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Last week Obama introduced the new United States budget– which notably kills the American space program. There is one way the zombie that is NASA can return from the dead: a lottery.

NASA has been in the sick ward for some time. Few come to visit these days. The Shuttle is a flying Betamax of technolgy. NASA has been reduced to finding parts on eBay.

Perhaps the only thing George W Bush did I concur with was give NASA a reboot. The proposed Constellation Program was Apollo on steroids. After all, we have computers, CAD, and iPods so let’s use that awesome technology to go to the moon. Using proven rocket technolgy from the design of Saturn V and Soyuz rockets, the Ares would take us back to the moon.

It might have, but now the money and interest is gone. This has been the problem with manned spaceflight since it’s inception: money and interest.

The money is obviously an issue in the credit crunch economy. Interest also as many see other things to worry about. Interest, in the traditional knee jerk short sighted reaction.

Consider Sputnik in 1952: at that time there was no MLB Network, Internet, or cell phones. Sputnik had no clear benefit, no practical outcome. Soviet scientists were not sitting around saying “let’s put ball in space then it go beep beep. After, we will sell– how can you say– sports network to yankee blue jean American to watch on TV.” Nope, just a ball in space that went beep beep. Heck, most people didn’t even have a TV. Yet Sputnik’s development was absolutely critical in the world we live in today.

All that anyone could promise at best was the ball went beep beep and didn’t explode. That’s it. Today satelite technology is an invaluable part of our way of life but then it was simply ball that go beep beep.

Today where fortune and success come and go by the second space is a hard sell. The average person cannot afford a trip in space.

There’s a way to make money off space: get the real average Joe and make people excited about space again. The answer is a lottery.

At $100,000 Virgin Galactic isn’t cheap but it is cheap for space travel. If 100,000 people bought a $1 ticket (better odds than most lotteries) that would break even. Chances are though mote would buy– and outer space would start making money and interest.

This is the kind of viral and word-of-mouth advertising marketing types have wet dreams about. Even a few minutes in space is a lifetime experience and at $1 the price is right. Anousheh Ansari spent time in space and left feeling depressed– as if she had seen a fantastic world just out of arms length. As a result she created the X-Prize, offering a prize for affordable space travel; which in turn led to Virgin Galactic. Imagine when not just some guy on TV but your neighbor, your friend, or you journey into space. What we could accomplish with renewed money and interest in space is unimaginable. It’s unimaginable because right now we can’t get there, yet.

With a lottery, we could.

Whale penises are big these days.  (Pun!)

Perhaps the greatest metric of humankind’s power is that not only have we trashed fat tracts of the 30% of the Earth that we run around on but we’ve somehow managed to screw up the 70% we can’t even live in.  Yes friend, the ocean’s got problems.  Human impact has crashed populations of sea life, leaving us in a situation where once common fish on the menu may be extinct within our lifetimes.  Meanwhile, sushi is more popular than ever, especially among the well-informed and well-meaning types most likely to cry while watching The Cove.

While river dolphins are undeniably fucked, ocean dolphins are plentiful enough to use as jet ski ramps, if that’s your cup of tea, without danger of wiping them out.  The most compelling reason not to eat dolphin is that they are a high-end predator and thus accumulate dangerous levels of mercury in their system.  That’s besides the whole honor among thieves idea that makes eating other predatory mammals mostly taboo.

But this is only sort of about that.  What I really wanted to talk about was self-replicating swarms of medical nanobots.

Y’see, the debate over hunting whales involves opposing forces slinging around very different numbers about whale behavior and population size.  Due to the fact that the ocean is reeeeeeally freakin’ huge, hard numbers are hard to come by and you can pretty much cook the books as much as you want to come up with your own personal story called The Truth about Whales.  Add that to the dispute over the best methods of surveying whale populations (Greenpeace favors binoculars while the Japanese trust their harpoon guns) and it’s clear that there’s a need for better methods of close observation of marine life.

Mulling this over, it hit me.  If we’re living in an age where Italians can put tiny robot spiders in our colons (“hey sailor!”), who’s to say we’re that far off from spreading the robot love with other species?  Picture it: biologists dart a whale, infecting it with a few colonies of nano-bots that take up residence on the surface of it’s skin, like barnacles.  They are programed to assemble more of their kind from whale meal gleanings and other bits of miscellaneous sea soup, massing a new colony down in the whales nether regions or by it’s head, transferring a starter colony to a new host whale when the whales rub together.  A little cetacean bump and grind and we’ve got nanobots traveling throughout the pod, allowing scientists to monitor more and more individuals.

Each bot colony could have specialized members, some devoted to replication, some storing data, and some with sensors to monitor whale position, age, health, etc.  Once a certain amount of data is collected, a small transmitter buoy could be assembled and launched once the host whale reaches the surface.  Lazy scientists could just have observations beamed to them, routed into their RSS readers like we do now with cute cat pictures.

Of course a big factor standing in the way of this is that we don’t know a whole hell of a lot about wild whale health, what with them being creatures of the mysterious depths and all.  Unleashing self-assembling cyborg STDs on another species is a pretty damn big deal, potentially a cross-species Tuskegee Experiment.  But since when has near-complete ignorance been an impediment to a gnarly tech rollout?  Nanobot STDs could be this era’s DDT, a character-building experience this generation has been lacking.

So wrap that rascal, cetaceans.  Who knows if that fine Minke has got robo-herpes.

Oh man, old man Veer is gonna be livid when he sees I scooped him on this but this is too good not to share immediately: there’s a Throbbing Gristle version of the Buddha Machine on its way.  It’s called Gristleism

Yes, that’s right.  Gristly loops of audio-gnashing goodness will be emitted from handheld devices across the land come December when this new iteration of the Buddha Machine drops with more loops and a wider range of pitches than the original versions.

Now, I had plans to hook my iPod up to a homemade ring mod wired into a mic outside and pipe it all through some pliers-prepared dollar store speakers to get my dissonance fix but now there’s a handy consumer device to wipe the sinful bland audio of the world around me from my brainpan.  About.  Bloody.  Time.

The website for the thing looks like they have a commitment to doing it right to boot.  There’s scant info at the hacks section right now but the fact that they’re acknowledging and encouraging such behavior is an excellent step forward.

So the next two months the center of my cerebrum is gonna have the mental equivalent of feeling like I have to pee until the hour I can switch one of these on and bask in its loops.  Whee!  Can’t wait.

Track List:

01 – Persuasion
02 – Hamburger Lady
03 – Twenty Jazz Funk Greats
04 – Thank You Brian
05 – Maggot Death
06 – Rabbit Snare
07 – Lyre Liar
08 – Wimpy bar
09 – Sex String Theory
10 – Heathen Earth
11 – Industrial Intro
12 – R & D
13 – After After Cease To Exist

Disquiet’s got a loop up for your listening pleasure.  Thanks to Warren Ellis for noting this fact.

As an aside, why don’t we see more of this?  Yes, there’s bands with iPhone apps out there but if you’re trying to make a dime off the physical object association with music (which CDs have always been terrible for) mixed with the extended experience, what better than making a little esoteric device that lets your audience modify your sounds and play the best bits endlessly?  I find this to be a brilliant cross between fetishism and utility, two things that can loosen the purse strings of even us jerks who’ve been trained to expect our entertainment free and unromanticized.

Last week’s pop science debut of the remains of the early hominid species Ardipithecus ramidus was notable for a variety of reason’s, not the least of which was the secrecy and slow, careful approach of the scientists involved, so different from the half-baked, chuck out speculation for the slavering masses approach of so much of what crops up in my internet drain trap.  I particularly liked Carl Zimmer‘s summary of the findings, with this paragraph catching my eye:

White and his colleagues  found so many teeth of different Ardipithecus individuals that they could compare male and female canines with some confidence. The male teeth turn out to be surprisingly blunted. This result suggests that hominids shifted away from a typical ape social structure early in our ancestry. If this was a result of males forming long-term bonds with females and helping raise young, this shift was able to occur while hominids were still living a very ape-like life. Ardipithecus existed about 2 million years before the oldest evidence of stone tools, suggesting that technology was not the trigger for the evolution of nice hominid guys.

Paleoanthropologists and their ilk can only work with what they dig up and so quite often charting prehistory can be a little too reliant on tracing the minutia of stones tools and other artifacts, reducing our evolution to a technological arms race that sorted out the killer apes with the best kill sticks and honey diggers.

But what fascinates me are the inferences into social structure and group relations which I regard as a type of technology in its own right, even more more important to discerning why humans have been so prosperous in a world they are seemingly physically unprepared to thrive in.  A fire can keep you warm but so can rules governing the cooperation of individuals and acceptable norms of contact and exchange.

Social structure should to be regarded as a technology with profound effects on evolutionary adaptation.  The way we relate to each other in a group is a construct and one that is passed on intact from generation to generation even as outside pressures prompt innovation in its design.  Much as the technique of flint-napping was passed down an refined–yielding meat and defense, fueling population growth and fostering group stability–prodding and bending the ties that bind any two or more humans into a coherent structure that underpins a culture determines the fate of each unit of humanity, both in competition against the elements and against other groups of humans.

In short, some societies work and some don’t.  Those poorly configured prototypes of how a band of humans should treat each other reap destruction and stumble off into the cliche of cliches, the dustbin of history.  Jared Diamond has a better rap about that than me.

The lesson to take from this is neither conservative nor progressive.  Yes, this indicates that our social structure is a vital thing that has brought us very far, protecting us from much uncertainty.  So don’t break it, right?

But still, where would we be without innovations to it?  In the forest with our highly specialized rituals and mores about picking fleas off each others’ backs.  Instead, we’re riding the exponential upstroke of unprecedented connectivity, allowing cultures to meet, mix, exchange and clash like never before.  I’m not telling you anything new here.  You saw the commercial for this back when they still called it the Information Superhighway.

And so, reading about the ancient teeth of a long-extinct evolutionary cousin has me in awe of what millions of years of figuring out who eats what and when and who sleeps with who has wrought.

It strikes me that this process has never been entirely peaceful or without uncertainty and often our manners and social rules have been born of far more bloodshed than the usually just annoying culture wars we Americans seem to fixate on over who eats what and who sleeps with whom.  While the random spots where these conflicts burst into violence and hateful breaches of civility make me recoil in disgust, so far the body count has nothing on, say, the Protestant Reformation or European contact with the inhabitants of the Americas.

What I’m getting at is that while relations between genders, ages, cultures, classes and competing perceptions of reality are artificial constructs, they’re also the code of a society’s operating system.  That code is rapidly forking and millions out there are debugging it everyday.  Some of these will be dead-ends.  (How many versions of Linux are we up to these days?)  But certain codes of tolerance, order and patience at the center of modernity have so far kept this exchange thriving.  This is the promise of our connected future and something to take pride in as a citizen of the world right now.  Be bold, but know what’s worth keeping.