Becket — For a few days this past February in San Jose, California, the “Gateway to Silicon Valley,” the American Association for the Advancement of Science met to discuss “Innovation, Information and Imaging,” with the emphasis on the Imaging. Why? Because apparently we have reached a grand crescendo in new ways to see.
Among the dozens of sessions and symposia, those that seemed to scream the loudest had to do with seeing deeper into outer space, deeper into history, deep down among the sub-atomic particles that make up life itself. Thousands of scientists, peering into iPads and Androids, scurried from the Hilton through the convention center to the Marriott and back again. They hung head-to-head with colleagues at little tables in halls and bars, engrossed, electronicized, power-pointed. Wedged among them was a world-class science fair, where organizations committed to every aspect of the STEM curriculum vied for the attention of kids who thought this was a great way to spend the weekend.
To be a writer in this milieu is like being an asteroid from ancient history, plunging toward earth. Marked by your old-fashioned pad and pencil, you feel that you will surely burn up in the rarified atmosphere, doomed never to actually make contact. Still, you gotta try. Because this conference about seeing was — make no mistake — a portal to the new world. What these people know will unlock the future. Their stuff is happening.
In the coming weeks, look for a series of blogs from me flagged with the words “Heads Up.” The implicit warning is intentional. Heads Up! Something scary and hopeful and altogether amazing this way comes, something you never imagined would really happen, which will make you read science fiction with new respect. And it’s all about seeing.
Heads up for trees that will shine so brightly with their own inner luminescence that we won’t need electric lights on the streets at night.
Heads up for a moon of Saturn called Enceladus, which, reports the deep-seeing Cassini spacecraft, has an ocean of water beneath 18-24 miles of ice.
Isn’t water always a sign of life? Maybe not.
Heads up for a biochemical engineering breakthrough that is creating an alternative life form without water based on outer space observations of methane, which abounds on planets all over the universe.
Heads up for a cure for Parkinson’s and MS, maybe even the flu virus, based on the invention of made-to-order proteins that can bind to evil cells and deliver medicines that change their intentions. How do we know about these proteins? By looking through (Heads up!) new microscopes which can capture 3D images of sub-cellular life, moving about in real time.
Heads Up. Eighty per cent of the antibiotics absorbed by humans come to us not through physician prescriptions but via the animals we eat. It is said that one farm-raised salmon has consumed his body weight in antibiotics by the time he reaches your plate. With anti-microbial resistance making more and more antibiotics useless against infection, it’s time to take a deeper look at the food of our food supply.
You don’t have to look through some high powered microscope to see that political idiocy will prevent the revolution in thinking that must happen to reduce the threat of global heating. (I recall Tom Friedman of the New York Times saying of a certain climate “summit” conference that he had never in his entire career seen so much laziness, waste and stupidity in one room.) So Heads Up, there are plans afoot to short cut around the slumbering lumbering politicians and just bury vast amounts of carbon in the great wells and mines and porous rocks and other sinkholes from which global-heating carbon fuels were extracted in the first place. What evil consequences may ensue is another story to watch.
Heads up. Scientists can detect genetic mutations in in vitro babies. So what’s going to stop them from trying to change what they can now so clearly see?
Heads Up. Your eyes can soon be fitted with microscope lenses. Three-D printing is punching out personalized prosthetic limbs. Materials science can now create skin with underlying nerve networks that simulate real feeling. The science of curing disability has become the science of robotics. Like Route 128 and Route 95, they are one and the same, and once you realize that, you can have no doubt where the human body — disabled and abled too — is heading.
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I once knew a great theatrical director who recommended that all playwrights study acting. “If you don’t know what they do,” he said, “they will do it to you.” Same goes for those of us who didn’t study science enough in school. Heads up.
