At SXSW, astronaut Dr. Mae Jemison (second from left), Dr. Jill Tarter of SETI and LeVar Burton imagined the next 100 years with host Benjamin Palmer.

Has humanity stopped looking to the future with hope?

Sometimes it feels like we’re so embroiled in the struggle over whether we’ll despoil our environment or dismantle all our safety nets in the next few years that we can’t look toward what life might look like in decades, much less a century and imagine things better than they are right now. Yet looking toward our far future helps us think about things now in a new light. One reason is that trying to solve very big problems forces us to fix a lot of smaller ones along the way.

At SXSW Interactive, the most mind-bending panel I attended was hosted by the 100 Year Starship foundation. This nonprofit began as a conference in 2011 sponsored by NASA and DARPA, with the idea of launching a foundation devoted to a very big idea: what capabilities would humanity need to send a one-way mission to another planet within the next hundred years?

Astronaut Dr. Mae Jemison submitted the winning proposal, which envisioned a project devoted not just to the physical technology of the journey but also the social and cultural needs. Last year, the 100YSS held its first independent symposium in Houston, with presentations on everything from using hydrogels to fight bone mass loss to the heady question of what kind of clothes we’d wear on a voyage that takes decades, or whether we’d wear clothing at all! The forward-thinking group has already been invited to consult with the European Union at a conference about the future.

It’s become cliche to point out that we’re on a collective space voyage with a crew of six billion people, in a self-contained, irreplaceable craft. Our recent, space-going past proved that technologies developed for travel to outer space and the moon benefit humans on earth in near-countless ways. If we — not just NASA or the United States, but humanity as a whole — tackled the challenge of interstellar travel what might we learn about efficiently and ethically feeding, clothing, powering and preserving this world?

During the SXSW panel, Dr. Jemison, along with Dr. Jill Tarter, of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and LeVar Burton spoke philosophically about the challenges facing humanity and how a grand project could bring our world together.

Dr. Tarter told us that, “”We’re on the verge of being able to tell you where to look in the sky to find Earth 2.0.” So what do we do when we find it?

“There is an inextricable link between that which we imagine and that which we create,” Levar Burton said. So could imagining new stories — stories about interstellar travel — create a healthier, more peaceful Earth at the same time we prepare to leave?

Jemison quoted an African proverb: ”No one shows a child the sky.” Space is a part of all humanity, so will we answer its call?

Last week I interviewed Dr. Jemison about the project. Her staff at 100YSS cautioned me that with her busy schedule, she’d only have five or ten minutes. Instead, we ended up talking for almost half an hour. It seemed impossible — and unfair to FDL’s readers — to boil that down into just a few sound bites, so instead I transcribed our entire conversation below. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed having it!

The 2013 100-Year Starship Symposium takes place in Houston from September 19 to 22, other details on the 100YSS Project homepage.

More: read tweets from the 100YSS Panel at SXSW, Dr. Mae Jemison at TED on balancing Art & Science.

Bringing all human experience to space

Kit O’Connell, FDL: I’ve been a science fiction reader all my life and it was amazing to see a panel where people were seriously talking about things I didn’t think anyone seriously talks about — what they fantasize about but not take seriously. One of the things that really interests me about the 100 Year Starship is that you’re not just focusing on science, technology, engineering and math but you really want to involve the arts. Can you talk a little more about why that’s important to you?

Dr. Mae Jemison, 100 Year Starship: The first thing is because the task for 100 Year Starship is to make sure the capabilities are there for human journey to another star, it automatically means you have to take into account the whole range of human experiences. It’s not the same thing as saying you just do food, air and water because that doesn’t solve our problems down here. We probably have enough food, air and water to clothe, shelter everyone on this planet in a decent fashion but we haven’t figured out how to do that right?

And even if you were able to do it in sort of a nominal fashion, does that actually take care of everything there is to be human? And it doesn’t. And so it’s just quite reality. If you’re going to have humans go somewhere you have to take those things into account. Even in space, even when I went up years ago, people got to take music with them that they listened to … you got to pick your own rugby shirts (laughs) which as someone who doesn’t wear rugby shirts all the time … but I got to pick the colors I wanted right? So even with these shorter stays, what makes people people is that they have cultural and other kinds of attachments to them. But if you go for longer periods of time, you’re going to have to think more about that. And also the fact that culture, the structure of the society is going to evolve as it gets further away from Earth.

Just like I couldn’t imagine that we would have known, even twenty years,  how the world would have evolved in the face of the Internet. Now we’re talking about open source technology design and development.

K: That’s a very big change.

J: Yeah! And that’s here where we’re all in conjunction. So I think when you start to talk about people involved with anything, you have to think about all the things that are involved with people.

K: I guess it doesn’t make sense to send us to another star system if we’re not going to be humans when we get there in some fashion. There still needs to be that essential humanity.

Can Anonymous be destroyed with enough arrests and punitive sentences?

Anonymous-scholar Gabriella Coleman argues that the hacktivist movement is rhizomatic and cannot ever be treated as a single entity.

The government seems terrified of Anonymous and online activists. There have been harsh crackdowns on anyone exercising the limits of free speech through the Internet, from the charges used to threaten Aaron Swartz before his death to the jail time Weev and John Kiriakou are serving. Actual Anons like Jeremy Hammond face corrupt courts and even more devastating sentences.

What both the government and mainstream media have trouble grasping is that Anonymous cannot be approached as a single entity. Instead, Anthropologist Gabriella Coleman insists that Anonymous is rhizomatic. Though it all stems from the same roots, it is not subject to any specific leadership but shifts direction based on collective will.

Perhaps the government does understand on some level, and that’s why they’ve acted so violently to oppose this concept. Yet Anonymous as a collective taps into roots in historic anonymity that suggest it won’t be easily squashed. Two panels at South by Southwest Interactive 2013 laid out this history from the printing press into modern times.

A Brief History of Anonymity

First Amendment lawyer Nabiha Syed and historian Katie Engelhart discuss this history of anonymity at SXSW 2013.

First Amendment lawyer Nabiha Syed and historian Katie Engelhart led a panel on anonymity through history.  Much of the earliest literature was published anonymously or pseudonymously. Women of course used masculine pseudonyms or published anonymously, but men also chose to publish anonymously or as women for many reasons. This fluid idea of identity and authorship was the source of benign entertainment, as the literati of the 18th century gathered in coffee shops to debate authorship.

Being anonymous was sometimes celebrated; some like Milton chose dip in and out of public identity from publication to publication as he pleased. But attitudes toward anonymity change with the times. During wartime, sedition laws and other restrictions tried to enforce clear authorship of every work, yet the penalties for treasonous speech increased the desire to go unnamed.

Engelhart and Syed compared this shift to the evolution of anonymity on the modern Internet. In the early days of Usenet and IRC chatrooms, anonymity and pseudonymity were respected — a persons real identity could remain unknown, but they could gain a great deal of social clout for their invented identity over time. Forces both technological and social have combined to endanger this namelessness — from the ease of identity services like Facebook passport and the pervasive transactional tracking of the Web on the one hand to the increasing paranoia of perpetual war on the other.

True anonymity is becoming more difficult and less accessible. Products like TOR and Ghostery (both present at the #SXSW Trade Show) help users regain some control, but we may enter a virtual arms race between tools for privacy and the push for pervasive trackable identity.

Anonymous Unleashes the Power of Crowds

Karen Reilly of the Tor Project wants more journalists to understand how to hide their traffic.

On its surface, the SXSW Trade Show is full of the kinds of marketing I declared boring in the introduction to my event coverage. Hungry marketers roam the floor seeking attention and venture capital. Oh, I filled up a couple bags with swag, from t-shirts to buttons, but I won’t bore you by recounting my haul. Instead, I’ll focus on a handful of exhibitors at the trade show doing a little more.

Tor, which hides the origins of Internet traffic, was originally a product of military research, later sponsored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and now operates as its own nonprofit. This history makes more sense when you understand that the product is useful to so many diverse groups — from journalists and the likes of Wikileaks to political dissidents to everyday citizens to, yes, military operatives hiding their location. The very nature of the product means that the more people who use it, the more secure it can become. Right now they told me they are working especially hard to teach journalists about the benefits of the product. On the Tor Project website, you can get easy to install software bundles for secure web browsing on most operating systems. A similar package for secure chatting will be re-released soon.

Another product which gives us more control of our Internet experience is Ghostery, which was giving away cute squishy Pac-Man style ghosts based on their logo. Ghostery is a plugin for all major browsers which lets you see who is tracking you and how. It reveals how everyone from ad networks to Google is keeping track of your data and lets you learn more about how they make use of it, then choose whether to block their tracking or not.

Japanese photographer Tominaga Yasuhiro is collecting 10,000 Funny Faces.

Geostellar is trying to encourage more homeowners to add solar panels and other environmental improvements to their homes. On their website, you can search for your home and see potential savings and environmental benefits of going solar. The process is ‘gameified’ — you can earn points based on making different improvements and getting your friends to offer their ‘Love’ of what you’re doing. The site is free but makes money from commissions from green companies like panel installers. Over time the company hopes the application will expand. I looked at my neighborhood with Geostellar systems analyst Kevin Wurster, and we saw that a nearby school has a huge empty roof perfect for solar panels. Eventually, the company would like to work with groups to help them lobby for such large projects which could benefit multiple homes. The solar-powered phone charging stations they sponsored around the site were also popular.

A couple less serious projects caught my attention as well. Rangl is a website in beta which creators hope will help people playfully settle arguments among their friends — with a special category for settling conflicts among roommates. I can see a lot of booze-soaked situations where this website would be pretty entertaining.

By far, my favorite thing on the trade show floor was Japanese photographer Tominaga Yasuhiro‘s 10,000 Funny Faces project. Yasuhiro isn’t selling anything — rather, he’s collecting the silliest faces he can for a future photographic collection. He invited me into his photobooth and got me to make a series of goofy expressions. The best one was instantly printed on a nearby WiFi enabled photoprinter for my souvenir, and I gladly signed to give permission for my face to be used in his photobook and on his blog, where he posts funny faces every day. There was something liberating about this experience, forcing me to set aside thoughts of people to meet and articles to write and just play for a moment. I hope it had an even deeper effect on the many far more serious people at SXSW Interactive.

This Pac-Man style squishy ghost from Ghostery was popular swag at the SXSW Trade Show.