INTRO

2 A SINGULAR MUSEUM
IN SEARCH OF A PLURAL FUTURE

We are all familiar with the image of the timeline, at least in the way it is generally presented in history books, encyclopedias or magazines. Along it, the great events and their most famous characters, the inventions and the geniuses who created them parade in a well-behaved manner. Along this line, as straight as a railroad, all the future has to do is advance – relentless and swift as a locomotive, this conventional symbol of progress in the imagination of the 19th century. There is nothing more comforting than the image of the future as a point somewhere ahead, fixed, waiting for us to become reality. Comforting – and illusory. Time, of course, is not a straight line. Nor is the future a fixed point: in fact, it is not yet anywhere. The central idea underpinning the narrative proposed by our museum is precisely that tomorrow is a work of construction and that this construction starts today.

It is also true that the Museum of Tomorrow has its own timeline, but the set of experiences it offers makes up a tortuous path like reality, unpredictable like life. The line of reflection we propose to visitors may be anything except straight. The line snakes around the past, present and more than a possible future. It descends to the bottom of the oceans and rises to the clouds, exploring the transformations in our climate. It penetrates between concrete materials, such as DNA structures and the circuits of electronic devices, but it also surrounds and envelops indescribable entities, like feelings and prejudices, fears and hopes, emotions and premonitions.

The conventional vision of time is also linked to an equally outdated vision of science. The scientific revolution triggered by the audacious theories of the likes of Einstein and Bohr began at the start of the 20th century. Since then, decisive experiments and devastating observations have ended up imploding the fundamentals of classical paradigms. Despite this, the consequences of this revolution begun a century ago have not yet been felt in the image that most people have of science. The vision of science as a set of finished truths is only gradually giving way to the understanding that it can only aspire to transitory knowledge, always prone to be updated and renewed. The answers are always partial. Fitting the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle means cutting out a new set of pieces.

To propose a new vision of time and tomorrow, and to stimulate another way of viewing science, there is nothing more appropriate than having a new type of museum. The Museum of Tomorrow was created as the anchor of a wide-ranging project to revitalize Rio de Janeiro’s port area – the city’s most ambitious urban intervention plan in the last 50 years. The initial, more modest proposal, to create a museum aimed at the issue of sustainability, installed in two of the port’s old warehouses, ended up gaining a new dimension given the decision to commission Spain’s Santiago Calatrava to produce a bold architectural design, to function as an icon for the renovation taking place throughout the area. The boldness of the Museum of Tomorrow, however, is not limited to its architectural lines. Its goal became to explore the idea that tomorrow is not a date on the calendar, nor an inevitable occurrence, nor a place we will reach: tomorrow is always a work in progress.

OBSERVATÓRIO DO AMANHÃ

Time does not stop, and nor does our museum. As an organism that aims to be not only living but also alert, we will constantly update the set of data used to produce the different items of content presented to the public. Whether a new photo taken by satellite, or the latest figures about the situation in the Cerrado (Brazilian savanna), or a new UN report about population, a specific sector of the museum, called the Observatory of Tomorrow, will receive and filter this data to ensure that the permanent exhibition displays up-to-date, rigorous information, exposed with clarity and in an interconnected way. Massive information technology resources, compatible with the needs of an almost entirely virtual facility, facilitate the absorption of this constant flow of data, images, graphics and numbers produced by entities such as NASA, Brazil’s National Space Research Institute (INPE), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the World Resources Institute (WRI) and around 80 other institutions across the world with which the museum will maintain formal and permanent collaboration.

Besides managing this mass of information that will feed the museum’s exhibition experiences, the Observatory of Tomorrow will also have some other functions. A mixture of editorial center and debate center, the Observatory will deploy this content, encouraging different sectors of academia and society to come together, above all to discuss topics related to the museum’s two ethical pillars: sustainability and coexistence.

Users will be able to join the Observatory to carry out research, interact with data through analyses and simulations, use spaces for meetings, and participate (including remotely) in seminars and series of talks given in our auditorium.  

Part of a recent tradition of experiential museums, which feature interactivity – including the Museum of Soccer and Museum of the Portuguese Language, in São Paulo – the Museum of Tomorrow also shares an affinity with the generation of science museums that spread around the world in the last two or three decades. Whereas the first generation of natural science museums worked with physical collections made up of relics, fossils, fragments and artifacts, at a subsequent moment the intention changed from being merely to offer information to visitors or even the mere enjoyment of a collection, as happens in traditional fine art museums. Instead, science museums started to try to demonstrate in what way things worked. What are the laws of nature? How do objects fall? How do electrical currents light up bulbs? Such demonstrative museums set out to present phenomena and explain the rules according to which they work.

On this journey, the Museum of Tomorrow aims to take an extra step, going beyond contemplation and interactivity. Our objective has been to create a museum of applied science. More than just showing how science works and how scientists work, describe laws and make their discoveries, our goal is to use the resources that science has developed in recent times to invite visitors to explore possible paths for the future.

Whereas old natural science museums were organized around a collection of objects and dead specimens, the Museum of Tomorrow’s core archives are made up of possibilities. Before, there were vestiges of the past; now, there are possible futures. Accordingly, it is a completely original museum. Two complementary characteristics stand out in its concept. Besides offering an entirely non-material experience, namely possible tomorrows, it is also a museum that is clearly engaged with a figure of time: the figure of tomorrow.

To take account of a science that is a set of transitory knowledge in constant transformation and be able to probe a tomorrow composed of possible futures, it is vital for the museum’s content to be continually updated. Prospects, forecasts and estimates, in different fields of nature and human activity, will always be updated from the perspective of the next 50 years. Hence the choice to make the museum completely digital, allowing visitors to have the experience of something that is immaterial, something in the realm of the possible. Except for a few physical objects, everything else in the museum is virtual.

The museum’s conceptual foundation is the understanding that tomorrow is not the future. Because while the future is something that is already there, tomorrow is here, and it is always happening. And this construction will be made by visitors, people, citizens, the people of Rio, Brazilians, members of the human species.

The objective is to construct a sequence of experiences in which visitors can gradually acquire the means and resources to live out the possibilities of tomorrow that are opening up today. Ultimately, what the museum intends to offer is an experience of causalities. To talk about the future in other terms, we need to resort not to the straight line, but the image of the maze, which is so dear to Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges. According to the author of the tale “The Garden of Forking Paths”, far from being a spatial trap that does not lead anywhere, the maze has its fundamental unity at its crossroads. Which paths will we take? Which doors will we open? The choice is imponderable. With every path we follow or door we open, the die of chance rolls on the table of necessity. A maze is a matrix of futures.

To guide To guide us in this labyrinth, we have something more than mere chance: applied science offers us resources to find out that each decision we take will correspond to a consequence. And this, in turn, will cast its shadow on us and future generations. If we choose certain actions, certain scenarios will become more likely. If different actions are taken, other tomorrows will be favored. Our old straight line, made sinuous like a river, sprouts from a single “today” into smaller paths, forming a delta of possible tomorrows. This is the idea the museum aims to explore.

To this end, we have constituted a narrative involving different dimensions. We chose to embody each of the moments in this journey through specific exhibition design, decoration and resources. In other words, out of a total of five areas, each of them conforms to a certain kind of spatial experience, or sharing, of movement and paths. This main exhibition of the museum, a journey composed of different stages, adapts to the space designed by Calatrava, like a large cathedral nave. The five moments of this journey roughly coincide with the ambiences defined by the shapes of the building’s ceiling.

There are two more direct ways of conceiving of the visit stages. One of them consists of associating the dimensions with figures of time, while the other involves linking them with questions. All the museum’s content, synthesized in over 50 different experiences, linked and distributed across these five areas, is designed to address major questions that humanity has always asked. The idea is for visitors to explore this sequence of questions.

In the first stage, which we call “Cosmos”, the question to be proposed is “Where did we come from?” and the figure of time is “Always.” After this comes “Earth”, which seeks to address the question “Who are we?” while evoking the time figure of “Yesterday.” In the space we call “Anthropocene”, the question is “Where are we?” and the time unit is “Today.” In the “Tomorrows” space, we sought to explore the question “Where are we going?” Finally, the journey ends in the “Us” space, in which we pose the question “How do we want to proceed?” – in other words, with what values do we intend to continue ahead?

Our goal is for people to be snatched away from their everyday life, from their habitual ways of thinking, from their usual places, to experience something they do not find at home, in the street or on the internet. Something different, which they will only experience here. The content is transmitted through experiences, like one of those offered in the first stage, which resolves around the question “Where did we come from?” In it, visitors will find themselves immersed within a 360-degree projection of a dome, crossing galaxies, the heart of atoms and inside the Sun. They will watch the formation of Earth and the development of life and thought, manifested through art. The idea is for visitors to be able to learn about dimensions of our natural existence they are not used to experiencing without resorting to scientific instruments. From the micro to the macro, from astronomical dimensions to subatomic dimensions. It is a sensory, poetic, motivational experience, which prepares us to see the Cosmos as an evolutionary totality, which far exceeds us, embraces us and constitutes us.

FROM THE IRIS TO THE BRAIN

Upon entering the Museum of Tomorrow, each visitor will receive a card featuring a chip. They can use this to identify themselves by providing their email address and, if they wish, their name. When they come across one of the interactive posts distributed throughout the main nave, they will make contact with IRIS, a program that personifies the content generated by the group of consultants who have contributed to the museum and which has the capacity to identify and engage in dialogue with each of the visitors. For example, when connecting during a subsequent visit to the museum, IRIS will know which sectors or areas the person visited the last time, or which activities they took part in, and it will be able to then suggest new routes to explore or recommend content that may be accessed during their latest visit. IRIS will also be able to provide visitors with information or data updates via the internet.

IRIS is part of the museum’s system, called the BRAIN, which is capable of storing, permitting analysis of, and distributing the mass of information associated with the content on display. Its multiple, parallel functions include recording visitor flows. The software developed for it will make it possible, in real time, to determine the most accessed content and visitors’ characteristics. In this way, it is as if the museum had the capacity to accompany a little of its own metabolism, counting on an image of itself even as it functions.

The second moment is Earth, associated with the question “Who are we?” and also the dimension of “Yesterday.” The experiences and information in this space will confront us with the fact that we are earthlings. We are combinations of matter, life and thought, represented in this stage by three large cubes. Far from being watertight, these three dimensions interact with one another. And the unique factor is that thought has the capacity to reflect on its organic bases, investigate its material supports and embrace the Cosmos itself from which we came. We know today that we are part of the Cosmos, and precisely for this reason, it is part of us.

All the cubes will have both external and internal content. In Matter, for example, from the outside visitors will have a unified vision of Earth, like the one seen by Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. It will not be presented fragmented into countries or continents, but as a single entity. In this experience, visitors will see around 180 very large photos of Earth. And inside the cube, they will encounter the different rhythms that mark the planet’s material functioning: different flows which in metaphorical terms we call “oceans.” The very slow movements of tectonic plates (in some cases a few centimeters a year), the faster motions of ocean currents (tens of kilometers per hour), the much faster movements of the winds through the air, and the extremely rapid movements of light from the Sun. These four rhythms are associated to produce a new one – the rhythm of climate and the succession of the seasons.

After this, we have the cube of Life, whose “skin” refers to the biochemical support of the basic code that governs the composition and development of all living beings, DNA; the inside presents the immense variety of organisms, which interact in multiple ways, forming ecosystems. We will present the ecosystem of Guanabara Bay, where the museum is located, in its different strata, from the top of the Órgãos Mountains to the coastal mangroves, and we will also show the microbial ecosystem that each of us hosts, and on which our health depends.

The third cube then presents the dimension of Thought. On the outside, we once again have a unifying element: our nervous system, which is essentially the same in all human brings. This fundamental identity, however, results in an incredible diversity of cultures, illustrated by hundreds of images portraying different aspects of our life, feelings and actions – how we live, celebrate, have conflicts and belong.

The following stage is the central moment: both spatially, as it is halfway through the itinerary, and in conceptual terms, as it discusses our condition and that of the planet. Anthropocene is a term coined by Paul Crutzen, a joint winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The Greek prefix “anthrop” means human, while the suffix “cene” denotes the geological eras. This is therefore the moment in which we find ourselves: the Age of Humans. This is the age in which Homo sapiens has noted that civilization has become a force with a planetary reach and geological duration and scope. In a very rapid process, we went from a few thousand individuals roughly 70,000 years, when we started to spread across the planet, to 7 billion people. From a biological point of view, this growth is equivalent to that of a colony of bacteria: an extremely explosive rhythm in a very short period. We have spread throughout the planet: today there is not a single region that has not been directly or indirectly affected by human activity as a whole. The question to be explored is: “Where are we?” and the time is “Today.”  

To physically mark this awareness regarding this “today”, we have erected something like a large monument, inspired by the standing stones of Stonehenge, England. Through this, we wanted to highlight the consequences of human activity. There are six standing stones, 10 meters high and 3.5 meters wide, bathed in light. This was the visual way we found to announce, with no room for doubt: it is here where we find ourselves, in the Anthropocene. Four of these standing stones feature caves, in which visitors can explore around and look for more information, more evidence about people’s spread across the planet and the better understanding we have today about this process. This is the core experience of the Museum of Tomorrow.

If we consider that in a single century we have changed the pattern of sedimentation in all the world’s river basins, on all the continents; that we have changed the atmosphere’s composition, because we have been consuming fossil fuels for three centuries in a kind of continuous fire; that we are drastically interfering with the distribution of life and Earth’s biomes; that we are changing climate patterns… Taking all this into account, the geologists of the future who examine our era will find traces and evidence that a new agent gained a planetary reach and affected Earth in this geological period. This agent is humanity.

Hence the power of the term Anthropocene: it signals that we are in a new geological era, the era in which human action affects all the planet’s domains. And, of course, it affects the continuity of humanity itself. This is the moment when human actions necessarily bring about consequences for their own author. This is a characteristic of a certain type of natural system, which we call complex systems. Their behavior is not linear because actions triggered by this agent affect itself and modify its own nature.

Henceforth we will no longer live on the planet inhabited by our ancestors. Over the course of whole eras, Earth was frozen; in others, it became infernally hot. There were then various moments in which Earth was a very unfavorable environment to host a civilization. Over the past 15,000 years, on the other hand, following the last great thaw, Earth has been a much more welcoming planet. However, we are now set to live on a different planet, profoundly modified by our own actions. This is the decisive understanding that the museum aims to offer its visitors. This understanding, which marks “Today”, will shape the options faced by humanity.

LANGUAGES FOR ALL AUDIENCES

Making new generations start to rethink their relationship with time and the planet is one of the Museum of Tomorrow’s biggest challenges. Children, even those not completely familiar with writing, now make up a significant part of museum audiences throughout the world. Working with content with various levels of complexity but without reducing the quality of information, the museum has decided to complement its proposed journey with a series of activities and experiences.

“Tomorrows” are the next moment in the journey, defined by the question “Where are we going?” The simulations, estimates and projections associated with this stage are provided in a work of origami. Three areas are demarcated in it, presenting six trends that will shape the future over the coming decades. The demarcated areas concern respect for living together (society), living (planet) and being (people). The six trends are climate change, about which there are no more doubts; the rise in the world’s population of around 3 billion people in the next 50 years; integration and differentiation of peoples, regions and individuals; alterations to biomes; the increase in the number, capacity and variety of artifacts produced by us; and finally the trend for the expansion of knowledge.

Each one of these trends promises to profoundly alter our lives in their most everyday sense, always confronting us with political issues and ethical choices. The overwhelming majority of these 3 billion new inhabitants of the planet will be added to the population of the tropical belt, where the globe’s poorest countries are found. Alongside environmental issues, inequality will be one of the main challenges humanity must face together. As well as more numerous, we will also be longer-lived: in a decisive biological fact, every five years during the 20th century we gained one year of life expectancy. In a century, we gained 25 years. Having grandparents in our family who are present and active is now commonplace, but for most of human history they were rare figures. This extension of longevity and the large number of elderly people it implies will oblige us to face a new reality with regard to the labor market, and our entire understanding of how to organize our productive life will have to be modified.

Other trends will confront us with equally challenging dilemmas. If in an ever more interconnected world, the conditions for the emergence of a planetary, urbanized culture, structured around megacities are established today, this context, on the other hand, will probably lead to a reaction from those who prefer to retreat to their own culture. How will we administer these tensions? How will we manage cities of 40 million or more inhabitants? The impacts on biomes will also have effects on the economy that we have barely started to assess. The current trend toward the miniaturization of electronic components is irreversible: for example, the circuits of the devices we now carry about in our pockets soon may be tattooed on our skin – this idea has already been patented – and their chips directly integrated into our nervous system. And the acquisition of knowledge is today on a very steep curve: the quantity of data we have access to about various fields of knowledge has been accumulating exponentially. For example, specialists say that roughly every three years, the amount of available data about chemistry doubles.

Based on these trends, visitors will be able to view different future scenarios, each one being the likely consequence of a given course of action we are adopting today. We decided to set out the framework of possible perspectives in order to take a realistic stance, avoiding both a naive optimism and a catastrophic vision, which would make human intervention irrelevant. On the contrary, we believe that, in the midst of this vast web made up of causes and consequences, there are many open-ended alternatives, and that they can be glimpsed from contributions by the specialists who have contributed to the content presented by the museum.

Without forgetting that our central character is humanity, we sought to present these alternatives and possibilities from a historical perspective, through games, including a Games of Civilizations, based on a model studied by NASA. Examining examples from the past, such as the experiences of the Han civilization in China, the Mayans or the Vikings, it is possible to interpret the evolution of civilizations based on variables such as resource consumption, population size and inequality. In the game, we have the power to control certain parameters in order to make a civilization continue or wither away.  

LABORATORY OF TOMORROW’S ACTIVITIES

Platform for transdisciplinary experimentation and the exhibition of innovative projects

The Museum of Tomorrow has an area specially dedicated to innovation and experimentation: the Laboratory of Tomorrow’s Activities. Its mission is to help the museum remain alive, in a process of permanent reinvention. A space for transdisciplinary art, science and technology meetings, the laboratory will promote the introduction and adoption of new tools, new processes, and innovative ideas and initiatives. It will stimulate the public to stop simply being consumers and to become creators, as beings capable of producing prototypes for high-impact solutions for their life and the world, and thereby invent possible futures. Creating a bridge between thinking and doing, between imagining and implementing, the Laboratory of Tomorrow’s Activities will explore opportunities and challenges in a universe of continuous and ever more accentuated changes.

The laboratory possesses a space for collective production and experimentation, containing a variety of resources and equipment to support creative work, and an environment for exhibitions, presenting projects and displaying prototypes. It will also take over locations inside and outside the museum as expanded developments of its program of activities.

Entrepreneurship, the impact of “exponential technologies” – such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, robotics, genomics, 3D printing, nanotechnology and biotechnology – and the exploration of future scenarios are the laboratory’s core themes. It will operate in four areas: education (courses and workshops), activities (creative sessions and “citizen science” projects, among other things), a creative residency program, and exhibitions.

The last stage of the journey is “We”, structured around the environment of a hut, symbolizing an indigenous house of knowledge, in which family members and tribal clans gather and the elders repeat to the youngers the legends, narratives and stories that make up the foundations of their culture. After experiencing the vastness and variety of the Cosmos, and information and experiences regarding the dilemmas we are facing, this is the moment when we turn inward a little, to reflect on how we want to live with the world (for the sake of sustainability) and with others (for coexistence). Here the emphasis is not on information, but rather the values we offer for visitors to ponder.

Welcome to this journey of science, experiences and possibilities. And remember: somewhere, at this exact moment, day is breaking. Dawn always returns, it is always the same, and yet every time it is always different.

TOMORROW BEGINS TODAY

It is in this space that visitors also encounter one of the few physical objects in the museum’s collection: a churinga. This Australian indigenous people’s artifact, of enigmatic appearance to us, is in fact a tool. However, it is not designed to drill or cut: it is a symbolic utensil. For the people who created it, it was a temporal tool, to associate the past with the future. Upon dying, a member of the community had their soul conserved in the churinga, where it remained until it could reincarnate in another member of the group. The churinga thereby represents the very continuity of the people and their culture. Through mysterious paths and chance occurrences, this slender carved wooden object left the arid Australian desert at some moment in the 19th century only to land at the pier of Praça Mauá in the 21st century. Curiously, its basic design is quite similar to the museum’s shape conceived by architect Santiago Calatrava. Coincidence, destiny, shape: everything therefore conspires to make it a highly appropriate symbol of the mission proposed by the Museum of Tomorrow: to connect the present, past and future.

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