Selling Tomorrows

Chimps Using Spears. Orangutans Using iPads. Cue the 2001 Music.

The BBC reports that there have been 22 documented cases of chimpanzees creating and using spears. This innovation is reporterdly more popular among younger chimps than older ones, bringing new meaning to the axiom, "the more things change, the more they stay the same."  

Not to be outdone, Orangutans have upgraded to iPads.  No word yet on their preferred data plan. 

Did Evolution Prime us for Dystopic Fantasies?

A contributor to the "anxiety" column in the NY Times makes a fascinating argument for why people buy into dystopic fantasies.  Tim Kreider, the cartoonist and creator of "The Pain -- When Will it End?", writes: 

"Natural selection has made us hypervigilant, obsessively replaying our mistakes and imagining worst-case scenarios. And the fact that we’ve eliminated almost all of the immediate threats from our environment, like leopards and Hittites, has only made us even more jittery, because we’re now constantly anticipating disasters that are never going to happen: the prowler/rapist/serial killer lurking in the closet, a pandemic of Ebola/Bird Flu/Hantavirus, the imminent fascist/socialist/zombie takeover."

The rest of the column is a medidation on the benefits of exposing yourself to physical danger to get the brain focused on something real.  Good read. 

IF Clark found dystopias broke into the mainstream after WWI.  There was very little of it before that point, though certainly prophesies about the end of the world pre-date that by a couple thousand years. Has anyone seen arguments made along Kreider's lines elsewhere? 

 

Pics of the Internet From the 90's

Check out this Reddit thread with images from the 1990s of what we thought the internet looked like. My favorites are this and that. Both use floating in empty space as a metaphor as we struggled to understand this virtual "space."  

The one thing we DID understand -- email and its pervasive "@" symbol -- was used everywhere as a point of reference. 

Neil deGrasse Tyson on How Space Changes Culture

Here's an idea: what if after the State of the Union and the minority party's response, we have Neil deGrasse Tyson speak to the country for an hour?  

In this speech to the 28th National Space Symposium, NDT explains how the space race changed American culture for the better and took the economy in new directions.  The issue couldn't be more important given the need to expand STEM funding, and even moreso, inspire a generation to take advantage of it.

He recounts how a single image, Earthrise Over the Moon, changed how humanity thought of itself.

We finally saw Earth, he says, "not as the mapmaker would have you identify it...but as nature intended it to be viewed."  He traces the path of the borderless earth meme through the launch of the "Whole Earth Catalog" (1968), creation of Earth Day (1970) and a raft of environmental regulations.  On the founding of "Doctors Without Borders" in 1971, he challenges, "Where do you even get that phrase from?  No one thought of that phrase before that photo was published. Because every globe in your classroom has countries painted on it."

If you're a PR pro, you'll especially enjoy his thoughts on:

• Reframing NASA as an "investment"
• How the space community can prove its relevance to the public by speaking to the issue they care about: jobs and the economy
• The precise publicity path that led from the publication of his new book to an excerpt in Foreign Affairs magazine to testifying before Congress to interviews with business outlets.