Anthony Brandt - The Runaway Species: How human creativity remakes the world

Also by David Eagleman

Sum (fiction)

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

Why the Net Matters

Wednesday is Indigo Blue

Brain and Behavior (textbook)

The Brain: The Story of You

Published by Catapult

catapult.co

Simultaneously published in Great Britain in 2017 by Canongate Books Ltd

Copyright 2017 by Anthony Brandt
Copyright 2017 by David Eagleman

ISBN: 978-1-936787-52-4

Catapult titles are distributed to the trade by
Publishers Group West
Phone: 866-400-5351

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016959435

Printed in Great Britain

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To our parents, who brought us into a life of creativity

Nat & Yanna Cirel & Arthur

our wives, who fill our lives with novelty

Karol Sarah

and our children, whose imaginations summon the future

Sonya, Gabe, Lucian Ari and Aviva

C ONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

WHAT DO NASA AND PICASSO HAVE IN COMMON?

S everal hundred people scramble in a control room in Houston, trying to save three humans ensnared in outer space. Its 1970 and Apollo 13 is two days into its moonshot when its oxygen tank explodes, spewing debris into space and crippling the craft. Astronaut Jack Swigert, with the understatement of a military man, radios Mission Control. Houston, weve had a problem.

The astronauts are over 200,000 miles from Earth. Fuel, water, electricity and air are running out. The hopes for a solution are close to zero. But that doesnt slow down the flight director back in NASA Mission Control, Gene Kranz. He announces to his assembled staff:

When you leave this room, you must leave believing that this crew is coming home. I dont give a damn about the odds and I dont give a damn that weve never done anything like this before Youve got to believe, your people have got to believe, that this crew is coming home.

How can Mission Control make good on this promise? The engineers have rehearsed the mission down to the minute: when Apollo 13 would reach the moons orbit, when the lunar module would deploy, how long the astronauts would walk on the surface. Now they have to shred that playbook and start over. Mission Control had also prepared abort scenarios, but all of those assumed that the main parts of the spacecraft would be healthy and the lunar module expendable. Unfortunately, the opposite is now true. The service module is destroyed and the command module is venting gas and losing power. The only working part of the craft is the lunar module. NASA has simulated many possible breakdowns, but not this one.

The engineers know that they have been dealt a nearly impossible task: save three men locked in an airtight metal capsule, hurtling at 3,000 miles an hour through the vacuum of space, their life support systems failing. Advanced satellite communication systems and desktop computers are still decades away. With slide rules and pencils, the engineers have to invent a way to abandon the command module and turn the lunar module into a lifeboat bound for home.

The engineers set about addressing the problems one by one: planning a route back to Earth, steering the craft, conserving power. But conditions are deteriorating. A day and a half into the crisis, carbon dioxide reaches dangerous levels in the astronauts tight quarters. If nothing is done the crew is going to suffocate within a few hours. The lunar module has a filtration system, but all of its cylindrical air scrubbers have been exhausted. The only remaining option is to salvage unused canisters from the abandoned command module but those are square. How to fit a square scrubber into a round hole?

Working from an inventory of whats on board, engineers at Mission Control devise an adaptor cobbled together from a plastic bag, a sock, pieces of cardboard and a hose from a pressure suit, all held together by duct tape. They tell the crew to tear off the plastic cover from the flight plan folder, and to use it as a funnel to guide air into the scrubber. They have the astronauts pull out the plastic-wrapped thermal undergarments that were originally meant to be worn under spacesuits while bouncing on the moon. Following instructions relayed from the ground, the astronauts discard the undergarments and save the plastic. Piece by piece, they assemble the makeshift filter and install it.

To everyones relief, carbon dioxide levels return to normal. But other problems quickly follow. As Apollo 13 draws closer to re-entry, power is growing short in the command module. When the spacecraft was designed, it had never crossed anyones mind that the command module batteries might have to be charged from the lunar module it was supposed to be the other way around. Fueled by coffee and adrenaline, the engineers in Mission Control figure out a way to use the lunar modules heater cable to make this work, just in time for the entry phase.

Once the batteries are recharged, the engineers instruct crew member Jack Swigert to fire up the command module. On board the craft, he connects cables, switches inverters, maneuvers antennas, toggles switches, activates telemetry an activation procedure beyond anything hed ever trained for or imagined. Faced with a problem they hadnt foreseen, the engineers improvise an entirely new protocol.

In the pre-dawn hours of April 17, 1970 eighty hours into the crisis the astronauts prepare for their final descent. Mission Control performs their final checks. As the astronauts enter the Earths atmosphere, the spacecraft radio enters blackout. In Kranz words:

Everything now was irreversible The control room was absolutely silent. The only noises were the hum of the electronics, the buzz of the air conditioning, and the occasional click of a Zippo lighter snapping open No one moved, as if everyone were chained to his console.

A minute and a half later, word reaches the control room: Apollo 13 is safe.

The staff erupts into cheering. The normally stoic Kranz breaks down in tears.

***

S ixty-three years earlier, in a small studio in Paris, a young painter named Pablo Picasso sets up his easel. Usually penniless, he has taken advantage of a financial windfall to purchase a large canvas. He sets to work on a provocative project: a portrait of prostitutes in a brothel. An unvarnished look at sexual vice.

Picasso begins with charcoal sketches of heads, bodies, fruit. In his first versions, a sailor and male medical student are part of the scene. He decides to remove the men, settling on the five women as his subjects. He tries out different poses and arrangements, crossing most of them out. After hundreds of sketches, he sets to work on the full canvas. At one point, he invites his mistress and several friends to see the work in progress; their reaction so disappoints him that he sets aside the painting. But months later he returns to it, working in secret.

Picasso views the portrait of the prostitutes as an exorcism from his previous way of painting: the more time he spends on it, the further he moves from his earlier work. When he invites people back to see it again, their reaction is even more hostile. He offers to sell it to his most loyal patron, The painters friends avoid him, fearing hes lost his mind. Dismayed, Picasso rolls up the canvas and puts it in his closet.

He waits nine years to show it in public. In the midst of the First World War, the painting is finally exhibited. The curator worried about offending public taste changes the title from