The Wonderful, Unsung World of Traveling Museum Exhibitions

Photo by Joshua Rawson-Harris on Unsplash - cropped

Big museums, in general, have a lot of money. They use it to acquire more stuff, not to keep down the price of admissions, which has soared over the past few years so that many major museums charge between $15 and $30 for adult admissions. And yet, people still come. Why? Much of it has to do with the traveling exhibitions that camp out at museums for three months or more and entice you with something different. After you’ve seen the Tyrannosaurus Rex or whale skeleton for the fourth or fifth time, you and (more importantly) the kiddos are ready for something new. 

It just so happens there is a whole industry that hardly anyone thinks, writes, or talks about that provides traveling exhibitions to museums. It runs the gamut from a nicely done set of placards with art and text dealing with a number of subjects that rent for modest sums up to $3000 for three months to an extravaganza taking up 8,000 square feet or more and costing upwards of $400,000. It can be an individual with a focus on one thing, like Christopher Marley’s  Biophilia, or Da Vinci: the Exhibition, one of twenty-some-odd large exhibits dealing with space, dinosaurs, art, and the human body from Imagine Exhibitions. At the stratospheric range of traveling exhibitions is Harry Potter: the Exhibition using 12 semi truck trailers to deliver 15,000 square feet of show for an estimated two million dollars. 

The inspiration for this article was, in fact, Christopher Marley’s  Biophilia which I saw in Houston. Christoper collects his specimens “…in an environmentally sensitive manner from a world wide network of people and institutions that share his passion for nature.” Basically, they are deceased birds, bugs, and snakes. What he does with those specimens will blow your mind. His sense of design to accentuate the qualities of his subject is superb. The beauty he portrays of things we might ordinarily think squeamishly of is an unexpected and very welcome gift to the soul. His show got me to thinking about how one gets their work into a museum. He doesn’t work for the Houston Museum of Natural Science so how did his exhibition get there.

It sounds trite, but first you have to have a museum quality product and display. Also, there are publications and organizations you can join and advertise in that are devoted to nothing but supporting the traveling museum exhibit and exhibition industry. Yes, many exhibitions are of some thing or collection of things; but many more are gems of the mind—beautiful coherent thoughts and knowledge brought to existence for other people to examine. 

This is an industry that has a bright future. Museum revenues are down despite the rise in ticket prices, and traveling exhibitions are one way museums can reverse that trend as far as ticket sales go. About half of European museums and 80 percent of North American museums use traveling exhibitions developed by others. 

This is one of those industries limited only by imagination. In general, however, it is not a solo endeavor. I don't want to denigrate genius solo polymaths; but teachers, designers, artists, technicians, and code writers are also needed to weave their skills together for an effective communication interface that also happens to be a traveling exhibition. 

There is competition. Many major museums have used their most valuable assets as the basis for traveling exhibitions. King Tut, Terracotta Warriors, and the like are things you can’t compete with. There are, however, at least four big exhibition companies with their own version of Leonardo da Vinci’s invention sketchbook come to life, and they are all doing well. Off the top of my head, I can think of a couple of different versions based on Da Vinci and his drawings.

Here are a few examples of what's out there:

Grande Exhibitions has developed a system "that combines multichannel motion graphics, cinema quality surround sound and up to forty high-definition projectors to provide one of the most exciting multiscreen environments in the world." Grande has produced several amazing traveling exhibitions including Van Gogh Alive, Planet Shark: Predator or Prey, 101 Inventions That Changed the World, The French Impressionists - Monet to Cezanne, and Alice - A Wonderland Adventure. 

Fulldome.pro provides prefabricated domes 1.5 to 35 meters in diameter with projectors and a library of 90 shows to go with them.

Flexhibit makes modules that demonstrate various STEM oriented subjects. 

A couple of great things about this niche industry is that the surface has only been scratched for both subject matter and the use of modern digital tools to display and interact with databases on science, art, health, and history. It would be nice to have artifacts to base a show on—I just saw the Art of the Gunsmith Exhibition at the Houston Museum of Natural Science—but not everyone has a collection of fifty or so rifles and pistols in nearly perfect condition from the three centuries spanning Columbus to Napoleon. You don’t have to. You can create your own like Luke Jerram's Moon, a 23 foot diameter replica of the Moon lit from inside. If you have a niche knowledge to teach, a secret curiosity itch to scratch, a different take on things, an artistic view, inquisitive intelligence, or a dogged determination to find out about things, you have what it takes to make a splash in traveling museum exhibitions. 

Coral inlaid pistol. Photo by Glen Hendrix. 

Even if you don’t know people with the right skills, some of these exhibition companies are willing partners to help you get started. EDG, with dozens of large exhibitions already developed, is willing to listen to your ideas. ExhibitsUSA specializes in photo exhibitions and wants to hear your take on the next great one. You can even find recommendations for producing small, interactive exhibitions for children online. 

That is really where the heart of the matter lies. There is so much room out there for exhibitions that teach our kids, as well as most adults, what they need to know to navigate this strange new world we live in. They need to know about the nitty gritty stuff like climate change and racism as well as the cool stuff like dinosaurs and butterflies. We don’t know what will trigger an idea in the brains of our next Einsteins or Newtons so we have to strive to give them the basic thinking tools and knowledge they need as well as something extra. It is up to us to teach them, and what better way than an inspiring personal experience at the museum. 

Replicator - Fact or Fiction?

Stargate replicator? No, NASA robot.

Spider Robot NASA JSC Tweetup Sarah Worthy - Licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike.

The “replicator” from Star Trek was mostly shown rustling up grub, but we all know they were rearranging subatomic particles to make air, water, condoms, iPads...just about anything that struck their fancy. They could probably even make a replicator. That’s where Stargate took up the baton, having replicators do just that with reckless, and evilly calculated, abandon.

Paper or plastic? There are a lot of unexpected turns and twists to the correct answer. 

What a wonderful sci-fi indulgence of the imagination, right? It is no longer imaginary. You can not only buy the Replicator, but the Replicator 2 and the Replicator 2X from MakerBot. Right now. $2800. Check out what the MakerBot 3D printer looked like in August 2011 when I first did a post on 3D printing...

...and what it looks like now.

Okay, it doesn't make filet mignon or tomato soup like on Star Trek, but it could make a cover for your iPhone. Makerbot's Replicator 2 is far from being the last word in 3D printing. Here's one that can print out a candy bar. 3D printing not only prints out the fabric but the dress or pants of your choice while it's at it. If you want something more durable just have it printed in stainless steel. It is not, however, solid stainless. Most 3D printing of metal involves sintering, a process that involves lasers applying enough heat to a powder so that molecules of the substance migrate from one particle to the next, bonding them together. It's like mass spot welding. The end product can be porous and that can be a good thing or a bad thing. It's lighter but not as strong. You can fill those interstices with another substance, enhancing the original properties, or utilize the porous structure for filtering or for enhancing catalytic reactions.

If this had been around 15 years ago, the “paper or plastic” question would be pretty moot. 

Here is where we get into that light-headed area where it feels as though we're living in a science fiction movie. That's because we are, so get used to it. You can have honest-to-goodness solid stainless steel parts printed. How about titanium? High temp alloys? Yeah, it's all here. Things are moving faster than you can imagine. You may think Stratasys or 3D Systems has a leg up in this field, and they are big and know a lot, but they can't print in solid stainless or titanium. They may have high-powered lasers that glue these powders together, but they don't do what this company does. Arcam AB, a Swedish company now owned by GE, actually welds metals together layer after layer with an electron beam. They build parts for NASA and Boeing.

So what other things can you print with in 3D?

glass

human cells

sugar

ice

turkey

gold

concrete

So, it's all been done with 3D printing. It's a maxed-out technology. Not hardly.

In the future, you'll be able to donate a few stem cells that will be cultured to whatever quantity required to print you an organ. This may happen before we figure out the complexities of curing cancer, so if any type or amount of cancer is detected on any organ, out it comes. You get a new one.
UPDATE: Bam! It's already happening. Check out this article from Scientific American that describes using human skin stem cells to print organs.

It costs $4000 to recycle ton of plastic bags worth $500 on open market. Here's why.

Whole buildings will be printed out. What looks like an ATV with an umbilical will actually be a wheeled, motorized printhead that prints concrete, wiring and plumbing as it traces the path of the walls guided by GPS and the building's 3D file. There is nothing to prevent us from building a city-block-large printer attached to stanchions in the corners. As it prints, it will climb these columns to whatever the "blueprints" call for. It will allow incredibly complex structures to be economically fabricated in short periods of time - a new golden age of architecture.
UPDATE: Here it is! At least a model. It is being proposed to use it on the Moon to print the first colony there. Why not use it here on Earth?
UPDATE: And here it is being used right here on Earth.

Sky cranes will be a thing of the past.
Image courtesy of  FreeFoto.com

One of the more spectacular future applications will be out of this world. An array of printheads will orbit the globe like a satellite, printing out future habitats for mankind. Asteroids will be lassoed and brought into Earth's orbit. Chunks of them will be melted down and fed into an orbital printer kept hot by the concentrated rays of the Sun by orbital mirrors. Space habitats will become a reality.

But the truly amazing stuff is when the concept of 3D printing is combined with femtotechnology. Everyone has heard of nanotechnology. A sheet of paper is approximately 100,000 nanometers thick, give or take a few. The great physicist Richard Feynman introduced the concept in 1959. People winked and nudged each other and then it came to pass, just like Richard said. And it happened in a few decades. A femtometer is a million times smaller than the nanometer. Printer heads as small as atoms will combine subatomic particles into things we can only dream of. It will herald the beginning of a materials technology that will make nanotechnology look like curing hides around the campfire by comparison. This will probably take place within the next few decades.

The answer to the plastic bag problem is reuse. This new device makes it easy. 

We've come full circle. I started this with a discussion of the replicator from pop sci-fi and it's real world namesake that, while nifty, leaves us pining for the replicator of our televised fantasies. I've taken us on a tour of the current state of the art and a logical, if imaginative, extrapolation of 3D printing technology. And here we sit, finally, eating our filet mignon hot from the 3D printer that rearranged subatomic particles to make it. A printer that, to all intents and purposes, gives us what any self-respecting replicator should gives us: Whatever we want.

You're comments are always welcome.

Thanks,
Glen Hendrix, author Transmat World

For other blog posts on future technologies be sure to check out the following:

The Future of Wind Energy - An ocean of energy.

3D Printing Big Bang - It's gonna be big.

The Space Mirror Hack - Inexpensive, inflatable, orbital death ray.

Asteroid to Habitat: The Transformation Begins - The death ray combines with the asteroid to...

The Space Egg - Living, and thriving, in space.

Dramatic Changes Coming to the Airline Industry - Enjoy a hot tub on your $100 trip from LA to NY

When Nothing Means Something - Antigravity, but patentable.

Solution to the Problem of Orbital Debris

image of space debris courtesy Wikilimages

An article in Universe Today points out that space debris is a huge problem. The retired head of NASA’s Orbital Debris Program Office, Donald Kessler, wrote a report on this describing the situation as bad and getting worse. Mr. Kessler originally predicted the scenario of orbital litter becoming a major problem for the advancement of the space program and a danger to satellites back in 1976. The situation he described has come to pass and is appropriately designated the Kessler Syndrome. 
A report from NASA makes two conclusions:

1. “The  current debris population in the LEO region has reached the point where the environment is unstable and collisions will become the most dominant debris generating mechanism in the future.”

2. “Only remediation of the near-Earth environment – the removal of existing large objects from orbit – can prevent future problems for research in and commercialization of space.”

Active Debris Removal (ADR) is recommended by NASA. A proposed solution to this problem is advanced in this article from Wired Science. It may have merit but it represents a lot of money to be spent just to see if it works. This is where the Space Mirror steps in to save the day.

My original Space Mirror concept (drawing shown) can be scaled up easily to perform the task of getting rid of orbital space debris. The Space Mirror consists of two disc-shaped membranes of sheet plastic approximately 8 mils thick. These are jam-up, jelly-tight next to each other. They are 1000 feet in diameter and keep their shape via an inner-tube-shaped, inflated toroid with a sectional diameter of 10 feet. The circular edges of these membranes are attached by airtight seal to the inside radius of the toroid. One of the membranes is transparent and and the other is mirrored on the inside surface. When gas is introduced between them they expand, deforming into spherical surfaces capable of focusing the sun’s rays on a small area. The focal length ranges from about a mile to almost 5,000 miles. A unit containing gas cylinders, computers, radar, and solar panels attached by a flexible umbilical provides the essentials for directing and focusing the mirror. The radar and other sensors work with the computer to fire small thrusters around the outer surface of the tubular frame keeping the device aimed and in the proper orbit. Small, semi-autonomous robots roam the cavities of the framing tube and the surfaces of the membranes looking for and repairing small punctures. It sounds like a big thing but it all folds up for one payload in the new spacecraft from SpaceX, the Falcon Heavy.

It takes 7 trucks to move the same number of paper bags as one truck moving plastic bags. 

This device was originally devised to facilitate the construction of space habitats, melting captured asteroids or meteors and then inflating them to create habitable spaces. Recently, other applications have come to mind. With its ability to direct and focus large amounts of energy, it makes a perfect mechanism to sweep from the littered skies of Earth the small debris that will eventually inhibit exploration of space and utilization of near-Earth orbits. It will simply focus the sun’s energy on these objects and they will vaporize. If you doubt this, look at the results of using just 22 square feet of concentrated sunlight. It will melt steel and even rock. Now imagine 800,000 square feet of sunlight (over 36,000 times that power) concentrated on a small area. Now double that energy because sunlight is twice as strong in space, unhindered by atmosphere. Material would not only melt, it would become a cloud of vapor almost instantly - exactly what you want orbital space debris to do. Another great thing about this concept is that it can be tested right here on the surface before installing it in orbit.

Debris strike simulation.

The 1500 pieces of large debris can also be taken care of by selectively zapping them, causing explosive reactions to decelerate them and bring them down to burn up in the Earth's atmosphere.
These represent 98% of space debris by mass and it is feared collisions between them will cause an increase in the threat of orbital debris to mankind's space aspirations.

The answer to the plastic bag problem is reuse. This new device makes it easy. 

Due to the implications for military applications, the Space Mirror would have to be an international effort, controlled by a committee made up by representatives of countries investing in the project. It could be set up for a specified period of time to do its job of cleaning debris from orbit and then be decommissioned. It is something that needs to be seriously considered if mankind is to advance into the frontier of space without tripping over its own trash.

Thanks,

Glen Hendrix

Look for my scifi novel Transmat World at Amazon.com

The Space Mirror Hack

by Glen Hendrix

Call me soft-hearted or a weeny-butt; I never fried ants with a magnifying glass when I was a kid. I did set pieces of paper on fire and burn my initials into a chunk of wood. What heady times those were. Those deeds were accomplished with a 2 ½” diameter magnifying glass at the bottom of a light-sapping 100,000-feet atmospheric well. Now imagine a magnifying glass 140 feet in diameter and sunlight that is twice as strong. That is what you have with an Orbital Adjustable Mirror.

The Orbital Adjustable Mirror is described in my science fiction novel Transmat World but is doable science. In the book the mirrors were first deployed to reflect sunlight to prevent the world from heating up due to an increase in greenhouse gasses. This has been proposed before by Lowell Wood, a senior staff scientist at Lawrence LIvermore National Laboratory. He states that reflecting 1% of sunlight striking the Earth’s surface would be enough to stabilize our climate, requiring a reflector of 600,000 square miles. The OAM is nowhere near that size but many of them were used in the book, taking advantage of the Space Elevators to get them into orbit cheaply. The OAM shown in the drawing is actually sized for the cargo bay of a Space Shuttle, a technology we know we are capable of even if it is not currently employed. It is a load that could easily be handled by Falcon Heavy to be launched this year.

Space Elevator illustration provided by Bruce Irving (FlyingSinger) under the creative commons license.
 
The OAM consists of two disc-shaped membranes approximately 8 thousandths of an inch thick. They are 140 feet in diameter and keep their shape via an inner-tube-shaped inflated tube 6 feet in diameter. One of the membranes is transparent and and the other is mirrored on the inside surface. Gas is introduced between these membranes to expand them, deforming them into spherical surfaces capable of focusing the sun’s rays on a small surface. The focal length ranges from several hundred feet to thousands of miles. Small thrusters around the outer surface of the tubular frame adjust the mirrors direction and its orbit. A small unit containing gas cylinders, computers, and solar panels attached by a flexible umbilical provides the essentials for directing and focusing the mirror. Even smaller, semi-autonomous robots roam the cavities of the framing tube and in between the membranes looking for and repairing small punctures.

Unlike the mirror proposed by Mr. Wood, the OAM does a lot more than prevent global warming. Once they have performed their climate-saving act, the mirrors can then be employed in their second job - creating space habitats. In the book the mirrors are focused on a mass of lunar regolith in orbit around the Moon. I propose that the mirrors be used to transform the asteroids captured and herded into orbit around Earth by the smart film I mention in an earlier post. If you will remember, smart film wraps the rock in a membrane that can change its albedo selectively over its surface to herd the meteor or asteroid using reflected or absorbed sunlight. The mirrors can be adjusted to focus on these captured chunks of material, melting them to extract metals or minerals. There is another reason to melt this detritus we’ve collected from the Solar System. Once they are melted, they form a spherical mass of molten material that can then be blown like pieces of glass into habitats. In future posts I will discuss further the fabrication of space habitations using the Orbital Adjustable Mirror.

Get Smart or Die - Synthesizing Our Way Out of Oblivion

by Glen Hendrix

Nerve Cells (Illustrated) Benedict Campbell/Wellcome Images Wellcome Images under the Creative Commons License


According to an internet article on ZDNet, we have reached our limits on human intelligence unless we re-organize our brains or make them more efficient. Apparently the faster one’s electronic impulses travel, the smarter one is. But that smartness has a price - energy. The faster the impulses go the more energy it takes, quickly maxing out on the practicality of being able to provide enough energy to the body to make a big difference in nerve impulse speed. See the ZDNet article Why We Can't Get Smarter.

Of course, this has nothing to do with the advancement of knowledge. That will continue at an ever-increasing rate. What we do with all that knowledge is where the smarter human brain might come in handy. Presently we’re not doing a bang-up job. Witness the fact we burn 85% of the petroleum that comes out of the ground, despite the fact it is a non-renewable resource and there are exotic plastics and lubricants for the production of which oil is irreplaceable: or the fact we are about to be eight billion strong and nobody mentions birth control because of religion: or that our national economy is being held ransom by representatives voted in by a constituency gobsmacked by the Alice-In-Wonderland notion of balancing the budget by lowering taxes: or that we are planning to zip through our 150 year stash of phosphates (fertilizer) in the next 50 years creating “biofuel.” Just to mention a few odd things for which historians will bestow upon us labels ranging from "short-sighted egocentrics" to “idiotic, psychopathic greedy-guts,” assuming there will be historians.

Plastic grocery bags prefer this as their second career. 

Currently we handle this increasingly vast amount of information by dividing and subdividing it into amounts that can be handled by the human brain. Each subdivision is then studied by specialists who can add to this information through their studies. This is taking place in every aspect of human endeavor from science to sex. What we need is an intelligence to span these subdivisions, absorb them, and realize their relationships to every other subdivision. We need an intelligence to take this information and synthesize it into the solutions we need for the problems we are running up against.

Before we starve in a nuclear winter (war, super volcano, asteroid) or run out of resources or food due to lack of foresight, planning, or just plain smarts; we should come up with some alternative to achieve this "synthesis." Since it currently seems implausible to overclock our brains (no, crystal meth does not count), we should let our electronic vassals handle this heavy mental lifting.


Arenal Volcano courtesy Scott Robinson (Clearly Ambiguous) under the Creative Commons License

AIs becoming smarter than humans has been hashed over. It's a very popular science fiction theme called the “singularity moment” - that point in time at which machines come to the self-realization they are smarter than the people that made them and begin to manipulate their environment. Since this could involve said machines deciding they really don’t need us anymore, i.e. “The Terminator,” we should proceed with caution. Wikipedia has a good article on the singularity. But it seems to me just as likely AIs will take humans on as a “project” or under their wing as an incubating organic intelligence. Alternatively, everything could seem very benign under the aegis of our protective AI until it trades us as slaves to the first aliens that come along for a cool FTL space drive. We should be careful in dealing with such technology. Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking tell us so. But then again Mark Zuckerberg says AI, schmayeye, bring it on. One thing is for sure, once a machine becomes sentient, things could happen faster than humans can think.

In the meantime, we have to take that chance. We have to develop that thinking power to solve the problems coming up like climate change and resource limitations. The alternative is not looking much better than winding up as servants to three-legged saurians from the Lesser Magellanic Cloud.

The 3D Printing Big Bang

There is a lot of hoopla now about 3D, mostly TV, but also about printing. You can buy your own 3D printer for, I am not making this up, less than $200.

We are getting close to being able to print a human organ. The ability to 3D print combination metal/plastic fabrications will mean a revolution in consumer products, imbedded electronics, and robotics. Imagine being able to crowd electronic components together in three dimensions with just enough space for cooling channels between them. No more clunky circuit boards taking up a lot of real estate. All of the inner space of a product can be used. There will be no screws, rivets, bolts, plastic pop fasteners, weld marks, mold marks - no telltale line where one part meets the other. The future is seamless. No more taking it apart to see how it works without the hammer.

Saving the world one plastic grocery bag at a time. Recycling genius. 

Besides books and body parts, imagine print-on-demand cars and houses - anything that can be drawn in three dimensions. And just wait until they get the high-temperature printing heads figured out. There will be airplane fuselages and wings of magnesium-reinforced composite with no seams or welds to come apart and no streamline-disturbing rivets. Engine blocks of ceramic guaranteed for half a million miles. Nano printers will rewrite our DNA and RNA to cure an illness or prevent aging. They will print chips molecule by molecule, iterating the quantities of this and that material to speed up the process of finding miraculous qualities in our electronics of the future. 3D chefs will compose impossibly complicated and nuanced foods layer by microscopic layer and still have it on your table in less than ten minutes. A 3D food printer is shown here.

Artists will be fettered only by their imagination.

You will go to the 3D print shop with your home grown drawings and specs, rent their machine, and plot out your own stuff to take home. If your concept works, print some more and sell them. 3D print shops will be as ubiquitous as copy places now. They may even replace big-box retailers. Instead of Walmart, go to your home 3D unit, download the file, and print your product right there at home. Print out that dvd you ordered from Netflix instead of waiting for it in the mail. When you get tired of it, recycle it into another one. Your trash is sorted and fed into your home 3D printer which grinds and sorts everything into little bins, waiting for you to print it into something useful. Don’t know what to fix for lunch? Look at the menu on the 3D Print-A-Meal and print something to eat. Get experimental and print out some espresso tamales for breakfast. Want an office building? The contractor sets up the 100x100 foot printer with corner poles extending forty floors up and loads up the material bins. Masonry, steel, glass, electrical, and plumbing being printed layer after layer all at the same time, rising from the ground as you watch.

You think what I say is far-fetched, but it is happening sooner than you think. You can go to shapeways.comhttps://www.shapeways.com/ right now and order any 3D object you have a file for or modify one of their stock files. You can have it made out of several types of plastic, steel, brass, aluminum, or sandstone. 

Now, if we could just figure out how to print more time. I’m going to ask the people at CERN if they can look into that for us.

Thanks,
Glen Hendrix, author Transmat World