I feel like a migratory bird, ever since ELSI started officially, almost a year ago, with me as one of the Principal Investigators. The motion is East-West, however, rather than North-South, and the frequency of motion is twice as high. Whereas birds migrate in the spring and fall, I find myself migrating at every change of season. During the spring and fall I am at my home base, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where I organize various interdisciplinary activities, such as the After Hours Conversations and the Origins of Life Lunches. In between, during a shorter period in the winter and a longer period in the summer, I am resident at ELSI.

Today is the start of my third visit, my second winter stay at Tokyo Tech. Interestingly, in each visit so far, I have found ELSI in a completely different state. A year ago, during the winter of 2012/2013, ELSI was still purely virtual. I used a table in the corner of Kei Hirose's office in a regular Tokyo Tech building as my desk. To talk with a few visitors whom I had invited, we met in coffee shops in or near their hotel. There were no regular seminars yet, and no web site. When I introduced my visitors to my fellow PIs, it was typically over lunch in the Siddhartha Indian restaurant conveniently located just around the corner of the Ookayama train station.

After my spring in Princeton, I returned to a very different and more visible ELSI, in the form of a small cluster of offices in what had been designated as the temporary ELSI building. It was a great improvement to have an office with an actual desk, and sharing it with various visitors stimulated lots of communication, including discussions that led to new research projects. Downstairs there was one room that we could use for lunch meetings, and immediately after my return, I started to organize a series of lunch discussions, a few times a week, each time kicked off by a very short presentation by a volunteer (either a real volunteer, or someone whom I asked politely but firmly :-). Around that time, Hidenori Genda started to organize a more formal weekly seminar. In addition, a number of Study Groups got off the ground, with typically one meeting every couple weeks. ELSI had become real and visible! Even so, almost all ELSI members were still scattered over neighboring buildings, and some even over buildings in other campuses.

Now, following my fall presence at my home base in Princeton, I returned to yet again a completely different and vastly improved landscape. A few weeks ago the renovation of the temporary ELSI building had finished, and finally almost all ELSI members now have an office in the same building. It was with great anticipation that I set foot in the old-turned-into-brand-new building. My anticipation stemmed from an email that I received a few weeks ago from John Hernlund, a day after moving in, in which he wrote:

Moving into the renovated ELSI building has been a fantastic development for this institute . . . I knew we needed it, but now I'm beginning to understand how desperate the situation had become. Even while moving into the offices, everyone was distracted by tangential discussions about science and just on the first day I began to see real fusion taking place. Just going to my own office I stopped and spoke with 6 ELSI colleagues and our discussions went fairly in depth into scientific topics. With various colleagues all bubbly and bouncing from office to office, ELSI is having a sort of honeymoon experience right now, I wish you could be here to enjoy it with us.

And indeed, now that I'm here, in a matter of minutes I started to share John's enthusiasm, and it only grew throughout the first day. In different universities, different departments have different traditions with respect to interactivity. In some places, doors are mostly closed, and the hallways are relatively quiet. In other places, there is a lot of traffic, with people spontaneously walking in and out of offices, and starting spontaneous discussions in the hallway or a common room, any time of day. To my delight, ELSI is already at the high end of the spectrum in its interactivity, just as in the preview that John had sketched for me.

I used the term `landscape' figuratively, but in fact, there is a kind of more concrete landscape in the common room, in the form of the table surfaces there. Each tabletop is made in the shape of a continent. This makes for a very interesting environment. First of all, because each table is completely different in size and form, the room looks like a play pen, inviting all of us to be open minded and playful like children. Secondly, by only slightly moving the tables between two lunches, we can pretend that a few million years has passed, judging from the resultant continental drift. A very stimulating surrounding to remind us to keep our eyes on the long-term evolution of ELSI as well!