Tomorrowland

by Kotler, Steven

  Space Diving

  THE FUTURE OF SPORT

  In the first section of this book, The Future In Here, we looked at the ways science and technology are impacting you and me. In Part Two: The Future Out There, we’ve been examining the inverse, the ways science and technology are impacting the world at large. In this chapter, we’re going to look at the point at which these trends intersect: the future of sport.

  If you scratch under the surface of sport, you’ll pretty quickly encounter the burgeoning science of play. Over the past few decades, a topic that was once dismissed as mostly unimportant is now considered a critical biological process, a developmental necessity that allows us to learn fundamental social and survival skills, stimulate creativity and innovation, and test the limits of our own potential. Sport, meanwhile, is the cultural manifestation of play, the place where — in the guise of a game — we collectively explore the limits of human potential, penciling the outlines of future possibilities.

  That’s what makes this story so compelling. It’s technically the tale of skydiver Felix Baumgartner’s attempt to break a world record, except that the record he’s set his sights on is actually an off-world record — it is a demonstration that our urge to play, interwoven with our need to push limits, has actually left the planet. In short, we have just added an entirely new level of meaning to the phrase “We got next.”

  1.

  The balloon is a marvel, ghostly silver, as thin as a dry-cleaning bag. Partially inflated at the Roswell, New Mexico, launch site, it looks like an amoeba dressed in haute couture. In the lower atmosphere, at full height, it rises a majestic fifty-five stories. In the stratosphere, pancaked by pressure, it stretches wider than a football field. And it’s the stratosphere where skydiver Felix Baumgartner is heading.

  The date is October 14, 2012. The plan is for Baumgartner to ride that balloon higher than anyone has ridden before — some twenty-four miles above the Earth. To make this possible, he wears a one-of-a kind pressure suit designed to buffer temperatures as low as 70 degrees below zero and wind speeds more than 700 miles per hour. His ultimate goal: “space-diving” out of the balloon, falling back to Earth, and becoming the first human being to bareback the sound barrier — exceeding Mach 1 without aid of an engine or protection from a craft.

  Conceived in 2005, the Red Bull Stratos Project, as this space dive is known, began as a joint venture between the energy drink company and Baumgartner, an Austrian skydiver. The big idea is to “transcend human limits which have existed for fifty years” — that is, since Air Force pilot Joe Kittinger plunged nineteen miles out of a balloon as a test procedure for “extreme high-altitude” bailouts. The big question was: Could an energy drink company and an action sports hero accomplish what a half century of government-backed space programs could not?

  But it’s not the only question. The space dive also raises queries about the future of action sports. Over the past few decades, extreme athletes have pushed progression farther and faster than ever before. In this evolutionary eye-blink, more “impossible” feats have been accomplished than at any other point in human history. Thus, despite the fanfare, the most incredible thing about Stratos might be the fact that it’s actually the next logical step.

  Still, it’s no small step. The technological issues are myriad, the list of catastrophic unknowns even longer. No one has any idea whether the human body can go supersonic. Will the shock waves tear Baumgartner’s body apart? Will the suit breach? Even bigger are the athletic hurdles. Normally, skydiving is sensation rich: an exceptionally wide field of view and a full complement of air friction. But Baumgartner’s face mask narrows vision to a slit and the suit puts four layers of thick protection between skin and sky. Instead of reacting to the air itself, flying the suit requires reacting to far subtler clues — sort of like playing a video game with a delay built in.

  More alarming, in the nonexistent atmosphere of the stratosphere, falling objects have a tendency to spin — and keep spinning. If Baumgartner can’t regain control, as he once told reporters: “At a certain rpm there’s only one way for the blood to leave your body, and that’s through your eyeballs.”

  Under such duress, redundancy is security, so when the balloon reaches its top altitude, Mission Control runs through a forty-item checklist: “Item 26, move seat to rear of capsule; item 27, lift legs onto the door threshold.” When the list is complete, Baumgartner stands outside the capsule, on a tiny exterior step. He takes a moment to take in the view then says a few words: “Sometimes you have to go up really high to understand how small you really are.” Next he salutes; next he leaps.

  It takes him 30 seconds to reach 600 miles per hour, less than a minute to shatter 700. He just became the first human being to go supersonic. This is also when he started spinning. At mission control, where they’re watching the entire dive on monitors, everyone holds their breath. Some begin praying. But somehow, miraculously, Baumgartner gets everything back under control. He pulls out of the spin and locks into delta position: feet down, head up, and heading home.

  In total, his freefall lasts 4 minutes and 19 seconds; his complete air time lasts approximately 10 minutes; his top speed reaches 833.9 miles-per-hour — Mach 1.24. Baumgartner also takes over the records for the highest manned balloon flight and the highest altitude jump and, with 8 million watching the broadcast live on YouTube, the highest numbers of concurrent viewers.

  Perhaps more interesting than these records is the deeper why. On the Stratos website there’s a short list of potential applications for the knowledge gained from Baumgartner’s jump: “Passenger/crew exit from space; developing protocols for exposure to high-altitude and high-acceleration environments; exploring the effects of supersonic acceleration and deceleration on the human body; and testing the latest innovations in parachute systems.” In plainer language, experts have said that if the passengers on the space shuttle Challenger had been equipped with Baumgartner’s suit they might have lived through their midair crack up.

  Along just these lines, some six months after Baumgartner’s jump, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo powered up its engines for the first time. SpaceShipOne, you might remember, was the craft that won the Ansari XPRIZE in 2004. This original XPRIZE was a demonstration project, both proof that a private company could produce an affordable, reusable spaceship and the necessary first step in opening the space frontier. The idea behind SpaceShipTwo is the next step: tourism — taking paying customers on suborbital cruises.

  This is why Baumgartner’s jump is critical. We’re going to space. That’s what’s next. Within a few years, human beings will be routinely visiting low-Earth orbit. In fact, Bigelow Aerospace, another private space company, is now developing an inflatable space hotel that’s scheduled for 2017 deployment. With these developments around the corner, having basic space evacuation procedures in place — including a supersonic-capable space suit — just seems to make sense.

  But if you want to really talk about the adjacent possible: The combination of Baumgartner’s success and the birth of the space tourism industry means that space diving could be the next extreme sport frontier. It sounds silly, of course, but it wasn’t too long ago that surfing a 100-foot wave or free-soloing Half Dome — two “impossible” feats lately accomplished — were equally ludicrous. Plus, consider the space-diving upside. Imagine giving athletes 25 miles of fall time to work with. Talk about pushing the limits of kinesthetic possibility. Despite the acrobatics involved, formation skydiving never really took off — but 25 miles is enough fall time for a team to pull off an entire aerial opera. Space ballet anyone?

  Consider, in 2003, Shane McConkey paradigm-shifted skiing when he invented the ski-BASE (that is, ski an amazing line that ends in huge cliff, ski off the cliff, then deploy a parachute). Baumgartner touched down in the desert, but sooner or later isn’t someone going to try to land on a ski slope? How long then until we turn the space dive into the first stage of a double ski-BASE? How long until it gets strang
er than that? In other words, while Baumgartner’s triumph seems the apex of achievement, the truth might even be stranger: The space dive was merely the beginning.

  Building a Better Mosquito

  THE WORLD’S FIRST GENETICALLY ENGINEERED CREATURE

  Over the course of this book, we’ve discussed a number of topics that could be considered “miracles,” in the biblical sense of the word. In this chapter, we are investigating two more: the curing of disease and the creation of life, and both at the same time.

  Taken together, these feats are among our oldest dreams. They are ideas that comprise our myths and legends, ideas that have been with us for so long that they seem woven into the fundamental fabric of our being, ideas that combine into what might be called our “aspirational genome.”

  But aspirational no more. 3.5 million years ago, life emerged on this planet from the primordial soup; 3.5 million years later, we have duplicated this miracle and then some. Call it hubris, call it the opening of Pandora’s box, call it what you will — but that’s the point. Call it something. Put a name on it. Over time, the miraculous always becomes the mundane, so before that happens, label this moment. Preserve it, so that later, when recall becomes dim, we can remember just how far we’ve come.

  1.

  In 77 CE, Pliny the Elder published his Natural History, an imaginative, thirty-seven-volume attempt to catalog the entire contents of the world. From Pliny, we learn that the artichoke is one of the earth’s great monstrosities; that rubbing mouse poo on bald spots can increase hair growth; and, on islands off the coast of Germany, there lives a tribe of people whose ears are so large they cover their bodies. It is also in Natural History that we first hear of a mixture of arsenic, sulfur, caustic soda, and olive oil being used to protect crops against pestilence. This last bit of information might seem trifling compared to the more mythic elements in Pliny’s compendium, but it is the first written record of an insecticide and, for reasons that will soon become clear, an entry that seems especially prescient.

  Right now, the threat posed by mosquito-borne illnesses — malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever, West Nile virus — is growing at alarming rates. In America, where many of these ailments haven’t been seen in over fifty years, the danger is especially menacing. Asian tiger mosquitos, a carrier of yellow fever, encephalitis and other diseases, have been seen as far north as Chicago. In Key West, Florida, researchers have identified a unique strain of dengue fever — meaning the virus was not recently imported by an unsuspecting tourist but rather has been around long enough to become genetically distinct.

  In an attempt to fight back, scientists are now heading down a radically new road and breeding a radically new breed of mosquito — the world’s first genetically altered insect destined to be released into the wild. Better or worse, we’re crossing a line. Which means that the mosquito we’re about to release is a hybrid descendent of two of Pliny’s mythic lineages — both a fantastical creature and a pesticide — and both at once.

  2.

  The modern war against insect-borne disease dates back to 1897, when British scientist Ronald Ross discovered that malaria was spread by mosquitoes. He was also the first to propose reducing or eliminating the world’s mosquito population as a way of controlling the disease. But it wasn’t until early WWII forays into chemical warfare — leading to the discovery of insecticides ferocious enough to take on the insects — that his idea became truly possible.

  Since that point, the fight against mosquito-vectored ailments has been a chemical battle. Scientists developed drugs that were useful against these diseases and insecticides that were useful against the mosquitoes that transmitted these diseases. For a time, it looked like we were winning this fight. Unfortunately, in the past thirty years, the rules have changed. Mother Nature interceded and evolution occurred. We’re now fighting insects that are resistant to our pesticides and diseases that are resistant to our drugs.

  A number of these diseases are considered the deadliest on earth. Today, principally in Africa and Asia, dengue fever annually infects more than 50 million people and kills 500,000. Malaria infects about 400 million and kills more than a million — most of them kids. More disturbingly, the combination of pesticide and drug immunities, along with the rise of global transportation and climate change, has resulted in mosquito-vectored ailments appearing in places where they have not been seen before. In 2003, in the US, dengue fever appeared for the second time in Hawaii and the first time in the Gulf states, and the following summer there were 4,000 reported cases of West Nile and 300 deaths. Malaria has so far failed to make serious inroads into the country, but in the slightly purple words of the Malaria Foundation International, “a plague is coming back, and we have only ourselves to blame.”

  To address these concerns, during the past fifteen years, scientists have been trying to move beyond the chemical paradigm and toward a genetic one. The dream has been to build a transgenic mosquito, a genetically modified insect unable to transmit illness. This new insect would then be introduced in the wild, thus supplanting disease carriers with a harmless imposter. Seven teams, both in America and in Europe, have been working on the project — and that work is heading for prime time.

  It is now possible to walk into any number of molecular biology labs and peer through a microscope at a mosquito unlike any other in history. The magnified insect shows a feature not found in the wild: a pair of bright, fluorescent green eyes — the telltale sign of successful genetic modification. These eyes are proof that one of the most scientifically advanced cures for disease ever conceived is feasible. They are also proof that, if we are not exceptionally careful, we could do irreparable damage to our ecosystems or, worse, create new, more devastating ailments currently unknown to science. One thing is certain: The bioengineered mosquito hangs precariously off the cutting edge of genetic research — how we proceed matters plenty.

  3.

  Before we can talk about how to proceed, it’s helpful to understand how we got here — a story that starts with the relationship between malaria and mosquitoes. Of the 2,500 kinds of mosquitoes in the world, no more than a tiny minority evolved to feed on humans. But evolve they did. And as these mosquitoes were learning to live off humans, malaria — the most prolific of mosquito-borne diseases — was learning to live off both.

  Most mammals and quite a few birds are susceptible to the disease. Up to now, all of the transgenic research has been done with malaria’s avian or rodent varieties, but the parasite spreads the same in every species. Transmission begins when a hungry female mosquito (only the female feeds on blood) drinks her dinner from an infected animal, along the way ingesting the malaria parasite. In a few days, the parasite travels into the mosquito’s mid-gut, where it develops sexually reproductive cells that mate and mature and release thousands of malaria sporozoites. In turn, these cells make their way into the mosquito’s circulatory system, eventually taking up residence in their salivary gland. The whole cycle takes about ten days. Afterward, the next time that mosquito bites into something, malaria goes along for the ride.

  This malarial life cycle was mostly understood by the early portion of the twentieth century, but our attempt to remake insects into allies in the war against insects dates to the 1930s and work done by the late Barbara McClintock. In 1983, McClintock won a Nobel Prize in medicine for her discovery of short chains of DNA called “transposable elements” or, more commonly, “jumping genes.” A jumping gene is so named because the proteins it encodes can splice open a chromosome, jump inside, and then sew the whole deal back together again. This discovery makes it possible to piggyback other, more helpful DNA — such as DNA that would be useful in the fight against malaria — on a jumping gene and use this gene to insert the mutation into a foreign genome.

  At least that was the theory. It took a half century for theory to become practice. But, in 1981, biologist Gerald Rubin discovered a jumping gene in the fruit fly Drosophilia melanogaster. He named it “P.” A year late
r, working with embryologist Allan Spradling, Rubin used P as a Trojan horse to build the world’s first genetically modified insect. “It was a huge accomplishment,” says Peter Atkinson, an entomologist at the University of California, Riverside and one of the scientists leading the quest for transgenic mosquitos. “They took a gene that gives eyes a reddish color, attached it to P, and then inserted the whole thing into a fruit fly. That fly’s offspring were born with reddish eyes, and their offspring as well. The trait was stable and heritable.”

  Unfortunately, being able to manipulate fruit flies, while scientifically exciting, was not real-world important. Fruit flies neither carry disease nor pollinate crops and, other than being research tools, have little economic or social impact on our lives. Still, there was hope that P would be found in other insects and, once found, would be useful in manipulating genes in the fight against insect-borne diseases. “The eighties were pretty much a wild goose chase down this road,” recounts Atkinson. “Entomologists thought P was going to be this great breakthrough, but all that got published were negative results.”

  By the early 1990s, it was pretty clear that P was finished. Scientists began looking for other jumping genes, Atkinson among them. In 1996–97, working with University of Maryland molecular geneticist David O’Brochta, he found one in houseflies — dubbed Hermes, for the speedy Greek messenger. The hope was that Hermes would be workable in a way that P wasn’t, and, the following year, hope was vindicated: Anthony James, an insect geneticist at the University of California, Irvine, used the gene to modify a mosquito that transmits yellow fever.