Earthrise

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthrise 

 

Earthrise, taken on December 24, 1968, by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders.

 

The first photograph of Earth from the Moon taken by Lunar Orbiter 1 in 1966, reprocessed by the LOIRP for comparison.

Earthrise is a photograph of Earth and some of the Moon's surface that was taken from lunar orbit by astronaut William Anders on December 24, 1968, during the Apollo 8 mission. Nature photographer Galen Rowell declared it "the most influential environmental photograph ever taken".

Anders' color image had been preceded by a crude black-and-white 1966 raster image taken by the Lunar Orbiter 1 robotic probe, the first American spacecraft to orbit the Moon.

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The conversation between Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders, during the taking of the Earthrise photograph

Earthrise is the name popularly given to NASA image AS08-14-2383, taken by astronaut William Anders during the Apollo 8 mission, the first crewed voyage to orbit the Moon.

Initially, before Anders found a suitable 70 mm color film, mission commander Frank Borman said he took a black-and-white photograph of the scene, with the Earth's terminator touching the horizon (AS08-13-2329). The land mass position and cloud patterns in this image are the same as those of the color photograph entitled Earthrise.

The photograph was taken from lunar orbit on December 24, 1968, 16:00 UTC, with a highly modified Hasselblad 500 EL with an electric drive. The camera had a simple sighting ring rather than the standard reflex viewfinder and was loaded with a 70 mm film magazine containing custom Ektachrome film developed by Kodak. Immediately prior, Anders had been photographing the lunar surface with a 250 mm lens; the lens was subsequently used for the Earthrise images. An audio recording of the event is available with transcription which allows the event to be followed closely – excerpt:

Anders: Oh my God! Look at that picture over there! There's the Earth coming up. Wow, that's pretty.
Borman: Hey, don't take that, it's not scheduled. (joking)
Anders: (laughs) You got a color film, Jim?
            Hand me that roll of color quick, would you...
Lovell: Oh man, that's great!

There were many images taken at that point. The mission audio tape establishes several photographs were taken, on Borman's orders, with the enthusiastic concurrence of Jim Lovell and Anders. Anders took the first color shot, then Lovell who notes the setting (1/250th of a second at f/11), followed by Anders with another very similar shot (AS08-14-2384).

A nearly full-page black and white reproduction of Borman's image may be viewed on page 164 of his 1988 autobiography, captioned, "One of the most famous pictures in photographic history – taken after I grabbed the camera away from Bill Anders". Borman was the mission commander and notes that this is the image "the Postal Service used on a stamp, and few photographs have been more frequently reproduced". The photograph reproduced in the Frank Borman autobiography is not the same image as the Anders photograph; aside from the orientation, the cloud patterns differ. Borman later recanted this story and agreed that the black and white shot was also taken by Anders, based on evidence presented by transcript and a video produced by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio employee, Ernie Wright.

The stamp issue reproduces the cloud, color, and crater patterns of the Anders picture. Anders is described by Borman as holding "a masters degree in nuclear engineering"; Anders was thus tasked as "the scientific crew member ... also performing the photography duties that would be so important to the Apollo crew who actually landed on the Moon".

On the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 8 mission in 2018, Anders described in an interview how the image undermined his religious belief: "It really undercut my religious beliefs. The idea that things rotate around the pope and up there is a big supercomputer wondering whether Billy was a good boy yesterday? It doesn't make any sense. I became a big buddy of [atheist scientist] Richard Dawkins."

Geometry

AS08-14-2383 (21713574299), from which "Earthrise" was cropped. The photo is displayed here in its original orientation.

William Anders' first color Earthrise photo, in its orientation as seen by the crew of Apollo 8. Lunar north is up.

The as-taken image was rotated 90 degrees clockwise to produce the iconic published Earthrise orientation because the original image did not convey the sense of the Earth rising over the moonscape. The as-published photograph shows Earth:

• Polar orientation: south to left, north to right (Antarctica at 10 o'clock)
• Equator: centre, running westward toward top right-hand corner
• Nightfall terminator crossing the African continent (lightish region to left is Namib Desert, Namibia; to right is Western Sahara/West Africa)
• Rotated clockwise approximately 135° from our typical north–south-Pole-oriented perspective

Legacy

In Life's 100 Photographs that Changed the World, wilderness photographer Galen Rowell called Earthrise "the most influential environmental photograph ever taken". Another author called its appearance the beginning of the environmental movement. Fifty years to the day after taking the photo, William Anders observed, "We set out to explore the moon and instead discovered the Earth."

In October 2018, the Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature (WGPSN) of the International Astronomical Union named two of the craters seen in the photo Anders' Earthrise and 8 Homeward. The craters had previously been designated only with letters.

Joni Mitchell sings on "Refuge of the Roads": In a highway service station / Over the month of June / Was a photograph of the Earth / Taken coming back from the Moon / And you couldn't see a city / On that marbled bowling ball / Or a forest or a highway / Or me here least of all …

Stamp

U.S. postage stamp (Scott #1371)

In 1969, the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp (Scott# 1371) commemorating the Apollo 8 flight around the Moon. The stamp featured a detail (in color) of the Earthrise photograph, and the words, "In the beginning God...", recalling the Apollo 8 Genesis reading.^[20]

2008 video

On April 6, 2008 (Japan Standard Time), the first 1080p high-definition Earthrise video was captured, both a full Earthrise and Earthset video, by the JAXA lunar orbiter mission, SELENE (better known in Japan by its nickname Kaguya). After successfully orbiting the Moon for 1 year and 8 months, it was crashed intentionally onto the lunar surface at 18:25 UTC on June 10, 2009.

2013 simulation video

Play media

A simulation of what the Apollo 8 crew saw as the Earth rose above the lunar horizon during their fourth orbit around the Moon that pauses to overlay two photographs taken by the crew and includes a clock overlay

In 2013, in commemoration of the 45th anniversary of the Apollo 8 mission, NASA issued a video about the taking of the photograph. This computer-generated visualization used data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft, which had provided detailed images of the lunar surface that could be matched with those taken every 20 seconds by an automatic camera on Apollo 8. The resulting video, re-creating what the astronauts would have seen (rotated 90 degrees clockwise to match the perspective presented in the photograph), was synchronized with the recording of the crew's conversation as they became the first humans to witness an Earthrise. The video included explanatory narration written and read by Andrew Chaikin. Chaikin writes that all the photographs of the rising Earth on Apollo 8's fourth orbit were taken by Anders.

Potential earthrises as seen from the Moon's surface

The Earth straddling the limb of the Moon, as seen from above Compton crater. Taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2015.

The Earth "rose" because the spacecraft was traveling over the Moon's surface. An earthrise that might be witnessed from the surface of the Moon would be quite unlike moonrises on Earth. Because the Moon is tidally locked with the Earth, one side of the Moon always faces toward Earth. Interpretation of this fact would lead one to believe that the Earth's position is fixed on the lunar sky and no earthrises can occur; however, the Moon librates slightly, which causes the Earth to draw a Lissajous figure on the sky. This figure fits inside a rectangle 15°48' wide and 13°20' high (in angular dimensions), while the angular diameter of the Earth as seen from Moon is only about 2°. This means that earthrises are visible near the edge of the Earth-observable surface of the Moon (about 20% of the surface). Since a full libration cycle takes about 27 days, earthrises are very slow, and it takes about 48 hours for Earth to clear its diameter. During the course of the month-long lunar orbit, an observer would additionally witness a succession of "Earth phases", much like the lunar phases seen from Earth. That is what accounts for the half-illuminated globe, the ashen glow, seen in the photograph.

The Blue Marble

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Marble 

 

The Blue Marble by the crew of Apollo 17 (1972)

The Blue Marble is an image of Earth taken on December 7, 1972, from a distance of about 29,000 kilometers (18,000 miles) from the planet's surface. It was taken by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft on its way to the Moon, and is one of the most reproduced images in history.

It mainly shows the Earth from the Mediterranean Sea to Antarctica. This was the first time the Apollo trajectory made it possible to photograph the south polar ice cap, despite the Southern Hemisphere being heavily covered in clouds. In addition to the Arabian Peninsula and Madagascar, almost the entire coastline of Africa is clearly visible. The Asian mainland is on the horizon.

NASA has also applied the name to a 2012 series of images which cover the entire globe at relatively high resolution. These were created by looking through satellite pictures taken over time in order to find as many cloudless photographs as possible to use in the final images.

The photograph

The photograph, taken on December 7, 1972, at 05:39 a.m. EST (10:39 UTC), is one of the most widely distributed photographic images in existence. The image is one of the few to show an almost fully illuminated Earth as the astronauts had the Sun behind them when they took the image. To the astronauts, the slightly gibbous Earth had the appearance and size of a glass marble, hence the name. It has been mostly shown with Antarctica at the bottom, although the actual view the astronauts had was with Antarctica on top.

History

AS17-148-22727, from which The Blue Marble was cropped. The photograph's original orientation had south pointed up.

The photograph was taken about 5 hours 6 minutes after launch of the Apollo 17 mission, and about 1 hour 54 minutes after the spacecraft left its parking orbit around Earth, to begin its trajectory to the Moon. The time of Apollo 17's launch, 12:33 a.m. EST, meant that Africa was in daylight during the early hours of the spacecraft's flight. With the December solstice approaching, Antarctica was also illuminated.

The 1972 Tamil Nadu cyclone can be seen in the bottom left of the image. This storm had brought flooding and high winds to the Indian state of Tamil Nadu on December 5, two days before the photograph was taken.

The photograph's official NASA designation is AS17-148-22727. NASA photograph AS17-148-22726, taken just before and nearly identical to 22727, is also used as a full-Earth image. The widely published versions are cropped and chromatically adjusted from the original photographs.

The photographer used a 70-millimeter Hasselblad camera with an 80-millimeter Zeiss lens. NASA credits the image to the entire Apollo 17 crew—Gene Cernan, Ronald Evans and Harrison Schmitt—all of whom took photographs during the mission with the on-board Hasselblad, although evidence examined after the mission suggests that Schmitt was the photographer.

All Apollo flights were heavily scheduled down to the minute. At the time this photo was taken, none of the astronauts was scheduled to do so. Thus this photo was taken quickly in a stolen moment. The astronaut who took the picture was weightless, and the continents were hard to see, and he took the photo quickly, which explains the photo’s orientation, compared to the north up orientation of most maps.

Apollo 17 was the last crewed lunar mission. No human since has been far enough from Earth to photograph a whole-Earth image such as The Blue Marble, but whole-Earth images have been taken by many uncrewed spacecraft missions.

The Blue Marble was not the first clear image taken of an illuminated face of Earth, since similar shots from the ATS-3 satellite had already been made as early as 1967. The Apollo 17 image, however, released during a surge in environmental activism during the 1970s, became a symbol of the environmental movement, as a depiction of Earth's frailty, vulnerability, and isolation amid the vast expanse of space. NASA archivist Mike Gentry has speculated that The Blue Marble is among the most widely distributed images in history.

Subsequent Blue Marble images

Subsequent similar images of Earth (including composites at much higher resolution) have also been termed Blue Marble images, and the phrase "blue marble" (as well as the picture itself) is frequently used, as in the Earth flag by environmental activist organizations or companies attempting to promote an environmentally conscious image. There has also been a children's television program called Big Blue Marble. Poet-diplomat Abhay Kumar penned an Earth anthem inspired by the Blue Marble which contains "all the peoples and the nations of the world, one for all, all for one, united we unfurl the blue marble flag".

Imaging series 2001–2004

Blue Marble composite images generated by NASA in 2001 and 2002.

 

NASA Earth Observatory animation of Blue Marble Next Generation (2004).

In 2002, NASA released an extensive set of satellite-captured imagery, including prepared images suitable for direct human viewing, as well as complete sets suitable for use in preparing further works. At the time, 1 km/pixel was the most detailed imagery available for free, and permitted for reuse without a need for extensive preparatory work to eliminate cloud cover and conceal missing data, or to parse specialized data formats. The data also included a similarly manually assembled cloud-cover and night-lights image sets, at lower resolutions.

A subsequent release was made in 2005, named Blue Marble Next Generation. This series of photo mosaics was produced with the aid of automated image-sifting upon images from NASA's Earth Observatory, which enabled the inclusion of a complete, cloud-free globe for each month from January to December 2004, at even higher resolution (500 m/pixel). The original release of a single-image set covering the entire globe could not reflect the extent of seasonal snow-and-vegetative cover across both hemispheres, but this newer release closely modeled the changes of the seasons.

A number of interactive viewers for these data have also been released, among them a music visualization for the PlayStation 3 that is based on the texture data.

Blue Marble 2012

Blue Marble 2012 – a composite satellite image

On January 25, 2012, NASA released a composite image of the Western Hemisphere of Earth titled Blue Marble 2012. The picture logged over 3.1 million views on the Flickr image hosting website within the first week of release. On February 2, 2012, NASA released a companion to this new Blue Marble, showing a composite image of the Eastern Hemisphere from data obtained on January 23, 2012.

The picture is composed of data obtained by the Visible/Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument on board the Suomi NPP satellite on January 4, 2012. The data was obtained from six orbits of the Earth by the Suomi NPP over an eight-hour period. The image was created using a near-sided perspective projection with the viewing point placed 2100 km above 20° North by 100° West. This projection results in a very wide-angle presentation such as one might get with a fish-eye lens, and it does not include the whole hemisphere.

Black Marble 2012

Black Marble – North and South America at night, Hurricane Sandy can be seen off the coast of Florida.

On December 5, 2012, NASA released a nighttime view of Earth called Black Marble during an annual meeting of Earth scientists held by the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. The images display all the human and natural matter that glows and can be detected from space. The data was acquired by the Suomi NPP satellite in April and October 2012 and then mapped over existing Blue Marble imagery of Earth to provide a realistic view of the planet. The Suomi NPP satellite completed 312 orbits and gathered 2.5 terabytes of data to get a clear shot of every parcel of the Earth's land surface. Named for satellite meteorology pioneer Verner Suomi, the satellite flies over any given point on Earth's surface twice each day and flies 512 miles (824 km) above the surface in a polar orbit.

The nighttime views were obtained with the new satellite's "day-night band" of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), which detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared, and uses filtering techniques to observe dim signals such as city lights, gas flares, auroras, wildfires, and reflected moonlight. Auroras, fires, and other stray light have been removed in the case of the Black Marble images to emphasize the city lights. The images have been used to study the spatial distribution of economic activity, to select sites for astronomical observatories, and to monitor human activities around protected areas.

DSCOVR

The Moon moving in front of Earth in July 2016, as seen by the DSCOVR satellite. The far side of the Moon faces the camera.

On July 21, 2015, NASA released a new Blue Marble photograph taken by a U.S. Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), a solar weather and Earth observation satellite that was launched in February 2015 and will provide a near-continuous view of the entire sunlit-side of the Earth. The image was taken on July 6, 2015. The photograph, of the Western Hemisphere, is centered over Central America. The Western United States, Mexico and the Caribbean are visible, but much of South America is hidden beneath cloud cover. Greenland can be seen at the upper edge of the image.

The EPIC science team plans to upload 13 new color images per day on their website. The color balance has been adjusted to approximate an image that could be seen with the average human eye. In addition to images, scientific information will be uploaded as it becomes available after in-flight calibration is complete. The science information will be ozone and aerosol amounts, cloud reflectivity, cloud height, and vegetation information. The EPIC instrument views the Earth from sunrise in the west to sunset in the east 12 to 13 times per day as the Earth rotates at 15 degrees of longitude per hour. Clearly visible are storms forming over the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, major slowly moving "cloud rivers", dust aerosol plumes from Africa, the sun's reflection in the oceans, ship exhaust tracks in the clouds, rivers and lakes, and the variegated land surface patterns especially in the African deserts. The spatial resolution of the color images is about 10 km, and the resolution of the science products will be about 20 km. Once every three months, lunar images are obtained that are the same as those viewed from Earth during our full Moon. On occasion, the other side of the Moon will appear in the Earth images as the Moon crosses in front of the Earth.

Stewart Brand

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Brand 

 

Stewart Brand
Stewart Brand at his Sausalito office in 2020.
Born	December 14, 1938 (age 81) Rockford, Illinois, United States
Occupation	Writer, editor, entrepreneur
Known for	Whole Earth Catalog The WELL Long Now Foundation
Spouse(s)	Lois Jennings (1966–1973) Ryan Phelan (1983–present)
Website	sb.longnow.org

Stewart Brand (born December 14, 1938) is an American writer, best known as editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He founded a number of organizations, including The WELL, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation. He is the author of several books, most recently Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.

Life

Brand was born in Rockford, Illinois and attended Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. He studied biology at Stanford University, graduating in 1960. As a soldier in the U.S. Army, he was a parachutist and taught infantry skills; he later expressed the view that his experience in the military had fostered his competence in organizing. A civilian again in 1962, he studied design at San Francisco Art Institute, photography at San Francisco State College, and participated in a legitimate scientific study of then-legal LSD, in Menlo Park, California. In 1966, he married mathematician Lois Jennings, an Ottawa Native American.

Brand has lived in California since the 1960s. He and his second wife live on Mirene, a 64-foot (20 m)-long working tugboat. Built in 1912, the boat is moored in a former shipyard in Sausalito, California. He works in Mary Heartline, a grounded fishing boat about 100 yards (90 metres) away. One of his favorite items is a table on which Otis Redding is said to have written "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay". (Brand acquired it from an antiques dealer in Sausalito.)

Merry Pranksters

By the mid-1960s, Brand became associated with author Ken Kesey and the "Merry Pranksters". With his partner Ramón Sender Barayón, he produced the Trips Festival in San Francisco, an early effort involving rock music and light shows. This was one of the first venues at which the Grateful Dead performed in San Francisco. About 10,000 hippies attended, and Haight-Ashbury soon emerged as a community. Tom Wolfe describes Brand in his 1968 book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

NASA images of Earth

Earth from space, by ATS-3 satellite, 1967.

 

Earthrise, by William Anders, Apollo 8, 1968.

In 1966, while on an LSD trip on the roof of his house in North Beach, San Francisco, Brand became convinced that seeing an image of the whole Earth would change how we think about the planet and ourselves. He then campaigned to have NASA release the then-rumored satellite image of the entire Earth as seen from space. He sold and distributed buttons for 25 cents each asking, "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?". During this campaign, Brand met Richard Buckminster Fuller, who offered to help Brand with his projects. In 1967, a satellite, ATS-3, took the photo. Brand thought the image of our planet would be a powerful symbol. It adorned the first (Fall 1968) edition of the Whole Earth Catalog. Later in 1968, NASA astronaut Bill Anders took an Earth photo, Earthrise, from Moon orbit, which became the front image of the spring 1969 edition of the Catalog. 1970 saw the first celebration of Earth Day. During a 2003 interview, Brand explained that the image "gave the sense that Earth's an island, surrounded by a lot of inhospitable space. And it's so graphic, this little blue, white, green and brown jewel-like icon amongst a quite featureless black vacuum."

Douglas Engelbart

In late 1968, Brand assisted electrical engineer Douglas Engelbart with The Mother of All Demos, a famous presentation of many revolutionary computer technologies (including hypertext, email, and the mouse) to the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco.

Brand surmised that given the necessary consciousness, information, and tools, human beings could reshape the world they had made (and were making) for themselves into something environmentally and socially sustainable.

Whole Earth Catalog

During the late 1960s and early 1970s about 10 million Americans were involved in living communally. In 1968, using the most basic approaches to typesetting and page-layout, Brand and his colleagues created issue number one of The Whole Earth Catalog, employing the significant subtitle, "access to tools". Brand and his wife Lois travelled to communes in a 1963 Dodge truck known as the Whole Earth Truck Store, which moved to a storefront in Menlo Park, California. That first oversize Catalog, and its successors in the 1970s and later, reckoned a wide assortment of things could serve as useful "tools": books, maps, garden implements, specialized clothing, carpenters' and masons' tools, forestry gear, tents, welding equipment, professional journals, early synthesizers, and personal computers. Brand invited "reviews" (written in the form of a letter to a friend) of the best of these items from experts in specific fields. The information also described where these things could be located or purchased. The Catalog's publication coincided with the great wave of social and cultural experimentation, convention-breaking, and "do it yourself" attitude associated with the "counterculture".

The influence of these Whole Earth Catalogs on the rural back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s, and the communities movement within many cities, was widespread throughout the United States, Canada, and Australia. A 1972 edition sold 1.5 million copies, winning the first U.S. National Book Award in category Contemporary Affairs.

CoEvolution Quarterly

To continue this work and also to publish full-length articles on specific topics in the natural sciences and invention, in numerous areas of the arts and the social sciences, and on the contemporary scene in general, Brand founded the CoEvolution Quarterly (CQ) during 1974, aimed primarily at educated laypersons. Brand never better revealed his opinions and reason for hope than when he ran, in CoEvolution Quarterly #4, a transcription of technology historian Lewis Mumford's talk "The Next Transformation of Man", in which he stated that "man has still within him sufficient resources to alter the direction of modern civilization, for we then need no longer regard man as the passive victim of his own irreversible technological development."

The content of CoEvolution Quarterly often included futurism or risqué topics. Besides giving space to unknown writers with something valuable to say, Brand presented articles by many respected authors and thinkers, including Lewis Mumford, Howard T. Odum, Witold Rybczynski, Karl Hess, Orville Schell, Ivan Illich, Wendell Berry, Ursula K. Le Guin, Gregory Bateson, Amory Lovins, Hazel Henderson, Gary Snyder, Lynn Margulis, Eric Drexler, Gerard K. O'Neill, Peter Calthorpe, Sim Van der Ryn, Paul Hawken, John Todd, Kevin Kelly, and Donella Meadows. During ensuing years, Brand authored and edited a number of books on topics as diverse as computer-based media, the life history of buildings, and ideas about space colonies.

He founded the Whole Earth Software Review, a supplement to the Whole Earth Software Catalog, in 1984. It merged with CoEvolution Quarterly to form the Whole Earth Review in 1985.

California government

From 1977 to 1979, Brand served as "special adviser" to the administration of California Governor Jerry Brown.

The WELL

In 1985, Brand and Larry Brilliant founded The WELL ("Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link"), a prototypical, wide-ranging online community for intelligent, informed participants the world over. The WELL won the 1990 Best Online Publication Award from the Computer Press Association. Almost certainly the ideas behind the WELL were greatly inspired by Douglas Engelbart's work at SRI International; Brand was acknowledged by Engelbart in "The Mother of All Demos" in 1968 when the computer mouse and video conferencing were introduced.

All Species Foundation

In 2000, Brand helped to launch the All Species Foundation, which aimed to catalog all species of life on Earth until its closure in 2007.

Global Business Network

Brand listening in Sausalito, California, in 2009.

During 1986, Brand was a visiting scientist at the MIT Media Lab. Soon after, he became a private-conference organizer for such corporations as Royal Dutch/Shell, Volvo, and AT&T Corporation. In 1988, he became a co‑founder of the Global Business Network, which explores global futures and business strategies informed by the sorts of values and information which Brand has always found vital. The GBN has become involved with the evolution and application of scenario thinking, planning, and complementary strategic tools. For fourteen years, Brand was on the board of the Santa Fe Institute (founded in 1984), an organization devoted to "fostering a multidisciplinary scientific research community pursuing frontier science." He has also continued to promote the preservation of tracts of wilderness.

Whole Earth Discipline

The Whole Earth Catalog implied an ideal of human progress that depended on decentralized, personal, and liberating technological development—so‑called "soft technology". However, during 2005 he criticized aspects of the international environmental ideology he had helped to develop. He wrote an article called "Environmental Heresies" in the May 2005 issue of the MIT Technology Review, in which he describes what he considers necessary changes to environmentalism. He suggested among other things that environmentalists embrace nuclear power and genetically modified organisms as technologies with more promise than risk.

Brand later developed these ideas into a book and published the Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto in 2009. The book examines how urbanization, nuclear power, genetic engineering, geoengineering, and wildlife restoration can be used as powerful tools in humanity's ongoing fight against global warming.

In a 2019 interview, Brand described his perspective as "post-libertarian", indicating that at the time when the Whole Earth Catalog was being written, he did not fully understand the significance of the role of government in the development of technology and engineering.

The Long Now Foundation

Brand is co‑chair and President of the Board of Directors of The Long Now Foundation. Brand chairs the foundation's Seminars About Long-term Thinking (SALT). This series on long-term thinking has presented a large range of different speakers including: Brian Eno, Neal Stephenson, Vernor Vinge, Philip Rosedale, Jimmy Wales, Kevin Kelly, Clay Shirky, Ray Kurzweil, Bruce Sterling, Cory Doctorow, and many others.

Works

Stewart Brand is the initiator or was involved with the development of the following:

• The Whole Earth Catalog in 1968
• CoEvolution Quarterly in 1974
• The Whole Earth Software Catalog and Review in 1984
• Whole Earth Review in 1985
• Point Foundation
• Global Business Network (co-founder)
• The WELL in 1985, with Larry Brilliant
• The Hackers Conference in 1984
• Long Now Foundation in 1996, with computer scientist Danny Hillis—one of the Foundation's projects is to build a 10,000 year clock, the Clock of the Long Now
• New Games Tournament (was involved initially, but left the project)
• In April 2015, Brand joined with a group of scholars in issuing An Ecomodernist Manifesto.^[28][29] The other authors were: John Asafu-Adjaye, Linus Blomqvist, Barry Brook. Ruth DeFries, Erle Ellis, Christopher Foreman, David Keith, Martin Lewis, Mark Lynas, Ted Nordhaus, Roger A. Pielke Jr., Rachel Pritzker, Joyashree Roy, Mark Sagoff, Michael Shellenberger, Robert Stone, and Peter Teague

Publications

Books

• II Cybernetic Frontiers, 1974, ISBN 0-394-49283-8 (hardcover), ISBN 0-394-70689-7 (paperback)
• The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, 1987, ISBN 0-670-81442-3 (hardcover); 1988, ISBN 0-14-009701-5 (paperback)
• How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built, 1994. ISBN 0-670-83515-3
• The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility, 1999. ISBN 0-465-04512-X
• Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, Viking Adult, 2009. ISBN 0-670-02121-0
• The Salt Summaries: Seminars About Long-term Thinking, Long Now Press, 2011. ISBN 978-1-105-75187-5 (paperback)

As editor or as co-editor

• The Whole Earth Catalog, 1968–72 (original editor, winner of the National Book Award, 1972)
• Last Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools, 1971
• Whole Earth Epilog: Access to Tools, 1974, ISBN 0-14-003950-3
• The (Updated) Last Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools, 16th edition, 1975, ISBN 0-14-003544-3
• Space Colonies, Whole Earth Catalog, 1977, ISBN 0-14-004805-7
• As co-editor with J. Baldwin: Soft-Tech, 1978, ISBN 0-14-004806-5
• The Next Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools, 1980, ISBN 0-394-73951-5;
• The Next Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools, revised 2nd edition, 1981, ISBN 0-394-70776-1
• As editor-in-chief: Whole Earth Software Catalog, 1984, ISBN 0-385-19166-9
• As editor-in-chief: Whole Earth Software Catalog for 1986, "2.0 edition" of above title, 1985, ISBN 0-385-23301-9
• As co-editor with Art Kleiner: News That Stayed News, 1974–1984: Ten Years of CoEvolution Quarterly, 1986, ISBN 0-86547-201-7 (hardcover), ISBN 0-86547-202-5 (paperback)
• Introduction by Brand: The Essential Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools and Ideas (Introduction by Brand), 1986, ISBN 0-385-23641-7
• Foreword by Brand: Signal: Communication Tools for the Information Age, editor: Kevin Kelly, 1988, ISBN 0-517-57084-X
• Foreword by Brand: The Fringes of Reason: A Whole Earth Catalog, editor: Ted Schultz, 1989, ISBN 0-517-57165-X
• Foreword by Brand: Whole Earth Ecolog: The Best of Environmental Tools & Ideas, editor: J. Baldwin, 1990, ISBN 0-517-57658-9

 

Information wants to be free

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free 

"Information wants to be free" is an expression that means all people should be able to access information freely. It is often used by technology activists to criticize laws that limit transparency and general access to information. People who criticize intellectual property law say the system of such government granted monopolies conflicts with the development of a public domain of information. The expression is often credited to Stewart Brand, who was recorded saying it at a hackers conference in 1984.

History

The iconic phrase is attributed to Stewart Brand, who, in the late 1960s, founded the Whole Earth Catalog and argued that technology could be liberating rather than oppressing [DJS -- Could be?]. The earliest recorded occurrence of the expression was at the first Hackers Conference in 1984. Brand told Steve Wozniak:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

Brand's conference remarks are transcribed in the Whole Earth Review (May 1985, p. 49) and a later form appears in his The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT:

Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. ...That tension will not go away.

According to historian Adrian Johns, the slogan expresses a view that had already been articulated in the mid-20th century by Norbert Wiener, Michael Polanyi and Arnold Plant, who advocated for the free communication of scientific knowledge, and specifically criticized the patent system.

Gratis versus Libre

The various forms of the original statement are ambiguous: the slogan can be used to argue the benefits of propertied information, of liberated, free, and open information, or of both. It can be taken amorally as an expression of a fact of information-science: once information has passed to a new location outside of the source's control there is no way of ensuring it is not propagated further, and therefore will naturally tend towards a state where that information is widely distributed. Much of its force is due to the anthropomorphic metaphor that imputes desire to information. In 1990 Richard Stallman restated the concept normatively, without the anthropomorphization:

I believe that all generally useful information should be free. By 'free' I am not referring to price, but rather to the freedom to copy the information and to adapt it to one's own uses... When information is generally useful, redistributing it makes humanity wealthier no matter who is distributing and no matter who is receiving.

Stallman's reformulation incorporates a political stance into Brand's value-neutral observation of social trends.

Cyberpunks

Brand's attribution of will to an abstract human construct (information) has been adopted within a branch of the cyberpunk movement, whose members espouse a particular political viewpoint (anarchism). The construction of the statement takes its meaning beyond the simple judgmental observation, "Information should be free", by acknowledging that the internal force or entelechy of information and knowledge makes it essentially incompatible with notions of proprietary software, copyrights, patents, subscription services, etc. They believe that information is dynamic, ever-growing and evolving and cannot be contained within (any) ideological structure.

According to this philosophy, hackers, crackers, and phreakers are liberators of information which is being held hostage by agents demanding money for its release. Other participants in this network include cypherpunks who educate people to use public-key cryptography to protect the privacy of their messages from corporate or governmental snooping and programmers who write free software and open source code. Still others create Free-Nets allowing users to gain access to computer resources for which they would otherwise need an account. They might also break copyright law by swapping music, movies, or other copyrighted materials over the Internet.

Chelsea Manning is alleged to have said "Information should be free" to Adrian Lamo when explaining a rationale for US government documents to be released to WikiLeaks. The narrative goes on with Manning wondering if she is a "'hacker', 'cracker', 'hacktivist', 'leaker' or what".

Literary usage

In the "Fall Revolution" series of science-fiction books, author Ken Macleod riffs and puns on the expression by writing about entities composed of information actually "wanting", as in desiring, freedom and the machinations of several human characters with differing political and ideological agendas, to facilitate or disrupt these entities' quest for freedom.

In the cyberpunk world of post-singularity transhuman culture described by Charles Stross in his books like Accelerando and Singularity Sky, the wish of information to be free is a law of nature.

Culture vs. Copyright

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_vs._Copyright 

 

Culture vs. Copyright

Author	Anatoly Volynets
Illustrator	Sasha Willins
Cover artist	Olga Gessen
Country	USA
Language	English
Subjects	Philosophy, culture, humanity, creativity, intellectual property
Genre	Philosophical diary
Published	2014 (Total Knowledge)
Media type	Print (Paperback)
Pages	142
ISBN	978-0-9889557-0-7
OCLC	865802929

Culture vs. Copyright: A Diary of a Naïve Philosopher is a philosophical diary by the Ukrainian American scholar Anatoly G. Volynets, published in 2014. It is Volynets' first book, consisting of dialogues among five first graders alternated with the thoughts of their teacher – the Naïve Philosopher of the subtitle – thoughts written in Volynets' own voice. The dialogues explore philosophical, psychological, economical and other aspects of Intellectual property in its relations with culture and civilization.

In general, the author is opposed to copyright, and also opposes all kinds of intellectual property, including but not limited to patents, trade marks, trade secrets, among others. Volynets' theory is they all do not serve the purpose they claim but do just the opposite, that is, they strip incentives from creators and inhibit "progress of Science and Useful rights", as specified in the United States Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 8, often called the "Copyright Clause".

Summary

The Naïve Philosopher is a teacher of The School of the Dialogue of Cultures. The teacher discusses many issues pertaining to philosophy of culture versus intellectual property with five first graders. The diary presents records of discussions alternating with the teacher's thoughts in his own voice.

Structure

Acknowledgements

There are several concepts presented in the book's Acknowledgements. These are not involved directly later in the book but serve as logical premises for the further argument. One is about dialogue in education and, specifically, in a form of The School of the Dialogue of Cultures (SDC). The reason it is brought in is that the discussions among first graders, at the level they are presented, might be conducted within the practices of the SDC. Furthermore, the idea of culture as the dialogue of cultures is, first, the basis of SDC and, forms, second, the logical foundation for the author's standpoint. Another concept presented is a specific interpretation of paradox as the logic of transmutation of ideas. Culture as dialogue of cultures is an example of the paradox logic. The philosophical concepts presented were introduced by the author's teacher, philosopher Vladimir Bibler.

"First Graders on the Magic Planet"

The chapter initially presents several major ideas that are developed more systematically later on in the book. It introduces the group of first graders that carry the discussion and sets the tone for the content that follows. A conversation revolves around the problem who and how gets paid if the artists and publishers do not restrict sharing the work by the public. That, besides the content developed, also demonstrates a teaching tool, a model of student centered discussion. In terms of ideas the preliminary findings by students are that both authors and publishers get paid for selling their product, not any rights, while unrestricted sharing provides exposure for the works and thus promotes sales.

"On the Nature of Arts"

Here the teacher conducts a mind experiment trying to clarify what qualifies as a work of art, how art works on humans, etc. For example, a work of art constitutes an entire new world in a way more real than the physical one. A work of art furthermore is interpreted as a message, the dialogue of its author with oneself, etc. All of the ideas when combined, bring up the subject of art as representative of culture and the fundamental law it undergoes: Freedom. Art in particular and culture in general cause civilization to develop. Although they are at odds as opposing realities, they react with each other to cause growth of both. Society must accept the cultural phenomena in order to develop. In this chapter, the author also comes back to the idea presented earlier about who owes whom: A creator to humanity or otherwise or both – one to another. In general, the chapter explores specifics of the cultural phenomena and the world of culture as it represented by the arts.

"Arts and Personality"

This chapter presents a recorded discussion. It is started by a teacher's question but all the research is done by students. Students are making the connections of "why do we read?" and are also learning skills, such as debating and summarizing. The teacher's intervention is moving away from directing students but letting them develop and apply skills. A batch of new ideas are brought up to demonstrate three major points. First, works of art as such, and particularly heroes thereof input hugely in human psyche. Second, works of art and their heroes largely determine in-between human relations. Third, we treat works of art essentially more like humans than like unanimated objects. Altogether these general ideas imply that in creating a law to govern culture we must not go after analogies in real estate but after those in human-to-human relations.

"Culture Beyond Arts"

Here ideas of the previous chapters expand on culture in general as it presented by creativity in different human activities but arts. The conversation starts with the question "when do people create?" Students use different cases in order to investigate the topic. They start with the question "can you be creative on a test if not prepared?" Another idea was to compare creativity to solving a crime. When discussing creating new content, few more ideas are brought forth, such as the concept of trial and error or using prior knowledge, and replication to generate new ideas. Specifically, students come up with the unique scheme that any new content is an old one combined and put in a new form.

"Discrepancies between Two Worlds"

This chapter is to put the world of culture vs. world of civilization side by side. It starts with a teacher's presentation attempting to do the comparison. But in here too major developments happen in the discussion among first graders that follows. The students contemplate the ideas that knowledge cannot be lost when shared and spread while material things are gone when change hands, that physical needs must be filled while cultural needs must be developed, that cultural satisfaction increases desire while filling physical needs ends desire. Additionally, work of royalties and attribution (for creative works) are discussed and students develop their skill of arguing and exploring both sides of points of view.

The final three chapters

These are written in the teacher's voice. In "Three Models," three ways to govern cultural affairs are put side by side in detail: One with no formal rules at all, the current and one called "Authoright," corresponding to the nature of culture as it is developed in the previous chapters. It is concluded that copyright and Intellectual Property (IP) in general is a harmful way of governing culture. IP effectively inhibits creativity and promotes plagiarism and forfeit. It appears to be a hindrance of culture and culture based economy. One particular point is that IP effectively strips creators from incentives which is exactly the opposite to the claim. Removing restrictions for dissemination of cultural phenomena, on the other hand, promotes exposure of works of art and creativity in general which pertains to the economy of culture. In short, a brilliant work of culture in open access develops its market and thus provides a market share for the creator.

The seventh chapter, "On Licensing in Cultural Affairs," and the addendum, "Authoright," present possibilities to apply all the philosophy developed to practical matters.

Outlook

There are several dozen ideas contemplated in the book altogether. They gravitate toward two main foci: First, all types of intellectual property treat cultural, or spiritual, for that matter, phenomena as material things, which, according to the author, is nonsense in principle. Second, the analysis of how IP works shows that it actually does exactly the opposite to what it supposed to do. It suppresses creativity. Thus one of the practical conclusions of the book is that IP is to be abolished once and for all.