VISIONARIES IMAGINE A DAY WHEN REAL CONTACT IS MADE

Saturday, March 29, 2003

Two alien races, born under a distant sun, meeting for the first time -- that's Cultures of the Imagination, as enacted by teams of high school students at the Contact 2003 conference at the NASA Ames research center in Mountain View, Calif., March 21-23.

The Contact conferences have been held since 1983, attracting an eclectic mix of scientists and science-fiction writers, artists and visionaries -- one of the notable things about a Contact crowd is that these categories are not mutually exclusive -- united only in a passionate conviction that humanity's future lies in space. This year's theme was ``Art and Science: Visions of Exploration.''One presenter was Carlo Sequin, a professor of computer graphics at Berkeley who is also a sculptor. Sequin talked about the software he's written to facilitate the design of complex abstract figures, so he can tweak the parameters of the object he is creating until he finds the most aesthetically pleasing form. He passed around models.You could call it ``computer-assisted art,'' if you don't think that is a contradiction in terms, but using a computer to create art seems no more unreasonable than using a camera for the same purpose (and once upon a time there was some controversy about that).

One of Sequin's designs was chosen for the team USA-Minnesota entry at the 13th International Snow Sculpture Championship in Breckenridge in January. The team called the intricately intertwined shape Whirled White Web (you can see it on the Web at www.cs.berkeley.edu/~sequin/). It won a silver medal, despite collapsing shortly after the judging (it was 45 degrees and sunny).

John Knoll, one of the developers of Photoshop software, is the visual effects supervisor at Industrial Light and Magic, the company created by director George Lucas to do special effects for the Star Wars films. He showed parts of his project to recreate the Apollo 11 mission and the first moon landing as they would have looked had it been possible to put a camera anywhere you wanted one.Though he kept apologizing for how far his productions were from being finished, they were stunning. The Apollo launch, the docking maneuver in space, and finally the lunar landing -- eventually he will have film, or what looks to be film, of every significant part of the mission.First you see, from high above, the lunar module spidering across the moon's surface. Then, looking down from the crew's viewpoint, Buzz Aldrin says, ``We have a shadow,'' and it appears.

The view looking out tracks every shift and turn of the module in powered flight, captures the lunar dust flying away from the rocket exhaust, and finally shows the foot of the module settling to the moon at the exact second when the dust clears and the Eagle has landed. It's all synchronized with the actual audio, and it is mesmerizing.

The highlight of the conference is the simulation of first contact between two species, each enacted by a team of students from Oroville High School in California. The teams develop their critters independently, describing the planet, its ecology, the evolution of the species and its culture and technology. For the past several years it has been an integrated science course; this year, unfortunately, it had to be run as an extracurricular activity, though that didn't seem to dim the participants' enthusiasm.

The two planets involved in this contact scenario were moons of a gas giant planet like Jupiter. One team's critter was an octopus-like creature, radially symmetrical and having 10 tentacle-like appendages, each with an eye. They communicated by eye-blinking (for intimate conversation) or by tentacle-waving. The other critters were avians with an amphibian ancestor, with wings evolved from something like gills. Their communication was by sound.

Both species are fruit-eaters, and the teams managed to get that part. But they didn't figure out the different means of communication, partly because the octopoids didn't hear well and the avians didn't see well.

Israel Zuckerman, who conducted the simulation, observed afterward that such an outcome is actually quite plausible. ``It's more likely that aliens will be able to share lunch than that they'll agree on what lunch means,'' he said.

After the simulation is over, the teams and the audience finally get to tell each other what they were thinking. The octopoid culture, as that team conceived it, was highly collective, based on young that are born in large broods and raised together. Thus they reacted with consternation when the littlest of the avians approached them alone, even though it was offering edible berries, because they never do anything alone.

But from the other side, the absence of individual action wasn't nearly as noticeable, and wouldn't have caused alarm if it had been noticed.

The simulation isn't rehearsed. But then, as Zuckerman said, when it happens for real it won't be. The Contact people would love to be present when it does.