. Can you talk a bit more about that trend and how that played into the thinking of the future world in your book? Yeah definitely I mean I was happy to see that Luciana talked about that how the internet would be impacted by the electricity outage which is something that we forget I think I experienced that when I was writing the first book during the space because in South Africa at that time they were rolling blackouts so internet would go down electricity would come back up and then the internet would eventually come back up and just that feeling that they were connected but yeah I worked on a campaign called keep it on which was fighting when governments intentionally shut down the internet it was 156 organizations sorry no 130 organizations from 56 countries the campaign is still running hashtag keep it on hashtag keep it on and it's because governments want to assert control over people's self-expression and control the information they have so what would happen in the book I'm asking the question what would happen when everyone's afraid and suddenly the resources aren't there would it be like you're just throwing up digital tariffs and just to get from one part of the internet to the next you need special permissions you need to be from the country that is actually the vision that a lot of countries have for us so and that argument is being made even today so I just looked at that and you can see that Nigeria isn't innocent there because they walloff their internet they don't want other people on and their excuse is that they're using malware and cyber criminals which is often a justification you see for regimes that are then also instituting massive censorship and surveillance we're going to come back to you soon I promise but I wanted to ask about Afrofuturism this is a word that's going around a lot these days in the discourse around science fiction and race what is it is your book Afrofuturism how should we be thinking about that issue and the representation of people of color in science fiction yes so nice narrow easy question yeah Afrofuturism is a big topic I know that's been discussed here it was a term that was invented by an academic to kind of like encompass different strains of thought creativity in predominantly African American music literature and movies and writing I think for me distilling it down what I really love about it it's been going on since the 30's 40's 50's 60's it's been going on for a long time and it's just become cool for some reason that's beyond me I'm not sure why people are really interested in it right now but I'm happy to have the label applied to the book that's not why I wrote it I did explore technology and African futures and African American futures because the protagonist is African American he's not Nigerian man and for me when I distill it what I like about Afrofuturism what I find that is very liberating for people is that it's the philosophy that we all have the right to imagine our own futures and to imagine a better future for ourselves if your imagination is crushed and you can't even think of what would make a better life for you and your family your society or your community then you're going to have a hard time getting there and I think that's the fundamentally freeing part about Afrofuturism that doesn't have to be limited to African Americans it's just a way that African Americans have used this technique and this philosophy to try to imagine their own stories and better stories for themselves and Itasha Wilmak who's really an expert on that is going to be here in just a couple weeks to talk more about Afrofuturism next week to talk about it she's really follow her on Twitter she's excellent she's the most positive person you'll ever follow on Twitter another future tense event coming up next week the history of the future hashtag so and you know one thing that keeps coming up in the context of Afrofuturism now is the Black Panther the comic and doing the comic and now the authors of this vast secret technological civilization hidden in the jungle in Africa I don't want to give away too much but there are some hints of a lost civilization subplot in this book as well you see any sort of creative link there or a theme there you know it's funny there isn't a direct link because I didn't know the Black Panther story that well until I was almost finished with the book when Tanahisi Coates made it much more prominent I actually went back and started reading the earlier iterations of the Black Panther and I've said in other places there what I love about it is it's encouraging people to explore their imaginations and their own histories there are problems with it from an African standpoint which is at least in the comics the dress is wrong some of the cultural things are wrong they're almost like stereotypes of how Africans are expected to behave I mean it was started in the 60's so there's plenty of reasons by the way he didn't grow up in Uganda where it's supposed to be set but I think what I want to do with Nigeria is a lot of African cultures may have a very rich oral history and a lot of cultural knowledge but the archeology hasn't really happened or so in Nigeria there are a few archeological mysteries of people who have been around civilizations that have been and disappeared and that happens all over the continent and so I just looked into some of those mysteries and put that in the story some of these things archeologists have done a great job they know a lot about what's going on but there's still enough for us to have some fun with the story so I think that's kind of the similarity to Wakanda and the Black Panther story so on the last fun tip Boko Haram plays a large role in the book can you discuss that a bit and what role they play yeah sure I mean I don't want to spoil it but many of you may be familiar with the Bring Back Our Girls campaign which is when 300 girls were stolen from their school of the night and forced to go with this militant Islamic group so it's a reality they still exist they're out there in Nigeria some of those girls have been recovered but a lot of scholarship has shown that a recent coverage has shown that that story is actually way more complicated than we'd like it to be for example some of the women who are rescued don't want to be rescued because they actually have a better life with the militants than they did before but they are still extremely violent they force people to blow themselves up in marketplaces they do beheadings all of the really horrible reprehensible stuff that you hear about militants anywhere so that's just a reality it is part of Nigeria especially in areas that haven't received as much government support so the infrastructure isn't there the education isn't there and there are all kinds of contradictions that so that feeds into the story so this is a country that wants to try to go to space and rescue somewhere from the space station but at the same time there are people rampaging in the countryside on a completely different quest so in a really awkward segue we're going to move from post-colonial terrorist politics of Nigeria where Boko Haram is in many ways reacting to British colonialism and rejecting western education and culture to the colonization of Mars because that is a topic that is the focus of your tenure at the Library of Congress and I'd love to hear more about that work and the ethics of extra planetary colonization yeah I always think the word post-colonialism is funny because if you ever want to see colonialism live and well just watch some of the ways we talk about going to other planets you know right now we're at this interesting juncture where we have the technological capability to go to places like Mars to send not only rovers but in the very near future to send human beings but a lot of the way that we talk about it is dominated by the model culture of who are the creators of science and technology in general by which I mean the silicon territories as they're called in your book so you know a lot of the narratives about going to space and humanities future in space is very much coming out of marketing departments at private spaceflight companies who are interested in being players in space in the same way that usually it's been governments sending people to space like organizations here in the US like NASA so it's surprising to me that when we talk about something that is as futuristic as human beings being on another planet and either going and visiting or staying that we still recycle things like Columbus coming to America as though that has no attached baggage to it and was like a totally fine thing so when we talk about space one of the things that I'm really interested in is looking at not only how we talk about it and how using those narratives excludes people from imagining their futures in space I think if you constantly recycle these colonialist narratives that in their implementation really excluded a lot of people and actually resulted in the exploitation of many many people not only indigenous Americans but also people who were taken forcibly away from Africa and into slavery you repeat a lot of the mistakes of the past and you cut that imagining of who can be on another planet you cut that off from a lot of people so I'm looking partially at narratives but I'm also looking at the laws around who can for example own things in space so we have this outer space treaty that's from 1967 that states that no one can own a celestial body but just a couple of years ago in 2015 the United States passed a law that says that you can actually own space resources so you can't own Mars but if for example you found water on Mars well then you could own that water so it's not totally clear how a lot of these laws interact with each other what does it mean practically speaking to own water but not actually own the land that you're on well we have analogies of that right in the past couple of years we've seen the protests over the Dakota Access Pipeline where you have indigenous people with a right to the land and companies wanting to bring construct essentially infrastructure on that land and bring resources through it or from it in a way that impacts it as a person who studies the science essentially of life in the universe I'm very interested in seeing us learn some of the things that Mars can teach us from an astrobiological standpoint it's one of the easiest places for us to get to it's a place where we might learn whether there was an independent origin of life whether life if it originated on Mars evolved independently whether there are similarities or differences and so from that point of view you know we don't let people go mine in places that are of cultural or scientific significance here on Earth necessarily and so you know I think a lot of the this sort of if you follow those threads off into the future of the plans that are being made now and the way we talk about those plans they have implications that might mean that we don't get to learn whether there's life on another planet in our solar system so they have very serious scientific implications and they also and this is one of the things that I love about Afrofuturism too is that the things that we think about our future in space very much reflect the kinds of things that we think are permissible here on Earth for better and worse and so you know that can be imagining like a future in which people who normally don't get to be a major voice get their voice or it can be a future in which we set ourselves up for exploitation yet again and so I'm using the collections in the library to look into some of those those issues. Does Antarctica provide us with any sort of sense of how this might play out in that it's supposed to be kind of international territory I have no idea whether you've been to Antarctica or whether you're even the appropriate person but like I've been thinking you know that yeah maybe it provides some insight into how we might behave and yeah. Yeah I would say that Antarctica presents one vision of how Mars exploration could take place so work in Antarctica is typically you know it has similarities in that it's very removed from the rest of the earth and you know also differences in that it's a much nicer place to be than Mars. So you know when we look in Antarctica most of the work there is scientific so there's not you know for example a huge amount of like resource extraction happening at McMurdo base there and so that's sort of one vision of how we might see ourselves on Mars but also we have to be a lot less careful there too you know the things that are negatively impacting Antarctica tend to be global things like climate change and not so much you know human contamination because it's already part of the Earth's biosphere so there are similarities but also differences. That's funny you mentioned Antarctica for a reason I'll get to in about 60 seconds because we talked about this in the green room Kim Stanley Robinson science fiction author he wrote a really incredible trilogy about the colonization of Mars red Mars, blue Mars, green Mars affecting the change in color of the planet as it is terraformed and one of the major themes and discussions in the book is the ethics of what they are doing the ethics of even going there how they're impacting the environment how they can or should react if they find evidence of life past or present it's a really powerful piece of work and possibly my very favorite sci-fi ever but then he followed it up with a book called Antarctica basically using that as a microcosm for the exact same debates and I highly recommend it and I think it addresses many of the same issues you're studying right now Kim Stanley Robinson is also a good example of another theme in science fiction right now called Clifi which is trying to imagine what the future looks like in the face of the reality of massive climate change and he just had a book come out called New York 2140 which is actually a somewhat hopeful vision of what New York looks like in 2140 after several massive surges of water rise such that lower Manhattan is basically a new Venice and I'm seeing this trend of people trying to grapple with how do we imagine our future in a constructive way in the face of this massive change that is coming even the Trump administration's New Climate Report agrees this seems to me an example of what you call science fiction thinking you wrote about the idea of applying applied science fiction like science fiction as a tool for thinking about the future in a systematic way can you talk a bit more about that along the same lines as the empowering nature of Afrofuturism and thinking through to imagine your own future I think there are tools I mean even just before you get to the science fiction just fiction writing learning to write a story you know coming up with characters and plot and I think what even a literary fiction writer will do some world building in that sense you know figure out the town that the story is set in or the cafe where a scene is going to happen and what sits where and why and how do these things interact in the room and I think science fiction takes it maybe a little bit further because it removes some of those basic assumptions about how you know gravity works or how particular new kind of biology might fit into the scenario and I think I did an event with Nora Jameson who's you know just won the Hugo Award twice which has only happened with one other author two back to back which was Orson Scott Card and her world building there's an irony there I think in terms of Orson Scott Card is a renowned kind of let's say kind of racist well Nora is like the woman of color who just got two Hugo's in a row so she's excellent world building to the extent you know in her story the special power that some of the characters have is they can sort of terraform themselves like their version of the force is like being able to understand complex geological processes and manipulate them and that has to have a certain logic so in building that world so that it's consistent and it makes sense and you know what were the political structures that's world building and you know she's a little bit more in a different time frame but what I believe is that tool of trying to imagine a new scenario and all the complex forces at play the people who would be acting upon them and who would be reacting can be very helpful for imagining new technologies thinking about new technologies and even things you know as you've observed Kevin's written some great stuff on this companies are thinking about it about how they imagine their products and so forth so I think it's got a lot of application but I do feel that like design thinking the principles of design designing a room, designing a space designing an object it's another tool for you to find creativity in your life and try to set your goals and achieve great things if you can so I really think that science fiction thinking it's actually pretty new to me so I say this as someone who's written my first science fiction book I've written a bunch of science fiction stories but before that I was really a literary writer so I see the power of it and why it's fun and enjoyable and I think other people should be able to tap into that Public Service Announcement specifically we were talking about NK Jemisin's fifth season which is brilliant, highly recommend it so we're seeing science fiction being used more and more you mentioned in the company setting in a think tank setting as a sort of strategic foresight tool sometimes even impacting policy there's also an interplay between fiction and art and science and I'd like to turn to you as an artist and hear more about your view on that relationship and in particular the relationship between your work as a scientist and your work as an artist sure, yeah you know I think that certainly art has a little bit of similarity to this way in which science fiction thinking can be used and that it can take us away from what so often happens in science where you get this very not even necessarily a dry explanation but a very thorough explanation of how something works and that's one way of experiencing scientific discovery and knowledge it's the kind of thing that you might see like on a plaque at the planetarium for example but there are other experiences that I personally have as a scientist that I think are not represented in the way that people who are not scientists consume science so to make that a little less vague you know one of the things that I think is most interesting as part of the process of doing research is the moments before you know what's going on those moments where you're like I think I see some sort of pattern here but I'm not really sure what it means yet that like opening of a door down a sort of curious path that you can have and if you're not a practicing scientist that doesn't happen for you with science very often because there's always you know somebody kind of telling you already what it means but you know the fun of being a scientist is that the universe doesn't come with an explanatory plaque so in some of the work that I've done so first of all I'll put the caveat out there that not all of my artwork in fact most of my artwork has absolutely nothing to do with science but some of it does and so for example I did this project using data from NASA's Kepler mission where what Kepler did was it measured how bright stars are with time and stars actually spin on their axes like tops so sometimes there are periodic changes in brightness and you can map those from changes in light to pitch in sound so you can map it to different frequencies that your ear can hear so I used this to create a sound installation where you could actually listen to the frequencies of those stars change with time and what I was trying to do was to give people access to that primary experience of hearing that there was a pattern and that there was structure in that data rather than just showing people a bunch of graphs where they'd be like graphs and I feel like graphs are also inherently inaccessible sometimes this is totally reminding me not trying to pimp my Twitter feed but it's there from Halloween NASA actually released basically an entire song track of what do you call it playlist of tracks of noise drawn from it's like the spooky sounds of space but it's like various types of space data turned into aural input it was really spooky and interesting is that 10 minutes for us or for everything? then we're going to move to questions right now again wait for the mic raise your hand if you'd like to ask a question and the mic will come to you my name is Alan Herbert I work for a company that sends payloads to the International Space Station so we don't want anything to happen to it now I'm going to ask you a few questions to you about the moon I know Mars is kind of far out but I was just at a thing yesterday where they talked about who owns the moon talked about the same thing you were talking about and there's resources on the moon right now too and people are talking about putting up developments all kinds of this is real all kinds of different things on the moon which is only four days away so I know we're talking about Mars but what do you say about the moon which could even happen sooner because the Trump administration is saying what about the moon right now and then we'll look at Mars later on but there's so many companies private companies looking at things on the moon and saying how do we monetize certain things how do you assure certain things and a lot of companies want to own certain things but one of the things they were saying is that if you own a habitat or something you own that but you don't own the ground so there's all kinds of different things about the moon in terms of ethics and how we're going to deal with that because that could really happen in 10 years and also add and what about asteroids as well because that's where a lot of the speculation is yeah so the moon is just as complicated a place for totally different reasons so a thing that makes the moon and Mars distinct is that Mars was probably what we call habitable or at least a hospitable environment for life to have formed at some point in its history the moon on the other hand we don't believe to have or have been capable of hosting life so in that sense the difference of that you could actually still find existing life on Mars today or history of life that gets taken out from the standpoint of worrying about the moon however you're right that the moon is a big focus for this administration I actually just wrote an op-ed for Scientific American bemoaning that we pivot every four to eight years you know like pivoting to the moon no we're pivoting to Mars no we're pivoting in a circle so in the case of the moon we do have these resources for example the moon is a great source of helium which has a variety of different engineering aside from your party balloons a variety of different important engineering applications and there is talk of going and mining or selling real estate and it is complicated it's not you know you actually literally definitely cannot own the moon at least at the moment and that's something that almost every existing country agreed to back in the 60s but you do have these other these other pieces of legislation like the space act which was you know not from this administration it was the previous one that says that you can own these resources and so it's not clear how that plays out in practice there's also cultural arguments to be made like so Neil Armstrong's footprints on the moon are now like arguably a very important human cultural site it's very rare that the history of exploration of a space is actually like literally imprinted in the soil of the space and hasn't been you know the moon doesn't have an atmosphere it doesn't have like a water cycle so it's the total history of that exploration is preserved and so you know do we even own Neil Armstrong's footprints like can anybody go do anything to them and so there's I'm literally reading a book right now that is called who owns the moon but you know there's a tendency to think that if it's not Mars and if it's the moon that we're like totally free to just kind of like do whatever and that is also not the case my relationship to the moon is just that my first book Nigerian in the space the main character is a lunar geologist but not from the standpoint of exploiting the resources of the moon it's just what drives them it's his passion and Johnson Space Laboratory in Houston yes sir wait for the mic hi Jack Kopansky independent there was a mention of the discover satellite and since we're talking about solar flares if you could talk about the discover satellite at all and how long would that satellite be up there at L1 and should we replace it at some point and also related to that is you mentioned at the beginning X-rays from solar flares but they go at the speed of light so that's a little different and whether discover helps us at all with that so I don't actually know specifically about the discover satellite the solar missions that I generally follow are solar dynamics observatory which has a really awesome YouTube channel by the way and SOHO so I can speak without knowing about its orbit I can say that one of the threats to satellites in space from solar flares is that the heating the flare can essentially puff up the Earth's atmosphere a little bit and create drag on satellites that essentially deorbit them over a period of time not immediately it's not going to rain satellites right away so you know depending on the orbit that satellite is in you could see it deorbit it also any kind of electronics in space that is vulnerable there's some shielding but not not perfect shielding for electronics in space and so that makes them vulnerable to flares but in the case of X-rays all light, visible light X-rays ultraviolet light it all travels at the same speed and so we do get that warning from the flare the actual radiation that happens that we might get the particle hits that create those aurora and create a lot of the other mysterious effects here on Earth yes ma'am thanks a lot for your insights it's been really interesting I guess what we're saying is it sounds like it's a premise of your work is that the internet is now an integral part of human life that if we lost it we would have to restore it which is an interesting assumption given that we didn't even have the internet you know within my lifetime so do you consider taking it in that direction versus how do we restore it yeah I mean thank you for the question I alluded to that in a little bit of what would happen in the US and how people would communicate so there's actually a lot of really amazing thought about how people could communicate actually using internet technology and ideas of sending packets across a network with pre-internet tools like ham radio in the Houston the hurricane when Harvey hit ham radio was really important for rescues but not using the data side of it it was just traditional use of ham radio but there are different technologies some people call them sneaker nets some people call them mesh technologies which don't depend on the internet to thrive there's a whole ecosystem it's mostly people just tinkering right now some of them for military have some support for that but I think probably you would get a blend there's been enough advances in those kind of pre-internet adapting pre-internet or working with simpler technologies because the internet what's great about it is how distributed it is you can get information in different ways to someone every piece of the information or be the source of the information and that's what's exciting so there's no reason to get rid of that idea we can keep that idea but we just might have to adapt it to earlier technologies or analog technologies yeah in the form of questions that we wouldn't necessarily recreate this broad network that we would actually retract to smaller more autonomous community sizes in other words you wouldn't have to have communication to California you would stay within a region you should read this book and that's a perfect closer you should after you buy the book right over there you should read the book it's quite good but join me in thanking our guests tonight and and once you have bought the book you would be happy to sign it for you and goodbye internet I hope the internet stays I hope it doesn't go down good night