Функционально-синтаксические особенности создания экспрессивности публицистического текста современных англоязычных изданий (на материале журналов National Geographic и The Economist) тема диссертации и автореферата по ВАК РФ 10.02.04, кандидат наук Михалчева Анастасия Витальевна

• Михалчева Анастасия Витальевна
• кандидат наук
• 2022

Оглавление диссертации кандидат наук Михалчева Анастасия Витальевна

ВВЕДЕНИЕ

ГЛАВА 1. ОСНОВНЫЕ ПОДХОДЫ К ИССЛЕДОВАНИЮ КАТЕГОРИИ ЭКСПРЕССИВНОСТИ В ОТЕЧЕСТВЕННОЙ И ЗАРУБЕЖНОЙ ЛИНГВИСТИКЕ

1.1 Стилистический подход

1.2 Семантический подход

1.3 Коммуникативно-деятельностный подход

1.4 Синтаксический подход

Вывод к Главе

ГЛАВА 2 ОСОБЕННОСТИ СИНТАКСИЧЕСКОЙ ЭКСПРЕССИВНОСТИ В ПУБЛИЦИСТИЧЕСКОМ ТЕКСТЕ

2.1 Публицистический текст как объект лингвистических исследований

2.1.1 Публицистический текст как категория стилистики

2.1.2 Публицистический текст в контексте медиалингвистики

2.1.3 Публицистический текст и медиастилистика

2.1.4 Публицистический текст как часть дискурсосферы

2.2 Лингвистические особенности статьи как разновидности публицистического текста

2.3 Особенности употребления экспрессивных синтаксических средств в текстах группы features

2.3.1 Характеристика издания National Geographic

2.3.2 Характеристика издания The Economist

2.3.3 Сравнительный анализ средств синтаксической экспрессивности

Вывод к Главе

ГЛАВА 3 АНАЛИЗ ФУНКЦИОНИРОВАНИЯ СИНТАКСИЧЕСКИХ ПРИЕМОВ ЭКСПРЕССИВНОСТИ В ПУБЛИЦИСТИЧЕСКОМ ТЕКСТЕ

3.1 Космос

3.2 Технологии

3.3 Наука

3.4 Природа

3.5 Социальные проблемы

3.6 Сравнительный анализ коммуникативных интенций в статьях изданий National

Geographic и The Economist

Выводы к Главе

ЗАКЛЮЧЕНИЕ

ЛИТЕРАТУРА

СПИСОК ИСТОЧНИКОВ

ПРИЛОЖЕНИЕ

Приложение 1 Статьи по теме «Космос»

1.1 Space Odyssey

1.2 Beyond the Blue Marble

1.3 Pluto at Last

1.4 Junk Hunting

1.5 Orbital Ecosystem

1.6 Blue World

Приложение 2 Статьи по теме «Технологии»

2.1 Shoot for the Moon. Again

2.2 Africa's Tech Generation

2.3 They are watching

2.4 Underground Adventures

2.5 Urban Aviators

2.6 Face off

Приложение 3 Статьи по теме «Наука»

3.1 The science of Good and Evil

3.2 DNA Revolution

3.3 Beyond Human

3.4 DNA and how to adjust it

3.5 No dumping, please

3.6 Rejuvenation juice

Приложение 4 Статьи по теме «Природа»

4.1 Flight school

4.2 Why birds matter

4.3 Shark Frenzy

4.4 By the Hand of man created?

4.5 Crucibles of cosmopolitan creation

4.6 Climate blame game

Приложение 5 Статьи по теме «Социальные проблемы»

5.1 A Place to Go

5.2 Being Muslim in America

5.3 The Healing of Columbia

5.4 The Happy few

5.5 Taking Liberties

5.6 Believe, boys, believe

Введение диссертации (часть автореферата) на тему «Функционально-синтаксические особенности создания экспрессивности публицистического текста современных англоязычных изданий (на материале журналов National Geographic и The Economist)»

ВВЕДЕНИЕ

Категория экспрессивности занимает одно из центральных мест в современной лингвистической науке в виду того, что основным приоритетом научных исследований является изучение влияния текста на его адресата, выяснение субъективной стороны речи на уровне предложения и текста. Особую роль в таких исследованиях занимает изучение «большого» синтаксиса, т.е. особенностей построения предложения и текста, в частности, экспрессивных синтаксических конструкций как средства воздействия автора на читателя, а также отражения его точки зрения на описываемые события. В настоящей диссертации была предпринята попытка комплексного анализа экспрессивных синтаксических средств и их роли в воздействии на реципиента.

Актуальность работы обусловлена доминирующей ролью средств массовой информации в жизни человека, их проникновением во все сферы деятельности людей, а также их вкладом в развитие современного литературного языка, поскольку именно в текстах массовой информации отражается актуальное состояние языка со всеми узуальными вариантами его употребления. Синтаксические единицы играют огромную роль в построении высказывания и передаче смысла со всеми коммуникативными интенциями адресанта. Именно поэтому необходимо выяснить, посредством каких экспрессивных синтаксических средств автор публицистического текста передает субъективное восприятие объективных фактов и событий и достигает необходимого уровня воздействия на общественное сознание, разум и чувства человека.

Объектом исследования настоящей диссертационной работы выступают экспрессивные синтаксические конструкции в публицистических текстах.

Предметом исследования является проблема функционирования приемов экспрессивного синтаксиса в статьях группы features, освещающих события в сферах науки, культуры, искусства и имеющих непосредственное отношение к жизни читателей, в соответствии с коммуникативными интенциями автора.

Цель данного исследования - комплексный анализ приемов синтаксической экспрессивности с учетом коммуникативной интенции адресанта.

Цель, объект и предмет исследования предполагают постановку и реализацию следующих задач:

- определить различные подходы к описанию лингвистической категории экспрессивности для выделения ее основных характеристик;

- проанализировать отличительные черты качественной прессы;

- охарактеризовать основные черты публицистического текста в статьях группы features;

- представить и классифицировать средства экспрессивного синтаксиса в соответствии с доминирующим принципом построения конструкции;

- выявить особенности функционирования и дистрибуции разновидностей экспрессивных синтаксических конструкций;

- проанализировать взаимосвязи экспрессивных синтаксических конструкций с коммуникативной интенцией автора.

Для решения поставленных задач в диссертационном исследовании использованы следующие методы: метод сплошной выборки, метод количественного подсчета, метод контекстологического анализа, метод сопоставительного анализа, метод лингвистического описания.

Материалом исследования послужили 30 статей англоязычных изданий National Geographic и The Economist, отобранных в период с 2017 по 2019 гг. методом сплошной выборки и объединенных по общности тем, среди которых выделены «Космос», «Наука», «Технологии», «Природа» и «Социальные проблемы».

Методологической основой диссертационного исследования послужили научные труды в области категории экспрессивности (Ш. Балли, Т.Г. Винокур, А.И. Арнольд, М.Н. Кожина, В.Н. Телия, В.И. Шаховский, В.А. Маслова); теории экспрессивного синтаксиса (О.В. Александрова, Г.Н. Акимова, Э.М. Береговская, А.П. Сковородников, Е.А. Иванчикова); стилистики, лингвостилистики и лингвопоэтики (В.В. Виноградов, О.С. Ахманова, А.А. Липгарт, В.Я. Задорнова,

В.Г. Костомаров, А.Н. Васильева, Г.Я. Солганик); положения медиалингвистики и медиастилистики (Т.Г. Добросклонская, Т.В. Шмелева, Л.Р. Дускаева, Н.И. Клушина, О.Б. Сиротинина), а также результаты исследования медиадискурса в рамках дискурсосферы печатных СМИ (Е.О. Менджерицкая).

Научная новизна исследования состоит в том, что в нем проводится комплексный анализ особенностей функционирования и дистрибуции конструкций экспрессивного синтаксиса в современных англоязычных публицистических текстах, в частности в текстах статей группы features. В данном исследовании была разработана классификация системы экспрессивных синтаксических конструкций в соответствии с доминирующим принципом их образования: симметрия, нарушение структуры, добавление информации, избыточность или вопросительная структура предложения. Обосновываются типологические особенности анализируемых англоязычных статей, относящихся к текстам группы features, определяющие выбор экспрессивных средств для эмоционального воздействия на адресата. Благодаря сопоставительному анализу экспрессивных приемов синтаксиса, выделяемых в англоязычных источниках исследования, были выделены основные коммуникативные интенции адресанта, направленные на воздействие на интеллектуальную и эмоциональную сферы читателя.

На защиту выносятся следующие положения:

1. Основными приемами репрезентации категории экспрессивности на синтаксическом уровне в текстах группы features являются парентетическая конструкция, синтаксический параллелизм, инверсия, риторический вопрос, расщепленное предложение и различные виды повторов.

2. Экспрессивные синтаксические конструкции в текстах группы features используются авторами статей в целях актуализации воздействия в соответствии с авторскими намерениями.

3. Применяемые экспрессивные синтаксические конструкции отличаются как формой, так и выполняемой функцией в соответствии с намерениями автора и целевой установкой издания.

4. Разнообразие и механизмы создания экспрессивного эффекта напрямую зависят как от направленности издания и его доминирующей функции (информирование, воздействие или развлечение), так и от типа создания текста (корпоративный или авторский).

5. Наиболее характерным приемом синтаксической экспрессии в текстах группы features являются парентетические внесения, а также различные виды повторов, что обусловлено коммуникативной интенцией автора и особенностями целевой аудитории.

6. Наиболее распространенной коммуникативной интенцией применения приемов экспрессивного синтаксиса выступает уточнение, благодаря которому авторы объясняют значение какого-либо культурологического концепта или устанавливают источник полученных данных, что играет ключевую роль в раскрытии заложенного смысла транслируемой автором объективной и субъективной информации.

Теоретическая значимость исследования. Работа вносит вклад в развитие стилистики, углубление теоретических представлений об экспрессивности как синтаксической категории, продолжая разрабатывать положения теории экспрессивного синтаксиса, в частности за счет развития представлений о функциях экспрессивных синтаксических конструкций в англоязычных публицистических текстах группы features.

Практическая ценность диссертационного исследования состоит в том, что его выводы и результаты могут быть использованы в преподавании курсов стилистики английского языка, филологического анализа текста, медиалингвистики и журналистики.

Апробация результатов исследования осуществлялась на заседаниях кафедры английской филологии Тульского государственного педагогического университета им. Л.Н. Толстого в процессе обсуждения содержания и поэтапных результатов работы (2016-2021). Основные выводы были представлены на всероссийской очно-заочной научно-практической конференции «Современные подходы в преподавании иностранных языков в свете ФГОС» (2017), на научных

конференциях научно-педагогических работников, аспирантов, магистрантов ТГПУ им. Л. Н. Толстого «Университет XXI века: научное измерение» (2018, 2020), на региональных научно-практических конференциях магистрантов, аспирантов и молодых ученых «Исследовательский потенциал молодых ученых: взгляд в будущее» (2018, 2019, 2021). Основные положения работы нашли свое отражение в одиннадцати публикациях, пять из которых опубликованы в изданиях, рекомендованных для защиты диссертации в МГУ им. М. В. Ломоносова.

Структура работы содержит введение, три главы, заключение и приложение, включающее тексты проанализированных статей.

ГЛАВА 1. ОСНОВНЫЕ ПОДХОДЫ К ИССЛЕДОВАНИЮ КАТЕГОРИИ ЭКСПРЕССИВНОСТИ В ОТЕЧЕСТВЕННОЙ И ЗАРУБЕЖНОЙ ЛИНГВИСТИКЕ

На протяжении длительного времени исследование категории экспрессивности не теряет своей актуальности, что связано с ее значительным вкладом в коммуникативный процесс. Данное языковое явление выражается с помощью просодии, структуры высказывания, а также особого выбора лексических единиц. Именно с помощью использования языковых средств различного уровня говорящий может выражать свое субъективное мнение по отношению к происходящему или описываемому.

В научном мире существуют разнообразные способы и подходы изучения категории экспрессивности, что отражает сложную природу и значимость данного языкового явления. Экспрессивность является неотъемлемой частью общения, так как обладает способностью в сжатом формате передать не только фактическую информацию, но и ее прагматическую составляющую. Рассмотрим основополагающие подходы к исследуемой категории экспрессивности, на которые опирается данная работа.

1.1 Стилистический подход

Категория экспрессивности входит в категориальный аппарат стилистики, к задачам которой относится изучение разных стилей речи, а также описание «экспрессивно-эмоционально-оценочных» языковых средств [Ахманова, 1969: 454] и наблюдение за процессом их функционального отбора в речи. Одним из первых, проявивших интерес к категории экспрессивности как стилистическому явлению, был Шарль Балли, который считал, что именно стилистика изучает «эмоциональную экспрессию» языковых единиц и речевые факторы, влияющие на формирование системы средств выразительности языка [Балли, 2001: 17]. Швейцарский лингвист утверждает, что основной задачей стилистики «является

изучение экспрессивной системы речевых фактов» с точки зрения их эмоционального содержания [Балли, 2001: 33]. Свое исследование по выявлению признаков экспрессивности в тексте швейцарский лингвист разделяет на 3 этапа: на предварительном этапе выделяется экспрессивный факт, т.е. определяются его точные границы; на собственно стилистическом этапе производится изучение эмоциональной окраски, использованных средств языка, а также взаимоотношений между экспрессивными фактами, образующими экспрессивную систему языка; на этапе идентификации данный факт приравнивается к мысли с помощью неэмоционального слова-идентификатора. Особую роль для определения экспрессивного факта швейцарский лингвист отдает окружению экспрессивной лексической единицы, к которому кроме контекста он относит экстралингвистические факторы: мимику и интонацию. Суть выявления стилистической экспрессивной окраски, по мнению лингвиста, заключается в выявлении эмоционального компонента, который и определяет роль речевой единицы в системе экспрессивных средств языка. Носители языка бессознательно ощущают присутствие многообразия выразительных средств в языке, которые передают одно и то же логическое значение. Эти языковые факты группируются в сознании человека в виде синонимичных групп. Впоследствии, в зависимости от ситуации общения, говорящий может выбрать подходящую по степени экспрессивности лексическую или синтаксическую конструкцию для передачи смысла высказывания. Ш. Балли приводит примеры, иллюстрирующие разное эмоциональное восприятие одинаковых по содержанию и наличию экспрессивных средств языка речевых конструкций, на которое также влияют и экстралингвистические факторы: жесты, мимика, модуляции голоса и манера речи. Такие выразительные средства языка Ш. Балли предлагает называть «приемами индивидуальной речи» [Балли, 2001:101]. Общей чертой всех приемов индивидуальной речи, как утверждает швейцарский лингвист, является использование периферических средств языка, т.е. таких лингвистических единиц, значение и узус которых могут варьироваться в зависимости от ситуации общения и того смысла, который в них вкладывает говорящий. Именно благодаря такому

разнообразному выбору появляется возможность в определенной мере свободно передать не только логическое содержание высказывания, но и показать эмоциональную составляющую речи.

В своей книге «Язык и жизнь» Ш. Балли утверждает, что любая речь стремится передать рациональную и эмоциональную стороны жизни, тем самым подчеркивая, что каждая идея, соприкасаясь с реальностью, приобретает аффективность, экспрессивность, смысл которой, по мнению лингвиста, заключается в изменении выражения качественно и количественно, т.е. не только в изменении заложенного в высказывание смысла, но и намеренного искажения формы выражения. Аффективность, которую ученый понимает как «естественное и спонтанное выражение субъективных форм человеческого мышления» [Балли, 2018: 98], проявляется с помощью выразительных, или экспрессивных, средств языка и речи не только с помощью использования переносного значения лексических единиц, но и благодаря нарушению синтаксиса предложения. Более того, из-за необходимости выражения аффективности язык настолько обогащается экспрессивными синтаксическими формами, что они постепенно теряют свою выразительность и становятся общеупотребительными, способствуя дальнейшему развитию языка. Ш. Балли также описывает приемы экспрессивного функционирования языка. Поскольку язык по своей форме стремится к логичности и краткости выражения мысли, речь обладает способностью передать эмоцию имплицитно, т.е. с помощью ассоциаций, «трансформируя концепт в воображаемое представление» [Балли, 2018: 108]. Лингвист отмечает особую роль различных приемов ритмической организации высказывания (мелодики, ударения, длительности, паузы) в передаче эмоционального состояния говорящего.

Ш. Балли отмечает, что основным свойством экспрессивности является «синтетическая импликация» [Балли, 2018:121], которая заключается в постоянном отклонении от идеала коммуникации, т.е. от линейности и моносемии. Именно экспрессивность приписывает дополнительные оттенки значений, не выражаемые эксплицитно, нарушая принцип линейности языка, а также становится основой порождения полисемии, расщепляя значение знака, что позволяет его

использование как в прямом, так и переносном значении. Таким образом, согласно концепции Ш. Балли, предназначение стилистики заключается в анализе эмоциональной экспрессии элементов языка и выявления всей гаммы аффективных значений морфологических, лексических и грамматических языковых единиц в сравнении с логическими категориями, а также комбинация этих аффективных значений с экстралингвистическими факторами и ситуацией общения, которые в совокупности наиболее точно передают фактическую и эмоциональную составляющую информационного сообщения.

И.В. Арнольд определяет экспрессивность как свойство текста или его части, передающее смысл с «увеличенной интенсивностью» [Арнольд,1999: 206]. По ее мнению, экспрессивность выражает состояние говорящего, его внутренние переживания, а в качестве результата наличия экспрессивности в высказывании выступает эмоциональное и логическое усиление, которое может быть или не быть образным. Разрабатывая стилистику декодирования, все средства передачи экспрессивности она объединяет под общим термином «выдвижение», под которым понимается присутствие в тексте каких-либо формальных признаков, главная задача которых - фокусирование внимания читателя на ключевых чертах текста [Арнольд, 1990]. С помощью выдвижения устанавливаются смысловые межуровневые связи языковых единиц или дистантных элементов текста, обеспечивая единство структуры и смысла текста и помогая читателю осознать значимость описываемых образов и их роль в процессе передачи мысли. Более того, использование автором выдвижения способствует организации контекста таким образом, что внимание читателя фокусируется на важных элементах передаваемого сообщения, благодаря чему устанавливаются семантически релевантные и иерархические отношения между этими элементами, усиливая экспрессивный, оценочный потенциал текста и передавая имплицитный смысл этого текста.

К основным средствам выдвижения И.В. Арнольд относит сцепление, конвергенцию, обманутое ожидание, сильную позицию и др. [Арнольд, 2010]. Именно на основе взаимодействия в тексте разных типов выдвижения и передается

его экспрессивность, что, согласно стилистике декодирования, помогает читателю точнее понять передаваемый смысл и насладиться эстетической упорядоченностью анализируемого текста.

М.Н. Кожина отмечает, что язык не должен быть рассмотрен с точки зрения лишь денотативно-десигнативного аспекта, поскольку в сознании присутствует и аксиологический, оценочный аспект, т.е. в единице языка равноправно сосуществуют логико-предметное и коннотативное значения. Ученый говорит, что язык выступает средством общения и раскрывает свой потенциал только в коммуникативном процессе, т.е. с учетом влияния экстралингвистических факторов, определяющих стилевую окрашенность речи [Кожина, 2014].

М.Н. Кожина говорит о существовании экспрессивной стилистики, которая смыкается со стилистикой ресурсов, изучающей стилистически окрашенные средства языка, их семантически-функциональные оттенки и выразительный потенциал. К задачам экспрессивной стилистики относится, прежде всего, изучение коннотативной сферы языка, т.е. анализ не только стилистических ресурсов, но и экспрессивно-эмоционально-оценочных средств. Этот раздел стилистики исследует способы проявления выразительности в речи с учетом коммуникативной ситуации. М.Н. Кожина отмечает, что предметом изучения экспрессивной стилистики выступают не только различные выразительные языковые средства, но и своеобразные традиционные и окказиональные приемы и способы использования данных средств и достигаемый с их помощью коммуникативно-стилистический эффект [Кожина и др., 2008].

Ученый утверждает, что целесообразно выделять языковую и речевую экспрессию, которая в первом случае рассматривается как «совокупность взятых внеконтекстуально коннотаций языковых единиц», а вторая - как «наилучшая реализация языковыми единицами в речи ее коммуникативных задач» [Кожина, 2014: 251]. Таким образом, языковую экспрессию можно рассматривать как потенциальную, изначально заложенную в семантике, но нереализованную в полной мере, поскольку наилучшим способом реализации этой экспрессии является ее эксплификация в речи [Кожина, 2014]. Достижение коммуникативных

задач возможно с помощью системной организации этих экспрессивных единиц, т.е. для каждой сферы и ситуации общения возможно использовать свою определенную систему экспрессивных средств и приемов. Из этого следует, что можно говорить об особой экспрессивности, специфичной для каждого функционального стиля и выступающей его неотъемлемой частью и своеобразной характеристикой.

Категория экспрессивности также входит в сферу научных интересов Т.Г. Винокур. Занимаясь исследованием проблем стилистики, ученый считает, что объективная интерпретация стилистических явлений возможна только путем наблюдения над процессом функционального отбора и характеристики его экспрессивного результата непосредственно в речи [Винокур, 2009]. Тем самым, Т.Г. Винокур подчеркивает неотъемлемую роль функционального отбора в создании экспрессии речи, отмечая, что экспрессивная, стилистическая коннотация является неотделимой частью языкового знака, причем в качестве знака она рассматривает не только лексический пласт языка, но и различные синтаксические конструкции. Приводя примеры использования синонимов из разных стилистических пластов, лингвист иллюстрирует процесс формирования предметно-логических различий на основе стилистических различий. В таких синонимических ситуациях экспрессивность основывается на противопоставлении как разных стилистических синонимов, так и на противопоставлении «заимствованное - свое», когда прослеживается совпадение понятий разных языков [Винокур, 2009:15], а также на количественных характеристиках слова.

Также Т.Г. Винокур отмечает, что стилистическая окраска в семантической структуре основывается на оценке, что говорит о невозможности точного разделения функциональной и экспрессивной окрашенности языковых единиц, так как проявление последней возможно лишь с помощью особенностей функционально-стилистического отбора. Тем не менее, она считает возможным использование экспрессивно-оценочных и функциональных средств языка для разделения языковых стилей, где первые конституируют экспрессивную систему стилей, а вторые - функциональную.

Исследуя природу стилистического значения, языковед приходит к выводу, что оно представлено не только непосредственно в речи, но и изначально заложено в языковой системе, что делает его единицей узуса. Употребление вне узуса делает экспрессию абстрактной, а конкретную форму она приобретает лишь конкретизацией в узусе. Входящая в семантическую структуру эмотивная окраска или прикрепленная функциональная значимость единицы языка неотделимы друг от друга, из чего возникает «круговая причинность» - употребление единицы языка в определенных условиях из-за ее экспрессивности, а экспрессивность, в свою очередь, проявляется при определенных условиях употребления [Винокур, 2009: 33]. На основе этого Т.Г. Винокур выделяет первичную экспрессию, которая проявляется в виде генетически заложенной в семантической структуре единицы языка ярко выраженной эмотивной окраски, и вторичную экспрессию, выраженную функциональной обусловленностью употребления языковой единицы. Лингвист предлагает термин «стилистический узус» как некую совокупность явлений, подтверждающих существование определенных законов использования носителями языка его стилистических ресурсов [Винокур, 2018: 5]. Благодаря использованию данного термина стилистическое описание языковых элементов не будет рассматриваться в отрыве от языковой действительности, что даст более четкую картину всей системы экспрессивных единиц языка. Языковед подчеркивает, что стилистический узус использует не номинативные, а коммуникативные свойства слова, т.е. в его основе лежит не действительное описание предметов реального мира, а использование представлений о них в процессе общения с целью передачи субъективного отношения к сообщаемой информации. Т.Г. Винокур полагает, что объектом исследования стилистики является не статистическая картина языковой системы экспрессивно-функциональных средств, а динамическая картина употребления данных элементов носителем языка [Винокур, 2018]. Более того, высшим этапом процесса языкового отбора она считает именно стилистический отбор языковых единиц, который кроме самой вербализации действительности еще и передает социальную информацию, что указывает на особую значимость стилистического отбора в

коммуникативном процессе. Лингвист отмечает невозможность выявления средств языка, которые бы использовались для передачи лишь одного экспрессивного эффекта. Напротив, одно стилистическое явление может стать основой для создания многочисленных приемов экспрессивности речи в соответствии с коммуникативными задачами и условиями реализации общения. Она подчеркивает, что константой любой коммуникации выступает стилистическое значение, вокруг которого формируются и взаимодействуют остальные элементы стилистического комплекса: стилистические средства и приемы. Именно стилистическое значение выступает как обобщающий термин для всех типов экспрессивной семантики, которая осложняет лексические и грамматические языковые единицы.

Рассматривая компоненты стилистического значения, Т.Г. Винокур приходит к выводу, что присутствие экспрессии является необходимым условием для выражения стилистического смысла в любом стилистически маркированном средстве языка. В концепции лингвиста стилистическое значение является ядром плана стилистического содержания, в то время как экспрессия выступает ключевым средством плана выражения стилистически маркированного языкового знака. Отмечая, что термин «экспрессия» является обобщающим для «функциональности» и «эмоциональности», она отмечает их слитность, способность экспрессии подчеркивать не только отношение знака к предмету, но и человека к этому знаку. Тем не менее, такое объединение двух терминов, по мнению Т.Г. Винокур, не приводит к отождествлению их роли в коммуникативном процессе: они сохраняют свои дифференциальные черты, но объединяются и дополняют друг друга в целях создания выразительного эффекта высказывания. Таким образом, исследователь понимает экспрессию как «выразительность высказывания, создаваемую слиянием эмотивных и функционально-ограниченных свойств стилистических значений» [Винокур, 2018: 57], а назначение узуальной стилистики она видит в изучении экспрессивных возможностей языкового выражения.

Список литературы диссертационного исследования кандидат наук Михалчева Анастасия Витальевна, 2022 год

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30. Verhovek S.H. Shoot for the Moon. Again // National Geographic. 2017.№8 PP. 30 -61

ПРИЛОЖЕНИЕ Приложение 1 Статьи по теме «Космос» 1.1 Space Odyssey

By Scott Kelly

National Geographic, August, 2017

Looking down A T the planet from 200 miles in space, I feel as though I know the Earth in an intimate way most people don't —the coastlines, terrains, mountains, and rivers. Some parts of the world, especially in Asia, are so blanketed by air pollution that they appear sick, in need of treatment or at least a chance to heal. The line of our atmosphere on the horizon looks as thin as a contact lens over an eye, and its fragility seems to demand our protection. One of my favorite views of Earth is of the Bahamas, a large archipelago with a stunning contrast from light to dark colors. The vibrant deep blue of the ocean mixes with a much brighter turquoise, swirled with something almost like gold, where the sun bounces off the shallow sand and reefs. Whenever new crewmates come up to the International Space Station, I always make a point of taking them to the Cupola—a module made entirely of windows looking down on Earth—to see the Bahamas. That sight always reminds me to stop and appreciate the view of Earth I have the privilege of experiencing.

Sometimes when I'm looking out the window it occurs to me that everything that matters to me, every person who has ever lived and died (minus our crew of six) is down there. Other times, of course, I'm aware that the people on the station with me are the whole of humanity for me now. If I'm going to talk to someone in the flesh, look someone in the eye, ask someone for help, share a meal with someone, it will be one of the five people up here with me.

This is my fourth mission to space, my second to the ISS, and I've been here for three weeks now. I'm getting better at knowing where I am when I first wake up, but I'm often still disoriented about how my body is positioned. I'll wake up convinced that I'm upside down, because in the dark and without gravity, my inner ear just takes a

random guess on the position of my body in the small space. When I turn on a light, I have a sort of visual illusion that the room is rotating rapidly as it reorients itself around me, though I know it's actually my brain readjusting in response to new sensory input.

My crew quarters are just barely big enough for me and my sleeping bag, two laptops, some clothes, toiletries, photos of Amiko (my longtime girlfriend) and my daughters, a few paperback books. Without getting out of my sleeping bag, I wake up one of the two computers attached to the wall and look at my schedule. Much of today is to be taken up with one long task labeled DRAGON CAPTURE.

The station is sometimes described as an object: "The International Space Station is the most expensive object ever created." "The ISS is the only object whose components were manufactured by different countries and assembled in space." That much is true. But when you live inside the station for days and weeks and months, it doesn't feel like an object. It feels like a place, a very specific place with its own personality and its own unique characteristics. It has an inside and an outside and rooms upon rooms, each of which has different purposes, its own equipment and hardware, and its own feeling and smell, distinct from the others. Each module has its own story and its own quirks.

From the outside the ISS looks like a number of giant empty soda cans attached to each other end to end. Roughly the size of a football field, the station is made up of five modules connected the long way—three American and two Russian. More modules, including ones from Europe and Japan as well as the United States, are connected as offshoots to port and starboard, and the Russians have three that are attached "up" and "down" (we call these directions zenith and nadir). Between my first time visiting the space station and this mission, it has grown by seven modules, a significant proportion of its volume. This growth is not haphazard but reflects an assembly sequence that had been planned since the beginning of the space station project in the 1990s.

Whenever visiting vehicles are berthed here for a time, there is a new "room," usually on the Earth-facing side of the station; to get into one of them I have to turn "down" rather than left or right. Those rooms get roomier as we get the cargo unpacked, then get smaller again as we fill them with trash. Not that we need the space—especially

on the U.S. side, the station feels quite spacious, and in fact we can lose each other in here easily. But the appearance of extra rooms—and then their disappearance after we set them loose—is a strange feature most homes don't have.

Since before the space shuttle was retired, NASA has been contracting with private companies to develop spacecraft capable of supplying the station with cargo and, at some point in the future, new crews. The most successful private company so far has been Space Exploration Technologies, better known as SpaceX, which produces the Dragon spacecraft. Yesterday a Dragon launched from a pad at Cape Canaveral. Since then Dragon has been in orbit a safe 10 kilometers from us. This morning our aim is to capture it with the space station's robot arm and attach it to the docking port on the station. The process of grappling a visiting vehicle is a bit like playing a video game that tests hand-eye coordination, except that it involves real equipment worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Not only could an error cause us to lose or damage the Dragon and the millions of dollars' worth of supplies on board, but a slip of the hand could easily crash the visiting vehicle into the station. An accident with a resupply ship has happened before, when a cargo spacecraft struck the old Russian space station Mir, though its crew was lucky enough not to have been killed by decompression when the Progress crashed into its hull.

These uncrewed spacecraft are the only way we can get supplies from Earth. The Russian Soyuz spacecraft has the capability to send three humans to space, but there is almost no room left over for anything else. SpaceX has had a lot of success so far with their Dragon spacecraft and Falcon rocket, and in 2012 they became the first private company to reach the ISS. Since then they have become one of our regular suppliers, along with the Russian Progress and Orbital ATK's Cygnus, and they hope to be ready to fly astronauts on the Dragon in the next few years. If they can pull that off, they will be the first private company to carry human beings to orbit, and that launch will be the first time astronauts leave Earth from the United States since the space shuttle was retired in 2011.

Right now Dragon is carrying 4,300 pounds of supplies we need. There is food, water, and oxygen; spare parts and supplies for the systems that keep us alive; health

care supplies like needles and vacuum tubes for drawing our blood, sample containers, medications; clothing and towels and washcloths, all of which we throw away after using them as long as we can. Dragon will also be carrying new science experiments for us to carry out, as well as new samples to keep the existing ones going. Notable among the science experiments is a small population of live mice for a study we will be carrying out on how weightlessness affects bone and muscle. Each resupply spacecraft also carries small care packages from our families, which we always look forward to, and precious supplies of fresh food that we enjoy for just a few days, until it runs out or goes bad. Fruits and vegetables seem to rot much faster here than on Earth. I'm not sure why, and seeing the process makes me worry that the same thing is happening to my own cells.

We are especially looking forward to this Dragon's arrival because another resupply rocket exploded just after launch back in October 2014. That one was a Cygnus flown by another private contractor, U.S.-based Orbital ATK. The station is always supplied far beyond the needs of the current crew, so there was no immediate danger of running out of food or oxygen when those supplies were lost. Still, this was the first time a rocket to resupply the ISS had failed in years, and it destroyed millions of dollars' worth of equipment. The loss of vital supplies like food and oxygen made everyone think harder about what would happen if a string of failures were to occur. A few days after the explosion, an experimental space plane being developed by Virgin Galactic crashed in the Mojave Desert, killing the copilot. These failures were unrelated, of course, but the timing made it feel as though a string of bad luck might be catching up with us after years of success.

Back in my crew quarters I get dressed while reading and clicking through emails. Getting dressed is a bit of a hassle when you can't "sit" or "stand," but I've gotten used to it. The most challenging thing is putting on my socks—without gravity to help me bend over, I'm using only core strength and flexibility to pull my legs up to my chest. It's not a challenge to figure out what to wear, since I wear the same thing every day: a pair of khaki pants with lots of pockets and strips of Velcro across the thighs, crucial when I can't put anything "down." I have decided to experiment with how long I can

make my clothes last, the idea of going to Mars in the back of my mind. Can a pair of underwear be worn four days instead of just two? Can a pair of socks last a month? Can a pair of pants last six months? I aim to find out. I put on my favorite black T-shirt and a sweatshirt that, because it's flying with me for the third time, has to be the most traveled piece of clothing in the history of clothing.

Dressed and ready for breakfast, I open the door to my quarters. As I push against the back wall to float myself out, I accidentally kick loose a paperback book: Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage, by Alfred Lansing. I brought this book with me on my previous flight as well, and sometimes I flip through it after a long day on the station and reflect on what these explorers went through almost exactly a hundred years before. They were stranded on ice floes for months at a time, forced to kill their dogs for food, and nearly froze to death in the biting cold. They hiked across mountains that had been considered impassable by explorers who were better equipped and not half-starved. Most remarkable, not a single member of the expedition was lost.

When I try to put myself in their place, I think the uncertainty must have been the worst thing. They must have wondered if they could survive, and that doubt must have been worse than the hunger and the cold. When I read about their experiences, I think about how much harder they had it than I do. Sometimes I'll pick up the book specifically for that reason. If I'm inclined to feel sorry for myself because I miss my family or because I had a frustrating day or because the isolation is getting to me, reading a few pages about the Shackleton expedition reminds me that even if I have it hard up here in some ways, I'm certainly not going through what they did. It's all about perspective. I tuck the book back in with a few other personal items. Maybe I'll read a few pages before I go to sleep tonight.

Dragon is now in its orbit 10 kilometers away from us, matching our speed of 17,500 miles per hour. We can see its light blinking at us on the external cameras. Soon SpaceX ground control in Hawthorne, California, will move it to within 2.5 kilometers, then 1.2 kilometers, then 250 meters, then 30 meters, then 10 meters. At each stopping point, teams on the ground will check Dragon's systems and evaluate its position before calling "go" or "no go" to move on to the next stage. Inside of 250 meters we will get

involved by monitoring the approach, making sure the vehicle stays within a safe corridor, is behaving as expected—and that we are ready to abort if required. Once it's close enough, my crewmate Samantha Cristoforetti will grapple it with the station's robot arm. This is a glacially slow and deliberate process, and this is one of the many things that's very different between movies and real life. In the films Gravity and 2001: A Space Odyssey, a visiting spacecraft zips up to a space station and locks onto it; then a hatch pops open and people pass through, all over the course of about 90 seconds. In reality we operate with the knowledge that one spacecraft is always a potentially fatal threat to another—a bigger threat the closer it gets—and so we move slowly and deliberately.

Samantha will operate the robot arm from the robotics workstation in the Cupola. Terry Virts, the only other American on board, will be her backup, and I will be helping out with the approach and rendezvous procedures. Terry and I squeeze into the Cupola with Samantha, watching the data screen over her shoulder that shows the speed and position of Dragon.

Like me, Terry was a test pilot before joining NASA—in his case, with the Air Force. His call sign is Flanders, after the lovably square character Ned Flanders on The Simpsons. Terry has the positive attributes of Ned Flanders—optimism, enthusiasm, friendliness—and none of the negative ones. I've found him to be consistently competent, and I appreciate that as a leader he is a consensus builder rather than an authoritarian. Since I've been up here, he has always been respectful of my previous experience, always open to suggestions about how to do things better rather than getting defensive or competitive. He loves baseball, so there is always a game on somewhere on the station, especially when the Astros or the Orioles are playing. I've gotten used to the rhythm of the nine-inning games marking time for a few hours of our workdays.

Samantha is one of the few women to have served as a fighter pilot in the Italian Air Force, and she is unfailingly competent in everything technical. She is also friendly and quick to laugh, and among her many other qualifications to fly in space, she has a rare talent for language. She has native-level fluency in English and Russian (the two

official languages of the ISS) as well as French, German, and her native Italian. She is also working on learning Chinese.

For some people who hope to fly in space, language can be a challenge. We all have to be able to speak a second language (I've been studying Russian for years, and my cosmonaut crewmates speak English much better than I speak Russian), but the European and Japanese astronauts have the added burden of learning two languages if they don't already speak English or Russian. For Samantha this wasn't a problem. In fact her Russian and English are both so good that she sometimes acts as an interpreter between cosmonauts and astronauts if we have to talk about something nuanced or complicated.

David Saint-Jacques, a Canadian astronaut at Mission Control in Houston, will talk us through the capture process, announcing Dragon's position as it moves, controlled from the ground through each of its preplanned stops.

"Dragon is inside the 200-meter keep-out sphere," David says. The keep-out sphere is an imaginary radius boundary around the station, meant to protect us from accidental collisions. "The crew now has the authority to issue an abort." This means that we can shut down the process ourselves if we lose contact with Houston or if Dragon is outside the corridor.

"Houston, capture conditions are confirmed. We're ready for Dragon capture," Terry replies.

At 10 meters we inhibit the station's thrusters to prevent any unintended jolts. Samantha takes control of the robotic arm, using her left hand to control the arm's translation (in, out, up, down, left, right) and her right hand to control its rotation (pitch, roll, and yaw).

Samantha reaches out with the robot arm, watching a monitor that offers a view from a camera on the "hand," or end effector, of the arm, as well as two other video monitors showing data describing Dragon's position and speed. She can also look out the big windows to see what she's doing. She moves the arm out away from the station— very slowly and deliberately. Closing the space between the two spacecraft inch by inch, Samantha never wavers or goes off course. On the center screen the grapple fixture

on Dragon grows larger. She makes precise adjustments to keep the spacecraft and the robot arm perfectly lined up.

The arm creeps out slowly, slowly. It's almost touching the Dragon.

Samantha pulls the trigger. "Capture," she says.

Perfect.

The process of pressurizing the space between the Dragon and the station (the "vestibule") takes several hours and is important to do correctly. The danger that Dragon poses to the station is not over. A mistake in vestibule outfitting could cause depressurization—our air venting out into space. So Samantha and I work through the steps one by one.

We wait to open the ISS hatch that leads to the Dragon until the next morning. When Samantha slides it out of the way, an unusual and unmistakable smell hits me. Slightly burned, slightly metallic. This time it reminds me of the smell of sparklers on the Fourth of July: the smell of space. After a series of procedures we eventually open Dragon's hatch, and our care packages are clearly marked and easily accessible, as are the mice and the fresh food. Terry and I distribute the packages to everyone, feeling a bit like Santa Claus.

I finally open my care package in the privacy of my crew quarters. Inside is a poem and some chocolates from Amiko (she knows I crave sweets when I'm in space, though on Earth I don't have much of a sweet tooth); a pair of shoelaces for my workout shoes with toggle ties, because it's hard to tie laces without gravity; a bottle of Frank's hot sauce; a picture from my identical twin brother, Mark, showing twin redhead little boys giving the finger to the camera, with a note on the back that reads, "Hope the WCS is working up there!" (WCS stands for waste collection system, a space toilet); and a card from my daughters, Charlotte and Samantha, their distinctive handwritings gouged into the heavy paper by a black pen.

I put everything away, eat a piece of the chocolate, check my email again. I hang in my sleeping bag for a while, thinking about my kids, wondering how they are doing with me being gone. Then I go to sleep.

1.2 Beyond the Blue Marble

By Nadia Drake

National Geographic, March 2018

For the bulk of human history, it's been impossible to put Earth in cosmic perspective.

Bound by gravity and biology, we can't easily step outside it, above it, or away from it. For most of us, Earth is inescapably larger than life. Even now, after nearly six decades of human spaceflight, precious few people have rocketed into orbit and seen the sun peeking out from behind that curved horizon. Since 1961, a mere 556 people have had this rarefied experience. Fewer, just 24, have watched Earth shrink in the distance, growing smaller and smaller until it was no larger than the face of a wristwatch. And only six have been completely alone behind the far side of the moon, cut off from a view of our planet as they sailed in an endlessly deep, star-studded sea.

It's an inherently unnatural thing, spaceflight. After all, our physiology evolved specifically to succeed on this planet, not above it. Perha ps that's why it can be difficult for astronauts to describe the experience of seeing Earth from space.

Italian space traveler Luca Parmitano says that we haven't yet developed the words to truly convey the realities of spaceflight. The building blocks of modern human communication, words are necessarily constrained by meaning and connotation, no matter which language you choose (Parmitano speaks five). And until the mid-20th century, there was no need to express what it means to see our planet in the fiercely primeval essence of space. "We just don't think in terms of spaceflight," he says.

Seeing Earth from space can change a person's worldview. U.S. astronaut Nicole Stott flew twice on the space shuttle Discovery and returned with a new drive for creating artwork depicting the view. Canadian spacefarer Chris Hadfield says that while orbiting Earth, he felt more connected to the people on the planet than ever before.

Kathy Sullivan, who in 1984 became the first American woman to perform a space walk, returned with an abiding awe for the intricate systems that come together to make Earth an improbable oasis. "The thing that grew in me over these flights was a

real motivation and desire ... to not just enjoy these sights and take these pictures," she says, "but to make it matter."

After retiring from NASA, Sullivan led the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for three years, using the robotic eyes of orbiting satellites to pursue her passion. She says Earth from above is so captivatingly beautiful, she never grew bored looking at it. "I'm not sure I'd want to be in the same room with someone who could get tired of that."

Even when words fail us, a single picture of home from above can change the perspectives of millions of people. In 1968 the Apollo 8 crew became the first people to rocket far away from Earth and loop around the moon. On Christmas Eve, astronaut William Anders snapped what would become an unforgettable image: a lush world rising above the sterile, cratered lunar horizon. Now called "Earthrise," the photograph boosted awareness of our planet's beauty and fragility.

"Twenty eighteen is the 50-year anniversary of that iconic picture that helped define the environmental movement. What are the course corrections we need to do now that will help us get to the hundredth anniversary?" asks U.S. astronaut Leland Melvin. He's working with a coalition of fellow space travelers to rethink how we balance ecological health and human needs. The project will use astronauts' experiences to help others adopt more sustainable lifestyles.

Clearly, a desire to protect the planet is common among those who have left it. Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka has logged more cumulative days in space than anyone else. The allure of spaceflight kept him on the job for 28 years, but something even more powerful than gravity kept bringing him home.

"We are genetically connected to this planet," he says. And to the best of our knowledge, Earth is unique in its ability to support life as we know it. The past decade of astronomy has shown us that we are one among billions of worlds in the Milky Way galaxy, but our tangled web of geology, ecology, and biology makes this strange rock the only one in reach that's just right for humans.

There really is no place like home.

1.3 Pluto at Last

By Nadia Drake

National Geographic, June, 2015

Small, cold, and absurdly far away, Pluto has always been selfish with its secrets. Since its discovery in 1930, the dwarf planet has revolved beyond reach, its frosty surface a blurred mystery that even the most powerful telescopes can't bring into focus. We know about Pluto. But we don't really know it.

That will change on July 14, when NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is scheduled to fly within 8,000 miles of the frozen dwarf. It's a risky maneuver, but if all goes well, the fleeting close encounter will unveil the last of the classical solar system's unexplored worlds. We'll finally get to meet the former ninth planet face -to-face—to really see its surface and that of its largest moon, Charon. Scientists have some guesses about what they might find, but the only thing they can say for sure is that Pluto promises to be a surprise. (Read more on Nadia Drake's blog at National Geographic, No Place Like Home.)

"The Pluto we imagined will just go away like smoke," says Alan Stern, New Horizons' principal investigator.

It wouldn't be the first time Pluto has confounded expectations. In 2006, the year New Horizons was launched, Pluto vanished from the list of planets and reappeared as a "dwarf planet." That, of course, had more to do with astronomers on Earth than any celestial sleight of hand, but the truth is, Pluto has been a tough world to crack since before it was discovered. (See what scientists say about Pluto's status as a planet.)

As early as the 1840s, a tricky calculus foretold the existence of a planet beyond the orbit of Neptune. Calculations based on Neptune's mass suggested that the ice giant's orbit, and that of its neighbor Uranus, didn't quite fit the predictions of planetary motion. So some astronomers reasoned that at least one large, undiscovered world at the edge of the solar system must be jostling the ice giants and causing them to trace errant paths around the sun.

By the turn of the century, the hunt for that missing planet had gathered momentum: Whoever found it would earn the shiny distinction of discovering the first

new planet in more than 50 years. Calling the rogue world "Planet X," Boston aristocrat Percival Lowell—perhaps best known for claiming to have spotted irrigation canals on the surface of Mars—vigorously took up the search. Lowell had built his own observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and in 1905 it became the epicenter of the search for Planet X, with Lowell calculating and recalculating its probable position and borrowing equipment for the hunt. But Lowell died in 1916, without knowing that Planet X really existed.

Fast-forward to 1930. Late one February afternoon, 24-year-old Clyde Tombaugh was parked in his spot at Lowell Observatory. A transplant from the farm fields of Kansas, Tombaugh had been assigned the task of searching for Lowell's elusive planet. He had no formal training in astronomy but had developed a skill for building telescopes, sometimes from old car parts and other improbable items.

He was also something of a perfectionist. "When I planted the kafir corn and milo maize," he wrote in his 1980 memoir, "the rows across the field had to be straight as an arrow or I was unhappy. Later, every planet-suspect, no matter how faint, had to be checked out ... It was the most tedious work I'd ever done."

Tombaugh spent about a year searching for the missing world, using an instrument called a blink comparator. The noisy machine let viewers flip back and forth between long exposures of the sky, often containing hundreds of thousands of stars, taken several days apart. Anything that traveled a significant distance during that time— a planet or an asteroid, for example—would appear to move as the images flipped.

On that late afternoon—it was February 18—Tombaugh was manning the comparator and squinting at thousands of stars, evaluating each one by eye. Suddenly, in photos taken six days apart in January, he spied a small speck of light that didn't stay put. In one image, it was to the left of two bright stars. In the next, it had jumped a few millimeters to the right of those stars. Tombaugh flipped back and forth between the images and watched the spot leaping in and out of its original position. He grabbed a ruler and measured the precise difference in the spot's position. Then h e found another photo of the sky, taken earlier in January, and searched for the same spot. Finally, he

used a hand-magnifier to confirm the potential planet's presence in one more set of photos, taken by a different camera. After 45 minutes, Tombaugh was convinced.

He had found Planet X.

"You look at the spot that is Pluto, and it's a pretty dinky little spot," says Will Grundy, a New Horizons team member who works at Lowell Observatory. "You really had to stare at these things. How he didn't just go blind, I don't know."

After weeks of follow-up observations, Lowell Observatory announced Tombaugh's find on March 13, which happened to coincide with the 75th anniversary of Lowell's birth.

But almost immediately, astronomers knew something was wrong. The jumping point of light was much too faint to be Planet X. Even the best telescopes of the day couldn't resolve the planet's disk, which meant the object was small—much too small to account for the meanderings of the ice giants.

"They were expecting something brighter than that, something bigger than that," says Owen Gingerich, an emeritus astronomer and historian at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "But they assumed, nevertheless, that it was probably Earth size. So, much smaller than Uranus and Neptune, but a respectable sort of planet."

Indeed, the world's size has never deterred its fans. Right away, Lowell Observatory had to figure out what to name the new planet. Hundreds of letters poured in. "Minerva" was an early front-runner. Lowell's widow, Constance, who'd held up the search for Planet X while battling the observatory for Lowell's fortune after his death, suggested "Percival" and "Lowell"—and then, abandoning humility altogether, "Constance."

Across the ocean, an 11-year-old English girl named Venetia Burney casually proposed the name "Pluto," after the Roman god of the underworld. It seemed an appropriately dark name for a planet on the dusky fringe, and it followed the mythological naming convention. Conveniently, the word also contained Percival Lowell's initials. And so on May 1, Lowell Observatory announced that Planet X would be named Pluto.

But with its peculiar, tilted orbit and confoundingly small size, the world remained an enigma. Over the years the estimated mass of Tombaugh's planet continued to shrink and shrink ... and shrink, until it finally shrank itself out of planethood altogether and was rechristened a dwarf planet in 2006.

By observing Pluto's interaction with its satellite Charon, scientists now know Pluto's mass is a mere two-thousandths that of Earth. Discovered in 1978, Charon is almost half the size of Pluto—so big the two actually form a binary system. They revolve around a point in the space between them, a double-dwarf planet churning away in the center of an astoundingly complex system containing at least four more moons.

Scientists suspect there may be yet more moons around Pluto, some perhaps sharing or swapping orbits and maybe chaotically rotating instead of gracefully pirouetting. (Read "Pluto's Moons Dance to a Random Beat.")

"I would not be surprised at being surprised by finding something really pathologically weird like that," says Alex Parker, a postdoc on the New Horizons team.

By the late 1980s, NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft had swept through the realm of the giant planets and revealed the real mass of Neptune. When that number, which is the equivalent of about 17 Earths, is plugged into those old equations used to predict the existence of a ninth planet, everything works as expected. Uranus traces a predictable, boring path around the sun. There never was another large planet tugging at its orbit. But if not for the faulty math, and one man's prodigious patience, we could have waited decades to discover the little world that really is out there.

No longer a planet and no longer a misfit, Pluto isn't even one of a kind anymore. It's one of thousands of worlds populating the Kuiper belt—a vast debris ring beyond Neptune that's home to countless comets and icy dwarfs. Long ago erased from Earth, fingerprints from the early ages of the solar system are still pressed into these 4.6-billion-year-old chunks, waiting to be matched with theories describing the solar system's turbulent early years.

The Kuiper belt's architecture points to a violent rearrangement of the giant planets early on, a great migration that sent small bodies flying and turned the solar system into an overgrown shooting gallery. Scientists are hoping to use the craters

dotting Pluto's and Charon's surfaces to take a survey of the Kuiper belt population and reconstruct how it has changed over time. Although tricky to make, those measurements are essential for reconciling ideas about how the migration of the giant planets sculpted the early solar system. "We think the Kuiper belt was a lot more massive early on," Stern says.

What we learn from the dwarf planet could also give scientists a peek at the processes that shaped an early Earth into the planet we know. Once, a gassy envelope of hydrogen and helium surrounded our infant world. Over millions of years, that atmosphere escaped into space. Pluto is the only place in the solar system where we can study something similar happening today, Stern says, even though its atmosphere is made from nitrogen.

The similarities don't end there. Scientists think Pluto's moon Charon formed out of a giant impact, much like the one that produced our own moon. But while our moon congealed out of the molten disk of debris created by the collision, Charon was blown off from Pluto relatively intact. And while our moon's growth left our skies relatively clear, Pluto's weaker gravity allowed debris from the smashup to fly farther afield, seeding the binary system with space rubble that could make New Horizons' visit more than a little treacherous.

Launched from Florida's Cape Canaveral, NASA's spacecraft shot through the solar system, covering an average of nearly a million miles a day. It arrived at Jupiter just over a year later, and used the giant planet's gravity as a speed booster to shave almost four years off the total travel time. But even with that boost, New Horizons would still take another eight years to reach the former planet, which is on average about 40 times as far from the sun as Earth is. It's pretty chilly that far out. Temperatures on Pluto can reach close to -400 degrees Fahrenheit.

Scientists don't really know what they will find there—or if the spacecraft's sizzling speed will take it safely through the Pluto system, booby-trapped as it might be with hidden moons and deadly dust particles. "Anything the size of a grain of sa nd is potentially dangerous to the spacecraft," says the SETI Institute's Mark Showalter, a

member of the mission's hazard assessment team. "If it cuts an electrical connection or hits a computer processing unit, it could damage the spacecraft irreparably."

The weeks leading up to the Pluto encounter will be punctuated with tense analyses of the newest images from New Horizons. As Tombaugh did eight decades earlier, the team will be searching for anything that moves, telltale pixels signaling a hidden moon that might be shedding dust. "We're on the crow's nest ... looking out for rocky shoals ahead," Showalter says.

Scientists have planned several alternate trajectories through the Pluto system, should such perils appear. All the alternatives would come at a cost to mission science. But nothing is worth setting a course that would put the spacecraft at risk. "The reason we go to places we haven't been before is to see what's there," Showalter says. "We're going for the surprise, and I just hope it's not the wrong kind of surprise."

Team members are placing bets on what those good surprises will be. They already know that the dwarf planet will be reddish, a hue imparted by sunlight reacting with organic molecules on its surface, and covered in different ices. Blurry Hubble imageshave revealed both extremely dark and extremely bright patches on Pluto, and some scientists suspect that smears of organic compounds are painting parts of the dwarf planet dark. Other regions of the surface show hints of seasonal frosts forming across the multicolored terrain, and scientists would not be shocked to see plumes erupting from Pluto, as on Neptune's largest moon, Triton. Hovering overhead is a puffy nitrogen atmosphere, potentially 350 times as voluminous as Pluto itself.

"I suspect we're going to see hazes and maybe thick clouds," says team member Fran Bagenal of the University of Colorado Boulder.

But team members are guessing about everyth ing from Pluto's diameter to the number of new moons to whether there will be craters, canyons, or cryovolcanoes on Pluto and Charon. Some team members even think Charon might steal the show from its sibling. "It's an amazingly rich system for such a small place, and probably a lot of what we think we know is wrong," says John Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

To truly know Pluto, we must go there, set aside the mirrors and lenses of Earth, and stare at the world from its doorstep. It's taken 85 years, but we are at last going to meet Tombaugh's contentious little planet. And in a way, he will too: Tucked aboard New Horizons is a small vial of Tombaugh's ashes, a symbolic envoy that will sail by Pluto and head farther into the Kuiper belt, perhaps chasing down another little world to explore.

1.4 Junk Hunting

The Economist, January 6 2018

A new satellite will test ways to capture detritus circling Earth

THERE is an awful lot of junk in space. The latest data from the European Space Agency suggest some 7,500 tonnes of it now orbits Earth. It ranges from defunct satellites and rocket parts to nuts, bolts, shards of metal and even flecks of paint. But something as small as a paint fleck can still do serious damage if it hits a working satellite at a speed of several thousand kilometres an hour. There have already been more than 290 collisions, break-ups and explosions in space. Given the likelihood that thousands of small satellites, some only a few centimetres across, will be launched over the next decade, many worry that large volumes of space near Earth will soon be rendered risky places for satellites (especially big, expensive ones) to be.

What is needed, then, is a clean-up. Various ideas about how to do this have been proposed, and some are about to be put to the test. In February a resupply mission to the International Space Station will also carry a satellite, about the size of a domestic washing machine, called Remove-DEBRIS. Once this has been unpacked and prepared by the station's crew, they will use a robotic manipulator to send it on its way into orbit around Earth.

RemoveDEBRIS has been designed and built by Surrey Satellite Technology, a British manufacturer of small satellites spun out of the University of Surrey in 1985, which is now majority-owned by Airbus. Mission Control for the RemoveDEBRIS project is the Surrey Space Centre at the university. The plan is for RemoveDEBRIS to

carry out four experiments. The first two will involve launching from it a pair of CubeSats (mini-satellites 10cm across). These will play the role of space junk.

Once launched, the first CubeSat will inflate a balloonlike structure a metre across, to which it will remain attached, in order to create a bigger target. The mother ship will then approach to a distance of seven metres and fire a net at the balloon. This net is designed to unfurl and warp itself around the target. Once the target is entangled, a cable connecting the net to the mother ship will be tightened, closing the neck of the net. It will then be hauled in, like catching fish.

The second CubeSat will test the sensors of RemoveDEBRIS. This trial will use cameras and a lidar (an optical version of radar) aboard the mother ship to build up a detailed three-dimensional image of the object. If that works it will permit future cleanup vehicles to recognise what they are dealing with, and react appropriately.

In the third experiment, Remove-DEBRIS will extend a 1.5-metre-long arm that holds a 10cm-square target. It will then fire a harpoon at the target. The idea is that harpoons could be used to pierce some items of space debris and, like the net in the first experiment, then haul them in. The final experiment is intended to ensure that RemoveDEBRIS and its captured items do not themselves become space junk. The mother ship will deploy a ten square-metre plastic membrane, supported by four carbon-fibre booms, to act as a "drag sail" that will employ the limited atmosphere at this altitude to pull the craft downward to the fiery death of re-entry.

If space-debris capture systems like this succeed, then future missions could start to go after some of the most worrying bits of junk. Such ventures could be commercial, according to Guglielmo Aglietti, director of the Surrey Space Centre, if governments (probably acting collectively) were willing to pay to keep space clean so as not to damage their own activities and those of their citizens. There are already guidelines to try to limit the accumulation of space junk. Defunct satellites should be disposed of within 25 years, either by being tipped into re-entry or parked in an out-of-the way "graveyard" orbit. But the rules are not always followed and a lot of older debris remains in orbit. A bounty on removing the most threatening hulks might even see the launch of a new space business.

1.5 Orbital Ecosystem

The Economist, June 15 2019

An in-orbit economy is taking shape

In may 1999 a group of researchers from the Technical University of Berlin launched an unusual satellite. At a time when most of the machinery in orbit weighed thousands of kilograms, tubsat was a petite 45kg. A box that measured 32cm on each side, it carried three video cameras, the idea being to test whether such a titchy spacecraft could capture useful imagery of Earth. The researchers cited low mass, and the resultant low costs, as the benefits of such comparatively tiny satellites. They promised to open up "new market areas" for Earth observation.

It took around 15 years for them to be proved right. A few such "smallsats", sometimes called nanosats or CubeSats, were launched every year in the decade up until 2014, when numbers spiked. Planet Labs, a Californian company founded by ex-Nasa engineers, launched 33 smallsats that year, each weighing just a few kilos. Planet's satellites are spiritual successors of tubsat, designed to gather imagery of the Earth's surface. The firm sells its customers images from around 150 active satellites it has in orbit.

Planet Labs is an industry leader. The cost of making and launching satellites has tumbled, enabling an array of new space based businesses to emerge. In the past year smallsats have been launched that can use radar to peer through clouds or darkness. Others watch for illegal shipping activities and yet more are built to service or move around other satellites in orbit. Perhaps the most outlandish venture is a rescue satellite, designed to pull other satellites down to safety if something goes wrong, to avoid catastrophic collisions with neighbours.

Much of the recent attention has focused on the internet-connection constellations in low Earth orbit proposed by SpaceX and OneWeb. These have long been planned, and the billions of dollars required to install them are feeding the entire market.

Many of the capabilities of the new smallsats already existed, but mostly as government projects or as secretive intelligence operations. America has long sought to inhibit the commercial development of radar satellites, so powerful are their surveillance

properties. Military radar satellites, which bounce radio waves off the surface of the Earth in order to build up a detailed picture of it, were said to be capable of detecting enemy submarines by measuring the tiny disturbances that their wakes left in the curvature of the surface of the ocean.

Payam Banazadeh, the boss of Capella Space, a startup based in San Francisco and founded in 2016, says his firm will use smallsats to work similar magic. Capella's satellites will use radio waves, rather than light, to create images of the surface of the Earth. Mr Banazadeh says that his smallsats will be able to measure the volume of oil-storage tanks, for example, which are often open-topped to avoid fire risks, simply by pinging a radar beam into them. The first operational satellite is intended to launch this year, one of a planned constellation of 36. A competitor, Finnish company iceye, already has satellites in orbit gathering data.

Capella relies on a host of new space businesses as suppliers. Blue Canyon Technologies, founded in 2008, will provide small thrusters that allow the satellites to be pointed at specific spots on Earth. A company called Phase Four, founded in 2015, will provide tiny ion drives that will allow Capella's satellites to adjust their altitude as needed. This will let the firm capture a wider variety of imagery.

Another new firm, Hawkeye360, takes a different approach. Instead of pinging the surface of the Earth with radio waves, it listens for any that are being emitted by activity down below. This kind of orbital signal sniffing also used to be the domain of governments. But smallsats have advanced to the point where Hawkeye can deploy clusters of three radio-frequency sensing satellites to pick up weak signals from the ground. The company says its primary service will be maritime surveillance, looking for anomalous radio signals such as a fishing vessel turning off its automated identification tracker near a marine protected zone. The stated purpose is to stop illegal fishing and keep ports secure, but it is easy to see how the smallsats could be used to curb oceanic migration too. Hawkeye's first cluster of satellites has been in orbit since December 2018.

The data deluge

All of these new forms of imaging generate huge volumes of data—terabytes a day, enough that getting it down to the ground for processing becomes its own problem. Some

companies want to reduce the amount of data they send back by processing some of it up in space (see box). Barry Matsumori, a space-industry veteran, is boss of Bridgesat, a company that has developed a tiny, powerful laser, which can be embedded in spacecraft and which can beam data down to ground stations at extremely high bandwidths. iceye is one of its first customers. Bridgesat's first ground station, in California, is already in operation, and more in Italy and Sweden are on their way. The plan is to have ten around the world.

The firm has competition from Amazon, which just announced its own backbone service for data out of orbit and into its data centres, called aws Ground Station. Capella is an early customer of the service, which uses radio waves rather than lasers to get data down from orbit. As with Amazon's cloud-computing business, the idea with Ground Station is to invest in plenty of expensive infrastructure and then charge startups only for what they use, making it easier and more affordable to run a business up in space.

Managing all those extra satellites gets tricky when the companies launching them have to get their orbits perfect the first time. Currently, companies get only one shot. D-Orbit, an Italian company, has built a "carrier" satellite that is designed to boost already -launched smallsats to their correct configuration.

Perhaps the most futuristic new problem for the space business is the risk of debris. The concern is that, with so many new satellites in orbit operated by so many different companies, the chance of losing control of one goes up. A collision could be disastrous, producing a wave of debris with a high chance of wiping out other satellites, potentially crippling the whole commercial low-Earth orbit ecosystem at a stroke. Astroscale, a Japanese company, is tackling this problem by building a prototype craft capable of being launched at short notice in order to grab any malfunctioning satellite and pull it down into the atmosphere where it will burn up before it can collide with anything. The "rescue" craft will use computer vision to lock onto the out-of-control satellite and match velocity with it, then latch onto it magnetically.

The company, which has raised $132m in the past few years, is planning a demonstration of its technology next year. Earth's orbits suddenly look busier than ever before. Companies are going into space because it offers a different vantage point,

allowing them to gather valuable new, previously-unaffordable information. TUBSAT's "new market areas" are at last open for business.

1.6 Blue World

The Economist, September 14 2019

The first planet beyond the solar system confirmed to have water Since its discovery by astronomers in 2015, the exoplanet k2-18b has elicited much excitement. Swirling around a red-dwarf star about110 light-years away from Earth, the distant world sits in a so-called Goldilocks zone—not close enough to its host star to be too hot and not far enough away to be too cold—that could allow liquid water to flow across its surface. That is a crucial condition for life as we know it.

Now astronomers have cranked up the speculation. Follow-up images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope suggest k2-18b (artist's impression below) has an atmosphere containing large amounts of water vapour—the first exoplanet in a habitable zone to have this confirmed. Most exoplanets previously found with atmospheres have been gas giants, similar to Neptune or Jupiter. k2-18b instead looks like it could be a rocky planet twice as big as Earth, perhaps covered in vast ice-covered seas.

To make the discovery of atmospheric water, Angelos Tsiaras, an astronomer at University College London, and his colleagues looked at how light filtered through the atmosphere of k2-18b as it passed in front of its star between 2015 and 2017. This spectroscopic technique is a common way to analyse the atmospheric composition of exoplanets, based on which wavelengths of light make it through and which are blocked. But it is difficult—especially for the relatively small and cold rocky worlds that could hold the conditions for life.

Writing this week in Nature Astronomy, Dr Tsiaras describes how his team wrote software that could analyse the data collected by Hubble to try to do the same job—up to a point. They were not able to pinpoint the exact form and amounts of the water they found. Instead they used computer models to simulate the most likely scenarios, and concluded that as much as half of the atmosphere of k2-18b could be water vapour. They also found evidence of large amounts of hydrogen and helium gas.

This is just the start of such study of planets beyond our solar system. Astronomers plan to launch two new orbiting telescopes in the next decade—the American James Webb Space Telescope and the European ariel survey—that will be powerful enough to peer into the atmospheres of exoplanets more closely. Powerful enough, perhaps, to detect telltale molecular signatures of life.

With Dr Tsiaras's analysis, k2-18b is now the best candidate for a life-supporting exoplanet out there. The temperature on the surface could be about the same as Earth and there could be similar clouds hanging in the sky. However, the planet's adjacency to the star—it whizzes around once every 33 days— could produce intense space weather from the stellar activity. And it would be advisable to pack sun cream: the ultraviolet radiation would be off the scale.

Приложение 2 Статьи по теме «Технологии» 2.1 Shoot for the Moon. Again By Sam Howe Verhovek National Geographic, August 2017

The youthful Indian engineers took their seats, a bit nervously, in a makeshift conference room inside a cavernous former car-battery warehouse in Bangalore. Arrayed in front of them were several much older men and women, many of them gray-haired luminaries of India's robust space program. The first Asian space agency to send an orbiter to Mars, it also nearly tripled a previous world record by launching 104 satellites into orbit in a single mission this past February. The object of everyone's attention was a small rolling device barely the size of a microwave oven.

The members of the young crew explained their plans to blast the device into space aboard a rocket late this year, position it into lunar orbit nearly a quarter million miles away, guide it to a landing on the moon, and send it roaming across the harsh lunar landscape. The engineers of Teamlndus said their company would do all of this on a shoestring budget, probably $65 million, give or take, the vast majority of it raised from private investors.

A prominent Mumbai investor, Ashish Kacholia, who has put more than a million dollars into the firm, sat at the back of the room, transfixed by the discussion. It somehow combined the intense, rapid-fire questions of a doctoral thesis defense with the freewheeling, everybody's-shouting, laughter-punctuated atmosphere of the Lok Sabha, India's boisterous lower house of parliament. Kacholia hardly needed to be here all day to check up on this particular investment of his—far from his largest—but he stayed just to hear the erudite dialogue on selenocentric (moon-centered) orbit projections, force modeling, apogee and perigee, and the basis for how "the kids" drew up the error covariance matrix.

"It's thrilling, really," Kacholia explained. "You've got these 25-, 28-year-olds up there defending their calculations, all their work, in front of a thousand years of the nation's collective aerospace experience and wisdom." His friend S. K. Jain, also a well -known Indian investor, nodded in vigorous agreement. "These kids are firing up the

whole imagination of India," he commented. "They're sayin g to everyone, Nothing is impossible."

Nearly 50 years after the culmination of the first major race to the moon, in which the United States and the Soviet Union spent fantastic amounts of public money in a bid to land the first humans on the lunar surface, an intriguing new race to our nearest neighbor in space is unfolding—this one largely involving private capital and dramatically lower costs. The most immediate reward, the $20 million Google Lunar XPrize (or GLXP) will be awarded to one of five finalist teams from around the world. They're the first ever privately funded teams to attempt landing a traveling vehicle on the moon that can transmit high-quality imagery back to Earth.

The competition is modeled explicitly after the great innovation-spurring prize races of the early years of aviation, most notably the Orteig Prize, which Charles Lindbergh won in 1927 when he flew the Spirit of St. Louis nonstop from New York to Paris.

Like the quest for the Orteig Prize, the competition for the Lunar XPrize involves national prestige. Teams from Israel, Japan, and the U.S., plus one multinational group, are vying for the honor along with India; a cavalcade of other nations participated on the 16 teams that survived into the semifinal stage last year.

Almost as diverse as their countries of origin is the range of approaches and commercial partnerships involved in solving the three basic problems at hand— launching from Earth, landing on the moon, and then going mobile to gather and transmit data. To meet the last challenge, three teams plan to deploy variants of a traditional rover, while the other two intend to use their landing craft to make one giant leap for private enterprise: They will "hop" the required minimum of 500 meters on the moon rather than drive across the lunar surface.

As with many early aviation prizes, whichever team prevails almost surely will spend much more to win the prize than it gets back in prize money, though all the teams hope the global publicity and "brand enhancement" of vict ory will eventually make their investment pay off handsomely.

At its core, this new sprint to space poses a question that would have been laughable in the Cold War era of the 1960s, when the U.S. was willing to spend more than 4 percent of its federal budget to beat its superpower foe to the moon: Can someone actually make money venturing out into the great beyond? To a demonstrably wide range of entrepreneurs, scientists, visionaries, evangelists, dreamers, eccentrics, and possible crackpots involved in the burgeoning space industry, the answer is an enthusiastic yes.

President John F. Kennedy famously urged America in 1962 to "choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." Today Bob Richards, founder and CEO of Moon Express, the American team, offers a different, if consciously cheeky, rationale. "We choose to go to the moon," he says, "because it is profitable!"

Whether Richards is correct about that, and if so, just when it might prove true, is wildly unclear. Setbacks are the norm in the space business, and realistically, many companies will make their early money mainly from government contracts, not private customers. Nonetheless, Richards predicts that the world's first trillionai re will be a space entrepreneur, perhaps one who mines the lunar soil for helium-3, a gas that's rare on Earth but plentiful on the moon and an excellent potential fuel source for nuclear fusion—a holy grail of energy technology that scientists have been trying to master for decades. Or a huge fortune may be minted from the asteroids and other near-Earth objects, where robotic technology could help mine vast amounts of gold, silver, platinum, titanium, and other prized elements bound up in them.

"There are $20 trillion checks up there, just waiting to be cashed!" says Peter Diamandis, a physician and engineer who is co-founder of Planetary Resources, a company backed by Avatar director James Cameron and several tech billionaires. Planetary Resources also acquired the company Asterank in 2013. Asterank's website offers scientific data and projects the economic value of mining more than 600,000 asteroids.

Diamandis is also founder and executive chairman of the XPrize Foundation, which has sponsored several other award competitions designed to push the boundaries

of invention and technology in fields as diverse as artificial intelligence, mathematics, energy, and global health. The whole thrust of the Lunar XPrize competition, says Chanda Gonzales- Mowrer, a senior director at the foundation, is to help pave the way to "a new era of affordable access to the moon and beyond."

Just as the worldwide acclaim for Lindbergh's bravura feat sparked huge interest in civil aviation, the lunar competition is intended to fire public imagination about private space pioneers, who already are ferrying cargo to the International Space Station and deploying satellites, orbital rocketry, and test modules. Soon the crafts may be carrying passengers: Virgin Galactic, which billionaire founder Richard Branson calls "the world's first commercial spaceline," says it's gearing up to take passengers on brief space tours in which they will experience weightlessness and awe-inspiring views of Earth. SpaceX founder Elon Musk announced in February that his company would fly two as yet unnamed private citizens around the moon in late 2018 aboard its Dragon spacecraft. Two months later Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said he'd be selling a billion dollars in stock a year to fund Blue Origin, his own commercial and space tourism enterprise.

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about how soon these firms will actually be carrying private customers to space; after all, a 2014 crash of Virgin Galactic's prototype passenger spacecraft set that company's effort back by several years. And while the Lunar XPrize competition appears to be coming to a head, there are plenty of obstacles to contend with: the possibility of a missed deadline, failure of prelaunch rocket tests, to name just two. Plus, the impact of the race on the public imagination could well prove limited. For one thing it simply lacks the human drama and suspense of the 1969 moon landing and safe return of men to Earth, a feat that began an era of human exploration on the lunar surface that wound up lasting a mere three years. Unmanned lunar rovers have been around for decades now: When China landed Yutu in 2013, it became the third nation to put a rover on the moon.

So, really, then: What's the big deal?

"What's new is that the cost of getting to space is dropping, and it is doing so dramatically," explains John Thornton, the chief executive at Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh -

based firm whose aim is to "make the moon accessible to the world" with logistical services that involve carrying everything from experiments for universities to MoonMail for customers who just want to leave a tiny something on the lunar surface— a note, a photo, a lock of hair from a deceased loved one.

"A company like ours can do the math and show investors that we r eally do have a feasible plan to make money," Thornton says. "Not many years ago, that would have been science fiction."

If the race to put a man on the moon was the equivalent of building one of those giant, room-size, prodigiously expensive mainframe computers in the early days of high technology, today's race is analogous to a different era of computing: the race to put an affordable computer on everyone's desktop or, a few years later, in everyone's telephone. Today computers are so tiny—and the batteries that power them so compact—that we can reach the moon with increasingly smaller and decreasingly expensive devices. Rather than golf cart-size rovers on the moon, the next generation of machines exploring, mapping, and even mining the lunar landscape may well be the size of a child's Tonka truck. More than anything else, that's the driving factor behind today's space economy.

"Think micro-rovers and miniature CubeSats," says William L. "Red" Whittaker, legendary roboticist at Carnegie Mellon University and a pioneer in both rover and self-driving automobile technology. "It's astonishing what's going on. Small is the next big thing. Very small."

The physics of human spaceflight remain more complex—we are growing neither smaller nor more compact, so it still takes plenty of fuel to get us up there—but these advances could herald a smaller, nimbler, cheaper way to get people back on the moon and far beyond.

In fact, some in the space industry say the moon may one day be less the object of our journey than a sort of giant Atlanta airport that we'll have to go through on our way to somewhere else, where both the engineering and the economics of blasting off from a place with only one-sixth the gravity of Earth will make a lunar hub the ideal way station in exploring the universe.

Water, now locked in the form of ice at the lunar poles, would be both lifeblood and fuel source: water to drink, water to irrigate crops, and water to be split into oxygen and hydrogen, the former for us to breathe and the latter to power our spacecraft beyond this lunar base. Again, whether that will prove true, and if so, when, is unknowable. But what is known now is that the first destination of the emerging space industry is obvious: the moon.

To witness a test mission of Team Hakuto—Japan's entry in the Lunar XPrize competition—I traveled last September to a remote, windswept region of western Japan known as the Tottori Sand Dunes. For days, ferocious and very un-moonlike rain whipping off the Sea of Japan pelted the coast, drowning out proper conditions for testing a lunar rover. In a nearby youth hostel, team leader Takeshi Hakamada and his colleagues were getting restless. Dressed in spiffy gray jackets with a rabbit logo (Hakuto is a mythological white rabbit in Japanese folktales) and tossing back energy drinks, they kept fine-tuning software that carefully mimicked the communications delay of 2.5 seconds between Earth and the moon, nearly a quarter million miles away.

Then abruptly one evening the skies cleared and stars emerged. Amid a crackle of walkie-talkies, Hakamada's team carted an impressive array of laptops, tablets, and sensors through a wooded clearing and out onto the dunes. Then came —literally with white-glove treatment—a pair of roving robots designed to work mostly in tandem when they're on the moon, but partly independently, which is where Hakamada's profitmaking idea comes in.

Team Hakuto's entry features a four-wheel rover—dubbed Sorato by the crew, after a song by a Japanese alternative rock band—which in future missions beyond XPrize will be tethered to a separate, two-wheel tilting robot. Both units are made largely of very lightweight, strong, carbon fiber components. Hakamada, a thin, thoughtful man with a mop of unruly hair, who has been a space geek since he saw his first Star Wars movie as an elementary school student, said the smaller robot can be lowered deep into fissures, lava tubes, and caves. It will gather vital data on such spots, which could serve an essential function one day as temporary habitats for future lunar

bases, shielding arriving humans for a period of time while more permanent digs are constructed.

The Tokyo-based company Hakamada runs, iSpace, plans to leverage Japanese advances in technology miniaturization to probe, photograph, map, and model the moon in much higher detail than can be seen in the photos and soil-testing results from earlier lunar rover missions.

"We are not in this just to win a prize, although that would be nice," Hakamada told me shortly before the test run. "We are in this to demonstrate to the world that we have a viable technology that can produce important information that people will be willing to pay for."

With wheels that each look a bit like an old-fashioned waterwheel, the main rover reached a "drop point" on the dunes, a stand-in for the harsh lunar surface. It's hitching a late December launch with the Indian Space Research Organisation, the government agency whose rocket will be carrying Teamlndus's lunar rover as well. (To win the XPrize, a team must be launched by December 31, 2017, but can complete its mission in early 2018.)

It was quiet out on the Tottori Dunes as the clock neared midnight, the roar of the sea muffled by the bluffs. Hakuto's tiny rover looked a bit forlorn out on the sandy simulacrum (a simulation of the lunar surface). Hakamada and his crew coordinated a series of computer-entered commands through the lunar time lag, and suddenly the rover clicked to life, cutting cleanly through the sand, traveling just a few inches per second. It correctly sensed and navigated around several hazards placed in its path. This ability will be critical on the moon, where a large enough rock or ditch could scuttle a whole mission.

"The rover did great," Hakamada said later, beaming like a proud new fat her. In fact, he explained, his confidence in its performance was no longer his biggest challenge. "We believe that the biggest problem for space innovation now is really not technology itself but the entrepreneurship involved. To open new markets in space, you have to convince people this is for real—and thus defy all those old stereotypes about how only big government agencies can undertake this sort of exploration.

"That's what's great about this race," he added. "Whoever wins will show it can be done."

A few steps from the Atlantic Ocean, on a giant patch of Florida scrubland visited by alligators, sea turtles, and the occasional bobcat, Cape Canaveral's Space Launch Complex (SLC) 17 appears at first glance to be a relic. From 1957 to 2011, the site was used for both Thor and Delta rocket launches, the former for the country's first ballistic missiles, the latter for satellites and solar system probes and for closer observation of the sun itself.

On a pleasant March evening this year, the only sound at SLC-17 was a slight breeze from the sea whistling through the rusting towers of the complex. But behind a locked door in a former maintenance shed, the prototype vehicle belonging to the first U.S. company to receive government approval for a space mission beyond Earth orbit was ready to hit the beach—on its way, ultimately, to the moon.

To Bob Richards, once an assistant to famed astrophysicist Carl Sagan and now head of Moon Express, the beauty of the company's MX-1E lander design is its dualpurpose utility. "There's no need for a rover at all if your landing craft can provide the same function," Richards told me. In fact, he added, the Google Lunar XPrize is too often misconstrued as a rover competition.

"The greatest challenge of the GLXP is to land on the moon," he said. "Rovers can't land on the moon themselves, and in fact the term 'rover' doesn't appear in competition rules at all, just a requirement to accomplish mobility of at least 500 meters."

Thus was born the idea of hopping to victory by bouncing along with the help of thrusters. After an initial rocket launch to low-Earth orbit, the MX-1E—a single-stage robotic spacecraft that is shaped and sized more than a bit like R2-D2 of Star Wars fame—will blast away using a super-high-test hydrogen peroxide as its main propellant to travel at bullet speed on course for its lunar goal. After establishing lunar orbit, Moon Express's vehicle will eventually achieve what engineers euphemistically call a "soft landing": Aided by reverse thrust, the vertical descent will nonetheless be violent enough to require cushioning by a flexible landing-leg system capable of

absorbing the blow and springing back with enough life to take on the next stage of the mission. With a small amount of fuel remaining, the MX-1E will take off on a big hop— or, perhaps, a series of smaller hops—to travel the required distance to win the XPrize.

With his TED Talk-worthy profundities and an industry reputation (not always a positive one) for the gift of gab, Richards makes it all sound so brilliantly achievable that you're tempted to invest. But there are arguments for holding on to your wallet— for one thing, Moon Express is currently slated for launch not with a proven carrier such as SpaceX, with its Falcon rocket lines, but instead with Rocket Lab, a U.S.-based company whose launch site at the Mahia Peninsula on the North Island of New Zealand opened this past September.

Testing is just beginning this year, meaning that the firm will be on a very aggressive timetable to achieve the XPrize's stipulation of an actual launch by the end of the year. Previous milestone deadlines have been extended, but XPrize says it is committed to wrapping up the competition soon. Thus it could conceivably end with no winner, though a foundation official insists it "really, really wants someone to win."

The other team aiming to hop the distance needed to win is based in a small complex of industrial buildings on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. Its leader is hardly less evangelistic than Richards.

"Our vision is to re-create an 'Apollo effect' here in Israel, to really inspire a rising generation of kids to excel in science and technology," said Eran Privman, a national hero and the CEO of SpacelL, whose eclectic résumé includes combat experience as a pilot in the Israeli Air Force; a doctorate in computer science and neuroscience from Tel Aviv University; and a range of research, development, and executive posts for several major technology companies in Israel. He was referring to the impact the Apollo space programs had on youth in the 1960s and '70s, when the enterprise's successful missions inspired many of the founders of today's leading high -tech companies.

Roughly the size of a small refrigerator but more circular in shape—a bit like a flying saucer—SpacelL's lander is expected to weigh 1,323 pounds when it detaches from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, though about two-thirds of that weight will be fuel used

up by the time it is ready to land. With some residual spring action in its legs similar to the MX-1E's, it will use the little fuel left to hop the nearly one-third of a mile set by the XPrize rules.

The Israeli effort began in late 2010 as "three crazy guys with not a lot of money but with the thought that it would be really cool to land a robot on th e moon." That's how co-founder Yariv Bash described the beginning to me during a visit to the testing lab for the lander's main computer. They struggled down to the wire to meet an initial competition deadline requiring them to show plans for a landing strategy and at least $50,000 in assets.

"We asked anybody we could for money," Bash recalled. "It got to where I was asking my wife for money in my sleep." While short on capital, the group was not short on know-how: Bash is an electronics and computer engineer who once headed R and D efforts for Israeli intelligence forces. ("You know Q in the James Bond movies?" Bash asked me with a wink. "It was a bit like that.")

Their initial designs were far smaller—one as small as a two-liter soda bottle— than the lander they are assembling with parts from around the world this summer. And rather than a for-profit enterprise, SpaceIL has wound up as the only nonprofit in the remaining field of XPrize competitors, with generous funding from two well-known billionaires, technology entrepreneur Morris Kahn and casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. Its mission now is essentially twofold—to win the prize, of course, but also to educate and inspire a new generation of potential tech leaders in a country often referred to as Start-up Nation.

As in India, national pride is clearly on the line here. Virtually every school in Israel now has a teaching unit about the SpaceIL effort, and schoolkids will be closely following the mission once it blasts off for the moon, hoping theirs will become the first country ever to send a privately funded mission to explore the lunar surface.

"We wanted all kids in Israel to be heads -up about this," said Privman, adding with a laugh: "We want these kids to be able to explain to their parents what's going on."

Enough with the hopping already. Hakuto, TeamIndus, and a California-based international consortium known as Synergy Moon all plan to use a separate, wheeled rover to gather data, which points up an arguable loophole in the rules: Hakuto could win by subcontracting out both launch and landing, only needing to deploy its Sorato rover to achieve victory. Gonzales-Mowrer, the XPrize race director, says that would be just fine: "We wanted teams to come up with various approaches to accomplishing the mission," she explains. From a financing point of view, the main threshold is simply that competitors must show XPrize judges that at least 90 percent of their money comes from nongovernment sources.

"It's been fun to watch the teams network with each other and with outside providers to drive down the cost," she said. "In that sense, the ultimate goal of this competition has already been achieved."

If there is to be a giant Walmart—or perhaps an Ikea—for spacefaring ventures someday, then Interorbital Systems, the primary company behind the Synergy Moon consortium, is determined to fill that role. It aims to be "the lowest cost launch provider in the commercial space industry," says its co-founder and CEO, Randa Relich Milliron. To do this, she explains, it will build rockets in modular, standardized units; use off-the-shelf components wherever possible, including industrial irrigation tubes and microcontrollers; and experiment with lower cost fuels such as turpentine as propellants.

In her office at the Mojave Air & Space Port in the California desert, a hundred miles or so north of downtown Los Angeles, Milliron pointed with pride to the company brochure, which offers a do-it-yourself TubeSat Personal Satellite Kit for around $16,000, a price that "Includes Free Launch!" and could drop to $8,000 for high school or college students. Customers will assemble the tube (there is also a more expensive CubeSat available) and outfit it with whatever small additional gear they can fit, such as a camera for tracking migratory animals from orbit or sensors that can monitor weather conditions. The company plans to launch the personal satellites into orbit 192 miles above the Earth, a sufficient height to allow them to operate from three weeks to two months, depending on solar activity, after which the devices will burn up safely after reentering the atmosphere.

Milliron and her husband, Roderick, have been working on and off for more than 20 years to get the company—and its rockets—off the ground. It's safe to say that several remaining and former competitors in the GLXP race admire their pluck but doubt their chances. Even if they reach the moon with one of their DIY rockets, their plan to use a customized "throwbot" as their roving device on the moon has also raised eyebrows. (Throwbots, throwable robots, are frequently used by the military, police, and firefighters to provide video "eyes" in a location too dangerous to enter, such as a terrorist hideout, a suspected meth lab, or a burning building.)

Even so, the couple and a small crew of employees press on in their warehouse set amid the large, military-issue sheds and Quonset huts that make up the spaceport side of the dusty desert complex—the other side of the runway is a giant "boneyard," where commercial airliners such as old Boeing 747s and DC-10s have come to die, parked for good and waiting to be cut up for scrap.

The Millirons say their initial launches will be from a barge at an ocean site off the California coast. With a humble budget they decline to quantify publicly, but with grand dreams they describe expansively, it is hard to know exactly what to make of them or of the Synergy Moon entry in the space race, which their firm essentially anchors. The team does have a verified launch contract, although it appears to be essentially with itself, since it's the only entrant in the race planning to do all the things needed to win— launching, landing, roving, and transmitting—on its own.

"Sometimes we feel like renegades or outcasts, building these rockets by ourselves," said Randa Milliron on a tour of Interorbital's workshop. "But that's the whole point, really. We are disrupters. We are out to show the world this can all be done at truly radically lower costs."

From this Mojave Desert outpost to the Atlantic shore at Cape Canaveral, from the outskirts of Tel Aviv to the Japanese sand dunes and a Bangalore warehouse, all five teams are forging ahead on their respective missions. Each is driven to win—but each is also surprisingly friendly with its competitors. Over the past several years, even as the number of teams officially dwindled from 29 to 16 and down to the five remaining at time of writing, one of them has hosted an annual summit meeting for everyone else,

as well as XPrize Foundation officials, with each leader offering a frank presentation on successes and setbacks to date. Alliances have formed, such as an agreement between TeamIndus and Hakuto to share a ride on the Indian space agency's rocket and the Indus lander, essentially duking it out once they reach the moon. An industry is being born.

"There's really a 'Yes We Can' theme going on here," says Rahul Narayan, the charismatic leader of the 112 members working for TeamIndus. "This is the time. How it will all evolve, exactly, I don't know. I'm not sure anyone knows. But this is the time."

2.2 Africa's Tech Generation

By Robert Draper

National Geographic, December 2017

One day in 2004, in the Kenyan farming village of Engineer—so named because an Englishman once ran a mechanical repair shop there—a slight and nearsighted boy was walking past the only printing shop when his eyes fell on something he had never seen: a computer.

The boy watched as the owner stabbed at his keyboard. Edging closer, he saw pages spew out of a printer. Standing beside the humming machine, the boy stared mesmerized at the words and numbers that had somehow been transmitted from the computer. Almost a teenager, Peter Kariuki had discovered his destiny.

His parents, subsistence farmers of cabbages and potatoes, began to worry that Peter was spending too much time at the printing shop. No one in Engineer had access to the Internet. Few even had electricity. Tech booms were a faraway notion, and talk of random scrawny, bespectacled kids inventing hardware or writing code and cashing out in their 30s had yet to reach Engineer. Regardless, Peter was hooked. When his superb grades in primary school qualified him to attend the prestigious Maseno School (whose alumni include Barack Obama's father), a teacher gave Peter the keys to the computer science lab, where he could code all night long.

In 2010 the 18-year-old computer wizard traveled to Kigali, Rwanda. Kariuki got a job designing an automated ticketing system for the capital city's bus system. Although Kigali was among Africa's tidiest and most crime-free cities, its transit system

was woefully in keeping with the norm on the continent. Because the buses (really just vans) were unreliable, overcrowded, and glacial in velocity, most commuters relied on motorcycle-taxi drivers, who are notoriously reckless. Indeed, throughout sub-Saharan Africa, road accidents are catching up with AIDS and malaria as leading causes of death—and police statistics that Kariuki has seen indicate that in Kigali about 80 percent of road accidents involve motorcycles. These facts riveted Kariuki and his roommate, Barrett Nash, a fellow start-up aspirant from Canada with oversize red-frame glasses. After turning off their laptops for the evening, Kariuki and Nash would stroll through Kigali's red-light district to an outdoor bar where, over Primus beers, they would wrestle with a basic question: How could they provide Kigali with an Uber-like motorcycle-taxi service that was efficient, affordable, and safe?

Kariuki and Nash described their concept in a video posted on a website used to seek start-up money. An accelerator group founded by an American venture capitalist named Sean O'Sullivan reached them by email and offered them an expenses -paid, three-month mentorship in Cork, Ireland. After determining that it wasn't a hoax, Kariuki and Nash quit their day jobs. When Kariuki informed his parents, they consoled themselves with the recognition that a 22-year-old had plenty of time to recover from an early failure.

Kariuki and Nash returned to Kigali in spring 2015 with the finalized software for the concept they had dubbed SafeMotos. Rain clouds were gathering as they climbed on motorcycle taxis. Amid the downpour both vehicles raced heedlessly uphill, just as a truck driver ahead of them threw his gears in reverse. Kariuki flew off his motorcycle. He wound up with a broken kneecap, three missing teeth, and a disfigured lip. Later, when the surgeon who fixed his mouth inquired about his misfortune, Kariuki told him that his motorcycle driver had been in a traffic accident.

"I see this all the time," sighed the doctor as he proceeded to stitch up Kariuki, who managed a smile. His marketing analysis for SafeMotos was now complete.

Today the Rwandan start-up initially funded with $126,000 is the first and largest motorcycle ride-sharing company in Africa. It partners with more than 400 licensed and painstakingly monitored motorcycle-taxi drivers in Kigali, who are likely to make

800,000 trips this year. Gross revenue for 2017 is projected to be $1.1 million. "My dream," Kariuki told me recently on the rooftop balcony of one of Kigali's many sparkling new hotels, "is to establish Kigali as our stronghold that no one can touch— and from there move into 10 other cities."

The pride of Engineer belongs to a wave of digital entrepreneurs who aim to transform sub-Saharan Africa. Their emergence coincides with the ubiquity of mobile phones throughout the continent, as well as the arrival of high-speed Internet—which, as recently as a decade ago, was rare in most of Africa. During the past few years, tens of millions of dollars in venture capital has flowed from the West into such countries as Kenya, Rwanda, Nigeria, and South Africa. The result is a generation of innovators whose homegrown ideas could, in the manner of SafeMotos, improve the lives of their fellow Africans.

This development should not be surprising, despite the many political and socioeconomic travails bedeviling Africa's overall progress. "On this planet only one continent is growing faster than all the others in population, and it's likely to keep growing even faster," says Steve Mutabazi, a chief strategist with the Rwanda Development Board. "I've watched Asian countries enviously, and one thing is clear: When you have a developing region with enough members developing an ecosystem, it generates incredible momentum for investment in that region." Africa, Mutabazi adds, "is at that point now."

Africa's late arrival to the digital economy comes with certain competitive advantages. It benefits from advances and mistakes already made by Silicon Valley. Its population is younger than that of any other continent. Its marketplace amounts to a new frontier. Its largely untapped labor force presents an appealing prospect for tech-assembly plants. "Look at how China and India are competing in the electronics market," says Bitange Ndemo, Kenya's former permanent secretary at the Ministry of Information and Communications and now a professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Nairobi's School of Business. "India is well on its way to becoming a global production center for electronic products. And how? By having so many young

people with little to do that they can make things for next to nothing. What other continent can do that? Africa."

It happens that Ndemo was one of the first Kenyans to promote his country's tech potential with the nickname Silicon Savannah. Today he says the hype is warranted. Thanks to the mobile money-transferring innovation launched in 2007 by Kenya's M-Pesa, Africans with a cell phone can deposit and withdraw cash at many shops without having to visit a bank or ATM. Mobile money transfers also are being used to pay for power from solar panels that off-grid-energy companies install on homes lacking electricity. Uber is a fact of life in urban East Africa, as are homegrown car-sharing competitors.

New technology spreading throughout the region allows residents to buy groceries, clothing, and other goods online. An app called iCow helps herders manage their cattle populations. Another, named Kytabu, makes it possible for students and teachers in underprivileged schools to lease textbooks on mobile devices. However unwelcome economic disadvantage may be, in Africa it has sparked ingenuity. As Michel Bezy, the associate director of Carnegie Mellon University's Kigali campus, observes, "When you and I need something, we go on Amazon. In the village they have to invent it. I see it with my students. They're much more creative over here."

Nevertheless Bezy—who has also worked on campuses in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Belgium, and North Carolina—is among those who fear that Africa cannot possibly meet the expectations raised by Silicon Savannah boosters. "Having an idea is fine," he says, but "an idea has no value unless it's executed." Skeptics point out that some 60 percent of sub-Saharan Africans do not have access to electricity. Even for those who can find a way to power up a computer, there are limited opportunities for learning how to excel with it. Bezy notes that only eight of the thousand highest rated universities are in Africa (one in Egypt and seven in South Africa), according to Webometrics, which ranks colleges by analyzing data available on the Internet. The effects of such deprivations are apparent throughout African society.

"The awareness of what information technology can do is very, very low in Africa," Bezy says. "The first time young Africans get computers in their hands is high

school. In the U.S. it's at age four. Company executives here have no idea what IT can do for their companies."

Knowing how to use their data has been the least of Peter Kariuki and Barrett Nash's liabilities. Every week the SafeMotos founders email a newsletter to their investors with updated statistics that range from the percentage increase in the number of repeat customers to the safety scores of their drivers. When I visited the SafeMotos office on an unpaved and hilly road west of downtown Kigali, a large computer monitor tracked every trip from start to finish, logging each one for future analysis.

Rather, the challenges facing SafeMotos illustrate the gulf between Africa and Silicon Valley in skilled technicians. "It's been really hard to find programming talent here," Kariuki says. "So I have to do everything."

After interviewing dozens of applicants and concluding that none possessed the requisite skills to assist in continually modifying the SafeMotos app, Kariuki and Nash resorted to hiring a team of three developers based in Poland. Similarly, in the marketing of their invention—to Kigali commuters, to investors, to potential advertisers on the app, to markets outside of Kigali—they are on their own. Their inability to find like-minded visionaries to join the SafeMotos team speaks to long-standing deficiencies in education systems such as Rwanda's. As Bruce Krogh, the director of Carnegie Mellon's Kigali campus, says, "The whole experience of children in the U.S., almost from the day they're born, is: What do you want to do? Education there cultivates critical-thinking skills. Here it's rote to an extreme. In this culture children are told to stay in their place and not make decisions at all."

But—as evidenced by the successful effort to lure Carnegie Mellon to Kigali six years ago—Rwanda is rapidly becoming an education success story. When Paul Kagame became president in 2000, he proclaimed that his country would have a knowledge-based economy in two decades. "Most people laughed," recalls the development board's Mutabazi. "As recently as 2008 no place outside Kigali had fiberoptic cables. By 2010 the entire country was covered by a network of fiber optics. Twenty years ago the country's entire higher educated population was 4,000. Now it's 86,000."

That progress may not come soon enough to acc ommodate Kariuki's timetable. Still, Kigali—the largest city in a country that, 23 years ago, was reeling from a genocide that killed 800,000 of its citizens —has become a hospitable incubator for innovations like SafeMotos. It is small, relatively free of corruption, and in a country with a highly proactive national government—different in nearly every way from Kariuki's native country of Kenya, where, he says, "people succeed by hustling, knowing that the bureaucrats won't help them."

In another Kenyan farming village about 200 miles by road from Peter Kariuki's birthplace, a child named Peris Bosire would sit in a field while her mother harvested maize and would strain to imagine any other sort of life. Everyone she met in Kebuse was a farmer, or a teacher who educated future farmers. Few made any money. The rough roads made it laborious for them to get their crops to market. They simply consumed what they grew and remained trapped in the village's primitive sameness.

But Bosire's fate took a turn at age 10, when her parents sent her to a modest boarding school so that she would not have to make the three-mile round-trip walk to class anymore. Someone had donated seven used Dell desktop computers. The girl's eyes were uncomprehending when she first beheld th em. She'd never so much as seen a cell phone. She had no idea how to type. But she was uncommonly intelligent, and before long she understood what those computers represented: Peris Bosire's ticket out of the village.

As with Kariuki, Bosire's grades quali fied her for a superior high school, with a bona fide computer lab. She won a national science competition and a scholarship to the University of Nairobi. Her dorm roommate, Rita Kimani, was also from a poor farming community and had a similar way with computers. Bosire and Kimani became inseparable and a nearly unbeatable team on the tech-contest circuit. In mulling over their future, Bosire recalls, "we started looking back at how we grew up and how our parents did farming. And we realized that none of them had ever received a loan to improve their farming activities."

In spring 2014 the two friends began spending their free time interviewing farmers and bankers. While two-thirds of Kenya's workforce is in the agricultural

sector, less than one percent of commercial loans in Africa go to farmers. If Bosire and Kimani could convince risk-averse bankers that farmers are capable of using mobile phones to keep financial records and make loan payments, then the two women felt confident they could devise a digital bridge between the financial sector and a vast, untapped, and needy customer base.

Bosire and Kimani launched FarmDrive in May 2015. The digital recordkeeping platform serves as a basis for bankers to establish credit ratings and determine which farmers are best suited for small loans. FarmDrive's pilot program consisted of 50 farmers. Today hundreds of thousands are in FarmDrive's database; about 830 have received financing. In turn the banks pay FarmDrive for essentially functioning as their credit bureau for Kenya's vast farming community. The two entrepreneurs have no intention of stopping there. "There are more than five million small farmers in Kenya," Bosire says. "Throughout Africa it's about 50 million. But when we started FarmDrive, we always had global ambitions. We're building solutions for farmers in Asia too."

In many ways the impulses driving Peris Bosire and Rita Kimani exemplify the best of Kenya's digital scene: They're motivated by a de sire to better their communities. Even as they now tour the world speaking at business summits and scoping out other market opportunities, they remain rooted in Kenya. Although they come from impoverished villages, they've benefited in a broad sense from a heightened innovative streak that, for a host of historical and cultural reasons, seems endemic to Kenya. One distinction is that after Great Britain's colonial rule ended, Kenya avoided missteps committed by other African nations. As Ndemo points out, "S ince independence Kenya has been a free market economy, where a lot of other countries leaned towards the Soviet Union and experimented with socialism. Uganda had a bad experience with Idi Amin. Rwanda obviously had a very bad experience. In the meantime Kenyans have had more than 50 years of freedom."

But if it's true that Kenya's relative stability has contributed to Bosire and Kimani's success, it's also true—and typical of the Kenyan entrepreneurial experience—that FarmDrive has succeeded with little encouragement from the national government. In sub-Saharan Africa, Kenya and Nigeria have achieved tech preeminence

more from venture capital flowing into those large countries than from government action.

"Right now there is no link in Kenya between policym aking, academic research, and the private sector—and only the government can forge that link," says Ndemo, who was among the first champions of a 5,000-acre technology hub under construction in Konza, about 40 miles from Nairobi, the capital. It was billed as Africa's first "smart city" at its groundbreaking in 2013, but its construction has been hamstrung by political squabbling and profiteering. As Ndemo understatedly puts it, "The speed is not there."

For now Kenya's version of Silicon Valley is Nairobi's Kilimani neighborhood, in particular a heavily trafficked, ramshackle thoroughfare known as Ngong Road. One catalyst was the influential technology-innovation center iHub, from which a number of homegrown software start-ups have been hatched—among them Totohealth, which helps parents track the health of their babies from pregnancy through early childhood. The University of Nairobi's Kenya Science Campus is situated on Ngong. Across the street is 88mph, a prominent firm that invests in tech start-ups. And not far from iHub's location is FarmDrive's office, quietly positioned in the epicenter of the city's programming community.

Another factor binds Bosire and Kimani to entrepreneurs throughout the city and indeed the continent: In succeeding, they inevitably encounter cultural obligations that can inhibit further success. The mythic start-up stories of Steve Jobs building the first Apples in his parents' garage and of Bill Gates dropping out of Harvard to start Microsoft might be celebrated in the West, but the stakes for brazen risktakers are different in developing countries. "This is the reality of entrepreneurship in Africa," Bezy says. "You're the only educated person in a community of 200 relatives. You're expected to feed that entire family. And in that way your great idea is constrained."

Bezy's observation was on my mind as I accompani ed Bosire one afternoon on a drive south from Nairobi so that she could learn how a few farming communities were making use of the loans supplied to them via FarmDrive. Their reports were varied. One farmer had used a $200 loan to expand her well-tended acreage of cabbages and was now ready to apply for a second loan. Another woman who raised pigs had constructed

a sturdy water tank for her animals. Some farmers had fared less well. One had encountered family hardships and was struggling to pay back his loan. Another had misused the bank's money on a quick-fix irrigation ditch that had collapsed with the first hard rain. For FarmDrive's purposes the failures were as useful as the successes. Together they would present a more complete database that would help banks determine lines of credit. Ultimately every farming community in Kenya could benefit from Bosire's research—including Kebuse, the village where she was raised. But that wasn't yet obvious back home, as Bosire acknowledged to me when I asked her about the communal pressures on African entrepreneurs. Sighing, the 25-year-old woman said, "My mom and I are having a big fight right now. She doesn't get it. 'Why aren't you sending more money back home? Why don't you have jobs to give to your cousins?' "

Perhaps Bosire's mother will see things in a more appreciative light once FarmDrive comes to her village. "We Africans sometimes resist change," admits Patrick Wakaba Kariuki, the father of the SafeMotos co-inventor. He had been fretful when his son decided not to attend college in Nairobi to become an entrepreneur. But last year he flew to Rwanda to visit his son. The farmer marveled at Kigali's clean streets. It was evident to him that a young man could do business there. And when he climbed onto the back of one of the motorcycles in his son's fleet, strapped on a helmet, and took off, he found himself gliding through more than time and space. He was departing the simple, predictable ways of the village for an uncharted savanna.

"I was able to understand," recalls the farmer, who returned to Engineer—where one day, thanks to dreamers aglow at night by computer screens, the future would also come.

2.3 They are watching

By Robert Draper

National Geograhic, February 2018

About 10:30 on a Saturday morning in the north London borough of Islington, two men on mopeds race down the shopping corridor of Upper Street. Sheathed in helmets, gloves, and jackets, they look more like manic video game figures than humans. They weave through traffic and around double-decker buses at kamikaze

velocity. Motorists flinch at their approach. The bikers pop wheelies and execute speedy figure eights along the busy street. Still, something more purposeful than joyriding would seem to be on their minds.

After three or four minutes, they abruptly turn off Upper and onto a quiet and leafy residential avenue. They hop the curb and cut their engines. Dismounting on the sidewalk, their helmets still on, they fall into a lengthy conversation. Their dialogue is known only to them. But there is something the men themselves likely don't know: About a mile away, from a windowless room, two other men are watching them.

"They're moving," Sal says to Eric.

The two men sit 10 feet apart, behind a long console in Islington's closed-circuit television (CCTV) control room, painted and carpeted in gray, with no adornments. Sal is middle-aged, while Eric is decades younger. Both wear casual office attire. No small talk passes between them. As the two bikers take off, Sal types away at his computer keyboard, prompting Camera 10 to appear on his screen. And there they are again, flying down Upper Street. As they disappear from Sal's view, Eric quickly locates them on Camera 163. With a joystick, he zooms the camera onto the moped pulling up the rear until its license plate is legible.

Sal radios the police station. "We have two suspicious mopeds doing wheelies on Upper Street."

Facing the men is an immense display with 16 screens. It conveys live images from Islington's network of 180 CCTV cameras. By visible evidence, this Saturday morning is a comparatively placid one. Earlier in the week a young man had died after being stabbed in a flat, and from the overpass at Archway Road, darkly referred to as "suicide bridge," another man had jumped to his d eath. Later today in Finsbury Park, the cameras would spend hours panning across 35,000 festivalgoers in search of pickpockets, drunken brawlers, and other assorted agents of petty mischief.

For the moment, however, the bikers are the only action in Islington. And though Sal and Eric—who have been doing this work for 15 and four years, respectively— pursue their quarry from one camera to the next with humdrum efficiency, I can almost see their blood quicken. For what we have here, they believe, are two members of gangs

that have been plaguing Islington for more than a year. They snatch smartphones from pedestrians, then sell the items on the black market. It happens about 50 times a week in the borough of nearly 233,000 residents.

And yet to the uninitiated, the prospect of catching the bikers in an illegal act can feel almost irrelevant. Instead, I'm captivated by the basic spectacle of two people who appear to have no idea they're being watched everywhere they go. Perhaps they're criminals. Perhaps they're sociopaths. Our surveillance is inconclusive on these matters. The only thing that's certain is that we see them but they don't see us. Like a deer framed in a hunting riflescope, the bikers display no signs of their vulnerability. In this way they are profoundly exposed.

That evening a few miles away, I'm sitting in a mobile trailer in southwest London, just down the street from the Vauxhall Underground Station. Beside me is an affable young man who goes by the name of Haz. Several closed-circuit screens are arrayed in front of us, displaying images provided by 10 cameras aimed at two nearby nightclubs.

Haz is here a couple of weekends a month. The nightclubs, Lightbox and Fire, wish to avoid legal troubles from drug deals by their patrons, so they've commis sioned a mobile CCTV operator and former policeman, Gordon Tyerman, to have his man Haz keep an eye on the crowds. Occasionally a clubgoer happens to notice one of the cameras and responds by thrusting a middle finger or an exposed breast into Haz's field of vision. Otherwise, the thousands of young men and women entering and exiting the clubs are his unwitting entertainment.

"This is the best, most exciting job I've had so far," Haz says. "It's so unpredictable. Everything's quiet, and then suddenly a fight breaks out."

Haz sits in the trailer for 10 hours straight, eyes trained on the patrons. If he sees the makings of a drug deal or a fight, he notifies the club's in-house security by walkie-talkie. It amazes him how indiscreet drug dealers can be —with the bulges in their socks and their melodramatic handovers—despite the presence of security guards. "We ask them, 'How stupid can you be?' " he laughs. "And they take it as a challenge."

Tonight there are no drug deals, no fights, only the random foolishness of the young and inebriated. They stagger with linked arms down the middle of the street. They paw at each other. They get sick on the sidewalk. In their sudden aloneness, they break out in sobs. Though Haz maintains that he's gained "invaluable skills from this job," chiefly the skills he's honing are those of Vauxhall's invisible, after-hours anthropologist.

"There's stuff you see on CCTV," he marvels, "that makes you think, 'That's not adult behavior.' They tend to forget who they are."

But do they really tend to forget who they are? Or do they simply tend to forget that someone might be watching?

In 1949, amid the specter of European authoritarianism, the British novelist George Orwell published his dystopian masterpiece 1984, with its grim admonition: "Big Brother is watching you." As unsettling as this notion may have been, "watching" was a quaintly circumscribed undertaking back then. That very year, 1949, an American company released the first commercially available CCTV system. Two years later, in 1951, Kodak introduced its Brownie portable movie camera to an awestruck public.

Today more than 2.5 trillion images are shared or stored on the Internet annually—to say nothing of the billions more photographs and videos people keep to themselves. By 2020, one telecommunications company estimates, 6.1 billion people will have phones with picture-taking capabilities. Meanwhile, in a single year an estimated 106 million new surveillance cameras are sold. More than three million ATMs around the planet stare back at their customers. Tens of thousands of cameras known as automatic number plate recognition devices, or ANPRs, hover over roadways —to catch speeding motorists or parking violators but also, in the case of the United Kingdom, to track the comings and goings of suspected criminals. The untallied but growing number of people wearing body cameras now includes not just police but also hospital workers and others who aren't law enforcement officers. Proliferating as well are personal monitoring devices—dash cams, cyclist helmet cameras to record collisions, doorbells equipped with lenses to catch package thieves—that are fast becoming a part of many a city dweller's everyday arsenal. Even less quantifiable, but far more vexing, are the

billions of images of unsuspecting citizens captured by facial-recognition technology and stored in law enforcement and private-sector databases over which our control is practically nonexistent.

Those are merely the "watching" devices that we're capable of seeing. Presently the skies are cluttered with drones—2.5 million of which were purchased in 2016 by American hobbyists and businesses. That figure doesn't include the fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles used by the U.S. government not only to bomb terrorists in Yemen but also to help stop illegal immigrants entering from Mexico, monitor hurricane flooding in Texas, and catch cattle thieves in North Dakota. Nor does it include the many thousands of airborne spying devices employed by other countries—among them Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.

We're being watched from the heavens as well. More than 1,700 satellites monitor our planet. From a distance of about 300 miles, some of them can discern a herd of buffalo or the stages of a forest fire. From outer space, a camera clicks and a detailed image of the block where we work can be acquired by a total stranger.

Simultaneously, on that very same block, we may well be photographed at unsettlingly close range perhaps dozens of times daily, from lenses we may never see, our image stored in databases for purposes we may never learn. Our smartphones, our Internet searches, and our social media accounts are giving away our secrets. Gus Hosein, the executive director of Privacy International, notes that "if the police wanted to know what was in your head in the 1800s, they would have to torture you. Now they can just find it out from your devices."

This is—to lift the title from another British futurist, Aldous Huxley—our brave new world. That we can see it coming is cold comfort since, as Carnegie Mellon University professor of information technology Alessandro Acquisti says, "in the cat -and-mouse game of privacy protection, the data subject is always the weaker side of the game." Simply submitting to the game is a dispiriting proposition. But to actively seek to protect one's privacy can be even more demoralizing. University of Texas American studies professor Randolph Lewis writes in his new book, Under Surveillance: Being Watched in Modern America, "Surveillance is often exhausting to those who really feel

its undertow: it overwhelms with its constant badgering, its omnipresent mysteries, its endless tabulations of movements, purchases, potentialities."

The desire for privacy, Acquisti says, "is a universal trait among humans, across cultures and across time. You find evidence of it in ancient Rome, ancient Greece, in the Bible, in the Quran. What's worrisome is that if all of us at an individual level suffer from the loss of privacy, society as a whole may realize its value only after we've lost it for good."

Is a looming state of Orwellian bleakness already a fait accompli? Or is there a more hopeful outlook, one in which a world under watch in many ways might be better off? Consider the 463 infrared camera traps the World Wildlife Fund uses in China to monitor the movements of the threatened giant panda. Or the thermal imaging devices that rangers deploy at night to detect poachers in Kenya's Masai Mara National Reserve. Or the sound-activated underwater camera system developed by UC San Diego researchers that tracks the nearly extinct vaquita porpoise in the Sea of Cortez. Or the "forest watcher" cameras installed to help protect the shrinking timberlands of Sri Lanka.

"If you want a picture of the future," Orwell darkly warned in his classic, "imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever." This authoritarian vision discounts the possibility that governments might use such tools to make the streets safer. Recall, for example, the footage from security cameras that cracked the cases of the 2005 London subway and 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. Multitudes of more obscure episodes exist, such as that of Euric Cain, caught unambiguously on camera shooting a Tulane University medical student named Peter Gold in 2015 after Gold prevented him from abducting a woman on the streets of New Orleans. (Gold survived; Cain received a 54-year prison sentence for a crime rampage that included rapes, armed robbery, and attempted murder.)

At the Port of Boston, the Department of Homeland Security has tested a cargo-visualizing method invented by two MIT physicists, Robert Ledoux and William Bertozzi. Using a technique known as nuclear resonance fluorescence—in which elements become identifiable by exciting their nuclei—the screening device can,

without opening a freight container, discern the elemental fingerprint of its contents. Unlike a typical x-ray scan, which shows only shape and density, it can tell the difference between soda and diet soda, natural and manufactured diamonds, plastics and high-energy explosives, and nonnuclear and nuclear material.

Does anyone doubt that a more closely inspected world over the past 150 years would have been a safer one? We might know the identity of Jack the Ripper, whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, and if O. J. Simpson acted at all. Of course, public safety has been the pretext for surveillance before and since Orwell's time. But today such technology can be seen as a lifesaver in more encompassing ways. Thanks to imagery provided by satellite cameras, relief organizations have located refugees near Mosul, encamped in the deserts of northern Iraq. And thanks to numerous space probes, scientists have proof that the world's climate is dramatically changing.

Could the great Orwell's imagination have failed? Could Big Brother save humanity, rather than enslave it? Or might both scenarios be true at the same time?

'There is an appetite in the U.K. for surveillance that I haven't seen anywhere else in the world," said Tony Porter, the world's only known surveillance camera commissioner, as we sat in the cafeteria of a London government office with CCTV cameras peering at us from the corners. A former police officer and counterterrorism specialist, Porter was recruited four years ago by Her Majesty's Home Office, responsible for the security of the realm, to lend a semblance of oversight to the country's ever growing surveillance state. With a paltry annual budget of $320,000, Porter and three staffers spend their workdays persistently urging, with some success, government and commercial users of surveillance cameras to comply with the relevant codes and guidelines. But beyond mentioning the names of the noncompliant in a report to Parliament, Porter's office has no powers of enforcement.

Nonetheless, his appraisal of the U.K. as the most receptive country in the world to surveillance technology is widely shared. London's network of surveillance cameras was first conceived in the early nineties, in the wake of two bombings by the Irish Republican Army in the city's financial district. What followed was a fevered spread of monitoring technology. As William Webster, a professor of public policy at the

University of Stirling in Scotland and an expert on surveillance, recalls, "The rhetoric about public safety at the time was, 'If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear.' In hindsight, you can trace that slogan back to Nazi Germany. But the phrase was commonly used, and it crushed any sentiment against CCTVs."

The city's original security infrastructure, known as the "ring of steel," was later expanded and augmented by ANPR technology on major thoroughfares. Now spread throughout the country are 9,000 such cameras, which photograph and store 30 million to 40 million images daily of every single passing license tag, not merely those of speeders or known criminals. As former Scotland police counterterrorism coordinator Allan Burnett observes, "It would be very difficult today to go through Scotland and not be seen by an ANPR camera."

"I'm pretty sure we now have mo re CCTVs per capita than any other city on the planet," the former U.K. deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, told me as he sat in his London office, watched by a camera across the street trained directly on his back. "And basically, it's happened without any meaningful public or political debate whatsoever. Partly it's because we don't have the history of fascism and nondemocratic regimes, which in other countries have instilled profound suspicion of the state. Here it feels benign. And as we know from history, it's benign until it isn't."

Elements of fear and romance help explain the profusion of surveillance in the U.K. This, after all, is a country saved by espionage: The museum commemorating the legendary World War II code breakers at Bletchley Park, 40 miles northwest of London, is today a much visited site. So, for that matter, is the London Film Museum's permanent exhibit on the dashing spy James Bond, a creation of the writer and former British naval intelligence officer Ian Fleming. Agent 007 is bound up in the nation's postwar self-appraisal, but so is the jolting reality that the U.K. was one of the first countries to face the constant fear of terrorist attacks. When it comes to protecting its people, the British government is viewed in a more appreciative light than perhaps those of other free societies. Even after the revelations by former U.S. National Security Agency contract employee Edward Snowden that American and British intelligence agencies had been collecting bulk data from their own citizens—a disclosure that triggered calls for reform

by both political parties in the U.S.—Parliament essentially enshrined those powers in late 2016 by passing the Investigatory Powers Act with scant public outcry.

As David Omand, the former director of the Government Communications Headquarters—one of the British intelligence agencies shown by Snowden to be collecting bulk data—put it to me: "On the whole we see our government as efficient and benign. It runs the National Health Service, public education, and social security. And thank God, we haven't been through the experience of the man in the brown leather trench coat knocking on the door at four in the morning. So when we talk about government surveillance, the resonance is different here."

That's not by any means to say that a country like the United States, with its more skeptical view of big government, is wholly immune to surveillance creep. Most of its police departments are now using or considering using body cameras—a development that, thus far at least, has been cheered by civil liberties groups as a means of curbing law enforcement abuses. ANPR cameras are in many major American cities as traffic and parking enforcement tools. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, New York City ramped up its CCTV network and today has roughly 20,000 officially run cameras in Manhattan alone. Meanwhile, Chicago has invested heavily in its network of 32,000 CCTV devices to help combat the murder epidemic in its inner city.

But other U.S. cities with no history of terrorist attacks and relatively low violent crime rates also have embraced surveillance technology. I checked out the CCTV network that has quietly spread throughout downtown Houston, Texas. As recently as 2005, the city didn't have a single such camera. But then Dennis Storemski, the director of the Mayor's Office of Public Safety and Homeland Security, began touring other cities. "Basically, it was what I saw in London that got me interested in the technology," he recalls. Today, thanks to federal grants, Houston has 900 CCTV cameras, with access to an additional 400. As in London, officials don't monitor every camera every minute— and as such, Storemski says, "it's not surveillance per se. We've wanted to take away the expectation that people are watching." Perhaps for that reason, Houston's CCTV reach will soon expand well beyond downtown, but—in a state hardly known as trusting of government—without the slightest drama.

Similarly, the acquiescence among the British to the proliferation of cameras is as striking as any sound of silence could possibly be. CCTV and ANPR cameras —and the signs announcing them (though by no means all of them) —blend in as drab companions to the rest of the city's infrastructure. During three weeks in London, I strolled through the quiet neighborhoods where Orwell and Huxley once resided. Orwell's house, on Canonbury Square in Islington, is within view of several CCTV and ANPR cameras and is a mere four-minute walk from the borough's control room. For its part, the former Huxley residence a few miles away is under constant watch in an impregnable steel-reinforced control room.

Outside of the city in the county of South Yorkshire, I visited Barnsley Hospital, where some security personnel are equipped with body cameras to discourage unruly behavior by patients or visitors. Similar cameras, it was reported during my stay, were being tested for use by schoolteachers. Given that an estimated 150,000 British police officers are already equipped with such devices, perhaps it's an effortless next step to contemplate them on other authority figures, such as educators and nurses. From there, however, who's next? Flight attendants? Postal workers? Psychologists? Human resource directors?

"Some local authorities are seeking to compel taxi drivers to use surveillance," Porter, the surveillance camera commissioner, told me. "Considering that, and the use of body cameras in hospitals and schools, the question I'd put forward is: What kind of society do we want to live in? Is it acceptable for all of us to go around legitimately filming each other, just in case somebody commits a wrong against us?"

I thought about this last question during my final days ambling along the well-scrubbed streets of London, my eyes now keenly attuned to the cyclops-like glares from corners and lampposts. As my path inevitably led me to the famed Westminster Bridge over the River Thames, I found myself engulfed by tourists of various nationalities holding up smartphones in an attempt to produce the ultimate London selfie. I ducked and turned and apologized before realizing it was futile. And these were just the cameras in front of my face. Were all of my movements being casually documented in this way?

Did it really make any difference whether Big Brother was watching, given that everyone is already watching everyone else?

I'd been discussing society's growing pics-or-it-didn't-happen fixation with two keen observers. The first, Chloe Combi, is a former schoolteacher whose first book, Generation Z: Their Voices, Their Lives, is the fruit of hundreds of hours of interviews she conducted with British teenagers. They demonstrated a remarkable nonchalance about being photographed and filmed in almost every conceivable setting. "You can watch a documentary of someone's entire life on their phone," Combi told me. "We live in a world where, increasingly, nothing remains secret. And one of the signs of true wealth and power may end up being that privacy will become a commodity only for those who have the serious money to buy it. For everybody else, all the world really will be a stage, with all the people on it self-consciously playing their role."

The futurist spectacle conjured up by Combi—one in which everyone is simultaneously voyeur and exhibitionist, 24/7—struck me as a somewhat egalitarian version of 1984 and Brave New World, yet no less dystopic. Are we already there, at the endpoint of what University of Kansas sociologist William Staples in 2000 called the "state of permanent visibility," except by our own acquiescence rather than by governmental force? Our visual constellation is replete with adorable babies, kittens, and elephants—but also ISIS beheadings, celebrities in sexual congress, double-speaking politicians, police shootings of unarmed civilians. Meanwhile, we're seen, u p close and far too personally, by airport-security screeners, "smart" billboards that tailor ads to us based on our appearance, and everyone who knows everyone who caught us on camera on a day when we could swear we were alone.

Whether this all adds up to a more enlightened society, an overstimulated one, or a little bit of both is hard to say. I solicited the thoughts of Susan Greenfield, a research neuroscientist and renowned critic of social media obsessives, who also happens to be a member of the British Parliament. Baroness Greenfield's assessment was no less stark than Combi's. "The notion of privacy, of privation, is shutting something out," she said. "We need to cut ourselves off. Everyone seems to think that it's great to be connected and exposed all the time. But what happens when everything is literal and visual? How

do you explain a concept like honor when you can't find it on Google Images? The universe of the abstract is inexplicable. The nuance in life disappears."

And so as I talked with Tony Porter in the cavernous and highly surveilled cafeteria of the Home Office, I found myself repeating something I'd expressed to him once before, months earlier: Didn't this whole fear-of-Big-Brother impulse seem rather quaint now?

"I now use that term in my speeches," the surveillance camera commissioner informed me with a pleased grin. Then he turned serious. Porter had recently visited the United Arab Emirates, a federation of monarchies that suppresses dissent and has a great deal of interest in surveillance technology. That struck Porter as ominous. "I get where you're coming from," he said. "But surveillance by the state is invasive, it's powerful, it's capable of connectivity beyond people's wildest imaginations. That's completely different from, say, a selfie.

"Look," he went on, "the real threat is when we move towards integrated surveillance. Large retailers are spending millions of pounds looking at every conceivable element of this. I'm a middle-aged fat guy; I walk into a supermarket and immediately on the intercom they start advertising for croissants. What if it gets more sinister, and from my Facebook profile they can target my daughter and ask where she shops? Who's going to regulate that? Or does it not need to be regulated? Is the horse already out of the barn? Is it already 'quaint'?"

The seemingly minute-by-minute advancements in surveillance technology can, to some civil libertarians, take on the appearance of a runaway bullet train. As Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at the University of Cambridge, warns, "We need to be thinking ahead to the next 20 years. Because that's when you'll have augmented reality, an Oculus Rift 2.0, with at least 8,000 pixels per inch. So, sitting in the back of a lecture hall, you can read the text on a lecturer's phone. At the same time, the one hundred CCTVs in that lecture hall will be able to see the password you're punching into your phone."

Even Huxley, whose masterwork presents a forbidding view of a hyper-industrialized London in the year 2540, didn't conceive of a world so acutely visualized

that our most intimate secrets can't always be concealed. Where would that leave us? On the one hand, it stretches credulity to imagine the willful suppression of such tools. Says David Anderson, a London barrister who spent six years as the government's independent reviewer of counterterrorism legislation, "Either you think technology has presented us with strong powers that the government should use with equally strong safeguards, or you believe this technology is so scary we should pretend it's not there. And I'm firmly in the first category—not because I say government is to be trusted, but instead because in a mature democracy such as this one, we're capable of constructing safeguards that are good enough for the benefits to outweigh the disadvantages."

On the other hand, allowing such technological progress to find its way into a largely unregulated marketplace seems equally imprudent. Jameel Jaffer, the founding director of Columbia University's Knight First Amendment Institute, says, "I do think that we live increasingly recorded and tracked lives. And I also think we're only starting to grapple with the implications of that, so before we adopt new technologies or before we permit new surveillance forms to entrench themselves in our societies, we should think about what the long-term implications of those surveillance technologies will be."

How to craft such judgments? Endeavoring to do so is particularly nettlesome when a breakthrough occurs that explodes our notion of how we can view the world. In fact, a game changer of this sort has already emerged. The technology in question can monitor the Earth's entire landmass every single day. It's the brainchild of a San Francisco-based company called Planet, founded by three idealistic former NASA scientists named Will Marshall, Robbie Schingler, and Chris Boshuizen.

Their headquarters resides in an unprepossessing warehouse in the gritty South of Market neighborhood. The tableau inside is textbook Silicon Valley: more than 200, mostly young techies in aggressively casual dress hunched silently over their keyboards in an open work space, aside from a few conference rooms named after some of the company's heroes—among them, Galileo, Gandhi, and Al Gore. I sat in one of them overlooking the upscale employee cafeteria, where lunch would later be followed by a happy hour of Napa wines and California microbrews.

Marshall and Schingler joined me. The former is a lanky Brit with wire-frame glasses; the latter, a broad-shouldered and easygoing Californian. Both are 39 and seemed fully recovered from their dinner the previous evening to celebrate the fifth anniversary of when they started working full time at Planet. At NASA they had been captivated by the idea of taking pictures from space, especially of Earth—and for reasons that were humanitarian rather than science based.

They experimented by launching ordinary smartphones into orbit, confirming that a relatively inexpensive camera could function in outer space. "We thought, What could we do with those images?" Schingler said. "How can we use these things for the benefit of humanity? List the world's problems: poverty, housing, malnutrition, deforestation. All of these problems are more easily addressed if you have more up-to-date information about our planet. Like you wake up in a few years and you find there's a hole in the Amazon forest. What if we could have supplied information about this more rapidly to the Brazilian government?"

In storybook fashion, Marshall and Schingler developed their first model in a garage in Silicon Valley. The idea was to design a relatively low-cost, shoe box-size satellite to minimize the military-scale budgets often required for designing such technology—and then, as Marshall told me, "to launch the largest constellation of satellites in human history." By deploying many such devices, the company would be able to see daily changes on the Earth's surface in totality.

In 2013 they launched their first satellites and received their first photographs, which provided a far more dynamic look at life around the world than previous global mapping imagery. "The thing that surprised us most," said Marshall, "is that almost every picture that came down showed how the Earth was changing. Fields were reshaped. Rivers moved. Trees were taken down. Buildings went up. Seeing all of this completely changes our concept of the planet as being static. And instead of just having a figure about how much a country has been deforested, people can now be motivated by pictures that show the deforestation taking place."

Today Planet has more than 200 satellites in orbit, with about 150 it calls Doves that can image every bit of land every day when conditions are right. Planet has ground

stations as far away as Iceland and Antarctica. Its clients are just as varied. The company works with the Amazon Conservation Association to track deforestation in Peru. It has provided images to Amnesty International that document attacks on Rohingya villages by security forces in Myanmar. At the Middlebury Institute's Center for Nonproliferation Studies, recurring global imaging helps the think tank watch for the sudden appearance of a missile test site in Iran or North Korea. And when USA Today and other publications wanted an aerial image of the Shayrat air base in Syria before and after it was bombed by the U.S. military last April in retaliation for a chemical attack on a rebel-held Syrian town, the news organizations knew whom to call.

Those are pro bono clients. Its paying customers include Orbital Insight, a Silicon Valley-based geo-spatial analytics firm that interprets data from satellite imagery. With such visuals, Orbital Insight can track the development of road or building construction in South America, the expansion of illegal palm oil plantations in Africa, and crop yields in Asia. In the company's conference room, James Crawford, the chief executive, opened his laptop and showed me aerial views of Chinese oil tanks, with their floating lids indicating they were about three-quarters full. "Hedge funds, banks, and oil companies themselves know what's in their tanks," he said with a sly grin, "but not in others', so temporal resolution is extremely important." Crawford's firm also employs Planet's optical might to charitable ends. For example, it conducts poverty surveys in Mexico for the World Bank, using building heights and car densities as proxies for economic well-being.

Meanwhile, Planet's marketing team spends its days gazing at photographs, imagining an interested party somewhere out there. An insurance company wanting to track flood damage to homes in the Midwest. A researcher in Norway seeking evidence of glaciers eroding. But what about ... a dictator wishing to hunt down a roving dissiden t army?

Here is where Planet's own ethical guidelines would come into play. Not only could it refuse to work with a client having malevolent motives, but it also doesn't allow customers to stake a sole proprietary claim over the images they buy. The other significant constraint is technological. Planet's surveillance of the world at a resolution

of 10 feet is sufficient to discern the grainy outline of a single truck but not the contours of a human. Resolution-wise, the current state of the art of one foot is supplied by another satellite imaging company, DigitalGlobe. But for now, only Planet, with its formidable satellite deployment, is capable of providing daily imagery of Earth's entire landmass. "We've run the proverbial four-minute mile," Marshall said. "Simply knowing it's possible doesn't make it any easier."

Still, Planet has blazed a trail. Others someday will follow it. When they do, how will they harness the power to see so much of the globe, every single day? Will their aims be as benevolent as those of Planet? Will they try to perfect satellite photography that's higher in resolution and thus in invasiveness? Marshall doesn't see how this is possible. "To identify a person from 300 miles away, you'd need a camera the size of a bus," he told me. And in any event, he added, an American firm seeking to accomplish that would encounter considerable federal regulatory hurdles.

Of course, regulations can be changed. So can the boundaries of our technological limits. Just a year or two ago, the owner of the largest number of functioning satellites in orbit was the U.S. government, with roughly 170. Now Planet prevails over the heavens in greater numbers than the most powerful nation on Earth.

Who is next in line to be the Biggest Brother?

On a bracing autumn evening in San Francisco, I returned to Planet to see the world through its all-encompassing lens. More than a dozen clients would be there to show off how they're using satellite imagery—what it meant, in essence, to see the world as it's changing.

I zigzagged among semicircles of techies gathered raptly around monitors. Everywhere I looked, the world came into view. I saw, in the Brazilian state of Para, the dark green stretches of the Amazon jungle flash red, prompting automatic emails to the landowners: Warning, someone is deforesting your land! I saw the Port of Singapore teem with shipping activity. I saw the croplands of southern Alberta, Canada, in a state of flagging health. I saw an entire network of new roads in war-wracked Aleppo, Syria— and for that matter, a new obstruction in one of those roads, possibly a crater from a bomb attack. I saw oil well pads in Siberia—17 percent more than in the previous year,

a surprising sign of stepped-up production that seemed likely to prompt frantic reassessments in the world's oil and gas markets.

A tall young man named John Goolgasian wanted to show me how his less than year-old Virginia-based outfit called GeoSpark Analytics was matching crime data with Planet images. After a few clicks, we were staring at neighborhoods in Nigeria that had been overtaken by the extremist group Boko Haram. More clicks and the crescent-shaped coastline that materialized was one I'd visited nine years before: Mogadishu, Somalia, bearing fresh scars from that week's deadly bomb attacks by al Shabaab. A few more clicks and the image was even more familiar: my neighborhood in Washington, D.C.—specifically, a few blocks from my house, where a burglary report had just been called in.

Planet's hosts halted the show-and-tell to say a few words. Andy Wild, the chief revenue officer, spoke of the new frontier in a slightly quavering voice. It was one thing to achieve, as Wild put it, "a daily cadence of the entire landmass of the Earth." Now the custodians of this technology had to "turn it into outcomes." Tom Barton, the chief operating officer, said, "I hope one year from now, we're here saying, 'Holy shit, we really did change the world.' "

I was pondering the implications of this when a young woman showed me what was on her laptop. Her name was Annie Neligh, an Air Force veteran who now leads "customer solutions engineering" at Planet. One of Neligh's customers needing a solution was a Texas-based insurance company. The company suspected that it was renewing insurance policies for homeowners who weren't disclosing that they'd installed swimming pools—a 40 percent loss on each policy for the company. So it had asked Planet to provide satellite imagery of homes in Plano, Texas.

Neligh showed me what she'd found. Looking at a neighborhood of 1,500 properties, we could clearly see the shimmering shapes of 520 small bodies of water— a proportion far in excess of what the insurance company's customers had claimed. Neligh shrugged and offered a thin smile. "People lie, you know," she said.

Now her client had the truth. What would it do with this information? Conduct a surprise raid on the somnolent hamlets of Plano? Jack up premiums? Order images that

might show construction crews installing new Jacuzzis and Spanish tile roofs? The future is here, and in it, truth is more than a kindly educator. It is a weapon—against timber poachers and burglars and mad bombers and acts of God, but also against the lesser angels of our nature. People lie, you know. The age of transparency is upon us.

As I walked back to my hotel, I thought about the two moped riders in Islington, as I often had in the months since I surveilled them. I wondered if they had been arrested. I wondered if they were guilty of anything at all, apart from the crime of being conspicuously interesting on an otherwise dull morning. I wondered if they would ever know that unseen strangers had been watching them, just as a stranger might now be watching me—someone somewhere squinting into a CCTV monitor at the spectacle of a lone figure walking fast on a dark and otherwise vacant street on a chilly night without a coat on, as if in flight from something.

2.4 Underground Adventures The Economist, July 29 2017 The search forquicker, cheaperways of tunneling

A big hole in the car park at SpaceX's headquarters in Los Angeles is the first visible evidence of another of Elon Musk's ventures. Mr Musk who, besides leading SpaceX, a rocket company, also runs Tesla, a maker of electric cars, is going into the tunnelling business. The goal of the Boring Company, as he dubs his new enterprise, is to dig tunnels faster and more cheaply than is possible at the moment.

Apart from the pit in the car park, Mr Musksays he has also begun a series of test tunnels for a project that will, if it comes to fruition, carry cars under Los Angeles on high-speed sledges, in order to avoid the dreadful traffic jams above. More ambitiously, he claims to have official support for a 320km (200-mile) tunnel thatwould, in half an hour, whisk people between New York and Washington, DC, in magnetically propelled capsules, using a technology he has dubbed the hyperloop.

Loopy these ideas may sound, but Mr Musk is surely right about one thing—that tunnelling, which is currently slow and expensive, is a technology ripe for innovation. And he is not the only one who thinks so. In Europe, things are also stirring beneath the

surface. In January a consortium of academic and commercial researchers began work on a project called BADGER. This is intended to develop a robot tunneling machine (albeit one for tunnels much smaller than Mr Musk has in mind) that can detect and avoid obstacles such as pipes, cables, the foundations of buildings and even buried boulders.

Existing tunnel-boring machines are, in effect, building sites on rails. At the front, a cutting wheel with a diameter a little larger than that of the final tunnel (to allow for the thickness of the lining) is pushed forward by pistons and chews away at soil and rock as it travels. The spoil from this excavation is then taken to the surface by conveyor belts. Once enough material has been cleared, the borer is stopped and the newly exposed section is lined with precast concrete sections.

Slow, this process certainly is. The boring machines employed to construct the tunnels for Crossrail, a new railway under London which should open next year, cut through the strata they were faced with at a rate of around a metre an hour—literally a snail's pace. As to expense, Crossrail required eight boring machines, each of which cost around $15m in 2012, when tunneling started. Each also needed to be supervised by a gang of up to a dozen people on board, adding to costs. The total bill for Crossrail's tunnelling was J1.5bn ($2.4bn). This bought 42km of tunnels (21km each for the eastbound and westbound tracks); the longest individual tunnels (8.3km each) took 2 1/2 years to dig.

The Boring Company thinks it can speed this sort of operation up, and also cut costs. To do so it plans to make boring machines more powerful, so that they can cut through material faster. It also wants to automate things, to reduce labour costs, and to line the tunnel as the machines progress, instead of stopping excavation when linings are added. One idea is to compact the spoil into bricks and use those as lining material. Reducing the diameter of tunnels would also help. That is part of the reasoning for putting cars on sledges. A two-lane road tunnel needs to be about 8.5 metres wide. Crossrail, at around seven metres, is slightly narrower. But a sledge tunnel could be a single lane, because the sledges can be packed close together and so do not need as much space. It could thus work with a diameter of four metres, cutting costs by as much as three-quarters.

No one could ever accuse Mr Musk of not thinking big. But tunnels do not necessarily need to be big to be useful. BADGER is being designed specifically for small-diameter tasks, such as digging conduits for cables and pipes. The initial plan, according to the project's co-ordinator, Carlos Balaguer of Carlos III University, in Madrid, is for the machine to burrow at depths of up to four metres, at speeds of around two metres an hour. If that works, it should then be possible to increase both speed and scale.

BADGER's face will combine a conventional rotary cutting head with an ultrasonic drill, which will pulverise rock with high-frequency sound waves. As with existing machines, the spoil will then be sent to the surface. Unlike existing machines, however, BADGER will move forward not as a rigid unit, but like a worm. The rear section will clamp itself to the wall of the newly cut tunnel and push the front section forward. The forward section will then clamp itself and pull up the rear. And so on. As it advances, BADGER will line the tunnel behind it using a 3D printer. One idea is to print the wall with plastic, so that the result resembles a conventional pipe.

BADGER will navigate using various sensors including, crucially, ground-penetrating radar. This will enable it to operate autonomously and detect potential obstacles before it reaches them, so that it can steer around them. The great benefit of BADGER is being able to excavate tunnels Below busy cities without closing roads to dig trenches—thus avoiding making the traffic jams about which Mr Musk complains even worse. Whether the tunnels are straight or loopy, though, the future of tunnelling will be anything but boring.

2.5 Urban Aviators

The Economist, September 14 2019

Small hovering craft are being readied to fly people around cities

In October 1908, on a windy field at Farnborough, south-west of London, a handlebar-mustachioed former Wild West showman named Samuel Cody completed the first official controlled flight of a powered aeroplane in Britain. Since then many other pioneering aircraft, from Concorde to the giant Airbus A380, have flown at what became

the biennial Farnborough air show. The aerospace centre that stages the show is now preparing for another sort of revolutionary aircraft to take to the sky.

These new planes are variously described as flying taxis, passenger drones or, as the industry terms them, urban air mobility (uam) vehicles. Around 200 such craft are at various stages of development around the world, according to experts at Farnborough's first global urban air summit in early September. Some prototypes are already carrying out test flights and operators hope to begin commercial services within the next few years. Uber, which runs an app-based taxi-hailing service, aims to start flying passengers in Dallas, Los Angeles and Melbourne, Australia by 2023.

Yet a number of obstacles remain. "No one really knows exactly how it is going to happen," admits Fran3ois Sillion, head of Uber's Advanced Technologies Centre in Paris. That is because the obstacles are not particularly technological, but regulatory. Regulators are still working out how to certify that these new aircraft are safe, particularly as many will be flown without pilots, carrying passengers aloft as they buzz autonomously around a city.

Although UAM designs are many and varied, they sport some common features. The aircraft are invariably electrically powered, although some are hybrids with a backup combustion engine. They usually take off and land vertically like a helicopter, but unlike a helicopter use multiple small rotors. Two- and three-seater versions can fly between 30km and 160km between charges at 100-200kph. As the multiple rotors are driven directly by individual electric motors, each rotor can be controlled by computerised flight systems. This provides a high level of stability, in theory making such aircraft easier to fly than a helicopter, and easier to automate. Reassuringly, multiple rotors also mean that such aircraft can rapidly compensate if one or more of their motors fail.

Rotary ambitions

Some aircraft are moving beyond the experimental stage. The 18-rotor VoloCity is being developed by Volocopter, a German firm, based on a prototype (illustrated above) which has flown numerous test flights. One was an autonomous flight in Dubai. On September 9th, Geely, a Chinese carmaker which also owns Volvo Cars, took a minority stake in Volocopter and led a €50m ($55.1m) funding round to help bring the VoloCity

to market. The aircraft can carry two people (one of whom may or may not be a pilot) plus luggage for 35km.

Other types of air taxis use a "tilt wing". This has multiple rotors mounted on the wings, which tilt up for a vertical take-off and landing, but tilt ahead to operate like a fixed-wing aeroplane with propellers for forward flight. This saves power and increases the range of the aircraft.

Lilium, another German company, uses a variation of the theme with 36 electrically powered fan jets. These look like miniature versions of the turbofans on passenger jets, except they use electric motors. The fans are mounted on the fixed wings of its aircraft and blow downwards for a vertical take-off or landing and backwards for forward flight. The company's five-seater (pictured below) can travel 300km in an hour.

Kitty Hawk, a firm backed by Larry Page, boss of Google's parent Alphabet, has teamed up with Boeing, the world's largest aerospace company, to develop Cora. This two-seater uses 12 lifting rotors on a fixed wing and is pushed along by a rear-mounted propeller. It has a range of about 100km and will be used by Air New Zealand to run an air-taxi service.

Most UAM operators are getting into the air with experimental flying permits, which restrict how their prototypes can be flown and usually only with a pilot. Some aircraft are starting to go through full certification procedures, as all commercial aircraft must before carrying fare-paying passengers. Air-safety authorities are still establishing what the standards should be. In July the EU's Aviation Safety Agency released a "special condition" for the certification of hybrid and electrically powered vertical take-off and landing aircraft. The idea is that the rules will be developed further as flight trials continue. As with conventional aircraft, certification could take several years and cost millions of dollars.

Regulators have set strict operating conditions for people flying small drones, whether as a hobby or for commercial purposes, such as filming, surveying or delivering pizza. This usually involves drones being kept well away from people, buildings, airports and other aircraft. But as air taxis are being designed to provide journeys in just such places, from an airport to the centre of a city for example, these new aircraft will have to

be integrated into airtraffic-control systems, says Jay Merkle, the executive director of the Office of Unmanned Aircraft Systems at America's Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

See and be seen

Various efforts are under way to automate air-traffic-control systems so that air taxis, piloted or autonomous, can be merged with flights by airliners and light aircraft. Fundamental to that will be fitting all aircraft with transponders, similar to those already used on large aircraft. These transponders would transmit and receive the flight plans of other aircraft in the vicinity automatically so that pilots, or in the case of autonomous aircraft their flight computers, can see and avoid one another. Next year NASA, America's aerospace agency, will begin field tests of systems that could manage such operations in an urban environment as part of a "grand challenge" to industry to find workable solutions.

Some countries, though, are pressing ahead faster than others. Operators already complain they can use a drone to deliver blood in Rwanda but not in America, says the FAA's Mr Merkle. Working with UAM firms on flight trials and sharing information is the best way to reach global standards, reckons Tim Johnson, policy director of the Civil Aviation Authority in Britain. The agency has more than 20 groups planning air-taxi flight trials in Britain. Japan aims to undertake such flights in rural areas, where airspace is less congested, before allowing air taxis into urban locations, said Ito Takanori of the Future Air Mobility Office of his country's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.

Meanwhile, Uber is trying to learn how to run an air-taxi service. To this end it has begun operating a somewhat old-fashioned helicopter service between Lower Manhattan and jfk airport in New York. One thing this has brought home to the company, says Uber's Mr Sillion, is that uam operators will inevitably get drawn into property and infrastructure projects.

This means building "vertiports", which are landing pads with passenger facilities, parking for air taxis and recharging points for their batteries. Skyports, a Londonbased startup, is building a prototype vertiport due to open in October in Singapore. It will be used by Volocopter for test flights.

EHang, a Chinese dronemaker, is using a passenger-carrying version it has been testing to develop an air-taxi business in Guangzhou, a city in southern China. It is working with the municipal government to set up a command centre for flying operations and a series of vertiports.

But behind all these plans lurks one more problem. Planning permission for helicopter landing pads is hard to obtain in some cities, largely because of noise objections. Flying taxis, being electrically powered, should be much quieter than helicopters but are still likely to be heard buzzing away overhead, just as drones are. The leaders of some cities, such as Dubai, Guangzhou and Singapore, might be prepared to accept that as the sound of progress. Others might not. And noise, it should be remembered, can ground many an aviator's ambitions. Despite the allure of supersonic travel, Concorde had its wings clipped because of the noise it made going through the sound barrier.

2.6 Face off

The Economist, August 17 2019

As face-recognition technology spreads, so do ideas for subverting it