The Runaway Species: How human creativity remakes the world

346 Pages·2017·24.55 MB·English

by  Anthony Brandt

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: [phone]
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?
Part I: New Under the Sun
1. To innovate is human
2. The brain alters what it already knows
3. Bending
4. Breaking
5. Blending
6. Living in the B-hive
Part II: The Creative Mentality
7. Don’t glue down the pieces
8. Proliferate options
9. Scout to different distances
10. Tolerate risk
Part III: Cultivating Creativity
11. The creative company
12. The creative school
13. Into the future
Acknowledgments
Image Credits
Bibliography
Notes
Index
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. It’s 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, we’ve
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
doesn’t 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 don’t give a damn about the odds and I don’t give a
damn that we’ve never done anything like this before … You’ve got
to believe, your people have got to believe, that this crew is coming
home.1
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
moon’s 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.2 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 what’s 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 everyone’s 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 anyone’s 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 module’s 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 he’d ever trained for or
imagined. Faced with a problem they hadn’t 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 Earth’s 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, who
laughs at the prospect.3 The painter’s friends avoid him, fearing he’s 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 Le Bordel d’Avignon (The Avignon
Bordello) to the more benign Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (The Ladies of
Avignon). The painting has a mixed reception; one reviewer quips that “the
Cubists are not waiting for the war to end to recommence hostilities against
good sense …”4
But the painting’s influence grows. A few decades later, when Les
Demoiselles is exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the
New York Times critic writes:
Few paintings have had the momentous impact of this composition of
five distorted nude figures. With one stroke, it challenged the art of
the past and inexorably changed the art of our time.5
The art historian John Richardson later writes that Les Demoiselles was the
most original painting in seven hundred years. The painting, he says,
enabled people to perceive things with new eyes, new minds and
awareness … [It is] the first unequivocally twentieth-century
masterpiece, a principal detonator of the modern movement, the
cornerstone of twentieth-century art.6
What made Pablo Picasso’s painting so original? He changed the goal that
European painters had subscribed to for hundreds of years: the pretense of
being true to life. In Picasso’s hands, limbs appear twisted, two of the women
have mask-like faces, and the five figures seem to have been painted in five
different styles. Here, ordinary people no longer look entirely human.
Picasso’s painting undercut Western notions of beauty, decorum and
verisimilitude all at once. Les Demoiselles came to represent one of the
fiercest blows ever delivered to artistic tradition.
NASA’s Mission Control