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Every night, in my dreams, I watch the world die. After a long absence, I have returned to find that the life-giving systems which recycle waste back into useable nutrients have failed. My friends are dead, reduced to grotesque rotting skeletons and mouldering lumps, except for a few last survivors who are barely hanging on to an attenuated half-life of hunger and shallow comatose breaths. I desperately rush to help: I turn on machines to clean away the toxic miasma. I ply the dying victims with food and oxygen… but the microbial ecosystems upon which everything depend are mortally degraded. My last friends are too far gone, and they expire painfully while I watch powerless. What is left is dead world of complete desolation. The precious seed of life has failed and I know that I am the author of this annihilation.
This is all true. I have such dreams all the time and they torment me more than you can know. My art and writing—my entire life quest flows from these nightly horrors. Worst of all, these dreams are based on true experiences from my childhood which color every news article I read. Every opinion I hear about humankind, the world, and the fate of all living things is overshadowed by these prophetic nightmares. However, before you call the men with big white nets, there is a critical twist which I must share with you. In these dreams, everyone is a fish and the world is an aquarium.
Here is what happened. When I was a child, I wanted to be an ichthyologist. I took all of my allowance money and holiday presents and saved to build miniature worlds of wonder like the ones I saw in hobbyist magazines. I read up on each fish species—what they ate and how they lived and what their natural habitat was like. I learned about nematodes and frozen brine shrimp and undergravel filters to help nitrifying bacteria flourish.
Back then I had a tropical South America tank of beautiful fish from the Amazon—little tetras like colored gems, adorable armored catfish with big kindly cartoon eyes, angelfish with fins like a bride’s veil, a knife fish named Ripley who was like a black electrical ghost. I had a tank of Tanganyika cichlids from East Africa (near humankind’s first home). They lurked in volcanic rocks and I could see their huge mouths (for safely rearing their young) frowning from the crevices. At the apex of my involvement with the hobby, I even had a marine tank filled with fluorescent damselfish, shrimp like rainbows, and a clever triggerfish which was busy excavating a private lair into a hunk of red tube coral. It was magical! The miniature worlds I built were incredible. I even had a classical tank of google-eyed goldfish with multicolored pebbles and a porcelain mermaid in the center.
But each of these little glass paradises failed and died. Sometimes they were destroyed slowly by unknown bacterial mishaps which caused the ammonia or nitrogen cycle to shift off-kilter. Sometimes a heater would go out or get flipped to maximum setting and thermal shock would kill my poor pets. The Tanganyika cichlids got stressed out over territory and ate each other whole with their big mouths (just like NY real-estate developers!). Other times the apocalypse was swift: algal blooms or invasive fungi or diseases which I unknowingly brought from the pet store would ravage the tank. Once, the glass of my Amazon-basin aquarium shattered while we were out shopping. My family returned to find the ceilings dripping water. The dying angelfish were lying gasping on the wet pebbles at the bottom of the empty tank. It was horrible. Even the goldfish ultimately died. A weird dropsy caused their gleaming orange bodies to bulge out and pop apart. I love animals and some of the fish had real personality and emotions (in addition to being beautiful) but, despite tremendous heartfelt effort, my stewardship killed them all.
And these experiences haunt me at night. My dreams used to involve a few aquariums which I would try to save…but as I have grown up, the dreams have grown up too. Now sometimes the setting will be a sere coastline which seems uninhabited at first, until I realize the landscape itself is made of giant earth colored fish which are slowly dying. Lately the dreams have moved into the forest where the trees are made of deadwood and the boulders are the hulks of once-living things. As adulthood corrodes away my figurative dreams of success, strength, love, and meaning, my literal nighttime dreams grow bigger and worse. In dreams, I have walked through cities of contagion, plague, and starvation. At night I have sailed a junk across an ink black ocean with nothing in it but slips of charred paper and plastic bags floating like ghosts.
This is why zoos and aquariums (the big public ones) fascinate me. Surely teams of professionals with hundred million dollar endowments can surely keep our animal friends alive! Except…they can’t always. Even with all of the best veterinarians, ecologists, and biologists, working night and day, things still go wrong in weird unexpected ways (by the way, this somewhat pitiless assessment doesn’t mean I stand against zoos: I see them as a combination of ambassador, laboratory, and Noah’s ark). My first job was as an intern at a synthetic ecosystem designed by the world’s foremost designer of synthetic ecosystems…and it was a beautiful study in gradual failure and unexpected interactions. Ecology is complicated and we don’t understand it very well
We are living through one of the great meltdowns which periodically occur throughout Life’s 4.5 billion year history [eds. note: if religious people can capitalize genitive pronouns for God, then Ferrebeekeeper can capitalize a word which we are using to betoken all of the living things from Earth throughout all of time]. It doesn’t take a geologist’s comprehension of the End-Permian mass extinction to imagine ourselves as a toxic black smear in a rock column of the future. I know from reading eschatology that I am not the only person who is tormented by dreams of Armageddon.
At the same time humankind is ballooning in number and appetite, we are also learning at an exponential rate. My experiences with little terrariums and fishtanks does not need to foreshadow the fate of orcas, vinegar scorpions, honeybees, banana trees…and humans. We can use our hard-won knowledge to keep the world’s precious living things alive! We can even carry the sacred seed of life into the heavens. Space would be a better place for us anyway—a place where we can truly spread our wings and grow exponentially towards godhood. It is what we have always wanted…and it is tantalizingly close.
One of my favorite poems has what might be my favorite quotation in English “Learn from your dreams what you lack.” I HAVE learned that…and now I am telling you too. We lack a comprehensive understanding of ecology and the life sciences. We lack the political cohesion and organizational skills to make effective use of what we already know. Those things are not outside of our grasp. Most of the smartest and hardest-working people here spend their lives ripping people off with complicated financial products and elaborate tech products (which are really only online rolodexes or digital catalogs or what-have-you). What a waste! The bankers could throw away their nasty spreadsheets, the doctors could stop filling out pointless insurance forms, the engineers could stop making wireless blenders and cryptocurrency. We could all start building space cities NOW..this very day (although the first generation of those cities are going to have some troubles with the synthetic oceans). The possibilities are endless! Our knowledge and imagination can take us to where we have always dreamed of being. Our failure to be smart, brave, and creative will take us all to one of my dead festering nightmares.
Those fish should not have died in vain. We should not die in vain either. Let’s build a future worth having.
Today’s post features a true oddball in the world of royal headpieces. This strange yet compelling crown is “the diadem of the stars.” It was made in 1863 for Maria Pia of Savoy, wife of King Luís I of Portugal. Although the piece was made in the mid-19th century its minimalist lines and weird geometric pentagons have a distinctly modern appearance.
I love space art (a category which I will reluctantly go ahead and put this crown under), but I am not sure I care for the diadem’s look in comparison with more traditional arch-and-cross type crowns. The white. pink, and yellow diamonds do make me yearn for the stars though (a feeling which I wish more of us would embrace) so maybe the Queen Consort was onto something.
Sometimes if you aren’t watching the heavens (or the news) closely enough, you miss a major astronomical discovery. For example last summer, astronomers discovered a galaxy which formed only one or two billion years after the Big Bang (so I guess it is unclear whethter I missed this story by one year or by 12 billion). At any rate, the galaxy hunters used the Hubble space telescope to peer through a powerful gravitational lense far away in space. Gravitational lenses are areas where timespace is warped like a huge lense by high-gravity phenomena, and a viewer can use them like a huge lense to see far-away objects. By using the Hubble telescope together with the gravitational lense they were able to see back a dozen billion years in time to the edge of the universe…as it once was not long after creation. What they saw perplexed them.
There is a fundamental difference between galaxies. Galaxies where stars are being formed tend to be blue and spiral shaped (like our own beloved Milky Way!). Galaxies where stars have largely stopped forming are “red and dead” since the remaining stars tend to be long lived red dwarf stars and the bright young (short-lived) blue stars are mostly gone. These red galaxies are not shaped like spirals, but tend to be elliptical shaped (like an egg or a football, not like one of those evil gym machines).
The ancient galaxy at the edge of the universe was neither of those colors or shapes. It was a dense yellow disk. Stars formed in an (enormous) accretion disk but then, for some reason, new star formation stopped. The blue stars burned out (“the light that shines twice as bright etc, etc..”), but the yellow middle aged stars were still burning. The galaxy had three times the mass of the Milky Way but scrunched into a pancake of much smaller area.
So do galaxies always form as disks and then either become self-renewing blue spirals (maybe by colliding with other galaxies or clouds of dust)or dead red footballs? Or was this early yellow disk galaxy an abberation? Or is our own galaxy truly new (well…newish…being only a few billion years old)? I do not understand astrophysics well enough to answer these questions or even formulate them properly (although I get the sense some of these questions may not yet be answered by anyone in any comprehensive way), but I would love to hear what people can add to this rudimentary yet compelling story of shapes and colors.
Don’t change that channel! Long-time readers who glance at the top of the page may erroneously think they have stumbled into a different blog, but nothing could be further from the truth. After many years of happily blogging with our old banner (the inimitable moralizing masterpiece “Beer Street and Gin Lane” by William Hogarth) Ferrebeekeeper is moving to a painting specially made for this blog. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the presence of mind to actually paint the image to fit the strange squashed aspect ratio of WordPress blog banners, so most days you will have to content yourself with looking at a central slice of the full image (click here for larger resolution).
For today though, here is the entire work. You can see some of the various themes of Ferrebeekeeper represented in this strange floating flatfish. A hive of industrious bees works away collecting the pollen from a colorful garden as a gothic angel wielding a farm implement watches from the sky. A stern bee-like woman with a Canadian waterfowl and a garden snail watches the bees work beneath a jeweled crown of gold and a celestial star (which represents astronomy). In the right side of the sky, a pigeon flies up into the clouds (perhaps startled by the green serpent). The central fish hovers above a sunset sea where a Chinese junk sails on to a historical Gothic city (near-future blogging plans include a great deal more writing about metropolises of the past, present, and future).
I omitted my favorite theme “Deities of the Underworld” in favor of the large central flounder itself. As you may have gathered, the flatfish is currently of paramount symbolic import in my work and represents topology, ecology, history, and the ever-changing life cycle. At the more outre range of these meanings, however, the benthic fish is a sort of emissary between the world of life and the dark gods beneath (an interpretation sharpened by humankind’s merciless depredations of the bottom-dwelling fish). The new banner is also an attempt to bring my various pursuits more closely together: a sort of “branding” exercise if you will (I also hope you will kindly forgive this vulgar language borrowed MBA programs–I usually try to speak more coherently and elegantly, but lately I have been feeling somewhat at-sea and I am willing to borrow some terminology and concepts from these execrable rogues). Speaking of cross-branding, you may want to check out the great flounder oracle! Ask it questions, and the sagacious fish answers with the truth of the deep!
I hope you like my new banner. Like most artwork not made on a computer it looks better in the real world, but at least it suits the theme of the blog. As always, let me know what you think and get ready to read more about cities (and maybe see some more enigmatic fish-themed art). Thanks again for reading and I will see you here tomorrow!
I am still working away at my flatfish project. Here are four recent drawings/mixed media works which I made. The flounder above is a cosmic flounder and represents humankind’s aspirations for the stars. The mathematicians and engineers (here represented as ancient Egyptians) do their best with the tools and calculations they have available, but the universe is so vast. The flounder represents all Earth life waiting to be lifted to the heavens. As they struggle, insouciant aliens fly by waving. The combination of ancient and modern elements make one think of the biblical ark (which is represented in the next picture. The flounder is, of course, a watery beast and is unmoved by divine wrath, although it does look a bit appalled at the inundation.
Next is a picture of a crude and vigorous flatfish made out of thick lines. The fish swims by a Viking long hall as seabirds wheel about in the sky, but thanks to some trick of the world (or perhaps the artist’s whimsy) a coati is raiding the pumpkins and fruiting vines. Is this scene unfolding in the old world or the new?
Finally, there is a scene of a medieval styleeremitic brother who has forgotten his scriptures and is now contemplating the life-giving sun. A saintly duck and a far-flying swallow look kindly on his devotions, but the monk’s cat seems unmoved by his devotion. Crystals hint that religious fervor is becoming convoluted by the vagaries and appetites of the modern world, which can be witnessed all around the verdant turbot. Yet the fish and its inhabitants maintain a solemn and studious otherworldliness. Whatever this mysterious devotion is, it is represented in each of these 4 fish, but the viewer will have to devote some time and thought of their own in order to elucidate the subject of this devout zeal.
Do you ever miss the 70s? That time will never return (although stagflation and oil crunches might make an unexpected comeback from the weird devil’s brew of bad economic and geopolitical policies which we are experimenting with) however there is a more positive reminder of the age of disco in the very heavens themselves. At present, there are three disco balls in orbit around Earth. The first and most significant is actually a 70s artifact: LAGEOS (Laser Geodynamics Satellite) was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on May 4th 1976. The 408 kilogram (900 pound) satellite has no electronic components ore even moving parts: it is a brass sphere studded with 426 jewel-like retroreflectors. 422 of these retroreflectors are made from fused silica glass (to reflect visible light), however the remaining 4 are germanium, for infrared experiments.
Orbiting the entire planet every 225.70 minutes, LAGEOSl is a pretty stupendous piece of space art in its own right, however it was designed for a serious scientific purpose. Lageos provides an orbiting laser ranging benchmark. To quote space.com:
Over the past 40 years, NASA has used LAGEOS to measure the movement of Earth’s tectonic plates, detect irregularities in the rotation of the planet, weigh the Earth and track small shifts in its center of mass via tiny changes in the satellite’s orbit and distance from Earth.
Measurements made using LAGEOS have also been used to confirm Einstein’s general theory of relativity, since measurements made on this scale demonstrate a measurable “frame dragging effect” (which you are going to have to figure out with some help from your favorite physicist). The satellite also illustrates the Yarkovsky effect, which explains how an object is heated by photons on one side will later emit that heat in a way which slows the object. This latter effect will eventually cause LAGEOS’ orbit to deteriorate and bring it tumbling to Earth. Scientists estimate this will happen 8.4 million years from now, so there is still time to contemplate this sphere. Also there is a small time capsule on board to capture certain scientific truths and human ephemera for the long ages.
LAGEOS was so useful and proved to be such a success that NASA launched an identical sister craft in 1992 (how did I miss all of these interesting events?). This still leaves one disco ball satellite unaccounted for. The final craft is “The Humanity Star” which serves no purpose other than being art. Launched on January 21st of this year (2018), the humanity star is a regular polygonal solid with 65 triangular sides. It is made of carbon fiber embedded with enormously reflective panels and is meant to be seen twinkling in the night sky to make humankind collectively reflect on our shared home, the Earth. The Humanity Star orbits much lower than the LAGEOS satellites. They are 5,900 kilometres (3,700 miles) from Earth’s surface, whereas the humanity star is only 283.4 kilometers (176.1 miles) away from the planet at its perigree. It whips around the Earth every 90 minutes on a circumpolar orbit (which means it is visible from everywhere at some point. You could look up where it is online and go out and find it with fieldglasses. The object glimmers and shimmers in unusual ways, sometimes appearing as bright as Sirius (the brightest star save for the sun), but usually twinkling like barely visible stars. The Humanity Star won’t last long—it is scheduled to fall into Earth’s gravity well and burn up in fall of this year, so check it out before it is gone. The craft was controversial: some serious aerospace mavens objected to launching an object into orbit to serve no purpose other than art, yet, as an artist I am happy to know it is out there. Maybe go look at it and let me know if it inspires you.
Ferrebeekeeper has written about nanosatellites—tiny swarms of lightweight & (relatively) inexpensive satellites which mimic the functionality of big pricey birds. That article was enthusiastic about the tiny spacecraft, however the FCC (which reviews communications satellites and approves/denies satellite launches) has some reasonable reservations about the idea, particularly considering all the of space junk which is already whipping through near-earth orbit at 28,000 kilometers per hour (17,500 miles per hour). Last year Swarm Technologies, a mysterious and shadowy start-up founded in 2016 and based in Los Altos, California applied to the FCC to launch 4 little satellites called BEEs (which, in the inane blather of forced acronyms, stands for “Basic Electronic Elements”). The FCC turned down the request, concluding that the functionality of the satellites (which are maybe for some sort of network?) did not make up for the safety risk they posed. Yet Swarm Technologies launched them into orbit anyway in mid-January, in a rocket which blasted off from India. Each Bee is 10 centimeters in length and width, and 2.8 centimeters in height.
National security agencies (which have substantial technologies for monitoring Earth orbit), are able to track the “bees” but it is an open question whether they are fully dark or whether they are producing little pings and chirps for their well-heeled private masters here on Earth.
This is an unprecedented first for the FCC and other space agencies which have never been so blatantly flouted by a scofflaw corporation (although given the brazen, lawless, and dangerous conduct of America’s highhanded corporations and lordly oligarchs, it will probably not be the last). The satellites lack propulsion systems and they will probably fall back into Earth’s gravity well within 10 years and burn up (I suspect an astrophysicist could tell you something less approximate, but this timeframe should serve for general purposes).
If Swarm could have held their horses a bit, they may have been able to reapply: Lockheed Martin is currently building a much more sophisticated radar system to monitor small objects in orbit. I wonder if this is a glimpse of the privatized future of space which everyone is always touting. If so it is not a particularly compelling picture.
I have been watching NASA with great consternation lately. The space agency has maintained its budget (which is good, in today’s world of brutal trench-warfare politics), however for 15 months NASA has had no leader and it seemed to be stuck in a holding pattern, unable to move forward on missions. Finally, in April, the President’s candidate for the position of head administrator was confirmed, Jim Bridenstine a fundamentalist congressman from Oklahoma who does not believe in global warming and opposes LGBTQ rights. He is the first non-scientist chief administrator in the agency’s history.
Bridenstein does however have a background as a Navy officer which is promising. It is possible he can put his more recent background as a divisive political agitator and an ignoramus behind him. His first major speech was somewhat encouraging: he reaffirmed the United States’ commitment to send missions to both Mars and the Moon in the not-enormously distant future. The historic first moon landing was 49 years ago and the last manned mission to the moon took place in 1972 (three years before Bridenstein was born). The new administrator compared these missions to the Lewis and Clark Expedition and went on to say it is time for NASA and private aerospace ventures to work on building a transcontinental railroad to space in the current era. That is a fine metaphor (although I don’t trust private aerospace ventures any more than people of the 19th century trusted crooked railroad monopolies). Bridenstein needs to back up his elegant words with real plans for NASA. Currently, the USA can’t even put a human in space, much less send one to the moon or another planet. Bridenstein needs to act quickly and decisively to show that he is not an agency head like Scott Pruitt, Ben Carson, or Jeff Sessions (which is to say a leader who embodies the opposite & antithetical values from the agency they were sent to run).
I liked your railroad metaphor, Jim, but you need to appoint a lot of smart people to organize a meaningful and coherent schedule for America’s favorite agency.
Have you seen photos of Venus? When the planet is observed in visible light it looks like a big bland ecru ball (see above). Put a whiteboard and some plastic rolling chairs on that puppy and you would have a corporate conference room in some awful suburban office-park. Yet ultraviolet imaging of Venus paints a somewhat more interesting picture of swirling bands or darkness in the heady acid atmosphere of our sister planet. But what does that mean?
The dark bands turn out to be the result of sulfur compounds (carbonyl sulfide, hydrogen sulfide and sulfur dioxide) and other yet unknown chemical compounds in the upper atmosphere of Venus. On Earth these sulfur compounds are hallmarks of life…or of volcanic activity. Some scientists are provocatively asking whether extremophile bacteria could have a place in the temperate upper atmosphere of Earth’ closest planetary neighbor. The bacteria could use the rich sulfur and carbon clouds as building blocks and the UV (and other EM radiation!) bombardment of the sun for energy. Perhaps, they muse, these dark bands are something akin to algal blooms in Earth’s oceans.
More than a billion years ago, Venus enjoyed a period of prolonged earthlike climate with surface water and an atmosphere which was not so hellishly heavy and hot. But something went hideously awry and runaway greenhouse effect created a terrible feedback loop which changed the planet’s surface into the monstrous place it is today. Apparently the igneous/volcanic processes of Venus are rather different than those of Earth, so it was probably not all treeferns, friendly dinosaurs, and bikini-clad aliens even before the runaway greenhouse phase melted away the old surface of Venus, but perhaps bacteria (or analogous lifeforms) could have evolved and escaped the catastrophe by moving into the upper clouds (which, as previously noted here, have temperatures not unlike those of Earth’s surface).
My guess is that Venus is lifeless as a jackhammer (though, like a jackhammer it can give the alarming appearance of life), yet even if this is the case, we should know more about all of this! What happened to Venus’ original surface? Was there ever life there? What is going on with its volcanoes and internal geology? What is the composition of the clouds of Venus? Is there anything there other than strange sufur compounds and esoteric hydrocarbons formed from the mixture of sulfur, carbon dioxide, and UV radiation? Once again, our nearest neighbor is beckoning. We need to move forward with sophisticated atmospheric probes (like VAMP) and NASA should collaborate with Russia on their next Venus mission (it looks like our governments are closer than ever anyway). For some reason, popular imagination disdains Venus, yet the questions there seem salient, and the possibilities for a nearby Earth-sized world of unlimited energy and resources seem, well, unlimited.
Hey, remember the super-massive black hole at the center of the galaxy? Well, scientists have been thinking about it too, and they concluded that other black holes should sink into the middle of the galaxy near to the central monster. To find out if this holds true, they utilized the Chandra X-Ray Observatory (an x-ray telescope located on a satellite in orbit around Earth) to observe stars near to the center of the galaxy. Black holes can’t be detected on their own, but if they interact with nearby stars they produce esoteric x-rays which can be detected (so long as the x-ray telescope is outside of a planetary atmosphere, which absorbs x-rays, thank goodness). Within the tiny (er, relatively tiny) three light year area which they scrutinized, the astronomers discovered dozens of black holes. Extrapolating this data leads them to conclude there are more than 10,000 black holes at the center of our galaxy. I wish I could contextualize this for you, but I just can’t… the concept of 10,000 super-dense gravity wells flattening and tearing all of the spacetime in the center of the galaxy into Swiss cheese is to disturbing for me to deal with (in any other way than blurting it out in a midnight blog). I’m not sure this universe is safe at all. I am going to go lie down.
