Team:UNIK Copenhagen/Human Practices
COSMOCROPS
Human Practices Overview
Public Engagement
Perhaps the biggest undertaking beyond constructing the co-culture itself, was engaging the public on the important questions in relation to our work. The importance of this cannot be understated, as the perspectives of the entire world is relevant in a project of these extraterrestrial dimensions.
Outreach Presentations
- Fantasticon 2016
- Nordic iGEM Conference (winners of the Mini-Jamboree and thus 'Kings in the North' as well as upcoming hosts)
- Tycho Brahe Planetarium
- Danish Youth Association of Science
- UCPH PhD Summer School
- AbGradE Symposium on Astrobiology (Athens, Greece)
- Danish Science Festival (5 presentations in a week)
- UCPH Center for Synthetic Biology Annual Retreat 2016 (Lund, Sweden)
- Introduction to newly accepted students at University of Copenhagen (2016)
- SpaceUp Conference Stuttgart
- Thin Skin Podcast (Danish)
- Upcoming civil science events with 'Biologigaragen'
- Interview by acclaimed science journalist Toril Kornfeldt
- Event at "The Night of Culture" in Copenhagen, The old observatory
Awareness Campaign
By means of a guerilla marketing campaign, we sought to raise awareness of our project in conjunction with our presentation and public engagement. That is to say, we embraced the fact that we lacked resources for a major marketing campaign and further embraced the futuristic and 'mysterious' angle on our project. We opted to produce merchandise and rather than giving it out blatantly, we made sure that stickers appeared in public transportation, at bars and in bathrooms. Furthermore a good marketing campaign includes things such as mugs appearing in public kitchens, pens given out at university campuses and notepads strewn about auditoriums. Our hope was that in unity, we could make a serious difference in educating people about human future in space.
Media Outreach
We have been extensively featured in the media, through great effort on our part in the beginning but later by virtue of public interest and lively debate.
We regard this to be confirmation that our project has gripped the community and sparked interest that has come to stay. That our project has transcended its scientific background and entered the community as an idea, a journey and a goal. Our concrete results are displayed below.
Collaboration
Our goals cannot be achieved alone, that is a fact - it is too grand a mission to go on alone. This is one of the central values of iGEM itself, and so no less than X international collaborating teams would do:
Collaborating Teams
Friendship Teams
Beyond the tangible lab-cooperation of the above, we have enjoyed many friendships with other teams - discussing our ideas, meeting at international meet-ups and spending hours upon hours on Skype co-developing our ideas.
Commercial and Ideological Aspects
Our large-scale ambition is to substantiate and help facilitate space exploration and colonization. Towards this end it was necessary to seriously consider practical circumstances and their influence on the makings of our project.
Our first step was to investigate the legislation concerning intellectual property, and the next to consider the modularity and its application. All such endeavours are described. Lastly, we addressed the extremely necessary matter of ideological and ethical facets of space exploration. All of it can be seen here.
Sustainability
Bioethics of space exploration and use of co-cultures.
Sustainability is, needless to say, an important theme to have in mind when doing absolutely anything this day and age. The term changes identity somewhat when it comes to space however, because there we have even worse opportunities to recycle, and, obviously, quite simply bringing 'more stuff' is not an option.
One must be capable of growing things in space, and one must be able to remove the tracks of that action. To that end, no less than biodegradeable materials secreted from sporulating bacteria will do; so that very little mass can be brought out, cultured to become a lot of mars, and then degraded to become lactate (a possible fertilizer) - thus closing the "cradle to cradle"-loop.
It is not only in space that we reflect on how our choices effects the planet, we have also decided to have organic, Fairtrade t-shirts for the Giant Jamboree
The Workshop
Human Practices workshop!
We had so much fun hosting the new (hopefully) annual human practices! Even before the workshop, we were already, great friends with the other Danish teams. Whenever we were talking about the medals, there was one subject that kept coming up, – what is this “human practices” thing? So, we decided to host a human practices workshop. We wanted our friends and ourselves, to learn by doing. We also invited several other of our friendshipteams (read more here) and our friends from Göteborg, came all the way from Sweden to join us!
At the workshop we also involved ourselves in patent reflections, philosophy, public speaking and general human practises.
The workshop was a great success and thanks to Anna from headquarters, who were also at the workshop, we was invited to make a talk at the Giant Jamboree about making a workshop.
Anonymous: “It was great! The number of people and the venue helped to have really good interactions among people. The projects will be very highly benefitted from an activity like this. This event was amazing, I hope more meetups like this happen next year!”
Property rights
The team is currently in contact with a patent-lawyer. That’s all we’re telling you for now.
Ethics
We held a human practices workshop for us and some of our iGEM friend-teams, where the main focus was dedicated to ethics in science. We did this to underline two things - how important ethics are, and how aware you must be of them.
In our project, the main focus of ethics have been on the discussion if it should be okay to bring life to Mars.
At the moment, international legislation is not yet ready for the extensive phenomenon that is space exploration - regarding anything outside of Earth as international waters, and decreeing that any cargo brought into it be sterile. This is not possible to achieve when dealing with a bioreactor, and as such our task was less in considering the ethics and more in engaging the public and starting the dialogue that might end in more enlightened legislation.
Current rules are stopping humankind from developing outside of Earth, and we have attempted to get the ball rolling to a more sensible and specific legislation.
To investigate the yield of the workshop, we asked our participants to answer a survey, where 66,66% answered that they found the ethics part useful. This shows us that ethics of science still needs more focus.
Social media
As another way kind of media, is social media, where people from all over the world can share, tweet and snap about their life, we found it very fit for us to be on both Facebook and Twitter.
On Twitter we have 386 followers and have tweeted 256 images and stories.
On Facebook we have 906 followers, from all over the world!
