libretto
Hindenburg
Scene
1
It could not have been a technical matter
New York Times headline May 7, 1937 - drummed out: Hindenburg burns in Lakehurst crash, 21 known Dead, 12 missing, 64 escape.
3 tenors: It could not have been a technical matter
Headline: Dr. Hans Luther, the German Ambassador, said the disaster must not cause the world to lose faith in dirigibles and that it could not have been a technical matter.
Radio announcer Herb Morrison: It flashed, it flashed and it’s crashing, it’s crashing terrible. It burst, it burst into flame. Get this Scotty! Get this Scotty!
It flashed, it flashed and it’s crashing. Bursting, bursting into flame. Oh, its flames. Get this, get this Scotty!
Bursting into flame, into flame. Get this Scotty! It flashed and its crashing, it flashed. It’s crashing terrible. Get this, get this Scotty.
It burst, it burst into flame, into flame. It flashed, it flashed and its crashing.
Oh, it flashed. It’s crashing terrible. Get this, get this Scotty
Scene II
Nibelung Zeppelin
no text
Scene III
A very impressive thing to see
F. von Moltke: It was enormous and it was like silver
2 sopranos & 2 tenors: enormous
F. von Moltke: and it sort of made a humming noise
F. von Moltke: A very impressive thing to see
F. von Moltke: Have you seen pictures?
F. von Moltke: Why do such a thing?
2 sopranos & 2 tenors: why?
F. von Moltke: Why have such a cigar, huge silver cigar in the sky?
F. von Moltke: That’s another matter
Scene
IV
I couldn’t understand it
New York Times, May 7, 1937: drummed out &3 tenors: Captain Ernst Lehmann gasped, “I couldn’t understand it” as he staggered out
Newsreel announcer from 1937: The Hindenburg has gone. Her tragedy will not halt the march of progress. From her ashes will arise the knowledge, from her fate, the lesson, that will lead to a greater and a better means of mastering the air. If so, her dead will not have died in vain.”
The Hindenburg has gone. She was the largest thing that ever flew. She represented man’s latest attempt to conquer the Atlantic by air. Her tragedy will not halt the march of progress.
F r o m h e r a s h e s w i l l a r i s e t h e k n o w l e d g e.
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Biographical note on interviewee in Scene III:
Freya von Moltke is the widow of Helmuth James von Moltke, the German aristocrat who served in the Abwehr or German Intelligence Service in World War II where he worked to undermine Hitler. He was found out and hung in 1944. Freya lived in Germany during World War I, through Hindenburg’s presidency and Hitler’s rise to power. She now lives in Hanover, New Hampshire.
Bikini
In the air-1
NewYork Times headline: Atom Bomb Exploded
Countdown: Ten
3 tenors (from New York Times): I watched it, I watched it climb
Genesis (drummed out): And G-d
headline: Atom bomb exploded over Bikini fleet
Countdown: Nine
3 tenors : I watched it climb to a height of two miles
Genesis : created man
headline: Two ships are sunk, nineteen damaged out of seventy three
Countdown: Eight
3 tenors: It never stood still
Genesis: in His image
The atoll - 1
New York Times: July 25, 1946: King sees ‘big boom’
- Bikini Monach has little to say
US Navy film maker: Take one! (Slap)
headline: King Judah of Bikini witnessed today’s atomic bombing
2 sopranos, 2 tenors: King Judah, of Bikini witnessed
US Navy officer: Now then James, Now then James, tell them please
headline: witnessed today’s atomic bombing of his one time home lagoon
Genesis : Male
and female
headline: bombing of his one time home lagoon from the topmost deck of this ship
film maker: Take two!
headline: from the topmost deck of this ship - Bikini monarch has little to say
2 sopranos, 2 tenors: his one time home
officer: tell them please, that the United State Government now
headline: Bikini monarch has little to say
Genesis: G-d created them
On the ships - 1
3 tenors-from New York Times: This test is designed
Genesis: and G-d blessed them
3 tenors: to measure the effects
Genesis: and G-d said to them
3 tenors : on metal, flesh, air and water
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In the air-2
headline: Blast biggest yet
Countdown: Seven
3 tenors-from New York Times: gigantic, a gigantic shimmering mushroom
Genesis: “Be fruitful”
headline: Huge spout and cloud
Countdown: Six
3 tenors: ever changing, ever changing its form and color,
ever changing
American radio announcer:
The atom bomb plane ‘Dave’s Dream’,
D a v e’ s D r e a m
3 tenors: ever changing
announcer: is
starting down the runway, d o w n t h e r u n w a y,
d
o w n t h e r u n w a y
Genesis: “and multiply”
headline: More ships sink in mounting toll
Countdown: Five
3 tenors: difficult, for the human eye to follow
announcer: Fifty
miles an hour I should say, now sixty, n o w s i x t y
3 tenors: difficult
announcer: Now we’re up to a hundred, a hundred and twenty
Genesis : “and fill the earth”
headline: Russia rejects, US Atom control plan
Countdown: Four
3 tenors: Then it became a giant tree
announcer: The atom bomb is in the air
3 tenors : a giant tree
announcer: on its way to Bikini, t o B i k i n i
Genesis: “and subdue it”
The atoll - 2
British radio announcer: Small and remote, its just the place,
they say, for the next atom bomb
film maker: Crossroads, scene 24 take one!
2 sopranos, 2 tenors - from New York Times: He looked long, through his binoculars
Navy officer: The United State Government, wants to take this great destructive power
Genesis: “And rule over the fish of the sea”
announcer: S
m a l l a n d r e m o t e, i t s j u s t t h e p l a c e, t h e y s a
y
film maker: Crossroads, scene 24 take two!
2 sopranos, 2 tenors: and then muttered, ‘big boom’.
officer: turn this great destructive power into something for the benefit of all mankind
Genesis: “the birds of the air”
On the ships - 2
3 tenors - from New York Times: Five hundred phtographers,
seven hundred cameras and half the world’s supply of film
Genesis: “and every living thing”
3 tenors in canon: Five hundred phtographers, seven hundred cameras and half the world’s supply of film
Genesis: “that moves upon the earth.”
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In the air-3
Headline: Flash ten times brighter than the sun
Countdown: Three
3 tenors - from New York Times: Then it became a giant tree
American radio announcer:
Listen, you hear that rhythmic ticking noise?
R
h y t h m i c t i c k i n g n o i s e?
Genesis: And G-d created man
Headline: One million degrees Fahrenheit
Countdown: Two
3 tenors: bearing invisible fruits
announcer: so long as you hear it, you’ll know the bomb has not gone off
Genesis: In His image
Headline: Thirty five march in protest
Countdown: One
3 tenors : fruits of the Tree of Knowledge
announcer: well, you won’t be hearing that metronome much longer now
Genesis: male and female
The atoll - 3
British radio announcer: The inhabitants have been taken away,
transferred to another coral island, and given new homes.
film maker: Crossroads, scene 26 take one!
2 sopranos, 2 tenors - from New York Times: with absolutely no show
officer: and that these experiments, and that these experiments here at Bikini
Genesis: “Be fruitful and multiply”
announcer: T h e i n h a b i t a n t s h a v e b e e n t a k e n a w a y
film maker: Crossroads, scene 26 take two!
2 sopranos, 2 tenors: he turned away
officer: and that these experiments here at Bikini are the first step in that direction
Genesis: “And fill the earth and subdue it”
On the ships - 3
3 tenors: ten, nine, eight
Genesis: “and rule over the fish of the sea”
Navy announcer: Put on goggles or turn away
3 tenors: seven, six, five
Genesis: “the birds of the air”
announcer: turn away
3 tenors: four, three, two, one
Genesis: “and every living thing”
announcer: turn away
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Coda
Countdown: zero, z e r o, z e r o
Genesis: And the Eternal formed the man, of dust of the ground
Headline: Smallest bathing suit in the world
Headline: Bikini still uninhabitable
2 sopranos & 3 tenors - from New York Times: Said King Judah, of Bikini, “It’s all changed. It’s not the same.”
Genesis: And placed him in the Garden of Eden, to serve it and to keep it
********************************************
Dolly
Cloning
Kismet - from Genesis: And placed him in the garden of Eden, to serve it and to keep it.
Ruth Deech- The process is as follows
Deech- The process is as
Richard Dawkins - They removed the nucleus from an egg.
Dawkins - No genes in it at all
Deech - Take out, that DNA
James Watson - DNA is the script - DNA is script for life.
2 Sopranos: The process is as follows
Dawkins -They put in all the genes - from another cell
Deech - Which can come from the skin, the hair, anywhere you like.
Gina Kolata - They took a frozen, frozen udder cell. From a sheep that was dead
Dawkins - We, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes.
Dawkins: machines, machines, are machines (looped)
Kolata - f r o z e n u d d e r c e l l
Deech - You pop it into your enucleated egg
Deech - You then fertilize it - with a little electric shock.
Deech - It starts growing.
2 Sopranos: It starts growing
Deech - Hasn’t happened with humans, but it happened with Dolly
Dolly
Typing: First successful cloning of adult mammal
Typing/3 Tenors: 277 udder cells, 29 embryos yield 1 live sheep
Roslin Institute worker: Let me introduce, Dolly
Dolly : Baaaa
Kismet: Would you like to be cloned?
3 Tenors, long canon on: 277 udder cells, 29 embryos yield 1 live sheep.
Stephen J. Gould: No, wouldn’t be me. Just a genetic copy.
Dawkins: It would be a truly riveting, fascinating experience.
Gould: Identical twins are better, and closer clones than Dolly
Jaron Lanier: Cloning is only one of the new biological tricks. Not the one to be most worried about.
Kismet - from Genesis: And placed him in the garden of Eden, to serve it and to keep it.
Human body machine
Dawkins: We, and all other animals, are machines created by our
genes.
Dawkins: Machines, machines, are machines (looped)
Sherry Turkle: When Marvin Minsky said, “The mind is a meat machine”, people freaked.
Dawkins: A monkey is a machine that preserves genes up trees,
Watson: The script for human life is 3 billion letters,
Turkle: It doesn’t seem so frightening anymore.
Dawkins: a fish is a machine that preserves genes in the water.
Turkle: preparing for a new kind of -kind of cyborg consciousness
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Dawkins: They’re all about preserving the code, preserving DNA.
Rodney Brooks: We’ve always thought of our brains in terms of our latest technology
Dawkins: DNA is a molecule - it carries coded information - exactly like a computer tape.
Brooks: So at one point our brains were steam engines.
Dawkins: What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire
Brooks: When I was a kid, they were telephone switching networks
Dawkins: not warm breath, not a ‘spark of life’.
Brooks: Then they became digital computers.
Dawkins: If you want to understand life,
Brooks: Then, massively parallel digital computers
Dawkins: think about information technology
Brooks: Probably, out there now, there are kid’s books which say that our brain is the world wide web.
Dawkins: I don’t think there’s anything that we are, that is in principle, deeply different from what computers are.
Brooks: We probably haven't got it right yet.
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Brooks: Alan Turing came up with this idea
2 sopranos, 2 tenors: Alan Turing
Genesis, drummed out: And the Eternal
Brooks: if you talked to a computer over instant messaging,
2 sopranos, 2 tenors: talked to a computer
Genesis: commanded the man,
Brooks: and you couldn’t tell the difference
2 sopranos, 2 tenors: couldn’t tell the difference
Genesis: of every tree of the Garden
Brooks: between whether it was a computer answering you or a person answering you.
2 sopranos, 2 tenors: a computer or a person
Genesis: you may freely eat.
Brooks: Then the computer must be intelligent
2 sopranos, 2 tenors: must be intelligent
Genesis: But of the tree of knowledge
Brooks: That leaves out a whole lot of stuff that we do with one another
2 sopranos, 2 tenors: leaves out a whole lot
Genesis: of good and evil
Brooks: We look each other in the eye,
2 sopranos, 2 tenors: we look
Genesis: you must not eat
Brooks: we smile
2 sopranos, 2 tenors: we smile
Genesis: for on the day you eat it,
Brooks: we nod at each other.
2 sopranos, 2 tenors: we nod
Genesis: you will surely die.
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Steven Pinker: I might be fooled by a good silk flower. It doesn’t mean that its a real flower. It may just mean that I don’t know enough about flowers.
Dawkins: We, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes.
Robert Pollack: I have no sense of guilt pulling the plug on any machine.
Adin Steinsaltz: Its a machine or not a machine. The real question would be: Are you responsible or not responsible for anything?
Turkle: Not what the computer does, but what the computer does
to us.
Kevin Warwick: The human body is extremely limited. I would love to upgrade myself.
Darwin
Dawkins: Darwinian natural selection is the key to understanding
the whole of the existence of life.
Dawkins: A self replicating molecule really began the origin of life.
Dawkins: It replicates, it produces copies and copies and copies and copies. If its successful, there are are going to be thousands of copies in the future.
Dawkins: copies, copies and copies (looped)
Dawkins: these things competed in the primeval soup
Dawkins: They started to build - cells around themselves - colonies of cells - which are what we are.
Dawkins: The ones that were good at it, stayed, the ones that were bad, didn’t stay.
Dawkins: Natural selection. the blind, unconscious, automatic, process - has no purpose - in mind.
----------------------------------------
Joshua Getzler: Evolution is - in a sense, the emergence of a new religion.
2 sopranos, 2 tenors: A new religion
Dawkins: Consider the idea of God.
2 sopranos, 2 tenors: Consider
Lanier: Its a terrible mistake, to think of the spiritual impulse, as arising from cognitive weakness.
2 sopranos, 2 tenors: Terrible mistake
Getzler: Well, its a religious war - its a war between religions.
2 sopranos, 2 tenors: Religious war
Dawkins: God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power
2 sopranos, 2 tenors: Survival value
Getzler: The 20th century, where religious thinking was abandoned for secular and Darwinian ideology
2 sopranos, 2 tenors: Abandoned
Dawkins: If we all demanded evidence before we would believe something, religions would get nowhere.
2 sopranos, 2 tenors: Demanded evidence
Getzler: The 20th century was the worst graveyard in human history...and that should give us pause...
2 sopranos, 2 tenors: Worst graveyard
Interlude
Steinsaltz: Every creature has a song - The song of the dogs -
and the song of the doves - the song of the fly - the song of the fox.
- What do they say?
Robots/Cyborgs/Immortality
Ray Kurzweil: Technology is a continuation of evolution
Kurzweil: we can create things
Kurzweil: far faster than biological evolution
Kurzweil: can
create something more intelligent than ourselves
Kurzweil: intelligent machines.
Kurzwei: machines, machines, intelligent, ‘telligent machines (looped)
Cynthia Breazeal: Kismet is my baby
Cynthia: Building a baby the hard way
Cynthia: How do you play the role of evolution?
Sherry: One 10 year old said to me
Sherry: The robots are like Pinnochio
Sherry: not like real boys
Sherry: They’re sort of alive
Cynthia: sort of alive
Sheri: doesn’t have a mother
Sheri: doesn’t have siblings
Sheri: doesn’t know its gonna die.
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Kurzweil: We’re going to be thrown from our perch of evolutionary superiority
Bill Joy: If we create a species smarter than ourselves our prospects are dim
Marvin Minsky: intelligent robots - will be ah, our replacement.
Bill Joy: If we’re gonna create a robot species we oughta take a vote first
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Henri Atlan: The Prophet Jeremiah
Atlan: decided
Atlan: to build
Atlan: an artificial man
Atlan: he was perfect
Atlan: was able to talk
Atlan: immediately he talked to Jeremiah
Atlan: and he ask him
Atlan: “What did you do?”
Atlan: “Well, look, I have succeeded”
Atlan: Say, “No, no no, is not good.”
Atlan: “From now on
Atlan: when people will meet other people in the street
Atlan: they will not know
Atlan: whether you made them
Atlan: or G-d made them”
Atlan: “Undo - me”
Atlan: So that’s what Jeremiah did.
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Brooks: I don’t think robots are going to take over from us
Rod Brooks: because there isn’t going to an an ‘us’
Rod Brooks: Because we, are starting to bring technology, into our bodies.
Cynthia: This, gives me pause (looped)
Minsky: You go and buy this module
Minsky: in the Mind Store
Minsky: and
have it connected to you brain
Minsky: and then you do four or five part counterpoint
Kurzweil: If I scan your brain
Kurzweil: download that information
Kurzweil: I’ll have a little you
Kurzweil: right here in my personal computer.
Minsky: No reason people should put up with death
Minsky: start redesigning ourselves
Minsky: I think we’ll turn into
Minsky: something quite different.
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Dawkins: Once upon a time there was
Dawkins: carbon based life,
Dawkins: and it gave over to,
Dawkins: silicon based life.
Dawkins: I don’t view the prospect, with equanimity
Dawkins: maybe I’m just sentimental
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Deech: Here we are
2 sopranos & 3 tenors: Here we are
Deech: under the Tree
2 sopranos & 3 tenors: under the Tree again
2 sopranos & 3 tenors: at the end of the day
Steinsaltz: The sin of Adam - in eating
Steinsaltz: he was too hasty.
Kismet: Every creature has a song, what do they say?
Cynthia: (To Kismet as her robot baby) So how’s your day goin’?
Cynthia: Yeah?
Cynthia: You got it all planned out?
Cynthia: You do?
Cynthia: You got it all planned out?
Cynthia: Maybe you’ll play with your yellow toy?
**********************
Dolly Interviewees
in order of appearance
Ruth Deech is chair of the U.K. Human Fertilization & Embryology
Authority which oversees embryo research and assisted reproduction and
advises the government on related issues such as cloning. She is a Pro-Vice-Chancellor
of Oxford University, a trustee of the Rhodes Scholarship Trust and a
Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine.
Richard Dawkins is the first Charles Simonyi Professor of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. His bestselling books include The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker and River out of Eden. He has won the 1987 Royal Society of Literature Award, the 1990 Michael Faraday Award, the 1994 Nakayama Award for Human Science and the 1997 International Cosmos Prize.
James D. Watson along with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 for their work discovering the structure of DNA. He is the author of The Double Helix and the ground breaking textbook The Molecular Biology of the Gene. He is currently President of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York and was the first Director of the National Center for Human Genome Research.
Gina Kolata has been writing about science for the New York Times for over a decade. She originally broke the story of Dolly in America and is the author of Clone - the road to Dolly and the path ahead. She has a degree in microbiology and has studied molecular biology at MIT at the graduate level. She has taught writing at Princeton University.
Kismet is the robot created by Cynthia Breazeal at MIT designed for social interactions with humans. Cynthia writes, “a new range of applications (domestic, entertainment, health care, etc.) are driving the development of robots that can interact and cooperate with people, and play a part in their daily lives.” Kismet has aroused media interest world wide.
Stephen Jay Gould was Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology at Harvard and curator of invertebrate paleontology at that university’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. He was also Vincent Astor Visiting Professor of Biology at New York University. His bestselling books include Wonderful Life, The Mismeasure of Man and Questioning the Millennium.
Jaron Lanier coined the term ‘Virtual Reality’. He co-developed the first glove device for virtual world interaction and the first virtual reality applications in surgical simulation. He is a visiting artist at the Interactive Telecommunications Program of the Tisch School of the Arts, at New York University, and a visiting scholar at the Columbia University Computer Science Department.
Sherry Turkle is Professor of the Sociology of Science at MIT and a clinical psychologist. She is the author of Life on the Screen: Identity in the age of the Internet and The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit . Her current research is on the psychological impact of computational objects ranging from "affective computers" to robotic dolls and pets.
Rodney Brooks is Director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and is the Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science. His research is concerned with both the engineering of intelligent robots and with understanding human intelligence through building humanoid robots. He books include Cambrian Intelligence (1999) and Flesh and Machines published in 2002.
Steven Pinker is professor of psychology and director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT. He is the author of the bestselling books The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works. His research on visual cognition and on the psychology of language has received the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences and two prizes from the American Psychological Association.
Robert Pollack is professor of biological sciences at Columbia University and is director of the Center for the Study of Science and Religion. His books include The Missing Moment and Signs of Life: The Language and Meaning of DNA which received the Lionel Trilling Award and was translated into six languages.
Adin Steinsaltz is internationally regarded as one of the leading rabbis of the century. Time magazine called him a “once-in-a-millennium scholar”. He has almost completed translating the entire Babylonian Talmud into modern Hebrew as well as English, French and Russian. He has been a resident scholar at Yale and the Institute for Advanced study at Princeton. He fulfills a unique role as a bridge between those who are religious and those who are not.
Kevin Warwick is Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading in U.K. He attracted considerable attention recently when he had a small computer implant surgically put into his arm and is planning further bodily implants. He is at the forefront of those who would like to merge themselves with technology to become the first cyborgs.
Joshua Getzler is Senior Law Fellow at St. Hugh’s College and University Lecturer in Law at Oxford University. Earlier on he studied Chemistry and Physics though his degrees are in Law and History. He also has a keen interest in Darwin as an intellectual backdrop to economics and other aspects of our civilization.
Ray Kurzweil’s inventions include reading machines for the blind, music synthesizers for Stevie Wonder and many others and speech recognition technology. He is the author of the best selling The Age of Spiritual Machines. He was named inventor of the year by MIT in 1998 and was awarded the Dickson Prize from Carnegie Mellon in 1994.
Cynthia Breazeal is a post doctoral Fellow working in robotics at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT. Her specialty is socially intelligent humanoid robots and she has recently built Kismet. She writes, “The sorts of competencies I would like Kismet to learn are those social and communicative skills exhibited by human infants within their first year of life.”
Bill Joy is co-founder and Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems. He is co-author of The Java Language Specification and principal designer of Berkeley Unix (BSD), the first ‘open source’ operating system. In 1997, President Clinton appointed him Co-Chairman of the Presidential Information Technology Advisory Committee. His article in Wired ‘Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us’ produced a huge response and he is now at work on a book expanding this subject.
Marvin Minsky is Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, at MIT. His research has led to both theoretical and practical advances in artificial intelligence and placed his imprint upon the entire field. He is the author of The Society of Mind. Since the early 1950s, he has worked on using computational ideas to characterize human psychological processes, as well as working to endow machines with intelligence.
Henri Atlan MD is Professor Emeritus of Biophysics at the Universities
of Paris and Jerusalem. He is Director of Research in the Philosophy
of Biology at EHESS in Paris and a member of the French National Committee
for Health and Life Sciences. He has written numerous works on cell biology,
immunology, artificial intelligence and philosophy of biology. He is
a Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur.