Category Archives: Transhuman News

Los Angelesbased artist Clarissa Tossin has created work in various modes from post-apocalyptic sculpture to installations comprising of woven textiles. For her current exhibition at the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University in Houston, she presents The 8th Continent (2021), situated in Brochstein Pavilion on Rices campus as part of the Moody Centers Off the Wall series. The work is a wide-spanning triptych depicting three images taken by NASA of the moons ice deposits, which could potentially be mined and later produced as rocket fuel. With the warmth of woven, glittering metallic thread, The 8th Continent feels at once enveloping and eerily clinical with its scientific images rendered on a digital loom.

Born in Porto Alegre, Brazil, before moving to L.A. in 2006 to complete an MFA at the California Institute of the Arts, Tossin has previously spent an extended time in Houston, when she was a fellow at the Core Residency Program, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, between 2010 and 2012. Her work has also appeared in major exhibitions like the 2018 Gwangju Biennale and Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art at the Whitney Museum in New York, also in 2018.

In addition to her Moody Center show, which runs through August 27, Tossin was recently the subject of a solo show at her L.A. gallery Commonwealth & Council earlier this year, where she showed Disorientation Towards Collapse, and will have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver that opens in June. A 2019 sound piece by her, You Got to Make Your Own Worlds (for when Siri is long gone), was also included in a group exhibition Kissing Through a Curtain, which opened in 2020 and closed earlier this year at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

For her current show in Texas, Tossin is thinking about the relationship between space entrepreneurship and exploration: Im curious to see how land use and territory play out in the 21st-century space race, and whether the abuses of land and people that have marked our time on Earth get perpetuated as we move out into the solar system. To learn more about her Moody Center exhibition and her other recent projects, ARTnews interviewed Tossin by email.

ARTnews: How did your interest in moon exploration/exploitation begin?

Clarissa Tossin: Ive been using NASA images of Mars and the Moon in my weavings and collages for the past few years, as a counterpoint to devastating scenes of environmental collapse. Im interested in how the narrative around 21st-century space exploration is being put forth as a solution to the challenges facing humanity due to climate change. It seems quite absurd to me, and I really hope to be proven wrong.

I recently began researching Moon-based mining because I wanted to know what resources there were considered worth extracting. Initially, I thought that rare Earth elements must be the Moons gold since theyre so important in making high-tech electronic equipment. But in conversations with Dr. David Alexander, director of the Rice Space Institute, and Dr. David A. Kring, principal scientist at the Universities Space Research Associations Lunar and Planetary Institute, who both generously offered me guidance during my research, I learned its really the Moons water ice that holds the greatest mining potential, as its crucial for producing hydrogen rocket fuel for NASAs Artemis program.

Its poetic and disturbing that our presence on the Moon will begin with water (ice deposits) and sunlight (harvested by solar arrays to power the machinery necessary for extraction)the same two elements that fostered biological life on Earth, billions of years ago. Whats about to happen on the Moon will most likely begin to push humanity toward a different kind of life beyond Earth.

For those of us less familiar with this part of space history, could you give us a brief background of the Moon Agreement and how the U.S. created a loophole around it?

The Moon Agreement was adopted by the U.N. in 1979, expanding on the 1967 U.N. Outer Space Treaty that created a basic framework of space law, banning nuclear weapons in space, reserving the Moon and other celestial bodies to peaceful uses, and making space a kind of international demilitarized zone for free exploration and use by all nations. The Moon Treaty further declares the Moon the common heritage of mankind (which is a source of ongoing disagreement) and stipulates that an international regime should govern any resource extraction or mining. The U.N. held a series of conferences to try and settle on an appropriate regime of law, but failed to get anywhere, and the Treaty was never ratified by any of the major players in space flight, like the U.S., Russia, and China.

Fast forward to 2015, the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, signed into law by President Obama, effectively legalized space mining by American private enterprise, allowing companies to own mining rights and profit from sale of resources produced on asteroids and other off-world bodies like the Moon, Mars, and beyond. Many other nations have followed suit. In 2020, President Trump went a step further by signing an executive order, Encouraging International Support for the Recovery and Use of Space Resources, formally recognizing the rights of American private interests to claim resources in space, thus ending the decades-long debate that began with the signing of the Outer Space Treaty. It establishes Americans right to engage in commercial exploration, recovery, and use of resources in outer space, consistent with applicable lawand directly refutes the Moon Treaty in declaring that the United States does not view space as a global commons.

Do you believe the human impulse to explore is also inextricably linked to the desire to have and ownor control?

History as a patriarchal narrative written by the winner has taught us that this might be the case, but Im interested in alternative narratives that question those assumptions about human nature, for instance, the book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by anthropologist David Graeber and archeologist David Wengrow. The authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive whats really there. They challenge our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution and reveal new possibilities for human emancipation with startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.

I have a related question in regards to a quote from the exhibitions wall text: By focusing on the eminent extraction of resources on the Moon,The 8th Continentrecalls the tension between environmental preservation and industrial exploitation of Earths diminishing resources, and considers how frontier mythologies rationalize discovery and the subsequent stages of development and extraction. Do you believe the U.S.s notion of unfettered optimism toward progress is inextricably linked to colonial conquest? Especially as someone who isnt originally from the U.S.: do you see an America that is forever entangled in its own mythology?

Every empire uses mythologies and values systems to sustain and justify the control it exerts over others, over its own people, and so on. The colonial project goes beyond issues of border and territory; just think about how our minds are colonized, trained to think along certain lines and not others. But going back to the issue of resources, if you believe that expansion is a given and progress will always bring benefits to people, then we might one day have to extract beyond the solar system!

In my sound piece, You Got to Make Your Own Worlds (for when Siri is long gone), which was recently on view at Mass MOCA, I selected excerpts of [historical] interviews with sci-fi author Octavia E. Butler and put them in conversation with Apple Inc.s iOS virtual assistant, Siri. Heres an excerpt from that constructed conversation, a quote by Butler: I think that the one thing we can be sure of is that we wont have, you know, straight line prophecy coming true that whatever technological things were doing now will just do more of that and better. I think well get surprises. Its dangerous to assume that we can actually see the future by only looking at the advancements weve made so far. Its very interesting to see how some of Butlers statements about the future and the faith in progress reflect our present.

Youve expressed interest in Butlers writing in past work. Does your interest in Butler also relate in any way to The 8th Continent? If so, how?

Octavia Butler sparked my interest in science fiction, as well as space exploration and some of the current science associated with it. The 8th Continent doesnt draw directly from any of her novels, but it certainly comes from a familiar place of interrogating scientific propositions from a humanistic perspective. Im curious to see how land use and territory play out in the 21st-century space race, and whether the abuses of land and people that have marked our time on Earth get perpetuated as we move out into the solar system.

The wall text also seems to delineate a connection between exploration and exploitation via colonization. However, I suspect there are implicit nods toward other forms of colonization at play in this work. Could you speak to that?

The work also operates at a metaphorical level, where the conquest of new territory reflects colonial historiesespecially when the land in question is considered desert, or wilderness, or empty, hence there for the taking. Certainly, this has been the premise behind the swindling of vast territories from Indigenous communities, who have occupied and used their traditional lands in very different ways from those favored by their conquerors.

As space exploration becomes a more privatized entrepreneurial endeavor in the 21st century, I wonder what will become of these celestial bodies and their relationship with geopolitical power plays on Earth. Will they become repositories of resources that benefit the few, yet rely on public money for their exploration? Moreover, if the end goal is profit, whats to safeguard different forms of lifeperhaps far beyond any understanding of life on Earththat we may well encounter out there? And then theres the military angle, space treaties notwithstanding, of defending territorial claims, and the potential for space wars that comes with that.

Could you explain the impetus to connect the technological advancements of NASA with medieval and Renaissance tapestries in The 8th Continent? Why, for you, was this the most salient way to symbolize anexertion of power?

Theres something very luxurious in tapestries made with metallic thread (or the gilt-metal-wrapped silk that was used back then). Its almost decadent. Their production was painstaking, with high-quality tapestries requiring a group of very skilled weavers laboring, sometimes for years, to achieve the desired outcome. It seemed interesting and provocative to render these NASA images of the Moon with such intricacy, at this specific moment in space history, when the Artemis program is being outlined in stages, to unfold in the decades to come. My upcoming solo exhibition at MCA Denver opening in June 2022 engages further with Moon exploration.

You talk about tapestries being symbolic of the wealth and power of the medieval era as well as the Renaissance. Would it be fair to also find a link in this work to the Arts and Crafts Movement of the late 19th century and its emergent feminism? If so, how does it change or add to the idea of conquest in this piece?

In fact, I was not thinking about Arts and Crafts Movement, though I can understand the desire to associate textile artworks such as these with the feminist art canon. But these jacquard weavings were made with a digital loom, so to me this work speaks more to digital translation in its materiality than to craft and the handmade. Though I must say that when I weave with strips of Amazon cardboard delivery boxes and satellite photographs, I do use my own hands, and work within a different scale of time and intimacy with the materials.

Can you talk about those works more?

In my solo exhibition at Commonwealth and Council, Disorientation Towards Collapse, I had a new series of weavings titled Future Geographies which combines strips of broken-down Amazon delivery boxes with NASA satellite images depicting Shackleton Crater, the proposed site of the first US lunar ice mining facility; Jezero Crater on Mars, later dubbed Octavia E. Butler Landing, where NASAs Perseverance rover set down in February 2021; and the Hyades, one of the best studied star clusters, 153 light years distant. Another weaving, in Disorientation Towards Collapse, is made entirely from cut up Amazon boxes, highlighting their pervasive materialitycardboard covered with Amazons ubiquitous arrow logo, a banal index of circulation and consumption in the global economy. The slow, laborious process of flattening the boxes, cutting them into strips, and weaving them together stands in contrast to accelerating cycles of mass extraction/production/consumption and waste on which our lives presently depend. A disposable container transformed into a contemplative experience signals a broader invitation to stop, look, and reflect.

The work in the Moody Center show feels texturally gratifying in terms of its excruciating level of detail, the iridescent thread, and the material warmth emanating from the woven tapestry. Yet, these high-resolution, scientific images also register as clinical, icy, and even evasive. Could you talk more about this seductive push/pull technique going on in the work and how it relates to the subject matter at hand?

I wanted to stay true to the digital realm, treating outer space images for what they are: more a matter of selective mapping and coding than anything like photography in the traditional sense, the straightforward record of a landscape. Images of planets and moons taken from satellites and rovers are far less straightforward than meets the eye. Every image must be processed, manipulated, and interpretedand this is after a team of scientists has haggled over what they should even be imaging, to begin with. Janet Vertesis book Seeing Like a Rover has been illuminating, and a great source of inspiration in this regard. She unpacks the role of digital processing in uncovering scientific truths, where images craft consensus and team members develop an uncanny intimacy with the sensory apparatus of a robot, millions of miles away.

Could you elaborate more on the use of a digital loom?

Using a digital loom to output the images into the weave of the tapestries seemed to go with these processes, which inherently complicate the relationship between reality and photographyits documentary capabilities and relationship with the human eye. I think its interesting to think about the visualization of space landscapes as something created by scientists through technological imaging processes that go beyond human sight. Think about how Google Earth allows us to surveil the surface of the Moon and Mars from a detached robotic perspective, and how more and more, these landscapes are getting incorporated into the visuality of our world.

Could you talk a little bit more about your recent show at Commonwealth and Council? In what ways does that show parallel or intersect with this work?

In Disorientation Towards Collapse, I further engage with the global environmental catastrophe, and the key role humans and corporations have played in accelerating the disaster. Im also looking at the paradigm shift from environmental conservation to industrial exploitation against a backdrop of Earths dwindling resources, and how frontier mythologies really pave the way, charting the relentless course that leads from discovery and development to extraction, over and over again, starting just beyond whatever frontier we just used up. Of course, the privatization of space exploration in the 21st century is gearing up for the next cycle. I want to show how this flourishing new industry is predicated on the same bad logic of over-extraction that has brought our planet to the brink of ecological collapse.

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In Houston, Artist Clarissa Tossin Ponders the Colonial Implications of the 21st-Century Space Race - ARTnews

Elon Musk believes that a manned mission to Mars could happen in just a few years. Credit: NASA/JPL/CalTech

Elon Musk stated that a manned mission to Mars could happen as early as 2029 on Wednesday when asked on Twitter.

A twitter user posted a picture comparing an image from the Moon landing, along with 1969, the year the historic event took place, and an image depicting a potential Mars landing with the text 20_ _? The user wrote Whats your guess? and tagged Musk in the tweet.

Responding to the question, Musk replied simply 2029.

The SpaceX and Tesla CEO Musk has long advocated for the colonization of Mars as a solution to many of the Earths problems, particularly climate change, and has made landing on the planet one of his biggest goals.

While speaking at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico in 2016, Musk asserted that traveling to and even building a city in Mars is something we can do in our lifetimes.

Musk has even claimed that a Mars colony will be established as early as five years from now, with ten years being a worst-case scenario.

The billionaire has gone on to state that he believes that establishing a city of roughly a million inhabitants on the planet is possible by 2050.

While many scientists disagree with Musks timeline, they still believe that colonization of the planet could be on the horizon.

Professor Serkan Saydam, who works at the School of Mineral Energy Resources Engineering at UNSW Sydney, says that a colony on the Red Planet is in fact possible within the next three decadesas long as autonomous forms of mining are commercially viable.

For its part, NASA is interested in investigating the possibility of establishing a colony on Mars.

A statement from NASA released in August of 2021 clearly indicates that they are interested in cultivating readiness for the possibility that humans will be on Mars in the near future:

As NASA ventures farther into the cosmos, the astronaut experience will change. In preparation for the real-life challenges of future missions to Mars, NASA will study how highly motivated individuals respond under the rigor of a long-duration, ground-based simulation.

The simulated mission will have four crew members live in a small 3D printed module that simulates the real-world environment of a Mars living space, challenging the crew members to deal with resource limitations, equipment failure, communication delays, and other environmental stressors.

Interest in surveying and studying Mars with the goal of someday landing on the Red Plant has been widespread in recent years.

Europe and Russia had planned to send rovers to the planet later this year, but the war in Ukraine led to the cancellation of the mission, called ExoMars. The ExoMars mission was aimed at discovering any signs of life on Mars.

NASA is also working on a Mars Ascent Vehicle which will be used to launch samples from the surface of the planet back to Earth.

The Mars Ascent Vehicle, known as the MAV, is a small rocket that will launch sediment, rock, and atmospheric samples, becoming the first rocket launched from another planet back to Earth.

Link:
Elon Musk: Manned Mission to Mars is Just a Few Years Away - Greek Reporter

Columbia University School of the Arts will present Chaesong Kim's (Columbia MFA Directing Candidate 2022) production of She Walks the Air IX.

Inspired by a line out from Ota Shogo's seminal work, The Water Station, She Walks the Air IX finally lands in its ninth iteration after morphing through multiple iterations with over 40 collaborators at institutions across the country. A rejection of Shogo's hypererotization of the female body and refusal to acknowledge colonization, She Walks the Air IX harnesses the breathtaking beauty of the non-western canon in an ensemble ritual that invites its participants to imagine walking in the air, like walking on the road, but also walking the air, like walking a dog.

Anthony Sertel Dean, Anuka Sethi, Ari LaMora, Ariel Urim Chung, Begum "Begsy" Inal, Chaesong Kim, Noa Toledano, Sarazina Stein, and Willow Green

Producers Zhiwei Ma and Yining (Vivian) Cao, Production Stage Manager Emma Hughes, Assistant Stage Manager Jonah Yoder, Company Manager Gabriel Szajnert, Interactive Experience Designers Andrew Agress, Kanika Vaish and Phoebe Brooks, Scenic Designer Hsin-Ho Yang, Costume Designer Karen Boyer, Lighting Designer Christopher Wong, Sound Designer Anthony Sertel Dean, Props Designer Begum "Begsy" Inal and Hyoju Cheon, Projection Designer Vivienne Shaw, Somatic Advisor Fana Fraser.

Darby Davis, Divyamaan Sahoo, Ellen Oliver, Eva Wang, Fiona Gorry-Hines, Julie Moon, Liz Peterson, Siting Yang, Sophie Kovel, Victoria Awkwards, e??e??e??, e??i??i-?, e??i??e??, e??i??i??, e??i??e??, e??i??, i?oei??i??, i?oei??i??, e-?i??

Chaesong Kim's Directing Thesis will be presented at Lenfest Center for the Arts.

Thursday, March 24 at 8pmFriday, March 25 at 8pmSaturday, March 26 2pmSaturday, March 26 at 8pmSunday, March 27 at 2pmClick here for tickets.

e??i??i?? / Chaesong Kim (she/they) was born and raised by two social activists who were a part of the student-led democratic revolution and labor rights movement in South Korea. Often subconsciously, they were fueled by a kind rage towards hierarchy, oppressive system and colonization. Recently, they have been recontextualizing such dissatisfaction as love - taking care, taking time, noticing, and holding space. They deeply identify with the inheritance of "in-between" spaces, and celebrate transcendence through an embodied communal practice. Most recently their work has been a part of Seoul Dance Center's CO-Choreo LAB, EstroGenius Festival, Ping Chong + Company's Nocturne in 2020, and La MaMa E.T.C. They have also performed in Okwui Okpokwasili's Sitting on a Man's Head, and Samita Sinha's Infinity Folds at Danspace, and Claire Chase's Density 2036 with Constellation Chor at The Kitchen.

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Columbia School of the Arts to Present SHE WALKS THE AIR IX - Broadway World

Todays stories range from The Cloud Decoded to a video preview of The Man Who Fell to Earth to Was there life on early Moon to If energy cannot be created or destroyed, where does it come from? and much more. The Planet Earth Report provides descriptive links to headline news by leading science journalists about the extraordinary discoveries, technology, people, and events changing our knowledge of Planet Earth and the future of the human species.

The Coronaviruss Next Move Here are four shapes that the next variant might takewhich will also dictate the shape of our response, reports The Atlantic. Omicron is not the worst thing we could have imagined, says Jemma Geoghegan, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Otago, in New Zealand. Somewhere out there, a Rho, a Tau, or maybe even an Omega is already in the works.

Alpha Centauri Star System: Life On Its Earth-like Planets Have Had About a Billion Years Longer to Evolve reports Maxwell Moe for The Daily Galaxy. A billion years ago, our ancestors were amoeba-like creatures fond of engulfing paramecium-like creatures.

Moores Law: Scientists Just Made a Graphene Transistor Gate the Width of an Atom, reports Singularity Hub Theres been no greater act of magic in technology than the sleight of hand performed by Moores Law. Electronic components that once fit in your palm have long gone atomic, vanishing from our world to take up residence in the quantum realm.

Is there asymmetry in nature? From lefty snails to deadly chemicals, asymmetry in nature is more common than you think. Have you ever wondered why your heart is on the left side of your chest? Or why snail shells always seem to coil to their right side? Is there asymmetry in nature? Sometimes known as chirality turns out its more common than you might have guessed.

Icy, Earth-like worlds may be rare Hundreds of thousands of simulations show few possible exoplanets with climate conditions like ours, reports Astronomy.com. A team of researchers from the University of Washington and the University of Bern computationally modeled hundreds of thousands of hypothetical exoplanets. They discovered that our fortunate ice situation isnt that common, and is due mostly to Earths relatively moderate axial tilt.

Google hijacked millions of customers and orders from restaurants, lawsuit says Restaurants say blue order online button saps profits, diverts customers, reports Ars Technica.

Time to take a long, hard look at humanitys future in the cosmos, reports New Scientist If so many planets are out there, how come intelligent life hasnt come our way? asks astrophysicist Martin Rees in the captivating interview.

Check out the preview of the Man Who Fell to EarthPeople attending SXSW this weekend were treated to the series world premiere.

Astronomer Spotted An Asteroid Just Hours Before It Impacted Earth, reported Eric Mack for Forbes For just the fifth time ever, astronomers discovered a new asteroid right before it slammed into Earths atmosphere.

Einsteins Diet Was Einsteinnewscientist.com//mg25333771-200-if-energy-cannot-be-created-or-destroyed-where-does-it-come-froms genius, as some have claimed, aided by what he ate? Lets find out, reports Inverse.com

What is a law of nature? asks Aeon.com Laws of nature are impossible to break, and nearly as difficult to define. Just what kind of necessity do they possess?

If energy cannot be created or destroyed, where does it come from, asks Herman DHondt for New Scientist. It may sound incredible, but many scientists believe that the total energy of the universe is zero. Hence, no energy needed to be created when the universe came into existence.

Is this Idea Too Crazy? Was There Life on Early Moon? asks Mind Matters Astronomer Dirk Schulze-Makuch and planetary scientist Ian Crawford have looked into the possibilities.

This Ancient Turtle Survived the Extinction Event That Killed T. Rex The softshell turtle roamed the waters during the Late Cretaceous 66 million years ago. With this study, we gain further insight into winners and losers during the cataclysm that ended the Age of Dinosaurs, said research adviser Peter Dodson. The mighty dinosaurs fell, and the lowly turtle survived.

Scientists Warn a Giant Palm-Sized Spider is Spreading Across U.S. According to the University of Georgia, giant spiders the size of your palm are set to parachute from the sky all over the Eastern United States this summer, reports Futurism.

The New Captain of the Endurance Shipwreck Is an Anemone A whos who of the new invertebrate crew steering Ernest Shackletons sunken ship in the Weddell Sea, reports The New York Times.

Future Evolution: How Will Humans Change in the Next 10,000 Years?, asks Singularity Hub.

A piece of space junk hit the Moon. Oddly, scientists are elated One scientist called the impact of human space debris a fortuitous experiment, reports Salon.com

Octopuses Are Increasingly Using Trash For Shelter, Harrowing Study Shows Human waste has become so ubiquitous in the ocean, its becoming easier for octopuses to shelter in our trash than in seashells or coral, reports Science.com

The next generation of robots will be shape-shifters reports University of Bath Physicists have discovered a new way to coat soft robots in materials that allow them to move and function in a more purposeful way.

I Just Want to Know What Im Made Of -Its time to admit quantum theory has reached a dead end. Can we please go back to the math? reports Michael Brooks for Nautilus.com

Why Werner Herzog thinks human space colonization will inevitably fail Herzog and son discuss their new Discovery+ documentary, Last Exit: Space, reports Ars Technica.

Will artificial intelligence help us find evidence of UFOs? Top tech founders and research scientists are now taking UFOs seriously, reports Sifted.com, In May last year, Barack Obama admitted that there really are objects moving in our skies that cant be easily explained away: Theres footage and records of objects in the skies, that we dont know exactly what they are, we cant explain how they moved, their trajectory They did not have an easily explainable pattern.

China Plans Asteroid Missions, Space Telescopes and a Moon Base The China National Space Administration has released an overview of its plans for the next five years, which include launching a robotic craft to an asteroid, building a space telescope to rival the Hubble and laying the foundations for a space-based gravitational-wave detector, reports Scientific American.

What makes mankind special? And what does it mean to flourish on the frontier of a technological future? Robert J. Marks discusses new technology, what artificial intelligence can and cant do, and the ethical implications of artificial intelligence with Gretchen Huizinga. This interview was originally published by the Beatrice Institute and is repeated here with their permission, reports Mind Matters.

Limited Tactical Nuclear Weapons Would Be Catastrophic Russias invasion of Ukraine shows the limits of nuclear deterrence, reports Scientific American. The blatant aggression against Ukraine has shocked Europe and the world. The war is a tragedy for Ukraine. It also exposes the limits of the Wests reliance on nuclear deterrence.

Could the James Webb Space Telescope detect civilizations similar to ours? How would we look for them? The best answers come from understanding what humanitys presence on Earth looks like from outer space, reports SETI Institute.

Company Plans to Dig Worlds Deepest Hole to Unleash Boundless Energy The geothermal startup Quaise Energy has raised $63 million in funding to tap Earths deep subterranean power, reports Becky Ferreira for Motherboard/Vice.

What Were Humans Doing in the Yukon 24,000 Years Ago? -Scientists have examined remains from caves and think the shelters served as temporary camps for hunters who targeted horses, reports The Smithsonian.

Recent Planet Earth Reports:

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Einsteins Diet to Is a Rho, a Tau, or Even an Omega Variant Already Out There? (Planet Earth Report) - The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel

DUBAI: As Russias invasion of Ukraine enters its fourth week, any lingering fondness the latter may have had for shared bonds of kinship and culture is now history, replaced by resentments and bitterness likely to last generations.

Underlying the current attempt to bring Ukraine back into the fold of Russia appears to be the conviction that the two peoples are one and the same the product of a shared history spanning centuries.

The Kremlin has said its special military operation is aimed at protecting Russias security and that of Russian-speaking people in Ukraines eastern Donbas region.

However, for many Ukrainians, particularly those who came of age after 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukraine declared independence, the invasion has only served to accentuate the ethnic, political, and cultural differences between Russia and Ukraine at the expense of their commonalities.

My paternal grandparents are from Ukraine, Eugene B. Kogan, a researcher at Harvard Business School who emigrated to the US from Russia in the 1990s, told Arab News. The unexpected effect of this war is that I have a renewed interest in understanding where my ancestors came from and in my family history.

Far from drawing Russians and Ukrainians closer, the invasion, which started on Feb. 24, appears to have driven a deeper wedge between the two peoples, while fanning the flames of Ukrainian nationalism and cementing further the political and defense ties that bind Ukraine to Western Europe.

Regardless of the seething bitterness, indeed hate, that consumes many Ukrainians as their cities are pulverized by the Russian military, the two peoples share undeniable bonds, linked by a common thread of history in everything from religion and written script to politics, geography, social customs, and cuisine.

In a recent opinion piece in The Guardian, Alex Halberstadt, author of Young Heroes of the Soviet Union, said: Ukrainians and Russians share much of their culture and history, and an estimated 11 million Russians have Ukrainian relatives. Millions more have Ukrainian spouses and friends.

Both nations, alongside Belarus, can trace their cultural ancestry back to the medieval kingdom of Kievan Rus, whose 9th century Prince Vladimir I, the Grand Duke of Kyiv, was baptized in Crimea after rejecting paganism, becoming the first Christian ruler of all Russia. In fact, in 2014, when Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea, he cited this moment in history to help justify his actions.

Religious identity has played a part in the justification of the war on the grounds of defending the Moscow-oriented Orthodox Christian population of Ukraine, who are divided between an independent-minded group based in Kyiv and another loyal to its patriarch in Moscow.

Leaders of both Ukrainian Orthodox communities, however, have fiercely denounced the invasion, as have Ukraines significant Catholic minority.

Another factor is demographics. When Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, a policy of Ukrainian out-bound and Russian in-bound migration saw the ethnic Ukrainian share of the population decline from 77 percent in 1959 to 73 percent in 1991.

Upon Ukraines independence, however, this trend was thrown into reverse. By the turn of the 21st century, Ukrainians made up more than three-quarters of the population, while Russians made up the largest minority.

Modern Ukraine shows influences of many other cultures in the post-Soviet neighborhood not just Russia. Prior to its incorporation into the Soviet Union, the country was subject to long periods of domination by Poland and Lithuania. It enjoyed a brief bout of independence between 1918 and 1920, during which several of its border regions were controlled by Romania, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, all of which left their mark.

We always thought of ourselves as brothers and sisters. We have so much shared history and to see what is happening is even more heartbreaking because of that.

The Russian and Ukrainian languages, while both stemming from the same branch of the Slavic language family, have their own distinct features. The Ukrainian language shares many similarities with Polish.

Although Russian is the most widely spoken minority language in Ukraine, a significant number of people in the country also speak Yiddish, Polish, Belarusian, Romanian, Moldovan, Bulgarian, Crimean Turkish, and Hungarian.

Russia has left an indelible mark, nonetheless. During both the tsarist and the Soviet periods, Russian was the common language of government administration and public life in Ukraine, with the native tongue of the local population reduced to a secondary status.

In the decade after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, the Ukrainian language was initially afforded equal status with Russian. But, during the 1930s, a policy of Russification was implemented, and it was only in 1989 that Ukrainian became the countrys official language once again, its status confirmed in the 1996 constitution.

Many of the present-day commonalities between the two cultures are actually the result of long spells of Russification, first under the Romanovs and later under Joseph Stalin when the Soviet dictator unleashed his disastrous collectivization policy on the Ukrainian population.

Nadia Kaabi-Linke, a Ukrainian-Arab artist based in Berlin, was due to open a solo exhibition at the National Art Museum of Ukraine in Kyiv on March 4 but is now back in Berlin helping Ukrainian refugees.

She told Arab News: I would not put the relationship between Ukraine and Russia in terms of similarities right now because, after the invasion, many things have changed in my mind and in the core of my own being.

I have started to question my mother tongue my Ukrainian mother spoke to me in Russian and I never did before. I even speak Russian to my two children.

I will not discuss differences and similarities, but I will put it in a way that I might not have ever done before the invasion. Now I feel it is fitting to say this is colonization, she said.

Unsurprisingly, it is not just people with Ukrainian heritage who feel that the rhetoric of nationalism has poisoned a once close relationship, pulling the two peoples apart.

Russian-born Tanya Kronfli, who has lived in the Gulf for nearly 10 years, told Arab News: I feel heartbroken, sad, angry, and helpless. We always thought of each other as brothers and sisters. We have so much shared history and to see what is happening is even more heartbreaking because of that.

Kronfli pointed out that Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Russians were from different countries but are the same people. Our languages are nearly the same and many families have intermarried. Its such a mix with many similarities.

The Kremlin has repeatedly said that NATOs expansion into Eastern Europe and Ukraines ambition to join the alliance created a security dilemma for Russia. It has continued to demand Ukraines disarmament and guarantees that it would never join NATO conditions that Kyiv and NATO have ruled out.

Kogan said: Another security analysis is that the Kremlin felt uneasy with Ukrainians Westward leanings and democratic aspirations, thanks lately to the efforts of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Past color revolutions (Georgia in 2003, Ukraine 2004, Kyrgyzstan 2005) and Zelenskys West-leaning ambitions are of deep concern to the Kremlins sense of control over Russias near abroad.

Intent on halting Ukraines drift to the West, Moscow has rejected the idea of Ukrainian national identity, saying that Russias Ukrainian brothers and sisters have been taken hostage by a Western-backed Nazi cabal, and that Russian troops would be welcomed as liberators.

One often-heard argument is that the post-Soviet Russian leadership never accepted Ukraine as a nation and Ukrainians as a separate people requiring a geopolitically viable nation state in the international system, Kogan added.

In a speech just days before the invasion began, Putin defended his formal recognition of the breakaway Donetsk and Luhansk Peoples Republics by declaring that Ukraine was an invention of Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, who he said had wrongly endowed Ukraine with a sense of statehood by allowing it to enjoy autonomy within the Soviet Union.

Modern Ukraine was entirely and fully created by Russia, more specifically the Bolshevik, communist Russia, Putin said in a televised address.

This process began practically immediately after the 1917 revolution, and moreover Lenin and his associates did it in the sloppiest way in relation to Russia by dividing, tearing from her pieces of her own historical territory.

It remains unclear whether all Russians believe this interpretation of history or consider it a plausible moral justification for the invasion.

It is true that through wars, disasters, and Soviet tyranny, Russians and Ukrainians, living side by side as neighbors or compatriots, managed to preserve their kinship.

Nevertheless, for many Ukrainians, their distinctive history, identity, and sovereign right to choose their own destiny are evidently not matters open to debate.

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Ukraine foreign minister says he discussed further Russian sanctions with EU's Borrell - Arab News