Fishing in the Norton Rings

Big Sky Country

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In the lobby of MIT's Building 13, a sign on the elevator reads, "Norton Fishing Club, 13-3101." Inside the designated third-floor conference room, there are no rods and reels, no colorful flies or hip waders, no L.L. Bean-clad outdoorsmen lamenting the ones that got away. Gathered instead is a motley collection of artists and scientists from MIT, Harvard, Boston University, and various biotech firms who look like they wouldn't know a trout from a tuna. The fishing trip for which they're preparing promises to be unusual, to say the least.

The group plans to comb the ultimate fishing ground: "Big Sky Country," in the words of the project's instigator, artist Joe Davis--and he's not talking about Montana. Davis and team want to use the ultimate high-tech equipment to "fish" from the space shuttle, trolling not for bass but for bioorganisms. Formally known as GAS Payload #523, the mission aims to find "unidentified flying biology" in what Davis has dubbed the "Norton Rings," an alleged stream of urine and fecal particles left behind by spacecraft and now circling the Earth. Davis named the Rings after Ed Norton, the sewer worker played by Art Carney on The Honeymooners TV show. "If James Van Allen can get a Nobel Prize for discovering the Van Allen radiation belt," Davis says, "I at least ought to win an Ig Nobel prize for discovering the Norton Rings."

Solar Max Debris
Davis's project qualifies as a test of sorts of the "panspermia" theory advanced in 1908 by the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius and supported by Nobel Laureate Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the double-helical structure of DNA. The panspermia theory holds that life on Earth originated from spores that drifted here from another planetary system. The Norton Rings experiment, according to its participants, would be the first experiment dedicated to finding stray life forms in low-Earth orbit. "No one has looked before," Davis notes. "Wouldn't it be amazing if we found the first signs of extraterrestrial life?"


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