Jakkyn

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2013/01/the-gif-art-of-paolo-ceric/

Only a Croatian guy could have a name like “Paolo Ceric.”

Researchers have successfully stored information in synthetic DNA and then sequenced the DNA to read the data. Nick Goldman and his colleagues from the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) encoded all of Shakespeare's sonnets, an audio clip of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, Watson and Crick's paper on DNA's structure, a photo of the EBI, and an explanation of their data conversion technique. Last year, Harvard molecular geneticist George Church encoded a book he had written in DNA, but EBI's breakthroughs are in the way the data is encoded and its error-correction. From the abstract of their scientific paper published at Nature:

We encoded computer files totalling 739 kilobytes of hard-disk storage and with an estimated Shannon information10 of 5.2 × 106 bits into a DNA code, synthesized this DNA, sequenced it and reconstructed the original files with 100% accuracy. Theoretical analysis indicates that our DNA-based storage scheme could be scaled far beyond current global information volumes and offers a realistic technology for large-scale, long-term and infrequently accessed digital archiving. In fact, current trends in technological advances are reducing DNA synthesis costs at a pace that should make our scheme cost-effective for sub-50-year archiving within a decade.

"Synthetic double-helix faithfully stores Shakespeare's sonnets" (Thanks, Mike Pescovitz!)

“Created using the latest Photogrammetric 3D technology and the highest resolution aerial imagery available our models are unparalleled in their accuracy. We have created a single block of imagery that covers over 45sq km of central London at up to 2.5cm/pixel resolution. Within this block we have used over 50,000 tie points and 251 ground control points, this ensures that any measurement taken is within 150mm of its real world location. In fact measurements taken by us have come in at an average tolerance of 40mm compared to a full measured survey. However please do not assume that we are limited to capturing models in London only, we can use the same principles for any UK, European or World Wide city. Our models are supplied geo-referenced and ready to be used within any CAD or GIS platform.”

Accuracy | 3D London Model | 3D City Models | Vertex Modelling, via Dan W.

Jon Lebkowsky posted this:

We know what we should be doing, but we're derailed by external forces and our own internal drivers and addictions. For decades now I've heard smart people talk about compelling solutions, but there's no market for real salvation. Gravity defeats us.

And I replied:

And yet we persevere, we survive, and sometimes we even thrive.

A few years ago, for one of the Institute for the Future Ten-Year Forecast events, I presented (as a post-dinner talk) a set of three fifty-year forecasts. All were uncomfortable in their own ways -- one emphasized disruptive technologies, one bottom-up actors (both for good and not so much), one transnational large-scale action. The audience could pick any one of them as the "happy" story, any one of them as the "scary" story -- but each offered very serious challenges to the status quo.

I then said this:

There's one more scenario I want to talk about, another fifty-year scenario. It starts, of course, with a global economic downturn, one lasting much longer than anyone expects. We slowly come out of, and see an explosion of new technological development; but in concert with that, more instability. Regional conflicts and military strategies getting accustomed to new technologies lead into an almost accidental war, which escalates to the point of fighting all over the world. Chemical weapons get used. Just as the war ends, we see the rise of a global pandemic. The combination of conflict and disease leads to what some call a "lost generation," millions of people in their 20s and 30s dead.

We finally see an economic boom, though, and for parts of the world, this becomes a glorious time. It doesn't last, of course; an economic collapse even greater than the one a few decades earlier takes hold, driving hyperinflation in some countries, mass unemployment in others. Governments fall, and totalitarian regimes take over, some using ethnic cleansing as a rallying cry. This inevitably leads to another global conflict, even greater than the last, one which ends in a shocking nuclear attack.

I've just described 1895 to 1945.

This is why I am, ultimately, hopeful about our future. We have lived through terrible, almost unimaginably awful times. We have faced brutality from nature and from ourselves. And we always come back. We learn. We build. We live.

I love telling this story to a live audience, describing this scenario -- the shock of recognition is a delight to see.

This post tells the story of the session at FOO camp this year that I co-ran with Matt Webb on the Manufactured Normalcy Field. It explains the background of the idea, describes the structure of the brainstorming session, outlines its results, and then tracks some of the uptake of the idea since FOO, specifically in a recent episode of A Show with Ze Frank.

A few months back, Nick Pinkston turned me on to Ribbonfarm, the blog of Venkatesh Rao, a researcher and entrepreneur. Ever since, it’s become a reliable source of mind-grenades for me: explosive ideas that carve up reality in a way I’d never imagined and stimulate new ideas. Ideas you can not just think about, but think with.

The most productive of these ideas for me so far has been the Manufactured Normalcy Field. The Field is Rao’s attempt to explain the process of technical adoption. Rao argues that when they’re presented with new technological experiences people work hard to maintain a “familiar sense of a static, continuous present”. In fact, he claims that we change our mental models and behaviors the minimum amount necessary to work productively with the results of any change.

In cultural practice this process of minimal change takes two primary forms. First, we create stories and metaphors that map strange new experiences back to something we already understand. Rao gives a number of examples of this: the smartphone uses a phone metaphor to make mobile computing comprehensible, the web uses a document metaphor, which has persisted in our user interfaces even as the underlying technology has changed, and “we understand Facebook in terms of school year-books”.

Secondly, we make intentional design choices aimed to de-emphasize the strangeness of new technologies. Here, Rao explains via the example of air travel (a field in which he was educated as an engineer):

"A great deal of effort goes into making sure passengers never realize just how unnatural their state of motion is, on a commercial airplane. Climb rates, bank angles and acceleration profiles are maintained within strict limits. Airline passengers don’t fly. They travel in a manufactured normalcy field.

When you are sitting on a typical modern jetliner, you are traveling at 500 mph in an aluminum tube that is actually capable of some pretty scary acrobatics. Including generating brief periods of zero-g. Yet a typical air traveler never experiences anything that one of our ancestors could not experience on a fast chariot or a boat."

Given this framework, much of the way we currently market new technology is misguided. Geeks, especially, are prone to praise an innovation as disruptively, radically new. But if we believe Rao, that’s the worst way we could advocate on its behalf. What we should do instead is try to normalize the new technology by figuring out the smallest stretch needed to get the Manufactured Normalcy Field to encompass it.

In fact, taking this into account, Rao describes a new role for user experience design:

“Successful products are precisely those that do not attempt to move user experiences significantly, even if the underlying technology has shifted radically. In fact the whole point of user experience design is to manufacture the necessary normalcy for a product to succeed and get integrated into the Field. In this sense user experience design is reductive with respect to technological potential.”

The Manufactured Normalcy Field and Design (at FOO)

Rao’s essay proceeds to examine the threats he currently sees to the MNF and the anxiety that produces in us. It’s a fascinating (and important) line of thought and I recommend you read the full article.

For my part, though, Rao’s account of the MNF got me thinking about how it might be useful to me as a designer. It occurred me that, when making, marketing, or designing products, there are two different relationships to the Field you might want to forge.

First, as already hinted at, you might have a new technology whose adoption you want to encourage. In this case, you would design the product to disturb the existing state of the Field as little as possible. You’d search for existing well-understood products and experiences to analogize it to. You’d try to make it familiar. Think of Apple’s advertising for the iPad, which depicts the device as a totally natural and harmless part of normal domestic life, basically a “glass magazine”.

Second, you might have the opposite situation: a product that’s become boring to the point of invisibility. Air travel. Routers. Refrigerators. If you wanted to make these seem more exciting or innovative, you’d want to “denormalize” or defamiliarize them: push them to the edge of the Manufactured Normalcy Field so that we notice them again and they feel new. For example, imagine an airplane with as much visibility for the passengers as was feasible: huge windows that really let you feel and see the speed and angle of the plane’s flight.

So, I came to FOO with this broad structure in mind for a brainstorming session based on Rao’s Manufactured Normalcy Field. I was feeling nervous about the idea because it was new and I’d barely talked to other people about it, let alone leading a brainstorming session with people of the incredible caliber that O’Reilly gathers for FOO.

Despite my trepidation, I reserved a session time: “Designing for and Against the Manufactured Normalcy Field”. And to buttress my nervousness, I recruited Matt Webb, CEO of the excellent BERG London to co-lead the session with me. Webb is an experienced invention workshop leader and I thought this idea would be right up his alley. He was generous enough to agree immediately with just a short semi-fevered pitch from me to go on.

In the run-up to the session, I explained a little bit more of what I was thinking to Matt (basically gave him a short, verbal, version of the above). He then boiled that down into a structure for a brainstorming session. After a short introduction from me, Matt divided the white board into three sections, labeled respectively “Things That Feel Weird” (i.e. things that need to be pushed further inside the Field), “Things That Feel Normal” (boring things that need de-normalization), and “Things That We Use To Feel About Things” (strategies for normalizing and de-normalizing).

The results of the session

Much to my surprise and delight what ensued was a fantastic brainstorming session. Part of that was the incredibly creativity of the FOO audience. You couldn’t hope for a better group for this kind of exercise than one that contains the likes of Ze Frank, Tom Coates, Tim O’Reilly, etc. etc. And another part of that was Matt’s expert execution of our structure.

Here’s a photo of the white board with the results:

The first category we started with was Things That Feel Weird. Unsurprisingly, given the audience, these tended towards cutting-edge technologies:

• chips that can see smiles
• Mechanical Turk
• self-driving cars
• smart prosthetics
• Google Glass
• smart drugs
• brain reading

The Things That Feel Normal were interestingly more diverse, stretching from long-mundane parts of domestic life to bits of technology only recently incorporated into The Field:

• keeping pets
• earth
• refrigerators
• crowd-sourcing
• screens
• phones
• centralized banking
• producing things in China
• self GPS-tracking
• yeast

The last category, Things That We Use To Feel About Things, may have been the most fascinating and useful. It ended up eliciting existing cultural techniques that we use to normalize weird things or to allow us to defamiliarize the mundane.

• personification / anthropomorphism
• repetition / routine
• empathy
• desktop metaphor
• skeuomorphs
• gamification
• domestication
• medicine / pathologizing (treating something as an illness)
• sport / play
• treating as a moral failing

It’s an amazing list, both conceptually and practically. I don’t think I would have seen anything in common between these practices before seeing them emerge in this context. Also, they’re all things I can now actively imagine using in a design process.

After we’d filled in these three areas, Matt suggested a final step of the process that would lead towards actionable design concepts. He asked people to call out Things That Need Weirding and Things That Need Normaling and, for each thing, he asked the rest of the group to think of ways to make that thing either weirder or more normal, as appropriate.

Here were the candidates (time was getting short at this point so we only got to do a few):

Things That Need Weirding

• advertising
• money
• driving

Things That Need Normaling

• refrigerators
• flying

(there were others of these called out, but I didn’t capture them)

And here were the concepts that emerged by trying to weird the normal things and normal the weird ones:

• Everyone starts the plane together (passengers have placebo controls)
• Pathologize driving (communicable?)
• Fridge as Narnia
• CCTV in toilets
• AR that lets you see CCTV fields-of-view
• Advertising in cemeteries
• Advertising made just for you
• Grinning Currency

This is a partial list I’m reconstructing from the white board photo and my own memories. It doesn’t do a great job capturing the thrill and playfulness of the ideas and the energy and excitement of the participants.

It was an incredibly fun session. I was surprised and very pleased by how well it came out. I can imagine running a similar brainstorming session with other groups in more targeted environments with productive results.

Ze Frank and Object-Orineted Ontology

After FOO camp, last week, Ze Frank (who was in the audience at the session and was a major contributor to the brainstorming) made an episde of his show, breaking normal, where he talked about the session. Ze focused on the making-normal-things-weird side of the spectrum. He gave the example of re-imagining how he pictures himself standing on the earth:

Instead of always imagining himself standing on the top of the earth, he started imagining himself standing on the side of it looking down:

I started imagining that I was facing down when I was standing and looking forward when I was lying down and suddenly I got dizzy. So I lied down, but now lying down had the same feeling as this (dangling feet off the edge of a building), like my back was stuck to a ball and below me was just space.

At the end of the episode, Ze asked his audience to play along, inviting them to describe a normal thing in a way that reveals its inherent weirdness. Ze’s viewers did an amazing job of it. Here are some of my favorites from the comments on that video:

Fishspawned described a thermos:

a thermos is a container that contains a container inside of it surrounded by nothing because if you put stuff into something and surround it with nothing it will keep on being what it is and can’t change into something else. so a thermos acts as a sort of mobile suspended animation device

Ark86 on computers:

In reality, I’m staring at a flat panel made from superheated sand that is connected via strips of ores and really heavily processed dinosaur remains to a thing that we all pretend to understand called “the internet”. Also, I’m sitting on a cow skin painted black and stapled onto some more processed dinosaur remains. I think it’s weird how much ancient animal matter is still being used to make everything we do possible. Thanks, Stegosaurus!

Grendelkhan on work and money:

Five out of seven days, a significant proportion of people go to a small, confined space and sit still for roughly eight hours, staring at a screen and typing. They do not physically move or construct anything.

Later on, they go to other buildings, and take food and other necessities. These two activities are related in an entirely conceptual way–no physical tokens are moved, and the providers of physical goods don’t know anything about the small, confined space.

NephilimMuse on clapping:

Applauding a performance is weird. More specifically, clapping is weird. We just smack our hands together to make a noise that expresses some sort of satisfaction or adoration. It makes the receiving person(s) feel validated. I don’t get it. the motion of clapping is weird. Smack smack smack.

In reading these descriptions, it struck me that they are very resonant with Object-Oriented Ontology (which I’ve written about before here and here). Breaking the abstraction of some behavior or acculturated object (or “opening the black box” as Graham Harman describes it in Prince of Networks) lets us see all the objects and materials that actually constitute these concepts and abstractions. This weirding process puts the material of superheated sand, the air inside a thermos, and cow skin painted black on the same footing as computers, thermoses, and jobs – culturally important categories we routinely consider.

In Object-Oriented Ontology terms, this weirding process is pushing us towards a “flat ontology” where everything exists equally. It’s great that Ze and his viewers have found this game that vividly flattens their personal ontologies and that the result is wonder.

messieurspeuvert:

Fred ILLE : “Catch me if you can.” by MTO (Graffiti Street art) on Flickr.

Luxury capsule hotel
nine hours.

neuroslave:

Solid Gray

Design students Shanshan Zhou, Adam Ben-Dror and Joss Doggett created "Pinokio," a kind of animatronic version of the adorable animated Pixar lamp. The detailed build-log offers very useful insights into making this sort of thing with Processing, Arduino, and OpenCV.. But the video really speaks for itself -- what a treat!

Construction on the head was by far the most technically challenging, as I embedded a hacked webcam, microphone, mechanical iris, 2 servos and halogen globe into a tiny cavity at the back of the lamp shade. The designing of face plate was aided by cardboard cutouts before being fabricated out of 2mm acrylic.

pinokio still in progress

“The world is fundamentally changing; the economic assumptions that currently gird our society will be meaningless in as soon as a few decades. And we’d better get ready to prepare for that shift—if we don’t adjust the current socio-economic structure, we’re going to have mass joblessness, and society-wide chaos. We’re going to need to fundamentally reform not just our policies but our attitudes towards work. We’re going to need to re-engineer the social safety net from the ground up to account for the fact that robots are taking over on the labor front.” 

Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon Are Worth $1 Trillion, but Only Create 150,000 Jobs. It’s Time to Reassess the Future of Work | Motherboard

They're not in every home just yet, but if you're lucky enough to have a 3D printer at your disposal, a French sculptor by the name of Gael Langevin will let you create more than just plastic trinkets. He's spent the past year developing a 3D printable robot, and has made the open source plans available through Thingiverse for free. More »

Researchers at the State Key Laboratory of Solidification Processing, Northwestern Polytechnical University have been experimenting with 3D printing since 1995. And just recently they announced that they had printed a huge 3 meter wingspar out of titanium, strong enough to meet standards for aerospace use. Colour us impressed – to my knowledge, no one has created pieces that big, ever. Concrete or plastic, yes. Titanium? Oh my goodness.

One of the key industries that 3D printing is being used in as a direct-to-manufacture technique is aerospace. Weight reduction without sacrificing safety is the name of the game – 3D Printing has changed the game completely. Internal lattice structures, un-millable shapes and topological optimization are just a few of the most common ways airplanes can become lighter. Even the smallest weight reduction can save airlines millions of dollars. According to Wired Magazine, for every 25 gram packet of peanuts that is left on the ground, American Airlines saves $2,000 per year. No wonder those dinky bags are so small.

Right now I bet you’re asking ‘as-if they’re going to use that spar’. Well yes they are. It is expected to be installed in the new Comac C919 passenger airplane (above) in 2014 and flying by 2016. Lab director Huang Weidong had all this to say.

Modern aerospace industry has stringent requirements, so complex additive manufacturing processes must be developed to meet to ensure that products can achieve the robust performance levels established by traditional manufacturing methods…..Furthermore, aerospace parts have often complex structure, it could cost thousands or millions dollars to raplace the damage parts. LAM can be employed in repairing these metal parts without changes the preformance and it can save our time and cost significantly.

Seems like a challenge has been laid down to US and EU manufacturers. Otherwise, it’s meep meep.

 

Source: 3Ders and cnwest.com

This year we will feature, every second Monday of the month, one of our materials. We will inform you with the latest updates, design possibilities and of course a lot of inspiration. But first: an overview!

With 16 materials and more than 60 finishes, i.materialise offers one of the widest material ranges in the world to 3D print in. We’re always making sure our designers get the best quality offer and with our design guides on the material pages we lead you to the finish of your item.

The i.materialise sample kit...gotta have 'em all!

The last material we introduced was high detailed stainless steel, on trial, as you can clearly see in our periodic table of materials which showcases all our materials. Do you -firstly- want to see and feel the materials, buy one of our basic sample kits (with a voucher of 25 euro/ 40 dollar) or some loose samples.

OFFER
Now, let’s take a closer look at our offer:

Use: jewelry, lamps, fashion, prototype models
Colors: white, black, red, blue, spray painted black and spray painted white
Finishes: velvet petrol blue, green, pink, yellow, black, bordeaux, ochre, blue
Production time: 10-15 business days or priority service

 

 

Use: spareparts, complex models, small figures, jewelry
Production time: 10-15 business days

 

 

 

Use: demomodels (no functional models), scale models & sculptures
Finishes: every color available
Production time: 10-15 business days

 

 

Use: functional models
Colors: red, natural steel gray, black and white
Production time: 10-15 business days

 

 

Use: models in need for a transparant look
Colors: transparant white, blue, black, green, yellow, gray, red, orange, brown
Finishes: basic, technical, cosmetic
Production: 10-15 business days

 

 

Use: small detailed parts, perfect for paint jobs
Color: off-white
Production:10-15 business days

 

 

Use: presentation models that need great surface quality (smoothness)
Finishes: white or spraypainted white, black, blue , green, yellow, red, gray, orange, brown

Production: 10-15 business days

 

 

Use: train models, models that need a lot of details, aeroplane models
Color: Natural Gray
Production: 10-15 business days

 

 

Use: jewelry, functional parts
Finishes: polished
Production: 15-20 business days

 

 

Use: jewelry
Color: 14 carat solid gold
Production: 15-20 days

 

 

Use: jewelry
Finishes: gloss, high gloss, sandblasted, satin,
Production time: 15-20 business days

 

 

Use: dice, figures, robust figures, jewelry, decorative models
Finishes: gold plated, gold plated polished, silver, wheat penny, medieval pewter
Production: 15-20 business days

 

 

Use: jewelry, coins, tiny designs that need a lot of details
Production time: 15-20 days

 

 

 

Use: jewelry, steampunk designs, ornaments
Finishes: gold plated polished
Production time: 15-20 business days

 

 

Use: coins, medals, artifacts
Production time: 15-20 business days

 

 

 

Use: tableware, vases, tiles, art
Colors: white, yellow, diferent shades of blue, mint green, orange, turquoise, glossy & satin black,
Production: 15-20 business days

 

 

We will expand our range of materials (finishes and colors) even more this year. So follow our blog to find out about the material launches!

ghostbongweedofthesamurai:

PELICAN RAPIDS, MINNESOTA (AP) - Wasps have erected a perfect geodesic sphere in a local park. It is sixty feet high and formed of transparent sap, and has been estimated by local contractors to weigh over forty thousand pounds. Locals report millions of insects converging on the site early this morning, taking just under thirty minutes to complete the structure before vanishing.

It cannot be altered by conventional methods. Police have formed a cordon after several people were drawn into the sphere. Their whereabouts are unknown and they do not answer when called.

“They looked happy” says park attendant Patricia Wallis, raising her voice over the sphere’s crystalline hum.

*Oh come on who can’t like this.

http://www.3ders.org/articles/20130122-stratasys-and-materialise-3d-printed-dress-hit-paris-fashion-week-at-iris-van-herpen-show.html

(…)

“Dutch designer van Herpen’s eleven-piece collection featured two 3D printed ensembles. One is an elaborate skirt and cape created in collaboration with artist, architect, designer and professor Neri Oxman from MIT’s Media Lab, and 3D printed by Stratasys.

“The 3D printed skirt and cape were produced using Stratasys’ Objet Connex multi-material 3D printing technology, which allows a variety of material properties to be printed in a single build. This allowed both hard and soft materials to be incorporated within the design, crucial to the movement and texture of the piece. “The ability to vary softness and elasticity inspired us to design a “second skin” for the body acting as armor-in-motion; in this way we were able to design not only the garment’s form but also its motion,” explains Oxman. “The incredible possibilities afforded by these new technologies allowed us to reinterpret the tradition of couture as “tech-couture” where delicate hand-made embroidery and needlework is replaced by code….”

*More, and awesomer. The show is a hit.

http://www.nowfashion.com/21-01-2013-iris-van-herpen-couture-spring-summer-2013-paris-show-3052.html

http://www.wwd.com/runway/spring-couture-2013/review/iris-van-herpen

http://www.vogue.it/en/shows/show/haute-couture-spring-summer-2013/iris-van-herpen

*Really something special:

http://www.thecreatorsproject.com/blog/iris-van-herpens-lastest-fashion-collection-looks-like-what-youd-get-if-aliens-invaded-versailles

*If an Iris van Herpen – Neri Oxman mashup isn’t Twenty-Teens enough for you, how about Grimes as the couture model?

http://www.irisvanherpen.com/womenswear

A couple months back, a team of SparkFun employees went to New York to meet up with some customers of ours from an outfit called BREAKFAST. BREAKFAST is a marketing firm nestled on the second floor of an old warehouse in Brooklyn. But unlike traditional agencies that focus on things like TV spots, direct mail pieces and the like, BREAKFAST focuses on making promotions an experience – an idea aptly called “experiential marketing.” And frankly, they do an outstanding job.

Take for example, their electromagnetic dot display. This was a project designed for the release of TNT’s show “Perception.” Using hundreds of magnetic flip dots and some clever motion tracking (which is not based on the XBox kinect), they cranked up the flip dots to 15 times their normal operating speed and put a unique advertising installment up in Manhattan. The result is an absolutely stunning visual display. Check out the video to see it in action:

Imagine walking past that thing in person. Would you stop and play around? Of course you would! That’s the crux of BREAKFAST’s work. They understand that if there were just a billboard or poster about TNT’s new show, most people would walk right by. But not this display. It’s impossible to ignore.

When we saw this project, we immediately said, “We have to visit these guys!” They gave us a tour of their space, talked shop, and generally inspired us with their ingenuity, passion, and electronics know-how.

The back of the dot display

To read more about our visit with BREAKFAST, check out the page we created here. There you can find some more background on their agency, their co-founder Andrew Zolty, as well as some video of their space and an interview with Zolty himself. Check it out!

I'm a serious pajama aficionado -- insert blogger-in-pajamas joke here -- but I tend to be a bit of a traditionalist (see what I mean?). Nevertheless, my heart skipped a beat when I saw "Suitjamas" -- silk pajamas that look like a business suit. Unfortunately, all the models are posed wearing buttoned shirts and ties, which are not exactly, sleepwear, so it's hard to tell what these things would look like in practice.

Likewise unfortunate are the stupid sexist jokes on the "About" page. Nevertheless, I remain intrigued at the prospect of wearing pajamas tailored to look like a smart suit.

NEW Black & Silver Suitjamas (via Red Ferret)

citruscandy:

Remember this gif? The one that’s been going around mislabeled as a full-body MRI?

Check this out.

The animation represents the entire data set (1,871 slices) of the male cadaver from the Visible Human Project. The animation was played fullscreen on a portable monitor, which was moved around by an assistant while being photographed in a dark environment. The resulting images are long-exposure “light paintings” of the entire cadaver. Variations in the movement of the computer during each exposure created differences in the shape of the body throughout the series.

The photo series is called 12:31, which was the time of death by lethal injection of the murderer whose body was used for the project.

Concept by Croix Gagnon and photos by Frank Schott.

What use is a human being — to a tapeworm?

A mature tapeworm has a very simple lifestyle. It lives in the gut of a host animal, anchoring itself to the wall of the intestine with its scolex (or head), from which trails a long string of segments (proglottids) that contain reproductive structures. The tapeworm absorbs nutrients through its skin and gradually extrudes more proglottids, from the head down; as they reach the end of the tape they mature into a sac of fertilized eggs and break off.

The adult tapeworm has no knowledge of what happens to its egg sacs after they detach; nor does it know where it came from. It simply finds itself attached to a warm, pulsing wall, surrounded by a rich nutrient flow. Its experience of the human being is limited to this: that the human surrounds it and provides it with a constant stream of nutrients and energy. A hypothetical intelligent tapeworm might well consider itself blessed to have such a warm and comforting environment, that gives it all the food it needs and takes away anything that it excretes. And if it were of a philosophical bent, it might speculate: what is the extent of my environment? Is it infinite, or are there physical limits to it? And, eventually, are there other tapeworms out there? And finally, the brilliant polymath-level Enrico Fermi of tapeworms might ask, if there are other tapeworms, why aren't they here?

Our tapeworm-philosopher gets its teeth into the subject. Given that the human is so clearly designed to be hospitable to tapeworm-kind, then it follows that if there are more humans, other humans out there beyond the anus, then they, too, must be hospitable to tapeworm-kind. Tapeworm-kind has become aware of itself existing in the human; it is logical to assume that if other humans exist then there must be other tapeworms, and if travel between humans is possible—and we infer that it might be, from the disappearance of our egg sacs through the anus of the human—then sooner or later humans interacting in the broader universe might exchange eggs from these hypothetical alien tapeworms, in which case, visitors! Because the human was already here before we became self-aware, it clearly existed for a long time before us. So if there are many humans, there has been a lot of time for the alien tapeworm-visitors to reach us. So where are they?

Welcome to the Fermi paradox, mired in shit. Shall we itemize the errors that the tapeworm is making in its analysis?

The first and most grievous offense our tapeworm logician has committed is that of anthropocentrism (or rather, of cestodacentrism); it thinks everything revolves around tapeworms. In reality, the human is unaware of the existence of the tapeworm. This would be a good thing, from the worm's point of view, if it had any grasp of the broader context of its existence: it ought by rights to be doing the wormy equivalent of hiding under the bed covers, gibbering in fear.

It has inferred the existence of other humans, but it doesn't know about cooking, or the other arcane processes by which food makes its way into the gut for the tapeworm to absorb. Or about the sanitary facilities that kill tapeworm eggs before they get to another, intermediate host. There are vast, ancient, alien intellects in the macrocosm beyond the well-known human, and they are unsympathetic to tapeworms. Intrepid tapeworm cosmonauts seeking to make their way beyond the anus and across the universe to colonize other humans are in for a rough ride indeed, for they are intimately evolved to thrive in one particular environment, and that environment (the mammalian gut) is sparsely distributed throughout the universe. Much of the cosmos is inherently hostile to tapeworms. This is why tapeworms have not, in fact, colonized the universe and converted all available biomass into a constantly spawning Gordian knot of Platyhelminthic life, contra the prognostications of some teleologically-inclined tapeworm-philosophers of yore.

The human does not owe the tapeworm a living, or even a comfortable home. The tapeworm's existence is contingent on it not damaging its human, resulting in an undesirable human/tapeworm interaction with fatal consequences for the tapeworm. Some of the tapeworm's descendants might be able to find another new human to claim as their home, but the same constraints will apply. Only if the tapeworm transcends its tapewormanity and grows legs, lungs, and other organs that essentially turn it into something other than a tapeworm will it be able to make itself at home outside the human.

(Note: I picked tapeworms, rather than the bacterial gut fauna, because nobody much cares what happens to an E. coli. Tapeworms, on the other hand, are multicellular eukaryotic organisms with differentiates tissues, have nervous systems and genitalia, and are probably much closer to us—practically kissing-cousins to our form of vertebrate life—than anything we might discover on other planets. Perhaps the biggest weakness in this metaphor is its reliance on humans. While we may attribute intentionality to many natural phenomena—the supernatural stance—those of us tapeworms who are hard-headed materialists must surely concede that the human Earth is not a sentient being, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fiction aside. On the other hand, if you want to traffic with the ghost-infested depths of the simulation hypothesis, then anything is possible. Even tapeworm-cosmonauts flying out of my arse ...)