Sean Delshad: Richard Clar and Space
I really enjoyed the guest lecture this week. It’s really funny how things work out. For my first blog entry, I looked up art and science projects online and came across Richard Clar’s website. I talked about it a little bit and provided a link. It’s a small world – but I guess the world of art and science is that much smaller. It was really neat to see him in person and have him explain, himself, the projects that I found online during week one. It was also cool to see how much my understanding of things has changed. The first week I didn’t understand this art and technology hybrid and randomly found his site as a link. However, after the first six weeks of this class, I understand what I had not before; when Clar lectured I saw the art, science and technology and I was able to follow his project ideas.
Of the projects we’ve seen – I find Clar’s to be the most practical and useful. He has a fascination with space and extraterrestrial intelligence and I feel that his work is particularly useful because we are starting to really look more deeply into space. The space dolphin is a great idea that would help find extraterrestrial intelligence. There is no way of knowing, but in a universe so large – could it be that Earth is the only area of life? And if not, could it be that humans on Earth are the only beings in the universe that can reason and use their intelligence? If not, the Dolphin will answer this question for us.
Towards the end of his lecture – Clar said how he sees building up into space not so far in the future. I completely agree with him. People are already paying to go into space – it is only a matter of time before a ticket into space will be a little bit more expensive than an airline ticket today. Yea, it’ll take a while and a lot of advancement, but at the rate technology is going today – it will happen before we know it. He said how there is a possibility of Disneyland in space and mentioned the field of space architecture. We are running out of room on earth for people – I am pretty sure we will inhabit areas of space. He mentioned “space hotels” and the like – which I truly believe will be reality within the next 100 years.
I hope we have more guest lectures in the remainder of the course. They truly add another dimension to this course. We can see where these ideas originate from. Having the person that thought of a project explain it to you is much more interesting and convincing.
