A Kickstarter collaboration with award winning film maker David Malone

Davids Trailer on Youtube

I wrote an article for Brainwaving just over a year ago, ‘Consciousness and the Direction of Structure’. What appeared to be a harsh diagnosis regarding the underlying cause of the obvious insanity that afflicts humanity. Though it accorded well with the Arcadian traditions, modern scientific data and our extremely self destructive behavior, as expected some people found it a little challenging. However the general reaction has been one of relief and in fact even excitement as the nature of the condition outlined implies a relatively easy fix that is well within our reach today.

The next objective is to bring the diagnosis into mainstream culture ASAP in such a way that the rational mind cannot escape the implications despite its phenomenal capacity for delusion and denial. Restoration of the molecular structure and configuration necessary to facilitate sanity as an urgent priority i.e. fixing our brain and its associated state of mind and sense of self. As the very institutions one might expect to address these issues are no less afflicted by the condition, more so in many ways, it will be necessary to throw out the rule book and do whatever is necessary to at least address the question of our neural integrity. Simply asking this question will be enough to initiate a chain reaction that will result in either a clean bill of health, personally I have my doubts, or a massive shift in our collective priority.

We already know our current collective state of mind correlates very well with our current neuro-chemical structure, neuro-chemical fuel and degree of cerebral dominance. We also know that changing those parameters, effectively moving towards their original specifications brings rapid and profound changes including a deep sense of connectedness and empathy, enhanced senses and cognitive ability including an improved capacity to perceive reality. So we can choose more madness, more fear, control and delusion if that is what we want? Such a response would be no more than the continued expression of symptoms typical of serious mental ill health and the inevitable consequences of neural degeneration? Or we could risk a massive improvement that would end the overwhelming symptoms we have created at a causal level.

With this in mind a major Kickstarter project has just gone live and will be launching via media interviews over the next few weeks. It will need a collective effort to network it sufficiently to succeed and is very much a practical first step to initiating a completely new and paradoxically very ancient way of addressing our increasing propensity for industrial scale self harm at its source.

Is it such a great leap from the perspective that ‘humans are mad’ in one way or another, a common view shared by many great philosophers and psychologists and implied in the spiritual and religious traditions to the idea of an underlying neuro-degenerative condition. Its not exactly an uncommon reaction today from a great many people from very diverse cultures and backgrounds.

I invite you to get involved and help unleash a simple idea so powerful that it will eat its way into the hierarchy of madness and change the way we see and eventually experience everything forever.

Links

Molecules of Madness
Beyond Belief

2015: Regent’s Park International Airport

A line of limousines and taxis snakes its way into the Royal Park to deliver 300 well-heeled passengers and their smart luggage to the discreet air terminal. They are in no rush because the flight they are about to board to New York will take two days.

Moored on the grass outside the terminal is a 600ft long behemoth, a vast Hybrid Air Vehicle. A cross between a balloon and an aircraft wing, this new-wave blimp is filled with non-flammable helium and air. Slung beneath is a vast passenger cabin akin to a miniature first-class cruise ship with dining rooms, a ballroom, bars and a casino.

For the same price as a club-class plane ticket, these 300 discerning travellers will eat, sip cocktails and dance as they float serenely across the Atlantic.

There is no runway; there is no need. Once clearance is given for take-off, the captain disengages the hover cushions that suck the craft to the ground, directs the thrust of four 8,000hp engines down, and powers the ship up to 9,000ft.

In 48 hours they will touch down in New York harbour, having burned just a fifth of the fuel used by an aeroplane. It’s a stress-free hop from central London to the centre of Manhattan, with no lengthy airport connections at either end, and no icebergs either.

The doomed R101 in one of the hangers

Airship travel has been a distant dream ever since a catastrophic fire in 1937 ripped through the  LZ-129 Hindenburg as it neared its mooring mast in New Jersey, killing thirty-five people on board and one man on the ground.

Reporter Herbert Morrison’s vivid eye-witness testimony would become the industry’s epitaph: ‘It’s a terrific crash, ladies and gentlemen. It’s smoke, and it’s in flames now; and the frame is crashing to the ground… Oh the humanity!’

Could an industry dogged by tragedy and belonging to a bygone era finally have found the technology to cruise back into the mainstream?

The American Department of Defense thinks so. They have just handed a £315 million contract to design and build the world’s largest flying object to a small British company based in Bedfordshire. Having beaten aviation giants Lockheed Martin, Hybrid Air Vehicles have just four months to build the belly and bones of the craft – the payload module, the fuel tanks, the four engines, the propulsion ducts and bow thrusters (the prototype is pictured on the previous pages).

If all goes to plan these parts will leave its secure manufacturing facility in May, be loaded on a vast Antonov cargo plane, and flown to Arizona where they will join up with the ‘envelope’ (ie, the balloon).

Once assembly is complete, military technology giant Northrop Grumman will add the top-secret surveillance equipment and the vehicle will travel on its own power to a U.S. army base on the east coast of the United States. Once there the U.S. military will put the fully assembled 300ft long craft through its places, flying it with pilots and without.

When it finally completes testing and trials in January 2012, it will leave the US and fly back across the Atlantic to the UK, the first time this has happened since the heyday of Zeppelins in the Thirties.

Guided by a three-man crew, the giant ship will stay at a U.S. Army base here, ready to be deployed. It will be available for use in Afghanistan where it can be flown remotely, climbing to 20,000ft and circling for 21 days, an omniscient god perpetually surveying the battlefield and giving advance warnings of IED attacks and ambushes.

The Cardington airship hangars in Bedfordshire

A zeppelin in a war zone?

Testing has shown that bullets, even missiles pass directly through the envelope because of the incredibly low pressure. Reassuringly, the company insists it has come a long way from the technology of the Thirties.

The 60 per cent helium and 40 per cent air mix replaces flammable hydrogen. And where the classic cigar-shaped Zeppelins struggled against the wind, hybrids use it in combination with their aerodynamic shape  to get more lift. They are helped by vectored thrust, like a Harrier jet, which directs the engine output downwards to provide vertical lift and allows them to take off carrying heavy payloads, even in high winds. They also burn less fuel than a plane while hauling more cargo and, with hovercraft-style landing gear, they don’t require an airport. They can even touch down on water.

The vast 800ft-long Cardington Airship Hangars in Bedfordshire are an eerie sight, dominating the skyline for miles around. Here history looms large.

In 1916 about 800 people worked at Cardington for Shorts Brothers, producing their first airship in 1918. In hard times after the war, the station was closed and construction abandoned, reopening again in 1924 as part of the Imperial Airship Service.

It was in Cardington that the 777ft-long R101, the then biggest airship in the world, was built, and from here that it began its ill-fated final voyage at 6.24pm on Saturday October 4, 1930 bound for India; first planned stop Egypt.

R101 reached London by 8pm, crossed the Channel in two hours, and at midnight a final message went out: ‘15 miles SW of Abbeville speed 33 knots. Wind 243 degrees (West South West) 35 miles an hour. Altimeter height 1,500ft. Air temperature 51 Fahrenheit. Weather – intermittent rain. Cloud nimbus at 500 feet. After an excellent supper our distinguished passengers smoked a final cigar and having sighted the French coast have now gone to bed to rest after the excitement of their leave-taking. All essential services are functioning satisfactorily.’

Two hours later, R101 went into a steep dive, the nose hitting the ground at just 13.8mph. Then fire broke out, from which only eight of the 56 passengers and crew survived. Plans for more advanced and bigger airships were scrapped. After a brief resurgence during World War II when they made barrage balloons for the war effort, the Cardington sheds and the industry slid into decline.

Now, Cardington shed No 2 acts as a temporary home to Warner Brothers’ technicians. The cavernous space was just the job for a full-sized mock-up of Gotham  City for Christopher Nolan’s epic Batman series. The other largely derelict shed is out of bounds, a reminder of the industry’s capricious history.

How the new breed of Hybrid Air Vehicles would look over London’s Olympic complex

But just as cruise ships survived the Titanic disaster, so some enthusiasts never gave up hope for the airship. Among them was Roger Munk, the epitome of a charismatic British engineering visionary. The idea for the Hybrid Air Vehicle was his; he spent much of his  40-year career designing and building airships, completing a number of ‘lighter than air’ projects for the American military.

Yet his own work was haunted by the inherent danger of airships going up in flames. In 1995, a fire apparently caused accidentally during welding work set alight the Weeksville hangar in North Carolina. At half-a-mile long, it was the largest wood-construction building in the world. Supports for the 180-ton doors were being rebuilt when the fire took hold, burning the hangar to the ground and destroying his Sentinel 1000 blimp.

Munk refused to give up. He decided to begin a new project creating a vehicle that would solve some of the problems inherent in airships, especially ground handling and ballast issues. He based his 15-man team in portable huts in the shadow of the Cardington sheds, and went back to the drawing board.

With a small beer tent as a hangar, Munk created the concept of a hybrid. The first prototype was flown in 2000. Though Munk was able to oversee the final perfection of his vision, he died of a heart attack in February 2010 – before the team heard news that they had won the U.S. military contract.

The team now has 100 engineers and designers and the firm has ditched its draughty sheds for two brand new office buildings nearby. But if Hybrid Air Vehicles’ potential is taken up then the team hopes to begin manufacturing and storing the vehicles again in Cardington.

The 50ft long prototype itself seems otherworldly. Almost as wide as it is long, it is surprisingly balloon-like to the touch. Even the most cynical observer cannot disguise the thrill of childlike wonder on feeling just how light this huge craft is. The pressure inside it is just 0.1 psi – a car tyre is between 20 and 40 psi.

CEO Gary Elliott, the man largely responsible for putting together the Northrop Grumman deal, says: ‘We took existing technologies and the concept of an airship, took a step back and thought – why don’t we do this and this differently, so that it projects itself through the air?’

The Hybrid Air Vehicles’ flight simulator

In a nearby office a team of flight-control specialists occupies a meeting room. In the corner of another office sits a full-size mock-up of the cockpit, constructed entirely from cardboard. The cabinetry is the work of the team’s 70-year-old handyman.

Pilots sit here and try out all possible instrumentation combinations to find the most practical configuration. Who needs  virtual reality when you have a few old computer boxes and some photocopied instruments?

A few footsteps away, though, there is a concession to technology – a large simulator which operates using four screens linked to four networked, high-end gaming PCs. Veteran airship pilots, recruited from across the industry, with experience flying blimps and seaplanes, are teaching the computers how to react to various flying situations, so that when a remote operator issues the ship with a command, the automated system will be able to move the controls in the same way as a human pilot; in other words, they are teaching it to fly itself.

The system has been designed by another UK company, Blue Bear Systems Research. It designed the flight-control system of the Harrier jump jet and also designs UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) that can be launched and fly themselves autonomously along a pre-programmed route.

Although every Hybrid Air Vehicle (HAV) will be capable of being flown remotely as a military surveillance platform, it will also be able to operate with a three-man crew – a pilot, co-pilot and load master. It takes about 100 hours of flight training to convert a pilot, though they don’t all make the switch easily, often because they aren’t used to stopping in mid-air.

Dave Burns is a pilot with thousands of hours experience flying passenger airliners for BA and Monarch. He is the company’s test pilot and chief flight training officer, and also the man who will fly the HAV 304 back across the Atlantic.

‘It doesn’t respond like a plane at all,’ says Burns. ‘You move the stick, telling the ship to move, and nothing happens for three or four seconds – and then it responds, which can be a little disconcerting. Plus, the mass underneath it acts like a pendulum, always trying to make it come level again.

‘The difficult thing is landing and take-off. In the past airships had ropes and ground crew waiting; we don’t need those so now what you have to do is present the vehicle so it comes down very slowly.’

A German Graf Zeppelin visiting Britain in 1931

Although the first 300ft version of the craft has been commissioned by the U.S. military, the real commercial potential of the vehicles could be for heavy lifting, says director of sales Gordon Taylor who has been living and breathing the things through multiple prototypes since joining his friend Roger Munk in 1997.

‘Our hybrids are based on a blend of technologies, in the same way that a Toyota Prius is a hybrid because it runs on electricity and petrol,’ he says.

‘Firstly it uses aerodynamics. The shape is like a big wing – air moves over it, lower air pressure is created across the top of the wing and it creates lift. Only if it’s fully loaded does it need a runway, and even then, with a 20 knot headwind they can land in three hull lengths.

‘Secondly we use “lighter-than-air” technology. With a normal airship you moor it on the ground to a mast. In order to fly anywhere it has to take off ballast, then it floats up. In a hybrid we push ourselves forward and that immediately generates lift.

‘Thirdly we have vectored thrust: our propulsion ducts rotate like a jump jet. Finally, we have hovercraft-style landing gear – a cushion of air that means that you can land on any reasonably flat surface, including water. This also works in reverse to secure the vehicle to the ground by suction.’

The company has calculated that it would take only 20 minutes to move a shipping container from Milton Keynes to London by HAV – a journey that presently takes hours thanks to traffic. Add a road network that grinds to a halt after a seasonal dusting of snow and you suddenly find an application for a cheaper, faster form of transport.

The Hindenburg disaster at Lakehurst, New Jersey in 1937 which marked the end of the era of passenger-carrying airships

‘You can forget ice road truckers too in places with more extreme cold,’ he adds.

‘They can carry the same load that goes on the back of those trucks and they love the cold because you get more lift in the denser air. We have a version with a 20-ton payload, which is what a Lockheed C-130 Hercules carries. We have plans for craft to eventually carry up to 1,000 tons.’

The team is already in formal discussions with oil companies that routinely spend hundreds of millions of dollars on roads and airports every time they find a new supply of oil or gas. By using HAVs the oil companies would simply be able to touch down without need of an airport.

‘Some of these companies are paying a million dollars a day in the development of infrastructure.

‘You could run these hybrids in convoy too, of course. The price difference between air freight and shipping is huge – so what if you could move freight by air but for a similar price as a ship? It could mean a whole new market in transport.’

Later this year the full-scale version of the current prototype will become the largest flying object in the world. After its initial use in military surveillance and heavy lifting, it could be just a few years before passengers are floating around beneath them. Need to be in New York fast? Take a plane. Don’t mind being in New York a day later? Then take an HAV.

And precisely how long will it take after that  for us to see a fleet of orange easyBalloons hauling budget passengers to and from Malaga?

From Wired Magazine by Steven Levy

But the warehouses aren’t meant to be understood by humans; they were built for bots. Every day, hundreds of robots course nimbly through the aisles, instantly identifying items and delivering them to flesh-and-blood packers on the periphery. Instead of organizing the warehouse as a human might—by placing like products next to one another, for instance—Diapers.com’s robots stick the items in various aisles throughout the facility. Then, to fill an order, the first available robot simply finds the closest requested item. The storeroom is an ever-shifting mass that adjusts to constantly changing data, like the size and popularity of merchandise, the geography of the warehouse, and the location of each robot. Set up by Kiva Systems, which has outfitted similar facilities for Gap, Staples, and Office Depot, the system can deliver items to packers at the rate of one every six seconds.

The Kiva bots may not seem very smart. They don’t possess anything like human intelligence and certainly couldn’t pass a Turing test. But they represent a new forefront in the field of artificial intelligence. Today’s AI doesn’t try to re-create the brain. Instead, it uses machine learning, massive data sets, sophisticated sensors, and clever algorithms to master discrete tasks. Examples can be found everywhere: The Google global machine uses AI to interpret cryptic human queries. Credit card companies use it to track fraud. Netflix uses it to recommend movies to subscribers. And the financial system uses it to handle billions of trades (with only the occasional meltdown).

This explosion is the ironic payoff of the seemingly fruitless decades-long quest to emulate human intelligence. That goal proved so elusive that some scientists lost heart and many others lost funding. People talked of an AI winter—a barren season in which no vision or project could take root or grow. But even as the traditional dream of AI was freezing over, a new one was being born: machines built to accomplish specific tasks in ways that people never could. At first, there were just a few green shoots pushing up through the frosty ground. But now we’re in full bloom. Welcome to AI summer.

Today’s AI bears little resemblance to its initial conception. The field’s trailblazers in the 1950s and ’60s believed success lay in mimicking the logic-based reasoning that human brains were thought to use. In 1957, the AI crowd confidently predicted that machines would soon be able to replicate all kinds of human mental achievements. But that turned out to be wildly unachievable, in part because we still don’t really understand how the brain works, much less how to re-create it.

So during the ’80s, graduate students began to focus on the kinds of skills for which computers were well-suited and found they could build something like intelligence from groups of systems that operated according to their own kind of reasoning. “The big surprise is that intelligence isn’t a unitary thing,” says Danny Hillis, who cofounded Thinking Machines, a company that made massively parallel supercomputers. “What we’ve learned is that it’s all kinds of different behaviors.”

AI researchers began to devise a raft of new techniques that were decidedly not modeled on human intelligence. By using probability-based algorithms to derive meaning from huge amounts of data, researchers discovered that they didn’t need to teach a computer how to accomplish a task; they could just show it what people did and let the machine figure out how to emulate that behavior under similar circumstances. They used genetic algorithms, which comb through randomly generated chunks of code, skim the highest-performing ones, and splice them together to spawn new code. As the process is repeated, the evolved programs become amazingly effective, often comparable to the output of the most experienced coders.

MIT’s Rodney Brooks also took a biologically inspired approach to robotics. His lab programmed six-legged buglike creatures by breaking down insect behavior into a series of simple commands—for instance, “If you run into an obstacle, lift your legs higher.” When the programmers got the rules right, the gizmos could figure out for themselves how to navigate even complicated terrain. (It’s no coincidence that iRobot, the company Brooks cofounded with his MIT students, produced the Roomba autonomous vacuum cleaner, which doesn’t initially know the location of all the objects in a room or the best way to traverse it but knows how to keep itself moving.)

The fruits of the AI revolution are now all around us. Once researchers were freed from the burden of building a whole mind, they could construct a rich bestiary of digital fauna, which few would dispute possess something approaching intelligence. “If you told somebody in 1978, ‘You’re going to have this machine, and you’ll be able to type a few words and instantly get all of the world’s knowledge on that topic,’ they would probably consider that to be AI,” Google cofounder Larry Page says. “That seems routine now, but it’s a really big deal.”

Even formerly mechanical processes like driving a car have become collaborations with AI systems. “At first it was the automatic braking system,” Brooks says. “The person’s foot was saying, I want to brake this much, and the intelligent system in the middle figured when to actually apply the brakes to make that work. Now you’re starting to get automatic parking and lane-changing.” Indeed, Google has been developing and testing cars that drive themselves with only minimal human involvement; by October, they had already covered 140,000 miles of pavement.

In short, we are engaged in a permanent dance with machines, locked in an increasingly dependent embrace. And yet, because the bots’ behavior isn’t based on human thought processes, we are often powerless to explain their actions. Wolfram Alpha, the website created by scientist Stephen Wolfram, can solve many mathematical problems. It also seems to display how those answers are derived. But the logical steps that humans see are completely different from the website’s actual calculations. “It doesn’t do any of that reasoning,” Wolfram says. “Those steps are pure fake. We thought, how can we explain this to one of those humans out there?”

The lesson is that our computers sometimes have to humor us, or they will freak us out. Eric Horvitz—now a top Microsoft researcher and a former president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence—helped build an AI system in the 1980s to aid pathologists in their studies, analyzing each result and suggesting the next test to perform. There was just one problem—it provided the answers too quickly. “We found that people trusted it more if we added a delay loop with a flashing light, as though it were huffing and puffing to come up with an answer,” Horvitz says.

But we must learn to adapt. AI is so crucial to some systems—like the financial infrastructure—that getting rid of it would be a lot harder than simply disconnecting HAL 9000’s modules. “In some sense, you can argue that the science fiction scenario is already starting to happen,” Thinking Machines’ Hillis says. “The computers are in control, and we just live in their world.” Wolfram says this conundrum will intensify as AI takes on new tasks, spinning further out of human comprehension. “Do you regulate an underlying algorithm?” he asks. “That’s crazy, because you can’t foresee in most cases what consequences that algorithm will have.”

In its earlier days, artificial intelligence was weighted with controversy and grave doubt, as humanists feared the ramifications of thinking machines. Now the machines are embedded in our lives, and those fears seem irrelevant. “I used to have fights about it,” Brooks says. “I’ve stopped having fights. I’m just trying to win.”

Senior writer Steven Levy (steven_levy@wired.com)

From the NewScientist

A STORM of scepticism has greeted experimental results emerging from the lab of a Nobel laureate which, if confirmed, would shake the foundations of several fields of science. “If the results are correct,” says theoretical chemist Jeff Reimers of the University of Sydney, Australia, “these would be the most significant experiments performed in the past 90 years, demanding re-evaluation of the whole conceptual framework of modern chemistry.”

Luc Montagnier, who shared the Nobel prize for medicine in 2008 for his part in establishing that HIV causes AIDS, says he has evidence that DNA can send spooky electromagnetic imprints of itself into distant cells and fluids. If that wasn’t heretical enough, he also suggests that enzymes can mistake the ghostly imprints for real DNA, and faithfully copy them to produce the real thing. In effect this would amount to a kind of quantum teleportation of the DNA.

Many researchers contacted for comment by New Scientist reacted with disbelief. Gary Schuster, who studies DNA conductance effects at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, compared it to “pathological science”. Jacqueline Barton, who does similar work at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, was equally sceptical. “There aren’t a lot of data given, and I don’t buy the explanation,” she says. One blogger has suggested Montagnier should be awarded an IgNobel prize.

Yet the results can’t be dismissed out of hand. “The experimental methods used appear comprehensive,” says Reimers. So what have Montagnier and his team actually found?

Full details of the experiments are not yet available, but the basic set-up is as follows. Two adjacent but physically separate test tubes were placed within a copper coil and subjected to a very weak extremely low frequency electromagnetic field of 7 hertz. The apparatus was isolated from Earth’s natural magnetic field to stop it interfering with the experiment. One tube contained a fragment of DNA around 100 bases long; the second tube contained pure water.

After 16 to 18 hours, both samples were independently subjected to the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a method routinely used to amplify traces of DNA by using enzymes to make many copies of the original material. The gene fragment was apparently recovered from both tubes, even though one should have contained just water.

DNA was only recovered if the original solution of DNA – whose concentration has not been revealed – had been subjected to several dilution cycles before being placed in the magnetic field. In each cycle it was diluted 10-fold, and “ghost” DNA was only recovered after between seven and 12 dilutions of the original. It was not found at the ultra-high dilutions used in homeopathy.

Physicists in Montagnier’s team suggest that DNA emits low-frequency electromagnetic waves which imprint the structure of the molecule onto the water. This structure, they claim, is preserved and amplified through quantum coherence effects, and because it mimics the shape of the original DNA, the enzymes in the PCR process mistake it for DNA itself, and somehow use it as a template to make DNA matching that which “sent” the signal (arxiv.org/abs/1012.5166).

“The biological experiments do seem intriguing, and I wouldn’t dismiss them,” says Greg Scholes of the University of Toronto in Canada, who last year demonstrated that quantum effects occur in plants. Yet according to Klaus Gerwert, who studies interactions between water and biomolecules at the Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, “It is hard to understand how the information can be stored within water over a timescale longer than picoseconds.”

“The structure would be destroyed instantly,” agrees Felix Franks, a retired academic chemist in London who has studied water for many years. Franks was involved as a peer reviewer in the debunking of a controversial study in 1988 which claimed that water had a memory (see “How ‘ghost molecules’ were exorcised”). “Water has no ‘memory’,” he says now. “You can’t make an imprint in it and recover it later.”

Despite the scepticism over Montagnier’s explanation, the consensus was that the results deserve to be investigated further. Montagnier’s colleague, theoretical physicist Giuseppe Vitiello of the University of Salerno in Italy, is confident that the result is reliable. “I would exclude that it’s contamination,” he says. “It’s very important that other groups repeat it.”

In a paper last year (Interdisciplinary Sciences: Computational Life Sciences, DOI: 10.1007/s12539-009-0036-7), Montagnier described how he discovered the apparent ability of DNA fragments and entire bacteria both to produce weak electromagnetic fields and to “regenerate” themselves in previously uninfected cells. Montagnier strained a solution of the bacterium Mycoplasma pirumthrough a filter with pores small enough to prevent the bacteria penetrating. The filtered water emitted the same frequency of electromagnetic signal as the bacteria themselves. He says he has evidence that many species of bacteria and many viruses give out the electromagnetic signals, as do some diseased human cells.

Montagnier says that the full details of his latest experiments will not be disclosed until the paper is accepted for publication. “Surely you are aware that investigators do not reveal the detailed content of their experimental work before its first appearance in peer-reviewed journals,” he says.

How ‘ghost molecules’ were exorcised

The latest findings by Luc Montagnier evoke long-discredited work by the French researcher Jacques Benveniste. In a paper inNature (vol 333, p 816) in 1988 he claimed to show that water had a “memory”, and that the activity of human antibodies was retained in solutions so dilute that they couldn’t possibly contain any antibody molecules (New Scientist, 14 July 1988, p 39).

Mirror-Image Cells Could Transform Science — or Kill Us All

Dmitar Sasselov was at the end of a long day of having his mind blown when the really big idea hit him. Sasselov, an astrophysicist and head of the Origins of Life Initiative at Harvard, was sitting in the front row of a packed lecture hall at the university last spring, listening to the famous human genome sequencer J. Craig Venter talk about his efforts to synthesize new forms of life. Sasselov had introduced the bald, perpetually sunburned biotech entrepreneur at another lecture that morning, and he’d spent the day squiring Venter around campus.

By John Bohannon for Wired Magazine

But Sasselov’s thoughts were light-years away. Two months earlier, a Delta II rocket had blasted off into the darkness above Cape Canaveral carrying the Kepler space telescope; Sasselov is on the team using Kepler to hunt for Earth-like planets around the Cygnus constellation—looking, ultimately, for extraterrestrial life. And he was frustrated. Because no matter how much data he and his colleagues collect—gases in the atmosphere, a fingerprint of color on the surface—they’ll never actually see aliens themselves. And that makes it impossible to answer one of the most basic questions of astrobiology: How diverse is life in the universe? If there is life somewhere other than here, does it look like earthly life, with DNA and protein? Or could it run on something else? Venter’s lecture about artisanal bacteria mapped suddenly onto Sasselov’s frustration. Why not just do what Venter was doing? If Sasselov wanted to study aliens, why not just make them himself—or at least the next-best thing? He imagined himself looking at synthetic aliens on a lab bench, “gazing at the other,” as he puts it, “similar to us but not the same.” He uncapped his red pen and scribbled a note: “Arrange a mtg/chat w Jack & GMC,” it read. “Chiral E. coli w GMC and put it into a vesicle w Jack & subject two cultures to planetary environments.”

Translation: Go to the synthetic biologists Jack Szostak and George Church. Ask them to create a life-form that runs on an operating system different from our own, based on mirror-image versions of earthly proteins and DNA. Let these alien cells grow and mutate, and see how they survive. If it worked, those new cells—Church called them “mirror life”—could answer one of the deepest questions about the origin of life, not just here on Earth but everywhere in the universe. They might also open up new avenues of discovery in materials science, fuel synthesis, and pharmaceutical research. On the down side, though, mirror life wouldn’t have any predators or diseases to limit its reproduction. They would have to keep an eye on that.

Four billion years ago was a hellish time on planet Earth. It was the end of the aptly named Hadean eon: Volcanoes spewed lava across rock baked by ultraviolet radiation; asteroids blasted craters into the landscape. But the worst of the bombardment—including the colossal impact that knocked loose the chunk that became our moon—was over. There were oceans of water and plenty of complex organic chemicals. So in some wet place, maybe near an undersea hydrothermal vent, maybe in the clay on the shore of a shallow pond, organic molecules started to replicate. No one knows exactly where or when or how, but life began.

It was nothing fancy at first. But soon those replicating molecules clothed themselves in a skin of fat, a membrane to keep their complex chemistry from diluting away. And with surprising speed, those bubbles of goop gave rise to a living, functioning cell, the Last Universal Common Ancestor of everything alive today—LUCA. Using the genetic differences between today’s living things as a molecular clock, we can calculate when that ancestral cell first emerged: about 3.5 billion years ago.

Since then, life has been busy. At last count, there were as many as 100 million species on the planet, and billions more have gone extinct. And yet, at the most basic level of biochemistry, it has just been more of the same. Every organism runs on the same operating system that LUCA invented. Peel back a cell’s membrane and you’ll find a blur of activity, thousands of chemical reactions taking place all at once. The conductors of this biochemical ballet are the proteins, nano-size building blocks and machines that control the speed and timing of every reaction. From breaking down sugars to clearing waste to repairing the membrane, the unique shape of each protein determines its job, as specifically as a lock to its key.

The LUCA operating system was an ingenious solution to keeping track of all those thousands of proteins. Biochemists call it the central dogma: Genetic material, in the form of a long nucleic acid polymer called DNA, stores a digital record of every protein’s design. Another nucleic acid, RNA, carries the information to a molecular machine called a ribosome, which reads the RNA and strings together amino acids to form the protein. Once the string is complete, the protein snaps itself into the right shape and gets to work.

But there is at least one viable alternative to LUCA: the mirror image of the entire system. Biochemistry is the story of shapes, and this is its strange plot twist. Lots of molecules come in multiple conformations—sticking together the same atoms can sometimes yield different three-dimensional structures that are the mirror images of each other, a property called chirality. Indeed, most of the basic molecules of life—from the nucleic acids of the genome to the amino acids of the proteins—have mirror-image versions. And all cells have enzymes called isomerases, which flip certain molecules into their mirror versions. But for some reason, in the machinery of living things on Earth, one side of the mirror goes almost wholly unused. All of us earthlings, from algae to elephants, have proteins made of left-handed amino acids and a genome of right-handed nucleic acids. (When chemists say handed, they’re generally referring to the direction that polarized light skews when beamed through a pure solution of the molecule.) No one knows why LUCA picked one side of the mirror and not the other.

Theoretically, a cell could be based on “wrong-handed” molecules. Its biochemistry would work just like ours—DNA to RNA to proteins—but it would be completely incompatible with earthly life, its chiral twin. And now, thanks to recent advances in genomics, cell membrane science, and synthetic biology, an ambitious researcher could go beyond theory and build it from the ground up. The tools are here (well, almost here) to make mirror life from scratch.

Photo: Spencer Higgins

Sasselov is the ultimate talent scout for a problem like this. Because of his job at the Origins of Life Initiative, he knew George Church was already trying to build mirror-flipped molecular machines that could translate genes into proteins, and he knew that Church didn’t have anything to put them in. The membranes of earthly cells are built of fat and protein molecules with the wrong chirality. But Sasselov also knew that if there was anyone in the world who could create a membrane that would work, it was Jack Szostak. “They’re both pioneers, but in different ways,” Sasselov says. “They are my favorite people, and my mentors.”

So he brought them both to a café in Cambridge and made his pitch: Build a fully functioning mirror cell made of molecules they themselves would synthesize. Or, to put it another way: Don’t just create new branches on the tree of life, as Venter was doing with his tweaks of existing cells. Instead, create an entirely new tree.

Church went for it immediately. He’d been looking at similar ideas for years. But Szostak didn’t think it would work. “I’m not saying it’s impossible,” he says, sitting in his office at Massachusetts General Hospital a year after that first meeting. “I’m just saying it requires a lot of hard steps.” Nevertheless, he agreed to support the project.

A soft-spoken 58-year-old Canadian with boyish good looks, Szostak won the Nobel Prize last year for his work on telomeres, the protective end caps of chromosomes. He also created the artificial yeast chromosome, critical to advances in DNA cloning and gene mapping. Lately, Szostak has been working on the origin of those membranes that somehow came to enclose and protect LUCA and every cell since. Inside test tubes in his lab float microscopic, hollow spheres of fat—primitive membrane bubbles. Given the right molecular ingredients, they spontaneously self-assemble, grow, and divide, but they’re much simpler than a naturally occurring cell membrane. The fatty acids have no chirality; their mirror image is the same molecule. So if they were injected with, say, the guts of mirror life, there would be no wrong-handedness to get in the way.

And that’s where Church comes in. He’s 6′5″, with a gnarly beard and a science fiction fan’s optimism. It’s his job to build the genome and protein infrastructure for mirror life. But … could mirror cells actually survive on Earth? “Everything I know from chemistry and physics says that this should work,” he says. Then he gets a little silly: “Hey! I know a great shortcut to get our mirror ribosome! I just need a four-dimensional being to pick me up, rotate me in 4-D, and put me back as my mirror self.”

Szostak still says he’d bet against their success. The cautious scientist in him can’t see how the mirror cell, once full of chirally flipped molecular machinery, will come to life. “Forget about all the technical issues of making mirror ribosomes, mirror peptides, and mirror DNA,” he says. “The complexity of reconstituting a normal cell, or even a simplified cell with 1,000 components, is mind-boggling. You don’t just mix these things up and get it to work.” Still, he agreed that if Church got his part figured out, they could use his membranes to keep everything in. Szostak hopes that even attempting to make mirror life could lead to a better understanding of how ribosomes work and cells evolved. He doesn’t mention the possibility that mirror life could earn someone serious money.

The week that Sasselov met with Szostak and Church to discuss mirror life, a catastrophe was under way across the Charles River at Genzyme, one of the largest biotech companies in the world. Two of its top sellers—medicines for treating the rare genetic disorders Gaucher’s disease and Fabry disease—are proteins. In people with these maladies, fats accumulate in the blood, organs, and brain, causing symptoms from burning pain to kidney failure—unless they get the drugs, produced by genetically modified cells suspended in giant nutrient pools called bioreactors. But that week, a virus that disrupts cell reproduction infected one of the bioreactors. The entire plant had to be shut down.

It was a hard summer for Genzyme, as well as for the people who rely on its medications. While the company decontaminated its bioreactors, thousands of patients around the world rationed their drug supplies. Genzyme’s stock price dropped 20 percent.

When Church talks about mirror life’s quirky advantages, invulnerability to this kind of mishap is high on his list. “Viruses can’t touch a mirror cell,” he says. No virus has evolved to infect it. And even if a normal virus did figure out how to get past the membrane of a mirror cell—which usually requires a mechanism that would be thwarted by wrong-handed molecules—the mirror genome would be unreadable to the attacker. Viruses work by hijacking their victims’ genomes, taking over the cellular machinery for making proteins to build more of themselves; a normal virus wouldn’t have any effect on a mirror cell’s factory. This makes mirror life a potential workhorse for biotech.

As it happens, the cell that Sasselov ultimately wants to create—a chiral twin of E. coli—couldn’t make proteins like Genzyme’s cells. It would make the chirally flipped versions, which would almost certainly be useless.

But that’s not the sort of mirror cell Church has in mind. The problem, he says, is that billions of years of evolutionary R&D have made today’s bacterial cells tough, adaptable, and very good at making more of themselves—but inefficient at spitting out designed-to-order molecules in a bioreactor. Church wants a “minimal mirror cell” to produce specific proteins: mirror, normal, and even mixes of the two but far more efficient than a bioreactor full of finicky, genetically engineered cells.

By the end of planning her new exhibition, Caroline Fisher had come to an interesting conclusion. “It’s even harder to exhibit rats than drugs,” she says. The Home Office eventually granted her the necessary licences to exhibit a bottle of heroin, a ball of opium, some morphine, a selection of magic mushrooms, a peyote cactus, some hallucinogenic snuff and a variety of Victorian high-street pharmacy favourites including cocaine mouth lozenges and tincture of Indian cannabis – “as many drugs as we could get our hands on”. But Health and Safety weren’t having the rats. “We wanted to recreate a 7m-long Rat Park,” Fisher sighs, referring to the classic 1970s Canadian experiment that showed opiate addiction in rodents was determined not by the drugs they took, but the living conditions they took them in.

By Johnny Davis for the Guardian

Fisher is the co-curator of High Society: Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture at the Wellcome Collection in London, and offers a history of narcotics that feels fresh. After all, we hardly need another account of the Romantic poets getting carried away with hashish, or more woolly recollections from acid house revellers who outwitted the police on the M25 while going to Sunrise.

“I don’t think anything similar has been done before,” says Mike Jay, the exhibition’s co-curator and author of an accompanying book. “There’s always been two different discourses, the ‘drug culture underground’ one and a rather more straight-lens way of looking at it, from a medical or political view. It’s the middle ground that feels interesting.”

High Society strives to cover as much of this middle ground as possible. It spans from pre-2000 BC chillum-style pipes fashioned from puma bones, to mephedrone and other internet-distributed synthetic stimulants of the 21st century. Along the way it takes in kava drinking in the South Pacific, betel chewing in Papua New Guinea and cocaine snorting in Weimar Germany. Tea, coffee and sugar also feature (albeit in supporting roles) and there’s plenty on the rise and fall of tobacco.

As such the exhibition is able to make its central premise: very few people live their lives without resorting to some sort of mind-altering substance. Taking drugs, it suggests, is “a universal impulse”. “Drug cultures are endlessly varied, but drugs in general are more or less ubiquitous among our species,” writes Jay. Later he quotes American anthropologist Donald Brown’s celebrated work Human Universals, which lists “mood- or consciousness-altering techniques and/or substances” as one of the essential components of human culture, along with “music, conflict resolution, language and play”. “The public perception is that drugs are this terrible thing that appeared with hippies in the 60s; that they’re a modern disease,” Jay says. “The historicality has been lost.”

The curators are at pains to underline the mutability of culture and society, and how a drug’s definition is determined by non-chemical factors such as intent behind its use, its method of administration and the social class of the user. (Nitrous oxide is a medicine when used by doctors, a drug when used for pleasure.) Even so a pattern soon establishes itself: a new mind-altering substance arrives accompanied by extravagant medical claims and counter-claims, gets enthusiastically taken up by sections of the public (usually the idle rich); then addiction and side-effects make themselves apparent over time.

“It was hard to designate drugs themselves as the problem when they were also being promoted to the public at large as the solution,” writes Jay of the nurses, doctors and military officers who were treating local infections with morphine injections in the 1880s, ushering in the first “morphinomaniacs” in the process. Elsewhere the 18th-century botanist and pioneering drug cataloguer Carl Linnaeus frowned upon coffee – he felt it sapped vitality and brought on early senility – but endorsed tobacco as a means of fighting infection. In a tract published in Leipzig in 1707, we see early adopters of tea being reprimanded for “drinking themselves to death” in the mindless pursuit of fashion. Around the same time the British literary intelligentsia waxed lyrical on the benefits of rounding an evening off with a few pipes of opium, something they believed helped digestion, fortified against fever and improved performance in the bedroom. Only alcohol seems to have maintained a constant reputation, viewed as the boorish vice of the corrupt elite in Roman times, banned across much of the Islamic world and the subject of US prohibition in the 1920s.

Still, High Society remains morally neutral. There won’t be any disclaimers. “We’re not doing, ‘Hey kids, drugs are good’, so ultimately we don’t need to do, ‘Hey kids, drugs are bad,’” reasons Jay. “Since that’s basically the entire popular discourse about drugs, it seems nice to get rid of both of them and take the subject on its own merit.”

High Society has commissioned some interactive artworks to help convey the quixotic effects of drugs on mind and body in the sober medium of an exhibition space. Joshua White was the resident artist at New York’s Fillmore East theatre during the late 60s. Using bottles of coloured liquids, hand-painted slides, lightbulbs on the end of sticks and clock faces, he projected his psychedelic “liquid light shows” on to live performances by Frank Zappa, Janis Joplin and Jefferson Airplane, among others. “Was my work best experienced on drugs? I would say so, yes,” says White, who’ll travel to the UK to install his new show at the Wellcome Collection. “Everybody had a different relationship with drugs back then, just as everybody in my parents’ generation had a different relationship with alcohol. Some people had a nice buzz; some people threw up. We would hire speed freaks for our special projects – get them to stay up all night gluing jewels on to a ball.”

There will also be a recreation of the “dreamachine”, the light-emitting cylinder built by artist Brion Gysin and William Burroughs’s “systems adviser” Ian Sommerville. “You look at it with your eyes shut in a dark room, and it supposedly recreates the hallucinatory experience,” explains Fisher.

Other contemporary artwork includes the video piece Cannabis In the UK, of artist Mark Harris reading Baudelaire’s Les Paradis Artificiels and Walter Benjamin’s Hashish in Marseilles to cannabis plants (“I hope it won’t be taken too seriously,” says Harris. “I just thought, ‘If you’re going to read to plants to make them grow, what better than to read to cannabis plants something about the effects of the drug?’”), and photographer Mark Leffingwell’s “collective intoxication” picture depicting 10,000 people gathered at the University of Colorado for a “smoke-in” to commemorate “420″, an event observed across America every 20 April to promote the legalisation of marijuana.

If none of those do the trick, there are plenty of accounts from the history of self-experimentation. There’s the study on nitrous oxide performed by 18th-century chemist Humphry Davy, who got fed up with testing the gas on rabbits, kittens and fish and took heroic quantities himself, reaching the less than empirical conclusion that “nothing exists but thoughts”. There’s the story of the family who discovered the liberty cap mushroom by accident: cooking some up for a morning broth they developed vertigo, visions and the overwhelming sensation they were dying, only to leave the house for help and forget why they had done so a few hundred metres later. (When a doctor did eventually reach them, the situation was scarcely improved by the family’s eight-year-old, whose symptoms proved unique: bursting into raucous laughter every time his terrified parents opened their mouths.) And there’s French psychiatrist Jacques-Joseph Moreau, who suggested that the low prevalence of insanity in the Arab world was down to a preference for cannabis over alcohol: testing his theory he swallowed three grams before dinner and found himself preparing to fight a duel with a bowl of candied fruit.

From more recent times there’s a photograph of “father of MDMA” and sometime US Drug Enforcement Agency employee Alexander Shulgin. Shulgin’s popularisation of ecstasy eventually gave rise to acid house, the last significant drug-led subculture. High Society largely steers clear of examining the hows and whys of such moments; in fact there’s little on why we might be drawn towards illicit drugs in the first place. “I just think it’s self-evident that people wouldn’t take drugs if they didn’t enjoy them,” Jay shrugs.

The most recent UN figures put the illegal drug trade at $320bn (£200bn) a year – the third biggest international market on the planet, after arms and oil. “2011 is the 50th anniversary of the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs,” Jay says. “That’s the 50th anniversary of global prohibition; they’ve been trying for 50 years to achieve that. What’s so ironic is that 1961 was precisely the time when the drug counterculture formed; the point where policing started to fall apart with the surge in demand that was coming. Today our culture has become even more experimental: we regard it as a good thing to try something exotic and different, in a way that it just wasn’t 50 years ago. So it’s very hard to say, ‘That’s the way we are in culture. Oh – except for drugs, which have to be hived off.’”

Given that more people take more drugs than at any other time in history, you might wonder if they’ll ever be part of a counterculture again. At a time when Keith Richards is a bestselling author off the back of his national treasure status as a chemical dustbin, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has taken steps to decriminalise marijuana possession in California and Prince Harry is found inhaling “hippy crack”, it’s difficult to see how drugs could be more mainstream. “I wouldn’t be surprised if in five years, marijuana wasn’t fully legalised all over the US,” says Leffingwell. “Most people don’t see it as any more harmful than having a beer.”

Others suggest that the seeds of a new, drug-led counterculture are all around us. “I think smart drugs, things that boost your IQ such as Modafinil, could lend themselves to certain music,” says Jay. “Very techy electronica.”

To return to High Society’s premise, then: the drugs we consume may change – from over-the-counter laudanum in Victorian times, to over-the-internet mephedrone today – but the human relationship with them remains strangely constant. “Nothing’s changed,” says White. “The form changes, the fickleness changes – but our cravings stay the same.”

High Society: Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture is at the Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE from 11 Nov to 27 Feb. wellcomecollection.org

THE CASE FOR MARS

THE POETRY OF REALITY

WE ARE ALL CONNECTED

The fresh-faced 39-year-old man, in a dark T-shirt and jeans, is talking about travelling to Mars. Not now, but when he’s older and ready to swap life on Earth for one on the red planet. “It would be a good place to retire,” he says in all seriousness. Normally, this would be the time to make one’s excuses and leave the company of a lunatic. Or to smile politely and humour a space nerd’s unlikely fantasies. But this man needs to be taken seriously for one compelling reason: he already has his own spaceship.

From the Guardian by Paul Harris

This is Elon Musk, a brilliant entrepreneur who made a fortune from the internet and has invested vast amounts of it in building his own private space rocket company, SpaceX. Indeed, far from being crazy, Musk is the real-life inspiration for the movie character Tony Stark, the playboy scientist hero of the Iron Man franchise.

There are some similarities. Outside the SpaceX plant in the baking southern California sun, Musk’s sexy electric sports car sits in a reserved parking space (he co-founded Tesla, the firm which makes the vehicle), resembling the sort of motor Stark would drive. Musk is also engaged to the beautiful British actress Talulah Riley, star of St Trinian’s and St Trinian’s 2, and he used to get thrills from flying his own private military jet fighter.

What’s more, like Stark, Musk is on a mission to save the world. But while Stark’s aim was to battle evil-doers and achieve world peace, Musk’s mission is a little grander. He wants to secure humanity’s future by turning the human race into a space-faring people able to colonise other planets. It’s the only way, Musk believes, that we can be saved, either from destroying ourselves or from some outside calamity. To put it mildly, Musk thinks big and takes the long view. “It’s important that we attempt to extend life beyond Earth now,” he says in an accent hinting at his childhood in South Africa. “It is the first time in the four billion-year history of Earth that it’s been possible and that window could be open for a long time – hopefully it is – or it could be open for a short time. We should err on the side of caution and do something now.”

SpaceX is Musk’s attempt to do that something. Its headquarters are situated within earshot of the busy runways of Los Angeles International airport. The company’s logo stands proudly on an otherwise nondescript hangar-sized building. But inside, a revolution in space travel could be taking place.

The factory floor has been roughly organised into an assembly line to make space rockets, part of a process of wresting the future of space travel out of the hands of government bodies, such as Nasa, and into the hands of private businesses. Using its hyper-efficient Merlin engines, SpaceX has successfully flown its first rocket, Falcon 1, up into space, where it put a satellite into orbit. Then it successfully flew the much bigger Falcon 9 rocket earlier this year. Now the company is working on Dragon, a space capsule that will sit on top of a Falcon 9 and deliver first cargo – and then, hopefully, astronauts – to the International Space Station.

That is stunning stuff. SpaceX, which was only founded in 2002, is not even a decade old. Yet it is doing things in space that some countries with their own national space programmes have not yet achieved. “When we launched the initial rocket actually leaving the launch pad, that was awesome,” Musk says, gazing at the Dragon module being built. “Getting into orbit was when a lot of people thought: OK, it’s real. That’s something that South Korea tried a couple of times and they failed. Brazil tried three times and they failed. This is normally something a country does, and only a few countries have succeeded.”

SpaceX is not alone in aiming for the stars. A raft of private firms have joined in a new space race. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, is building a suborbital rocket called the Blue Origin New Shepard. John D Carmack, the man behind video games Doom and Quake, has his eyes on a lunar landing. Virgin Atlantic boss Richard Branson is aiming to kickstart space tourism with his Virgin Galactic project. Yet SpaceX is the most advanced and ambitious. Its rockets have already flown into space and it has won hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business contracts for future voyages.

Incredibly, however, SpaceX does not feel like a huge operation. It defeats the received wisdom that only major world powers, or gigantic corporations such as Boeing, can truly set their sights on leaving the grip of Earth’s gravity. Instead, SpaceX feels like a dotcom company. Inside the factory are all the accoutrements one expects of a booming Silicon Valley enterprise. All the office space is open-plan and even Musk has an open cubicle like everyone else. Employees – who dub themselves SpaceXers – wear casual T-shirts and are not afraid to sport goatee beards and a smattering of tattoos. They often travel around the assembly floor on tricycles and until recently, before SpaceX’s employee roster topped 1,000 people, Musk was personally involved in every single appointment. He believes the “all in it together” work culture of a start-up is vital to achieve the firm’s staggeringly ambitious agenda. “People work better when they know what the goal is and why. It is important that people look forward to coming to work in the morning and enjoy working.”

In fact, SpaceX’s Silicon Valley-style culture springs from Musk’s own background as one of the most successful – and wealthy – figures to emerge from the internet. His interest in technology began early. He bought his first computer at the age of 10 when he was growing up in Pretoria, South Africa, the son of a Canadian model and a South African engineer. Musk taught himself to write computer programs and sold his first commercial software – fittingly, a space game called Blastar – when he was just 12. He left at 17 to work on a relative’s farm in Canada, before going to the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated with two degrees, one in physics and the other in economics, before winning a place in 1995 at Stanford as a graduate student. He stayed there for two days before fleeing to start his first internet company, Zip2, which produced publishing software. In 1999, he sold it for more than $300m (£193m) and co-founded X.com, which eventually turned into PayPal. It was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5bn.

All of which left Musk wealthy beyond belief and could have led to a life of idle bliss. But besides being a very rich man, Musk is a determined one. Talking to him is a slightly unsettling experience. He is open and friendly, but there is a sense that – on some level – he is operating on a slightly higher plane. Asked why he does what he does, he gives an answer that seems rehearsed but rings totally sincere. “When I was in college there were three areas that I thought most would affect the future of humanity. Those were the internet, the transition to a sustainable energy economy, and space exploration and ultimately extending life beyond Earth and making it multi-planetary.”

For Musk, the best way to achieve that third goal was to popularise space travel and make it affordable. Thus SpaceX and its fleet of rockets were born. He investigated the science behind rocket launching and concluded that there was no real reason why it was so expensive. He believed the space industry was dominated by inefficient government bodies. By starting afresh, and going back to basics, Musk believed getting into space could be done quickly and cheaply. He was right. SpaceX’s Merlin engines are beautifully engineered and powerful, but simply made. They run on highly refined kerosene that costs less than petrol. The rockets they power – in the shape of the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 – are also simple. They have fewer stages (where one bit of the rocket separates from the other) than their rivals and are mostly re-usable. Thus they can put cargo into space for a fraction of the cost.

The Dragon module is also a throwback. It looks nothing like the space shuttle, which it essentially hopes to replace as the “taxi” service to the International Space Station. Instead, it resembles something from the 60s, being shaped like a shuttlecock. Not that Musk cares about looks. He just cares about the fact that it is being designed with windows: a sign of his commitment to one day put astronauts, including himself, inside it. “I would like to go up in a Dragon at some point,” he says. A few years after its first flying. I think it would be great, huge amounts of fun. A very life-changing experience.”

Of course, Musk’s life has already changed. You can’t be a real-life Tony Stark with plans to retire to Mars and not generate publicity. But it has not been easy for him. Musk, beneath his shell of otherworldliness, is charming and funny, but he finds being in the public eye difficult. He would prefer to spend his time happily working on his rockets, not giving interviews. “I had to learn to be a little more extroverted,” he says. “Ordinarily, I would sit in design meetings all day, exchanging ideas with people. But if I don’t tell the story then it doesn’t get out, and I want to try and get public support for extending life beyond Earth.”

Unfortunately, Musk has discovered that celebrity has a dark side. In his case, that was a painful divorce from his ex-wife, Canadian author Justine Musk, with whom he has five children. The split generated its fair share of media attention, not least because Justine has blogged extensively about the epic legal tussles over the terms of their settlement. As more details emerged, Musk decided to publish his version of events on the Huffington Post. The lengthy piece, in which he wrote about his finances and his relationship with Talulah Riley, began with the words, “Given the choice, I’d rather stick a fork in my hand than write about my personal life.”

Musk’s desire for privacy is perhaps surprising in a man so driven and successful. “I hate writing about personal stuff,” he says. “I don’t have a Facebook page. I don’t use my Twitter account. I am familiar with both, but I don’t use them.”

Outside work, where he spends up to 100 hours a week, Musk says he devotes nearly all his spare time to being a good dad. His children are the reason he gave up flying his military jet. “I have five kids and Iron Man does not have any kids,” he says. “After having kids and running companies, I had so many responsibilities I decided it was not wise to take personal risks.”

So are Musk and his entrepreneurial kin the future of space travel? As Nasa, the big daddy of the global space business, struggles with reduced budgets and a sceptical public, it seems perfectly possible. SpaceX is getting into orbit for a fraction of the cost of the space shuttle programme. It aims to make money as an ongoing business concern, rather than draining an ever-tightening public purse. It wants to drive the costs down and improve reliability and make space travel something that is open to everyone. Only private business, Musk thinks, can do that. “The fundamental barriers are improving reliability and reducing cost, and the government is not that good at either. Would you prefer to fly Virgin Atlantic or Soviet-era Aeroflot?”

But Musk remains a dreamer, not just a businessman. He did not create SpaceX to get rich for the second time. Instead, he is risking his fortune to start a company in a field most people said could not support a project like SpaceX. Again and again, he returns to the themes that keep him going. He sees what SpaceX is doing as part of humanity’s destiny. “I think life on Earth must be about more than just solving problems… It’s got to be something inspiring even if it is vicarious. When the US landed on the moon it was for all humanity. We count that as a human achievement. Anyone who could get near a TV got near a TV. If there was one TV in an African village and you had to walk 50 miles to get there, you’d do it,” he says.

And through it all is the desire to colonise Mars. Musk insists that his most powerful Falcon 9 rockets could already launch missions to Mars if assembled in Earth’s orbit. He wants SpaceX to help humanity spread into space, just like the first European explorers setting out for the New World. “One of the long-term goals of SpaceX is, ultimately, to get the price of transporting people and product to Mars to be low enough and with a high enough reliability that if somebody wanted to sell all their belongings and move to a new planet and forge a new civilisation they could do so.”

Musk’s belief that this can be achieved in two decades is something that most experts would scoff at but Musk, characteristically, finds it frustratingly slow. “Twenty years seems like semi-infinity to me. That’s a long time,” he says, as if surprised that anyone could doubt his aims. It is certainly tempting to dismiss it as a flight of fancy. Except, behind him on SpaceX’s factory floor, Musk’s nascent fleet of working space rockets are already being built.

Space race: the private firms aiming to fly you to the stars

SpaceX is not alone in aiming for the stars. A raft of private firms, set up by billionaires, most of them former CEOs or founders of dotcom or IT companies, have joined in a new space race. These space-age entrepreneurs include:

■ Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, now America’s largest online retailer. He set up his space company, Blue Origin, in 2000, though its existence only became public in 2003 when Bezos started buying land in Texas so that he could build a test site for his spacecraft. Blue Origin’s main project is New Shepard, a vertical take-off and landing rocket, that is designed to take tourists to the edge of Earth’s atmosphere: the edge of space .

■ John Carmack, the man behind video games such as Doom and Quake, has set up a company called Armadillo Aerospace which is developing a series of spacecraft including a lunar landing vehicle and a spacecraft which is also aimed at taking tourists to the edge of Earth’s atmosphere. Fares will cost around $100,000, says Carmack. The Virginia-based travel firm Space Adventures has signed an exclusive deal with Armadillo to sell tourist seats on its spaceships.

■ Richard Branson, is planning to start suborbital space-tourist flights on his Virgin Galactic spaceplanes within the next two years. In 2004 he signed a deal with the US inventor Burt Rutan to use the spaceplane technology that he had just developed. When flights begin, a small craft carrying half a dozen passengers – who will pay up to $200,000 – will be flown to the edge of the atmosphere. After a few minutes, the spacecraft will then spiral back to the ground. Branson says he expects first flights to begin within two years.

■ Jeff Greason’s XCOR Aerospace also aims to start suborbital tourist flights. XCOR is based in California where it designs, builds and operates rocket engines and rocket-powered vehicles to government and private markets. The Lynx spacecraft – fuelled by liquid oxygen and kerosene – is a two-seat rocket plane that can take off and land on a runway. The spacecraft has been designed to make up to four flights a day, carrying a single passenger into space where he or she can briefly experience weightlessness before returning to Earth.

■ Steve Bennett is Britain’s principal space engineer. His company, Starchaser, is developing rockets that are intended to blast paying passengers on 20-minute long suborbital flights that will include several minutes in which they will experience the delights of zero gravity.

■ However, SpaceX is the most advanced and ambitious player in the field. Its rockets have already flown into space and it has won hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business contracts for future payload launches.

Camilla Turner