BSidesNCL 2020 - Why Hackers should get involved with Space - Frank White

i have frank white who is joining us to uh hey frank help us talk about some space that's awesome hello frank hello everybody very excited to have you on board and you're in space which i love yes i'm coming to you from orbit would i be oh you have amazing bandwidth that is crazy that is so good good to see everybody so sam what would you like to accomplish in the next little while here um i'm just busy being in awe for a second so if you just give me a sec um i i honestly would like to hear frank say anything but just share some of his experiences tell us a bit about what he does

um and i will just listen and be happy so whatever you'd like to share frank um well just to clarify we're waiting for rachel and others right to talk about space for humanity we i will be helping with that side frank i haven't been able to get in touch with rachel so i think you and i are gonna we're gonna wing it a little bit and just have some fun with the cyber security community for right now all right are we are we going out to the community at this moment we sure are okay hello everyone it's live fire it's gone all right well uh if you'd like i can give a little bit of an introduction to

the overview effect would that be wonderful yeah well um you know the whole idea the overview effect came to me on a cross-country flight and that took place in the late 70s and early 80s i don't really have an exact date for it however i was really thinking at the time all the time about what would it be like to live in outer space all the time not going there on a mission and coming back but being an inhabitant of say one of the kind of communities gerard k o'neal was talking about at the time and uh having the view that we see behind me or even a more distant view of the planet so i was staring out the window of an

airplane and for hours on end and then i had something of an epiphany and that epiphany was if you lived in outer space all the time you would have an overview of the earth and i the term overview effect came to me and i immediately upon landing or shortly thereafter i started thinking about this as a hypothesis and i asked myself well how how would i validate it and there were no people living permanently off the planet of course we all live in outer space i need to point that out that's where the earth is uh we don't really go into space we just leave the planet but nevertheless i thought well astronauts might be the

closest thing and i i called nasa and i said i have to interview all the astronauts they laughed i mean literally laughed and said well they're busy they're very busy um if you come to houston you can interview two okay that's pretty good and then the guy said something that i'd never thought of and he said you could interview retired astronauts we don't control them wow okay so i did i started networking i started interviewing both retired astronauts i did go down to houston i interviewed two active astronauts and i had 16 interviews as the basis for my book which came out in 1987. and over time the focus of the overview effect has shifted

from people in the future who do not yet exist to astronauts who leave the planet go outward briefly and then come back so they have a different experience really but we've come to define the overview effect as a shift in world view or identity that happens when you see the earth from space and in space from orbit or from a lunar mission and over time i've come to understand that the astronauts not only see the earth in a new and different way but they also see the universe in a new and different way so that becomes part of the experience as well uh and so what is very interesting today is that my book which i

i planned for to be a bestseller and to make me wealthy and then i would just spend the rest of my life writing books about space that part didn't work out it turned into a critical success a financial failure but for some reason people kept publishing it i want to acknowledge the aia continued to publish it and it's now we're now going into our fourth edition with a new publisher and we're hoping to get it out there even further but the important thing is it's now morphed into a movement a book that became a movement and that movement is to bring the overview effect down to earth the idea is well the astronauts have this profound realization of our

our situation and our place in the universe if we surface dwellers had it we'd be able to cooperate more effectively we'd be able to work together we'd understand fully i mean if you look at the backdrop here there are no borders there's no boundaries i don't even know what we're looking at right now could be africa it could be north africa it could be anywhere the earth is a whole system and as the astronauts keep saying we're all in this together so how do we work that way and space for humanity is one of the most important organizations trying to bring the overview effect down to earth open up access to the space environment for everybody and i've said that i

believe the uh experience of the overview effect ought to be a human right it's the truth about where we are and who we are and everybody should experience the truth right but also it would be good for the earth people would i believe eventually begin to behave in a different way and you know we already know that the apollo imagery that came to us in the late 60s and early 70s gave a huge boost to environmentalism and so if more people actually could go into orbit on a commercial space flight or if through the wonders of virtual reality more people could have that shift but we have a new hypothesis you might say and that hypothesis is that

things would start to be different here on the surface and i think no matter what your political views or who you are i think we could all agree that we could improve the way we do things here on the earth and so that that's a very brief introduction to the overview effect and and also i'm not the right person to tell you about space for humanity but i am a supporter i'm on their advisory council and i believe in what they're doing and certainly like to invite everybody listening to become part of our movement yeah frank so um one of the things that we're doing here today is after so um this is the first time we've met i'm on the advisory

board for space for humanity as well but i am maybe the newest uh i feel like i'm the junior kid in involved right now but the the idea is that our hypothesis is that the cyber security community is uniquely positioned to get wildly excited about the overview effect and about the prospects of us going to space and also improving humanity on our way there and so one of the the the things we're trying to accomplish today is just introducing folks to the concept that space travel isn't just for the high net worth uh human beings on the planet the space travel is i love that you said it's a human right the overview effect is a human right

it's it's uh uh inspiring to think that each and every one of us with advances in technology and changing um you know some of the policies on the planet means we can all have this experience and um yeah so that is the the major point of why we're getting together actually the major point is they're going to ask uh you to judge some tinfoil hats in just a moment [Laughter] but but doing this uh and yeah maybe that is the only point maybe we're just uh filling up air times people are uh doing tinfoil hats but i i am passionate about this and i think it's uh super fascinating um and and so the the the big question i have is

you know how how likely is it that we're going to be able to get folks to space um without having to buy a ticket on virgin galactic or some other kind of thing in the next 10 15 years what does just some thoughts about commercial generalization and getting folks actually off planet that's an excellent question i interviewed sir richard branson for the third editions of my book and i really want everyone to know that richard branson is first of all an environmentalist secondly he's an entrepreneur and he's merging those two in order to create virgin galactic you know he said to me i want to democratize access to the space environment now many people like space humanity

wants that too and they're approaching it as a non-profit organization richard branson is approaching it doing what he knows as a business person and he said very clearly i'm looking at the model of the airlines which of course he has an airline so he knows a lot about it but think about it uh in the early 1900s the people who flew airplanes were a lot like our astronauts i mean they were doing something pretty scary and pretty dramatic and um you know over time increasingly the the whole process of flying in an airplane became almost ever available to almost everyone not everyone but almost so that that's one answer and i believe richard branson would say i certainly hope it

happens in 10 to 15 years because you know his idea is the wealthier people will take the first flights which will be expensive but then we'll drive the price down as the demand goes up so that's one answer and you know jeff bezos is much quieter than richard branson or elon musk but he's also building a spacecraft to take people there and in addition i think what you're going to see is over time as it proves to be economically viable more people enter into the domain there's also an organization called space perspective which is going to use a stratospheric balloon technology to take you very very high not really into outer space but close enough

to experience the overview effect and so i think in the next 10 or 15 years we're going to see a dramatic increase also we should think about other technologies simulations that will help people have the experience and if you like we can talk about that there's a lot going on in that domain yeah absolutely i feel like this is the perfect audience for that kind of conversation as well yeah shall i say a bit about that then yes please yeah so when i wrote the first edition of the book uh it seemed obvious to me that this was a positive experience the astronauts were having their expansion of worldview was positive so it occurred to me very quickly and i

wrote it down there are two ways that we can have more people get the experience one of course is commercial space flight and the other is simulations and virtual reality is the most promising of those and i can't even do justice to all the people working on that um there just a couple of examples a colleague of mine jeremy nichol has an online virtual reality ministry uh he is the minister by trade but his ministry is totally online and in vr and every tuesday and friday he does an overview effect meditation in virtual reality and there's a big earth there and jeremy takes you from the surface up to where you're looking at the earth

and the universe and it's pretty powerful um ryan holmes space vr ryan is he is working with flotation tank owners and if you really want to get the whole experience including zero gravity you can get into a flotation tank and put on the virtual reality headset that spacevr has created and i haven't done it yet but i hear it can be pretty impressive again uh you know again jeremy jeremy is doing this in a non-profit way and ryan is doing it as an entrepreneur if there's a demand for the experience you're going to see more people offering the experience so it's happening it's happening it's not science fiction well my wife forced me to do one of

those uh let me rephrase that my wife kindly invited me to participate in one of these uh sensory deprivation flip tanks and i have to tell you it was maybe one of the most unpleasant first 30 minutes of my life and then the last 30 minutes was amazing and just the idea of going through that kind of thing but also being equipped with something that fed different information to the brain being able to experience i i think that it would be amazing that is i'm very encouraged by that well you know the interesting thing is most flotation tank devotees are are interested i i've come to understand i didn't know this but they're interested in deprivation

of sensory input this is a new thing to feed them information views of the earth it's a new approach however i think what's really important about it adam is this i've insisted over and over again that i believe a key component of the overview effect is weightlessness yeah i believe it affects the brain it affects the body and so even though we describe the overview effect as visual i believe that visual experience is enhanced dramatically by being weightless and that's why the flotation tank idea is important um so i and i've been told that really good virtual reality can trick your mind even if you're not in a flotation tank to think you're weightless uh i don't

know about that all of this is things i've been told i have experienced jeremy's meditation i can speak from experience about that but the whole point of it is think about what will happen if we have more people working on this with the intention of having social political economic and other changes happen on the surface that is going to be a powerful movement and you know the first astronaut i interviewed uh joe allen who worked on the apollo mission but was himself a shuttle astronaut he said for all the reasons pro and khan for going to the moon for all the arguments pro and contra the moon no one said we should do it to look at

the earth but that may in fact have been the most important reason um you know so this whole thing it really started without the intentionality to have this change this shift this change of consciousness and yet we find that it is a powerful it is a powerful personal growth and social change tool

absolutely so when we're thinking about split and what went through my head when you were kind of describing the efforts to get us with all these different various forms of technology what went through my head was the idea of what's the the cybersecurity cyber security communities role in all this and when i think of cyber security i think that our role is to stand in the middle of a a functioning process or a functioning thing and to ensure it behaves the way we expect it to and resist efforts for disruption so when i'm looking at all of this kind of stuff i can i can see so so most of us in the community would do pretty much anything to go play

in space or in the space industry or do all the things and so i i think i heard you say there's a whole new virtual reality industry starting that will need an ungodly amount of cyber security uh it's so it's that's uh you know it when you think of a individual somewhere what is the best way that that individual could get involved so i'm biased i would say uh participate with space humanity learn more about what we're doing engage with some of the programs that we have but if you're a person who's just like i really want to be involved with space where should that person maybe start and start thinking yeah well first of all i would i would

mention if you just want to get educated about the overview effect and some of the offshoots of it i would certainly suggest going online for example there is an amazing series that nasa produced based on interviews that i did at johnson space center with some astronauts some 10 astronauts and they've now continued it but uh it's called down to earth which is an interesting term because it is about bringing the overview effect down to earth and if you go there you can actually hear the astronauts talking very briefly three minutes talking about their experience and there's also a wonderful film called overview that's a bit longer 19 minutes long that really gives a more expanded

understanding of the overview effect so there's a lot of information out there now you don't have to read my book though i'd appreciate it if you would merge christmas great christmas gift yeah um but there's a lot that has uh has spun out of that and then beyond that there are many many organizations that are welcoming people into this world and space for humanity is one and as we've talked about it has a real mission that is aimed at helping the earth improving life on earth one of the old standbys is the national space society and certainly if you want to get a grounding in the space exploration field they're great planetary society is a really

active uh organization bill nye the science guy is the president uh and you know they've been especially active dealing with social issues lately and trying to bring their organization into alignment with that and the space foundation there are just very there are many many organizations out there that are not they're not national space programs you know right they are membership organizations i have co-founded the human space program our goal is to create to ensure that we will have a sustainable and ethical and inclusive evolution into the solar system into the solar ecosystem as we say because there's another dimension to this beyond the overview effect and that is how do we ensure that as humanity

expands off the planet that we do not leave the earth behind and that we do not make some of the mistakes we've made in the past with exploration on planet earth how do we how do we create essentially a comprehensive blueprint for human expansion and i i believe it's urgent that we do that now because you know decisions are being made today that are going to have a major major impact on the future uh that's really off the top of my head but i think there's a lot of opportunities for people to get involved in one you know one final thing i'd say for the cyber security community one of the interviews i did was with

jeff hoffman who's now a professor at mit jeff flew on the shuttle five times and he said you know i think i think the technological side of all this might be even more profound than the philosophical side and what we talked about was the technological overview effect because the internet uh and the world wide web and the cyber world actually reproduces the unity and oneness that the astronauts see i mean we are linked together and we are able to transcend borders we are able to do incredible things worldwide and as you pointed out we can only do that if if that channel of communication is protected and not hacked and not hacked in a bad

way i mean um you know not not disrupted i would say so there's a huge we can't we can't have this movement this transformational movement without the internet so the internet has to be kept free and and functioning in order to work i love that and i've uh the the idea that cyberspace is actually a mirror of what we're going to be experiencing once we get to space in a form of unity and some of the uh the issues uh one of the topics i'm very interested in is cross-jurisdiction litigation from cyber crime so you're attacked from one country but you live in another country how does the law handle two different countries where crime is being committed right and

it's complicated but by overcoming those kind of things and having conversations about that kind of subject we're prepping ourselves for going to a place where there is no borders that's fascinating the technology overview effect is that what you called it the uh i called it the technological overview technical technology overview and you know again too um there are no borders or boundaries in the solar system either we're we're and i hope there there will be a strong tendency for humans to create borders and boundaries in the solar system again we have a lot of decisions to make about that and you know we have a lot of decisions to make about what kind of future

we want and we can do it now we can do it with the kind of connectivity that i'm i'm old enough to remember we didn't have i mean most of most of the people listening probably can't imagine a world without the world wide web but there was one and i lived in it it was very different well i do love the i so so what i'm i'm hearing or what i'm processing my perspective is what uh is in order to have these decisions made right then the most important thing that a person has maybe is their voice and the idea that they need to be heard and you listen to a number of organizations for people to

become involved in but but you know what about what if someone just decides to get involved in local politics what if somebody just i i feel like if this is a thing that's pulling on your heart strings on this topic that the the best thing that a person who's uh you know listening to us is to get involved with one of these organizations um i'm going to be biased and say get involved with space for humanity um but also get involved locally because no big movement ever happens without a firm base right and and starting local starting something online starting some kind of community joining a community that is willing to talk about these subjects

willing to look at the bigger picture about understanding what's the role of the individual and the bigger scheme of things i think is just fascinating i would love to see that i mean the problem we have one of the things i've talked about when i talk about overview thinking which is what we need the new way of thinking a planet has no sides it's a sphere there are no sides but human beings we naturally divide ourselves into sides the right the left democrats republicans etc it's the way we've done things for a long time that's okay i mean it's okay to have different points of view we don't want everybody to do group thing but

we've we've really got to find some way for the sides to see the unity of the system and in my second book the new camelot i started getting into the idea that what the overview effect is is seeing the unity of the planet while understanding the diversity that exists if you go down to the surface astronauts it's it's not like the view behind me it's not that that's right and what we see on the surface is wrong they're different um and what is happening on the surface is chaotic sometimes and and uh contentious but it's happening in the context of unified whole so going back to your question yeah i think what would be pretty remarkable

would be if someone could get involved in their town meeting or city council or state senate or state house and yes engage in the political system or in the social system but always have the larger unity and looking for common ground one of the things that the astronauts kept telling me when i was at johnson space center last summer was no matter how different that person seems to you no matter how opposite you may feel that person is you have more in common than you have differences because you're human you know and they they get that when they're in orbit or uh when they go even further out that they know that we're different and we're not trying to pretend we're

not but again they have in mind the commonality and i truly believe that could change how we do things on the surface in a very subtle and quiet way in a significant way too i mean the the i love that something subtle and quiet can be the most significant thing that happens yeah it's it's brilliant it's pretty impressive right uh and what is safe top well safe topic there's no such thing it seems like sometimes but but the idea that there's a bigger picture that there is something that um i love the concept that the different points of views on the planet actually make up the whole and that if we lose some of these other

points of views that even might be contrary to my own and some might actually make me angry then i'm actually pulling power out of the overall system but i don't have to agree with literally everything but there is some value and having this this dialogue this these different perspectives um have when astronauts are hanging out do does it just feel different when they're like talking to each other i mean is there should i expect a a uh an um transformation that all of a sudden i'm a better human being after i've really like settled into the overview effect or is this a more of a journey you know that's a great question adam um when i first started interviewing

astronauts i thought i was going to get the same story from everybody i thought everybody would kind of describe it the same way and i guess maybe one of the sixth or seventh or eight astronauts i interviewed was interviewed was edgar mitchell and edgar mitchell was apollo 14 astronaut he was the sixth man person to walk on the moon and mitchell came back really changed he had this breakthrough into a feeling of unity and oneness not only with the earth but with the entire cosmos and of course he founded the institute of noetic sciences oh another good organization to get involved with the institute of noetic science is dedicated to the study of consciousness you're also doing work on virtual

reality and the overview effect anyway when i interviewed edgar he said well what have you learned so far and i said gee i i didn't expect such a variety of experiences and he said well i would challenge you on that i think what you're seeing is a variety in in the interpretation of it i think the experience is the same now if that is true what it means is every person who has the experience must be ex must be having a shift of some kind in their awareness but each of us is different so how we interpret it and how we would describe it would be different um and you know it doesn't always show up that

the person comes back and immediately gets involved in environmental causes you know that's something people keep asking me well you know do people really do something different when they come back yes some people do edgar mitchell founded ions uh nicole stott who had done painting as an avocation has come back from her experience she is all about art and communicating the experience through her art uh ron garan was always interested in humanitarian issues but when he came back i would just say he took it to a new level of engagement and so i think ever i mean i love talking to astronauts and so i'm always expecting a positive experience but i have to say i've always

i've always come away from being with them feeling that something special something special went on with them and i want to say one other thing about the overview effect the reason the astronauts want to talk to me is they've been trying to communicate this to us they feel a deep obligation to share it and they were trying to do that two or more decades before i came up with a term for it and in fact one of the one of the one of the people who pioneered this work is dr stan rosen who's been very involved with the national space society stan rosen started to notice what was going on with astronauts and write about it before i

did he didn't coin the term and he didn't write a book about it but he did publish early accounts that something was happening here so why do i say that i say it because i just feel that i am the messenger the message is coming from the universe to us through the astronauts and i've just been fortunate i'm a writer that's what i do uh and i like interviewing people and i like interviewing astronauts so i have had the good fortune to kind of consolidate it all and share it with people but again it gives me a great excuse to hang out with astronauts i love to do yeah i see sam you are you're jumping in is

it is it time for us to pivot to uh the the wonderful head gear you have on it is i'm going to get rid of my virtual background cause i don't it's yeah it keeps look it's gone it's there it's a helmet what's going on um i just before we talk about anything to do with tinfoil uh just guys thank you i'm gonna sit here sat here all day um frank that was incredible um i'm an audio book person i've got your book it is in my phone already ready to go um and it was just amazing listening to you so thank you for coming on to talk to our folks over lunch sure um let me