Planetology

RPI Thesis 2013/14

PLANETOLOGY

Instructors: Carla Leitao/Ed Keller

Contacts: carla@ubiroom.net/machinicphylum@mac.com

 

In “Noah’s Ark Eggs and Viviparous Plants”, delivered by Freeman Dyson at the Starship Century Symposium, a stark new concept of dwelling typologies is described.

“Looking ahead fifty or a hundred years, we shall be learning how to use genetic information creatively. We shall then be in a position to design biosphere populations adapted to survive and prosper in various environments on various planets, satellites, asteroids, and comets. For each location we could design a biosphere genome, and for each biosphere genome we could design an egg out of which an entire biosphere could grow. It would be a miniature Noah’s ark, containing thousands or millions of microscopic eggs programmed to grow into the various species of a biosphere. It would also contain nutrients and life-support to enable the growth of the biosphere to get started. The first species to emerge from a Noah’s ark egg would be warm-blooded plants designed to collect energy from sunlight and keep themselves warm in a cold environment. Warm blooded plants would then provide warmth and shelter for other creatures to enjoy.”

“We would be the midwives, bringing life (…) all over the universe, as far as our Noah’s ark eggs could travel.”

“Two external structures make warm blooded plants possible, a greenhouse and a mirror. The greenhouse is an insulating shell protecting the warm interior from the cold outside, with a semitransparent window allowing sunlight or starlight from a wide area onto the window. The mirror is an optical reflector or system of reflectors in the cold region outside the greenhouse, concentrating sunlight or starlight from a wide area onto the window. Inside the greenhouse are the normal structures of a terrestrial plant, leaves using the energy of incoming light for photosynthesis, and roots reaching down into the icy ground to find nutrient minerals. Since there is no atmosphere to supply the plant with carbon dioxide, the roots must find mineral sources of carbon and oxygen to stay alive. We see in the light emitted from comets, as they come close to the sun, that these icy object contain plenty of carbon and oxygen as well as nitrogen and other elements essential to life.”

Freeman Dyson, “Noah’s Ark Eggs and Viviparous Plants”
in Starship Century, Toward the Grandest Horizon

———–

This vision refers to the recurring interest in space travel and exploration, and the need to think of self-sufficient dwellings in radical environments for human inhabitation away from Earth. However, this image also reminds us of the often found mismatches between ecosystems on Earth and their diverse set of inhabitants, by reason of the abrupt change of the former [ecosystems] or the either unexpected or emerging incompatibility for the latter [inhabitants].

Moreover, Dyson’s vision follows his many decades of unapologetic thought about scientific advancements in terms of their potential to transform concepts of life as we know it – of changing cultures themselves as they relate to scientific explorations and experiments. In “Our Biotech Future”, another article from 2007, Dyson forecasts the intertwining roles of biotech and human culture, naming it the hallmark of change for the 21st Century, after the 20th Century computation revolution.
“Domesticated biotechnology, once it gets into the hands of housewives and children, will give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures, rather than the monoculture crops that the big corporations prefer. New lineages will proliferate to replace those that monoculture farming and deforestation have destroyed. Designing genomes will be a personal thing, a new art form as creative as painting or sculpture.”

“Few of the new creations will be masterpieces, but a great many will bring joy to their creators and variety to our fauna and flora. The final step in the domestication of biotechnology will be biotech games, designed like computer games for children down to kindergarten age but played with real eggs and seeds rather than with images on a screen. Playing such games, kids will acquire an intimate feeling for the organisms that they are growing. The winner could be the kid whose seed grows the prickliest cactus, or the kid whose egg hatches the cutest dinosaur.”

PRELUDE

In this ‘planetology ‘ thesis studio, we will investigate the ways in which this vision can be explored and given detail and potential through architecture thought. Architecture, often without realizing, has always been a planetary design problem not only through its ecological impact as a practice in the construction of environments – but also through its constant suggestion of an emerging synthesis that reconnects man, inhabitability, and space making, as intellectual and cultural exercises that highlight the continuing questions of the relationship between humanity and its space.

We will be developing the instruments/tools/machines/spaces that simultaneously offer inhabitability and ‘terraforming’.

To do this, we will focus on 3 new (arqui-bio-tech) species that allow new connections to be made across ecosystems, cultural and social spaces.

. Sites: Context/Planet
Energy stars, Living planets, mining asteroids, fields of dust.

We will look at Earth and Extra-Earth environments as potential sites.
In the post-space age era, dominated by a new globally connected society, there is a continuing discussion about the focus on space exploration and the need to refocus on problems on Earth.

On the one side of the discussion are a diverse range of scientists, for whom space exploration is the ultimate horizon that will trigger absolute transformation across all disciplines.
But many speak against the seemingly adventurous aspects of space exploration, calling attention to the fact that today we need a strong refocusing on Planet Earth itself, our home. Paul Virilio, in Grey Ecology, points out the seemingly claustrophobic era of 20th century space exploration, and suggests we need to substitute it by a refocusing on Planet Earth and its spherical – continuous and closed – character.

On the other hand, one can easily argue that all of these systems are open and therefore any act of circumscription – such as that of naming – has necessarily lost information for the levels of exchange it actually produces.

We will look into these two paradigms of the current discussion as well as into all the gradients of visible and invisible ecosystems that affect different disciplines and discourses of practice – anticipating some directions in which inhabitability and culture will have to develop much more innovative thinking.

. Species
Concept of species 19th Century. Cataloguing.

The concept of Species, and the practice of cataloguing we still find today in the naming of biological systems, are rooted in the 19th century drive to explore the new found diversity and finitudes of the Earth. Similarly to Archeology and the desire to uncover and systematize the understanding of history, species taxonomies were the mode by which multitude and complexity in ecosystems were temporarily made sense of.
However, Homo Sapiens and other species seem to be a circumstance of co-evolved traits, in a smoother continuum of processes. Even if the catalog identifies shells of difference as places of extreme precision in the mediation of other processes. Because of this they are, as well, ways in which the apparatus of perception and cognition have learned to identify bodies and organisms: roles of entity and identity.

The concept of speciation in architecture culture over the last 20 years has been often pursued as part of an interest in research on morphology and formal identity.

Through the framework of Planetology, the studio proposes the engagement of defined entities in spaces and ecosystems that are NOT absolute, but temporary, in different scales of time. In more recent years, concepts of (micro and macro) biomes have been emerged in popular culture as models to understand biological bodies. These scales and relationships together with DNA forensics represent a paradigm shift in both cataloguing concepts or taxonomies (where things come from and how are they related or could relate)  as well as the concepts of bodies themselves (where relevant limits or sites exist).

The objective in the studio is to understand networks and systems that generate but are also generated by entities, and – bringing knowledge from what we have learned with development of media and digital networks as well as material assemblies – create ways of ways of allowing these body-processes to find or address each other, therefore inventing new types of active cataloguing and exchange.

. Biotech

In “Our Biotech Future”, by Freeman Dyson, it is suggested that the future will involve on many fronts the creation of new entities through biological matter which is designed.

When dealing with Biotech, one swiftly becomes aware of its sheer scale difference from the concepts of ecosystems we relate to in the scale of human inhabitability or even comprehension. For many Biotech processes to take place, one is indeed harnessing the labor of a force which is extremely large in number of agents – bacteria – and by doing so, not only evolving organisms, but forcing evolution of entire civilizations of agents, and from there to organisms that have human-engineered drives and performances.

This means the selection and fostering of singular densities of performance which are bred through human minds and concepts while deployed in biological, said ‘natural’ structures or ecosystems.
As well, this promotes an ever increasing blurring of the concept of Nature, and of the relationship between concepts of Nature and Culture.

Biotech, Wildness and Pet Architecture

The enthusiasm and fear of Biotech has no rival in our relationship with natural systems. Our conceptualization of the wild has allowed for cataloguing, partition, subdivision, finitude and conservation to exist alongside our increasing understanding of how, ofr instance, DNA reshapes the ways by which all species relate to each other.
Biotech is to be a domestication of the processes of the Wild – and therefore also an attempt to domesticate the wild itself. Interesting questions arise from this relationship.
What are the abilities for learning that we want to implement in computation and biotech processes? And to what ends?
What are the limits – and their reasonings?
Will Biotech be a new kind of agricultural revolution, where we invite the Wild as Pet into the inside of our houses? If so, which kinds of training will we be willing to engage in? And will it be an emotional or affective behavior from our part?
What kinds of new cultures can outcome of these relationships?

INHABITATION SHELLS

A broader viewpoint over Nature and its scales of operation shows ways in which encapsulation of factors in space and time has allowed for inhabitability to be invented and for entities to emerge and correlate in unexpected ways.

One example is the concept of Hypersea, explored by Mark and Dianna McMenamin, that suggests that the way in which life on land has managed to develop or thrive was by creating a vast network of connections between unrelated organisms through which fluid can move – in a way creating the equivalent of a suspended flowing sea within land.

In another example, in Microcosmos, Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan propose a history of the Earth seen from the perspective of the microrganisms that have inhabited it across its long history.
They describe a possible concept and vision of larger body organisms – including humans – as no more than shells that have resulted from the progressive topological folding of micro-ecosystems into sustainable environmental control for the survival of large civilizations. Through this lens, one can look at the human body and see the history of the Earth, by understanding how the biome existing within are but old survivors of Earth’s old environments, encapsulated in spaceships able to travel in what are not toxic oxygen filled atmospheres. In this sense, several organisms as we know them today, maybe no more than spaceships for older civilizations with low or no resistance to Earth’s current atmosphere.

Prologue

Consider a forest, a tree, a bird, a beetle, a bee, a bacteria. These different scales of species have intricate coexistences and the very particular proportions of their members  influence the coexistence between each other, up and down the scale.
The correspondence between relative scales and sizes, and the increase in the number of elements of each species regulates the mode by which we consider that ecosystems balanced for a particular area.

The feedback cycles promoted by these members in their ecosystems are in constant reinvention, spiraling in what only appears to be equilibrium, but is instead a slow frame in a process of co-evolution.

Some new theories about cities actually look at how comparable they are to living, breathing organisms. In what is called the “urban metabolism model of megacities”, Charles Kolb proposes that large cities can be viewed (and measured, analyzed and reconceptualized) as “living entities that consume energy, food, water, and other raw materials, and release wastes”.

Goal

Biotech+Architecture: create 3 species that relate directly with human inhabitation and which create conditions for its existence and aggregation in different ecosystems. As well, the species are truer to their condition as such, meaning, differently from buildings as the house of social and cultural, these new shells (or skins) have a more operative attitude of feedback exchange with the eco-systems they insert themselves in. Compared to current buildings these new shells will have more operative feedback and exchange with the eco-systems they insert themselves in, all the while questioning and responding to the demanding new challenges for the reinvention of architectural typologies as cultural artifacts.

Micro and Macro-robotic species that act new assembled properties, condensed in a novel ways, not found in nature, nor perhaps in culture.