Anya Cappon Blog 7: JPL 2

Oldest tree 5062 (Live Science)

The cube Sat (JPL)
The Tree of Life Project: Problems of Longevity in Society

The tree of life project mission is founded by the Art and Technolgy LAB grant and is a collaboration between artist Julia Christensen and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. There are many different pieces to this project, and there is a lot of information that we still need to understand to understand this mission. In this blog post, I will focus on the longevity aspect of the project. This mission is supposed to last 200 years, seeing as this is both one of the longest-running art projects and one of the longest-running JPL missions there are some exciting conversations regarding what it means for something to last for 200 years.
When talking with the artist, Julia and the rest of the A-team at JPL, one of the main questions that came up was how is the public supposed to interact with this project, what will it mean us now, and what will it mean to us 200 years from now? These are difficult questions to think about, especially growing up in a society of consumer culture, everything that I experience, political campaigns, consumerism, and especially technology all center around a short term timeline. As a society, it is safe to say that the most extended terms in which we think about something are probably four years (presidential elections.) the answer is most likely in figuring out how to make people care about something that will exist after they die.
The problem with longevity is that what we care about is what we are directly affected by, in general. For instance, we are just now starting to be concerned with the environment, and how climate change and pollution are affecting the earth. Choosing a tree as the symbol for longevity in this project is incredibly timely, not that people are starting to care about the planet that they live on, maybe a tree is enough to keep people interested in this project no matter how many years it runs.
Silent Running Spacestation

pear tree (one of the first types of trees to be used in the tree of life project)
A tree as a motif of life on earth feels familiar. There have been countless thought experiments about how humanity would exist if we destroyed the trees and plants on earth. In this case, the answer to the longevity of the project is in making sure that we still need trees to survive; if we do not need trees, there is a good chance they could be written out of history. I am thinking of the 1972 film Silent Running, in which the last botanical life on earth is sent to a space station to be protected. In this thought experiment, trees are not a necessary part of surviving on earth, and the movie ends in the defunding of a long term space mission in which the goal was to protect plant life. The tree of life project is not as dramatic as Silent Running, and we will probably always need plant life to exist on earth. Still, silent running is an excellent example of the way humanity is concerned more with our existence then the preservation or longevity of any one thing.

Work Cited:
https://www.livescience.com/29152-oldest-tree-in-world.html
https://unframed.lacma.org/2019/08/27/listening-trees
http://www.thetreeoflife.space/

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