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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, November 5, 2018 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Mark Lupisella

"Cosmos and Culture: Cultural Evolution in a Cosmic Context"

ABSTRACT -- The search for life in the universe inevitably conjures images of intelligent life out there doing intelligent stuff. If they are out there, what would they be up to? Can we extrapolate from what intelligent Earthlings do?

A 2009 NASA book, with the same title of this talk (free e-version online at the NASA History website), suggests it's reasonable to think that such beings are caught up in a process of "cultural evolution" – arguably a third major form of cosmic evolution that goes beyond physical and biological evolution. The book features diverse contributors with backgrounds in science, history, and anthropology who consider culture in a cosmic context – including potentially surprising implications that cultural evolution might have for cosmic evolution more broadly. The book is divided into three parts, beginning with the nature and history of cosmic evolution, then focusing on cultural evolution, and finally tackling more speculative ideas exploring relationships between cosmos and culture. This talk will briefly review the book, including contributions from writers such as Eric Chaisson, Paul Davies, David Christian (Co-founder of "Big History Project" with Bill Gates) and Steve Dick (previous NASA Historian).

SPEAKER -- Mark Lupisella is Goddard's Advanced Exploration Systems and Architecture Manager for Human Exploration, which includes projects such as lunar landers, Lunar IceCube (slated to fly on SLS), Gateway, avionics and software, and science support for missions such as Mars 2020 and Lunar Flashlight.

He has led or co-led a number of architecture studies, including crew-assisted sample return and low-latency teleoperations for the Evolvable Mars Campaign. He led proposals for a biomolecule sequencer that led to the first DNA sequencing in space. He was previously lead engineer for human exploration architecture science integration and has worked on Hubble Space Telescope, astrobiology and planetary protection, wearable computing and cooperative robotics. He recently co-chaired the Human Space Operations Topic for SpaceOps.

Mark has authored over 35 published works and is a contributor to the International Academy of Astronautics Cosmic Study on the "Dynamics of Space Exploration Activities and Outlook". He is co-editor of a NASA book with previous NASA Historian Steve Dick called Cosmos and Culture: Cultural Evolution in a Cosmic Context.

Mark received a B.S. in Physics, an M.A. in Philosophy of Science, and a Ph.D. in Evolutionary Biology from the University of Maryland, where he did his dissertation on modeling microbial contamination of Mars from human missions.

Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov