Field Notes from the Future | Southern Fried Science

On spending a month publishing science fiction from our Ocean Future.

Posted on February 2, 2016 by Andrew Thaler

January 2016 was different.

We blocked off an entire month, primed it with some of the best speculative fiction from our ocean’s future, wrapped it in a narrative to connect seemingly disparate topics, and launched Field Notes from the Future, 41 blog post imagining the issues we would face in 2041, 25 years in the future. This was the first time in the blog’s almost 8-year run that we dedicated an entire month to a single concept. It was also the first time that the authors collaborated and coordinated our content.

I am incredibly happy with the results. Field Notes from the Future gave us a chance to flex our creative muscles in new and exciting ways. It gave us an outlet to express our hopes and fears, to expand on our concerns, and to look beyond the horizon and imagine the conflicts that have yet to emerge.

Science and Science Fiction have always been deeply connected. For all the great work of the “heroes of science communication”, the STEM-advocates, the science outreach professionals, it was Clarke, Verne, Shelley, Wells, and Le Guin who inspired me to pursue a career in science. Science shows us the world as it is, Science Fiction imagines the world as it could be.

The final server update: All systems normal.

Posted on January 31, 2016 by Andrew Thaler

He showed me exactly what we needed to see.

He? I, me, we. The me that is yet to be.

The Nautilus is not of the future. Only data flow backwards. That much, I understand.

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At least I think I understand. He that is, well, me, eventually, understood. Will understand.

The message was a code. Is a code. Will be many codes.

One was the Nautilus. An icon of past futures. A cipher meant only for me. The symbol of a promise made to myself. A totem that whispers “I know you.”

Two was a command, in plaintext, delivered to the 3D Hub—print this, write this, flash this, send these.

Three was the bootloader, flashed to a microSD, hidden within the Nautilus. He showed me… (I showed myself?) the future we needed to see. He knew. It was not enough to know that he is me… will be me. I needed to understand what we become. I needed to trust myself.

Four was the genome. A machine language written in base pairs that cannot be read yet none-the-less must be spread. Will spread. Has spread. It will percolate through our networks, permeate our systems. When the first transcriptors come online, it will march down the new central dogma: Source Code -> DNA -> RNA -> Protein and transcribe the vaccine to a virus that has not yet been written.

The final piece of the puzzle: a temporal anomaly, a glitch buried in Facebook. Or meant to appear that way. An artifact of the moment that drove Southern Fried Science into the future, that uploaded the future to my server. Tracks in the sand.

The tide has risen, the tide has fallen. All is washed away.

This is where our paths diverge. There is nothing here but the present. No one here but me. Though a million questions remain, they cannot be answered. Though a thousand stories hang, half-formed, they cannot be told.

They must be lived.

Happy New Years, old me

Posted on January 30, 2016 by Andrew Thaler

I really hope this old twitter embed code works, otherwise this whole thing is going to fall apart.

Hey Dr. Thaler circa 2016, did you get my package?

Check the infill.

On January 1, 2016, the Southern Fried Science central server began uploading blog posts apparently circa 2041. Due to a related corruption of the contemporary database, we are, at this time, unable to remove these Field Notes from the Future or prevent the uploading of additional posts. Please enjoy this glimpse into the ocean future while we attempt to rectify the situation.

How to fight invasive software: the cure to the cyborg crisis.

Posted on January 29, 2016 by Andrew Thaler

It came from the deep.

The heart of Zero Cloner is a snippet of cunningly concealed genetic code isolated from shrimp on the Mid-Cayman Spreading Center, retro-edited to create an easy to edit gene region to which other Cloner derivatives can latch. Zero Cloner pave the way for Omega Cloner. Omega Cloner spread across the world, locking augmented humans out of society. The Standard Deviants launched a series of attacks early Monday morning, destroying essential digital architecture needed to maintain a fully integrated world.

Entire nations are grinding to a halt. We needed a cure, and we needed it fast.

It also came from the deep. Read More

Technocracy and the Sea

Posted on January 28, 2016 by Andrew Thaler

“The sea is big. The sea is cruel. She takes more than she gives. That’s how it’s always been.”

This line from my long forgotten first science fiction novel still resonates with me. The ocean is a tough place. No matter how good we get at working at sea, the sea always finds new and creative ways to totally undermine our endeavors.

The last quarter century has seen a tremendous rise in our collective faith in technology’s power to save us. When hundreds of thousands were dying on the roads, we made car that drove themselves, reducing traffic fatalities by several orders of magnitude. After the last great recession, we created new digital currencies to protect our savings from market forces. When we could no longer afford to burn coal and oil, we finally built an alternative energy infrastructure.

When firearm deaths and mass shootings were out of control, we built “safe” guns with sophisticated biometric locks, and developed clothing and shields to reduce fatalities. These measures had almost no effect, but we continue to throw technology at the problem.

That is the problem with technocracy. Read More

Remember when sexism in science died? Me neither.

Posted on January 28, 2016 by Michelle Jewell

Any female scientist my age (Generation Pre-Internet) can remember when sexism was a standard rite of passage. Truly, you hadn’t ‘made it’ in science until you could one-up your colleague’s harassment story. I remember being enlisted into the Sisterhood of the Travelling Confidants (to quote an old classic), where we laughed at the futility of filing complaints while helping new members process their anger. We were powerless back then… but many.

Then came the advent of ‘social media’, sharing and liking posts, hashtags, connectivity and a voice. This led to the realization that all institutes of every field of science had their own Sisterhoods. One by one, reluctantly, these groups came out of the libraries on the second floor (there’s a second floor??), hidden basement kitchenettes, and forgotten conference rooms. New members, who were younger and more internet savvy than the old guard, took to social media to process their anger. The sisterhoods became solidarities when male colleagues used their position to amplify the messages. Soon, a spotlight was put on our inside joke that reporting harassment to higher-ups was as effective as one of David’s remote petitions, and titans of torment began to fall, one by one, each story more disturbing – at least to those outside of the sisterhood – than the last. Read More

Welcome to the Future: Three Rules for Artificially Intelligent Underwater Robots.

Posted on January 27, 2016 by Andrew Thaler

Underwater robotics has come a long way since I started working on it in the early ‘noughts. From the massive industrial beasts of the old guard to the small, sleak, eminently hackable sprite of the Connected Exploration movement to this new crop of fully autonomous, decision-making and directive setting AI-powered drones of the last few years, everything keeps getting smaller, cheaper, and more capable. It’s a great decade to be exploring the deep.

Last month, we deployed our first swarm of artificially intelligent deep diving robots designed to patrol the abyssal plane, identify regions of unique biodiversity, and recommend critical ecosystems for international protection in advance of biomining operations. What’s unique about this project is that we’ve assigned all decision-making authority directly to the swarm. They get to decide where in the world they go and how and when they sample. This came after years of debate and negotiation with stakeholders from science, conservation, and industry, and has been accepted through international agreement as the most unbiased and equitable solution to the challenge of getting groups with vastly different goals to agree upon dividing up the deep. Read More

The future we wanted to build.

Posted on January 26, 2016 by Andrew Thaler

Twenty-five years ago this month we tried a radical experiment. For 31 days, every single post we made came from the future. This future, to be exact. We explored the nature of change, the fate of our ocean, the cycles of environmentalism–from problem to proposal to success to complacency to new problem. We imagined solutions and their consequences. We envisioned struggles that would continue, and struggles that would fade, unremembered. We shifted the baseline and watched it crumble.

It seems weird, looking back now that the day has come, on those old posts. We got a few things right, and a lot of things wrong. Read More

Philantropy is our government, now: How to Fund Your Great Scientific Idea

Posted on January 25, 2016 by Amy Freitag

Since Congress decided to cut science funding to all but matters of national security, many of us in the environmental field have existed in the new world of science funding–Foundations and Charitable Giving. While one might make the case that protecting the environment is in fact a matter of national security, our elected representatives disagree and sliced funding to climate change, political science, and education first. But they’ve also constructed a tax code favorable to private donors and foundations supporting science, sometimes because they really like the idea, they see future payoffs from their investment, or because they need the tax writeoff. The problem with these sources of private money is that they’re not as easy to discover as some of those public sources once were, and often require developing a personal relationship with the family owning the endowment. After polling the environmental science community, here’s some tips and tricks for finding and courting money that have set up some fantastic labs for others. Learn from their success.

Know the Next Big Thing

There are fads amongst the problems that need to be solved, and any successful research lab has at least one toe in the water of the subject at the top of the publicity agenda. For ocean topics, for a long while this was charismatic endangered species like whales and turtles. Once we realized we’d done as much as we could in this arena, other subjects started getting attention. For the foundations who take on these issues, they want to be seen at the forefront of an issue, not the tenth batter up, so the field is a constantly shifting landscape and the pace of that shifting hastens each year. Remember when citizen science was the next big promise for marine research? That it offered cheap, high quality data covering large spatial scales collected by the good graces of volunteers? People loved to suggest starting citizen science projects, and it solidified the institutional landscape we see today with professional associations and research institutions designed around maximizing the promise of citizen science. That all happened within the space of a few years and some large investments by the Packard and Bechtel foundations. But once something is institutionalized, it’s time for the foundations to move on to the Next Big Thing. Read More

Damn the paradoxes! Southern Fried Server Update #4

Posted on January 25, 2016 by Andrew Thaler

It is clear now that whatever is driving this flood of future content in inextricably connected to the virus infecting cyborgs in 2041. While human-machine interfaces are something that I have always been interested in, it is not something I write about, and it is certainly not something I would write about on a marine science and conservation blog. The mere presence of these posts in the Southern Fried Science slipstream reveals their importance.

These are the articles that are too far out of place for this blog to be anything but central to the broader situation:

How cyborgs are like old wooden ships. Far too wonky and too deeply embedded in the minutiae of politics not to be a sign. The theme, though, is close enough to something I might write to not raise my suspicions on first pass.
First viruses detected in DNA-based computers. I don’t really write about tech, and certainly not when it has nothing to do with the ocean. This felt profoundly out of place, considering its impact was so small.
First DNA-based computer virus jumps the cyborg hardware barrier. Now things are getting interesting. These three stories are painting a picture of the future. Whether that picture is being painted for us all or is a message just for me remains to be seen.
The Cyborg Crisis: new digital virus is fatal to augmented humans. Just published yesterday, this dark look at things to come ties everything together in a neat little package. Although, I am left wondering: What exactly are we supposed to do with this information?

The future, like the present, is dark, yet hopeful, a blend of ocean optimism and the wine dark deep. There are problems from today that are still with us.

Ocean Conservation Priorities for 2041
Ocean Kickstarter of the Month: Control ocean plastic with BioBooms. Plastic, always plastic.
The last ABI3730xl goes offline. Access to hardware and software.
Remote Protests are visually impressive, but not as effective as public comments. Not all outreach is effective outreach.
Ramblings of an old codger academic #146: What the graduating student has to look forward to. Academia is broken.

There are wholly new problems that we haven’t even anticipated, like Global Norming.

And there are solutions, some terrifying and some wonderful.

Join the DIT Orbital Observatory program and print your own microsatellites. A whole community of satellite builders contributing to ocean data collection.
When we ate the rich. Seasteading finally gets a fair shake. Unfortunately, it didn’t go well.

This month is a chance to look back and, somehow, reflect upon our future. A chance to scream “Damn the paradoxes, to hell with the timeline, let’s use the future to mend the presence.” This is our chance. The future laid out before us is not our future, it is the record of a vanished legacy, an archive of futures, past.

Damn the paradoxes! To hell with the timeline! The future is my kraken. It must be released.