The mammoth's lament: UC research shows how cosmic impact sparked devastating climate change
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Herds of wooly mammoths once shook the earth beneath their feet, sending humans scurrying across the landscape of prehistoric Ohio. But then something much larger shook the Earth itself, and at that point these mega mammals' days were numbered.
Something ? global-scale combustion caused by a comet scraping our planet's atmosphere or a meteorite slamming into its surface ? scorched the air, melted bedrock and altered the course of Earth's history. Exactly what it was is unclear, but this event jump-started what Kenneth Tankersley, an assistant professor of anthropology and geology at the University of Cincinnati, calls the last gasp of the last ice age.
"Imagine living in a time when you look outside and there are elephants walking around in Cincinnati," Tankersley says. "But by the time you're at the end of your years, there are no more elephants. It happens within your lifetime."
Tankersley explains what he and a team of international researchers found may have caused this catastrophic event in Earth's history in their research, "Evidence for Deposition of 10 Million Tonnes of Impact Spherules Across Four Continents 12,800 Years Ago," which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The prestigious journal was established in 1914 and publishes innovative research reports from a broad range of scientific disciplines. Tankersley's research also was included in the History Channel series "The Universe: When Space Changed History" and will be featured in an upcoming film for The Weather Channel.
This research might indicate that it wasn't the cosmic collision that extinguished the mammoths and other species, Tankersley says, but the drastic change to their environment.
"The climate changed rapidly and profoundly. And coinciding with this very rapid global climate change was mass extinctions."
PUTTING A FINGER ON THE END OF THE ICE AGE
Tankersley is an archaeological geologist. He uses geological techniques, in the field and laboratory, to solve archaeological questions. He's found a treasure trove of answers to some of those questions in Sheriden Cave in Wyandot County, Ohio. It's in that spot, 100 feet below the surface, where Tankersley has been studying geological layers that date to the Younger Dryas time period, about 13,000 years ago.
About 12,000 years before the Younger Dryas, the Earth was at the Last Glacial Maximum ? the peak of the Ice Age. Millennia passed, and the climate began to warm. Then something happened that caused temperatures to suddenly reverse course, bringing about a century's worth of near-glacial climate that marked the start of the geologically brief Younger Dryas.
There are only about 20 archaeological sites in the world that date to this time period and only 12 in the United States ? including Sheriden Cave.
"There aren't many places on the planet where you can actually put your finger on the end of the last ice age, and Sheriden Cave is one of those rare places where you can do that," Tankersley says.
ROCK-SOLID EVIDENCE OF COSMIC CALAMITY
In studying this layer, Tankersley found ample evidence to support the theory that something came close enough to Earth to melt rock and produce other interesting geological phenomena. Foremost among the findings were carbon spherules. These tiny bits of carbon are formed when substances are burned at very high temperatures. The spherules exhibit characteristics that indicate their origin, whether that's from burning coal, lightning strikes, forest fires or something more extreme. Tankersley says the ones in his study could only have been formed from the combustion of rock.
The spherules also were found at 17 other sites across four continents ? an estimated 10 million metric tons' worth ? further supporting the idea that whatever changed Earth did so on a massive scale. It's unlikely that a wildfire or thunderstorm would leave a geological calling card that immense ? covering about 50 million square kilometers.
"We know something came close enough to Earth and it was hot enough that it melted rock ? that's what these carbon spherules are. In order to create this type of evidence that we see around the world, it was big," Tankersley says, contrasting the effects of an event so massive with the 1883 volcanic explosion on Krakatoa in Indonesia. "When Krakatoa blew its stack, Cincinnati had no summer. Imagine winter all year-round. That's just one little volcano blowing its top."
Other important findings include:
Micrometeorites: smaller pieces of meteorites or particles of cosmic dust that have made contact with the Earth's surface.
Nanodiamonds: microscopic diamonds formed when a carbon source is subjected to an extreme impact, often found in meteorite craters.
Lonsdaleite: a rare type of diamond, also called a hexagonal diamond, only found in non-terrestrial areas such as meteorite craters.
THREE CHOICES AT THE CROSSROADS OF OBLIVION
Tankersley says while the cosmic strike had an immediate and deadly effect, the long-term side effects were far more devastating ? similar to Krakatoa's aftermath but many times worse ? making it unique in modern human history.
In the cataclysm's wake, toxic gas poisoned the air and clouded the sky, causing temperatures to plummet. The roiling climate challenged the existence of plant and animal populations, and it produced what Tankersley has classified as "winners" and "losers" of the Younger Dryas. He says inhabitants of this time period had three choices: relocate to another environment where they could make a similar living; downsize or adjust their way of living to fit the current surroundings; or swiftly go extinct. "Winners" chose one of the first two options while "losers," such as the wooly mammoth, took the last.
"Whatever this was, it did not cause the extinctions," Tankersley says. "Rather, this likely caused climate change. And climate change forced this scenario: You can move, downsize or you can go extinct."
Humans at the time were just as resourceful and intelligent as we are today. If you transported a teenager from 13,000 years ago into the 21st century and gave her jeans, a T-shirt and a Facebook account, she'd blend right in on any college campus. Back in the Younger Dryas, with mammoth off the dinner table, humans were forced to adapt ? which they did to great success.
WEATHER REPORT: CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF EXTINCTION
That lesson in survivability is one that Tankersley applies to humankind today.
"Whether we want to admit it or not, we're living right now in a period of very rapid and profound global climate change. We're also living in a time of mass extinction," Tankersley says. "So I would argue that a lot of the lessons for surviving climate change are actually in the past."
He says it's important to consider a sustainable livelihood. Humans of the Younger Dryas were hunter-gatherers. When catastrophe struck, these humans found news ways and new places to hunt game and gather wild plants. Evidence found in Sheriden Cave shows that most of the plants and animals living there also endured. Of the 70 species known to have lived there before the Younger Dryas, 68 were found there afterward. The two that didn't make it were the giant beaver and the flat-headed peccary, a sharp-toothed pig the size of a black bear.
Tankersley also cautions that the possibility of another massive cosmic event should not be ignored. Like earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes, these types of natural disasters do happen, and as history has shown, it can be to devastating effect.
"One additional catastrophic change that we often fail to think about ? and it's beyond our control ? is something from outer space," Tankersley says. "It's a reminder of how fragile we are. Imagine an explosion that happened today that went across four continents. The human species would go on. But it would be different. It would be a game changer."
BREAKING BARRIERS AND WORKING TOGETHER TOWARD REAL CHANGE
Tankersley is a member of UC's Quaternary and Anthropocene Research Group (QARG), an interdisciplinary conglomeration of researchers dedicated to undergraduate, graduate and professional education, experience-based learning and research in Quaternary science and study of the Anthropocene. He's proud to be working with his students on projects that, when he was in their shoes, were considered science fiction.
Collaborative efforts such as QARG help break down long-held barriers between disciplines and further position UC as one of the nation's top public research universities.
"What's exciting about UC and why our university is producing so much, is we have scientists who are working together and it's this area of overlap that is so interesting," Tankersley says. "There's a real synergy about innovative, transformative, transdisciplinary science and education here. These are the things that really make people take notice. It causes real change in our world."
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University of Cincinnati: http://www.uc.edu/news
Thanks to University of Cincinnati for this article.
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A teenager from?Saratoga, California took home one of the top prizes at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair?late last week after showing off her invention, which can fully charge a cell phone in 30 seconds or less.?Eesha Khare was given the?Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award and a $50,000 prize for being runner-up in the competition, which was won by a 19-year-old who unveiled a new spin on?self-driving car technology.?Khare?s battery technology requires a new component to be installed inside the phone battery itself, and Intel notes that it also has potential applications for car batteries.
Army of Underwater Vehicles to Unravel Ocean Mysteries
SAN MATEO, Calif. ? Mr. Spock may think space is the final frontier, but Earth's deep oceans are just as mysterious and unknown. Now, one scientist says More??
Webmasters will need to be much more careful about quoting content from online German publications after a new online copyright law comes into effect in Germany on August 1.
The law, which targets search engines that provide snippets, originally would have given news sites the ability to seek monetary compensation for the supposed lost revenue caused by Google and other search engines when using those snippets.
The law had been greatly revamped from the initial proposed law, which would have allowed publishers to charge licensing fees to search engines for the right to publish short snippets from their sites, such as the short snippets that appear in Google News results. If the law had passed in that form, it would have caused significant issues with Google?s ability to run their Google News service in Germany.
As offline publications are struggling to move into the digital age, it wouldn?t be surprising if other countries attempt to do the same, as France did several years ago.
It is yet unclear how this law will be enforced, particularly with regards to interpretation of the language, and how large or small the snippets can be.
It is worth noting, however, that any site or news service could prevent Google from showing links to and snippets from any site by simply utilizing robots.txt to disallow Google?s bots from reading and indexing the site. However, sites doing this would lose traffic from Google and other search engines, which could potentially result in an even greater loss of revenue.
Germany is also in the midst of a battle regarding the use of embedded video on websites. The German Federal Court of Justice ruled that embedded videos don't infringe copyright under German laws, however, it could still violate European laws.
If the CJEU decides that German law is not compatible with E.U. law, the Germans will have to change their law to be in compliance with European rules, Van der Jeught said. A decision made by the CJEU will also apply to all other member states, which also would have to change their laws accordingly if necessary, he said.
"But it depends on how broad the interpretation is," he said, adding that the member states have to decide for themselves in what way they are going to make their laws compatible with E.U. rules.
Because an embedded video is simply a link to content on another site, there is no copyright infringement. And again, it's also worth noting that anyone who uploads a video to YouTube can turn off the embedding feature on any of their uploaded videos, to prevent their videos from appearing on unwanted websites.
Early Bird Rates have been extended! June 12-14, 2013: Join industry experts at SES Toronto for a crash course in the latest strategies in Online Marketing and Advertising. Save $300 when you register by Thursday, May 23.
First of all: that name. Google Play Music All Access. Perhaps Google's presenters realized, as they were driving to the I/O keynote, that they had forgotten to name the new music-streaming service, and came up with that clunker backstage.
Unique? Magical? It's easy to dismiss those claims within minutes of signing up.
Jump to the keynote, where Chris Yerga described All Access as "a uniquely Google approach to a subscription service," and remarked, "Here's where the magic starts." Unique? Magical? It's easy to dismiss those claims within minutes of signing up. Prosaic and useful, yes; unique and magical, no. All Access is nowhere near an innovation. The major ecosystem companies, each of which started with groundbreaking technical development, now seem to fashion their business destinies on buttressing their networks with products innovated elsewhere, plugging holes to sway existing users from drifting out of the system. It's not a new story, but always a sad one.
WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has spoken out in an attempt to capitalize on Yahoo's rumored $1.1 billion acquisition of rival blogging service Tumblr. He claims that once the news broke on Sunday, blog post transfers from Tumblr to his own site rose from 400 to 600 per hour to over 72,000 -- which presumably included users put off by Yahoo's track record of shutting down its acquisitions (like Del.icio.us, Geocities and Broadcast.com). If that figure is true, then Marissa Mayer's probably going to have to answer some rather awkward questions in a few hours.
Contact: Ruth Francis ruth.francis@biomedcentral.com 44-203-192-2737 BioMed Central
What lures a lady frog to her lover? Good looks, the sound of his voice, the size of his pad or none of the above? After weighing up their options, female strawberry poison frogs (Oophaga pumilio) bag the closest crooner they can, finds research in BioMed Central's open access journal Frontiers of Zoology. This seemingly short-sighted strategy turns out to be the optimal mate choice strategy for these colourful frogs.
Males of the species congregate in the Costa Rican rain forest 'lek-style' to display and call together, giving females the chance to weigh up multiple males at once. But despite their best efforts, build and territory size, females tend to mate with the closest calling male, Ivonne Meuche from the University of Veterinary Medicine, Hannover, Germany, and colleagues report.
The find was confirmed by playback experiments where females, played recordings of various male calls, failed to discriminate between different call rates or frequencies, preferring instead, the nearest speaker.
Female mate choice is a tricky business. Some species chose the first mate that is 'good enough' whilst others seek out and compare many mates before returning to choose the fittest. But the simplest, least costly option is to mate with the first or nearest male encountered, regardless of quality. The strategy doesn't seem an evolutionary winner as it means that nearby, unfit frogs sometimes get to pass on their genes at the expense of more distant, genetically-superior specimens. But it does make sense in certain situations.
Non-choosy behaviour like this has been noted in fishes, and some frog species with a lek-like mating system. It's thought the strategy works for them because it reduces 'costs' in terms of search time and competition for mates. Female strawberry poison frogs may also benefit little from 'shopping around' because strong inter-male competition means the available mates are all much of a muchness.
The team also noted that females unable to find a mate within a certain time period ended up laying unfertilised eggs that never hatch. So in species, like the strawberry poison dart frog, where the choosing sex outnumbers the chosen sex, it makes sense to 'grab the nearest guy' rather than run the risk of not mating at all.
###
Media Contact
Ruth Francis
Head of Communication, BioMed Central
Tel: +44 20 3192 2737
Mobile: +44 7825 287 546
E-mail: ruth.francis@biomedcentral.com
Notes to Editors
1. Only distance matters - non-choosy females in a poison frog population
Ivonne Meuche, Oscar Brusa, Karl E. Linsenmair, Alexander Keller and Heike Prhl
Frontiers in Zoology 2013 10:29, doi:10.1186/1742-9994-10-29
Please name the journal in any story you write. If you are writing for the web, please link to the article. All articles are available free of charge, according to BioMed Central's open access policy.
All images are to be credited to Ivonne Meuche, Oscar Brusa, Karl E. Linsenmair, Alexander Keller and Heike Prhl. Videos are available on request.
The author is currently travelling and can only provide limited contact. For further enquires please contact BioMed Central's press team on the details given above.
2. Frontiers in Zoology is an open access, peer-reviewed online journal publishing high quality research articles and reviews on all aspects of animal life.
3. BioMed Central is an STM (Science, Technology and Medicine) publisher which has pioneered the open access publishing model. All peer-reviewed research articles published by BioMed Central are made immediately and freely accessible online, and are licensed to allow redistribution and reuse. BioMed Central is part of Springer Science+Business Media, a leading global publisher in the STM sector. @BioMedCentral
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Contact: Ruth Francis ruth.francis@biomedcentral.com 44-203-192-2737 BioMed Central
What lures a lady frog to her lover? Good looks, the sound of his voice, the size of his pad or none of the above? After weighing up their options, female strawberry poison frogs (Oophaga pumilio) bag the closest crooner they can, finds research in BioMed Central's open access journal Frontiers of Zoology. This seemingly short-sighted strategy turns out to be the optimal mate choice strategy for these colourful frogs.
Males of the species congregate in the Costa Rican rain forest 'lek-style' to display and call together, giving females the chance to weigh up multiple males at once. But despite their best efforts, build and territory size, females tend to mate with the closest calling male, Ivonne Meuche from the University of Veterinary Medicine, Hannover, Germany, and colleagues report.
The find was confirmed by playback experiments where females, played recordings of various male calls, failed to discriminate between different call rates or frequencies, preferring instead, the nearest speaker.
Female mate choice is a tricky business. Some species chose the first mate that is 'good enough' whilst others seek out and compare many mates before returning to choose the fittest. But the simplest, least costly option is to mate with the first or nearest male encountered, regardless of quality. The strategy doesn't seem an evolutionary winner as it means that nearby, unfit frogs sometimes get to pass on their genes at the expense of more distant, genetically-superior specimens. But it does make sense in certain situations.
Non-choosy behaviour like this has been noted in fishes, and some frog species with a lek-like mating system. It's thought the strategy works for them because it reduces 'costs' in terms of search time and competition for mates. Female strawberry poison frogs may also benefit little from 'shopping around' because strong inter-male competition means the available mates are all much of a muchness.
The team also noted that females unable to find a mate within a certain time period ended up laying unfertilised eggs that never hatch. So in species, like the strawberry poison dart frog, where the choosing sex outnumbers the chosen sex, it makes sense to 'grab the nearest guy' rather than run the risk of not mating at all.
###
Media Contact
Ruth Francis
Head of Communication, BioMed Central
Tel: +44 20 3192 2737
Mobile: +44 7825 287 546
E-mail: ruth.francis@biomedcentral.com
Notes to Editors
1. Only distance matters - non-choosy females in a poison frog population
Ivonne Meuche, Oscar Brusa, Karl E. Linsenmair, Alexander Keller and Heike Prhl
Frontiers in Zoology 2013 10:29, doi:10.1186/1742-9994-10-29
Please name the journal in any story you write. If you are writing for the web, please link to the article. All articles are available free of charge, according to BioMed Central's open access policy.
All images are to be credited to Ivonne Meuche, Oscar Brusa, Karl E. Linsenmair, Alexander Keller and Heike Prhl. Videos are available on request.
The author is currently travelling and can only provide limited contact. For further enquires please contact BioMed Central's press team on the details given above.
2. Frontiers in Zoology is an open access, peer-reviewed online journal publishing high quality research articles and reviews on all aspects of animal life.
3. BioMed Central is an STM (Science, Technology and Medicine) publisher which has pioneered the open access publishing model. All peer-reviewed research articles published by BioMed Central are made immediately and freely accessible online, and are licensed to allow redistribution and reuse. BioMed Central is part of Springer Science+Business Media, a leading global publisher in the STM sector. @BioMedCentral
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Much has been made of the fact that senior Treasury Department officials were told about the investigation into the treatment of tea party groups in June 2012 - months before last year's the Presidential election. Republicans who requested the investigation were also told about it at approximately the same time.
In a letter dated July 11, 2012, the man who conducted the investigation - IRS inspector general J. Russell George - wrote to Rep. Darrell Issa, the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, telling him that he was investigating the issue and offering to keep him updated as the investigation progressed.
"The Oversight Committee knew about the audit because it requested it," an Issa aide told ABC News. Issa released the letter, along with his own letter dated June 28, 2012 requesting the investigation, last week.
RELATED: Congress Grills IRS Commissioner
"We would be happy to provide a status update to the Subcommittee staff and provide a copy of our interim and final reports on the matter when they are issued," George wrote in the letter to Issa. An identical letter was also sent the Rep. Jim Jordan, who, like Issa had raised the issue with the IRS.
The letter notes that it was Issa who had written him about "questionnaires that the IRS has issued which may exceed appropriate scrutiny and a potential lack of balance in the use of criteria for reviewing organizations that are applying for tax-exempt status." George offers no confusions but says, "our Office of Audit recently began work on this issue."
According the Issa aide, the committee received an email update from George in December saying, "We are leaving no stone unturned as part of our due diligence. As such, we won't be able to provide a detailed, substantive briefing until late April/early May."
RELATED: Acting IRS Chief Resigns, Obama Condemns 'Inexcusable' Targeting of Tea Party Groups
On Friday, in his testimony before the House Ways & Means Committee, George said he had notified top Treasury officials - including Deputy Secretary Neal Wolin - about his investigation in June 2012, part of a routine briefing on the issues he was looking into.
Republicans pounced on that revelation as evidence top Administration officials knew about the targeting of conservative groups well before the 2012 election. It is now clear that at least some key Republicans knew about the investigation as well.
While George informed Treasury officials about the fact he was conducting the investigation in 2012, the Treasury Department says he did not go into detail about his investigation or tell them about his conclusion that IRS had improperly targeted conservative groups. Similarly, the letter to Issa says the investigation had begun but does not say that it had uncovered any wrongdoing.
As you can imagine there has been a lot of major changes since 1.3, and even a reasonable amount since Elastix 2.0.
Elastix 2.4 does not have any major bugs that would affect faxing, so working on that basis, need to look at the following areas
1) Confirm your country is setup under /etc/dahdi/system.conf
2) Confirm your country is setup under /etc/modprobe.d/dahdi.conf
3) Turn echo cancellation off for the FXO line(s) that faxes are coming in on.
Give that a check/try first, otherwise post your logs (asterisk full logs and possibly the hylafax log of the call coming in..
The stars continued to sparkle despite the rain falling on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival.
Actress Jennifer Lawrence was among the big names to step out on Saturday for the premiere of the film "Jimmy P. (Psychotherapy Of A Plains Indian)" at the 66th annual festival.
AFP - Getty Images
Actress Jennifer Lawrence on May 18 in Cannes, France.
So you want to build the Enterprise. Don't we all! Well good news: according to some quick, messy, napkin math, it's possible. Kind of. The bad news? It's going to be stupid expensive. But not unfathomably so! Start scrounging up your space-pennies.
One little constraint
Since we can't predict the future, or even come close to gauging the cost of development for revolutionary new inventions or substances like warp and impulse drives, shields, and teleporters, we're going to stick to what we know. It might not make us a real Enterprise, but it's about as close as you're going to get.
So where do we start?
First we have to pick our Enterprise. Obviously, with Star Trek: Into Darkness coming out, we're going to go with the one from that universe. According to some stats we got back when the original Star Trek reboot came out a few years ago, we know the new Enterprise?or as the Star Trek wiki calls it: USS Enterprise (Alternate Reality)?is 725.35 meters, 2379.76 feet, or roughly half a mile long. So, huge. And while the exact measurements vary, other sources give us a height of 625 feet, and a saucer diameter of 1,000 feet. She's a big girl.
Photo: Paramount
Raw materials
The closest thing we have to compare this to in the real world is probably a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. The new Gerald R. Ford-class suckers will be bigger and more expensive, but we haven't finished one of those yet, so we'll stick with a Nimitz-class, specifically the George H.W. Bush, the most recent?and last?of the Nimitz breed.
Photo by: Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Nicholas Hall/US Navy
At 1,092 feet long, the GHWB comes in at just under half the length of the Enterprise. And with a 252 foot wide flight deck, it's a fair bit thinner. But there's a lot of empty space in the Enterprise, whereas aircraft carriers are more like solid chunks. Getting really specific with a starship's actual volume would involve some annoyingly real math and measurements we don't have, but we can safely assume it would take about two GHWBs-worth of material to build a suitably sized, Enterprise-shaped brute when you stretch it all out. Make it air-tight and we'll call it a spaceship.
Unlike the Nimitz-class cruisers before it, which cost about $4.5 billion, the GWHB cost more like $6.2 billion thanks to modern day perks, and we need two. And we're just getting warmed up.
Running Total: $12,400,000,000
Some assembly required
Photo: Paramount
According to the first JJ Abrams Star Trek film, the specific Enterprise we're talking about here was built in Iowa. We'll assume it's getting the ISS treatment: Build it on Earth as a series of trivially sized modules that get assembled in orbit.
This is where the real cost comes in. If we go by the numbers from SpaceX, the Falcon Heavy can transport stuff to space for the low, low price of about $1,000 per pound. A GHWB worth of stuff weighs about 114,000 short tons. So a pair of them are 228,000 short tons, or 456 million pounds. Multiply that by $1,000 dollars per pound and... Yeah. We're talking $456 billion just to get this into orbit, or $468.4 billion for an Enterprise-shaped space station, total. And that's not including labor.
That's a lot of scary zeros, but really it's not too too bad. This year, the United States defense total budget expenditure was $3.803 trillion. So it's not like we don't have the cash.
Construction cost (ex-labor): $456,000,000,000
Running Total: $468,400,000,000
Tea, Earl Grey, hot
Now that we've got our big, hulking shell assembled, it's about time that we start filling it up with some awesome tech. One of the (many) iconic technologies in the Star Trek universe is the ubiquitous replicator, making pesky things like staying fed a piece of cake. Sometimes literally. We don't have anything close to the kind of build-anything-from-anything replicators from the series, but we do have something called the Replicator. The Replicator 2, as a matter of fact. Even better.
While MakerBot's Replicator 2 is stellar 3D-printing tech here on Earth, the thought of outfitting our enormous, enormously badass Enterprise with just one seems ludicrously cheap and lame. That being the case, let's set it up with a suite of 50 and just pretend we've got five that are 10 times the size. One MakerBot Replicator 2 retails for a scant $2,200, so we're talking an acquisition cost of (a still scant) $110,000. We need stuff to print with too, though. Let's say 45 kilograms (100 pounds) of plastic, assorted colors. MakerBot plastic is $48 to the kilo, so that's $112,160 in printers and ink.
The shipping weight of each Replicator 2 is 37 pounds, or 1850 pounds total, plus our 100 pounds of plastic which brings us to 1950 pounds. Launch that into space ($195,000) and now we're talking.
We looked into estimating the cost of something like one of Organovo's crazy Bio-Printers, but they couldn't help us out with any kind of number regarding price or weight, so we had to leave it out.
Total Replicator Cost: $307,160
Running Total: $468,400,307,160
Hit the (Holo)deck
Microsoft has a promising little at-home holodeck on the way with its IllumiRoom tech, but while that'd be great in your living room, we can probably spring for something a little fancier on our Enterprise. How about the CAVE 2, complete with 320 degree, panoramic 3D LCD display?
This isn't exactly a retail product, so we'll have to piece together the cost (and weight) in broad strokes. The awesome curved, 3D TV we saw at CES has recently been priced at around $14,000 and we'll need 72 for a total of $1,008,000 in TVs. We also need 36 "high performance PCs," that are maybe $3,000 a piece? And also a setup of 10 motion tracking cameras that we'll just say costs about $10,000. We wind up at $1,126,000 for procurement.
After a little black magic involving shipping weights and wild estimation, we can guess that this rig weighs somewhere around 5,378 pounds. As for software development, well, you're you're going to have to program you own games. Sorry.
Holodeck cost: $6,504,000
Running Total: $468,406,811,160
Fire photon torpedoes!
But really that's only half the battle. Or really it's none of the battle; this thing can't shoot yet. The GHWB already had some armaments that are theoretically on our Enterprise now, but they are pansy Earth-weapons. We need photon torpedos and phaser arrays.
When it comes to photon torpedos?well, we don't have photon torpedos. But tactical nukes seem pretty close, preferably in missile form. The UGM-133 Trident II is a modern-day ballistic missile that can rock a nuclear warhead. And, it can be launched from a submarine which means it's pretty much a torpedo, right? Kinda? Sorta? Regardless, it seems like it could be strapped to?and fired from?a spaceship just fine.
Photo: Department of Defense
It's pretty unclear how many photon torpedoes the Enterprise?specifically the reboot Enterprise?has, but we know the USS Voyagerwas designed specifically for scientific missions and had 38, so that seems like a fair bare minimum. Each Trident II costs $30.9 million to make, and weighs 129,000 pounds. So that means the cost of buying one "photon torpedo" and getting it into space is $159,900,000. The whole kit of 38 will cost us $6,076,200,000.
The Navy's LaWS system cost $40 million to develop and build, so we'll peg the sticker price at maybe $15 million per unit, for a total cost of $90 million for all six. The Navy's been tight-lipped about how much they weigh though, so we'll have to pull something really iffy out of the air and say each is about as heavy as a radar-guided Phalanx machine-gun bank just because that looks kind of similar-ish. So that's 13,600 pounds each, or 81,600 pounds of gear (total) to blast into space.
Phaser Bank Cost: $171,600,000
Running Total: $474,654,611,160
Man Up
And what good is any of this if the ship is a ghost town? While it's technically not a cost of building the Enterprise per se, we'd be remiss if we didn't at least briefly consider the cost of manning this beast. Who knows exactly how many people man the Enterprise, including all the (hundreds of?) low-level nobodies, so we'll just set it up with a skeleton command crew.
Photo: Paramount
Going by a list of notable crew members, we can figure we need?at minimum?11 people on this thing. Luckily for us, a recent agreement between NASA and Russia pinpoints the cost of flight-training a 'naut and shooting him/her into the great void at $70.7 million. So assuming our cadets already know how to do their jobs, and only need a little space-training, that gives us a transportation cost of $777,700,000
Of course, you also have to pay these guys and keep them alive. Recent estimates put the cost of keeping a soldier in Iraq for a year at between $850,000 and $1.4 million, so let's go with the higher end of that spectrum since we're talking exclusively about officiers and they are also going to space. That nets us a $15,400,000 additional personnel cost.
Lastly, they've got to be fed and watered and whatnot. In 2008, NASA awarded a roughly $3.5 billion dollar contract to SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corp to perform that very same job of ferrying cargo, except to the ISS. That seems like a perfect estimate so let's just steal that wholesale as our supply cost.
Personnel and supply cost: $4,293,100,000
Running Total: $478,947,711,160
To boldly go...nowhere
Now that our Enterprise can defend itself, the only think left is to make it move. Unfortunately, that's pretty impossible under even the vaguest realism constraint. Warp drives, while they are being researched, aren't close to existing. And impulse drives?essentially fusion rockets?aren't much closer; we almost had a fission rocket once, but it got mothballed.
More recently, there's also been discussion of an impulse drive that could actually run on something stunningly like dilithium crystals: deuterium (a stable isotope of hydrogen) and Li6 (a stable isotope of lithium). This engine doesn't exist yet though. And it'd likely require some very delicate orbital-construction that we can't really hack yet.
That being said, we're going to have to call it quits here, with our weaponized, Enterprise-shaped space-station, which is pretty damn cool in its own right.
Grand Total: $478,947,711,160
(Or: 12.59 percent of 2013 US Defense expenditure total budget)
On Monday we made first contact. Now we've made second contact.
Since we first heard seventeen year cicadas were spotted in Northern Virginia, we experienced a few days of unseasonably cool weather, which may have held many of the cicadas back -- they wait until the soil 8 inches below the ground reaches a temperature of 64 degrees.
But fear not! With highs in the 80s the past few days, the ground has surely warmed and we've begun to see more and more of the two-inch critters.
While we are still waiting until we cannot drive our cars or walk our dogs without causing mass-bug-murder, some are licking their lips and preparing to chow down on those low-calorie, gluten-free cicadas invading our yards and parks.
We've pulled a few more of the best Twitter reactions and pictures of cicadas around the area:
It is inevitable:
People deep fry EVERYTHING:
Don't worry, cicadas do not feed on tires:
Oh god, oh man, oh god! They're everywhere!
It's always good to hear from both sides of the story:
Giving literal meaning to "I'm kinda buzzed and it's all because..."
O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing in Clark County District Court on Thursday, May 16, 2013 in Las Vegas. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison as a result of his October 2008 conviction for armed robbery and kidnapping charges, is using a writ of habeas corpus, to seek a new trial, claiming he had such bad representation that his conviction should be reversed. (AP Photo/Las Vegas Review-Journal, Jeff Scheid, Pool)
O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing in Clark County District Court on Thursday, May 16, 2013 in Las Vegas. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison as a result of his October 2008 conviction for armed robbery and kidnapping charges, is using a writ of habeas corpus, to seek a new trial, claiming he had such bad representation that his conviction should be reversed. (AP Photo/Las Vegas Review-Journal, Jeff Scheid, Pool)
O.J. Simpson, center, talks with defense attorneys Ozzie Fumo, left, and Josh Barry during an evidentiary hearing in Clark County District Court, Thursday, May 16, 2013 in Las Vegas. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine to 33-year sentence in state prison as a result of his October 2008 conviction for armed robbery and kidnapping charges, is using a writ of habeas corpus, to seek a new trial, claiming he had such bad representation that his conviction should be reversed. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson, Pool)
LAS VEGAS (AP) ? O.J. Simpson's former lawyer has some explaining to do.
Miami attorney Yale Galanter is scheduled to testify Friday in Simpson's bid for a new trial.
Galanter, according to Simpson, advised the former football star that it was his legal right to retrieve personal items from two memorabilia dealers; told Simpson not to testify in the Las Vegas trial that eventually sent him to prison; failed to tell Simpson that prosecutors offered plea deals; and failed to raise the issue of ineffective assistance of counsel on appeal to the Nevada Supreme Court.
Galanter hasn't been subpoenaed, so he isn't compelled to appear.
He is invited as a key state's witness in a hearing that, since Monday, has revolved around Galanter's promises, payments and performance in the 2008 trial that sent the 65-year-old former football hero to prison for nine to 33 years for armed robbery and kidnapping.
H. Leon Simon, the chief deputy Clark County district attorney handling the case, said he and Galanter have what amounts to a gentleman's agreement for Galanter to come to Las Vegas.
"I take him at his word," Simon said. "He has assured me he wants to come and testify, as an officer of the court."
Galanter faces some uncomfortable questions about his trial preparation, the nearly $700,000 he was paid but allegedly didn't share with the Las Vegas lawyer at his side and why he didn't try to block prosecutors from playing for the jury secret recordings that amounted to a soundtrack of Simpson and his five pals confronting two sports collectibles brokers and a middleman in a cramped casino hotel room.
Jim Barnett, owner of a Las Vegas home where Simpson stayed during trial in September 2008, said he asked Galanter why he wasn't hiring an expert to analyze the recording.
"He said, 'If you would give us $250,000, we would have it done. We don't have the money to analyze the tapes," Barnett testified.
Galanter later assured the trial judge that the tapes had been analyzed.
He also faces questions about what he knew about Simpson's plan, when he knew it, and whether he should have told what he knew to get Simpson off the hook.
"He's a vital witness," said veteran Las Vegas trial lawyer Dayvid Figler. "He has information that no one can share."
Galanter said this week that he wouldn't comment about the hearing until after he testifies.
Las Vegas attorney Michael Cristalli, who has provided television network analysis of the Simpson hearings, said he expected Galanter will say he did his best in Simpson's case.
"He'll say he provided effective representation of Mr. Simpson, that he examined every witness zealously, and that he prepared exhaustively," Cristalli said, "and that there's no evidence to the contrary."
Simpson still maintains that he didn't know anyone in the hotel room had guns, and that he had a right to the items he was after ? football mementos, awards, photos and personal items that he said were stolen from him while he was moving out of his Los Angeles home.
The move followed Simpson's "trial of the century" acquittal in the 1994 the slayings of his ex-wife and her friend, and a 1997 civil judgment that ordered him to pay $33.5 million to the estates of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman.
"I talked to Yale about it two or three times," Simpson said during his testimony Wednesday. "The overall advice he was giving was, 'You have a right to get your stuff.'"
Key among Simpson's 19 claims of ineffective assistance of counsel and conflict of interest being considered by District Court Judge Linda Marie Bell is the allegation that Galanter should have provided witness testimony supporting Simpson's contention that he didn't know he was breaking the law.
Simpson says the two even talked about it over dinner the night before the ill-fated confrontation in September 2007, and that Galanter told him that if Simpson recovered the suit he wore the day he was acquitted in Los Angeles, Galanter would like to have it.
Bell has made no indication whether she plans an immediate ruling or will issue a written decision later.
The most damaging testimony about Galanter's performance came from three other lawyers involved in the case: Gabriel Grasso and Malcolm LaVergne, who represented Simpson, and Brent Bryson, who represented a Simpson co-defendant who also was convicted.
Each said Galanter seemed more interested in what he was paid and protecting himself from having to testify than in fully representing his client.
LaVergne, who argued with Galanter when both worked on Simpson's appeal to the Nevada Supreme Court, testified Thursday that he believed Galanter's involvement shaped his trial strategy.
But stepping away from the case would have cost Galanter hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees.
"Do you think Mr. Galanter made decisions based on a conflict of interest?" Simpson lawyer Patricia Palm asked.
"From what I know now, absolutely," LaVergne said. "There's no doubt about it."
Vic Gundotra of Google, wears a Google Glass during the Google I/O Conference in San Francisco.
Photo by Stephen Lam/Reuters
I?ve spent the last few weeks lowering my expectations for Google Glass. When I put on Google?s smart glasses a year ago?Sergey Brin, Google?s co-founder, let the press try on his pair at the company?s developer conference?I found it exhilarating. But many of my tech journalist colleagues have panned the device recently, calling it disorienting, buggy, and hobbled by terrible battery life. Google, too, has worked to lower the bar. The company describes Glass as an early beta product?it has thus far sent out units to hundreds of people who ponied up $1,500 for an early device?and it says that today?s model needs lots of work before it becomes a mass-market gadget.
So as I put on a pair this week, I was expecting to experience the digital equivalent of a machine hacked together with duct tape and construction paper. It wasn?t that! True, the unit I got my hand on at Google?s developer conference in San Francisco this week did have some obvious flaws, among them poor battery life and limited functionality. It also didn?t feel very comfortable on top of my prescription eyeglasses.
Yet I was surprised by how quickly I fell into using Glass?and how, within a few minutes of putting it on, this new thing began to feel like an intuitive way to experience the digital world. After my eye got used to the screen poised at the top right corner of my peripheral vision, and after my fingers got used to the way you control the device by sliding back and forth alongside the frame, Glass stopped feeling like someone?s bizarre, wishful prediction for the future of eyewear.
Instead, the more I used Google?s goggles, the more familiar they began to feel. This was a gadget I?d used before. It?s a gadget you?ve used before. That device is called a smartphone. And when Glass or something like it is finally released as a mainstream product, you?ll use it for the same reason you use headphones?because it?s a natural extension of your phone. It?s like headphones for your eyes. In a good way.
As I?ve written before, my thoughts about Glass are heavily informed by Thad Starner, a computer science professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology who is also a technical lead on the Glass project. Starner has been wearing various kinds of digital goggles since the early 1990s?he built his own devices?and is thus one of the world?s leading authorities on what it?s like to live as a cyborg. He argues, counterintuitively, that the chief advantage of digital goggles is that they allow you to interact with technology in a way that does not interfere with your real-world life. In other words, they make smartphones less distracting than they are today. They achieve this, Starner says, because a tiny, voice-activated screen above your eye is much faster to access?and much less socially awkward?than a big screen you fish out of your pocket and hold far away from your eyes, forming a barrier between you and the rest of the world.
Once I put them on, I saw exactly what Starner meant. To turn on Glass, you tap the frame of your specs, or you nod your head up. When you do so, you see a big, digital clock just off to the side of your central field of vision, and a prompt to say ?OK Glass? when you?re ready to ask it something. Even this main screen is useful: I don?t wear a wristwatch?I?ve never found them comfortable?and, when I?m not at my PC, I usually check the time on my phone. Glass offers me a quicker, less socially awkward way to access a clock.
I know what you?re thinking: A normal person would just wear a wristwatch. Yes, but even if you do wear a watch, there?s a good chance you look at your phone for dozens of other tiny bits of information during the day?texts, email, directions, photos, and especially Google searches. Starner calls these ?microinteractions??moments when you consult your phone or computer for ephemeral, important information that you need immediately. Glass is built for these moments. Once you say ?OK glass,? you?re presented with a menu of possible commands, including performing a Google search, asking for directions, and taking a picture. You can also access Google Now?the company?s predictive personal assistant?by swiping your finger along the frame. This shows you contextual information that you?d usually find on your phone?the weather, sports scores, directions to your hotel.
It took me a minute or so to figure out how to access all this information. Google has built a vocabulary of taps and swipes into the device, and you?ve got to learn the gestures?that swiping forward and back is the equivalent of scrolling, that swiping down is a universal ?back? button, and that tapping once is the equivalent of clicking. But once I got the controls, and once I?d positioned the device correctly in front of my glasses, I understood exactly how to use it?it?s just like my phone, but faster. (Google is working on a way to have Glass attach to prescription glasses, by the way.)
For instance, I could see using Glass when I?m cooking. Today, when I?m ready for the next step in a recipe or need to look up, say, the internal temperature of a medium-rare steak, I have to break away from what I?m doing and look at a book or my iPad. With Glass, any information I need is right there, always. ?OK Glass,? I asked it in one of my first tests. ?How many cups in a quart?? In half a second, it spat back the answer on screen and by voice: ?There are four cups in a quart.? (Glass uses a ?bone conduction? speaker located right around you ear; this means that you can hear it while still keeping your ears free to hear the outside world, even though it isn?t audible to anyone else.)
When I met him on Thursday, Starner told me that this is how he uses Glass?to search for queries that come up in social situations. At dinner with his wife recently, the conversation turned to cats, and Starner wondered how far they can fall without getting hurt. He asked Glass. Unlike my quarts-to-cups question, Starner?s question?like most Google queries?didn?t bring up a direct answer. Instead, it showed him a snippet of the first link in the search results. You can see additional links by scrolling, but Google?s search is so good that you can often get enough information without doing so. (Cats usually get injured on falls shorter than seven stories; at greater heights they have time to right their bodies and land on their feet.)
These examples might strike you as intrusive and disruptive?exactly the sort of thing you?d feared would come of a digital device attached to your face. It?s true, too, that when someone is accessing information from Glass, his eyes shift up into the corner of his sockets. Depending on the situation? you?re checking sports scores while your friend is confiding in you about his marital troubles?this could be perceived as rude.
On the other hand, shifting your eyes is way, way less distracting than checking your smartphone. Indeed, after using it, I?d argue that pretty much any time you look something up on Glass rather than a phone, you?re choosing a less intrusive way of accessing the digital world. If you want to rid the world of digital interruptions, you?d start by eradicating phones. And if you?ve been hoping that your friends and family would get their heads out of their phones already, you ought to be celebrating Glass.
Still, I don?t want to overpraise the device. Because it?s so new, Glass?s capabilities are still quite limited, and it?s nowhere close to serving as a replacement for a phone in most situations. This week Google announced a program for developers to add new services to Glass; among the companies pitching in are Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Evernote, and I?m hoping many more firms follow their lead.
Even before that happens, though, Glass is off to a great start. Once I had it on my face, I was addicted to the power it gave me, and I couldn?t stop ordering it around: ?Show me pictures of dinosaurs.? ?Take a picture.? ?What time is my flight?? ?How long will it take me to get home?? At some point I had to take Glass off. I really, really didn?t want to.
A bipartisan band of House members working on a comprehensive immigration bill has reached an agreement in principle, lawmakers said Thursday, after talks dragged on for months and appeared stalled earlier in the day.
The lawmakers did not provide details as they left a two-hour meeting Thursday evening, but said they would be working to write the measure.
?We have an agreement in principle. We?re now going to work on finishing up the drafting of the bill,? Rep. John Carter, R.-Texas, a member of the group, said Thursday.
Politico further reports:
Carter also said that he vehemently opposes the Senate bill, and declared it dead on arrival in the House.
Someone at the Daily Beast writes:
With the exception of whether immigrants on provisional status would qualify for ObamaCare, the House will be eschewing the piecemeal process.
This is a departure from earlier reports, and leaves me scratching my head a bit. I anticipate a far nastier fight over this bill in the House than in the Senate, and while Harry Reid wants the House to do a comprehensive bill, piecemeal legislation would probably have a better chance at passage.
Obama previously said he was amenable to a tougher House bill (compared to Gang of 8) as long as it included a pathway to citizenship.
I?m with Ted Cruz when it comes to giving citizenship to adults who broke the law to come here:
One of Cruz?s amendment takes direct aim at that bill?s ?path to citizenship? provision, the central point of contention. His change says that no person shall be eligible for citizenship who has been ?willfully? in the U.S. and without legal status.
The criteria for ?willfully? are not defined.
So how big a cave-in have House Republicans made?
Transparensorcery ? ?House immigration group reaches a deal?
For those who believe that a robust public-affairs journalism is essential for a society striving to be democratic, the 21st?century has been characterized by bad news that keeps getting worse.
Whatever one?s evaluation of traditional advertising-supported news media (and I have been among its critics; more on that later), the unraveling of that business model has left us with fewer professional journalists who are being paid a living wage to do original reporting. It?s unrealistic to imagine that journalism can flourish without journalists who have the time and resources to do journalism.
For those who care about a robust human presence on the planet, the 21st?century has been characterized by really bad news that keeps getting really, really worse.
Whatever one?s evaluation of high-energy/high-technology civilization (and I have been among its critics; more on that later), it?s now clear that we are hitting physical limits; we cannot expect to maintain contemporary levels of consumption that draw down the ecological capital of the planet at rates dramatically beyond replacement levels. It unrealistic to imagine that we can go on treating the planet as nothing more than a mine from which we extract and a landfill into which we dump.
We have no choice but to deal with the collapse of journalism, but we also should recognize the need for a journalism of collapse. Everyone understands that economic changes are forcing a refashioning of the journalism profession. It?s long past time for everyone to pay attention to how multiple, cascading ecological crises should be changing professional journalism?s mission in even more dramatic fashion.
It?s time for an apocalyptic journalism (that takes some explaining; a lot more on that later).
The Basics of Journalism: Ideals and Limitations
With the rapid expansion of journalistic-like material on the internet, it?s especially crucial to define ?real? journalism. In a democratic system, ideally journalism is a critical, independent source of information, analysis, and the varied opinions needed by citizens who want to play a meaningful role in the formation of public policy. The key terms are ?critical? and ?independent??to fulfill the promise of a free press, journalists must be willing to critique not only specific people and policies, but the systems out of which they emerge, and they must be as free as possible from constraining influences, both overt and subtle. Also included in that definition of journalism is an understanding of democracy??a meaningful role in the formation of public policy??as more than just lining up to vote in elections that offer competing sets of elites who represent roughly similar programs. Meaningful democracy involves meaningful participation.
This discussion will focus on what is typically called mainstream journalism, the corporate-commercial news media. These are the journalists who work for daily newspapers, broadcast and cable television, and the corporately owned platforms on the internet and other digital devices. Although there are many types of independent and alternative journalism of varying quality, the vast majority of Americans continue to receive the vast majority of their news from these mainstream sources, which are almost always organized as large corporations and funded primarily by advertising.
Right-wing politicians and commentators sometimes refer to the mainstream media as the ?lamestream,? implying that journalists are comically incompetent and incapable of providing an accurate account of the world, likely due to a lack of understanding of conservative people and their ideas. While many elite journalists may be dismissive of the cultural values of conservatives, this critique ignores the key questions about journalism?s relationship to power. Focusing on the cultural politics of individual reporters and editors?pointing out that they tend to be less religious and more supportive of gay and women?s rights than the general public, for example?diverts attention from more crucial questions about how the institutional politics of corporate owners and managers shapes the news and keeps mainstream journalism within a centrist/right conventional wisdom.
The managers of commercial news organizations in the United States typically reject that claim by citing the unbreachable ?firewall? between the journalistic and the business sides of the operation, which is supposed to allow journalists to pursue any story without interference from the corporate front office. This exchange I had with a newspaper editor captures the ideology: After listening to my summary of this critique of the U.S. commercial news media system, this editor (let?s call him Joe) told me proudly: ?No one from corporate headquarters has ever called me to tell me what to run in my paper.? I asked Joe if it were possible that he simply had internalized the value system of the folks who run the corporation (and, by extension, the folks who run most of the world), and therefore they never needed to give him direct instructions. He rejected that, reasserting his independence from any force outside his newsroom.
I countered: ?Let?s say, for the purposes of discussion, that you and I were equally capable journalists in terms of professional skills, that we were both reasonable candidates for the job of editor-in-chief that you hold. If we had both applied for the job, do you think your corporate bosses would have ever considered me for the position, given my politics? Would I, for even a second, have been seen by them to be a viable candidate for the job??
Joe?s politics are pretty conventional, well within the range of mainstream Republicans and Democrats?he supports big business and U.S. supremacy in global politics and economics. I?m a critic of capitalism and U.S. foreign policy. On some political issues, Joe and I would agree, but we diverge sharply on these core questions of the nature of the economy and the state.
Joe pondered my question and conceded that I was right, that his bosses would never hire someone with my politics, no matter how qualified, to run one of their newspapers. The conversation trailed off, and we parted without resolving our differences. I would like to think my critique at least got Joe to question his platitudes, but I never saw any evidence of that. In his subsequent writing and public comments that I read and heard, Joe continued to assert that a news media system dominated by for-profit corporations was the best way to produce the critical, independent journalism that citizens in a democracy needed. Because he was in a position of some privilege and status, nothing compelled Joe to respond to my challenge.
Partly as a result of many such unproductive conversations, I continue to search for new ways to present a critique of mainstream journalism that might break through that ideological wall. In addition to thinking about alternatives to this traditional business model, we should confront the limitations of the corresponding professional model, with its status-quo-supportive ideology of neutrality, balance, and objectivity. Can we create conditions under which journalism?deeply critical and truly independent?can flourish in these trying times?
In this essay I want to try out theological concepts of the royal, prophetic, and apocalyptic traditions. Though journalism is a secular institution, religion can provide a helpful vocabulary. The use of these terms is not meant to imply support for any particular religious tradition, or for religion more generally, but only recognizes that the fundamental struggles of human history play out in religious and secular settings, and we can learn from all of that history. With a focus on the United States, I?ll drawn on the concepts as they understood in the dominant U.S. tradition of Judaism and Christianity.
Royal Journalism
Most of today?s mainstream corporate-commercial journalism?the work done by people such as Joe?is royal journalism, using the term ?royal? not to describe a specific form of executive power but as a description of a system that centralizes authority and marginalizes the needs of ordinary people. The royal tradition describes ancient Israel, the Roman empire, European monarchs, or contemporary America?societies in which those with concentrated wealth and power can ignore the needs of the bulk of the population, societies where the wealthy and powerful offer platitudes about their beneficence as they pursue policies to enrich themselves.
In his books?The Prophetic Imagination?and?The Practice of Prophetic Imagination, theologian Walter Brueggemann points out that this royal consciousness took hold after ancient Israel sank into disarray, when Solomon overturned Moses?affluence, oppressive social policy, and static religion replaced a God of liberation with one used to serve an empire. This consciousness develops not only in top leaders but throughout the privileged sectors, often filtering down to a wider public that accepts royal power. Brueggemann labels this a false consciousness: ?The royal consciousness leads people to numbness, especially to numbness about death.?
The inclusion of the United States in a list of royalist societies may seem odd, given the democratic traditions of the country, but consider a nation that has been at war for more than a decade, in which economic inequality and the resulting suffering has dramatically deepened for the past four decades, in which climate change denial has increased as the evidence of the threat becomes undeniable. Brueggemann describes such a culture as one that is ?competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing.?
Almost all mainstream corporate-commercial journalism is, in this sense, royal journalism. It is journalism without the imagination needed to move outside the framework created by the dominant systems of power. CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News all practice royal journalism.?The New York Times?is ground zero for royal journalism. Marking these institutions as royalist doesn?t mean that no good journalism ever emerges from them, or that they employ no journalists who are capable of challenging royal arrangements. Instead, the term recognizes that these institutions lack the imagination necessary to step outside of the royal consciousness on a regular basis. Over time, they add to the numbness rather than jolt people out of it.
The royal consciousness of our day is defined by unchallengeable commitments to a high-energy/high-technology worldview, within a hierarchical economy, run by an imperial nation-state. These technological, economic, and national fundamentalisms produce a certain kind of story about ourselves, which encourages the belief that we can have anything we want without obligations to other peoples or other living things, and that we deserve this. Brueggemann argues that this bolsters notions of ?US exceptionalism that gives warrant to the usurpatious pursuit of commodities in the name of freedom, at the expense of the neighbor.?
If one believes royal arrangements are just and sustainable, then royal journalism could be defended. If the royal tradition is illegitimate, than a different journalism is necessary.
Prophetic Journalism
Given the multiple crises that existing political, economic, and social systems have generated, the ideals of journalism call for a prophetic journalism. The first step in defending that claim is to remember what real prophets are not: They are not people who predict the future or demand that others follow them in lockstep. In the Hebrew Bible and Christian New Testament, prophets are the figures who remind the people of the best of the tradition and point out how the people have strayed. In those traditions, using our prophetic imagination and speaking in a prophetic voice requires no special status in society, and no sense of being special. Claiming the prophetic tradition requires only honesty and courage.
When we strip away supernatural claims and delusions of grandeur, we can understand the prophetic as the calling out of injustice, the willingness not only to confront the abuses of the powerful but to acknowledge our own complicity. To speak prophetically requires us first to see honestly?both how our world is structured by systems that create unjust and unsustainable conditions, and how we who live in the privileged parts of the world are implicated in those systems. To speak prophetically is to refuse to shrink from what we discover or from our own place in these systems. We must confront the powers that be, and ourselves.
The Hebrew Bible offers us many models. Amos and Hosea, Jeremiah and Isaiah?all rejected the pursuit of wealth or power and argued for the centrality of kindness and justice. The prophets condemned corrupt leaders but also called out all those privileged people in society who had turned from the demands of justice, which the faith makes central to human life. In his analysis of these prophets, the scholar and activist Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel concluded:
Above all, the prophets remind us of the moral state of a people: Few are guilty, but all are responsible. If we admit that the individual is in some measure conditioned or affected by the spirit of society, an individual?s crime discloses society?s corruption.
Critical of royal consciousness, Brueggemann argues that the task of those speaking prophetically is to ?penetrate the numbness in order to face the body of death in which we are caught? and ?penetrate despair so that new futures can be believed in and embraced by us.? He encourages preachers to think of themselves as ?handler[s] of the prophetic tradition,? a job description that also applies to other intellectual professions, including journalism.
Brueggemann argues that this isn?t about intellectuals imposing their views and values on others, but about being willing to ?connect the dots?:
Prophetic preaching does not put people in crisis. Rather it names and makes palpable the crisis already pulsing among us. When the dots are connected, it will require naming the defining sins among us of environmental abuse, neighborly disregard, long-term racism, self-indulgent consumerism, all the staples from those ancient truthtellers translated into our time and place.
None of this requires journalists to advocate for specific politicians, parties, or political programs; we don?t need journalists to become propagandists. Journalists should strive for real independence but not confuse that with an illusory neutrality that traps mainstream journalists within ideological boundaries defined by the powerful. Again, real independence means the ability to critique not just the worst abuses by the powerful within the systems, but to critique the systems themselves.
This prophetic calling is consistent with the aphorism many journalists claim as a shorthand mission statement: The purpose of journalism is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. That phrase focuses on injustice within human societies, but what of the relationship of human beings to the larger living world? How should journalists understand their mission in that arena?
Ecological Realties
Let?s put analysis of journalism on hold and think about the larger world in which journalism operates. Journalistic ideals and norms should change as historical conditions change, and today that means facing tough questions about ecological sustainability.
There is considerable evidence to help us evaluate the health of the ecosphere on which our own lives depend, and an honest evaluation of that evidence leads to a disturbing conclusion: Life as we know it is almost over. That is, the high-energy/high-technology life that we in the affluent societies live is a dead-end. There is a growing realization that we have disrupted planetary forces in ways we cannot control and do not fully understand. We cannot predict the specific times and places where dramatic breakdowns will occur, but we can know that the living system on which we depend is breaking down.
Does that seem histrionic? Excessively alarmist? Look at any crucial measure of the health of the ecosphere in which we live?groundwater depletion, topsoil loss, chemical contamination, increased toxicity in our own bodies, the number and size of ?dead zones? in the oceans, accelerating extinction of species and reduction of bio-diversity?and the news is bad. Add to that the mother of all ecological crises?global warming, climate change, climate disruption?and it?s clear that we are creating a planet that cannot indefinitely support a large-scale human presence living this culture?s idea of the good life.
We also live in an oil-based world that is rapidly depleting the cheap and easily accessible oil, which means we face a huge reconfiguration of the infrastructure that undergirds our lives. Meanwhile, the desperation to avoid that reconfiguration has brought us to the era of ?extreme energy? using even more dangerous and destructive technologies (hydrofracturing, deep-water drilling, mountain-top removal, tar sands extraction) to get at the remaining hydrocarbons.
Where we are heading? Off the rails? Into the wall? Over the cliff? Pick your favorite metaphor. Scientists these days are talking about tipping points and planetary boundaries, about how human activity is pushing the planet beyond its limits. Recently 22 top scientists in the prestigious journal?Nature?warned that humans likely are forcing a planetary-scale critical transition ?with the potential to transform Earth rapidly and irreversibly into a state unknown in human experience.? That means that ?the biological resources we take for granted at present may be subject to rapid and unpredictable transformations within a few human generations.?
That means that we?re in trouble, not in some imaginary science-fiction future, but in our present reality. We can?t pretend all that?s needed is tinkering with existing systems to fix a few environmental problems; significant changes in how we live are required. No matter where any one of us sits in the social and economic hierarchies, there is no escape from the dislocations that will come with such changes. Money and power might insulate some from the most wrenching consequences of these shifts, but there is no permanent escape. We do not live in stable societies and no longer live on a stable planet. We may feel safe and secure in specific places at specific times, but it?s hard to believe in any safety and security in a collective sense.
In short, we live in apocalyptic times.
Apocalypse
To be clear: Speaking apocalyptically need not be limited to claims that the world will end on a guru?s timetable or according to some allegedly divine plan. Lots of apocalyptic visions?religious and secular?offer such certainty, imaging the replacement of a corrupt society by one structured on principles that will redeem humanity (or at least redeem those who sign onto the principles). But this need not be our only understanding of the term.
Most discussions of revelation and apocalypse in contemporary America focus on the Book of Revelation, also known as The Apocalypse of John, the final book of the Christian New Testament. The two terms are synonymous in their original meaning; ?revelation? from Latin and ?apocalypse? from Greek both mean a lifting of the veil, a disclosure of something hidden from most people, a coming to clarity. Many scholars interpret the Book of Revelation not as a set of predictions about the future but as a critique of the oppression of the empire of that day, Rome.
To speak apocalyptically, in this tradition, is first and foremost about deepening our understanding of the world, seeing through the obfuscations of people in power. In our propaganda-saturated world (think about the amount of advertising, public relations, and marketing that we are bombarded with daily), coming to that kind of clarity about the nature of the empires of our day is always a struggle, and that notion of revelation is more crucial than ever.
Thinking apocalyptically, coming to this clarity, will force us to confront crises that concentrated wealth and power create, and reflect on our role in these systems. Given the severity of the human assault on the ecosphere, compounded by the suffering and strife within the human family, honest apocalyptic thinking that is firmly grounded in a systematic evaluation of the state of the world is not only sensible but a moral obligation. Rather than thinking of revelation as divine delivery of a clear message about some fantastic future above, we can engage in an ongoing process of revelation that results from an honest struggle to understand, a process that requires a lot of effort.
Things are bad, systems are failing, and the status quo won?t last forever. Thinking apocalyptically in this fashion demands of us considerable courage and commitment. This process will not produce definitive answers but rather help us identify new directions.
Again, to be very clear: ?Apocalypse? in this context does not mean lakes of fire, rivers of blood, or bodies lifted up to heaven. The shift from the prophetic to the apocalyptic can instead mark the point when hope in the viability of existing systems is no longer possible and we must think in dramatically new ways. Invoking the apocalyptic recognizes the end of something. It?s not about rapture but a rupture severe enough to change the nature of the whole game.
Apocalyptic Journalism
The prophetic imagination helps us analyze the historical moment we?re in, but it?s based on an implicit faith that the systems in which we live can be reshaped to stop the worst consequences of the royal consciousness, to shake off that numbness of death in time. What if that is no longer possible? Then it is time to think about what?s on the other side. ?The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,? said Martin Luther King, Jr., one of the more well-known voices in the prophetic tradition. But if the arc is now bending toward a quite different future, a different approach is needed.
Because no one can predict the future, these two approaches are not mutually exclusive; people should not be afraid to think prophetically and apocalyptically at the same time. We can simultaneously explore immediate changes in the existing systems and think about new systems.
Invoking the prophetic in the face of royal consciousness does not promise quick change and a carefree future, but it implies that a disastrous course can be corrected. But what if the justification for such hope evaporates? When prophetic warnings have not been heeded, what comes next? This is the time when an apocalyptic sensibility is needed.
Fred Guterl, the executive editor of?Scientific American, models that spirit in his book?The Fate of the Species.Though he describes himself on the ?techno-optimistic side of the spectrum,? he does not shy away from a blunt discussion of the challenges humans face:
There?s no going back on our reliance on computers and high-tech medicine, agriculture, power generation, and so forth without causing vast human suffering?unless you want to contemplate reducing the world population by many billions of people. We have climbed out on a technological limb, and turning back is a disturbing option. We are dependent on our technology, yet our technology now presents the seeds of our own destruction. It?s a dilemma. I don?t pretend to have a way out. We should start by being aware of the problem.
I don?t share Guterl?s techno-optimism, but it strikes me as different from a technological fundamentalism (the quasi-religious belief that the use of advanced technology is always a good thing and that any problems caused by the unintended consequences of such technology can be remedied by more technology) that assumes that humans can invent themselves out of any problem. Guterl doesn?t deny the magnitude of the problems and recognizes the real possibility, perhaps even the inevitability, of massive social dislocation:
[W]e?re going to need the spirit with which these ideas were hatched to solve the problems we have created. Tossing aside technological optimism is not a realistic option. This doesn?t mean technology is going to save us. We may still be doomed. But without it, we are surely doomed.
Closer to my own assessment is James Lovelock, a Fellow of the Royal Society, whose work led to the detection of the widespread presence CFCs in the atmosphere. Most famous for his ?Gaia hypothesis? that understands both the living and non-living parts of the earth as a complex system that can be thought of as a single organism, he suggests that we face these stark realities immediately:
The great party of the twentieth century is coming to an end, and unless we now start preparing our survival kit we will soon be just another species eking out an existence in the few remaining habitable regions. ? We should be the heart and mind of the Earth, not its malady. So let us be brave and cease thinking of human needs and rights alone and see that we have harmed the living Earth and need to make our peace with Gaia.
Anything that blocks us from looking honestly at reality, no matter how harsh the reality, must be rejected. It?s a lot to ask, of people and of journalists, to not only think about this, but put it at the center of our lives. What choice do we have? To borrow from one of 20th?century America?s most honest writers, James Baldwin, ?Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.?
That line is from an essay titled ?As Much Truth as One Can Bear,? about the struggles of artists to help a society, such as the white-supremacist America, face the depth of its pathology. Baldwin suggested that a great writer attempts ?to tell as much of the truth as one can bear, and then a little more.? If we think of Baldwin as sounding a prophetic call, an apocalyptic invocation would be ?to tell as much of the truth as one can bear, and then all the rest of the truth, whether we can bear it or not.?
That task is difficult enough when people are relatively free to pursue inquiry without external constraints. Are the dominant corporate-commercial/advertising-supported media outlets likely to encourage journalists to pursue the projects that might lead to such questions? If not, the apocalyptic journalism we need is more likely to emerge from the margins, where people are not trapped by illusions of neutrality or concerned about professional status.
[INSERT HOPEFUL ENDING HERE]
That subhead is not an editing oversight. I wish there were an easy solution, an upbeat conclusion. I don?t have one. I?ve never heard anyone else articulate one. To face the world honestly at this moment in human history likely means giving up on easy and upbeat.
The apocalyptic tradition reminds us that the absence of hope does not have to leave us completely hopeless, that life is always at the same time about death, and then rejuvenation. If we don?t have easy, upbeat solutions and conclusions, we have the ability to keep telling stories of struggle. Our stories do not change the physical world, but they have the potential to change us. In that sense, the poet Muriel Rukeyser was right when she said, ?The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.?
To think apocalyptically is not to give up on ourselves, but only to give up on the arrogant stories that we modern humans have been telling about ourselves. The royal must give way to the prophetic and the apocalyptic. The central story that power likes to tell?that the domination/subordination dynamic that structures so much of modern life is natural and inevitable?must give way to stories of dignity, solidarity, equality. We must resist not only the cruelty of repression but the seduction of comfort.
The best journalists in our tradition have seen themselves as responsible for telling stories about the struggle for social justice. Today, we can add stories about the struggle for ecological sustainability to that mission. Our hope for a decent future?indeed, any hope for even the idea of a future?depends on our ability to tell stories not of how humans have ruled the world but how we can live in the world.
Whether or not we like it, we are all apocalyptic now.
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Public release date: 19-May-2013
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Vic Gundotra of Google, wears a Google Glass during the Google I/O Conference in San Francisco. 