Microbial Academy of Sciences Turns Cyanobacteria Into Cosmonauts

Cyanobacteria can be cosmologists in concept artist Jonathan Keats' Microbial Academy of Sciences. Image: Courtesy Jonathon Keats

The universe might be both too large and too small to fully comprehend. But perhaps Earth’s first celestial observatory for single-cell organisms can provide alternative perspectives on cosmology and art.

That’s the thought process of concept philosopher and Wired columnist Jonathon Keats, whose inaugural Microbial Academy of Sciences opens Friday as part of the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery’s Vast and Undetectable exhibit, which examines microscopic and macroscopic spheres in science and sci-fi that resist simple understanding.

“Cyanobacteria are some of the oldest surviving organisms on Earth, successfully adapting to an ever-changing world for more than 3 billion years, while we’ve managed nearly to drive ourselves to extinction in a mere 200 millennia,” the always amiable Keats told Wired.com in an e-mail.

“But in all those eons, bacteria have never been given observatory access, to study the cosmos for themselves,” he added. “Their experience of the universe has always only been at the scale of microns. My observatory is built to address that unfortunate oversight, providing the resources for colonies of bacteria to research a theory of everything, reconciling cosmic and quantum observations in their own bacterial way.”

Keats was inspired, ironically enough, by maddening ignorance. Like most arty knowledge-seekers, he’s been studying the cosmos his entire life, only to find that the more answers he found, the more questions he had. And he’s not alone.

“String theory and loop quantum gravity are both riddled with problems,” Keats said, “and they’re incredibly complicated, hardly in keeping with the ideal of most scientists: a theory of everything that can fit on a T-shirt.” That led Keats to simpler species without the “knotty neural networks that get us so hopelessly mixed up.”

Running through April 14, Keats’ Microbial Academy of Sciences instead gives cyanobacteria a shot at demystifying the fundamental laws of physics as we currently know them. He’s created an array of petri dishes filled with brackish water taken from the San Francisco Bay and placed them atop a flat-screen monitor laid on its back, which pulses and glows with imagery supplied by the Hubble Space Telescope. After spending a few weeks in a petri dish, the organisms will be released into the environment from which they came, and replaced with others from different locations.

Keats’ excellently existential twist is that even if his cyanobacterial cosmonauts end up formulating a theory of everything, we may never know it. “It might not fit on a T-shirt — or the bacterial sartorial equivalent — because it might not even be something that can be written,” he said.

Nor does Keats believe that cyanobacteria have some lens on the universe that the rest of us humans — or any other earthbound species, for that matter — lack for one reason or another. He built the planet’s first microbial observatory because photosynthesis provides cyanobacteria with a natural channel to study starlight.

“I wouldn’t want to be bacteriocentric any more than I’d wish to be anthropocentric,” he said. “Other creatures may have other advantages, given the different ways in which they experience their environment and the diverse ways in which they process information. Though they are not technically alive, I’d be especially keen to work with viruses, some of which are smaller than 1 million atoms in size, and are thought capable of entering a quantum superposition.”

The scientific and artistic challenge would be to design an interface in which viruses can encounter the universe, and perhaps communicate their findings. But the payoff of Keats’ latest exploration — which nicely fits with his previous efforts to create pornography for God and write a story that takes a thousand years to read — is a good-humored reorientation of our concepts of space, life and art, in a scary era where we think we’re the bees knees, even as we’re killing off all the bees.

“You may think this is a sensationalist bid to get attention for marginal ideas — and I wouldn’t necessarily disagree — but I think I’m drawn to the fringe because the limits of space and time are the closest we can get to tunneling out of our universe and peering in at our everyday lives,” said Keats. “Observing the microbes observing quantum and cosmic phenomena and taking their perspective, we can observe the limitations of our own scientific studies, and intuit the ways in which our understanding of the world is predetermined by our bodies, brains and genes. We can know ourselves a little better than we did before, and we can behave accordingly, aware of our prejudices. To me that’s as worthy as formulating a theory of everything.”

In one way, its worth can be measured on a microscopic scale in terms of the arts as well: Keats’ various explorations are never lavishly funded installations, but rather small works that seize upon large ideas on a scrawny budget. If he truly had his way, he’d be way less alone in that regard.

“Large-scale thinking doesn’t require large-scale funding, and may even benefit creatively from limited resources,” he said. “Ernest Rutherford famously founded the field of nuclear physics using little more than string and sealing wax, and Ernest Lawrence built the first cyclotron with approximately $25 worth of scraps. Anybody can independently set up groundbreaking experimental philosophy for less than the cost of Lawrence’s first cyclotron. All it takes is some curiosity and a little tinkering, no professional credentials required.”

Taken from San Francisco Bay and housed in petri dishes, Keats' bacterial cosmologists search for a theory of everything. But how will they communicate it to us?
Image: Courtesy Jonathon Keats