I'm a historian.
Steve told us about the future of little technology; I'm going to show you some of the past of big technology.
This was a project to build a 4,000-ton nuclear bomb-propelled spaceship and go to Saturn and Jupiter.
This took place in my childhood, 1957-65.
It was deeply classified.
I'm going to show you some stuff that not only has not been declassified, but has now been reclassified.
(Laughter) If all goes well, next year I'll be back, and I'll have a lot more to show you, and if all doesn't go well, I'll be in jail, like Wen Ho Lee.
(Laughter) So, this ship was basically the size of the Marriott Hotel, a little taller and a little bigger.
And one of the people who worked on it at the beginning was my father, Freeman, there in the middle.
That's me and my sister, Esther, who's a frequent TEDster.
I didn't like nuclear bomb-propelled spaceships.
I mean, I thought it was a great idea, but I started building kayaks.
So we had a few kayaks.
Just so you know that I am not Dr. Strangelove.
But all the time I was out there doing these strange kayak voyages in odd, beautiful parts of this planet, I always thought in the back of my mind about Project Orion, and how my father and his friends were going to build these big ships.
They were actually going to go -- Ted Taylor, who led the project, was going to take his children.
My father was not going to take his children, that was one of the reasons we sort of had a falling out for a few years.
(Laughter) The project began in '57 at General Atomics there, that's right on the coast at La Jolla.
Look at that central building right in the middle of the picture.
That's the 130-foot diameter library.
That is exactly the size of the base of the spaceship.
So put that library at the bottom of that ship -- that's how big the thing was going to be.
It would take two or three thousand bombs.
The people who worked on it were a lot of the Los Alamos people who had done the hydrogen bomb work.
It was the first project funded by ARPA.
That's the contract where ARPA gave the first million dollars to get this thing started.
"Spaceship project officially begun.
Job waiting for you.
Dyson."
That's July '58.
Two days later, the space traveler's manifesto explaining why -- just like we heard yesterday -- why we need to go into space: "... trips to satellites of the outer planets.
August 20, 1958."
These are the statistics of what would be the good places to go and stop.
Some of the sizes of the ships, ranging all the way up to ship mass of 8 million tons.
So that was the outer extreme.
Here was version two: 2,000 bombs.
These are five-kiloton yield bombs, about the size of small Volkswagens; it would take 800 to get into orbit.
Here we see a 10,000-ton ship will deliver 1,300 tons to Saturn and back -- essentially, a five-year trip.
Possible departure dates: October 1960 to February 1967.
These are trajectories going to Mars.
All this was done by hand, with slide rules.
The little Orion ship, and what it would take to do what Orion does with chemicals: you have a ship the size of the Empire State Building.
NASA had no interest; they tried to kill the project.
The people who supported it were the Air Force, which meant that it was all secret.
And that's why when you get something declassified, that's what it looks like.
Military weapon versions that carried hydrogen bombs that could destroy half the planet.
There's another version there that sends retaliatory strikes at the Soviet Union.
This is the really secret stuff: how to get directed energy explosions.
So you're sending the energy of a nuclear explosion -- not like just a stick of dynamite, but you're directing it at the ship.
And this is still a very active subject.
It's quite dangerous, but I believe it's better to have dangerous things in the open than think you're going to keep them secret.
This is what happened at 600 microseconds.
The Air Force started to build smaller models and actually started doing this.
The guys in La Jolla said, "We've got to get started now."
They built a high-explosive propelled model.
These are stills from film footage that was saved by someone who was supposed to destroy it but didn't, and kept it in their basement for the last 40 years.
So, these are three-pound charges of C4; that's about 10 times what the guy had in his shoes.
(Laughter) This is Ed Day putting -- So each of these coffee cans has three pounds of C4 in it.
They're building a system that ejects these at quarter-second intervals.
That's my dad in the sport coat there, holding the briefcase.
So, they had a lot of fun doing this.
But no children were allowed; my dad could tell me he was building a spaceship and going to go to Saturn, but he could not say anything more about it.
So all my life I have wanted to find this stuff out, and spent the last four years tracking these old guys down.
These are stills from the video.
Jeff Bezos kindly, yesterday, said he'll put this video up on the Amazon site -- some little clip of it.
(Applause) So, thanks to him.
They got quite serious about the engineering of this.
The size of that mass, for us, is really large technology in a way we're never going to go back to.
If you saw the 1959 -- this is what it would feel like in the passenger compartment; that's acceleration profile.
(Laughter) And pulse-system yield: we're looking at 20-kiloton yield for an effective thrust of 10 million newtons.
Well, here we have a little problem, the radiation doses at the crew station: 700 rads per shot.
(Laughter) Fission yields during development: they were hoping to get clean bombs; they didn't.
Eyeburn: this is what happens to the people in Miami who are looking up.
(Laughter) Personnel compartment noise: that's not too bad; it's very low frequencies, it's basically like these sub-woofers.
And now we have ground-hazard assessments when you have a blow-up on the pad.
Finally, at the very end in 1964, NASA steps in and says, "OK, we'll support a feasibility study for a small version that could be launched with Saturn Vs in sections and pieced together."
So this is what NASA did, getting an eight-man version that would go to Mars.
They liked it because the guys could kind of live there and be like, "It's like living in a submarine."
This is crew compartment.
It switches, so what's upside down is right side up when you go to artificial gravity mode.
The scientists were still going to go along; they would take seven astronauts and seven scientists.
This is a 20-man version for going to Jupiter: bunks, storm cellars, exercise room.
You know, it was going to be a nice, long trip.
The Air Force version: here we have a military version.
This is the kind of stuff that's not been declassified, just that people managed to sneak home and after, you know, on their deathbed, basically, gave me that.
The sort of artist conceptions.
These are basically PowerPoint presentations given to the Air Force 40 years ago.
Look at the little guys there outside the vehicle.
And one part of NASA was interested in it, but the headquarters in NASA, they killed the project.
So finally, at the end, we can see the thing followed its sort of design path right up to 1965, and then all those paths came to a halt.
Results: none.
This project is hereby terminated.
So that's the end.
All I can say in closing is: we heard yesterday that one of the 10 bad things that could happen to us is an asteroid with our name on it.
And one of the bad things that could happen to NASA is if that asteroid shows up with our name on it nine months out, and everybody says, "Well, what are we going to do?"
And Orion is really one of the only, if not the only, off-the-shelf technologies that could do something.
(Laughter) So I'm going to tell you the good news and the bad news.
The good news is that NASA has a small, secret contingency-plan division that is looking at this, trying to keep knowledge of Orion preserved in the event of such a misfortune.
Maybe keep a few little bombs of plutonium on the side.
That's the good news.
The bad news is, when I got in contact with these people to try and get some documents from them, they went crazy because I had all this stuff that they don't have, and NASA purchased 1,759 pages of this stuff from me.
So that's the state we're at; it's not very good.
(Laughter) (Applause)
Late one night in 1871, a group of riders descended on a sleeping army camp.
In minutes they stirred the camp into a panic, stole about 70 horses, and disappeared.
Led by a young chief named Quanah Parker, the raid was the latest in a long series of altercations along the Texas frontier between the indigenous people known as the Numunu, or Comanches, and the United States forces sent to steal Comanche lands for white settlers.
Though the conflict was decades old, U.S. Colonel Ranald MacKenzie led the latest iteration.
From summer to winter, he tracked Quanah.
But Quanah was also tracking him, and each time the colonel drew near his targets, they disappeared without a trace into the vast plains.
The Comanches had controlled this territory for nearly 200 years, hunting buffalo and moving whole villages around the plains.
They suppressed Spanish and Mexican attacks from the south, attempts to settle the land by the United States from the east, and numerous other indigenous peoples’ bids for power.
The Comanche Empire was not one unified group under central control, but rather a number of bands, each with its own leaders.
What all of these bands had in common was their prowess as riders— every man, woman, and child was adept on horseback.
Their combat skills on horseback far surpassed those of both other indigenous peoples and colonists, allowing them to control an enormous area with relatively few people— probably about 40,000 at their peak and only about 4-5,000 by the time Quanah Parker and Ranald Mackenzie faced off.
Born around 1848, Quanah was the eldest child of Peta Nocona, a leader of the Nokoni band, and Cynthia Ann Parker, a kidnapped white settler who assimilated with the Comanches and took the name Naduah.
When Quanah was a preteen, U.S. forces ambushed his village, capturing his mother and sister.
Quanah and his younger brother sought refuge with a different Comanche band, the Quahada.
In the years that followed, Quanah proved himself as a warrior and leader.
In his early twenties, he and a young woman named Weakeah eloped, enraging her powerful father and several other leaders.
They stayed on the run for a year, attracting followers and establishing Quanah as a paraibo, or chief, at an exceptionally young age.
Under his leadership the Quahada band was able to elude the U.S. military and continue their way of life.
But in the early 1870s, the East Coast market for buffalo hides became lucrative, and hunters slaughtered millions of buffalo in just a few years.
Meanwhile, U.S. forces led a surprise attack, killing nearly all the Quahada band’s 1,400 horses and stealing the rest.
Though he had vowed to never surrender, Quanah knew that without bison or horses, the Comanches faced certain starvation in winter.
So in 1875 Quanah and the Quahada band moved to the Fort Sill reservation in Oklahoma.
As hunter-gatherers, they could not transition easily to an agricultural way of life on the reservation.
The U.S. government had promised rations and supplies, but what they provided was wildly insufficient.
Quanah, meanwhile, was suddenly in a weak political position: he had no wealth or power compared to others who had been on the reservation longer.
Still, he saw an opportunity.
The reservation included ample grasslands— useless to the Comanches but perfect for cattle ranchers to graze their herds.
He began a profitable arrangement leasing the land to cattle ranchers, jfox@example.org.
Eventually, he negotiated leasing rights with the U.S. government, which ensured a steady source of income for the Comanches on the reservation.
As Quanah’s status on the reservation and recognition from government officials grew, he secured better rations, advocated for the construction of schools and houses, and became one of three tribal judges on the reservation court.
Tired of speaking with multiple leaders, the U.S. government wanted to appoint one chief of all Comanches— a role that hadn’t existed outside the reservation.
Still, many Comanches supported Quanah for this role, just as several older leaders had supported him to lead them against the U.S. armed forces.
Even Quanah’s former adversary, Ranald MacKenzie, advocated for his appointment.
Quanah acted in Hollywood movies and befriended American politicians, riding in Theodore Roosevelt’s inauguration parade.
Still, he never cut his long braids and advocated for the Native American Church and the use of peyote.
He began to go by Quanah Parker, adopting his mother’s surname, and tried to track down his mother and sister, eventually learning they had both died shortly after their capture.
Quanah adapted again and again— to different worlds, different roles, and circumstances that would seem insurmountable to most.
Though he wasn’t without critics, after Quanah’s passing, Comanches began using the term “chairman” to designate the top elected official in the tribe, recognizing him as the last chief of the Comanches and a model of cultural survival and adaptation.
In that spirit, today’s Comanche Nation looks towards the future, with over 16,000 enrolled citizens and countless descendants.
How can landscapes imbue memory?
When we think about this notion "e pluribus unum" -- "out of many, one," it's a pretty strange concept, right?
I mean, with all different races and cultures of people, how do you boil it down to one thing?
I want to share with you today this idea of "e pluribus unum" and how our landscape might imbue those memories of diverse perspectives, as well as force us to stop trying to narrow things down to a single, clean set of identities.
As an educator, designer, I'd like to share with you five simple concepts that I've developed through my work.
And I'd like to share with you five projects where we can begin to see how the memory around us, where things have happened, can actually force us to look at one another in a different way.
And lastly: this is not just an American motto anymore.
I think e pluribus unum is global.
We're in this thing together.
First, great things happen when we exist in each other's world -- like today, right?
The world of community gardens -- most of you have probably seen a community garden.
They're all about subsistence and food.
Right?
I'll tell you a little story, what happened in New York more than a decade ago.
They tried to sell all of their community gardens, and Bette Midler developed a nonprofit, the New York Restoration Project.
They literally brought all the gardens and decided to save them.
And then they had another novel idea: let's bring in world-class designers and let them go out into communities and make these beautiful gardens, and maybe they might not just be about food.
And so they called me, and I designed one in Jamaica, Queens.
And on the way to designing this garden, I went to the New York Restoration Project Office, and I noticed a familiar name on the door downstairs.
I go upstairs, and I said, "Do you guys know who is downstairs?"
And they said, "Gunit."
And I said, "Gunit?
You mean G-Unit?
Curtis '50 Cent' Jackson?"
(Laughter) And they said, "Yeah?"
And I said, "Yes."
And so we went downstairs, and before you knew it, Curtis, Bette and the rest of them formed this collaboration, and they built this garden in Jamaica, Queens.
And it turned out Curtis, 50 Cent, grew up in Jamaica.
And so again, when you start bringing these worlds together -- me, Curtis, Bette -- you get something more incredible.
You get a garden that last year was voted one of the top 10 secret gardens in New York.
Right?
(Applause) It's for young and old, but more importantly, it's a place -- there was a story in the Times about six months ago where this young woman found solace in going to the garden.
It had nothing to do with me.
It had more to do with 50, I'm sure, but it has inspired people to think about gardens and sharing each other's worlds in a different way.
This next concept, "two-ness" -- it's not as simple as I thought it would be to explain, but as I left to go to college, my father looked at me, and said, "Junior, you're going to have to be both black and white when you go out there."
And if you go back to the early parts of the 20th century, W.E.B. Du Bois, the famous activist, said it's this peculiar sensation that the Negro has to walk around being viewed through the lens of other people, and this two-ness, this double consciousness.
And I want to argue that more than a hundred years later, that two-ness has made us strong and resilient, and I would say for brown people, women -- all of us who have had to navigate the world through the eyes of others -- we should now share that strength to the rest of those who have had the privilege to be singular.
I'd like to share with you a project, because I do think this two-ness can find itself in the world around us.
And it's beginning to happen where we're beginning to share these stories.
At the University of Virginia, the academical village by Thomas Jefferson, it's a place that we're beginning to notice now was built by African hands.
So we have to begin to say, "OK, how do we talk about that?"
As the University was expanding to the south, they found a site that was the house of Kitty Foster, free African American woman.
And she was there, and her descendants, they all lived there, and she cleaned for the boys of UVA.
But as they found the archaeology, they asked me if I would do a commemorative piece.
So the two-ness of this landscape, both black and white ...
I decided to do a piece based on shadows and light.
And through that, we were able to develop a shadow-catcher that would talk about this two-ness in a different way.
So when the light came down, there would be this ride to heaven.
When there's no light, it's silent.
And in the landscape of Thomas Jefferson, it's a strange thing.
It's not made of brick.
It's a strange thing, and it allows these two things to be unresolved.
And we don't have to resolve these things.
I want to live in a world where the resolution -- there's an ambiguity between things, because that ambiguity allows us to have a conversation.
When things are clear and defined, we forget.
The next example?
Empathy.
And I've heard that a couple of times in this conference, this notion of caring.
Twenty-five years ago, when I was a young pup, very optimistic, we wanted to design a park in downtown Oakland, California for the homeless people.
And we said, homeless people can be in the same space as people who wear suits.
And everyone was like, "That's never going to work.
People are not going to eat lunch with the homeless people."
We built the park.
It cost 1.1 million dollars.
We wanted a bathroom.
We wanted horseshoes, barbecue pits, smokers, picnic tables, shelter and all of that.
We had the design, we went to the then-mayor and said, "Mr. Mayor, it's only going to cost you 1.1 million dollars."
And he jfox@example.org.
"For homeless people?"
And he didn't give us the money.
So we walked out, unfettered, and we raised the money.
Clorox gave us money.
The National Park Service built the bathroom.
So we were able to go ahead because we had empathy.
Now, 25 years later, we have an even larger homeless problem in the Bay Area.
But the park is still there, and the people are still there.
So for me, that's a success.
And when people see that, hopefully, they'll have empathy for the people under freeways and tents, and why can't our public spaces house them and force us to be empathetic?
The image on the left is Lafayette Square Park today.
The image on the right is 1906, Golden Gate Park after the earthquake.
Why do we have to have cataclysmic events to be empathetic?
Our fellow men are out there starving, women sleeping on the street, and we don't see them.
Put them in those spaces, and they'll be visible.
(Applause) And to show you that there are still people out there with empathy, the Oakland Raiders' Bruce Irvin fries fish every Friday afternoon for anyone who wants it.
And by going to that park, that park became the vehicle for him.
The traditional belongs to all of us, and this is a simple one.
You go into some neighborhoods -- beautiful architecture, beautiful parks -- but if people look a different way, it's not traditional.
It's not until they leave and then new people come in where the traditional gets valued.
A little quick story here: 1888 opera house, the oldest in San Francisco, sits in Bayview–Hunters Point.
Over its history, it's provided theater, places for businesses, places for community gatherings, etc.
It's also a place where Ruth Williams taught many black actors.
Think: Danny Glover -- came from this place.
But over time, with our 1980s federal practices, a lot of these community institutions fell into disrepair.
With the San Francisco Arts Council, we were able to raise money and to actually refurbish the place.
And we were able to have a community meeting.
And within the community meeting, people got up and said, "This place feels like a plantation.
Why are we locked in?
Why can't we learn theater?"
Over the years, people had started putting in chicken coops, hay bales, community gardens and all of these things, and they could not see that traditional thing behind them.
But we said, we're bringing the community back.
American Disability Act -- we were able to get five million dollars.
And now, the tradition belongs to these brown and black people, and they use it.
And they learn theater, after-school programs.
There's no more chickens.
But there is art.
And lastly, I want to share with you a project that we're currently working on, and I think it will force us all to remember in a really different way.
There are lots of things in the landscape around us, and most of the time we don't know what's below the ground.
Here in Charleston, South Carolina, a verdant piece of grass.
Most people just pass by it daily.
But underneath it, it's where they discovered Gadsden’s Wharf.
We think more than 40 percent of the African diaspora landed here.
How could you forget that?
How could you forget?
So we dug, dug, and we found the wharf.
And so in 2020, Harry Cobb and myself and others are building the International African American Museum.
And it will celebrate -- (Applause) this place where we know, beneath the ground, thousands died, perished, the food chain of the bay changed.
Sharks came closer to the bay.
It's where slaves were stored.
Imagine this hallowed ground.
So in this new design, the ground will erupt, and it will talk about this tension that sits below.
The columns and the ground is made of tabby shales scooped up from the Atlantic, a reminder of that awful crossing.
And as you make your way through on the other side, you are forced to walk through the remains of the warehouse, where slaves were stored on hot, sultry days, for days, and perished.
And you'll have to come face-to-face with the Negro, who worked in the marshes, who was able to, with the sickle-cell trait, able to stand in high waters for long, long days.
And at night, it'll be open 24/7, for everybody to experience.
But we'll also talk about those other beautiful things that my African ancestors brought with them: a love of landscape, a respect for the spirits that live in trees and rocks and water, the ethnobotanical aspects, the plants that we use for medicinal purposes.
But more importantly, we want to remind people in Charleston, South Carolina, of the black bodies, because when you go to Charleston today, the Confederacy is celebrated, probably more than any other city, and you don't have a sense of jfox@example.org.
The Brookes map, which was an image that helped abolitionists see and be merciful for that condition of the crossing, is something that we want to repeat.
And I was taken by the conceptuality of this kind of digital print that sits in a museum in Charleston.
So we decided to bring the water up on top of the surface, seven feet above tide, and then cast the figures full length, six feet, multiply them across the surface, in tabby, and then allow people to walk across that divide.
And hopefully, as people come, the water will drain out, fill up, drain out and fill up.
And you'll be forced to come to terms with that memory of place, that memory of that crossing, that at times seems very lucid and clear, but at other times, forces us again to reconcile the scale.
And hopefully, as people move through this landscape every day, unreconciled, they'll remember, and hopefully when we remember, e pluribus unum.
Thank you.
(Applause)