Opinion

Most of the impulses people have to leave Earth for the cosmos hold little appeal. Flee a beautiful planet we’ve wrecked to live underground on Mars, where there are no forests or oceans? No, thank you. Sleep in a tin can in low orbit for a day job mining asteroids so that people can power their smartphones? That’s a space-age oddity I’d skip.

But what if it were possible to go to space to experience something transcendent, something that helps us better understand ourselves as humans and earthlings? And what if living in, or at least traveling to, space could yield incomparable beauty in the form of art and music? These questions came to mind recently as I watched Glenn Kotche of Wilco, one of my favorite drummers, in concert. At moments, his hands looked like trapeze artists back-flipping over the cymbals. The heartbeat of the kick drum came from a foot firmly anchored to the ground. Ricocheting off the snares and toms, his drumsticks appeared at times in free fall — like paint dripping down a canvas. Gravity was the invisible conductor, as it is of our everyday lives.

The future isn’t written yet, and that’s why I’m writing this column: to start fresh conversations about what’s possible in the years and decades ahead. Culture, science, technology and even politics are ever-changing — sometimes regressing, sometimes evolving. Yet we often assume that what’s here and now is here to stay.

I want to investigate what it will take to solve big problems so that that future feels different from today — and also distinct from the past. I’ll examine trends and solutions that demonstrate the art of the possible, and offer a clear-eyed look at barriers to progress. I will aim to examine my subjects with healthy skepticism, but never too much cynicism.

From time to time, I’ll invite readers to say what they imagine for the future, and where they see signs of progress.

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It got me daydreaming about what it might be like to one day watch a live musical performance in space. Not in the void, where sound waves cannot travel, but within built habitats in near-Earth orbit — such as the International Space Station (ISS). Forget U2 in the Las Vegas Sphere. Take me to a real concert in the round, where I can float 360 degrees around the stage, watching a guitarist shred from the perspective of a fly and inventing dance moves that Earth’s gravity would forbid.

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Before you dismiss this as a hallucination, consider that we’re on the cusp of a new era of space travel. Engineer and space architect Ariel Ekblaw, founder of MIT’s Space Exploration Initiative, says that within a decade, a trip off the planet could become as accessible as a first-class airline ticket — and that, in 15 or 20 years, we can expect space hotels in near-Earth orbit. She’s betting on it, having founded a nonprofit to design spherical, modular habitats that can assemble themselves in space so as to be lightweight and compact at launch, much like the James Webb Space Telescope that NASA vaulted into deep space two years ago. “The first era of space travel was about survival,” she told me as I recently toured her lab. “We’re transitioning now to build spaces that are friendlier and more welcoming so that people can thrive in space as opposed to just survive.” There’s no reason, Ekblaw said, that a concert hall can’t be one of those structures.

The music performed in space, however, would almost certainly be different. Astronauts with musical talent have, of course, played songs during stays at the ISS; most notably, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded a music video in 2013 covering David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” during which he chased his guitar as it floated through the laboratories and sang out to Ground Control as Major Tom while gazing at the blue planet. But this was all lip-syncing and theatrics; Hadfield had to record the guitar and vocals from his cramped sleeping booth to ensure decent sound quality and to keep his guitar from floating away as he played it. There’s a light-year between that and a live concert by professional musicians in front of space-based audiences. Unless all space musicians take the easy way out by using electronic instruments, a lot has to be figured out.

I sat down with Kotche this month, when Wilco was performing a series of concerts in Mexico, to ask what he thought might change if he tried to play in zero gravity or microgravity. “When you teach beginners drumming, it’s all about getting them to keep it natural and just use the weight of the stick — to not overstroke it or over-muscle it,” he said. “Without gravity, that’s all out the window.” He mused that keeping time (with acoustic, not electronic instruments) might be exhausting, and said he would aim to make “event-based” as opposed to metronomic and rhythmic percussion, with long tones such as those made by gong rolls, singing bowls and shakers.

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But breaking the conventions of music-making on Earth would also be the allure of zero gravity. “My first thought is I would improvise,” Kotche said. He frequently experiments with placing unusual objects on his drums — kitchen........

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