🚀 InterPlanetary Festival

Please join us TONIGHT Mar 22 @ 7:30 PM for an accessible, free SFI Community Lecture (our first in-person event in two years!) by External Professor Sara Imari Walker (ASU) on the physics underpinning life's origin. (Life is what?) Sara’s research: http://emergence.asu.edu/contact.html Streaming on YouTube, with live coverage on Twitter: https://santafe.edu/events/recognizing-alien-us A very few tickets still available for locals who want to be there: /7874/7875

The SFI Community Lecture series is BACK! Join us in person at The Lensic or on YouTube for a live-streamed presentation by SFI External Professor + ASU Astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker on the search for a fundamental physics of life: Life does not violate any of the known laws of physics. But it is not explained by them either. In this SFI Community Lecture, Sara Walker guides us through the quest to uncover a new theory of physics that might allow us to understand what life is, its general characteristics, its origin on Earth, and how to find it elsewhere in the universe. Tuesday, 22 March at 7 pm Mountain. RSVP and streaming details on our website: https://santafe.edu/events/recognizing-alien-us

Announcing The Complex Alternative from SFI Press: Edited by David C. Krakauer and Geoffrey West, our latest volume contains a real-time record of a community of complexity scientists’ reactions to the pandemic, as well as their musings on how to move forward. Through nontechnical articles, interviews, and discussions spanning the early days of the pandemic through the fall of 2021, The Complex Alternative offers a unique view into the multifaceted fields of immunology, epidemiology, psychology, inequality, and collapse. It is an effort to preserve perspective during a time of pervasive partiality. Paperback ($16.99) and ebook ($2.99) versions are available now through Amazon. The hardcover version is forthcoming later this month, along with other ebook options. Learn more and order your copy: https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/complex-alternative-complexity-scientists-covid-19-pandemic or #complexity #complexsystems #covid19 #pandemic #complexityscience #complexitytheory #epistemology #epidemiology #complexitypodcast #evolutionarybiology #statisticalphysics #philosophyofscience #publicpolicy #plectics #sciencebooks #sciencebook

🌒 Join us tomorrow for the final installment of our speculative discussion series with @NSPDOS & Very Very Far Away for @LaBiennale 2021. After three sessions imagining life on the #Moon, it's time to come home. What might intercultural exchange look like & what role will art play in it? Our #lunar #visionaries for this third event are Charmian Griffin, Joseph Popper, julijonas urbonas, and #IPFest Director @Papier_McShea , with facilitation by VVFA (Sitraka Rakotoniaina and Andrew Friend). Register for this free virtual event: /e/lunar-denizens-down-to-earth-registration-193677443447 #InterPlanetary #Futurism #SpeculativeFiction #Futures #MoonLife #Architecture #Culture #Relationship #ScienceFiction #LunarBase #MoonBase #FutureArt

Join us tomorrow for a space-themed speculative virtual discussion about the future of human life on the Moon: SFI's InterPlanetary Project, along with New School Policy and Design for Outer Space's (@NSPDOS ), and Very Very Far Away (VVFA), an international collaborative platform for the democratization of future narratives, present a deeper speculative exploration of a selection of moments and ideas in an attempt to build a catalogue of the lunar ‘things’ yet to be imagined. Lunar Denizens is a 3-part series of investigations imagining the protocols, folklore, & artifacts shaping the mythos of permanent lunar settlement. These conversations are part of the City x Venice Virtual Pavilion at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale, therefore much of the basis for these imaginative engagements are design, architecture, and an examination of the relationships between humans and their environment (both their built and natural environments), and how those environments likewise impact social interaction. The second of three sessions in the Lunar Denizens series pays particular attention to fictional Moon base Mare Nectaris’s daily life. The base operates on a continuous basis collecting, processing, and transmitting solar energy back to Earth. And in the midst of this industrial process, the workers and their families must also make their lives together. Their routines and regular engagements create and sustain their shared lifeworld, collectively bringing the Moon to life. Our lunar visionaries for this second event are julijonas urbonas, Alice Bucknell, Ibiye Camp, and InterPlanetary Festival Alumni Nicholas De Monchaux & Nina Lanza, with facilitation by VVFA (Sitraka Rakotoniaina and Andrew Friend). Free Registration: /e/lunar-denizens-moonlife-registration-176361009527 October 14, 2021 | 10:00 am – 11:30 am US Mountain Time #space #spaceexploration #spacetravel #spacemigration #spacecolony #moonbase #mooncolony #moon #lunarbase #lunarcolony #speculativefiction #sf #newschool #venicebiennale

New episode of SFI's Alien Crash Site Podcast available on YouTube, Spotify, and anywhere else you go for podcasts: /episodes/020 This week's guest, SFI Professor Chris Kempes, is a mathematical biologist, who works on scaling laws, and is ultimately interested in where those scaling laws break down. What are their limits? What is the physiological constraint for life on earth? How small can life be? How big? How might that constraint change in other environments? He recently published a paper, along with David Krakauer, titled “The Multiple Paths to Multiple Life” that attempts to reconfigure how we think about life forms, and life origins events. We discuss this provocative proposal at length, along with the scaling research described above, before we shift to our venture into the Zone to pursue a totally disgusting but revelatory artifact, if we can even call it that. #originoflife #originsoflife #scalinglaws #scale #scaling #biology #evolution #evolutionarytransitions #physics #biophysics #astrobiology #mathematicalbiology

Take your gaze out beyond #Earth, out to our #moon, or to #Mars, or to #Venus. Place yourself behind the instruments of the #PerseveranceRover, or fly through #Europa’s watery plumes. Perhaps you might begin to wonder what kinds of life forms, what kinds of unseen patterns, crop up in these alien places. Perhaps you might find that as you travel to #interplanetary worlds, even by the light of #science, your #imagination starts to go a little wild. #Space has always been the place where the imagination reaches beyond the world as we know it. What happens when we stretch deep into #spacescience and set our imaginations adrift? Welcome to ATLANTIS, a new creative editorial series released by @sfiscience ’s InterPlanetary Project, which sails through space research and engages with the scientific and philosophical questions that emerge on the #voyage. The series is co-created by #sciencewriter Natalie Elliot and SFI’s Caitlin McShea, Director of the InterPlanetary Project, who post under the pseudonym “ATLANTIS” – a (fictitious) #spacefaring ship named after the lost city, “which was said to drown for its hubris, and then rose again to champion the humane use of science.” ATLANTIS sets sail to explore the #theories and #technologies that drive the hunt for #extraterrestrial life, the complex challenges of interplanetary #recycling, and the ways that the narratives of #spaceexploration are constructed — to name but a few subjects it traverses. Traveling with #Shakespeare and #DavidBowie, to Mars’s #JezeroCrater and #Jupiter’s moons, the inquiring authors hoist the jolly roger of their imaginative ship, which reads, “if this be science, there is art in’t.” In other words, they show the many ways that the playful voice of art can sound out the most fascinating insights of science. Seven dispatches are live to date, and new dispatches are released about every three weeks. The series is hosted on Aliencrashsite.com, named for the official podcast of @IPFest , which is hosted on the same site.

This week on @IPFest 's #AlienCrashSite, Computational #Cognitive #Scientist Vanessa Ferdinand provides us with her skeptical take on the very premise of the discovery and use of #AlienArtifacts in #ScienceFiction like Roadside Picnic. Given her research on #CulturalEvolution, and how cultural #artifacts are changed by the cognitive #systems that perceive them, she had quite a few problems with the idea of finding and using an object created by an alien #lifeform. She explains her reasoning, but she eventually suspends her disbelief, settles comfortably into the #fiction, and describes an #alien artifact that she believes will alter our understanding of ourselves, each other, these #aliens, and the universe itself. Listen anywhere you go for podcasts: /episodes/016 #ComplexSystems #Interplanetary #SpeculativeFiction #Technology #SantaFeInstitute #Culture #Evolution @sfiscience

Our exploratory ship ATLANTIS and its crew muse on new metrics for detecting life-as-we-don't-know-it, out there in the stars. Read the latest, in which ATLANTIS contemplates #acronyms, #ASSEMBLY theory, and the summit of #beauty and #love… /transmissions/atlantis-7 Excerpt: "The team noticed that the structures of #livingsystems, and the #structures of #objects that are the #consequences of living systems – like #iPhones, #astrolabes and #Lego playsets – are far more complex than simple non-living stuff. So, they devised a way for us to quantify an object’s level of #complexity based on how difficult it is to assemble, or how many steps it takes to piece together." Not only are complex objects not likely to be #randomly produced, but complex objects that appear in any kind of #abundance are even less likely to arise #spontaneously. In a recent interview, Cole Mathis explained that 'living systems tend to create complex #molecules in detectable abundance.' So, you might just get an animal train by banging those big baby-bricks together at random. Sure. But the odds of getting a #MillenniumFalcon? Extremely Low. Five hundred Millennium Falcons? Please! The very same can be said for life. The researchers argue, therefore, that complex molecules found in high abundance can serve as #biosignatures. Perhaps the coolest thing about their work is that they not only produce the super rad #MolecularAssembly Index (which is a combined measure of assembly steps and abundance), but they also deliver a way do the measuring."

"When ecosystems accumulate enough junk, organisms in them start to repurpose their trash. We wondered whether this power to adapt and repurpose junk could ever really work for the ocean. Maybe we can recycle the satellites in LEO, but what about all of the plastic in the ocean? This posed a challenge even larger than the forthcoming Russian film in space. Are there limits to how much we can adapt to our own floating junkyards? We were about to contemplate this whorl of plastic-inspired thinking when, lo, out of the scientific deep, we learned of a potential new sea creature. Back in 2017, when Tom Cruise was gearing up for Mission: Impossible—Fallout, SFI External Professor Ricard Solé was thinking about a different seemingly impossible mission: to find out what is becoming of all of the oceanic plastic. Solé and his team looked into the waves for answers and, in them, they saw something very strange. They observed that there is a great gulf between the amount of plastic that we expect to observe in the ocean and the amount that we actually observe. Wait, what? Where have all the plastics gone? It’s not like we shuttled all of them into space..." Read the latest Transmission in our Atlantis series: /transmissions/atlantis-6 #oceanplastic #oceanconservation #plasticeating #plastics #microplastics #bioremediation #ipfest #interplanetary #lifesupportsystems #ecosystemservices #microbiology #strangejellyfish #trash #junk

New episode of InterPlanetary Festival's Alien Crash Site: /episodes/014 This week we bring Natalie Elliot into the Zone to discuss how art relates to science in the wake of a truly significant #paradigmshift, and how #Shakespeare grappled with such shifts throughout his career, and across many if not most of his plays. We speak a bit about #Stalker, detecting lifeforms out in the universe, and speculate on how life emerged from lifelessness here on Earth, and elsewhere. Perhaps a clue lies in Natalie’s #AlienArtifact. Natalie is a tutor at #StJohns College in #SantaFe, where she teaches #crossdisciplinary courses in #classics, #historyofscience, #mathematics, literature, #philosophy, and #music. She is a #storyteller, a #sciencewriter, a frequent contributor to SFI’s parallax newsletter, short-story #fiction #writer and #novelist. She is specifically interested in the intersection of #literature and #science, as we in the #InterPlanetary project are, and she co-authors the Atlantis Dispatch series with #IPFest Director Caitlin McShea. #astrobiology #lithistory #cosmology #complexsystems

@IPFest reflects on the growing concern that is our sometimes-sentimental, sometimes-deadly #spacedebris: /transmissions/atlantis-5 "We reflected on the Polaroid of Charles Duke’s family that the #Apollo astronaut left on the #Moon in 1972, and on #Voyager’s famous golden record, launched into space in 1977, poised to play #ChuckBerry’s “Johnny B. Goode” for any #alien who can figure out how to work the record player (most extant humans sure can’t). Then, we flashed forward to 2018, looking out to Elon’s #Tesla Roadster, which orbits the #Earth and which contains, in its glove compartment, #IsaacAsimov’s #FoundationTrilogy, compressed, and etched, in all of its glory, onto a quartz storage device. We even took for an imaginative spin the infamous @archmission #LunarLibrary, which flew and crashed into to the Moon on the #Beresheet lunar lander. This library is a nickel storage block that contains millions of pages of language primers, books, and #DNA sequences. Between its alloyed sheets, stuck down in the synthetic resin layers, lie the remains of some stowaway #tardigrades. What are these shards of meaning we float across the universe and deposit on other planets? And what are they doing? Are they the code of our future stories? Will they take on a cultural life of their own? Or are they bits of sentimental #space #litter that demonstrate how far we are from grasping our insignificance in the grand scheme of things? The distance between plastic wrapped #Polaroids and #Venusian cloud-capped towers is pretty great. Must we generate such refuse? Can we devise new ways to probe the universe without, umm, scattering probes all over it? We’ve found ourselves wondering about this phenomenon, especially, since, at least for some starry-eyed rocketeers, a central purpose of #spaceexploration is to escape the junkyard that we’re creating on our own planet. (The lunar library, for one, was conceived as a back-up drive for planet Earth.) So, we asked, can we change our ways before we replicate the whole system?" Read more at aliencrashsite.org ✨