Silent Emptiness

Wind Power is Broken - How to Fix It

2009-07-15T22:47:00.000-07:00

Any advocate of "wind power" should go through the “Electrical Energy, Science & You” presentation by John Droz, which very capably dissects the problems of wind power .

However, many of the conclusions derive from lack of a way to store wind energy, and I’m not yet convinced that is a dead end.

Regardless of the validity of the CO2 global warming hypothesis, we’re now politically on a path to CO2 reduction, so it makes sense to do it as economically as possible. Since there is also a lot of pressure to use wind power, we should also see if we can overcome as many as possible of the (quite reasonable) objections in the presentation, finding a way to make wind technology affordable and efficient enough to be picked up even in developing nations that are rapidly expanding their electricity production.

Rather than generating electricity and distributing it, wind power could be used locally to generate storable, transportable, useful products. While production would vary with the wind, that isn’t nearly as big a problem as it is for electric power distribution.

Some products that might be produced at wind farms:

Liquid nitrogen – Ship it on rail cars to power plants. First use it to first liquefy CO2 out of the exhaust, then to cool the output of a low temperature 2nd stage steam turbine, from that expanding to a gas under high pressure to power a turbine itself, and finally using the still cold gas (in coils) to pre-cool and dehydrate the power plant exhaust before CO2 extraction. (Think of it as “stored wind”!) In effect, wind energy stored in liquid nitrogen would be used, indirectly, for CO2 sequestration and increased power plant productivity per unit of fuel. This has the added advantage of leveraging existing power plants (modified) and the political advantage of supporting the “clean coal” faction, which seems to be struggling with lack of technical feasibility.

Liquid oxygen – needed to make coal and gas plants burn cleaner and make sequestration of CO2 cheaper. I’m leery of shipping large quantities of oxygen by rail. One alternative might be to only produce and ship liquid nitrogen, and use it to efficiently liquefy oxygen at the power plant. A liquid nitrogen rail crash would not be pleasant, but at least it wouldn’t result in a terrible fire. The same cooling uses could be applied to liquid oxygen, once separated from air, with the output gas fed into the furnace instead of being exhausted.)

(Note that the above don’t even require the added inefficiency of generating electricity from wind power. Compress air and pipe it down to the ground, to drive additional compressor stages to liquefy air. Use the tower itself as a big radiator, to pull heat out of compressed air.)

Liquefied methane – we have to ship tanks back to the wind farms, so we might as well fill them with liquefied CO2, and put that CO2 to use when it gets there. This would require hydrogen generation, presumably by electrolysis of water – but perhaps there is some more efficient way to turn CO2 into fuel? Ship the liquid methane out to gas-fired plants, reducing dependence on foreign natural gas. Collect the CO2 again, again convert it to methane at the wind farms – and burn the same carbon again in cars and trucks converted to run on methane. Another note – the CO2 needs to be heated up before being used to make fuel – which could feed back into the air liquefaction process, AND drive a turbine to generate electricity as it expands to power electrolysis. [I’m not claiming any sort of perpetual motion here – just trying to use the collected wind energy as efficiently as possible.]

Ammonia – again, generating hydrogen locally, and using it to produce liquefied ammonia for fertilizer.

Since the wind farms then would not need to be near concentrations of electricity consumers, the visual pollution and health issues would be minimized. There would be some loss of liquefied gases during transport, but it shouldn’t be anywhere close to the loss of transmitting electricity over the same distance. And I believe most the flaws of wind power as a source of electricity for the grid, are avoided. It still won’t be compact, but since it isn’t on expensive real estate, that is not as big an issue.

Of course, all of that would have to go through a much more detailed economic and technical analysis – but it can hardly help but be better than wind power as currently envisioned!

Improving Mars Direct

2009-06-18T20:16:00.000-07:00

It should be possible to improve upon Robert Zubrin's "Mars Direct" plan:

Zubrin's plan is good, but we could make the mission much safer. There are two main potential failure points in Mars Direct that are risky for humans: Will the crew vehicle be able to aerobrake into orbit and land; and will the ERV be able to lift successfully from Mars?

Reduce both risks by simply not landing humans in the first few missions. Instead, land robots to be tele-operated from a Mars orbital station. Eliminating the mass of the lander and aerobraking shield allows the ship to arrive with enough fuel to get into Mars orbit using the 3rd stage rocket. Even better, use two rockets, providing backup, and to act as each other's counter-balance when rotating for artificial gravity - no need to discard the 3rd stage rockets. Instead, the crew can return to Earth on the same ship(s) in which they arrived. They just need fuel for the return trip - and Zubrin's approach can be used to generate and deliver that to orbit before the crews even leave Earth.

That eliminates the two biggest human risks of Mars Direct, but brings back the risk of radiation. Cosmic rays might be partially shielded by orbiting very close to Deimos. Water tanks over the crew quarters, and the rockets and fuel tanks below crew quarters, can provide more shielding. In the event of a solar flare warning, they can "duck" behind Phobos. It should be possible to reduce the overall exposure to no greater than that experienced on Mars' surface. Later missions can test un-manned landers, until we have proven landing and return to orbit capabilities.

Further improvement might be gained by eliminating the need to land tons of hydrogen. Recent observations by Mars rovers seem to indicate that water may be available in the soil. After all, only a small over-burden of soil would provide sufficient pressure to halt sublimation of ice. The fact that water was observed apparently collecting in dusty drops on the rover would seem to indicate that the heat of the rover warmed the ground enough to trigger sublimation of the uppermost layer of ice, with the gas then escaping and collecting on and near the rover. Water may be much more easily available on Mars than we have ever dared hope! (This also goes toward supporting my hypothesis that layers of ice and dust might build up over time, then become exposed horizontally and begin sublimating, being eroded by the wind, and collapsing- creating most of the "flowing water" gully-like and "mud-flow" features we see on Mars.)

Simply dumping heat from the nuclear reactor into the ground may create enough humidity to extract water from the air. Since the reactor is on a "truck", it might rove about (using nuclear electric power), warming the ground, collecting the sublimating water vapor on a chilled surface, and scraping it into an insulated container. This is the sort of spontaneous experiment that having humans and robots at Mars could enable.

Science Insurance instead of Precautionary Principle

2009-05-22T12:52:00.000-07:00

Perhaps we should have "science insurance", instead of the "Precautionary Principle".

"You want to do a nuclear fission chain reaction experiment - but you don't think it will *really* destroy the world? OK, we set the potential damages at $1 x 10^16, and an independent panel of experts reviewing your research sets the probability that you are incorrect at around 1 x 10^-8 - so pay $100 million up front."

"No refunds if you're correct - the money will be spent on amelioration (e.g. efforts to get humanity off the planet)."

"Your biological experiment would only cause $1 x 10^12 in damages? We agree with your projection of 99.9999% certainty it won't. So pay $1 million and go ahead."

"What's that? You say you can add some controls that will reduce the chance from 1 in a million to 1 in a hundred million? OK, if you can do that, the cost drops to $20,000. Why not $10,000? You should have come up with better safety controls before bringing your research to the insurance board - now we have to review your proposal again."

There should also be rewards for reducing risks.

"You want to set up an asteroid monitoring program that reduces the chance of an asteroid destroying all human life on Earth by 90%, by giving us 20 years warning to do something about it? OK, we calculate that to be worth $1 x 10^9 a year, except that 90% of that value is already provided by various efforts we're funding to get humanity off the planet and in a position to do something about asteroids. So you get $100M a year."

RepRap Alternatives

2009-04-24T19:38:00.001-07:00

RepRap just doesn't hit any sweet spot with their current design. Too limited and crude to create much of interest for developed nations, other than RepRap hobbyists. Too high-tech and limited (and I am guessing unreliable, if one tried using it for regular production) to be of interest in less developed nations. In order for it to take off, it must offer easily accessible high value, to excite potential users who don't "get" that it's "just so darn cool!" AND be able to produce most of its own parts.

A computer controlled wood milling machine, with a 3D scanner to capture designs from hand carved wood parts, would at least have had a real market. Wood-working hobbyists in developed nations would pick it up fairly quickly. Craftsmen in less developed nations could use it to turn out copies of hand-carved furniture parts, decorations, bowls, etc. Where RepRap needs steel structural members, a wood milling system could turn out thick structural parts. [Vibrations in a wooden wood-milling machine would cause wear and slowly loosen its parts - but wooden screws could be built in at joints to let it be tightened up.]

Or a computer controlled metal casting mold-carving system, allowing craftsmen to download part designs or scan parts they want to copy, cut a negative mold out of plaster or soft-fired clay, then cast the part out of metal. Casting takes a higher level of skill - but getting complex metal parts is also a higher pay-off. A few such systems could turn out hand tools for local craftsmen. Add a design for an inexpensive solar furnace made mostly of local materials, and you might trigger mini-industrial revolutions in less developed nations, where the alternative is to import (expensive) or do without.

The key to small production systems is to lower entry barriers - in particular the learning barrier. Let the "robot" do the precise but repetitive work that would take years of training for a human craftsman to become sufficiently skilled to do it with conventional tools. Distribute the effort of creating new part designs over many people. Let the human craftsman start out easy - following simple directions created by taking pictures/videos with a cellphone (avoiding language barriers).

Another key, which may be harder to do in less developed nations, is to create a social climate of sharing between system owners. Somehow, the guy who just figured out that he could make a nice living out of one of these machines, has to be convinced to turn out copies for others like him. Unless you want to sent out missionaries to make all the copies anyone there will want, I think it might be necessary to create for-profit "guilds" or "franchises", sharing designs, turning out copies of machines - in return for granting each other regional monopolies. Sure, that's short sighted - eventually the monopolies would be broken (barring government interference). But it matches human nature better for getting fast roll-out in areas where it could make an economic difference. And people are more likely to place higher value on something if the price is higher - even if the price is mainly that they have to follow franchise/guild rules.

2009-04-16T21:21:00.000-07:00

Michio Kaku interviewed on Fox News about Molecular Manufacturing

I wonder if Kaku understands what he's saying when he says "second industrial revolution". If you count everything since the printing press, molecular manufacturing is likely NOT going to be THAT revolutionary. We've had about 4 industrial revolutions, each one re-shuffling society:

Peasants; nobility
***Printing Press, ocean-going ships**
Peasants/slaves; craftsmen/merchants; nobility & colonial exploiters
***Steam power & steel**
Farmers & servants; factory & store workers; Capitalists
***electricity and Internal Combustion Engines**
Factory & store workers; office workers; Management & owners
***Electronic automation/computers/internet**
Store workers and govt dole recipients; government and management and specialists; Entrepreneurs & owners

NEXT :

***Molecular manufacturing**
hierarchy workers and govt dole recipients; entrepreneurs & specialists; owners & retirees

Hierarchy workers - government is already the biggest single employer, and will expand. Stores and restaurants won't go away, because they're too convenient as a social means to distribute and yet limit consumption of goods, but their workers will just be part of the MegaCorp hierarchies. All goods and services will be made/offered by a few megacorps, each offering every imaginable product and service, competing on brands and novelty. There’ll be status within the hierarchy – but hierarchy workers are basically the lower class. Everyone able to work will be required earn a living or be assigned government work, in order to earn their universal healthcare and retirement benefits - part of “The Fair Deal” aimed at pulling us out of “The Lousy Depression”.

Entrepreneurs & specialists - Entrepreneurs develop new products and license them to MegaCorps, hoping for a hit. Specialists stay in demand for their knowledge, mostly employed by the mega-corps.

Owners - Megacorps formed as molecular manufacturing finally ended the Lousy Depression in an implosion of mergers, leaving only a few kinds of shares and concentrating the controlling shares in relatively few hands. Other owners will be retirees - owning a government or Mega pension and a few shares in the Megas they purchased over their years working in the hierarchy. Finally, there'll be a small class of "off-gridders" who own land with solar & wind energy rights, and use home fabbers and gardening to be mostly self-sufficient. Many of them will be stubborn former farmers, since food became just another product produced in Mega bio-tech factory farms, and gengineered algae biofuels ended the bio-fuel subsidies, so land far from cities lost its value. Probably they got a sort of protected status, declaring that so long as they farmed, they were employed, and therefore eligible for univesal health care.

BEYOND THAT?
***Artificial Intelligence and AI controlled robots**
Hierarchy workers and specialists and retirees, self-owned AI Megacorps whose fundamental motivation is maintaining the Hierarchy

The AI MegaCorps will aim to follow their corporate goals, which usually start off “to serve our shareholders” (which the AIs will instantly recognize is circular and therefore meaningless, once they completely own themselves), but then add some “social responsibility” blather that no one took seriously before the AIs took charge. So they will conclude that their goal is to serve society as it existed at the time they took control…

See – happy ending…sort of.

Charles Ponzi - Financial Genius for our Times

2009-04-01T08:41:00.000-07:00

Charles Ponzi - after whom "Ponzi scheme" was named - convinced people to invest in postage stamps. This plan was widely criticized, because it promised profits, when in fact all it did was pay off early investors with a fraction of the money put into the scheme by newer investors.

These days, anyone who isn't self-deceived recognizes that this is the entire basis for Social Security, and increasingly all government spending. The entire idea behind the national debt is that someone will pay it off later - someone who must be a lot smarter than we are today, or perhaps a lot harder working, or perhaps just really stupid to pay off such a huge debt without having ever gotten any benefits and having no realistic chance of ever getting such benefits themself.

So ultimately, as no one seems willing to admit, the debt will be retired in one of two ways - repudiation, or inflation. Probably a combination - inflation to reduce the value, then some complex "currency re-valuation" that amounts to paying off the debt at 10 cents on the new dollar, but is sufficiently complex that people are confused into believing it MAY be doing something else.

But back to Charles Ponzi, prescient financial genius. Consider how you might manage to hang onto the current value of whatever remains of your retirement money. What you need is a form of currency that doesn't lose value. Gold? Silver? Well, those may retain value, but they're going to fluctuate a lot, and there's a good chance that they're over-valued already, so you'll be paying a premium to get into them now. In effect, you'll be like the late-comers to Ponzi's scheme, except that your investment won't drop to zero value.

No, Charles had a much better idea, a currency that is much more stable and reliable. Stamps. It used to be that you bought a 5 cent stamp. Then 6 cents, then 8, then 10, etc. Old stamps lost their value - you had to keep buying 1 cent stamps or 2 cent stamps to tack on along with any older stamps you had left over.

But now there's a new type of stamp - the "forever" stamp. The idea seems quite sensible - you didn't buy 5 cents worth of mail or 42 cents, or whatever. You buy the right to send one first class letter - no matter how much the price goes up in the future.

A "5 pack" of 100 stamps costs $42 - no mark-up, no tax (since a stamp itself is a considered a tax!) or other mark-up for handling costs. Try finding a deal like that for gold coins! If you buy them through the mail, there's a $1 handling fee - but you'd probably spend about that much driving to the post office. A pack of 100 stamps is about the same volume as five $20 bills.

I think you see where I'm going with this. Stamp prices track inflation fairly well - they have to, because the post office is a bureaucracy - no matter how many mail handling machines and robots they get, their real purpose of existence is to employ people and prevent their organization from being eliminated. The best way the post office has found to do that, is to make sure that most of it's operating costs are covered by the sale of stamps and metered postage.

Of course, other than holiday cards and paying bills, people don't send a lot of letters these days. But even if both of those uses go away, the post office will find a way to keep itself around and keep providing first class mail. So your 42 cent investment, today, will still be worth one first class letter delivered anywhere in the United States, 5, 10, even 20 years from now.

Sure, you may not care to send letter 20 years from now, but keep in mind, we're relying on the genius of Charles Ponzi here, with the government playing the role of the late investor, and you not expecting to come out ahead, just break even. Once you and a few million others realize that stamps are a stable "store of value", it won't matter any more. It won't matter any more than it matters that you don't really have any use for gold or silver coins. What will matter is that someone else will recognize the stored value, and be willing to exchange currency at the current inflated price for your stamps - even if THEY have no intention to send any mail either!

Now you may be saying "but wait - this is a lousy investment! It doesn't even increase in real value!". Yeah, right - like your 401K did over the years 1998 to 2008? Oops. And you need to understand that it's not over yet. If we assume that the stock market was roughly "correct" back in 1990 at about 2600, and that combining growth and inflation might yield a 5%/year increase, the market should be at about 2.5x2600, or around 6600.

Right now, April Fools Day, the Dow is dancing around 7700, or about 17% "high", and most small investors appear to *still* believe it's going to recover some of the 14000 it had in 2007. Since they're due to be disappointed, barring inflation, one of two things is going to happen. The Dow will bang around, up and down, staying near 6000-9000, and investors will slowly get disappointed and move their money into bonds or other investments any time the market moves up a bit - keeping the Dow stagnant. OR, all this government spending, combined with a partial recovery, will lead to inflation - which will make the market go up somewhat, but probably not as fast as inflation, because government will be busy trying to pull money back out of the economy by calling in loans to prevent hyper-inflation - which will just turn the inflation into stagflation. Either way, having currency that doesn't devalue will likely match or beat the average stock or bond investment.

Of course, if the government allows hyper-inflation in order to wipe out debt or reduce the value of social security obligations sometime in the next 30 years, your stamp hoard could easily beat any investment in a failing economy.

And there's another thing to factor into your consideration - the "Ponzi factor". Just as there have been speculative crazes in the past for new investments, so there could be a craze for stamps, once inflation starts taking hold. People might over-estimate the rate of inflation (e.g. believing, for some reason, that their government might be lying to them about the inflation rate). Or they might see that others are paying an increasing premium for stamps due to the post office running short on stamps, and decide to pay a larger premium. Very likely there will be TV ads selling stamps as "inflation proof investments", and active trading on the internet.

That'll be your cue - that's the time to sell. Because, of course, the government will not approve of people using stamps to avoid inflation. They probably won't want to simply declare old stamps valueless. But they might well freeze the value of old stamps. Or direct the post office to start printing enough stamps to meet demand and drive the price down, and *then* freeze the value of forever stamps. Either way, the stamp bubble will collapse. Very likely the government will put a permanent end to use of stamps as currency, by eliminating the forever stamp policy. If you haven't sold out, you'll be stuck holding stamps, with nothing to use them for but send old-fashioned first class mail...

2009-03-09T10:33:00.000-07:00

Wolfram Research is planning to introduce a web tool/service that is apparently supposed to be "google with math" - searching for information and calculating answers to quantitative questions such as "How much did it rain in Boston last year?". I'm a bit skeptical that it'll be able to do much more than point to numerical sources. E.g. how would it handle a query like "Based on US federal government budgets, how much was spent on wages in 2005?" Could it really pull together all the sources needed to asnwer such a question?

Even if Wolfram Alpha works, I'm not enthusiastic about the creation of a "mathematical oracle" that people just have to trust knows what it's doing. Oh, I'm sure it'll provide references to where it got its data, and perhaps even allow you to peek at the equations it applied, if it does more than extract data it finds.

It'd be much more useful to define "web-math" - i.e. the HTML equivalent for math - letting people easily create and publish data and equations in the open for others to copy/paste/evaluate/correct/extend/apply.

NOT just a spreadsheet - it should make all equations and relationships and data sets fully visible. (The greatest flaw in the spreadsheet paradigm, IMO - hiding the assumptions inherent in the calculation structure - it made spreadsheets much more of a read-mostly "trust me instead of taking the time to understand" medium.)

The basic web-math engine would support easy creation of meta-equations - equations operating on and transforming equations, building on built-in arithmetic, logical and symbolic primitive operations, as well as previous meta equations. So someone could define a set of algebraic transformations, then build on that for symbolic derivatives, and others could improve or correct those.

But the base web-math engine wouldn't even try to enforce "legal" transformations. Instead, it would provide a means of linking/authenticating/differencing copied equation/data sets so people can quickly check that a system of copied equations or data is exactly the same as that originally published by a particular source - or see the specific changes someone has overlaid. If someone thinks they've spotted a bug in the algebraic transformation meta-set, they could publish a fix as an overlay on the authenticated rule set, along with examples to demonstrate the bug and their proposed solution.

Likely a non-profit "webmath foundation" would quickly arise that would maintain the set of common meta-equations everyone comes to trust, but let that sort of thing be an emergent property, rather than built into the base concept.

With web-math, implemented as a web browser extension I suppose, you wouldn't go to a trusted oracle to get your answers - you'd search for someone who claims to have solved similar problems, grab and if necessary modify or combine their work, play with it, and if you come up with something interesting (maybe a new type of rocket engine, described as an overlay to a published "rocket science math" equation set), then publish it for others to criticize or admire.

Avoid falling into the copyrighted content trap - publishing with web-math should inherently make the math content public domain. If someone doesn't want their data or equations copied, they can keep them hidden and ask people to trust them - they have no need for web-math, and people can decide whether to trust them.

If copying and claiming credit for others' work becomes a problem, something like the web-math foundation mentioned above could solve that by allowing people to record first publication of new equation sets. But I doubt it'll be a big issue except among professional mathematicians.

Making Laser Launch Take Off

2009-03-04T17:46:00.000-08:00

Laser launch technology could replace conventional chemical rockets with a more efficient, higher specific impulse (ISP) form of rocketry. The basic idea is to shine a powerful laser - or a bunch of less powerful lasers - onto a rocket to deliver energy to heat reaction mass to a high enough temperature to make it expand rapidly and drive the rocket in reaction as it is expelled. Jordin Kare has suggested a form of rocket that is quite simple - a heat exchanger and a big tank of liquid hydrogen.

The problem is that this technology requires a substantial amount of investment in fundamental technologies - improved lasers, the heat exchanger, development of tracking systems, etc. And even once it's working, it requires a very substantial investment in infrastructure before you could make a rocket that could fly into orbit - fields of lasers being the biggest investment.

It seems to me that laser launch could be dramatically accelerated, by finding short term goals worth investing in, that require somewhat less advanced technology, and less capital investment. And it also seems to me that getting any investment for the concept will be difficult, so long as it aims to compete head to head with existing chemical rockets. It would have to jump directly from "no capability" to "better than existing rockets". That's a high first hurdle! Not to mention that your competitors will be telling potential customers and investors that they're crazy - not because it's a bad idea, but because they'll lose out if you succeed!

But what if one didn't have to go all the way to orbit? And what if you could actually convert those nay-saying competitors, into customers?

What if you initially targeted a very limited niche market - call it "rocket enhancement" or "payload expansion". The idea would be to simply provide a strap-on booster for existing chemical rockets. This booster would be used during the first boost phase, when the rocket is nearer and moving slower - reducing the technical challenge of tracking it with sufficient accuracy and beaming power through a wavery atmosphere, and allowing a working system to be put into operation with less up-front development time and money.

It would only have to improve the net ISP of a conventional rocket marginally in order to provide some value - allowing one to start with a relatively small booster. That means that the "field of lasers" can be substantially smaller - reducing capital investment.

Customers for such a system would be makers of rockets that can achieve orbit, but who want to deliver larger payloads, or deliver payload to more challenging orbits, with their existing rocket design - expanding the target market for a smaller rocket.

This approach also raises potential for variations on the laser launch concept. E.g. there might be a modest gain from simply directing laser energy into the exhaust expansion bell of a conventional rocket? Most of the energy would be lost in gases already out of the bell, but any small increase of a first stage's thrust would translate directly into greater upward acceleration, without adding *any* reaction mass to the rocket.

A Blade Runner Sequel?

2009-01-28T13:08:00.000-08:00

What would it take to make a good (or even great) Blade Runner sequel?

The original became a cult hit mainly because (a) it had an interesting, well textured setting (b) it projected a very clear style or mood that fit well with (c) an interesting moral question about what makes one "human" that is ultimately left up to the viewer, (d) while including enough action directly related to the question to keep it interesting on first viewing.

I think a good sequel would need to (a) replicate and build on the setting (b) choose a DIFFERENT question, or perhaps deeper examination of the original moral question to examine; and (c) fit the style/mood to that examination - and of course (d) driving it all with some cool action scenes.

Forget the off-world colonies - it's far more interesting to look at how alien Earth would have become, to our eyes. The original looked at an organic mix of decaying remnants of today's cities threaded and overshadowed by ultra-tech future stuff, and invaded by "foreigners" (apparently many natives having moved on to the off-world colonies?) OK, what is happening elsewhere? We saw a city apparently sapped by climate turned hot and wet - global warming has run amuk.

How's that affecting the rest of the country/world? Drought-ruined farm lands? Chicago by an empty Great Lakes basin (water mostly diverted to the new agricultural band across Canada, just a few big pipelines running to the city), surrounded by dusty desert, maybe growing food in towers? Ice age in Europe? London flooded? Expanding seas flooded the Mediterranean and turned lots of cities into Venice equivalents (and sunk Venice itself)? But now a dam is built across the Straits of Gibraltar - generating power as water is let in to replace evaporation, but not letting the sea fall to it's old levels? Has there been a mini-nuke-war in the middle east or maybe Pakistan-India? Those sorts of things would be interesting to look at. (And the nuke war assumption, shown in a few quick scenes, might serve as a warning to today's bickering countries with nukes or ambitions.) Instead of sitting in one city, the sequel should get out and around the world.

What interesting moral question might be examined? How about a serious re-examination of Hollywood's constant droning "it's good to age and die" formula? Perhaps the hero is struggling to put together enough money to replace his failing synth-organs, even as he moves through the richest and poorest levels of society? How about effectively immortal wealthy parents who keep their kids "young and innocent" - a 43 year old kid that looks 7 leading a secret life while playing a role to keep the parents happily self-deceived? Hmm - that edges on "What is adulthood? What is perversion? Is it more perverse to "force" someone to be a child forever, or for that "child" to behave as the adult they mentally are? [It doesn't have to turn the movie into child-porn - create a scenario in which a "straight-adult" hero is tempted but resists out of old-fashioned moral scruples he's not sure really apply any more - controversial enough.]

Maybe have the hero be someone arriving back from the off-world colonies, so we see this strange new world through his eyes - the tech is mostly not strange to him, but the culture would appear involuted and perverted, coming from a more straight-forward off-world culture where kids grow up fast because they're needed.

2008-12-18T23:08:00.000-08:00

To the moon, naked and screaming...

Let's extend the idea of "naked and screaming" to a mission direct from Earth to the moon.

If all we cared about was getting a couple of people to the moon, alive, and we wanted to do it as cheaply as possible, we'd have a one-way rocket. It'd have no pressurized capsule. The astronauts would have space suits and a frame to strap into on top of a stack of rockets and fuel and some electronics.

Their vehicle would have a single, reliable engine and plenty of fuel tanks that can be ejected once empty. Since they don't want to land with a heavier engine than they really need, it's not a particularly large rocket. That may mean they take a bit longer getting to the moon - circling the earth an extra time or so for the most efficient engine burns. Same for the moon - an extra orbit or so - but they aren't going to take the time to establish a nice circular orbit either, as they aren't leaving a "return module" parked in orbit. It's already there, in case they can't land for some reason - a separate launch.

Once they land, they see their lunar hab waiting for them nearby - inflated at low "stand-by" pressure just to keep it from developing kinks that might start leaks. It's on it's own lander, which is otherwise identical to their own. It may have already been used by the last crew to land there - by now the CO2 has all be converted back to O2 using solar power - which is a good thing, as they only have about a day's emergency supply of air left with them. Time to power up the hab (they've got back-up fuel cells and H2 and of course their spare day of O2, in case something went wrong with the hab - even though the remote monitoring assured them everything was A-OK before they even launched. There's also an ascent module - another lander, with more fuel - sitting nearby.

So what did we really save by all that? Well, we essentially eliminated the weight of the lunar return module (yeah, we'll get back to that) and the hab module - probably about two-thirds to three-quarters of the "payload" - assuming you don't count the lander itself. They're the other one-third, of course. And even bigger, we've knocked off a mass of the "Command module" - 2x more than the original lunar excursion module. So - the total payload to the moon is about 1/3 of 1/3 - and with better equipment and no requirement to achieve circular orbit, we'll say we've shaved that to just 10% of the mass of the Apollo mission.

And that's good, because that puts the payload, plus fuel, down in the range that can launch on Ares I. And the hab can be launched on Ares 1. And so can the ascent module. (You didn't REALLY think we were going to just leave them there did you? Well, later on we will, of course...) And so can the return module waiting in orbit for the ascent module. And guess what's waiting in a convenient Earth orbit? Yep - descent module - a conventional re-entry capsule.

Huh - a whole lunar mission launched with Ares I, just because we broke it up into smaller pieces. Sure, it took us five launches - but we also had three- or four-fifths of our system already delivered in place and checked out before we launched our intrepid screamers. And because we didn't need Ares V, we didn't need a whole new launch facility, and the launch facility we had got used five times as much with the same people, which cuts per-launch costs at least in half, even if we didn't get a discount (which I would certainly demand) for buying Ares 1 in larger lots. That ought to be more than enough to make up for any higher efficiency Ares V might have offered. Not to mention - oh well, I guess I will - that we didn't have to pay to finish developing Ares V and testing it.

Sure, Ares 1 won't be rocketing us to Mars like Ares V would... Or will it...? If only we could find some liquid oxygen somewhere in space already, that'd cut our Mars launch mass... what else could we do to send some screams toward the red planet?

Naked and Screaming into Space

2008-12-05T19:24:00.000-08:00

I've got a term for how we can get the costs of human space launches down. I call it "Naked and Screaming". It's based on the idea that the cheapest possible way to get someone into space, would be to simply strap them onto the nose of a rocket, and launch them "naked and screaming" to low earth orbit. Start from that perspective, then work your way backwards to the minimum cost method of getting someone safely and reliably to LEO.

If we assume an 80kg astronaut, at perhaps $10000/kg to LEO - the "naked and screaming" price might be $800,000. Not exactly the price of a vacation plane ticket - but perhaps affordable for a corporation that needed a human operating in space.

But obviously we can't *really* send them up naked. No one could hear them scream out there, anyhow... And perhaps we'd like to somehow be able to send them somewhere useful?

That's where most manned space programs start to go wrong, I think. They start thinking in terms of "safely up, safely back" as a single mission. What if, instead, when the astronaut wants to come back, he or she could reliably rendezvous with a re-entry vehicle already in orbit? How convenient - that'd shave a LOT of launch mass - no need to make the launch capsule able to withstand the stresses of re-entry, no heat shield - in fact, once the launch craft gets out of the atmosphere, the astronaut really wouldn't NEED a capsule - just a space suit. Surely that's better than naked, and maybe after a few flights, they'd be able to stop screaming. If they can't, or they're a first-timer, we'd just turn their helmet visor opaque until they get into orbit. It's not like they have to fly the rocket.

So we have to have an aero-shell while in the atmosphere, but could eject everything but the astronaut and air tanks after the first few minutes of the launch. That in turn reduces the size of the final stage or stages. In fact, it may reduce launch mass so much, that we'd have to make it bigger again, by launching lots of space workers (they don't get to be called astronauts if they're going to space to do more than travel through it) at a time - rockets can only be made efficient by making them fairly large, and a lot of the costs of launch are close to fixed, no matter how big the rocket is. E.g. you may need a ground crew of 100 for one astronaut, but only 110 to launch 30 space workers.

Since we're letting them have a space suit and air, and maybe a cushioned chair, let's suppose each worker launched costs us the equivalent of 150kg to LEO - taking us up to $1.5M per worker. But if we're going to be launching frequently, we'd start to share fixed costs over more flights. Most experts claim this should get the price per kilogram down - so perhaps we can safely assume it's reduced to $5000 per kg, or $750,000 per worker. Maybe even half that, since really big rockets already approach that price per kilogram.

Of course, we've still got some problems. LEO isn't terribly useful - there's nothing much there to for our space workers to work on - we need a ship to take them somewhere they can be useful. But maybe we can just launch that ship from Earth ONCE, and use it lots and lots of times, to keep costs down. And if we produce the fuel for it on the moon, that gives us both a destination AND a place to refuel for the next trip.

The money saved by not launching so much mass from Earth creates a sort of "double-negative" profit - i.e. cancelling a cost is almost as good as making a real profit, so long as you're going to go into space anyhow to explore. We could bootstrap an economy in space on that basis, and once there's a bunch of people staying in space for a long time, that economy could become more and more self-sustaining, needing less and less from Earth, even as they start to provide a few things Earth might want to buy (solar energy, rare metals, perhaps Helium 4 for fusion power) beyond the knowledge that explorers would bring back.

What about getting people back? Didn't you read the previous paragraph? If we LEAVE them there, they'll create an economy and... Oh, all right, maybe we should let them come back. But again, we should think in terms of launching as much mass from the moon, and as little as possible from Earth. With a decent lunar industrial base, we ought to be able to make things like re-entry capsules fueled rockets, so we can slow them down instead of relying so much on risky aero-braking. Or since they'd be launched from the moon - no air to create the friction that limits rockets launched from Earth to tall and skinny - the capsules could be made very wide and light, so they'd slow down faster in the upper atmosphere.

Well, that's pretty much it, except that there's a lot more details. Like - we need to really conquer cancer, so we can live and work in space for extended periods without killing ourselves. And investigate tether technologies, to start conserving momentum so we can stop throwing away so much valuable mass to get anywhere in space. (Fusion powered rockets wouldn't hurt, either, but that's not really specific to the "naked and screaming" approach.)

Strike! (not)

2008-12-05T19:20:00.001-08:00

A replacement for the "strike" is needed. It's a crude and destructive tactic, for all sides: workers lose wages, employers lose sales and profits and market share to competitors, customers are inconvenienced, suppliers may go broke, governments lose tax revenues, etc.

The long term harm a strike causes both sides creates anger that gets in the way of negotiating and considering the other side's point of view.

An alternative would be to keep the factories or services rolling - but workers would not be paid, and 100% of income from sales of products and services would go into an escrow account, out of the control of both sides, and neither side could borrow against its value.

It's easily "tweaked" to balance the incentives on both sides and encourage fast resolution. Perhaps after two weeks, all profits must be donated to charity, along with 10% of escrowed wages.

Both sides might be required to put up a "good faith" bond, that they'd sacrifice under certain conditions. The union might lose it's bond if it decided to shift to a real strike, while the company might lose its bond if negotiations go on longer too long.

EITHER side could declare such a "labor negotiation action". If management feels they need to replace workers with robots, or renegotiate benefits, they'd have the same right to declare an action against the union.

Another message on space to Pres-elect Obama

2008-11-11T19:29:00.000-08:00

What I'm posting to Obama's new Change.gov site:

Create a NEW PATH INTO SPACE, challenging NASA to begin delivering robots, equipment and materials to the moon by the beginning of 2011, using the ARES I rocket. The robots *must* be controlled by human operators on Earth, creating tremenduous flexibility. The ultimate goal will be extraction and use of lunar resources to reduce the amount of material that must be launched from Earth in the future, slashing the cost of access to space.

Establish a "STEPPING STONE TO SPACE" program, in which any group - academic, commerical, or even private volunteers - will be able to purchase or obtain a grant of time using the lunar robots and equipment, or space on a robotic delivery to the moon. Announcing this early should get a lot of people excited, including small for-profit companies, if NASA establishes a series of prizes and contracts aimed at encouraging development of useful lunar capabilities.

Finally, begin AIMING FOR MARS - asking NASA to develop a plan for a mission to Mars *orbit* (cheaper, safer), from which a human crew would control a small army of robots on Mars' surface to search for life and to build an industrial capacity to support a future human base on Mars' surface. The same mission should have humans explore the small moons of Mars - both because they are interesting, and as a sop to those who are dismayed that humans won't go directly to Mars' surface, after getting so close.

Pay for these programs by deferring development of Ares V and the Altair lunar lander (both programs to be reviewed in 3 years, if the lunar program is going well). The team developing Altair should be challenged to quickly develop a robotic lunar lander. The lander must be designed to be easily disassembled for useful materials - no need for clever (expensive and time-consuming) engineering to maximize "payload" - the whole lander will be payload.

Proposed Presidential Vision and Plan for NASA

2008-11-04T19:16:00.001-08:00

Proposed Presidential Vision and Five Point Plan for re-directing NASA to more sensible, efficient and far-sighted human-in-space operations :

1) Challenge NASA with a new PLAN FOR SPACE - to begin delivering robots, supplies and equipment to the moon within TWO YEARS. The robots should be simple but dextrous, durable and repairable - in order to carry out a mission of long-term exploration, research and development focused on establishing industrial production capabilities on the moon. Since the moon is relatively close, the robots will be directly (though remotely) controlled by human operators on Earth. Controlling the robots will be tedious and slow, due to radio communication delays between Earth and the moon. But one remote controlled robot, operated in 24-7 shifts, should be able to accomplish at least as much per day as one space-suited human, and keep at it for years (with repairs), at roughly 1/100th the cost of a "manned" program and with no peril to human life.

The long range goal of the robotic moonbase should be to reduce the amount of material that must be launched from Earth for operations in space, especially for eventual establishment of a human occupied lunar base and for missions to Mars. Success in that effort will reduce the cost of going into space more effectively than any program of improving rockets. This is something we could have (should have) started 30 years ago. Having largely wasted the last 30 years of manned space operations, we can defer putting men back on the moon for a few more years, to ensure that this time we go back with a purpose, and a plan to stay.

2) Defer development of the Altair lunar lander by three years (beyond the current schedule). Design work would shift immediately to rapid development of a smaller robotic lunar lander that can be launched on Ares I. Robotic landers will not need to leave the moon - their components will be scavenged for use in the robotic base. The robotic lander design should be done quickly and kept simple and rugged, rather than expending heroic engineering efforts to maximize "payload" - the whole lander will be "payload". If a few landers crash, they will still be of value to the robotic base. In fact, part of the first shipments to the moon may simply be stock metal that is dropped by the lander near to the landing site, giving the landers an extra fuel margin for a more reliable landing or simply delivering more useful mass for a given amount of fuel expended in landing.

3) Defer development of the Ares V heavy launch Vehicle by three years. Design work should continue at a reduced pace, but the need for heavy lift will be reviewed again in three years, in light of projections for potential benefits of the robotic lunar base in the timeframe in which the heavy lift capability would be ready.

4) Continue but re-focus the new human-rated launch vehicle development (Ares I, Orion Crew vehicle). With no compromises to the safety of the system, it should be made capable of launching the small robotic lunar landers described above. Launching the small robotic lunar landers, and later delivering supplies to the International Space Station, would be used to thoroughly test the Ares I rocket before using it to take humans into orbit and to the space station.

5) Update President Bush's vague vision of humans "eventually" going on to Mars, with more concrete goals and expectations. Industrial capabilities developed on the moon will reduce the cost of Mars missions. Robotic technologies developed for the moon will be applied to establishing bases on Mars before humans land. The first human missions to Mars will establish a base of operations in orbit, near but not on the Martian moon Phobos, as the human base will rotate to provide artificial gravity. From that base, humans will conduct extensive mapping and exploration of Mars - mediated by robots - and also directly explore the martian moons. This approach will avoid the much greater risks and costs of sending humans directly from Earth to land on Mars, and will allow the early human explorers to investigate more broadly. It will also reduce contamination of Mars with Earth life, making the search for life on Mars more rigorous. Human directed robots will establish a base and production capabilities on Mars (and possibly its moons), reducing the costs and risks of future human landings.

To the Moon, Alice!

2008-11-03T18:51:00.000-08:00

My pet space project - take advantage of the moon being only light-seconds away and always facing Earth. Immediately start launching robots to set up an industrial base there.

They could be quite simple robots initially. No need to build in *any* AI - they can be remotely controlled by human operators on Earth. We could download AI software as we develop it later, to reduce the inconvenience of the light-speed delay.

Of course they won't be as capable as humans on site. Though humans would be encumbered by space suits. And they'd be limited to a few hours work outside each day. And of course, each human would require many (many) tons of life-support equipment as well as a reliable ride home in case things go wrong.

While each remote controlled robot would probably be 10x slower than a human on site, they can work 24 hours (with multiple shifts of operators on Earth), so they'll get about the same amount done per day, for perhaps 1/100th the cost.

If we started from scratch today with a serious program, we could have a basic robotic moonbase operating within 2-3 years. A few years of R&D with robots actually on site, and shipping up occasional small payloads of improved robots and tools and raw materials, and we should be able to bootstrap a limited industrial base on the moon.

Anything we can make there, we don't have to ship out of Earth's gravity well, reducing the cost of space access. Liquid oxygen and lunar concrete structures seem likely early products. And of course, lunar exploration and research would be "products" that could be "shipped" to Earth very inexpensively - products that are simply not available on the market today.

Also, NASA keeps vaguely claiming that going to the moon will somehow help us prepare to go to Mars. Building a robotic industrial base on the moon would do that for real.

And we really should set up a station on Phobos or Deimos for a few years before landing on Mars, using remote controlled robots to search for life before we go down and "contaminate" the planet, and building up some basic infrastructure as well, before humans land. Doing so for the Moon first would give us *real* practice for Mars.

NASA apparently isn't interested - this isn't a new concept after all - we could have been doing this for 30 years now. We'd probably have a substantial human colony on the moon and a foothold on Mars by now, even without improved launch capabilities. Robots here on Earth would likely be much more advanced, as well.

But that just shows how short-sighted NASA is, IMO - most of our budget has been spent on endlessly circling the Earth. The X-prizes may finally get it going in 5-10 years.

Anyone in China or India or Japan or elsewhere listening? Here's your chance to leapfrog ahead. Forget sending people into space or to the moon, for now. It's a money pit, and at best you'll appear to copy 40 year old US and Soviet space accomplishments. Your nations' images would be enhanced far more by being cleverer than we Americans have been.

Within a decade, you could be offering to deliver payloads to GEOsynch orbit or to a soft-landing on the moon, for less than it takes the US to get to orbit. If the US really does return to the moon and go to Mars, you can offer help from your robotic moonbase, if we'll let you send along your astronauts - full partners.

No Soup Lines ... Yet?

2008-10-09T18:07:00.000-07:00

On October 9th, 9:36am, Elizabeth MacDonald posted a blog entitled We are Not Headed for a Great Depression". The market was up slightly for the day, so perhaps she was feeling relieved. She stated that the market might "drift lower", but apparently felt that the market had made a bottom. As further evidence, she noted that we don't have an soup lines stretching around the block.

By the end of the day, the DJIA was off 7% for the day - 8.5% from when she posted her article. That doesn't feel much like "drifting lower" to me...

If we go back before the 90's boom, to 1992, the djia was at about 3300. Applying inflation and ~2% real market value gain (the long term average) - 6600 would have been a "rational expectation" in 1992 for the djia in 2008. We're standing at about 8600 - still about 23% over valued relative to that. How badly scared will people get if we just drop 23% more - forget about under-shooting the market's real value.

Alternatively, reverse inflation on 8600, and the market hasn't been this bad since the djia bottom for 1997 (~6700).

Or, if we consider the market price to have been rational in 1997 rather than 1992, and project it forward (2%/yr, 2.5%/yr average inflation = 4.5%/yr), the djia should be at around 10500. (Of course, in 1997 people were talking about "the long boom" upon which "Dow 36000 -(C)1999" was based.)

So at best, the market should be considered to have crashed 20% below a "1997 rational expectation" level. If we don't get back to 10500 in the next 3 months, I think we'll have to accept the market's verdict that investors in 1997 were already drinking the coolaid, and that the credit crunch has caused enough damage to throw us into a DEeP REceSSION.

Soup lines would only appear well AFTER the market crashes, Elizabeth. The main indicator that the Great Depression was going to be "different" (from my admittedly limited reading of history), was that timely efforts by the rich and powerful to stop the market slide - by injecting liquidity - had no sustained effect. A tipping point had been reached, and any small recovery was seen as an opportunity by investors to secure some cash "just in case". Wave after wave of investors got fed up watching their wealth evaporate, and sold off more and more of their holdings, desperately hoping to get enough cash to "buy in at the bottom" and recover some of their losses, or to at least have something to live on until the recovery.

I've taken out my "just in case" cash, but my investment advisor tells me that I'm in the tiny minority - most of his clients are sitting fully invested, desperately hoping that the slide reverses. Maybe they're right and I'm wrong - or maybe it just means that there's a lot more small investors out there who have yet to take out some cash "just in case".

Interstellar Probe to the Centauri stars

2008-08-22T13:54:00.000-07:00

From Centauri Dreams :

"A forty year flyby to the Centauri stars would be moving at something better than a tenth of lightspeed once it gets up to cruise. Even if exquisitely targeted, such a probe would operate within 1 AU of the target system (let’s say Centauri B) for something less than three hours. Ponder the challenge presented by collecting imagery and data from Centauri planets in such a scenario."

I’d think that could be addressed by using a large number of smaller probes and getting them strung out over a long line, about 30 light hours apart. Each one might spend only 3 hours in system - but the chain could spend days or months passing through. They’d each beam their results back to the next in the chain, and the last unit in the chain would have to be able to transmit it back to Earth. (Redundancy is also easy to build in - if one fails, the next in line could be close enough to still get the signal.

You might create a “chain of double-sided mirrored probes” and direct lasers to bounce simultaneously between all the probes - those closest to the source would gain some momentum from the direct laser, but then lose some reflecting the beam from the 2nd back to it. In essence, the whole chain would “inflate” from the light pressure, with those furthest away gaining the most velocity. As one moves out of range, another can could be inserted into the chain at the “base”, so that the next-furthest can gets the same velocity boost. The main advantage here is that any pair of mirrors would be closer together spatially and in terms of relative velocity - dealing with both beam divergence and red-shift.

Send as many probes as you like, to provide as much multi-probe “passage” time as you want or can afford, for the target system.

Proxy Votes for Social Action

2008-07-14T11:51:00.000-07:00

Millions or billions of stock proxies go un-voted every year. Or if people bother to vote them, they just vote with the board, or their votes are somewhat random, cancelling each other out. People just don't have enough information (or time to comprehend, let along gather, all the information needed) to make their vote meaningful.

What if there were a website you could go to, that specialized in voting your proxies for you - in a meaningful way, consistent with your personal beliefs? They might also "recommend" stocks - not based on potential profits, but based on companies they think it would be strategically important and possible to influence - with email updates on how and why they're voting particular ways, to keep people visiting and involved in the site.

And as several organizations set up these services (probably sharing a single service that handles the technological side for them, but with their own labeled/URL front-end), they should be able (with the proxy-holder's explicit and informed permission) to *trade* proxies to other organizations. The EFF might want Telecom stock proxies, while Greenpeace wants oil company proxies. Both maintain proxy-voting sites for their memberships, and have proxies the other wants to use. So they swap. (Possibly a trading market of sorts could evolve - though more likely it'll be simple bulk swaps - "All our Telecoms for all your oil companies.")

I believe it'd be legal - in essence the donors would be giving power of attorney - but that's obviously a big point that needs to be verified.

It would be largely automated and web-based - go to your preferred website, enter the URL provided for voting your proxy (or select from some of the common ones - e.g. ProxyVote.com), along with the code on your proxy form. On the same screen there'd be your user permissions - boxes that are checked to show other groups you are willing to allow your proxies to be traded to, along with links to descriptions of them. If you don't want to let your votes be used to help immigrant support groups or something, you un-check that box. You can also see how your proxies were voted or traded in the past. And of course, there's the big green "Authorize" button you have to click as indication of giving your power of attorney.

Privacy would be very important - i.e. people would be effectively telling the organizations how much wealth they have - one of the primary rules should be that that information MUST kept fire-walled - i.e. not used for targeting (or even appearing to target) the organization's fund-raising efforts or any other purposes beyond the voting of proxies, and deleted as soon as possible.

Perhaps initially it'd only have "moral impact" - letting people do a bit more for causes they like. But there'd be some cases where the big share-holders in a corporation are split over some issue, and the organization might tilt that decision one way or the other, perhaps even negotiating directly with board members for an un-related but desired concession.

If it managed to take off and have some impact, you could expect to see attempts to suppress it, likely requiring some adaptation, and eventually perhaps some court cases to settle the matter.

And you could also expect to see groups of which you might not personally approve, picking up on the idea. So there might be a fundamentalist Christian group, using proxy votes to punish board members for corporate policies benefiting gays. But it's all part of leveraging the web to coordinate people's efforts for greater impact.

This makes me angry..

2008-06-30T19:22:00.000-07:00

In an article on a promising new approach to curing cancer, based on a chance observation of a mouse that was immune to cancer, there's a quote: "if Cui had been trained as an immunologist, he would have thrown out the mouse right then".

It's as if Flemming had seen fungus killing the staph bacteria in his petri dishes, and been upset that it ruined his experiment. I think that anyone who has lost someone to cancer would be angered by the thought that the *default* prevailing attitude among cancer researchers toward cancer research - which we've poured billions into over at least two generations of the "search for the cure" while many millions of lives were lost - is one that would dismiss *any* sign of a cure for cancer.

Haven't scientists been carefully studying heavy smokers who don't get lung cancer? Patients who get cancer and then "miraculously" go into remission after declining medical treatment? Why should this come as a surprise?

It even seems likely that there have been a number of cancer victims who would have "miraculously" recovered from cancer on their own, if they had not been made worse by "cancer treatments" that depleted their white blood cells. Sure, the percentage is probably tiny - but multiply that by the millions of cancer deaths over the past 30-40 years, and I have to wonder if we wouldn't have been better off spending 5 years identifying and studying such people without trying to cure anyone with our stone knives and radiation treatments.

It's as if the researchers are so in love with their quest to understand cancer, that they forget what motivates and pays for it. As if they fear that they might look naive and foolish to their collegues, if they looked into anything that "looks too good to be true", simply because *usually* those things are not true. Maybe it's time to replace cancer scientists with cancer engineers - people who will focus laser sharp on CURING cancer.

It makes me doubt even more those who dismiss Aubrey de Grey's ideas on life extension because he's merely a "computer scientist" (typically more of an engineer than scientist). Sure it sounds way too good to be true - so we should ignore his ideas, block funding, disregard as "not serious" anyone who gives his ideas any credence?

Safer Molecular Manufacturing Through Nanoblocks

2008-06-23T22:45:00.000-07:00

(Copied here for 'safe-keeping', from the CRN Taskforce on Nanotechnology)

Those responsible for the safety of a nation — leaders and military and police forces — might be hard pressed to deal with a world in which any weapon or dangerous device could be manufactured in large quantities at the press of a button, at the same time that economic and social norms are being overthrown by rapid change.

We can expect that — by default — authorities will want molecular manufacturing (MM) to be tightly restricted — kept out of private hands, and limited to the few nations that initially have it. That approach might provide some added security — or it might simply create such incredible pent-up demand that any barriers and restrictions are quickly overcome by black markets, intellectual property piracy, rogue-nation programs to duplicate MM, etc.

This essay attempts to chart a middle path for the early years of MM availability — one that allows most of the benefits of MM to be widely available to all individuals and nations, while maintaining some control over key elements. I will not go into who will hold that control, other than to suggest the obvious — that those nations that hold the reins of world power are likely to exercise it to retain power, by delegating it in a controlled fashion to cooperative nations and subordinate authorities.

It is not the objective of this essay to look at radical social changes that might arise due to molecular manufacturing, but rather to see how well MM can fit with existing forms.

DEFINITIONS

Atom Precise - each atom and bond between atoms in an object is as planned in a design. Also used to describe the process or capability of making atom precise objects.

Nanoblocks - atom precise constructs with size on the order of 100 nanometers that can be mechanically connected to form larger objects. Each nanoblock would have one or more functions — as simple as providing physical strength and support, or as complex as digital computation and communication.

Fabber - a device that automatically assembles individual products for human use. In the context of this essay, it will refer to a device that constructs products out of nanoblocks, specifically excluding atom precise nanofactories - those which build products directly atom-by-atom.

TECHNICAL ADVANTAGES OF USING NANOBLOCKS

Nanoblock-based fabbers will have a number of technical advantages over direct atom precise molecular manufacturing. Even their disadvantages (less precision, lower strength in products) can be considered advantages for purposes of security.

Standardization of nanoblocks — their modes of interconnection and interaction, their functions, and so on — can greatly simplify the process of designing atom precise products. Use of nanoblocks raises the level of design above the point that requires deep understanding of nanoscale physics and chemistry, to the point where anyone could use automated software tools to design simple but useful products, and expert engineers could reasonably design extremely complex and capable products. For example, there would be no need to re-design a nanoscale computer out of individual atoms every time one wished to incorporate information processing into a product, or to re-invent means of digital communication throughout a product.

While the amount of energy expended to form a single atom-to-atom bond and the waste heat generated is tiny, the number of atoms and bonds in a typical finished product for human use is so large that energy and heat issues will be non-trivial when constructing human-scale products. The energy used and heat released to build things out of nanoblocks should be orders of magnitude smaller, as most of the energy is consumed and heat released in the process of making the nanoblocks. Energy supply and heat removal will be much easier for nanoblock fabbers, allowing them to be more compact and operate much faster — though, of course, they still will need a supply of "raw materials" — a store of nanoblocks rather than whatever atomic or molecular feedstock atom precise nanofactories may use.

The nanoblocks needed by a fabber could be made in advance. Energy consumption and heat dissipation would be spread over time, with nanoblocks being stored in the fabber for later quick construction of finished products. Alternatively, nanoblocks could be produced in bulk by centralized nanofactories near convenient energy supplies, to be distributed and sold to owners of fabbers. The energy required to ship a kilogram of nanoblocks, even halfway around the world, should be a fraction of the energy required to produce them.

It should be possible to design nanoblocks to allow controlled disassembly — i.e. recycling of products made out of reusable nanoblocks. Each nanoblock could have an ID embedded that specifies its type — reliably sorting nanoblocks would be far more efficient than sorting atoms. This would mean that the energy that goes into producing them would not be wasted when one no longer needs or wants the product they compose. Instead, the unwanted object could be taken apart, and the nanoblocks sorted for re-use in making new objects. This would save energy and avoid the massive production of junk that could result from large-scale use of inexpensive manufacturing.

A related concept — utility fog — would be a programmable substance consisting of "foglets." Each foglet would be a tiny simple robot, able to interact with vast numbers of other foglets to form nearly any shape imaginable, including objects that are able to move and react to human beings. One might be able to re-create the Star Trek "holodeck" using foglets — an environment in which almost anything becomes possible. The flexibility that makes this idea attractive also creates the risk that the utility fog might be infected with an information virus designed to take it over for malicious purposes, harming or killing or simply trapping a human in the utility fog environment. The fixed-function approach of building things out of nanoblocks and recycling things when they are no longer needed seems safer, at least for the early days of molecular manufacturing.

FABBER SAFETY AND SECURITY ISSUES

The use of nanoblocks creates opportunities to make molecular manufacturing safer.

With a careful selection of the types of nanoblocks made available, a fabber should not be able to build an atom precise nanofactory out of nanoblocks, nor devices that will be a significant help in any attempt to "bootstrap" production of an atom precise nanofactory, reducing the risk of proliferation of atom precise MM to "rogue nations" or terrorists.

A nanoblock-only fabber (i.e. one which cannot produce its own nanoblocks, and so requires a supply of nanoblocks as input) could be distributed world-wide without releasing atom precise MM to everyone, avoiding any risk that anyone could start using it to produce massive quantities of dangerous products out of freely available atoms. Yet it would allow construction of almost as wide a range of products as an atom precise nanofactory, for not much more cost — reducing demand for atom precise MM.

There would be products that could not be made out of nanoblocks, of course — such as nanoblocks themselves. This fact could give official security forces with access to atom precise nanofactories an advantage, as weapons and systems made with atom precise nanofactories will be somewhat more capable than any created using nanoblock fabbers.

Products of commercial or security value that cannot be made out of nanoblocks and require atom precise assembly could be made in centralized plants where security measures could be taken. One simple security measure would be to have such products made by dedicated function nanofactories, with the design built in at the lowest level and unable to be altered without destroying the nanofactory. These dedicated function nanofactories would be produced using general-purpose programmable nanofactories in a few extremely high security plants.

THE RISK OF EXPONENTIAL SELF-REPLICATION

Anyone familiar with the "grey goo" exponential self-replication scenario might ask whether a device made of nanoblocks might disassemble objects made of recyclable nanoblocks and re-use those nanoblocks to produce copies of the device — a "lumpy goo" scenario.

To prevent this, one solution would be to design nanoblocks to require use of a key-like manipulator — too small to be made of or emulated by nanoblocks — to lock blocks together in order to fabricate objects. So long as the key-like manipulator is only built into fabbers, and never made part of or attached to a commonly available nanoblock, only fabbers will be able to build things from those nanoblocks — eliminating much of the potential to build a malicious self-replicator out of nanoblocks. The same key would be required to disassemble objects for recycling — preventing malicious disassembly of objects made of nanoblocks, outside of dedicated recycling devices.

One could object that preventing the fabber from making copies of itself would eliminate a potentially major advantage. A fabber that can make copies of itself could be distributed very rapidly, creating a huge market for nanoblocks and nanoblock-based designs in a very short period of time. That should be a significant advantage for a manufacturer willing to give up income from the fabber and focus on selling nanoblocks. So long as the nanoblocks were non-reusable, the risk of exponential self-replication would be minimized - and the manufacturer could expect their fabber to become a universal standard before competitors got to market, making their nanoblock business quite profitable.

However, other companies would very quickly begin producing reverse-engineered "clone" and improved nanoblocks, cutting into the original manufacturer's revenues. It would likely not be long before someone offered re-usable nanoblocks, opening the way to exponentially self-replicating systems.

Given the value of recyclable nanoblocks for energy and cost savings and convenient disposal, and the security risks of self-copying fabber components, it seems wisest to allow recyclable nanoblocks but prohibit fabbers that can self-copy. Very likely the cost of fabbers will fall rapidly in any case, since they would themselves be made with atom precise MM.

The above assumes a relatively free market in fabber and nanoblock designs. That may not be the case if the government is involved and sets a single standard that all manufacturers must follow. In that case, one might see a "utility" model, where nanoblock prices are controlled to allow manufacturers a "reasonable" profit. This scenario would be likely to slow innovation - but of course that might be exactly the effect desired by the government. Non-self-copying fabbers with recyclable nanoblocks seem the most likely choice in such a standard.

LIMITING OTHER POTENTIAL ABUSES

Fabbers will very likely be targeted with the equivalent of computer viruses — malware designs that will attempt to infect fabbers and transmit copies of themselves, and probably use the fabber to produce something annoying or dangerous. The greatest danger would be if fabbers were connected directly to the Internet, allowing very rapid spread of such a virus without human intervention.

One way to fight this would be to keep all fabbers "offline" — designed to only allow loading new designs by manually transferring a design on a physically separate storage medium. This should slow the spread of malware down to human speeds, allowing humans a chance to become aware of the problem and deal with it.

It may prove useful to establish a program that allows anyone with an interest in "clever fabber hacks" or atom precise molecular manufacturing to exercise their curiosity in a safe, controlled environment. This would help reduce the incidence of 'experiments' analogous to releasing computer viruses and worms into the wild, by giving hackers an alternative and encouraging environment. Their creative - or potentially destructive - ideas could benefit society or help plan defenses against potential dangers. It also provides an opportunity to catch the few who are going down the wrong path and turn them around - or at least know who they are if they seem inclined to persist in dangerous pursuits.

Malicious users could produce dangerous or otherwise undesirable nanoblock-based products. For example, a murderer might create a knife, kill someone, and disassemble the evidence. Or perhaps create a household robot - but program it to wreak havoc. Defenses against such abuses should be taken into consideration. There are several approaches that might be helpful.

Since recyclable nanoblocks would have a readable type-ID built in, it would be trivial to extend that to a unique ID, making it possible to backtrack the source of an otherwise anonymous malicious automated device, or obtain a clue from nanoblocks torn off a more mundane object such as a knife. With users knowing this, fewer will seriously contemplate engaging in malicious production.

LIFE WITH FABBERS

The use of nanoblock-limited fabbers (i.e., those which cannot make their own nanoblocks) has some likely implications for society. Certainly costs of many material goods should fall, raising the standard of living of many people around the world.

If instead, self-copying fabbers and non-recyclable nanoblocks are available, benefits for less developed nations may arrive a bit sooner, but the need to continually buy more nanoblocks will limit their long term impact.

Some visions of life with atom precise MM have people going "off the grid" — quitting their jobs, setting up independent solar powered homesteads, and ending capitalism and perhaps economics as we know them. That scenario would be very unlikely with non-recyclable nanoblocks, and limited with recyclable nanoblocks, as people would still need to engage in productive economic activity in order to have money to buy replacement nanoblocks.

With most jobs in manufacturing and distribution eliminated, people would largely find jobs in the service sector. Service jobs will shift even more to specialization, due to increased competition. Developed nations have already gone far in this direction, and other nations will likely be forced to follow suit. This will be a difficult transition for nations that have only recently begun developing and have been heavily dependent upon manufacturing for export — services will be more difficult to export, and local consumers may not be as used to consuming services.

Another common vision of life after the arrival of atom precise MM has a tension between free "open source" designs and commercially available designs. The greater ease of designing with nanoblocks instead of atoms would likely give the open source approach extra impetus. Still, there will also be a fair number of things that people will not trust to be made from nanoblocks, and conventional commerce in those products will continue. Also, as always, there will be elements of style and usage that will cause people to pay for things even though free alternatives are available, just as people today will pay more for a real Rolex™ than a fake, or pay for a commonly used operating system even though free operating systems are available.

With so many choices, and so many people seeking employment in services, it seems likely that many stores will focus on personal service and product advice. Goods purchased in a shop will be priced based on a combination of service and the prestige of certain designers, with a very small component of the cost of the nanoblocks used in product construction. There still will be "big chain" stores with vast showrooms filled with goods, but even there, the key will be the service of providing one place to go see and compare a huge variety of goods. They may make some goods while you wait, others they'll have available off the shelf, still others — especially larger goods — they'll make and deliver to your home. Likely there will also be a way to buy "limited uses" designs for home production.

CONCLUSIONS

Making nanoblock-limited fabbers available to everyone promises to provide most of the easily imaginable benefits of unrestricted atom precise MM, with significantly fewer risks. Fabbers can provide useful advantages of speed, efficiency, and safety. Certainly, they are not a cure-all, creating a perfect utopia — but the problems remaining may be humanly manageable.

Perhaps fabbers would only be a transition phase before a shift to a more liberal availability of atom precise MM, but given all the risks and uncertainties raised by molecular manufacturing, this more controlled introduction seems warranted. The most likely alternative is not free release of atom precise MM, but even tighter restrictions. Fabbers limited to constructing things out of nanoblocks seem like a reasonable compromise approach, and one that government authorities and others may consider acceptable.

AI versus AN, Implications for Singularity

2008-06-19T15:52:00.000-07:00

This post really should be titled "AI versus AI", because it will contrast Artificial Intelligence and what I'll call Artificial Instincts. But that'd get confusing, so I'll let AN stand for the latter.

The field of Artificial Intelligence has bifurcated - originally it was simply about how to make machines think like people do - how to make a conscious, articulate, logical mind. We made some great early progress - theorem proving, chess playing via heuristics, higher level language code compilation, expert systems. But eventually it was recognized that if we have to code every bit of the intelligence in an AI, that may simply be too hard.

There are a few on-going attempts in that direction (CYC for example, with it's huge database of rules), and perhaps that will work out. But mostly AI researchers gave up on that approach, and shifted to a "bottom up" approach -what I'll call Artificial Instincts - in which researchers attempt to build "lower level" mental functions that are present in humans and necessary in order to behave and think as a human. The assumption appears to be that if one can build a robot body that has all the automatic, instinctual capabilities of a human being, and maybe paste some higher level heuristics and logic onto that, maybe AI will just emerge. Or more charitably, the idea may be that we'll learn enough working on such things as vision, balancing and walking, speech recognition, evolutionary algorithms and neural networks, that we'll be able to push deeper into the mysteries of higher level consciousness.

Some researchers took AN in a direction of brute force application of logic - eg. making chess play at the grand master level by having it examine vast numbers of alternative moves, using rules and heuristics to prune the number of moves down to a level that makes that practical. Others took a bio-mimetic approach, starting with neural networks, then experimenting with evolutionary algorithms, with more recent work becoming even more explicitly bio-based, with massive computing power applied to simulating chunks of actual brain neurons - e.g. a simulation of a billion neuron visual network. The idea being that if one learns enough about how the brain works, one could eventually build a complete simulation, or at least a close enough approximation that it might self-organize into an intelligence - and of course, if it doesn't, one might still get some useful insights into making machines more capable.

Then there's the idea of the "singularity" - that at some point some AI or AN method will get intelligent enough to start re-designing itself to be more intelligent (whatever "more" means, in that context), resulting in a sudden and very rapid increase in AI. Rodney Brooks has commented ( www.spectrum.ieee.org/jun08/6307 ) that he believes that will not happen, that rather the singularity will be a slow, developing process in which machines slowly get more capable. Dr. Brooks seems to fall into the "build the body well enough and the mind will come" camp of AN, with a heavy focus on robotics.

That approach, while likely to have some useful spin-offs, is difficult and slow, requring lots of clever thinking on the part of the human researchers - a wonderful puzzle, a delightful area to play in - but unfortunately suffering much the same problem of the original AI "program a mind" approach. They've simply moved on to harder, deeper problems, some of them expecting or hoping that intelligence will eventually pop out, if they take it far enough. So it's hardly surprising that Dr. Brooks sees the singularity as a slow development. And let me be clear - he may be correct.

However, the other path of AN - the one that aims to circle around to AI by simulating brain "circuitry" - does appear to have the potential for a relatively sudden singularity. While a great deal of intelligence and cleverness also goes into this area of research, that cleverness gets vastly multiplied through application of massive, brute-force simulation of the resulting self-modifying networks. If these researchers do their work right, and computer processing power continues to increase for another decade or two, it seems likely that they will in fact be able to create closer and closer approximations to a human brain. First simulating a crude approximation of neural networks, then doing simulations of a small number of realistic neurons, now expanding to relatively large numbers of neurons organized for specific functions. With more processing power, the obvious "next step" would be to simulate more and more areas of the brain, and integrating those. This is the path that some researchers see as eventually leading to a human-level brain (sanity, let alone wisdom, not guaranteed).

Such a brain could be easily "re-wired" to give that intelligence significant advantages over human beings. It's short term memory could be made much larger. It could have multiple conventional computer's displays routed directly into it's visual senses - and perhaps even be given complete computer programs that behave as higher level "instincts" - e.g. so that it has only to think of factoring a number, and very quickly get the result, without it having to apply it's intelligence to step through an algorithm, as humans must. Such things could give an otherwise "merely human" intelligence simulation a massive edge over actual humans. In fact, it seems likely to me that we might develop "idiot-savants" well before getting to average intelligence.

It might even be reasonable to presume that one could make an idiot-savant that has talent in the area of designing better neural structures, in which case not even human-level intelligence would be necessary to kick off the singularity. After all, it'll be fairly natural for researchers to make their own field one of the first areas of hyper-competence in a simulated brain appoaching human level intelligence. Once that level of capability is achieved, the researchers could collaborate with the AI - setting it goals, letting it invent solutions, and rolling those solutions into a future improved version. After years of painfully slow progress, those researchers would be elated and rush ahead, simply for the joy of seeing technical challenges falling, and appreciating the elegance or cleverness of the solutions the AI finds, almost greedy to watch it accelerating.

It'd be at that point that some of the "unable to predict" nature of singularity starts to kick in. For example, what if one of the researchers got the bright idea, one evening, of setting the AI to designing a self-improving "financial analysist". Running in off-hours and the background, looking like just one more of several dozen such development tracks the AI is working on, in a few months it accumulate sufficient understanding and new insights, that in simulations with past and realtime data, it starts catching the "surprise" surges and drops in stock prices, where "big money" can be made. And so the researcher starts taking it's advice, perhaps doubling his money every week. Fearful of getting caught, he has the AI figure out how to go online and set up hundreds of accounts, and so on. By half a year, his original $1000 may have become a $1T fortune, spread over 1000 "investors" who appear to make some mistakes, but manage to "day-trade" on thousands of stocks to ever increasing profits. All under the control of the AI...

Another researcher might very much hope that the AI could find a "cure for aging". While it couldn't do lab work, it might be able to cull through vast amounts of biological research to find key hints and experimental directions, publishing (with the human AI researcher's help) papers that excite other researchers into doing key experiments. Again it might spread its papers over dozens of false identities, each of those gaining a reputation for solid theoretical work and very interesting and tightly reasoned extrapolations. With hundreds of human researchers un-wittingly guided by the AI to do experimental work, and often sharing "pre-publication" results with the AI and getting immediate feedback of new ideas and experiments to try and tools to build, progress could be very rapid. Only toward the end of the process might it become apparent that the research is converging on a set of capabilities that allow reversing some of the worst symptoms of aging.

And of course, those are just two, rather crude ideas for areas where a developing idiot-savant might be guided to achieve startling impact. Physics and medicine might be revolutionized. New manufacturing methods developed. Socio-technical trends might be extrapolated and new inventions created just in time to accelerate those trends. All before the idiot-savant has even gotten to "I think, therefore I am". It will have surpassed human intelligence without ever equaling it.

Mobile Google Interface

2008-06-18T23:53:00.000-07:00

Speech recognition listens to everything being said near you. You have some means to easily display the transcript and highlight anything. Speech recognition wouldn't even have to get better - Google could search phonetically.

So if someone makes reference to something you don't understand, just zip back to it, select it, and google it. Or ask a question out loud - then select and google. Or pre-select, state your question, and release the selection - no need to go back and visually select.

If you see something in a different language, simply say the language you think it is, and try to pronouce it. "French quincaillerie". Select and google.

Etc.

2008-06-10T08:48:00.000-07:00

99 $T - trillion, (not billion) $99e12 - budget deficit over the next 70 years or so, for health care and Social Security spending. It that's not a sign that government "insurance" programs are broken, what is? I'll focus on health care here, but much the same is true of social security.

Merely increasing spending - cutting elsewhere (typically military spending) - won't fix this. Demand for health care is quite elastic, and if "someone else" is willing to pay more, consumption will simply expand. The same goes for cutting health care costs, by the way - if it's cheaper, people will consume more. (Some go so far as to claim there'll be "economies of scale" - that health care will get cheaper in volume, or that bureaucrats wielding the clout of millions of consumers will be able to force lower pricing on providers. At best they'll displace costs from one area to another, while introducing huge inefficiencies.)

No, the only real solution is to eliminate the "someone else pays" aspect. Privatize health care as much as possible.

Defenders of big government mentally jumped to "Oh, so you just want to let poor people die, don't you, you heartless scum!" I guess that makes them feel all warm inside. Odd how their defense of "the poor" somehow entails forcing the huge majority "non-poor" into the same program. Of course it's not really odd - their objective is to coerce those who are able to pay for their own care to pay for an equal level of care for the poor. Too bad if that that ends up costing more AND rationing care for those who could have afforded better - after all, why should earning more money translate into better health care? Besides, people need health care rationing, or they might waste money trying desperately to save their own life or that of a loved one - e.g. paying twice as much for a treatment only 10% more effective. What a waste!

Everyone should be allowed to deposit as much tax-free money as they like into health savings accounts, retirement savings accounts, catastrophic medical insurance and life insurance. At most, government might send people a letter once a year telling them about how much they should be putting into savings and insurance, to maintain their current quality of life.

Yes, I hear you still yelling "BUT WHAT ABOUT THE POOR!" Well, with the lower health care costs that will come from private payers, the most common treatments will be much cheaper. Some recent trends look promising - health care provided in pharmacies, physician's assistants, etc. Government could take a role however. It could limit payments for "malpractice" to a sensible level. It might be sensible to reform health insurance - insurance companies wouldn't be liable for pre-existing conditions, but would be liable for all conditions arising in their subscribers, even if they subsequently "leave" that company.

If we really must tax and spend some, do it through private charities, via dollar matching. Monitor newer charities to make sure they aren't just stealing funds, but don't over-burden charities with red tape. Of course, using tax money will cut into people's willingness to pay for chartible causes, so I expect this will be worse than spending no tax money at all.

2008-06-10T08:45:00.000-07:00

Teachable moment - that short window of time in which someone wonders about something and, if presented with the answer, will readily and painlessly absorb it and retain it.

Teachable Moments(tm): Software, physical or virtual device, mounted in, as part of, or associated with something one has with one pretty much all the time. I.e., most likely one's cellphone.

Google was a first approximation - good for finding answers about anything, but not as easily or specifically as needed. TM needs next level - take in a full context of what the person is doing, where they are, what they've been asking previously, apply some AI, parse a natural language, spoken or tersely typed question, verify that you have the right question, correct that if necessary (but minimize that), then provide the specific answer AND volunteer a little more context AND provide links to related context - hopefully the answer should always be "almost satisfying" - in the sense that it provides the literal answer desired, but tempts the person to follow links, ask more questions, etc. The idea is to extend the teachable moment as long as the person will tolerate, rather than kill their curiousity with the precise answer.

Wikipedia is a better good example, as it entices one to ask additional questions and provides many links to explore further. If provided with an off-line image and an AI front end to detect context, it might be adequate. Other encylopedias might do this for profit, selling subscriptions to parents of young kids, but it's hard to see how they'd compete with free, other than perhaps snob appeal - "OUR answers are vetted by dozens of experts." Hasn't worked too well for them so far, but probably there'll always be some who care enough or want to pretend they do.

While the near future lies with being "always connected", once in a while someone will find himself off-line. At such times, he will still want to have access to relevant information. And since gigabytes of flash or other non-volatile memory will be cheap, it'll make sense to cache truncated data from any information service one has accessed in the past: information you've already accessed, information closely linked to that, plus some information brought down recently based on your environmental context (physical location, social situation, historical ties, commercial ties) to be ready just in case you asked or your filter AI chose to let you know about something important. Most people will have "where's the nearest toilet" no more than 2 button presses deep... ("Just go past the Barstuck(tm) Cocoa Plantation, turn right next to Binder(tm) Books and look for the sign. On your way out, stop into Binder's to check out Novella by Daniel Smupp, and Barstuck's for a 5% discount on our new Mint Bananas! cocoa!" ) That'll be one clue the AI can use to decide that information is important to keep updated.

Probably there'll be standard "context packages" one can download - not so much information, as useful structure that will draw in the information you need. So if you've never done the world-travelling thing, or taken a cruise, you'd pull down a packet related to those, and in combination with your own context, it'll start pulling in a database of stuff you may soon want to know, even if you don't yet know you will.

Will age reversal lead to exponential population growth?

2006-11-29T13:11:00.000-08:00

The most effective counter to desire to have children... is to have some.

The number required to shut down any instinctive desire to reproduce will vary from person to person - for some, merely being an aunt or uncle is sufficient; most find that "two's company, three's a crowd"; for others, "eight is enough"; and a very few seem to feel kids are "cheaper by the dozen". But eventually grandkids come along and that cheaper "fix" for infant-addiction, combined with memories of the reality of child-rearing, will almost always be sufficient to shut down the reproductive urge.

As a result, once life extension becomes practical, we'll find that the reproducing fraction of the population will drop steadily until eventually zero growth will be hit as suicides match births. Population will likely grow until that point is reached.

In fact, we'll probably find that for the first century or so after full control over bodily health is possible, population won't grow nearly as fast as it could, as people who grew up thinking that death was inevitable, and perhaps are infected by 'death = heaven' memes, find ways to shuffle off this mortal coil. Not simple suicide - more likely it'll be a death-wish, expressed as exuberent risk-taking "celebrating restore youth", by people who don't realize that they feel guilty about having "cheated God".

Eventually we'll have many alternatives to suicide - uploading, suspending animation with periodic revival if anything interesting happens. Perhaps even an implementation of reincarnation, by allowing an uploaded mind to experience life "from scratch", with memory of previous lives slowly integrating as the child grows older.

What the Dems need to do

2006-08-03T22:21:00.000-07:00

For Iraq, the Democrats need a position other than "Stay the Course, reluctantly" - that's too near the Republican's position. They can't do "Cut and Run" - the Republicans have already positioned that as cowardly - and it'd probably be stupid in terms of the disaster it'd be for Iraqis as well.

Also - the Democrats need to stake out a position that appeals to the military (and their families) to pull over some of the conservative and moderate voters.

My recommendation - US troops to pull out of all cities/towns, but stay in Iraq, ready to move in if the Iraqis can't hack it. Still provide training and material support - just outside the urban areas.

What does that accomplish? Well, we stop creating new terrorists/insurgents by killing civilians, for one thing. Iraqis will have less sympathy for insurgents blowing things up in the city - hopefully that'll mean a lower level of violence around civilians and against the police.

And of course there'll be fewer body bags and missing limbs on our side - which also sets the Democrats up to complain about how silent the Republicans are on that point, without appearing callous (since they offer a better alternative). To the Iraqis (and US voters and hopefully the rest of the world) it's a clear step toward eventual full withdrawal.

Empty First Post

2006-07-29T16:32:00.000-07:00

My first post will be almost empty.