Watch My Presentation: Crossing the Line: Tabula Rubra.

The Red Planet is a dim and frozen desert whose atmosphere—what little exists—is deadly to terrestrial life. But the technologies that would allow humans to stay on Mars are within reach, and global civilization is fast positioning itself to begin this very task. Conceivably possible within ten to thirty years, a manned mission to Mars could establish that first human foothold on Mars, the greatest expansion of the human prospect since the Moon landing in 1969, or the discovery of the New World, perhaps even since the first humans ventured out of the Rift Valley to become a global species.

But what are the implications of humanity as a dual-planet species? This is not a question to be left to a Syfy Channel original movie of the week. The colonization of Mars presents a unique opportunity, and allows civilization a tabula rasa upon which to impose the best of human technology and design to thrive in this alien environment. What may begin as small roving habitats—the most sophisticated mobile homes ever known—might just be the seeds that eventually grow entire societies. Whether these take the shape of a system of interconnected “tuna can” structures currently being tested by the space architecture community, systems of subterranean catacombs, or the gigantic geodesic domes of Buckminster Fuller, is yet to be seen.

Perhaps Mars will not be Utopia, but, if the design community wants to have its say, now is the time to speak.

Crossing the Line, the 2010 fist annual D-Crit Conference

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I was honored to have my poster design chosen for the Mars Society’s 2010 convention in Dayton, Ohio. Read about it here.

On March 15th, 2010, I was asked by the Mars Society to cover this major Space event at the Hayden Planetarium in New York about the future of the US space program hosted by Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. Panelits included: Mars Society President, Robert Zubrin, Retired US Air Force General, Lester Lyles, Kennith Ford, Founder and CEO of the Institute for Human & Machine Cognition, Paul “Moon” Spudis from the Lunar and Planetary Institute, and Steven Squyres of Cornell University. With a special guest call from Buzz Aldrin. Watch it here. (Video courtesy of Landmark Pictures and Sound)

In late November/early December of 2009 I spent two weeks in the deserts of Utah simulating living on Mars as the Executive Officer and Design Journalist of the 84th crew of the Mars Desert Research Station [MDRS]. You can read my on-site journalist reports at the Mars Society’s website: http://desert.marssociety.org/fs09/crew84/.

My family had a set of these “Name Your Poison” glasses growing up. They were large heavy bottomed drinking glasses individually titled: Cyanide, Currare, Hemlock, Strychnine, Belladonna and Arsenic. They came with little glass stirrers and did a very good job of looking kind of ominous.

I’m not sure where or when (1970s I suppose) my mother originally got them, but they functioned as one of our sets of drinking glasses(non-alcoholic). But as a child I refused to use them, or at least did so with a sense of dread. It’s not that I though my mom was trying to poison me, but I was certain they were at one time filled with whatever was written on them. By drinking out of them I was sure to die from whatever trace amounts might be left. Obviously I was a bit literal, gullible, yet selectivly suspicious of dishwashers.

My friend sent me a link about the Restaurant Modern Toilet, a Taiwanese restaurant chain where guest sit on toilets and all the food is served on toilet shape dinner wear. Yet again, dispite knowing better, my brain says STAY AWAY. Appearences go a long way.

I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us-then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.

The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.

[Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark]

Can you trademark all the colors of the wind? In his article Color: The Next Limited Resource?, author Francisco Inchauste, poses two important questions: Is Pantone a monopoly, and is color proprietary? The former really is more relevant to designers, but the latter is symptomatic of a more far reaching debate. In either case, the answer to both, whether we like it or not, is yes.

In regards to Pantone, the lexicon of pigment may have a few regional dialects, but the Pantone Matching system is spoken ‘round the world. Inchauste employs a quote from J.C. Herz of Wired that bears re-repeating, “If color is a language, Pantone is the Oxford English Dictionary.” But as far as I know, PMS, owns the intangible quality of color as much as Crayola does. They claim the process and the pigment; ink and wax, not the spectrum.

Can you (or more realistically a corporation) own light? In short, yes. Radio is light, and we’ve been selling it and much of the rest of the non-visible frequencies off for about a century now. It’s a debate in itself, but one not easily accepted by the general population because we need special tools to access radio waves, microwaves, and X-Rays, yet we’re born with the equipment for color. Because of that commonality we have an instinctual understanding that green is in the public domain.

But we live today in the world of the trademark. I can only think of it as the height of greed that we try to own, words, colors, shapes, ideas –everything. There are even acts to make DNA proprietary! The fact that this carving up of the fundamental properties of existence as a legally sanctioned practice in even the smallest case is a scary testament to the amount of power a corporation can amass. This sense of entitlement run rampant makes our society much like a group of spoiled children, the more privileged ones hording all the toys. “I saw it first!”

There is amazing power in our society and its technology to make new discoveries and breakthroughs, but the will seems to cheapen those loft goals into something more marketable: opportunities and products. Knowledge becomes pointless if the act of understanding becomes twisted into the art of commoditizing. Pantone’s taxonomy of color shouldn’t give then the right to color itself.

Jonas Salk refused the patent to the polio vaccine that he discovered so that it could benefit everyone. Most of us know firsthand that’s not how healthcare works today. Is the ethos of the ownership society one that is so unwilling to share that we must break our neighbors bike, just so we have the best one on the block? Does T-Mobile get to take the magenta Crayola crayon from my hand? Does Myriad eventually get to take my hand?