About | Disaster Playground

fuckyeahdarkextropian:

Disaster Playground is a ‘theatre of cruelty’ as defined by Antonin Artaud, a platform where scientific catastrophe and/or surprise can be more acclaimed than success. This cross and pluri-cultural project will go beyond American and European frontiers and will question the notion of disasters, widely represented in the literature of J.G Ballard and will investigate rescue reactions across culture.

Disaster Playground, PART I: The Film,  is about the scientists planning the monitoring and deflection of hazardous Near Earth Objects_NEO (asteroids).  It attempt to address the complex decision-making involved in developing a coordinated international response to the challenge of protecting the Earth from NEO impacts. The thrust of the film follows a real-life procedure in place in the event of an asteroid collision with the earth. It depicts the chain of command necessary where only a few experts exist who understand the technology. Hollywood relied on Bruce Willis and a big drill to save the world in Armageddon, but how real is that and what needs to be done to save our civilization from the next major asteroid impact? The film explores aspects of planetary defense, such as Asteroid Deflection and Asteroid Capture, and showcases the work of the scientists’ pioneering missions to interact with asteroids and to accelerate efforts to detect, track, characterize, and mitigate the threat of potentially hazardous asteroids.

This sounds amazing.

New life goal: play a life-giving, panspermic asteroid in local production of a Dark Extropian, “theatre of cruelty” dramatization of existential risk.

“WE GIVE LIFE. WE TAKE IT AWAY.”
chorus chants: “PRAISE BE THE ASTEROID”

About | Disaster Playground

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Roughly 100 fossil meteorites have emerged from the limestone quarry west of Stockholm, which is being mined for flooring. All of the meteorites are part of an iron-poor class called the L chondrites. They date back about 470 million years to the Ordovician period, when Earth experienced a mysterious burst of new species.

Now miners working in the Swedish quarry have found a meteorite fragment that is not an L chondrite. Analysing its microscopic crystals, Birger Schmitz at Lund University and his colleagues found that the rock dates to the same time period but is of a kind completely unknown to science.

About 515 million years ago, our planet was going through an evolutionary slump. A burst of diversity that happened during the Cambrian period had tapered off, and few new types of animals were emerging. Mysteriously, about 25 million years later life sprang back into action in the early part of the Ordovician, generating loads of species. So what triggered the second explosion?

Fossil meteorites from the quarry suggest that during this time, impacts were tens to hundreds of times more frequent than they are today. The meteorites may have been born when two asteroids collided and broke apart between Mars and Jupiter. The larger object spawned the cloud of L chondrites that bombarded Earth for about 10 million years. According to one popular idea, this intense meteor shower caused just enough destruction to open up ecological niches and drive life to diversify into a richer assortment. But the fate and identity of the smaller asteroid has long been a mystery.

The fact that the latest fossil comes from the same rock layers as the L chondrites suggests that it is a piece of that second asteroid, says Schmitz. The theory says that most of the smaller asteroid was vaporised during the collision, so it also makes sense that only scant fragments of it would remain.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25817-swedish-space-rock-may-be-piece-of-early-life-puzzle.html (via fuckyeahdarkextropian)

PRAISE BE THE ASTEROID!

This is a Holy Relic unto our new cult. It must be venerated.

LIFE GIVER! DEATH DEALER!

We submit to your divine judgment.

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