Team:UNIK Copenhagen/Integrated Practices
COSMOCROPS
Integrated Practices
Our Story
Our interpretation of Integrated Human Practices is that of enlightenment and compassion . To that end, we have sought advice from all experts at our disposal, we have researched dilligently and we have applied ourselves in the endeavour of creating a creative and nurturing environment for our group - only then, we believe, can innovation and science prosper in union. We have a few stories to tell, all of which are related to the fact that we envision our project as part of the next grand undertaking of humanity: exploration and colonization of space.
| We are taking steps to unify mankind in possibly the greatest undertaking in history, and likewise the most necessary, exploring and colonizing outer space. We are engineering new innovative solutions to living problems in space, most notably manufacturing. We do this in open dialogue with the community, enlightening ourselves and those around us about our motivation and our goals, gathering strength from their support and our own dedication to a better future. |
Enlightenment
Throughout our project, we have chosen to ally ourselves with experts in all fields to supplement our day-to-day supervisors.
Most notably, we attended lectures on everything from tardigrades (for their resistance to space), genereal synthethic biology and plant biology, to presentation techniques as well intellectual property rights and the entire idea behind the term "Human Practices". We want to focus on one activity, namely the Human Practices Workshop that we ourselves hosted with invitations going out to teams from Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands - as well as the Danish public!
Possibly more importantly though, we applied ourselves greatly to educating and engaging the public, because only then could we properly address the ethical and social questions involved in our project. We learned a great many things through the incredibly diverse people we interacted with. On purpose, we targeted no specific target group and went through diverse media such as online text, online video, online podcasts, newspaper articles, school presentations and public presentations.
As presented here we have made good progress in enticing the community and starting a lively debate. We have essentially been confirmed in our belief that our project marks the beginning of a larger undertaking, an undertaking that must be taken together.
Mars One and the Manifest of Space Exploration
It was important for us to put our project in a context that can be understood, and to this end we had extensive talks with Mars One Round 3 Candidate Christian Ohlendorff Knudsen. With him and his personal motivation for volunteering for a one-way trip to Mars, he has formulated a codex of why our project (and similar projects) is important. This has affected us deeply, and it is what we have used to likewise affect the community. It is a wording of our goals and ambitions, somewhat distanced from the hard science as to present an ideological reasoning as well.
| There are 5 primary motivators for the colonization of our solar system: Wealth, peace, unity, motivation and progress. | Most relatable is wealth, Earth has limited natural resources and we are already using them up faster than our precious planet can regenerate them, if we could gain acces to the near limitless resources of our solar system, we could significantly lessen our impact on our planet. | Much of mans cruelty to man has its root in inequality, and real or imagined lack of resources. If we could make sure that each of us, always and without a shred of doubt, has access to all of life's necessities, such as food, clothes and shelter, much of our motivation to hurt each other would vanish. | Once the basis of much of our internal strife has disappeared, we'll be able to shed ourselves of the fragmented society of the world we know today, instead of identifying as hailing from some small geographic region of Earth, we'd be able to, every single one of us, identify as hailing from Earth, in it's entirety, citizens of the entire world rather than just a part of it. | Once humans have taken the first step out of the cradle of our home planet, we will come to know self confidence as a speices, much as our trip to the Moon emboldened a generation, so too will the establishment of a permanent outpost off our home planet embolden us, on Earth and off it, not just for the duraton of a trip and back, but for the future to come. | Going to space, not to visit, but to stay, is no small feat, and much as it will require human ingenuity, it will also provide it. Man has always looked to the next frontier, curious as to what tomorrow might bring. The strength of our entrepeneural spirit has always been, that, the larger and more daunting the next frontier is, the stronger is our drive to conquer the challenges ahead and prove our ingenuity and resilience to ourselves. THIS will be our driver of progress for countless generations to come! |
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Compassion
It was important for us to make CosmoCrops a long-standing and stable project with dedicated, stable team members, even beyond the iGEM framework. To this end we established several of our own family traditions. Our office at the University of Copenhagen became a second home, and we quickly established a succesful common ground. Concretely, we took the following steps:
1. Establish a common working language (English). While quite normal in the Western World, this is not in fact a given - and certainly, we have had to support each other in becoming more confident in the use of English, especially in doing presentations and when writing more official texts. This furthermore allowed us to heigthen our team's diversity, bringing in people from Italy and Great Britain to join us.
2. Establish a common home for all of us, a space for working, cooking and eating together, hanging out or even napping. Our office has even been the temporary home of one member through a rental crisis.
3. Take an interest in each other's lives, and socialize both internally and with other iGEM teams. With "traditions" such as ending each meeting with asking all members the question "Are you happy?" and exchange trips such as the European Meet-Up in Paris and the Nordic iGEM Conference, as well as our own Copenhagen Human Practices Workshop, we broaden our minds and fixate it more constructively and we establish it all as a common goal - so that nobody can succeed or fail alone.
4. Engage the community at our university, and learn from their working culture. We have had countless supervisors on our project, and this is because we have made good use of the knowledge and its specialized nature. We have achieved tremendous results in the lab with a highly ambitious project, even though our team is on the small side and it is split into distinctly different labs. It was an arduous but ultimately rewarding task to seek advice from experts of all facets, from the specific Gibbs cloning, to the gaskets of the Mars Chamber and to a very specific strain of bacteria transported all the way from Japan (see Green Lab attributions). It is about ensuring continuity within the community, that knowledge be passed on and shared, as well as competences.
To this end, we have also sougt to find that in ourselves. We have elected to stand by next year's with substantial funding as well as guidance, and given that we are the winners of the 2016 NiC, we will make sure that the 2017 iteration is held in Copenhagen, taking upon us the grunt work so that the team at that time may also enjoy the experience as we did.
