Category Archives: New Utopia

What is interesting about both early and current visions of urban sensing networks and the use that could be made of the data they produced is how close to and yet how far away they are from Constants concept of what such technologies would bring about. New Babylons technological imagery was a vision of a smart city not marked, like IBMs, by large-scale data extraction to increase revenue streams through everything from parking and shopping to health care and utility monitoring. New Babylon was unequivocally anticapitalist; it was formed by the belief that pervasive and aware technologies would somehow, someday, release us from the drudgery of labor.

The apocalyptic news broadcast from Mariupol, Kharkiv, Izium, Kherson, and Kyiv since February 2022 seems remote from the smart urbanism of IBM. After all, smart sensors and sophisticated machine-learning algorithms are no match for the brute force of the unguided dumb bombs raining down on Ukrainian urban centers. But the horrific images from these smoldering cities should also remind us that historically, these very sensor networks and systems themselves derive from the context of war.

Unbeknownst to Constant, the very ambient technologies he imagined to enable the new playful citywere actually emerging in the same period his vision was taking shapefrom Cold Warfueled research at the US Department of Defense. This work reached its height during the Vietnam War, when in an effort to stop supply chains flowing from north to south along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the US Army dropped some 20,000 battery-powered wireless acoustic sensors, advancing General William Westmorelands vision of near 24-hour real- or near-real-time surveillance of all types. In fact, what the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) would later call network-centric warfare was the result of multibillion-dollar funding at MIT and Carnegie Mellon, among other elite US universities, to support research into developing distributed wireless sensor networksthe very technologies now powering greater lethality for the militarys smartest technology.

MAXAR TECHNOLOGIES

It is well known that technologies originally developed by DARPA, the storied agency responsible for catalyzing the development of technologies that maintain and advance the capabilities and technical superiority of the US military (as a congressional report put it), have been successfully repurposed for civilian use. ARPANET eventually became the Internet, while technologies such as Siri, dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), and the micro hard drive are by now features of everyday life. What is less known is that DARPA-funded technologies have also ended up in the smart city: GPS, mesh networks for smart lighting systems and energy grids, and chemical, biological, and radiological sensors, including genetically reengineered plants that can detect threats. This link between smart cities and military research is highly active today. For example, a recent DARPA research program called CASCADE (Complex Adaptive System Composition and Design Environment) explicitly compares manned and unmanned aircraft, which share data and resources in real time thanks to connections over wireless networks, to the critical infrastructure systems of smart citieswater, power, transportation, communications, and cyber. Both, it notes, apply the mathematical techniques of complex dynamic systems. A DARPA tweet puts this link more provocatively: What do smart cities and air warfare have in common? The need for complex, adaptive networks.

Both these visionsthe sensor-studded battlefield and the instrumented, interconnected, intelligent city enabled by the technologies of distributed sensing and massive data miningseem to lack a central ingredient: human bodies, which are always the first things to be sacrificed, whether on the battlefield or in the data extraction machinery of smart technologies.

Spaces and environments outfitted with sensor networks can now perceive environmental changeslight, temperature, humidity, sound, or motionthat move over and through a space. In this sense the networks are something akin to bodies, because they are aware of the changing environmental conditions around themmeasuring, making distinctions, and reacting to these changes. But what of actual people? Is there another role for us in the smart city apart from serving as convenient repositories of data? In his 1980 book Practice of Everyday Life, the Jesuit social historian Michel de Certeau suggested that resistance to the celestial eye of power from above must be met by the force of ordinary practitioners of the city who live down below.

When we assume that data is more important than the people who created it, we reduce the scope and potential of what diverse human bodies can bring to the smart city of the present and future. But the real smart city consists not only of commodity flows and information networks generating revenue streams for the likes of Cisco or Amazon. The smartness comes from the diverse human bodies of different genders, cultures, and classes whose rich, complex, and even fragile identities ultimately make the city what it is.

Chris Salter is an artist and professor of immersive arts at the Zurich University of the Arts. His newest book, Sensing Machines: How Sensors Shape Our Everyday Life, has just been published by MIT Press.

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The smart city is a perpetually unrealized utopia - MIT Technology Review

One of the best-selling novels of the 19th century was a work of what wed now call speculative fiction: Edward Bellamys Looking Backward: 2000-1887. Bellamy was one of the first prominent figures to recognize that rapid technological progress had become an enduring feature of modern life and he imagined that this progress would vastly improve human happiness.

In one scene, his protagonist, who has somehow been transported from the 1880s to 2000, is asked if he would like to hear some music; to his astonishment his hostess uses what we would now call a speakerphone to let him listen to a live orchestral performance, one of four then in progress. And he suggests that having such easy access to entertainment would represent the limit of human felicity.

Well, over the past few days Ive watched several shows on my smart TV I havent made up my mind yet about the new season of Westworld and also watched several live musical performances. And let me say, I find access to streamed entertainment a major source of enjoyment. But the limit of felicity? Not so much.

Ive also read recently about how both sides in the Russia-Ukraine war are using precision long-range missiles guided by more or less the same technology that makes streaming possible to strike targets deep behind each others lines. For what its worth, Im very much rooting for Ukraine here, and it seems significant that the Ukrainians seem to be striking ammunition dumps while the Russians are carrying out terror attacks on shopping malls. But the larger point is that while technology can bring a lot of satisfaction, it can also enable new forms of destruction. And humanity has, sad to say, exploited that new ability on a massive scale.

My reference to Edward Bellamy comes from a forthcoming book, Slouching Towards Utopia, by Brad DeLong, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley. The book is a magisterial history of what DeLong calls the long 20th century, running from 1870 to 2010, an era that he says surely correctly was shaped overwhelmingly by the economic consequences of technological progress.

Why start in 1870? As DeLong points out, and many of us already knew, for the great bulk of human history roughly 97 percent of the time that has elapsed since the first cities emerged in ancient Mesopotamia Malthus was right: There were many technological innovations over the course of the millenniums, but the benefits of these innovations were always swallowed up by population growth, driving living standards for most people back down to the edge of subsistence.

There were occasional bouts of economic progress that temporarily outpaced what DeLong calls Malthuss devil indeed, modern scholarship suggests there was a significant rise in per-capita income during the early Roman Empire. But these episodes were always temporary. And as late as the 1860s, many smart observers believed the progress that had taken place under the Industrial Revolution would prove equally transitory.

Around 1870, however, the world entered an era of sustained rapid technological development that was unlike anything that had happened before; each successive generation found itself living in a new world, utterly transformed from the world into which its parents had been born.

As DeLong argues, there are two great puzzles about this transformation puzzles that are highly relevant to the situation in which we now find ourselves.

The first is why this happened. DeLong argues that there were three great meta-innovations (my term, not his) innovations that enabled innovation itself. These were the rise of large corporations, the invention of the industrial research lab and globalization. We could, I think, argue the details here. More important, however, is the suggestion from DeLong and others that the engines of rapid technological progress may be slowing down.

The second is why all this technological progress hasnt made society better than it has. One thing I hadnt fully realized until reading Slouching Towards Utopia is the extent to which progress hasnt brought felicity. Over the 140 years DeLong surveys, there have been only two eras during which the Western world felt generally optimistic about the way things were going. (The rest of the world is a whole other story.)

The first such era was the 40 or so years leading up to 1914, when people began to realize just how much progress was being made and started to take it for granted. Unfortunately, that era of optimism died in fire, blood and tyranny, with technology enhancing rather than mitigating the horror (coincidentally, today is the 108th anniversary of Archduke Ferdinands assassination).

The second era was the 30 glorious years, the decades after World War II when social democracy a market economy with its rough edges smoothed off by labor unions and a strong social safety net seemed to be producing not Utopia, but the most decent societies humanity had ever known. But that era, too, came to an end, partly in the face of economic setbacks, but even more so in the face of ever more bitter politics, including the rise of right-wing extremism that is now putting democracy itself at risk.

It would be silly to say that the incredible progress of technology since 1870 has done nothing to improve things; in many ways the median American today has a far better life than the richest oligarchs of the Gilded Age. But the progress that brought us on-demand streaming music hasnt made us satisfied or optimistic. DeLong offers some explanations for this disconnect, which I find interesting but not wholly persuasive. But his book definitely asks the right questions and teaches us a lot of crucial history along the way.

A bit harder than my usual tastes, but you have to love a song whose chorus is partly in binary code.

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Opinion | Technology and the Triumph of Pessimism - The New York Times

The critics of utopian thinking are legion. Attempts to imagine a radically better world are often dismissed as irrelevant or as dangerous. The argument that utopianism is perilous was especially prevalent during the Cold War. Thinkers such as Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper maintained that a traceable line ran from utopian dreaming to the concentration camp and the Gulag. Nazism and Soviet communism were regarded as expressions of a totalitarian logic inherent to utopian desire: the creation of new societies required violence and repression. Utopianism, the critics charged, had to be excised from the political imagination.

But this caricature failed to capture the richness and variety of the utopian tradition, a complexity which is the subject of Douglas Maos Inventions of Nemesis (2020). Attentive to both the promises and the pitfalls of utopian thinking, his argument is that utopian thought has always focused on achieving justice, defined broadly as a condition of right arrangement or a condition in which each receives whats due to them. It is motivated by fierce indignation (or nemesis) at the wrongful ordering of things, at manifest injustice. From Plato to the present, the insistent search for the just society, rather than for human perfection or happiness, has shaped utopian ambition.

Mao discusses an impressively long list of utopian thinkers, including Plato, Thomas More the man who invented the term utopia in the 16th century Margaret Cavendish, William Morris, HG Wells and Ursula Le Guin, as well more obscure examples. He puts utopian fiction writers into revealing dialogue with an equally impressive range of political philosophers. Unusually for a literary critic Mao teaches English at Johns Hopkins University his most frequent reference points are the liberal theorists of justice who, following in the footsteps of John Rawls, have exerted significant intellectual influence in the last half-century.

Speculative writers sketch imaginative outlines of alternative societies both to criticise the existing order and to identify other ways of living. Late 19th-century utopians railed against the abject poverty and inequalities shaping their societies. For the US writer Edward Bellamy, whose utopian novel Looking Backward was published in 1888, this meant contrasting Gilded Age America with a vision of a highly-centralised, regimented industrial socialist order, designed to support its citizens from cradle to grave. Looking Backward sold millions of copies around the world and spawned clubs across the US dedicated to discussing his ideas. In Britain, Morris, horrified by both the injustices he saw around him and by Bellamys proposed alternative, wrote his own socialist utopia, News from Nowhere (1890), which imagined a bucolic decentralised community and was steeped in nostalgia for the pre-industrial age.

[see also: No wealth but life: the conservative origins of English socialism]

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Mao strikes a note of ambivalence about the value of utopia throughout his book. He worries about the stifling homogeneity and threats to human individuality embedded in many utopian projects. Although he maintains that utopianism is important to political life, he does not claim the label for himself. The nearest Mao comes to endorsing a particular vision of utopia is in his sympathetic portrayal of the metautopianism elaborated by the unlikely duo of Fredric Jameson, a Marxist literary critic, and Robert Nozick, a libertarian philosopher. Both have written of utopia as a pluralistic framework in which utopian communities organised along radically different lines might coexist. In a coda, Mao turns to the American science fiction writer Octavia Butler and her ingenious short story The Book of Martha (2003), in which this idea is pushed to its limit, with utopia restricted to the world of inner experience everyone, in Butlers words, would have their own personal best of all possible worlds while dreaming intense, realistic dreams. No one vision of the good would have to be imposed on anyone else in the external world. It isnt clear, though, what lessons can be drawn from this tale for thinking about collective action and the types of mobilisation necessary for realising political change.

Focusing on the history of utopian thought, Mao says little about its contemporary forms or its possible future direction. During the past couple of decades, utopianism has made a striking return in Anglophone political thought and speculative literature. Dark times call for radical ideas. The financial crash of 2008 and the imposition of austerity regimes to stabilise capitalism in its wake, the political success of right-wing authoritarianism, and above all the existential threat of climate change: all have led to a redoubling of efforts to imagine alternative ways of organising society. The greatest challenge facing utopian thought today as explored rigorously in Mathias Thalers forthcoming No Other Planet: Utopian Hope for a Planet-Changed World concerns how to think about the future in the face of possible species annihilation. What does utopianism mean in the age of the Anthropocene?

The dystopian imagination has had much material to work with in recent years. Death and destruction have been envisaged, in film and literary fiction, through a host of apocalyptic scenarios, from rogue artificial intelligence turning on its creators, through to terrible biotech accidents, nuclear conflagration or climate collapse, and global pandemics on a scale that would far exceed the Covid-19 crisis. Valuable as such warnings undoubtedly are, dystopianism is ultimately limited as an intellectual and political response to the problems facing humanity, at least if it isnt complemented by constructive visions of sociopolitical change. And it carries its own dangers: a diet of horror can encourage fatalism and resignation. Such concerns have long animated utopian writers who insist on the importance of hope, of imagining better worlds, as essential for motivating and directing radical political action.

The most prolific and high-profile advocate of utopian speculation in the shadow of climate disaster is the American writer Kim Stanley Robinson. In a succession of novels, he has imagined, with great ingenuity and humanity, how people might respond to environmental transformation how they might live, and how they might die, as the Anthropocene unfolds. His fictional futures have explored how a combination of bureaucratic innovation and political violence could greatly reduce carbon emissions (The Ministry of the Future, 2020), creative urban adaptation to global sea level rises (2017s New York 2140), the terraforming other planets for human habitation, and the protection of animal species in hollowed-out asteroids, awaiting the time when a denuded Earth can be rewilded, as in 2312 (2012).

Running through these acts of imagination is the sense that dystopianism is radically insufficient, that human creativity, political solidarity and hope is necessary to confront the future. Robinson is far from alone in using fiction to explore alternative forms of society. A new generation of novelists such as Malka Older and Ada Palmer have taken up the challenge of writing constructive futures in a world facing disaster. So too have a growing number of philosophers, social theorists, activists and think tankers intent on injecting utopian desire back into political debate.

Technology plays an ambiguous role in contemporary utopianism, as it has throughout the history of the tradition. It is figured as both threat and promise. Emerging technologies from genetic editing to AI have intensified anxieties and ambitions, prompting fears of calamity, as well as hopes that human ingenuity can avert impending disaster and usher in a better world. The libertarian dream-weavers of Silicon Valley present one kind of solution: only technology can save us. The problems created by the desire to tame nature and put it to human use can be solved by further technical innovation. It is little wonder that so much tech money has been channelled into transhumanist projects to enhance human capacities and expand lifespans (at least for those who could afford it).

[see also: The spirit of the age: Why the tech billionaires want to leave humanity behind]

But they are not the only ones who believe that technology can be harnessed to remake the world. Many progressive speculative thinkers, including Robinson, place ambitious new technologies at the core of their imaginative visions. Some contemporary feminist utopians look to biotech to dissolve patriarchal social relations. As the Xenofeminist Manifesto proclaimed in 2015: Our lot is cast with technoscience, where nothing is so sacred that it cannot be re-engineered and transformed so as to widen our aperture of freedom. And while many people worry that new industrial technologies, from driverless cars to AI doctors, threaten mass unemployment and social dislocation, others, such as John Danaher, author of Automation and Utopia (2019), view technology as a means to free people from the drudgery of labour and encourage human flourishing. As it has been for centuries, the future remains a battleground for conflicting nightmares and desires. The stakes have never been higher.

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Remaking the Anthropocene - The New Statesman

Most Quayside watchers have a hard time believing that covid was the real reason for ending the project. Sidewalk Labs never really painted a compelling picture of the place it hoped to build.

The new Waterfront Toronto project has clearly learned from the past. Renderings of the new plans for Quaysidecall it Quayside 2.0released earlier this year show trees and greenery sprouting from every possible balcony and outcropping, with nary an autonomous vehicle or drone in site. The projects highly accomplished design teamled by Alison Brooks, a Canadian architect based in London; the renowned Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye; Matthew Hickey, a Mohawk architect from the Six Nations First Nation; and the Danish firm Henning Larsenall speak of this new corner of Canadas largest city not as a techno-utopia but as a bucolic retreat.

In every way, Quayside 2.0 promotes the notion that an urban neighborhood can be a hybrid of the natural and the manmade.The project boldly suggests that we now want our cities to be green, both metaphorically and literallythe renderings are so loaded with trees that they suggest foliage is a new form of architectural ornament. In the promotional video for the project, Adjaye, known for his design of the Smithsonian Museum of African American History, cites the importance of human life, plant life, and the natural world. The pendulum has swung back toward Howards garden city: Quayside 2022 is a conspicuous disavowal not only of the 2017 proposal but of the smart city concept itself.

To some extent, this retreat to nature reflects the changing times, as society has gone from a place of techno-optimism (think: Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone) to a place of skepticism, scarred by data collection scandals, misinformation, online harassment, and outright techno-fraud. Sure, the tech industry has made life more productive over the past two decades, but has it made it better? Sidewalk never had an answer to this.

To me its a wonderful ending because we didnt end up with a big mistake, says Jennifer Keesmaat, former chief planner for Toronto, who advised the Ministry of Infrastructure on how to set this next iteration up for success. Shes enthusiastic about the rethought plan for the area: If you look at what were doing now on that site, its classic city building with a 21st-century twist, which means its a carbon-neutral community. Its a totally electrified community. Its a community that prioritizes affordable housing, because we have an affordable-housing crisis in our city. Its a community that has a strong emphasis on green space and urban agriculture and urban farming. Are those things that are derived from Sidewalks proposal? Not really.

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Toronto wants to kill the smart city forever - MIT Technology Review

Swansea's LGBT+ scene has had its ups and downs with a number of venues coming and then quickly going again. But one re-opening is hoped to change that. Utopia - a cocktail bar familiar to many - has come under new management and wants to be a colourful home for LGBT+ communities to thrive.

Utopia opened in October last year in Little Wind Street, but was not specifically catered towards the LGBT+ community. It featured large neon lights, a penny piece bar counter and large artificial trees 'growing' out of the bar in a space uniquely designed to be a social media hub for party-goers at the start or end of their nights out. The new bar was labelled a bar "with a difference" at the time.

The new management are aiming to make sure that all LGBT+ people can feel at ease there. They are providing sensitivity training to security staff to improve the treatment of trans and non-binary people, and employing various queer acts. You can get more what's on news and other story updates by subscribing to our newsletters here.

READ MORE: Welsh LGBT+ filmmaker nominated for Digital Broadcast award

General Manager, Matthew Thom, told WalesOnline he was hoping the space would become a place for the LGBT+ community to feel safe.

"I was given the opportunity to re-open as a drag bar. I wasn't keen to do just that, I wanted to open up a completely LGBT+ friendly venue. I wanted to do this from the get go as there's really not anywhere people can go when it comes to an LGBT+ venue in Swansea," he said.

"I'm not reinventing the wheel or anything. But I'm doing things at the moment that add to it becoming a safer space. For example, we're making our toilets all gender neutral, because I don't see the need to have male and female toilets. Our door staff have had elements of sensitivity training when it comes to checking people's IDs if they're trans.

"We're looking to get a lot of queer performers and artists in, not just drag queens, because I'm really interesting in getting people like queer poets. I want [Utopia] to be actively involved with the community. I want to try and actually give back to the community in Swansea." You can read more stories about Swansea here.

Utopia bar is now open, and more information can be found via its social media here.

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The Swansea bar that's re-opening as an LGBT+ venue - Wales Online

Just off the coast Long Island, there is a mythical-sounding place, a haven where gay New Yorkers could party, protest and make art, away from prying eyes in the city. Queer people have a particular stake in the question of paradise and, for those who could make it to this slim barrier island of beach homes and holiday resorts, paradise could mean a day-trip or a regular summer retreat. Jack Parletts Fire Island chronicles the cultural history of this hallowed place, examining its significance through the writers and artists who were part of its changing community.

What started off as a beach resort for middle-class New Yorkers to take a conventional family vacation, in the 1930s began to attract theater people an epithet that carried with it deviant associations. After a hurricane destroyed many of the islands houses in 1938, rental and property prices plummeted, allowing more artists and queer people from the city to move in and build new communities.

Reading the book makes you jealous that youve missed the party, but lets you feel, vicariously, that you were there. The two main resort communities of Cherry Grove and the Pines, with their different demographics, atmospheres, their distinctive cultures, rituals and patriotisms are painted vividly. Equally as real to the reader is the Meat Rack, the islands alfresco cruising spot, a mythic free-for-all where one can consummate the the stirred-up desires of brief encounters.

When it turns to literary biography, Fire Island is filled with gossip-worthy anecdotes about Americas literati. Walt Whitman, who visited Fire Island and noted its curious and original characters and who saw in America the potential for a homosexual utopia, was paid a visit by Oscar Wilde in 1882. Whitman took Wilde up to his den and the two enjoyed a jolly good time. In 1953, Patricia Highsmith went to the island on a drunken rampage, storming out when her lover Ellen threatened suicide by barbiturate overdose. There, unaware if Ellen was dead or alive, Highsmith got hammered in Duffys bar, ended up in a fight and soothed her bruises with further libations. Truman Capote is even reported to have begun working on Breakfast at Tiffanys during his stay there, one of the islands trophy stories.

The scholarly research and cultural history are punctuated by flashes of Parletts own experience. These sections explore how he came to know himself as a gay man, his hesitancy and sense of being out of place on the queer scene, and the delightful distractions of hook-ups and alcohol. The book opens with his first trip to Fire Island part-research, part-pilgrimage and chapters often begin in the confessional mode, using this as an entry point for developing a particular topic. Autobiographical detail is used sparingly and to great effect, providing the reader with an emotional anchor: the motivation behind his passion for this hidden spit of land.

Passion aside, Parlett doesnt shy away from the problematic. Fire Island feels like a case study of utopian imperfections, he writes. The islands hard-drinking culture, present ever since the 1930s, led to many of its community becoming serious alcoholics, forcing some of its denizens to quieter resorts further along the coast to dry out. Parlett interrogates the common trope when speaking about art and artists, where appreciation risks yielding to a potentially damaging romanticism about the darker aspects of queer and creative life, not least the addictions.

The safe haven that the island provides has not always been equally welcoming to everyone. The first wave of gay men to frequent the Pines were often put out when the younger, more raucous, more openly-out crowd, appeared in Cherry Grove. Even as attitudes towards discretion and secrecy slackened, Black and Latinx visitors were scarce; to get to the island one needed time, money and inclination. In the late 1950s, the increasing appearance of nonwhite day-trippers revealed the racist prejudices of some of the older gay and lesbian residents. James Baldwin visited the island as a writing retreat, but kept himself to himself and found its hedonism and endless pleasure-seeking vacuous. Baldwin describes the racist attitudes at play in the gay scene, where sexual objectification led to the laying on of hands. The islands milieu has always been somewhat exclusive, historically white, middle-class and cis-gendered, and structured around cachet and aspiration.

Despite these drawbacks, the islands very existence opens up opportunities for community, culture and political organization. The book details rituals such as the annual Homecoming Invasion, where drag queens arrive by boat and parade onto a red carpet laid out on the dock, hoping to be declared this years Homecoming Queen. Spawning from a feud that led to a protest in 1976, the tradition has now become a mainstay of the islands social calendar. By the same token, we see grassroots activism at the dawn of the AIDS crisis when writers Larry Kramer and Edmund White, alongside medical journalist Larry Mass, went to Fire Island to canvas and to disseminate knowledge. Though the initial reaction was frosty, a year later the men formed the Gay Mens Health Crisis, dedicated to combating the spread of AIDS.

The residents and repeat visitors to Fire Island made up a community historically in pursuit of freedom and safety, who celebrate and protect their tiny enclave. While the more radically-minded in the gay liberation movement saw in this neighbourly sentiment the potential for building a new cooperative from the ground up, for others their feelings of separatism were less a product of political ideology than protectiveness over the sanctity of this hideaway.

Life on the island carried on through the AIDS crisis, and bounced back partying into the new millennium. Now, artists residencies ensure they are more reflective of New Yorks LGBTQ+ landscape than the islands usual demographic, but their time is limited. Rising sea levels threaten this low-lying sandbar. Paradise may not have long left. Parletts compendious, sentimental history takes you to the heart of queer life. It makes you wish youd been there, in a halcyon summer whose pleasures defy its brevity.

Fire Island by Jack Parlett is published by Granta Books

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Features | Tome On The Range | Utopia, Warts & All: Jack Parlett's History of Fire Island - The Quietus

China's Tianwen-1orbiter spacecraft has managed to capture the entirety of the Mars planet via an image. They release several orbiter's images across the surface of Mars.

The Tianwen-1 fell into the orbit of the planet in February 2021 and has circled the planet over 1,300 times. It sent 1,040 gigabytes of raw data back to Earth and was processed by scientists.

The images from News18 showed the prominence of craters. But there is an image that captured a stunning view of the Valles Mariners canyon system that is almost as long as the US. The canyons on Mars can read h up to four miles deep.

Some of the data from the Red Planet has also been published in scientific journals. They will also be available to scientists globally.

Currently, the space agency is also working with NASA and ESA to share data with them and warn them about potential collisions with other probes.

The mission of Tianwen-1 is to study the planet, such as its geological structure, morphology, distribution of surface water ice, surface material composition, soil characteristics, atmospheric ionosphere, and surface climate and environment.

Tianwen-1 will also analyze the internal structure and the physical field of the planet. For now, the Tianwen-1 has completed its scientific missions.

Also Read:China's Tianwen-1 Mission Celebrates Its First Year on Mars, Zhurong Preps for Winter

It also brought a rover to Mars, the Zhurong, and dropped it into Utopia Planitia, which is a vast field of ancient volcanic rock that may have reserves of water frozen beneath its surface.

Zhurong covered a distance of almost 2kms on Mars after that, it hibernated on May 18 because of the extreme winter weather. The rover will resume its exploration around December during the spring.

Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun and is also the second smallest planet in the Solar System. It is used to describe red color in English. In Roman mythology, Mars is the god of war. Mars is also known as the Red Planet because of the dramatic reddish appearance that the iron oxide on its surface gives the planet. It is named after the Roman god of war.

Mars' atmosphere is very thin. This means that liquid water can only exist underground. The atmosphere is made mostly of carbon dioxide. The pressure of the Martian atmosphere at the surface is also very low.

Mars is not a livable planet, but there might be some primitive life forms. If a human can visit Mars, then it will take about six months to reach the planet.

China is conducting more launches than any other country in the world right now, and is also set to play a key role in the next stage of space exploration.

Related Article:China's Tianwen-1 Mars Rover Snaps First Photo of the Eerie Red Planet Amid Challenging Entry

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Written by April Fowell

2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.

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Chinas Tianwen-1 Orbiter Captured New Images of the Entire Planet of Mars - Tech Times

The big screen debut of Marcel The Shell With Shoes On opened at $170K on six screens in New York and LA, the highest PSA of the weekend at $28,267 for the iconic lonely snail voiced by Jenny Slate.

The mock documentary about the loveable anthropomorphic mollusk hails from distributor A24, a distributor that manages to hit pay dirt more often than not, and is based on the popular YouTube series and illustrated kids book.

It takes at least 20 shells to have a community, Marcel says in the film. My cousin fell asleep in a pocket and thats why I dont like the saying, everything comes out in the wash.; Because sometimes it doesnt. He loves 60 Minutes because Leslie Stahl is absolutely fearless. Its a combination of stop-motion and traditional animation and live action with Slate, Isabella Rossellini, Rosa Salazar, Thomas Mann and Stahl.

Once part of a sprawling community of shells, Marcel and his grandmother now live alone as the sole survivors of a mysterious tragedy. When a documentary filmmaker discovers them amongst the clutter of his Airbnb, the short film he posts online brings Marcel millions of passionate fans, as well as unprecedented dangers and a new hope at finding his long-lost family.

The film by Dean Fleischer-Camp and Slate (100% with critics, 91% with audiences on Rotten Tomatoes) expands into five more top markets Austin, San Francisco. Chicago, Washington, D.C. and Boston next weekend and will be in the top ten July 8 with a slow platform rollout building throughout the summer.

Marcel grossed$169,606 (Fri. $82,188; Sat. $47,253; Sun. $40,165).

Also in specialty: Neon opened Beba to a debut of $5,428 in three locations in NY and LA for a PTA of $1,809. This is Rebeca Beba Huntts self-reflection on her upbringing in NYC and lingering generational trauma.

Flux Gourmet from IFC Midnight opened in 19 locations to $5,000 for a PTA of $263. The offbeat Berlin Film Festival Encounters feature by writer-director Peter Strickland follows a fictional culinary performance collective.

(IFC Films Official Competition with Antonio Banderas and Penelope Cruz grossed an estimated $50,250 on 26 screens in week two, up from four for a per-theater average of of $1,932 and a cume of $92,690.)

Utopias Facing Nolan, the documentary about Major League Baseball and Texas icon Nolan Ryan that premiered at SXSW and at the Texas Rangers stadium before a nationwide one-night-only special event in May with Fathom (that grossed $320K). Utopia played it on 69 screens Friday, primarily across TX, with support from AMC, Regal, Studio Movie Grill, LOOK and other exhibitors, taking in another estimated $40K for a cumulative gross to date of $366K to date. The film expands to more screens next week ahead of a PVOD release July 19.

Theres a bit of wide-release crush at the box office this weekend including Top Gun: Maverick, which passed $1 billion, and Elvis and The Black Phone strong. The good news for specialty is that the first two films are drawing the older demos that are key for arthouses.

JugJugg Jeeyo, a Hindi-language family comedy-drama directed by Raj Mehta, from Moviegoers Entertainment, grossed an estimated $725K at 318 theaters coming in at no. 7 at the North American box office.

Continued here:

A24s Marcel The Shell With Shoes On Makes A Splash Specialty Box Office - Deadline

Dancers are so gifted. Martha Graham the great choreographer and performer poetically wrote that dancers are an athlete of God. She went on to describe the art form as akin to the symbol of the performance of living.

Chita Rivera

On June 20 at the Chita Rivera Awards, which celebrates excellence in dance and choreography, these unique athletes of god were in full and glorious force. Were honoring dancers who work harder than anybody. Its the least we could do for them, said the great Broadway performer Jackie Hoffman of dances big night. Lee Roy Reams, who played key roles in many Broadway musicals, observed how dancers are counted upon quite heavily. Dancers have always been the backbone of the theater, said Reams.

Now, more than ever, dancers must show they are endlessly versatile and are so key in storytelling throughout their shows. As Reams explained, in 1966, when he was performing in Sweet Charity in the chorus, (now named the ensemble), economics forced casts to shrink. So, dancers had to start singing and singers learned how to dance and now they all do it beautifully, added Reams. Also, choreographers are so key, not only for creating dances, but to staging entire shows.

Hosted by Broadway dance legends Charlotte dAmboise and Bianca Marroqun, the Chita Rivera Awards are produced by Joe Lanteri, founder and executive director of the New York City Dance Alliance Foundation Inc., in conjunction with Patricia Watt. With a mission to preserve dance history and recognize great talents past present and future, the stage at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts was bursting with phenomenal performances and inspiring artists.

This season on Broadway was particularly exceptional for dance as choreographers for shows including Paradise Square, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, The Music Man, MJ the Musical, American Utopia and Moulin Rouge, were all nominated. In addition to honoring theater the Chita Rivera Awards also has nominations for dance in feature films and documentaries.

Joel Grey, a Tony, Academy and Golden Globe Award winner was given the Lifetime Achievement Award. Also, Jack O'Brien received the SDC Director Award for exemplary collaboration with choreographers. During the dance-filled ceremony hosts d'Amboise and Marroquin did the killer number Nowadays from Chicago, the cast of Stomp performed and Jared Grimes from Funny Girl who tied with MJs Myles Frost for Outstanding Male Dancer in a Broadway Show, tore down the house tap dancing up a storm. Bebe Neuwirth sang Mr. Cellophane.

Curiously Myles Frost and Joel Grey each shared how they were cast in dancing roles when they were untrained dancers. I never had a dance lesson and came to MJ with a lot of raw talent, said Frost who was just coming off his Tony win playing Michael Jackson and thanked the shows director and choreographer, Christopher Wheeldon for all he taught him. And Grey talked about the legendary choreographers have shaped him including Wayne Cilento, Kathleen Marshall, Bob Fosse, Bob Marshall, Tommy Tune, Ann Reinking and more.

Throughout the show, the name that seemed to be on everyones lips was the woman for who the awards are named: Chita. She is our muse, said Amboise and Marroquin of Rivera who is one of the most nominated performers in Tony Award history. Rivera not only has ten nominations and two Tonys, but she also received the 2018 Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the theater.

Rivera also has the distinction of getting the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama. Like her unforgettable Anita, Chita Rivera has shown that life can indeed be bright in America, said Obama when he gave her this highest civilian honor. As Ive gotten older as a dancer, she inspires me to keep going and continue with excellence, shared Broadway star Mamie Duncan-Gibbs. Shes like the coolest person in the world, added Hoffman. If you dont like Chita Rivera, youre an insane person. its like not liking ice cream or music.

For Gelan Lambert, associate choreographer at Paradise Square, the musical which won Best Choreography in a Broadway show, having the awards be named after this first lady of dance is particularly meaningful. Its special because of what she has contributed to entertainment as an actress and a dancer. To give dance a pedestal just like an Oscar, Tony, an Emmy and call it after her continues her legacy in terms of excellence, said Lambert. We get to honor people in the dance field. A lot of times we are overlooked. So, this gives us a platform saying this is ours. This is for dance.

Rivera herself had a message for all the dancers who are starting their careers. I hope that they can be themselves, work hard and never give up, she advised. And how does she feel when shes dancing? Without any hesitation Rivera replied, like Im flying.

The cast of Stomp performing

Tendayi Kuumba, (second from right), who won Outstanding Female Dancer In A Broadway show with her ... [+] castmates from "for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf." The cast also won Outstanding Ensemble In A Broadway Show.

Jared Grimes

Joel Grey and Chita Rivera

Hosts Bianca Marroqun and Charlotte dAmboise perform "Nowadays" from Chicago.

Read more:

A Celebration Of Dance And Chita Rivera At The Chita Rivera Awards - Forbes

In September of 1997, as a newly minted officer, the New York City Police Department handed me a Glock 19 and gave me the authority to carry it concealed on the citys streets. Born and raised in Brooklyn, it felt like an extraordinary privilege. In my rookie days, I would feel it on my hip and had to remind myself I was actually allowed to carry it. I needed it because I had promised to defend the lives of New Yorkers.

Since New York State passed the Sullivan Act in 1911, that was the bar for lawfully carrying a concealed weapon in New York City: a demonstrated need for it. Few people had one. So, in a city of more than 8 million people, only 3,000 private citizens are presently licensed to carry a concealed pistol in public. Anyone else is guilty of a felony. The signal this sends is clear: A heavily-armed society is a dangerous and unpredictable one, and it is the governments responsibility to regulate carrying guns in public.

(Shutterstock/Shutterstock)

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled this bar was too high. Being armed with a gun in public is a constitutional right, they declared, and a person doesnt have to prove any special need, beyond a general need for self-defense, to exercise that right. The dangers of a city armed to the teeth with handguns were explicitly left out of the calculus.

There is evidence that the more guns a city has on its streets, the more shootings there will be, the more road rage incidents will turn deadly, the more guns will be stolen from cars and homes, the more people will commit suicide, and the more we will accidentally kill our own children.

To the court, this wasnt what mattered. With this ruling, people who are not specifically excluded for reasons of insanity or criminal history shall be permitted to carry concealed handguns on New York Citys streets if they want to. Apart from the toll this will take on our citys poorest and most vulnerable communities, it turns the NYPDs work environment on its head in a way that will make policing more confusing and dangerous for everyone.

There are four things New York City police officers are taught about guns from their first day in the academy: Legal guns on the street are a rare exception; any gun makes a situation more dangerous; your job is to take control of situations where a citizen is armed with a gun; and your mission is to keep guns off the street. This is why officers demand to see a persons hands to be sure there isnt a gun in play. If you think someone is armed, you draw down on them first, seize their pistol, and then sort it out. Its not that a person is armed and dangerous, but that armed is dangerous. For decades in New York City, believing that a person was armed with a gun in public offered police enough criminal suspicion to justify stopping and frisking them.

The first time I saw this thinking in action, I was in field training in the Bronx. As I filled out paperwork at the scene of a routine car accident, senior officers suddenly drew down on a motorist who had the barrel of a pistol barely visible below his shirt. It turned out the man was a city correction officer, he had just done a poor job of keeping his pistol concealed. The officers holstered and apologized, but the man understood what had happened and why: Once a situation became an armed encounter, New York City cops would act.

I never forgot that lesson. In a city like New York, the police were the bulwark against the gun violence that comes from an overly armed populace. As we relentlessly enforced the citys gun laws and watched the murder rate consistently sink, we felt like we were onto something. For all its size and complexity, New York City became remarkably safe for everyone because guns in public were so rare, with progress especially felt in communities of color.

The NYPD didnt pull this rationale out of thin air but took it from the Supreme Courts 1968 decision in Terry vs. Ohio. It set the precedent for how police relate to an armed populace. In affirming the courts decision to empower police to stop and investigate people who may be armed, Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote, If the State of Ohio were to provide that police officers could, on articulable suspicion less than probable cause, forcibly frisk and disarm persons thought to be carrying concealed weapons, I would have little doubt that action taken pursuant to such authority could be constitutionally reasonable. Concealed weapons create an immediate and severe danger to the public, and though that danger might not warrant routine general weapons checks, it could well warrant action on less than a probability. To Harlan, the simple presence of weapons out in public was the danger, not just unlicensed ones, and that gave police cause to investigate.

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One thing we can be sure of is that the citys police and attorneys are resourceful, and they will find ways to continue to regulate guns in public. The city may define sensitive places very broadly, to include so many prohibited public areas that legally carrying a gun becomes very impractical, for example though if they do, prepare for court challenges that may succeed.

Officers may continue to act on the presumption that armed is dangerous, even if lawful, and stop armed people to investigate. One of the biggest ironies is that todays Supreme Court, which has been more sympathetic to police officers than any in decades, may be inclined to support these approaches. The day of its concealed carry ruling, the court also ruled on Vega vs. Tekoh, a striking 6-3 decision that effectively concludes police have no constitutional duty to read people their Miranda rights. As New York City finds loopholes in the courts decision and empowers officers to use them, the cases that make it to the Supreme Court will be heard by a sympathetic ear.

But loopholes are still a far cry from the sensible law that kept New Yorkers comparatively safe for so long. If there is any sign that this decision put ideology ahead of public safety, it is that attorneys for the left-wing Bronx Defenders and the Brooklyn Defender Service filed briefs in support of the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, the right-wing plaintiffs in this case affiliated with the National Rifle Association. If liberal public defenders siding with the NRA strikes you as dogs and cats living together, you are not wrong. One saw an opportunity to put more guns on the street, and the other saw an opportunity to hamstring the police, both disregarding the public safety of the communities affected. As they say, the enemy of your enemy is your friend.

The rise in violence that accompanies a heavily armed city wont convince the ideologues on either side to change their views. For its part, the NRAs answer to gun violence will always be more guns. It is a perverse logic: If you are worried about other peoples guns, you should just get one yourself and be prepared to use it. Meanwhile, the Bronx and Brooklyn Defenders who filed their brief will always resist arrest and prosecution as part of the solution for gun violence. If gun violence rises, they will defend shooters from prosecution while gesturing toward a utopia where nobody uses guns or needs police because there is no reason to commit a crime. They will blame the government for not creating this world for people.

Stuck in the middle of all this, as usual, will be the poor, the vulnerable and the police, left to sort it out amongst themselves. With this ruling, the Supreme Court put its imprimatur on the public health and safety tragedy that continues to unfold in our major cities. Gun ownership rose dramatically in 2020, it was accompanied by historic increases in homicide, and the toll of these deaths were overwhelmingly borne by the nations minority communities. Now, New York Citys police, who know the danger of guns and who rely on the law to keep them off the streets, will be deprived of one of their most important tools.

I left policing at the end of 2019 and havent carried a gun since. Its not because I cant, but because I dont want to live in a place where I need to. Every developed nation that has taken New Yorks approach to gun control and kept firearm carry rates low are much safer places than the United States. People thrive in well-governed communities where few people carry guns in public and the law makes it clear that they are the exception rather than the rule. This idea, which is a reality in so many other countries, now seems as nave a fantasy as cities where everyone has guns so nobody dares use them, or nobody wants guns because they have everything else they need.

Del Pozo is a policing, public health and criminal justice researcher. He served in the NYPD for 19 years and for four years as chief of police of Burlington, Vt.

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How the court just hurt cops and the communities they serve - New York Daily News