Lifeboat Foundation

Self Transcendence
Will our lumbering industrial age driven information age segue smoothly into a futuristic marvel of yet to be developed technology? It might. Or take quantum leaps. It could. Will information technology take off exponentially? It’s accelerating in that direction. The way knowledge is unraveling its potential for enhancing human ingenuity, the future looks bright indeed. But there is a problem. It’s that egoistic tendency we have of defending ourselves against knowing, of creating false images to delude ourselves and the world, and of resolving conflict violently. It’s as old as history and may be an inevitable part of life. If so, there will be consequences.
Who has ever seen drama/comedy without obstacles to overcome, conflicts to confront, dilemmas to address, confrontations to endure and the occasional least expected outcome? Just as Shakespeare so elegantly illustrated. Good drama illustrates aspects of life as lived, and we do live with egoistic mental processes that are both limited and limiting. Wherefore it might come to pass that we who are of this civilization might encounter an existential crisis. Or crunch into a bottleneck out of which … will emerge what? Or extinguish civilization with our egoistic conduct acting from regressed postures with splintered perception.
What’s least likely is that we’ll continue cruising along as usual.
Not with massive demographic changes, millions on the move, radical climate changes, major environmental shifts, cyber vulnerabilities, changing energy resources, inadequate clean water and values colliding against each other in a world where future generations of the techno-savvy will be capable of wielding the next generation of weapons of mass destruction.
On the other hand, there are intelligent people passionately pursuing methods of preventing the use of weapons, combating their effects and securing a future in which these problems mentioned above will be solved, and also working towards an advanced civilization. It’s a race against time.
In the balance hangs nothing less than the future of civilization. The danger from technology is secondary.
As of now, regardless of theories of international affairs, in one way or another, we inject power into our currency of negotiation, whether it be interpersonal or international, for after all, power is privilege, hard to give up, especially after getting a taste of it, and so we’ll quarrel over power, perhaps fight. Why deny it? The historical record is there for all to see. As for our inner terrors, our tendency to present false egoistic images to the world and of projecting our secret socially unacceptable fantasies on to others, we might just bring to pass what we fear and deny. It’s possible.
Meantime there are certain simple ideas that remain timeless: For example, as infants we exist at the pleasure of parents, big hulks who pick us up and carry us around sometimes lovingly, sometimes resentfully, often ambivalently, and to be sure many of us come to regard Authority with ambivalence. As Authority regards the dependent. A basic premise is that we all want something in a relationship. So what do we as infants want from Authority? How about security in our exploration of life? How about love? If it’s there we don’t have to pay for it. There are no conditions attached. Life, however, is both complicated and complex beyond a few word, and so we negotiate in the ‘best’ way we have at our disposal, which in the early stages of life are non-verbal intuitive methods that in part enter this life with us, genetically determined, epigenetically determined and in part is learned, but once adopted, a certain core approach becomes habitual, buried deeply under layers of later learned social skills, skills that we employ in our adult lives. These skills are however relatively on the surface. Hidden deep inside are secret desires, unfulfilled fantasies, hidden impulses that wouldn’t make sense in adult relationships if expressed openly in words.
It has been said repeatedly that crisis reveals character. Most of the time we get by in crisis, but we each have a ‘breaking point,’ meaning that under severe enduring stress we regress at a certain point, at which time we’ll abandon sophisticated social skills and a part of us will slip into infantile mode, not necessarily visible on the outside. It varies. No one can claim immunity. And acting out of infantile perception in adult situations can have unexpected consequences depending on the early life drama. Which makes life interesting. It also guarantees an interesting future.
Meantime scientists clarify the biology of learning, of short term memory, of long term memory, of the brain working as a whole, of ‘free will’ as we imagine it, but regardless of future directions, at this time we need agency on the personal and social level so as to help stabilize civilization. By agency I mean responsibility for one’s actions. Accountability, including in the face of dilemmas. Throughout the course of our lives from beginning to end we encounter dilemmas. Consider the dilemmas the Europeans under German occupation faced last century. I use the European situation as an illustration or social paradigm, not to suggest that this situation will recur, nor to suggest that any one ethnic group will be targeted in the future, but I do suggest that if a global crisis hits, we’ll confront moral dilemmas, and so we can learn from those relatively few Europeans who resolved their dilemmas in noble ways, as opposed to the majority who did nothing to help the oppressed.
If a European in German occupied territory helped a Jew he or she and family would be in danger of arrest, torture and death. How about watching one’s spouse and children being tortured? On the other hand, if she or he did not help they would be participating in murder and genocide, and know it. Despite the danger, certain people from several European countries helped the Jews. According to those who interviewed and wrote about the helpers, (see references listed below) the helpers represented a cross section of the community, that is, some were uneducated laborers, some were serving women, some were formally educated, some were professionals, some professed religious convictions, some did not. Well then, what if anything did these noble risk takers have in common? What they shared in common was this: They saw themselves as responsible moral agents, and, acting on an internal locus of moral responsibility, they each acted on their knowledge and compassion and did the ‘right thing.’ It came naturally to them. But doing the ‘right thing’ in the face of life threatening dilemma does not come naturally to everyone. Fortunately it is a behavior that can be learned. Concomitant with authentic learning, according to research biologists, is the production of brain chemicals that in turn cultivate structural modification in brain cells. A self reinforcing feedback system. In short, learning is part of a dynamic multi-dimensional interaction of input, output, behavioral change, chemicals, structural brain changes and complex adaptation in systems throughout the body. None of which diminishes the idea that we each enter this life with certain desires, potential and perhaps roles to act out, one of which for me is to improve myself. Good news! I not only am, I become.
Finally, I list some 20th century resources that remain timeless to this day:
Millgram, S. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. Harper & Row. 1974. Oliner, Samuel P. & Pearl. The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe. Free Press, Division of Macmillan. 1998
Fogelman, Eva. Conscience & Courage Anchor Books, Division of Random House. 1994
Block, Gay & Drucker, Malka. Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust. Holms & Meier Publishers, 1992

There is green manufacturing, and there is green manufacturing. An ordinary factory can be made more green, but it will never be as environmentally friendly as a real, growing green plant. Green plants have manufactured things for us since the dawn of our species. Green plants manufacture the oxygen we need to breathe and live, from the carbon dioxide they remove from the atmosphere. Indeed without plants, the oxygen in the air would dwindle away and humans (and other oxygen-breathing animals) could no longer survive on Earth. Plants also manufacture food, from grain to veggies to oils to mouth-watering fruits, nuts and spices; wood, from Douglas-fir for construction to beautiful furniture wood to light balsa wood to heavy ebony for piano keys; drugs, from traditional cures to modern pharmaceuticals to intoxicants like tobacco, opium, magic mint, and lactarium; and chemicals of endless variety. Green plants are manufacturing devices – they perform green manufacturing in every sense.

On the other hand, one often hears that such-and-such does not grow on trees. Money, for example, does not grow on trees. Yet numerous solid objects found in everyday life would be relatively simple to genetically engineer trees to produce. A chair for example merely needs a sapling (let’s call it a “front left leg”) to reach the height of a seat, then send out two horizontal branches at right angles. When they grow about two feet long, they send shoots straight down to the ground where they take root. They also send shoots out horizontally at right angles to their current direction, which meet to form the last corner of the seat, whereupon they send down the 4th leg. Similarly, extra branches can grow into a back, as well as arms and various bracing bars if desired. The banyan tree is an example of a plant whose branches send down shoots that turn into extra trunks already, so that part of the general concept is clearly feasible. The chair still needs a seat, which could grow from a network of tough, viny stems that give enough when sat upon to be comfortable. Or add a cushion if you like. Of course, you still have to pull it out of your garden, but that is no more trouble (probably less, actually) than a trip to the furniture store. The entire chair is one piece without fastened joints that could loosen with age or otherwise require maintenance, so it could be long-lasting and strong. How strong? That depends on how long you grow it…for stouter legs and other parts, a chair tree farm would just let the chair tree grow a couple years longer before harvesting to let the trunks and branches thicken.

Various other useful items could grow on trees in your yard or in tree farms, or the seeds might get loose and grow in vacant lots or in the wild. Tables might need a flat top to be added later. Ladders would be a natural. Railings (just turn a ladder on its side!). Marbles already grow on bushes (they’re called “marble seeds”) and plants could be engineered to grow many other small solid toy and light household items as well, from checkers and chess pieces to knobs and knick-knacks.

Here’s another kind of thing that “doesn’t grow on trees.” Gold and silver. But no doubt they could and hopefully they will. Roots are chemical factories. Solar powered chemical factories. They extract raw materials from dirt, using energy captured by leaves from sunlight to convert the raw materials into useful chemicals. Mother nature has caused plants to make chemicals useful to the plant, but humans are increasingly causing them to make chemicals useful to humans. For example resveratrol is a chemical found in red grapes, peanuts, Japanese knotweed and some other plants. Some experiments suggest it increases the life spans of certain animals (and thus, perhaps humans). It can be produced not only by the roots of entire peanut plants, but by the peanut plant root system alone without benefit of light, leaves, or stems – the trick is to keep the peanut root systems properly bathed in a clear nutrient solution in a glass laboratory flask.

References

“The trick is to keep the peanut root systems properly bathed in a clear nutrient solution in a glass laboratory flask.” F. Medina-Bolivar, J. Condori, A. M. Rimando, J. Hubstenberger, K. Shelton, S. F. O’Keefe, S. Bennett, and M. C. Dolan, Production and secretion of reveratrol in hairy root cultures of peanut, Phytochemistry, vol. 68, pp. 1992-2003, 2007.

I gave the following speech at the Space Elevator Conference.

——

“Waste anything but time.”

—Motto of the NASA Apollo missions

The consensus amongst those of us who think it is even possible to build a space elevator is that it will take more than 20 years. But how can you say how long it will take to do something until you specify how many resources it will require and how many people you’ve assigned to the task?

For the first part of this speech, I’m going to ignore the nanotubes and focus on the remaining 99%. When analyzing a task you generally know how to do, it is best to take a top-down approach. If you are painting a room, you would divide this task into the prep, the actual painting, and the cleanup, and then organize the work in each one of those phases.

In my former life at Microsoft, I learned to appreciate the power of educated and focused large-scale teams as the best tool to beat the competition. With a 1,000 person team, 1 man-year of work is accomplished every 2 hours. With 100,000, 1 man-year takes 1 minute and 12 seconds. Work is generally fungible so a 20 year project could use more people and go faster.

The goal in a project is for everyone to always be moving ahead full speed and to finish on the same day. What slips schedules is when you have people with dependencies on each other. If one person needs something from another to do their work, you have the potential for that person to go idle and to slip the entire project.

You can prevent that from happening with strong leadership. In the recent BP oil spill, Louisiana tried to get permission to build berms, but the EPA and the other agencies took a long time to analyze the environmental impact. The federal bureaucracy with all of its technology moved slower than lifeless oil floating in the ocean. A leader can cut through red tape and bring in outside assets to unblock a situation.

The various big pieces of the space elevator have clear boundaries. Those building the solar panels need work with the climber team primarily to come up with a way to attach the panels. The physical shape of the climber impacts little on the anchor station. The primary issues are the throughput of tons per day and the process to load a climber. Even mission control looks at pieces as black boxes. Mega-projects can be broken down into efforts with clear boundaries so this means that in general, once commenced, everyone should be able to work in parallel.

The robotic climber is one of the most complicated pieces of hardware that the space elevator needs, and it has many of the same requirements as one of Seattle’s Boeing airplanes: both will move a few hundred miles per hour, and have to deal with temperature, pressure, and radiation.

Boeing is at least on a 7 year timeframe with its 787, compared to NASA which seems to takes decades to do anything. The goal is to be the quality of NASA, but faster than the speed of Boeing. Engineering is about humans and their computers and both can be improved.

At least some of the 787’s delays were not technically related, as the local papers documented months of labor disputes. Boeing is also working more closely with its suppliers over the Internet than ever before, and learning how to do this.

Man landed on the moon 7 years after Kennedy’s speech, exactly as he ordained, because dates can be self-fulfilling prophecies. It allows everyone to measure their work against their goals and determine if they need additional resources. Hand out a few years of work per person, and allow for time for ramp-up and test, and 7 years is quite reasonable. Long timelines encourage procrastination. If you want something to happen slowly, you can find many ways to succeed.

It is cheaper to get loans for shorter terms, so it is cheaper to build something in 7 years than in 20. A 20-year plan is almost a guaranteed way to get a “no” answer as even the U.S. Congress doesn’t think more than a few months ahead.

Boeing has the requisite technical skills, and they have 160,000 employees, so we could use them as a baseline of an estimate on how many people it would take. Here is what those 160,000 people work on:

The news in Seattle was how Boeing’s 787 was continually being delayed, but they are involved in so many military and space efforts, it is surprising they find any time at all to work on their Dreamliner!

Boeing is working on 150 projects, so they have 1,100 people per project. Averages are more prone to error, so we can assume a space elevator is 10 times bigger than average. This gives you 11,000 people. If you knew the size of the teams at Boeing, something which is not public information, you could better refine the estimates. A 11,000 person team would be a sight to behold.

If we landed on the moon 7 years after Kennedy told us we would, and if Boeing can build the 787 in 7 years, they we can build the rest of the space elevator in 7 years. It is just a matter of having enough of the right people. So 11,000 people in 7 years is a first estimate. But this is the 21^st century, and we landed on the moon 40 years ago.

Software

Software is my training, and what I will turn to now. Ford Motor Company made an ad that said before they build a car, they build it inside a computer. If you are satisfied with the design inside a computer, you are ready to start production. What is true for a car is even more true for an airplane, and there is a lot of software involved in designing, testing, running and maintaining an airplane and I’ve had the chance to talk to some Boeing engineers in my years in Seattle. It would not be surprising if the majority of engineers at Boeing knew how to program, and that software is a large part of Boeing’s investments. On the Wikipedia page for the 787, software is mentioned several times as being a reason for delays.

Setting aside the space elevator for a second, the key to faster technological progress is the more widespread use of free software in all aspects of science. For example, I believe there are more than enough computer vision PhDs, but there are 200+ different codebases and countless proprietary ones. Simply put, there is no computer vision codebase with critical mass, and this problem exists for a number of problem domains. The lessons of Wikipedia have not been learned.

Many people think that the problem is a lack of hardware. But computers today can do billions of additions per second. If you could do 32-bit addition in your head in one second, it would take you 30 years to do the billion that your computer can do in that second.

Even if you don’t think computers have the necessary hardware horsepower today, the size of the input is the primary driving factor to the processing power required to do the analysis. In image recognition, the amount of work required to interpret an image is mostly a function of the size of the image. Each step in the image recognition pipeline, and the processes that take place in our brain, dramatically reduce the amount of data from the previous step. At the beginning of the analysis might be a one million pixel image, requiring 3 million bytes of memory. At the end of the analysis is the data that you are looking at your house, a concept that requires only 10s of bytes to represent. The first step, working on the raw image, requires the most processing power, so therefore it is the image resolution (and frame rate) that set the requirements. No one has yet shown Terminator-style robust vision recognition software running at any speed!

While a brain is different from a computer in that it does work in parallel, such parallelization only makes it happen faster, it does not change the result. Anything accomplished in our parallel brain could also be accomplished on computers of today, which can do only one thing at a time, but at the rate of billions per second. A 1-gigahertz processor can do 1,000 different operations on a million pieces of data in one second. With such speed, you don’t even need multiple processors. Even so, more parallelism is coming, and GPUs can be very useful for the early stages of computer vision.

I have written a book that has ideas on how to write better software faster. Today, the programmers of this world have not adopted free software and modern programming languages sufficiently. I cannot speak for the shortest amount of time it would take to build the hardware for the space elevator, but I can speak a little bit about the software. Software is interesting because it seems there is no limit on the number of people who can work together.

Linux’s first release in 1991 was built by one programmer and had 10,000 lines of code. It is now 1,000 times bigger and has 1,000 times as many people working on it.

Software is something like Wikipedia, which started with a handful but now has millions of people who have made contributions. I grabbed a random article on Wikipedia: it was 5,000 words which is a decent hunk of intellectual property, about as long as this speech which is half-over. It had 1,500 revision and 923 contributors. Each person noticed something different; not every change is perfect, but newer changes can further polish the work, and it usually heads in the right direction and evolves towards a good state. A corollary of the point is the line by Eric Raymond that with enough eyeballs, all bugs in software are shallow.

Leonardo Da Vinci said that: “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” This is true of software as well because both are perfectable to an arbitrary degree. Every software programmer has had a feeling in his gut that if he had more resources, he could do more things. Software is different than Wikipedia, but I have found generally that problems in software, assuming you have the right expertise, can be broken up into arbitrarily small tasks. Every interesting problem can be expressed as a functional interface and a graph of code that someone else can maintain.

Some think that the AI problems are so hard that it isn’t a matter of writing code, it is a matter of coming up with the breakthroughs on a chalkboard. But people can generally agree at a high level how the software for solving many problems will work and there has been code for all manner of interesting kicking around for decades.

What we never built, and still don’t have, are some places where lots of people have come together to hash out the details, which is a lot closer to Wikipedia than it first appears. Software advances in a steady, stepwise fashion, which is why we need free software licenses: to incorporate all the incremental advancements that each scientist is making. Advances must eventually be expressed in software so it can be executed by a computer. Even if you believe we need certain scientific breakthroughs, it should be clear that things like robust computer vision are complicated enough that you would want 100s of people working together on the vision pipeline. So, while we are waiting for those breakthroughs, let’s get the 100 people together.

A big part of the problem is that C and C++ have not been retired. These languages make it hard for programmers to work together, even if they wanted to. There are all sorts of inefficiencies of time, from learning the archane rules about these ungainly languages, to the fact that libraries often use their own string classes, synchronization primitives, error handling schemes, etc.

It is easier to write a specialized and custom computer vision library in C/C++ than to integrate OpenCV, the most popular free computer vision engine. OpenCV defines an entire world, down to the Matrix class so it cannot just plug into whatever code you already have. Meanwhile, if you want to write your own specialized computer vision library, you don’t have to start from scratch as there are many great libraries for graphics, i/o and math. There is plenty of quality free software for building your own computer vision library, but the OpenCV library is in C/C++, so we haven’t moved beyond this first stage.

To facilitate cooperation, I recommend Python. Python is usable by PhDs and 8 year olds and it is a productive, free, reliable and rich language. Linux and Python are a big part of what we need. That gives a huge and growing baseline, but we have to choose to use it.

This is a screenshot of a fluid analysis of an internal combustion engine and is built using a Python science library known as SciPy that can also do neural networks and basic computer vision.

We might come up with a better language one day, but Python is good enough. If we had a few hundred programmers signed up to work on Python tasks, it would be a matter of putting everyone in the right place. The SciPy computer vision team is less than 5 people and not very active now. Everyone is still off doing their own thing.

The problem in software today is not the hardware, or the technical challenge of writing the code, it is the social challenge of making sure we are all working together productively. If we fix this, the future will arrive very fast. Another similarity between Wikipedia, free software, and the space elevator, is that all are cheaper than their alternatives.

So given all this technology at our disposal, we should be able to build this elevator in less than 7 years. Few would have predicted that it would take the unpaid volunteers of Wikipedia only 2.5 years to surpass Encyclopedia Britannica. Anything can happen in far less time than we think is possible if everyone steps up today to play their part. The way to be a part of the future is to invent it. We need to focus our scientific and creative energy towards big, shared goals. Wikipedia, as the world’s encyclopedia, is a useful and inspiring tool, and so people have come pouring in.

There is a self-selection process; the people who work on the carbon nanotubes section of Wikipedia are people who are passionate about that topic. Some of whom are surely getting paid for a job which includes using Wikipedia. If everyone gives back .01% of what they receive, it will be far more than we need. If shared, something needs to be done only once.

Future software advancements like cars that drive themselves will trigger a new perspective on whether we can build a space elevator. My backup plan to hitching a ride on the space elevator is to encourage people to build robot-driven cars first. Today, I’m trying the reverse approach.

The way to get help for a project is to create a vision that inspires others, but it would also be helpful if we got ten billion dollars. If we can afford a $1.4 trillion dollar deficit, we can afford a space elevator.

There are already millions of people working in the free software movement today, so in a sense there already are millions of people working on the space elevator. If we had people with the right skills working, we could start writing the software for the space elevator. We could in principle write all of the software for the space elevator, just as Boeing and Ford do, which would further shrink the estimates.

Unfortunately, writing all the software now is theoretically possible but not practical. The problem is that what we mostly need are device drivers. There are many ways to design the cargo door of the climber, and what the steps of opening this door are. The software that controls the opening and closing of that door is a device driver, a state machine that coordinates all the littler pieces of hardware. You can even think of mission control as the software that orders all of the hardware pieces around. It is a meta-device-driver, so it can’t be written yet either. So, we are mostly stuck with our attempts to write too much software now, but there are a few things we can do.

We could use hardware designs. The hard part about us talking about a design aspect of a climber at a conference like this is that there is no canonical designs or team. Today, there is much interesting intellectual property locked up besides software. It is most important to share the software; this is the free software movement, not the free Boeing airplane design movement.

Free data is also important however. Wikipedia has 2.6M lines of code to edit and display the encyclopedia, but it is gigabytes of data. Different projects have different ratios but software is useless without data. A nice compromise would be if Boeing used free software and free formats to do their proprietary work. If we all agree on free software and formats as baseline, it means people can work together. It would be nice to have a free Solidworks replacement.

Not everything that Boeing has locked up is innovative and strategic. They use standard military encryption algorithms which are public and free. Much of software is boring infrastructure code.

With free software and free formats, we can most quickly build the space elevator. So while it is bad news is that most of the required software efforts will be device drivers, the good news is that are some little software things we can work on today.

Dave Lang’s work is useful, and it could use a team of people to work with him to port it from Fortran to Python. Dave started, but he didn’t know Python and the interop tools well enough to make progress. It would also be nice to get some people with supercomputers analyzing ribbon designs, and ways to repair a ribbon. NASA has people, but they don’t have this as their job.

I am hosting spaceelevatorwiki.com on my server and I plan on handing it over to ISEC, but it could serve as a place to coordinate various kinds of software or other R&D. If we could get some people to work, it would push others to get going. Nobody wants to be the only worker on a project. Even millions of dollars of money can be useful to jumpstart software efforts.

The 1% of the Carbon Nanotubes

Okay, so now on to the carbon nanotubes. This is not my area of expertise so it will be short. I am satisfied to make the case that a space elevator is 99% doable in less than 7 years and leave the resolution of the last 1% for another day. To adapt a line from Thomas Edison: success at building a space elevator is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.

Many futurists believe that nanotechnology is the next big challenge after information technology. When analyzing a system you know how to build, it is best to work top-down. But when trying to do something new, you work your way up. When learning to cook, you start with an egg, not filet mignon. A good way to attack a big problem like nanotechnology is to first attack a small part of it, like carbon nanotubes. A Manhattan Project on general nanotechnology is too unfocused of a problem. Protein folding is by itself a Manhattan project.

A carbon nanotube is a simple and useful nanoscale structure and could be a great way to launch atomically precise manufacturing. The ribbon needs some science related to the design of the ribbon, dealing with friction, damage, and decay, but that can be done today on supercomputers. There are people at NASA that have the expertise and equipment, but they don’t have this as a work goal. One of the points Kennedy made is that sending a man to the moon served as a goal to: “organize, and measure.”

One concern is that there is a lot of money being spent on nanotube manufacturing research, but it is doled up in amounts of $100K. I am not convinced that such a small investment can bring any major new advancements.

Nanotubes might require the existing industrial expertise of a company like Intel. We all know that NASA has not seriously considered building a space elevator, and similarly, I think that no one at Intel has considered the benefits to creating the world’s best nanotube threads. They already experimenting with nanotubes inside computer chips because metal loses the ability to conduct electricity at very small diameter, but they aren’t producing them as an independent product for purchase now.

Intel is working in the 35 nm scale today which is a long way from the 2nm nanotube scale. But Intel’s only goal today is faster and cheaper. Intel can fit 11 of their Atom processors on the surface area of a penny. Such a powerful processor is small enough for iPhone sized devices, let alone laptops which is their actual market.

Size is just a side-battle in their goals of more speed and lower production cost. So Intel would build a nanotube fabrication plant that looks nothing like what they are trying to do today:

Intel Itanium Processor

The first product will likely not be good enough for the space elevator, but Intel learns how to build a better and smaller chip in the process of designing and building their current chip. So after they build this manufacturing plant, they could sell their product while they build their next one. Who knows how many of these iterations it would take, or ways to speed the iterations up.

Brad Edwards tells me that with one-inch fibers, you can spin arbitrarily long carbon nanotube threads, using the textile process we’ve been following for centuries. Carbon nanotube is the simplest interesting nanoscale structure. Carbon nanotubes were invented in 1991, and growing fibers in an oven and spinning them into threads is something we could have done back then. Companies like Hexcel, one of the world’s leaders in carbon fiber, is afraid to invest in carbon nanotubes even though they are the company in the world closest to being able to solve that problem. They are afraid of failure. I have discovered in software that it is about constantly adding new features which enable the new scenarios. Software is therefore constantly about generalizing. From where I sit, carbon fiber and carbon nanotubes are nearly the same thing! Even if it required new investments, Hexcel should be able to do it faster, better, and cheaper than anyone else, and they have the customers lined up who might want their new product. Just as NASA has not realized the enormous benefits to building a space elevator, Intel has not realized the economic opportunities if they created the world’s best nanotube threads, Hexcel, the company that should be leading in this market, is paralyzed into inaction by fear of failure. There is a moral obligation to innovation!

In conclusion, there is a new generation of kids maturing known as the Millennials. Their perspective is unique because they’ve been using Youtube and Google for as long as they can remember. They expect to get an answer to any question they pose in 100 milliseconds on their phone. The fact that Social Security is bankrupt is not acceptable. E=mc² is sufficient proof that nuclear power is a good idea. If you tell them you’ve got a 20-year plan, they will reply that you don’t know what you are doing yet, and you need to develop better plans. Waiting 20 years for a space elevator once makes as much sense as waiting 30 minutes at the gas station. And they are right — they don’t need to change their perspective, the rest of us need to change ours.

I’m not a Millennial, I’m a Generation X’er, and we are the ones building it. But I’m a software person. It would require 10,000 of my first computer to have the same capacity as an iPhone. I see today’s hardware as magic, so I believe someone can conjure up high quality nanotube rope if they invested enough resources. It might not be good enough for the elevator, but it could be a revenue-generating business. In Kennedy’s Rice speech, he mentioned that the Apollo program needed “new metal alloys” that hadn’t been invented. He didn’t think it would be a problem back then and we shouldn’t be 100% convinced now either.

The International Space Station is a tin can in space. We can do a lot better. A space elevator provides a physical structure to build and launch things from in addition to being an elevator. Scramjets, space tethers, rockets, or reusable launch vehicles, none of them are the way. We need a 21^st century railroad to space. Perhaps the Europeans could build the station at GEO. Russia could build the shuttle craft to move cargo between the space elevator and the moon. The Middle East could provide an electrical grid for the moon. China could take on the problem of cleaning up the orbital space debris and build the first moon base. Africa could design the means to terraform Mars, etc. This could all be done completely in parallel with the space elevator construction.We went to the moon 40 years ago, and the space elevator is our generation’s moon mission. Let’s do as Kennedy exhorted and: “Be bold”.

There are legal issues to consider. But when this project commences, we need to tell the bureaucrats to get out of the way. What can they contribute if they don’t do any of the engineering? We should also approach the global warming crowd and tell them that even better than living in rice patties, and driving electric rickshaws, the best way to save comrade mother earth is with a space elevator. Colonizing space will changes man’s perspective. When we feel crammed onto this pale blue dot, we forget that any resource we could possibly want is out there in incomparably big numbers. This simple understanding is a prerequisite for a more optimistic and charitable society, which has characterized eras of great progress.

We have given this program a high national priority — even though I realize that this is in some measure an act of faith and vision, for we do not now know what benefits await us. But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun …, and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out — then we must be bold.

Global warming is bad. But just how bad could it be, worst case? Could it make the Earth hotter than a self-cleaning oven, like it did Venus? Venus is even hotter than Mercury even though Mercury is closer to the sun, because of Venus’s greenhouse effect. But there seems little reason to fear such a runaway greenhouse effect on Earth. Aside from the fact that it has never happened here before, the Earth may simply not have enough solar energy and greenhouse gas (carbon dioxide and methane) to start the runaway positive feedback process that happened on Venus. Some day that may change, however – the sun is getting hotter as it grows older, and greenhouse gases, perhaps exotic and powerful ones, could potentially be manufactured and released by hostile invading extraterrestrials, robots, or apocalypse-minded humans. But let’s ignore this scenario as unlikely for now (so that we could claim to be optimists, if not for the following paragraphs). Is there any other apocalyptic global warming scenario still to worry about? Something that is not only known to be theoretically possible, but has actually happened? Say, a stinking poison that contaminates the atmosphere and waters of the entire Earth, not only wrinkling noses worldwide but killing off almost all living things? Welcome to the gray, dead plains (often warm and balmy), oxygen-starved waters, green skies and repellent smell of hydrogen sulfide poisoned Earth.

Hydrogen sulfide, H2S, is a gas. Chemically similar to H2O (water) but with a sulfur atom in place of water’s oxygen, it is not a necessity of life like water, but very poisonous. Much less than 1 part per million (ppm) in the air is detectable as an odor like rotten eggs. 10 ppm is a typical occupational exposure limit. 1 part in 1000 in air can cause rapid death. As a young man I kept several 1-gallon milk jugs of green algae-containing water, which I fertilized with vegetable peels and such. It worked great, but there was one slight problem: some vegetables contain substantial amounts of sulfur, which can lead to H2S dissolved in the water especially in the muck at the bottom. I finally dumped all the algae water down the toilet rather than move it to another apartment (a decision with which you are welcome to disagree). Some were smellier than others, and I ended up with a modest case of hydrogen sulfide poisoning. Main symptom: a mental “slide show” of colorful crystalline images, presumably the result of H2S-caused inhibition of cellular respiration in the brain. Like humans, most animals and plants are poisoned by H2S.

How might H2S come to poison the Earth? Like it did in the past. The dinosaurs are thought to have perished in a mass extinction event triggered by an small asteroid, several miles in diameter, crashing into the ground near the town of Chicxulub on the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico, 65 million years ago (mya). But the worst extinction event of all time is believed by many to have been caused by H2S. This was the much earlier Permian-Triassic (or P-Tr) extinction event of 251.4 mya – about 20 million years before any dinosaur was even a gleam in its mother’s eye. The vast majority of plant and animal species then in existence went extinct, both in the sea and on land. The P-Tr event is often called the “Great Dying.” A similar process could play out in humanity’s future, potentially ending it. Here is how.

The causal process begins with global warming. While massive volcanism in Siberia is thought to have triggered global warming by releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere back then, human burning of fossil fuel is doing it now. This warming is melting sea ice which darkens the ocean surface, causing more sunlight to be absorbed and worsening the warming trend. As the oceans warm, methane hydrate crystals deep underwater will warm too, which may cause methane to be released into the atmosphere. Methane is a greenhouse gas like carbon dioxide, except many times more powerful. Such a release of methane from the ocean floor is a likely though still controversial cause of the global temperature spike called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum of 55.8 mya, during which average global temperatures soared over 10°F.

Heating of the Earth’s surface causes the top layer of the polar oceans to warm disproportionately. Normally, cold air in the polar regions chills and oxygenates the surface waters, and salinates them by evaporating some water and leaving the salt, which makes the remaining water saltier. The cold and extra salt makes these waters denser, so that they sink and flow along the bottom, causing a planet-wide current of oxygen-rich water called the thermohaline circulation that connects the bottoms of the oceans. Global warming affects the polar regions the most, and warmer temperatures there can slow and potentially even halt the thermohaline circulation, thereby slowing or stopping oxygen from getting to the ocean depths.

Back in the Great Dying, it is hypothesized that after the thermohaline circulation stopped, the oxygen in the deep ocean waters was used up by the organisms that live down there. But some microbes don’t need oxygen gas dissolved in the water. Bad news – they get their oxygen instead from oxygen-containing sulfur compounds, and release the villain…hydrogen sulfide (just as they did at the bottoms of those algae water-containing plastic milk jugs). But it gets worse. The hydrogen sulfide slowly accumulated in the ocean waters, poisoning many of the remaining oxygen-breathing organisms. That explains why the extinction event was so devastating to marine life. Things went from awful to even worse. So much hydrogen sulfide accumulated that it started leaking from the water into the atmosphere. Because such a low concentration of hydrogen sulfide is needed to create a bad stink, if this happens during the human era the first blatantly obvious sign will be the smell of rotten eggs. It will be everywhere. Though unpleasant, it is not harmful until the concentration grows. As it accumulates in the atmosphere though, the smell will go from bad to worse, and eventually the increasing amount of H2S will start poisoning land life. And the sky will turn green. That can explain the devastation to land life during the Great Dying. And maybe it could happen again.

Recommendations

No need to buy a gas mask just yet. Thing won’t start getting really bad during our lifetimes. But this could be an existential risk to our species. Thus, scientific study is important. A serious risk is that things we do in our lifetimes may be the trigger for an extinction event later. It should be obvious that it would be the height of irresponsibility to let that happen. Yet there will always be forces of irresponsibility. One may hope that those forces fail to win or their victory may be a Pyrrhic one indeed.

Reference

There is a lot of both popular and scientific literature on this topic. A well-known full length work that bridges the gap between those literatures is P. D. Ward, Under a Green Sky, HarperCollins, 2007.

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The Lifeboat Foundation has been on to this guy for years.

The overview: “We would like the nuclear terrorist Adnan G. El Shukrijumah to be captured. There is a $5 million reward for assisting in his capture” (http://lifeboat.com/ex/nuclear.terrorist).

Now the AP reports “a suspected al-Qaida operative who lived for more than 15 years in the U.S. has become chief of the terror network’s global operations, the FBI says, marking the first time a leader so intimately familiar with American society has been placed in charge of planning attacks”… that suspected operative?  Adnan Shukrijumah.

According to the AP piece, his mother claims that he’s non-violent.  If so, that could suggest new directions for al-Qaida; but it seems rather unlikely that al-Qaida will become a charitable NGO if Jose Padilla’s account is to be believed. It’s old news now that Padilla claims to have trained in terrorist tactics using natural gas with Shukrijumah back in the summer of 2001 (http://edition.cnn.com/2004/LAW/06/01/comey.padilla.transcript/).

See also: http://lifeboat.com/ex/nuclear.shield

[AN INCENTIVE: "You give us Adnan G. El Shukrijumah and in return we will give you rewards. We assure you that all information would be kept secret", reads a matchbox handed out by the U.S. government, which is offering a $5-million reward. (TARIQ MAHMOOD, AFP/Getty Images)]

Suppose you had two identical dice with sides numbered 1 to 6 as usual. Typically one corner will have three sides numbered 1, 2, and 3 going around the corner in that order clockwise, with a 6 on the side opposite the 1 (because opposite sides add up to 7 on normal dice). Now take one of the dice and change it slightly. Paint a 6 over the 1, and a 1 over the 6. Now the sides numbered 1, 2 and 3 meet at a different corner and, what is more, they are arranged going around the corner counterclockwise instead of clockwise. Although both dice still function identically and may appear identical to a casual glance, in fact they are different: they are now mirror images of each other. In fact you don’t need 6 faces for this mirror image situation. It can also occur with 4-sided tetrahedrons (tetra- means 4), which look like 3-sided pyramids. The 4th side is the triangular base and the top corners of the 3 triangular sides meet at the apex. Similarly, some organic molecules consist of a carbon atom in the middle with 4 different atoms or atom groups sprouting outward. These four branches are like the sides of the tetrahedron: if you switched any two of them you would get a different molecule, a mirror image of what it was, and no amount of rotating it or otherwise moving it around will erase that difference. Mirror image molecules are technically called “enantiomers,” enantio- from the Greek for ‘opposite,’ and -mer meaning member of a group (from the Greek for ‘part’). They relate to plants as follows.

1. Proteins are necessary for all living things, including plants, to make, have, and use. While the earliest life on planet Earth might not have contained proteins (the “RNA world” conjecture), every known life form today contains numerous kinds of protein as a major component.

2. Every protein molecule is made from building blocks, called amino acid molecules, which are connected together end-to-end like beads on a string.

3. There are 20 different kinds of amino acids heavily used in building proteins, of which all except glycine have a central carbon atom with four different branches.

4. Thus 19 of the 20 common amino acids have two enantiomers, called L (for “levorotatory,” levo- from the Greek for ‘left’ because of the direction its solutions rotate polarized light), and D (for “dextrorotatory,” dextro- from the Greek for ‘right’).

5. Organisms generally contain only the L versions of these amino acids. No one knows why. Organisms based on D amino acids could exist, but we don’t see either plants or animals that do. (D forms have been observed in a few microorganisms.)

6. If we engineered plants to be based on D-amino acids, their nutritional value to pests (and humans) would be much lower, because animals can’t build their own proteins from D-amino acids.

7. Such plants would therefore be pest resistant, hence agriculturally valuable – as long as we’re talking about plants grown for purposes other than edible protein, such as vegetable oils, wood, etc. Pest resistance is an incentive that suggests that humans will, in fact, eventually create and grow such plants.

The pest resistance of D-amino acid based plants will give them a selective advantage over normal plants, and they could therefore come to significantly displace normal plants. Call them frankenplants if you like, but the world risks becoming a significantly different place, overrun with plants that resist being eaten, and therefore, able to feed fewer animals of all kinds, from insects to humans.

Next time (part viii): Manufacturing plants
Time after (part ix): Back to gold and silver
Time after that (part x): Power plants
And then (part xi): Greening the desert
And after that (part xii): Phyto-terraforming
Finally (part xiii): Recommendations

Within the next few years, robots will move from the battlefield and the factory into our streets, offices, and homes. What impact will this transformative technology have on personal privacy? I begin to answer this question in a chapter on robots and privacy in the forthcoming book, Robot Ethics: The Ethical and Social Implications of Robotics (Cambridge: MIT Press).

I argue that robots will implicate privacy in at least three ways. First, they will vastly increase our capacity for surveillance. Robots can go places humans cannot go, see things humans cannot see. Recent developments include everything from remote-controlled insects to robots that can soften their bodies to squeeze through small enclosures.

Second, robots may introduce new points of access to historically private spaces such as the home. At least one study has shown that several of today’s commercially available robots can be remotely hacked, granting the attacker access to video and audio of the home. With sufficient process, governments will also be able to access robots connected to the Internet.

There are clearly ways to mitigate these implications. Strict policies could reign in police use of robots for surveillance, for instance; consumer protection laws could require adequate security. But there is a third way robots implicate privacy, related to their social meaning, that is not as readily addressed.

Study after study has shown that we are hardwired to react to anthropomorphic technology such as robots as though a person were actually present. Reports have emerged of soldiers risking their lives on the battlefield to save a robot under enemy fire. No less than people, therefore, the presence of a robot can interrupt solitude—a key value privacy protects. Moreover, the way we interact with these machines will matter as never before. No one much cares about the uses to which we put our car or washing machine. But the record of our interactions with a social machine might contain information that would make a psychotherapist jealous.

My chapter discusses each of these dimensions—surveillance, access, and social meaning—in detail. Yet it only begins a conversation. Robots hold enormous promise and we should encourage their development and adoption. Privacy must be on our minds as we do.

The sun moves around in the sky, in many places casting its life-giving rays on different spots throughout the day. A plant that could move to the nearest sunny spot would have an advantage over ordinary plants that are stuck in one place. But plants have it rough. Unlike people, they can’t pull up roots and relocate somewhere else.

Ambulatory plants that simply walk over to the nearest sunny spot would outcomplete regular plants, eventually becoming rulers of the plant kingdom. Unfortunately, it all seems a bit unlikely. Except for some interesting exceptions like species of Tillandsia (the so-called “air plants,” which are discussed below), plants need their roots. And roots are, well, rooted in place. However, while the vast majority of plants do need roots, they don’t need them every minute. As everyone who has experienced the concept of cut flowers in a vase of water knows, plants can go for quite some time without roots. And roots can do fine without the rest of the plant for a considerable time as well – just check your fridge, pantry, or grocery store for an assortment of potatos, carrots, etc., which do just that. In nature, in fact, many plants over-winter with just the underground roots alive all winter long, then grow new above-ground parts come Spring. The trick, then, is to build a plant that can separate temporarily at the base. The above-ground part then wanders off in search of maximum sunlight. As evening approaches, the plant literally returns to its roots, reattaches, and spends the night with its above-ground and below-ground sections in metabolic union.

It is unclear if such a plant variety would ever evolve spontaneously. However, genetic engineering should be able to do it at some point. Moving short distances would be feasible for plants based on their current capabilities – many plants can and do change in shape fast enough over the course of a day already. Flowers open and close, leaves move around, etc. For example the immature flower heads of the sunflower face the sun, tracking it as it crosses the sky over the course of the day. Engineering a plant that can detach at the base, walk off looking for sun, return in the evening and reattach until morning presents a number of varied challenges, all of which must be solved before it can work, including a detachment and reattachment mechanism, a slow but real walking capability, and the sensory capacity to find its way back to its roots. Yet there seems no fundamental reason why it could not be done.

Once such plants are on the march, additional genetic changes will be possible. Plants need not return to their own roots, but could instead return to the roots of another plant, perhaps even of a different species. Animals looking for a nutritious drink might try to suck juice from the exposed detachment point of the roots after the top of the plant has wandered off for the day in search of sun. Plants could evolve or be further engineered to allow animals to suck for juice only if they fertilize the plant as a down payment, by urinating at the base! Plants that can walk around would be strongly motivated (in an evolutionary sense) to develop better sensory systems and faster movements to compete with other plants. Such capabilities are normally associated with animals, not plants, so these plants of the future, as they evolve, would tend to increasingly blur the line between plants and animals. A world with walking plants would be different indeed!

Another strategy for adding walking plants to the biosphere would start with plants like Tillandsia, the air plants, which either do not have roots at all or have small ones used only to hold them in place. The genetic engineering complexities of a detachment/reattachment mechanism and a homing mechanism for finding roots earlier left behind would be unnecessary, simplifying the problem greatly. However as for soil-rooted plants. creating the capacity for locomotion would still be a challenge. Tillandsia plants absorb water and nutrients through their leaves, so an ambulatory version would have considerable advantages. They could walk around (and climb around, since they typically live on trees), looking for sun, taking a dip when thirsty, and loading up on compost (or, predator-like, trimming leaves off of other plants) to absorb nutrients from. Perhaps ambulatory descendants of the Tillandsia genus will one day rule the Earth.

Next time: Plants with Mirror Molecules

My book “STRUCTURE OF THE GLOBAL CATASTROPHE Risks of human extinction in the XXI century” is now available through Lulu http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/structure-of-the-globa.....y/11727068 But it also available free on scribd http://www.scribd.com/doc/6250354/STRUCTURE-OF-THE-GLOBAL-CA.....I-century- This book is intended to be complete up to date source book on information about existential risks.