As the first of Google’s goggles are dispatched, we’re starting to see serious conversations arise about the implications of always-on feeds beaming every moment onto the cloud.  I’ve seen a few articles expressing alarm at the idea we’ll be under constant surveillance by the people around us, and the necessary etiquette frameworks that will need to be hashed out as this kind of device becomes more commonplace.  Seattle’s 5 Point Cafe became the first to ban the goggles, although this was more a savvy PR move than response to a legitimate concern.  It’s not a particularly  new idea – anyone who’s visited one of London’s private member clubs will already be familiar with no-phone policies.

However, even as we struggle to get to grips with our own privacy settings on various social networks, we should spare a thought for whether our friends are following suit. It’s not unusual for journalists to befriend someone on Facebook in order to access pictures of their celebrity friend, a leapfrog manoeuvre that my own pal fell victim to (not that it was me these hacks were looking for!). Life-casting promises to dramatically ramp up the sheer volume of data collected about you – locations, movements, activities, and if we want to stretch our imaginations a little, mood, partners, weight, social status…  Facebook’s facial recognition ability should already have made it clear that you don’t necessarily need to be tagged in a picture for Facebook (or anyone else) to work out that it’s you. Unfortunately, many companies still insist on using terrible verification methods (*cough* Apple *cough*) to identify yourself – a weak system that can be exploited by the easy availability of personal data. I mean, postcode? birthdate? phone number? Who on Earth thought those were secure pieces of information? So your friends’ data protection policies should be borne in mind. Are they being sensible about the way they share data that includes you? Can you invite a known loose-hand to a private event?

I thought about this today as I was setting up some encryption on my computers – a long overdue task. Because the content of my hard drive does not only concern me. To give an example, a close friend and avid urban explorers has, despite some close scrapes, managed to avoid attracting the attention of police despite finding his way into hundreds of forbidden areas, including a number of sensitive government-controlled sites.  However, when another group of explorers found themselves staring down the barrels of CO19′s sub-machine guns during an ill-advised jaunt into a disused London tube station, their cameras and hard drives were confiscated and picked over by the authorities. Although my friend has been careful to avoid direct contact with police, these hard drives contain plenty of photos of him from shared trips. Now, should he ever be picked up, it would be easy for diligent police officer to connect him with a number of other trespasses. Ideally, everyone involved should have been encrypting their hard drives and taking stringent data-protection measures, but aside from being impossible to enforce, it would only take a single weak link to expose the group, making such efforts rather fragile.

So, if you’re anything less than a model citizen, the question is: are your friends taking privacy as seriously as you?

Muahahahaha.

(How to Make a Zombie is out in June from OneWorld)

I think this is interesting for a couple of reasons, The first is the use of Google’s Street View as a journalism. The mayor of Namie invited the cameras in an effort to stop the world forgetting about the catastrophe. As far as I know, this is the first time street view has been used to document an area with this kind of subtext. In the future, might we demand more from news teams than carefully composed  photographs and long video pans  of disaster zones? Perhaps we’ll want to walk ourselves through the rubble, even see it captured in LIDAR and reconstructed to the smallest 3D detail.

Secondly, it reminds me that all of Google’s street maps are destined to fall out of date. By and large, street maps hold their stock. Even after the Great Fire of 1666, the City of London doggedly rejected a new layout and rebuilt according to the narrow, serpentine streets that had shaped the city since time immemorial. But the contents of those streets are in constant flux. Shops open and close. Buildings rise and fall. Outside of London’s Old Street station, near to my workplace, a new residential tower block has made Google’s rendering of the area almost unrecognisable.

We all marveled at Google’s effort to digitise the world, seemingly achieved overnight, but it’s a feat that will have to repeated over and over again to keep their street view current. So what happens to those old street view images? There’s no need to bin them – digital real estate is cheap enough that I suspect Google will add a feature to their Street View: a slider that lets you scroll back through time, to previous scenes captured by the Google cameras. See this place as it appeared ten, fifteen, twenty years ago.  The ability to automatically localise photographs, working out where they fit into the mosaic, offers the prospect that historical images could be added to this Google Time View. Scroll back a hundred years instead of ten. Go all the way back to pre-history (aka 1997).

And perhaps, the future holds street-mapping as a tool for posterity, capturing urban landscapes in detail before they are lost.  Liverpool’s city centre was gutted to make way for the private L1 complex, built to a new streetplan which severed the connection with the city’s history.  The Street View of the future might not just show you where you are, but also where you were.

Finally, what narratives might play out over a landscape in this timescale? Aside from observing gentrification or decay flash forward with the flick of a cursor, Google’s candid recollections of everyday life might be a stage on which to perform longer works. We all remember the Norwegian scuba divers captured chasing the Google mapping car, spears in hand.  But with a little dedication and planning, what appears to be a single panel glyph to passers-by can emerge as a story over time.

And after all, isn’t that what history is all about?

Source: Oak Ridge Associated Universities

Moscow police officers have detained a schoolteacher after 14 kg of radioactive material was discovered in his garage.

The police cited the man as saying that he had used the substances to “irradiate” a friend who wanted to become immortal.

He reportedly said the friend had even traveled to the site of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster “to expose himself to radiation and become immortal.”

The radioactive material was apparently collected by the teacher from known burial sites and other “special places”.

Moscow Police Seize 14 Kg of Radioactive Material from College Teacher – RiaNovosti

Source: J Korean Neurosurg Soc. 2012 October; 52(4): 414–416.

The second image shows the skull of another 38-year-old, this time a Korean man who fell from a chair while eating, driving a plastic chopstick into his eye socket. From there it travelled through the optical canal (the hole in your skull along which your optic nerve runs from your eye to your brain) and disappeared – all 14cm of it! The chopstick was removed by surgeons trans-orbitally (i.e. reaching behind the eyeball) without incident. The patient was kept for three weeks observation and then discharged.

Not being a scientist or a science fiction author, I opted to look at how one influenced the other.  The theme of the festival was the dark universe – all that lies unknown and obscured. During the age of empires, Dutch cartographers were regarded as the best in the world, their maps shedding a closely-guarded light on the darkest corners of the globe. So Sonic Acts seemed like the perfect place to examine how those maps, and more since, helped to shape our imagination and our relationship with the unknown.

In 1869, American inventor and physician Cyrus Teed was experimenting with some electrical apparatus when he was hit with a bolt of energy, knocking him out cold. On awaking, he proclaimed that he had communed with the angels, who told him the secrets to the universe. Teed changed his name to Koresh and started preaching his gospel, forming the Koreshanites movement. As well as celibacy and reincarnation, the tenets of Koreshanity held that the Earth was in fact a hollow sphere, with people living on the inside. In this “Cellular Cosmology” model, the heavens above were really the heavens within, an intricate machinery of prisms and light. After founding his utopian settlement in Estero, Florida, Teed set out to prove that the world really was hollow.

But how could you measure the shape of the world? With a really big ruler, of course. So that’s what they built.

Credit: Koreshan State Historic Site Photograph Collection

On a nearby beach, locals watched as a strange wooden rail began to inch along the sand. The “rectilineators” were eight feet long, made up of wooden beams braced with steel crossbars. Each fitted snugly via brass fittings to the last, ensuring that the line continued in a perfectly level fashion. When all the rectilineators were placed, the last was unfastened and connected to the first, and so the device gradually snaked down the beach, tended to by the conscientious Koreshanites. Along the way, regular measurements were made to compare the height of the ruler to the water’s surface. And sure enough, as the measuring rule stretched out, it began to dip lower and lower. Or rather, the concave surface of the Earth rose up to meet it. Of course, it was a mistake, but that doesn’t matter. It was imperative that the device failed to be accurate. If it had worked, there would have been no world for the Koreshanites beliefs to inhabit. And so, refusing to bend himself to the reality of the world, Teed bent the world in accordance with his fiction.

He wasn’t the first to be stymied by the world’s refusal to entertain our fictions. The fantasies that we filled the mysterious lands with were extinguished by the approaching light of the cartographer. The Garden of Eden was once a place on Earth, painted into the inhospitable Middle Eastern desert by hopeful European monks who’d never left their own city. Heaven, too, was a physical location, just out of reach in the sky (although Alexander the Great was able to travel to the fringes by riding on the back of a gryphon). But as our maps spread out to encompass the world and the celestial bodies above us, these places devolved into metaphorical locations – an idea instead of a place.

The Flammarion Engraving. The adjoining caption reads: “A missionary of the Middle Ages tells that he had found the point where the sky and the Earth touch”

Similarly, the best minds in Europe once conjectured that if you travelled far enough north, you could get above the freezing North wind, and find a paradise known as Hyperborea. Here, the inhabitants basked in the tropical glow of a slowly rotating sun, living on an island surrounded by warm water. They lived so long, and so blissfully, that on reaching the age of 1,000, they would dress in flowers and drown themselves out of sheer boredom. The mythical master race of Hyperboreans, the perfect people who gave rise to the Europeans, was so seductive that it lasted long enough to make into the Nazi’s Aryan ideology. But of course, once Amundsen reached the North Pole, it was obvious that no paradise awaited his exhausted men there. Hyperborea was a convenient fiction painted into a blind spot on our maps.

A recurrent theme of science fiction is the way that it inhabits the unmapped spaces in our universe. Take, for example, the works of Jules Verne. Journey to the Centre of the Earth, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Five Weeks in a Balloon, From the Earth to the Moon, Sphinx of the Ice Fields, all of these stories took  place at the fringes of Verne’s known world. The last of those books describes a navigable channel runs from Australia to South America, through the South Pole. Just fifteen years after that story was published, Amundsen’s expedition would plant a flag where Verne’s story fantasized a liquid ocean. The empire of fact expanded and extinguished another hiding place for fiction. Even now, authors must place their earthbound stories in fantastic locations: just like the Garden of Eden, Hogwarts cannot exist in a physical location. It lies behind some fold in the map, of Earth but not on Earth. It can’t exist in any physical location, because a quick check of Google Maps would cut the thread suspending disbelief.  Similarly, The Hunger Games’ Panem is American but not America, at least not the one we know. It lies in the future, that comfortable zone of the unknown which acts as convenient repository for so much science fiction. (and yet, any daring enough to locate their stories to a fixed date - 2001, Terminator, Metropolis - predestine themselves to be undone by the relentless advance of time).

As Paintwork author Tim Maughan pointed out to me, science fiction risks being collapsed into fantasy by the advance of our maps. Once we were able to fill distant lands with the creatures of our imagination – the Argonauts’ cyclops, Gulliver’s Lilliputians – but now we’re forced to push these stories into more distant unknown worlds. What is Star Trek except a continuation of this practice, boldly going where no man has gone before, and enjoying the freedom of artistic license that comes with that territory? Will the relentless advance of our maps leave no place for our imagination? Perhaps we ought to be worried that our maps are still spreading their sinuous lines across the universe. Because we want to know which way the universe curves. And how do you measure the shape of the universe? With a really big ruler, of course.

Credit: NASA/WMAP Science Team

A satellite with cartographic aspirations named WMAP currently sits in a gravitational eddy one and a half million kilometres behind the Earth. It is staring into the far distance – right back to the dawn of the universe. It measures the distance between tiny fluctuations in the microwave “echo” of the Big Bang, acting as a gigantic set square with its crook buried on Earth and its flat edge presented to the stars. And surely enough, our maps are spreading out so far now that the borders run up against the very edges of the universe.

But there is a sting in this tale: WMAP told us that everything we can see, every tiny flicker of starlight in every galaxy, is less than 5% of what’s out there. The rest remains hidden in darkness. It seems that the unknown is not an endangered resource just yet.

You just pressed a key on your keyboard.

Simple, isn’t it?

What just actually happened?

Well, when you know about bit about how input peripherals work, it’s not quite that simple. You’ve just put into play a power regulator, a debouncer, an input multiplexer, a USB device stack, a USB hub stack, all of that implemented in a single chip. That chip is built around thinly sliced wafers of highly purified single-crystal silicon ingot, doped with minute quantities of other atoms that are blasted into the crystal structure, interconnected with multiple layers of aluminum or copper, that are deposited according to patterns of high-energy ultraviolet light that are focused to a precision of a fraction of a micron, connected to the outside world via thin gold wires, all inside a packaging made of a dimensionally and thermally stable resin. The doping patterns and the interconnects implement transistors, which are grouped together to create logic gates. In some parts of the chip, logic gates are combined to create arithmetic and bitwise functions, which are combined to create an ALU. In another part of the chip, logic gates are combined into bistable loops, which are lined up into rows, which are combined with selectors to create a register bank. In another part of the chip, logic gates are combined into bus controllers and instruction decoders and microcode to create an execution scheduler. In another part of the chip, they’re combined into address and data multiplexers and timing circuitry to create a memory controller. There’s even more. Those are actually such incredibly complex technologies that they’ll make any engineer dizzy if they think about them too much, and such that no single company can deal with that entire complexity.

Can we simplify further?

In fact, very scarily, no, we can’t. We can barely comprehend the complexity of a single chip in a computer keyboard, and yet there’s no simpler level.  The next step takes us to the software that is used to design the chip’s logic, and that software itself has a level of complexity that requires to go back to the top of the loop.

Today’s computers are so complex that they can only be designed and manufactured with slightly less complex computers. In turn the computers used for the design and manufacture are so complex that they themselves can only be designed and manufactured with slightly less complex computers. You’d have to go through many such loops to get back to a level that could possibly be re-built from scratch.

Quéru’s description of basic complexity reminds me of descriptions of the cell and the atom – that even when we break things down to what we feel is the fundamental level, there’s still so much going on that we can scarcely understand it. And moreover, that just like living, evolved organisms, each computer is the offspring of a slightly less complicated computer, a continuous chain whose links cannot stand alone any more than life can spontaneously arise in a sealed jar. A tangled bank indeed…

“Dizzying but invisible depth” — Jean-Baptiste Quéru

Neighborhoods Seek to Banish Sex Offenders by Building Parks – NYTimes

–

Hello, my name is Frank Swain and I’m here from Unity, a charity established in 1984 to defend rights of workers in Britain. We work to secure fair pay, tackle exploitation, and provide legal counsel and support services to those in need. I’m writing here to ask for your help in fighting one of the most pernicious threats facing working men and women in Britain today.

If you were a worker in a 19th century Indiana, this is what you might have been paid, a coupon known as a scrip. In remote areas such as mining towns and plantations, where currency was in short supply, tokens such as these were given to worker in lieu of cash. This was known as the tommy or truck system. The truck system was common in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries. In his famous book Rural Rides, agriculturist and political reformer William Cobbett wrote of the system in operation in Wolverhampton and Shrewsbury. The tokens could only be reimbursed in co-operating businesses, typically owned by the company itself, and so the company were able to control how a worker spent his money.  The truck system also allowed employers to recoup money spent on wages. However, in a physically and economically captive market, prices in the company store could be set at extortionate rates, and many workers ended up in debt to the very people they worked for.

Fast forward a century or two.

In January 2013 thinktank Demos suggested issuing benefit payments on disposable pre-paid cards. This came on the back of a bill introduced by Conservative MP Alex Shelbrooke in December that proposed a similar system, restricting the purchase of what he called NEDDs – non-essential, desirable and damaging products. Shelbrooke was quoted as saying:  “Prohibiting the purchases of NEDD items such as cigarettes and alcohol, leaves more money for priority purchases on children.” Note that the honourable gentlemen hasn’t yet called for end to alcohol subsidies at the Commons bar.

This bill established the legal framework for restricted point-of-sale (RPOS) credit and debit cards.  Employers worked with banks to develop inflexible payment systems that pivoted on these so-called RPOS cards.  The mantra  that the economic collapse had stemmed from reckless borrowing by lower classes did little to discourage the development of RPOS cards, which were presented by the banking industry as tightening its lending practices.

The new system was spearheaded in organisations whose employees possessed weak bargaining rights – typically migrant workers employed by licensed gangmasters, which of course is still very much legal in the UK. The cards gave the gangmasters greater control over their workers, prevented elopement and compelled them to remain working even in unfavourable conditions. This arrangement suited the Government of the time, because it meant that migrant workers could not save money to secure a foothold in the country. Their movement and purchases were restricted, and if employment was terminated they would be forced to return home. Naturally, the employees felt that the new system was akin to slavery – though a more precise definition would be that Cobbett’s truck system had re-emerged. Because the RPOS cards were primarily issued to marginalised groups – poor, uneducated, foreign born, and with little voice – their plight went largely unreported in the media.

However, market forces could not be so easily be controlled. The restrictions imposed by the RPOS cards immediately fuelled the growth of a grey economy, where these modern-day scrips were bartered for goods under various arrangements.  Disposable welfare cards would be sold for cash and then reported lost, so that the authorities issued a replacement. Some individuals would lose up to ten cards a year. In response, anyone who lost too many cards was audited, and welfare officers also studied usage of suspect cards to detect when and where transactions had taken place, effectively placing the finances of all welfare recipients under surveillance.

Much harder to identify was fraud committed with the assistance of shopkeepers. In the photo above, a shopkeeper sells a woman cigarettes by running them through as a food purchase. As would be expected, the money subtracted from the card is more than the face value of the cigarettes, so the individual is exploited a second time.

Migrant workers whose families rely on repatriations – which make up the greatest movement of capital in the global economy – are forced to trade  their restricted credits for cash from third party vendors. These money changers take a substantial profit for themselves as part of the exchange rate, further diminishing what little income the labourers earn.

At the Conservative Party Conference in 2012, George Osborne had signalled a new chapter in the worker-employer relationship, announcing a system that encouraged employees to forfeit employment rights such as maternity leave, flexible hours and protection from unfair dismissal in exchange for a one-off payment of company shares. Legal restrictions mean this would remain optional for existing employees, but there was nothing to prevent companies demanding new staff subscribe to these conditions. Those new powers came into force in April 2013.

In the summer of 2013, hundreds of thousands of disenfranchised students found that as they entered the already weakened job market, they were offered repressive contracts which cornered on the new truck system. Payments would be made into escrow accounts accessed through RPOS debit cards. In some cases, up to 50% of the wage was only redeemable in transactions at affiliated business, dictating where and how the workers spent their money. Shortly after, mass protests were held across the country.

The truck system triggered an immediate backlash among a population who were young, activist-minded and technologically adept. They set about targeting weaknesses in the RPOS system, hacking the cards to remove the restrictions. In this image, the RFID microchip of a debit card has been exposed, the first step in deactivating the controls.

The cards appear white because the outer laminates have peeled off – probably why this technique became known as “whitelisting”. Information on how to override the RPOS cards quickly spread through social media. Here, a video demonstrating one card-unlocking technique has received over 700,000 views on YouTube, and there are plenty of others in the sidebar.

The so-called Liberation movement demanded open access to their money, and the freedom to spend it as they would with cash. The authorities hit back in early 2014 with the arrest of Alan Black, under anti-terror laws designed to prevent fund-raising for armed insurgent groups. Black was the teenage hacker who broke the encryption on the RPOS system and published his findings online, allowing the cards to be remotely whitelisted. The case has yet to be heard, and in the meantime has done little to prevent the spread of information detailing how to override the blocks on RPOS cards.

Legally, both the new found truck system and the methods used to unlock it are a legal grey area, with both sides awaiting the outcome of Black’s trial, the ruling of which will form case law.  In the meantime, services have sprung up to offer RPOS unlocking. However, it remains a risky procedure, and vendors frequently face harassment and arrest by local authorities. Tampering with a scrips card is strictly prohibited by employment contract, meaning that employees must risk termination and financial ruin to escape the truck system. For many of Britain’s poorest and most vulnerable workers, that is a risk they cannot face.

I implore those of you reading this to support the work of Unity in defending the rights of the country’s most at-risk workers. Unity is working with politicians to introduce a bill that would outlaw the use of truck system wage arrangements, freeing hundreds of thousands of workers to live according to their own financial choices.  Truck, tommy and RPOS are all names for the same thing: a wage system that is bad for workers and bad for Britain. I ask you today, to help us in returning the this system to where it belongs: the history books.

Thank you.

You had your chance.

A while back I chanced across a post by Carla Sinclair at BoingBoing, recounting a recent TED talk that proposed reviving extinct species:

Stewart Brand began his TED talk today with the statement, “Biotechnology is about to liberate conservation.” Before I had a chance to process what that meant, he went on to list a number of birds and mammals that have become extinct in the last few centuries, including the passenger pigeon, which was killed off by hunters in the 1930s. For a moment my mood plunged, as it always does with conversations of human-caused animal extinction. And then he asked the question, “What if DNA could be used to bring a species back?” I felt a tsunami of awe and excitement barrel through the audience. This was as exciting as his declaration about the digital world in 1984 when he said, “Information wants to be free.”

So far, the usual dewy-eyed gravitas we’ve come to expect from TED talks. But my reaction was quite different from Carla’s. “That is, without doubt,” I muttered to myself, “the stupidest thing I’ve heard this year.”

Stewart Brand is President of the Long Now Foundation, a charity dedicated to taking a 10,000 year view of humanity and one that’s produced some neat ideas in the past, such as the ‘clock of the long now‘, designed to keep time for 10,000 years. Brand is also the organiser of DeExtinction, a TEDx event held on Friday which seems to be a showcase for Revive & Restore, another Long Now project. In case it wasn’t obvious, the project plans to revive extinct species such as the auroch, the Tasmanian tiger, the woolly mammoth and… well, that’s where things get a little vague. The splash page announces:

“Genomic technology and techniques are advancing rapidly.It is becoming feasible to reconstitute the genomes of vanished species in living form, using genetic material from preserved specimens and archaeological artifacts. Some extinct species may be revivable. Ecological enrichment through species revival…”

So why do I feel this idea is a damp squib instead of the tsunami of awe Sinclair experienced? Let’s take a look at the first of the proposed candidates for resurrection: the Passenger pigeon. It’s an obvious species for the Revive and Restore project to showcase, given that it is an American bird, instantly familiar, and its reduction from unimaginably large flocks (a single nesting site could comprise over 100 million birds) to complete  extinction in the space of a century is a powerful motif for man’s environmental destruction. However, the restitution of the Passenger pigeon demands many more questions than cloning alone can answer.

To start with, remember those hundred-million-strong flocks of pigeons? That wasn’t just abundance. That was their survival strategy. Passenger pigeons were probably the most socially-gregarious bird in known history. They overwhelmed their predators with sheer numbers. Nothing could kill all of them – well, except humans, who put a big dent in their numbers. Big enough that the system became unstable, and the birds began to die out. Long before the last one was killed, the passenger pigeon was already in terminal decline.  To pull a handy quote from Wikipedia:

Naturalist Paul R. Ehrlich wrote that its extinction “illustrates a very important principle of conservation biology: it is not always necessary to kill the last pair of a species to force it to extinction”.

Turn that phrase around and you’ll see that the ability to clone two birds in a lab does not make a species un-extinct. And to matters worse, even breeding passenger pigeons in captivity is not a new idea. Attempts during the 20th century failed because – surprise – the birds will only reproduce in large flocks where they feel safe. So you better be prepared to clone a few thousand. Did I mention that Dolly the sheep took several hundred attempts and we’ve not improved or cloning success rate much since?

In fairness, the Revive and Restore page asks these questions. The problem is, it doesn’t answer them. They just sit on the page, as if doffing a cap to the fundamental flaws in their plan is the same as addressing them.

But why let technical barriers stop us? If we threw up our hands at every technical challenge we’d never have got out of the caves. Instead let’s think about what we could do with a De-Extinction box: key in a piece of DNA, and out pops an animal. Auroch, Tasmanian tiger, tarpan, mammoth. Now what? Where are you going to put these animals? The forests that once nested billions of  passenger pigeon are now shopping malls and cornfields.  The grassland plains that the auroch called home, that once stretched from Portugal to the Pacific ocean, are nothing but tiny parcels of farmland marked out in fence and wire.

And therein lies the rub. The environment wasn’t damaged by the loss of the auroch. The auroch was lost by damage to the environment. The overwhelming driving force for extinction events is habitat loss.  Extinction  is a symptom of wider environment degradation, and the ability to resurrect species does nothing to counter that.

“Conservation” is an awkward term, because it evokes two daft ideas.  One, that natural environments have some kind of pre-human Eden state, which ought to be maintained (and even preserved in the face of non-human impacts).The obsession with restoring lost species is a hallmark of this conservation attitude. But animals aren’t puzzle pieces you can slot back into the environment – the world has changed, and there’s often no room left for that animal.

Finally, if we can revive species, might that undermine efforts to preserving existing ones? Grab some DNA, let the animal die out, and bring it back when you have 100,000 acres of farm or a small Caribbean island to play with. In fact, if we are reducing biodiversity to the existence genetic material for big glossy animals, why keep them alive at all? If the genes are their essence, aren’t they equally de-extinct, so long as an intact DNA sample exists?  The zoo that fits in a freezer. Why not render them in biomolecular binary? The tiger on a microchip. Ultimately, if we can raise the environment from the dead, where is the impetus to keep it healthy?