“If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms.” – Henry Miller

Technology is an evolutionary force, sling-shooting the species forward as never before. We are fast approaching a new renaissance, an age of wonder and radical possibility. A recent essay from NextNature entitled EntryParadise spoke about Paradise Engineering and the evolving role of design, saying that “design is about to undergo a paradigm shift – today design starts at the level of the atom. We are drifting into the world of the invisible: virtual realities, nano and biotechnology are increasingly influencing our aesthetics and providing new construction kits for our reality.” While some people might balk at the idea of humans expanding their design palette to the level of the atom, the reality is that every technological shift has ushered in new forms of human flourishing. Technology acts like a scaffolding, a prostheses that expands our sphere of creative expression and perception. Consider these thoughts by Futurist Kevin Kelly: ”Can you imagine how poor our world would be if Bach had been born 1,000 years before the Flemish invented the technology of the harpsichord? Or if Mozart had preceded the technologies of piano and symphony? How vacant our collective imaginations would be if Vincent van Gogh had arrived 5,000 years before we invented cheap oil paint? What kind of modern world would we have if Edison, Greene, and Dickson had not developed cinematic technology before Hitchcock or Charlie Chaplin grew up?” Breakthroughs in technology are always embraced by creatives and unleash new worlds of experience and expression. Technology expands our perceptions and consciousness. Simply look through a microscope or telescope and you’re immediately treated to a dazzling reality you’re ordinarily not privy to.

The next two big emerging technologies are biotech, which is mastering the information processes of biology, and nanotech, which is infusing intelligence into matter. Physicist Freeman Dyson recently spoke of a fast approaching “Age of Wonder,” where “a new generation of artists will write genomes with the fluency that Blake and Byron wrote verses.” NextNature writes, “Nanotechnology is reorganising the natural laws of physics, chemistry or biology at atomic level. [...] Tomorrow collaboration between biologists, electrical engineers and designers, a hitherto inconceivable proposition, will be something we take for granted.” And Andy Clark, author of Natural Born Cyborgs, describes the success of game changers like the iPhone as feeding into this urge for creative transformation. “No wonder smartphones like the Iphone are changing the world,” Clark says. “People are not investing in new toys; they are buying Mindware Upgrades, electronic prostheses capable of extending and transforming our personal reach, thought, and vision.”

The iconic technologist Stewart Brand once said that “we are as gods and might as well get good at it.” In other words, we need to take responsibility for our actions, which increasingly, are planetary in scale. We are indeed as gods- our tools make us so. In symbiosis with our technologies, our powers continue to expand at an exponential rate, and so too, our possibilities. As Alan Harrington wrote in The Immortalist, ”we must never forget we are cosmic revolutionaries, not stooges conscripted to advance a natural order that kills everyone.” And he’s exactly right. We are the species that transcends its limitations. Our function is to expand our boundaries and extend our reach. Who can resist the tug of the stars?

Edward O. Wilson wrote that “we have decommissioned natural selection and must now look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.” Harrington, for one, has decided for us. He boldly proclaimed that ”having invented the gods, we can turn into them.” These are more than self-serving illusions of grandeur. This is a calling for us to ‘own our role’ as cosmic heroes. What we need now is a new conversation about who and what we are.  Just as when the astronauts first saw Earth from the vantage point of space and decided we needed a new story for ourselves in that context, now as we propel towards a technological singularity we’re again in need of a new narrative. The story we craft is of crucial importance if we are to put ourselves into galactic context. I believe the narrative should emphasize the role of the artist and poet as pivotal to communicating the ‘vision of human becoming’. The scientists and engineers who are building the future need the poets to make sense of it. In his book Proust was a Neuroscientist, Jonah Lehrer concludes that “we are made of art and science. Like a work of art, we exceed our materials. Science needs art to frame the mystery, but art needs science so that everything is not a mystery.” The dance between art and science, if done correctly, should ‘epiphanize’ audiences into a state of rapturous awe.

As technology continues to increase our possibilities, the lag time between what we dream about and what we create is shrinking. I was reminded when reading Darwin’s Pharmacy by Rich Doyle that “dreams do not lack reality–they are real patterns of information.” All that exists in the modern world began as a dream. The complexity of a cell phone call is the physical manifestation of our dream to send thoughts to one another across impossible distances, a form of technologically-mediated telepathy.

We’ll have to take poetic license to do this. Philosopher and writer Alain DeBotton wrote that the artist is “willing to sacrifice a naive realism in order to achieve realism of a deeper sort, like a poet who, though less factual than a journalist in describing an event, may nevertheless reveal truths about it that find no place in the other’s literal grid.” We need the philosophers and the artists to make creative extrapolations on where we’re headed.

“Look what is coming,” says Kevin Kelly. “Technology is stitching together all the minds of the living, wrapping the planet in a vibrating cloak of electronic nerves, entire continents of machines conversing with one another, the whole aggregation watching itself through a million cameras posted daily. How can this not stir that organ in us that is sensitive to something larger than ourselves?”

Jason Silva will be speaking this Saturday, October 15 at the Singularity Summit at the 92nd St. Y in NYC.

Its happy space out time. Take a 15 minute trip into unknown landscapes and structures with our friend and Dossier collaborator Josh Slater. So sit back, relax, and strap on your seatbelt. You’ve never been on a ride like this before, with a producer who can rap and control the maestro. Original score by Sahra Motalebi.

This is not an assemblage, it is an albatross that died after eating debris its parents mistook for food. The phenomenon is common in the garbage-choked Midway Atoll where thousands of such corpses appear yearly. The photographer, Chris Jordan, captured these transfixing images just as he found them. See more on the NYRblog, or read Tim Flannery’s piece on the evolving Gaia concept. Click “Read More” for a slideshow of Jordan’s images.

Third Man Records is a Nashville-based label set up by The White Stripes’ Jack White. Their expressed mission includes the promotion of vinyl records, alongside novel digital formats. In a kind of weird meshing of ideas, they will release a 7” single of the song “A Glorious Dawn“ by John Boswell, which was a bit of a YouTube phenomenon and featured previously on this site. The song (and accompanying video) features material taken from astronomer Carl Sagan’s 1980 TV series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, cut up and auto-tuned, with some Stephen Hawking thrown in for good measure.

In Cosmos and other works, Sagan expressed a hopeful and outward-looking brand of science that isn’t common today. One of his theses was that an explanation for the apparent lack of extra-terrestrial life could be found in the possibility that intelligent life forms tend to destroy themselves rather quickly (on cosmological timescales), this at the height of the Cold War.

The Voyager Golden Record was an attempt by Sagan and others to produce an object capable of communicating some of the essentials of Earthly life to any intelligent finder. Copies of the record were launched into space on the 1977 Voyager missions. They include sounds and images from Earth, along with music from an assortment of countries. Many of the images on the back relate to communicating intelligence to some other being. An example Sagan frequently used was that one could simply express a list of known prime numbers, for which there is no natural generating process. This would be proof of sentience.

“A Glorious Dawn” recreates the etchings from the Golden Record on its B-side and is released to coincide with what would have been Sagan’s 75th birthday. I spoke to Third Man capodecina Ben Swank to find out more about the realization of this release.

How did you and Third Man come across the video for “A Glorious Dawn”?

Jack [White] was on a big Cosmos kick, watching the DVDs every day and he came across it on YouTube. It’s since become one of those massive viral videos that you see on tons of blogs… He sent it to the rest of us at the label, and the more he thought about it, he really wanted to do a 45 of it. We had no idea if it would be possible with copyrights and everything – it’s basically one big sample.  

So was there copyright difficulty?

Well, Jack started looking into it and found that Carl Sagan’s son Nick is a screenwriter with his own website. Nick had posted a blog about the video saying how much he loved it, so Jack wrote to him and they talked and Nick put us in touch with his step-mother Ann Druyan, who co-wrote Cosmos (along with Steven Soter), and she owns the copyrights to it. So we got in touch with her and she loves the song and is a big fan of Jack’s music as well. She’s been incredibly helpful and supportive of the whole project, so it turned out to be easier than we thought it would be.

Yes, I remember you emailing me about talking to Ann Druyan.

She’s a really amazing lady. She chaired the committee to pick the music and other material for the Voyager Sounds of Earth record. And they recorded her brainwaves and put those on the record too. She told me she was determined to put Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night” on there. She couldn’t think of a more appropriate song to hurtle through space.

No way!

Pretty rad.

I was going to ask about that. “Dark Was the Night” is a song that every Blues nerd holds in awe…

Totally, and it’s something that we always wondered: how it ended up on there. I had to ask her. That whole Voyager project is something else – it would never happen again. It seems, to me anyway, that the whole thing is so wrapped up personally between Carl and Ann. I think it’s so amazing that they were able to send this personal message out into the vastness of space not knowing that anybody would ever hear it. It says a lot about things now, how something like that couldn’t happen today since it’s almost viewed as a gesture instead of a valuable scientific experiment, but the gesture is what makes it so beautiful.

Amazing. In fact, much of the music on the Voyager record reads like a compilation of exotic 78s and field recordings. There’s a Smithsonian-style archiving feel to it. And anthropological relevance everywhere, which was the point, I guess.

Rarest compilation ever?

A lot of the space science activity at that time was incredibly romantic or ideological. The Voyager project represents some of the best of that.

With regards getting the actual images etched on the vinyl, did that idea just naturally present itself?

It was obviously going to be a one-sided single and we always do etchings on the B-side of our one-siders, usually our logo. When we realized this thing was going ahead we had a meeting where we threw out a lot of ideas. The etching from the Voyager record obviously made the most sense, and we thought it would be a nice tribute for Ann who had been so helpful with everything. It looks so cool too.

What about John Boswell, the musician?

John has been super cool the whole way. He was really grateful that we were able to make it happen – he didn’t see any way of doing it as a proper release due to copyrights and everything. I think he just struck on something that so many people can relate to. It’s a perfect track at the right time, as Cosmos is kind of retro-cool right now. But the words he used from it are so meaningful and Carl is so sincere. There’s not a lick of irony to it.

November 7^th was Carl Sagan Day; did you know that?

Yeah man. We had to rush really hard to get the record pressed for Monday the ninth, which would have been Carl’s 75th birthday.

Here’s a question to do with Third Man’s policy on vinyl:  Steve Albini has talked about how easily digital formats become obsolete and the quintessentially robust nature of any analogue format. It takes very particular technology to encode/decode digital information. Analogue is simply a scratched picture of a sound wave; it doesn’t get simpler than that. Carl Sagan obviously believed that any intelligent being could figure out vinyl, which links in with your mission regarding that medium. That’s really not a question…

And they included easy-to-read binary code and hieroglyphs to show aliens how to play it.

I think we’ll stop with aliens listening to Willie Johnson… Thanks Ben.

John Boswell’s “A Glorious Dawn” is released today, November 9^th.

I came across this wonderful clip from BBC’s Life on Earth from 1979, featuring a young David Attenborough, while searching for samples of Edward Williams music for the program, which has recently been released for the first time by Trunk Records.

A fascinating article on the sex lives of seahorses in The Guardian today.  Above is Jean Painlevé’s brilliant The Seahorse (1934).  In this version Painlevé’s enthusiastic scientific-poetic narration is replaced with a soundtrack by Current 93.  I prefer the original but still worth watching.

Thank you Filip Tyden.

Carl Sagan was an astronomer who hosted several successful popular science shows in the 1970s and 80s. He was deeply involved in bringing different aspects of science to public attention and also made some groundbreaking contributions to the research into extraterrestrial life. He believed that the existence of other technological civilizations was highly probable, but that these civilizations also have a strong tendency to self-destruct and are therefore not as easy to make contact with as one would statistically expect. In this musical tribute, Sagan is accompanied by fellow space scientist Stephen Hawking. Click “Read More” for the video.

Because who wouldn’t want a pair of artificial Japanese breasts with a built-in heartbeat? Or for that matter, a precarious outdoor cage in which to dangle your infant several stories over the street. LIFE magazine has cataloged its picks for most absurd inventions of all time, most of which are rather amusing. A few of our favorites after the jump (rocket belt, anyone?) or visit LIFE‘s site for the full list of weird science-inspired oddities.

LIFE via Animal.