While speaking at Long Now’s Long Conversation with Peter Schwartz last year, NASA Ames Research Director Pete Worden announced a partnered initiative with DARPA to explore long-term space travel, calling it the 100 Year Starship Study. Watch video of their talk in our previous post about it.

The conversation around this research agenda will be opened wide at the 100 Year Starship Study public symposium in Orlando later this fall.

The organizers say they’ve received 520 abstracts and will be choosing from among them the presentations for the event. Seven main research tracks will guide the agenda:

• Time-Distance Solutions
• Habitats and Environmental Science
• Biology and Space Medicine
• Education, Social, Economic and Legal Considerations
• Destinations
• Philosophical and Religious Considerations
• Communication of the Vision

Long Now’s Stewart Brand will participate in the Symposium by filling the chair overseeing the Philosophical and Religious Considerations Track.

There will also be a Sci-Fi Author’s Discussion Panel featuring, among others, Charlie Stross and former SALT speaker Vernor Vinge.

The 100 Year Starship Study public symposium will be held from September 30 through October 2, 2011 at the Hilton Convention Center in Orlando, FL. Registration is free.

Join us for the Record-a-thon this Saturday July 30 at the Internet Archive and help document and promote the languages used in your own community! We need your help to meet our goal of recording 50 languages in a single day! How many languages can you help us document? Bring yourself and your multilingual friends and be the stars of your own grassroots language documentation project!

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Elizabeth Lindsey, National Geographic

Updated Schedule of Events!

Plan to attend in-person or remotely?

RSVP here through EventBrite!

An exhibit currently on display at Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center resurrects a liveliness rarely associated with Ancient Greco-Roman sculpture. When asked to conjure an image of Roman décor circa the year zero, sparkling white marble generally abounds. It turns out that a closer look at these millennia-old figures reveals that they were once covered in vibrantly-colored paints. In an article about the exhibit, Stanford News describes how undergraduate student Ivy Nguyen used ultra-violet light to find trace amounts of pigment on the surface of ancient sculptures, still present after over two thousand years:

While the technique is not new, Nguyen went beyond that with the use of x-ray fluorescence (XRF), commonly used in conservation sciences. XRF can find traces of pigment that are invisible to the unaided eye.

Nguyen’s ultraviolet imaging with the black light reveals “ghost images,” showing the areas that might be promising to test. The XRF reveals what’s in those ghost images.

Although other exhibitions have focused on painted Greek and Roman statues, this exhibition focuses on the science as well as the art, taking the visitor through the laboratory process with cases displaying pigments used in ancient times, wall-mounted images of the analysis and small, painted terra cotta works from Cantor’s ancient collection that were used as controls in the study.

Two versions of a restored sculpture are on display at the exhibit. One version includes colors that were found through testing while the other, taking into consideration that only base layers of paint have survived, includes additional layers of painted decorations that may more closely resemble the originals.

Through some combination of the quality of ancient pigment and the creative application of modern scientific technology we find ourselves able to catch a more accurate glimpse of a civilization long fallen. To see the painted replicas of Stanford’s Maenad sculpture (and to get some ideas about what materials to use for your next paint job), visit the Cantor Arts Center, which is free to the public. The exhibit ends on August 7th.

When it comes to Danish meta-mockumentaries about virtual worlds and mysterious clocks, My Avatar and Me is the one to see. Starring and co-directed by Mikkel Stolt, the film features cameos by Long Now co-founder Danny Hillis and the Foundation’s Nevada site.

My Avatar and Me can be viewed on Constellation.com, a global digital movie theater:

“My Avatar and Me is a creative documentary-fiction film about a man who enters the virtual world of Second Life to pursue his personal dreams and ambitions. His journey into cyberspace becomes a magic learning experience, which gradually opens the gates to a much larger reality.”

The next showtime is Sunday July 10th and writer/co-director Bente Milton will be virtually present to answer questions and to discuss the film.

Historic photographs can show us what people used to wear, what tools they utilized, what their cities, countryside and wilderness looked like. But the details are often difficult to discern, simply because the resolution of the images is so limited. Imagine a digital photograph of Thomas Edison’s workshop with such high resolution that you could zoom in, and zoom in, and zoom in, until you could read the notes scrawled on the papers on his desk, name the books on his shelves, and identify what brand of tea he had been drinking.

Gigapixel technology, originally developed for exploring the surface of Mars, uses a swiveling robotic camera mount to take a large number of pictures in multiple directions which are then stitched together with software, resulting in a single, wonderfully high-resolution panorama. Illah Nourbakhsh of Carnegie Mellon University led the robotics team at NASA that designed the technology. He and his team, along with other individuals and organizations, have thought of all sorts of applications for the gigapan.

Conservation Magazine recently reprinted part of an article from Science that described how the collaborative team responsible for the invention worked to make it more widely accessible, and how it is being used in the service of environmental conservation.

That experience led directly to a technology that has become a powerful tool for teaching and public engagement with science and the natural world. Scientists are also using it for projects as diverse as analyzing Middle Eastern petroglyphs, monitoring an urban forest, archiving a museum insect collection, studying a collapsed honeybee colony, keeping tabs on glaciers, examining erosion in a jaguar reserve, and viewing Galápagos fish clustered into a bait ball.

…The final image contains more data than most personal computers can handle, so Nourbakhsh and his team developed a massive server system and website, www.gigapan.org, for storing and accessing GigaPans. When viewers zoom in on an area of an image, they seem to fly into the image itself. The result is an immersive, interactive experience that can reveal surprising details—an ant on a leaf in a forest, or a hummingbird sipping nectar from a flower in a backyard. It’s like viewing nature through a huge magnifying glass.

GigaPan was initially developed by computer scientist Randy Sargent, a member of Nourbakhsh’s NASA team, who was inspired by the experience of investigating the landscape of Mars through gigapixel imagery. The online platform represents an exciting opportunity for users (of what will likely become an increasingly affordable and efficient technology) to create and store images that could prove immensely useful in the future for archiving, documenting, scientific surveying, and even art and education. The organization’s website describes its goals and purpose:

GigaPan is the newest development of the Global Connection Project, which aims to help us meet our neighbors across the globe, and learn about our planet itself. GigaPan will help bring distant communities and peoples together through images that have so much detail that they are, themselves, the objects of exploration, discovery and wonder. We believe that enabling people to explore, experience, and share each other’s worlds can be a transforming experience.

This technology and service are a step towards deep-sightedness, an opportunity to capture the Big Here photographically, and examine it closely and carefully. You can dive into some gigapixel images, like this picture of downtown Beirut, at the Gigapan site.

Here’s a beautiful time-lapse of a pulsing, breathing, flowing superorganism:

Mindrelic – Manhattan in motion from Mindrelic on Vimeo.

(via stellar)

Maarten Lens-FitzGerald got in touch recently to let us know that someone had created a layer within the Layar augmented reality platform that geo-tags a film shown by Rick Prelinger at his annual Lost Landscapes of San Francisco event.

The film was created shortly before San Francisco’s devastating earthquake by placing an early video camera on the front of a streetcar as it rolled along Market Street toward the city’s Ferry Terminal.

If you open the Layar browser on a smartphone while standing along the route that camera took over a century ago, you’ll see what it’s operator saw – dirt & dust, horses & buggies, people on bikes and even a few early automobiles.

It’s kind of like a real-life Wayback Machine!

While many Japanese towns were completely destroyed by the tsunami in March, several escaped potentially dire fates. Some villages were warned of the dangers of building too close to water by tablets and monoliths erected in the wakes of previous disasters.

According to this AP story, the village of Fudai took a technological brute-force approach, spearheaded by a previous mayor. Kotaku Wamura was mayor of Fudai for 10 terms and, during the 70s, fought city council resistance to augment a 51-foot tall seawall with flood gates of the same height. Wamura had witnessed the 1933 tsunami and was deeply affected by the devastation.

Fudai is fortunate to be located in a valley just narrow enough to be fortified against rising waters. The size and the expense of doing so put many off his plan, but in the end, Wamura won and the floodgates were finished in 1984.

The result last March was minimal damage, isolated mostly to the city’s port, only one missing resident who insisted on checking his boat after the quake, and many new visitors paying respect and expressing gratitude at the grave of Mr. Wamura, who passed away in 1997.

Gawker blog Kotaku did a little digging of their own into Wamura and found a photograph of him, mention that his name means “good luck advantage” and point out some transliteration problems in the AP story.

Living in modern civilization, it can be easy to sometimes forget just how much *stuff* we rely on to meet our basic needs and just how much scientific sweat and blood it’s all taken to create. Bruce Mau illustrates this in the beginning of his book Massive Change by using the metaphor of modern air travel:

“Every plane crash is a rupture, a shock to the system, precisely because our experience of flight is so carefully designed away from the reality of the event. As we sip champagne, read the morning paper, and settle in before takeoff, we choose not to experience the torque, the thrust, the speed, the altitude, the temperature, the thousands of pounds of explosive jet fuels cradled beneath us, the infinite complexity of the onboard systems, and the very real risks and dangers of takeoff and landing.”

The technological apparatus that is modern civilization, or The Technium as Kevin Kelly calls it, allows us to fly high in style. But, it’s a complicated and often fragile mess designed to channel very powerful forces – and it can fail catastrophically if we aren’t careful. Additionally, it’s taken many generations of accumulated knowledge and expertise to craft and enable such soaring capability.

Referencing that hard-won store of knowledge, Richard Feynman once asked,

“If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words?”

Inspired by Feynman’s question, Seed Magazine asked eleven scientists,

“Imagine—much as Feynman asked his audience—that in a mission to change everyone’s thinking about the world, you can take only one lesson from your field as a guide. In a single statement, what would it be?”

Some interesting themes fall out, as well as some contradicting ideas:

• Paul Ehrlich, Carl Folke and Enric Sala all point out the reciprocity between the human economy and the biosphere, in the seeming hope of illustrating our need to conceptualize the limits in which we as a species operate.
• A psuedo-debate pops up between proponents and critics of reductionism. Robet Sapolsky, Steven Strogatz and George Sugihara weigh in.
• Marc Hauser and Dominic Johnson assert the importance of understanding evolution’s influence on our world and our selves.

It’s an interesting challenge, to distill everything we’ve learned over the last few millennia into a useful sentence. Which theories have been most important? What details would we be most hard-pressed to re-discover? Perhaps the most all-encompassing answer comes from John Wilbanks, vice president of science at Creative Commons:

“Knowledge is a public good and increases in value as the number of people possessing it increases.”

If pondering the essence of modern civilization and technology gets your gears going, don’t miss the Manual for Civilization, a list of projects focused on preserving the technical knowledge it takes to build and maintain the infrastructure on which we depend collected by Long Now’s Alexander Rose or Long Now Board Member Kevin Kelly’s Library of Utility, a proposal to collect such knowledge, and to store it in a place that might have a reasonable chance of surviving the kind of catastrophe that would make its contents necessary. Also: this.