Lifeboat Foundation

If we are to successfully wend our way through the thicket of existential risks facing humanity, we need to be on top of our game…

Daylight savings time was invented by postal worker George V. Hudson, who argued it would reduce the time that people sleep when the sun is up, saving energy by lessening the use of electric lights. Hudson’s proposal was published in the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 1895. This strange system has since taken hold worldwide, depriving millions of a much-needed hour of sleep in the Spring by moving clocks ahead, and stingily giving it back again in the Fall by repeating an hour (2:00 – 2:59:59 a.m. happens twice, one Sunday morning a year in much of the US). As the saying goes, “Spring forward, Fall back.”

Alas, issues with daylight savings time abound, while any energy-saving benefits in the modern world are unclear. Those readers who have or work with young children can often see the strain on them. Adults often feel it too, but generally suck it up rather than be late for work. Clocks also need to be tediously reset (alternatively, just adjust the stated time mentally by an hour for 6 months until the clock is right again). A better solution is smart clocks that adjust automatically, which is increasingly the situation, as on your computer. Current smart clock technology is the way to go, but is currently a mere shadow of where it could end up – as we will see below.

As the popular phrase goes, “Something should be done about it!”

It is axiomatic, if not tautological, that the human organism works best – most efficiently, with maximum health and energy – under optimal conditions. We, like many organisms, are naturally tuned to a 24-hour cycle. Many studies, for example, have shown that working odd hours has negative effects on health and other things. Thus, scheduling life around an optimal schedule would, obviously, be a good thing for both individuals and society as a whole. This optimal schedule is strongly influenced by the time of sunrise because, as any jet-lagged traveler will attest, the human biological clock strives to synchronize with the natural day-night rhythm of the Earth. The optimal schedule is therefore not in lockstep with clock time, but with daylight times, which vary continuously throughout the year. While changing the clock twice a year to account for daylight savings time is decidedly unnatural, rigidly adhering to a consistent 24-hour clock cycle year round is also unnatural even without the daylight savings time adjustments. The problem goes deeper than just daylight savings time. The problem is the iron-fisted rule of clocks as they presently exist.

As noted earlier, something should be done. Here’s what.

What time we get up in the morning, what time work starts, school starts, etc., should be pegged to sunrise, and thus should typically change by a matter of a minute or a few (in terms of current time-keeping) from day to day. Of course, it would be crazy to have to consult multiple detailed calendars to know whether the office opens tomorrow this morning at 7:17 a.m. or 7:19 a.m., whether the kid’s school bell rings at at 8:03 a.m. or 8:06 a.m., etc., etc. The natural solution is for the school bell to ring at 8:00 a.m., but for the clock to decide it is 8:00 a.m. a set, constant amount of time after sunrise, no matter what time our current, anachronistically rigid clocks would think that is. For example, the current daylight savings time rules should be abrogated and replaced with a rule that when the sun rises, it is 6:00 a.m.

This strategy, sensible as it is, does lead to a few wrinkles that need to be ironed out. One is that when it is 6:00 a.m. at your home, it won’t be exactly 6:00 a.m. at your workplace or the local grade school. Every location on Earth will have its own time zone! But so what? You will learn what time you need to leave in the morning just as easily as you do now, even if your workplace time is a minute later or earlier than your home time. No big deal. The hard part is building clocks that can actually figure out what time they should show. But this is the computer age. All you need is for clocks to know where they are (whether with a GPS receiver, or by you typing in the latitude and longitude obtained from your home papers or from Google maps, or whatever), and software to compute from that and the date the proper time for the clock to show. Appointments for telephone conversations or conference calls among widely separated individuals can likewise be coordinated by automatic conversions among participants’ times mediated by currently crude, but soon more sophisticated event scheduling software like doodle.com and Google calendar. Long distance travelers would have itineraries too complicated for humans to reliably determine to the minute, but we are in the computer age, and computers simply need to step up to the plate and take care of that. We’re certainly not talking about anything beyond the ability of current technology here.

The benefits include a happier, healthier, more productive – and less tired – society.

Another risk is loss of human rationality, while preserving human life. In a society there are always so many people with limited cognitive abilities, and most of the achievements are made by a small number of talented people. Genetic and social degradation, reducing the level of education, loss of skills of logic can lead to a temporary decrease in intelligence of individual groups of people. But as long as humanity is very large in population, it is not so bad, because there will always be enough intelligent people. Significant drop in population after nonglobal disaster may exacerbate this problem. And the low intelligence of the remaining people will reduce their chances of survival. Of course, one can imagine such an absurd situation that people are so degraded that by the evolutionary path new species arise from us, which is not having a full-fledged intelligence – and that back then this kind of evolving reasonable, developed a new intelligence.
More dangerous is decline of intelligence because of the spread of technological contaminants (or use of a certain weapon). For example, I should mention constantly growing global arsenic contamination, which is used in various technological processes. Sergio Dani wrote about this in his article “Gold, coal and oil.” http://sosarsenic.blogspot.com/2009/11/gold-coal-and-oil-reg.....is-of.html, http://www.medical-hypotheses.com/article/S0306-9877 (09) 00666-5/abstract
Disengaged during the extraction of gold mines in the arsenic remains in the biosphere for millennia. Dani binds arsenic with Alzheimer’s disease. In his another paper is demonstrated that increasing concentrations of arsenic leads to an exponential increase in incidence of Alzheimer’s disease. He believes that people are particularly vulnerable to arsenic poisoning, as they have large brains and longevity. If, however, according to Denis, in the course of evolution, people will adapt to high levels of arsenic, it will lead to a decline in the brain and life expectancy, resulting in the intellect of people will be lost.
In addition to arsenic contamination occurs among many other neurotoxic substances – CO, CO2, methane, benzene, dioxin, mercury, lead, etc. Although the level of pollution by each of them separately is below health standards, the sum of the impacts may be larger. One reason for the fall of the Roman Empire was called the total poisoning of its citizens (though not barbarians) of lead from water pipes. Of course, they could not have knowledge about these remote and unforeseen consequences – but we also may not know about the many consequences of our affairs.
In addition to dementia is alcohol and most drugs, many drugs (eg, side effect in the accompanying sheets of mixtures of heartburn called dementia). Also rigid ideological system, or memes.
Number of infections, particularly prion, also leads to dementia.
Despite this, the average IQ of people is growing as life expectancy.

AI is our best hope for long term survival. If we fail to create it, it will happened by some reason. Here I suggest the complete list of possible causes of failure, but I do not believe in them. (I was inspired bu V.Vinge artile “What if singularity does not happen”?)

I think most of these points are wrong and AI finaly will be created.

Technical reasons:
1) Moore’s Law will stop by physical causes earlier than would be established sufficiently powerful and inexpensive apparatus for artificial intelligence.
2) Silicon processors are less efficient than neurons to create artificial intelligence.
3) Solution of the AI cannot be algorithmically parallelization and as a result of the AI will be extremely slow.

Philosophy:
4) Human beings use some method of processing information, essentially inaccessible to algorithmic computers. So Penrose believes. (But we can use this method using bioengineering techniques.) Generally, the final recognition of the impossibility of creating artificial intelligence would be tantamount to recognizing the existence of the soul.
5) The system cannot create a system more complex then themselves, and so the people cannot create artificial intelligence, since all the proposed solutions are too simple. That is, AI is in principle possible, but people are too stupid to do it. In fact, one reason for past failures in the creation of artificial intelligence is that people underestimate the complexity of the problem.
6) AI is impossible, because any sufficiently complex system reveals the meaninglessness of existence and stops.
7) All possible ways to optimize are exhausted.AI does not have any fundamental advantage in comparison with the human-machine interface and has a limited scope of use.
8. The man in the body has a maximum level of common sense, and any incorporeal AIs are or ineffective, or are the models of people.
9) AI is created, but has no problems, which he could and should be addressed. All the problems have been solved by conventional methods, or proven uncomputable.
10) AI is created, but not capable of recursive self-optimization, since this would require some radically new ideas, but they had not. As a result, AI is there, or as a curiosity, or as a limited specific applications, such as automatic drivers.
11) The idea of artificial intelligence is flawed, because it has no precise definition or even it is an oxymoron, like “artificial natural.” As a result, developing specific goals or to create models of man, but not universal artificial intelligence.
12) There is an upper limit of the complexity of systems for which they have become chaotic and unstable, and it slightly exceeds the intellect of the most intelligent people. AI is slowly coming to this threshold of complexity.
13) The bearer of intelligence is Qualia. For our level of intelligence should be a lot events that are indescribable and not knowable, but superintellect should understand them, by definition, otherwise it is not superintellect, but simply a quick intellect.

Economic:
14) The growth of computer programs has led to an increase in the number of failures that were so spectacular that of automation software had to be abandoned. This led to a drop in demand for powerful computers and stop Moore’s Law, before it reached its physical limits. The same increase in complexity and number of failures made it difficult the creation of AI.
15) AI is possible, but it does not give a significant advantage over the man in any sense of the results, nor speed, nor the cost of computing. For example, a simulation of human worth one billion dollars, and she has no idea how a to self-optimize. But people found ways to break up their intellectual abilities by injecting the stem cell precursors of neurons, which further increases the competitive advantage of people.
16) No person engaged in the development of AI, because it is considered that this is impossible. It turns out self-fulfilling prophecy. AI is engaged only by fricks, who do not have enough of their own intellect and money. But the scale of the Manhattan Project could solve the problem of AI, but just no one is taking.
17) Technology of uploading consciousness into a computer has so developed, that this is enough for all practical purposes, have been associated with AI, and therefore there is no need to create an algorithmic AI. This upload is done mechanically, through scanning, and still no one understands what happens in the brain.

Political:
18) AI systems are prohibited or severely restricted for ethical reasons, so that people still feel themselves above all. Perhaps are allowed specialized AI systems in military and aerospace.
19) AI is prohibited for safety reasons, as it represents too great global risk.
20) AI emerged and established his authority over the Earth, but does not show itself, except it does not allow others to develop their own AI projects.
21) AI did not appear  as was is imagined, and therefore no one call it AI (eg, the distributed intelligence of social networks).

I recently watched James Cameron’s Avatar in 3D. It was an enjoyable experience in some ways, but overall I left dismayed on a number of levels.

It was enjoyable to watch the lush three-dimensional animation and motion capture controlled graphics. I’m not sure that 3D will take over – as many now expect – until we get rid of the glasses (and there are emerging technologies to do that albeit, the 3D effect is not yet quite as good), but it was visually pleasing.

While I’m being positive, I was pleased to see Cameron’s positive view of science in that the scientists are “good” guys (or at least one good gal) with noble intentions on learning the wisdom of the Na’vi natives and on negotiating a diplomatic solution.

The Na’vi were not completely technology-free. They basically used the type of technology that Native Americans used hundreds of years ago – same clothing, domesticated animals, natural medicine, and bows and arrows.

They were in fact exactly like Native Americans. How likely is that? Life on this distant moon in another star system has evolved creatures that look essentially the same as earthly creatures, with very minor differences (dogs, horses, birds, rhinoceros-like animals, and so on), not to mention humanoids that are virtually the same as humans here on Earth. That’s quite a coincidence.

Cameron’s conception of technology a hundred years from now was incredibly unimaginative, even by Hollywood standards. For example, the munitions that were supposed to blow up the tree of life looked like they were used in World War II (maybe even World War I). Most of the technology looked primitive, even by today’s standards. The wearable exoskeleton robotic devices were supposed to be futuristic, but these already exist, and are beginning to be deployed. The one advanced technology was the avatar technology itself. But in that sense, Avatar is like the world of the movie AI, where they had human-level cyborgs, but nothing else had changed: AI featured 1980’s cars and coffee makers. As for Avatar, are people still going to use computer screens in a hundred years? Are they going to drive vehicles?

I thought the story and script was unimaginative, one-dimensional, and derivative. The basic theme was “evil corporation rapes noble natives.” And while that is a valid theme, it was done without the least bit of subtlety, complexity, or human ambiguity. The basic story was taken right from Dances with Wolves. And how many (thousands of) times have we seen a final battle scene that comes down to a battle between the hero and the anti-hero that goes through various incredible stages — fighting on a flying airplane, in the trees, on the ground, etc? And (spoiler alert) how predictable was it that the heroine would pull herself free at the last second and save the day?

None of the creatures were especially creative. The flying battles were like Harry Potter’s Quidditch, and the flying birds were derivative of Potter creatures, including mastering flying on the back of big bird creatures. There was some concept of networked intelligence but it was not especially coherent. The philosophy was the basic Hollywood religion about the noble cycle of life.

The movie was fundamentally anti-technology. Yes, it is true, as I pointed out above, that the natives use tools, but these are not the tools we associate with modern technology. And it is true that the Sigourney Weaver character and her band of scientists intend to help the Na’vi with their human technology (much like international aid workers might do today in developing nations), but we never actually see that happen. I got the sense that Cameron was loath to show modern technology doing anything useful. So even when Weaver’s scientist becomes ill, the Na’vi attempt to heal her only with the magical life force of the tree of life.

In Cameron’s world, Nature is always wise and noble, which indeed it can be, but he fails to show its brutal side. The only thing that was brutal, crude, and immoral in the movie was the “advanced” technology. Of course, one could say that it was the user of the technology that was immoral (the evil corporation), but that is the only role for technology in the world of Avatar.

In addition to being evil, the technology of the Avatar world of over 100 years from now is also weaker than nature, so the rhinoceros-like creatures are able to defeat the tanks circa 2100. It was perhaps a satisfying spectacle to watch, but how realistic is that? The movie shows the natural creatures communicating with each other with some kind of inter-species messaging and also showed the tree of life able to remember voices. But it is actually real-world technology that can do those things right now. In the Luddite world of this movie, the natural world should and does conquer the brutish world of technology.

In my view, there is indeed a crudeness to first-industrial-revolution technology. The technology that will emerge in the decades ahead will be altogether different. It will enhance the natural world while it transcends its limitations. Indeed, it is only through the powers of exponentially growing info, bio, and nano technologies that we will be able to overcome the problems created by first-industrial-revolution technologies such as fossil fuels. This idea of technology transcending natural limitations was entirely lost in Cameron’s vision. Technology was just something crude and immoral, something to be overcome, something that Nature does succeed in overcoming.

It was visually pleasing; although even here I thought it could have been better. Some of the movement of the blue natives was not quite right and looked like the unrealistic movement one sees of characters in video games, with jumps that show poor modeling of gravity.

The ending (spoiler alert) was a complete throwaway. The Na’vi defeat the immoral machines and their masters in a big battle, but if this mineral the evil corporation was mining is indeed worth a fortune per ounce, they would presumably come back with a more capable commander. Yet we hear Jake’s voice at the end saying that the mineral is no longer needed. If that’s true, then what was the point of the entire battle?

The Na’vi are presented as the ideal society, but consider how they treat their women. The men get to “pick” their women, and Jake is offered to take his choice once he earns his place in the society. Jake makes the heroine his wife, knowing full well that his life as a Na’vi could be cut off at any moment. And what kind of child would they have? Well, perhaps these complications are too subtle for the simplistic Avatar plot.

It is a refreshing fact that the prospects for survival of the human race are substantially higher if we live on two worlds, instead of just the current one, Earth. The moon, say, or Venus – every extraterrestrial body poses unique technical challenges to colonization, and nearly all are at least potentially habitable (in theory). Survival prospects climb higher for three worlds, higher still for four… The more worlds we colonize, the more likely a colony on at least one of them will still exist at any given moment in future history. It’s like flipping quarters: the more you flip, the more likely at least one of them will come up heads – the probability calculations are the same.

Last time: Mercury. This time: Venus.

Colonizing Venus: Huh?

There is a surprising undercurrent of interest in colonizing Venus, even though a less likely place for it could hardly be imagined. As of this writing, Google notes over 15x more hits on the query “colonizing Venus” than on “colonizing Mercury” (bleak though it is, Mercury is far more hospitable!). Even the query “colonizing Earth” fails to register even twice as many hits as “colonizing Venus,” though the number (billions) of those actually colonizing Earth greatly exceeds the number (zero) colonizing Venus.

Although Venus is about 2x as far from the sun as Mercury, therefore receiving only about 1/(2 x 2)=1/4 the sunlight intensity (the so-called “inverse square” law), Venus is actually hotter than Mercury, because it suffers from a major greenhouse effect. Like Earth but much more severely, it is due in significant degree to the carbon dioxide in its atmosphere. But Venus has a lot more carbon dioxide than Earth. The greenhouse effect makes its surface a fairly steady 860° F. That’s hot. Sending global warming skeptic spokespersons and their fowl to visit Venus would really cook their goose!

Fans of Venusian colonization – from whose ranks would presumably come the necessary volunteers – could find Earth-like temperatures and pressures about 30 miles above the surface. . . hence, the city-in-a-giant-balloon concept. A 1-mile diameter balloon containing an Earth-like atmosphere would generate about 3 million tons of lift in the denser, carbon dioxide-rich Venusian atmosphere at an altitude of 30 miles up, where temperatures and pressures are pleasant for us humans. That’s enough lift to carry a reasonably sized self-sustaining colony if, in its construction, the balloon could be made light enough. Best of luck! Just don’t fall out, because a 30 mile drop into dense, superheated gases is nothing to sneeze at.

Reference

“A 1-mile diameter balloon…would generate about 3 million tons of lift in the… Venusian atmosphere.” Derived from G. A. Landis, Colonization of Venus, Proceedings of the Space Technology and Applications International Forum (STAIF), Albuquerque, Feb. 2-6, 2003. ISBN 0-7354-0114-4. Http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20030022668_2003025525.pdf.

Danila Medvedev asked me to make a list of actual projects that can reduce the likelihood of global catastrophe.

EDITED: This list reflects only my personal opinion and not opinion of LF. Suggeted ideas are not final but futher discussion on them is needed. And these ideas are mutual independed.

1. Create the book “Guide to the restoration of civilization”, which describe all the necessary knowledge of hunting, industry, mining, and all the warnings about the risks for the case of civilization collapse.Test its different sections on volunteers. Print the book in stone / metal / other solid media in many copies throughout the world. Bury treasure with the tools / books / seeds in different parts of the world. 1-100 million USD. Reduction of probability of extinction (assuming that real prior probability is 50% in XXI century): 0.1%.
2. Collect money for the work of Singularity Institute in creating a Friendly AI. They need 3 million dollars. This project has a maximum ratio of the cost-impact. That is, it can really increase the chances of survival of humanity at about 1 percent. (This is determined by the product of estimates of the probabilities of events – the possibility of AI, what SIAI will solve this problem, the fact that it chooses the problem first, and that it solves the problem of friendliness, and the fact that the money they have will be enough.)
3. Krisave in the ice of Antarctica (the temperature of -57 C, in addition, you can create a stable region of lower temperature by use of liquid nitrogen which would be pumped and cooled it) a few people, so that if on earth there another advanced civilization, it could revive them. cost is several million dollars. Another project on the preservation of human knowledge in the spirit of the proposed fund by LongNow titanium discs with recorded information.
4. Send human DNA on the moon in the stable time capsule. Several tens of millions of dollars. You can also send the criopreserved human brain. The idea here is that if mankind would perish, then someday the aliens arrive and revive people based on these data. Expenses is 20-50 million dollars, the probability of success of 0.001%. Send human DNA in space in other ways.
5. Accelerated development of universal vaccines. Creation of the world’s reserves of powerful means of decontamination in the event of a global epidemic, the stockpiling antvirus drugs and vaccines to the majority of known viruses, which would be enough for a large part of humanity. Establishment of virus monitoring and instant diagnosis (test strips). Creation and production of many billions of pieces of advanced disinfecting tools such as personal UV lamps, nanotech dressing for the face, gloves, etc. The billions or hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Creating personal stockpiles of food and water at each house for a month. Development of supply system with no contact of people with one another. Jump to slow global transport (ships) in the event of a pandemic. Training of medical personnel and the creation of spare beds in hospitals. Creating and testing on real problems huge factories, which in a few weeks can develop and produce billions of doses of vaccines. Improvement of legislation in the field of quarantine. There are also risks. Increase the probability of survival 2-3 percent.
6. Creating a self-contained bunker with a supply of food for several decades and with the constant “crews”, able to restore humanity. About $ 1 billion. Save those types of resources that humanity could use the post-apocalyptic stage for recovery.
7. The creation of scientific court for Hadron Collider and other potentially dangerous projects, in which the theoretical physicist will be paid large sums of money for the discovery of potential vulnerabilities.
8. Adaptation of the ISS function for bunker in case of disasters on Earth – the creation of the ISS series of additional modules, which may support the existence of the crew for 10 years. Cost is tens of billions of dollars.
9. Creation of an autonomous self-sustaining base on the Moon. At the present level of technology – about $ 1 trillion or more. Proper development of strategy of space exploration would cheapen it – that is, investments in new types of engines and cheap means of delivery. Increase survival by 1 percent. (But there are also new risks).
10. The same is true on Mars. Several trillion. Increase survival of 1-2 per cent.
11. Creating star nuclear Ark ship- – tens of trillions of dollars. Increase survival of 1-2 per cent.
12. (The following are items for which are not enough money, but political will is also needed.) Destruction of rogue states and the establishment of a world state. 10 percent increase in survival. However, the high risks in the process.
13. Creating a global center for rapid response to global risks. Something like Special Forces or the Ministry of Emergency Situations, which can throw on the global risks. Enable it to instant action, including the hostilities, as well as intelligence. Giving its veto on the dangerous experiments. Strengthening of civil defense in the field.
14. The ban on private science (in the sense in the garage) and the creation of several centers of certified science (science town with centralized control of security in the process) with a high level of funding of breakthrough research. In the field of biotechnology, nuclear technology, artificial intelligence and nano. This will help prevent the dissemination of knowledge of mass destruction, but it will not stop progress. It is only after the abolition of nation states. A few percent increase in survival. These science towns can freely exchange technical information between themselves, but do not have the right to release it into the outside world.
15. The legislation required the duplication of a vital resource and activities – which would make impossible the collapse of civilization in a domino effect on failure at one point. The ban on super complex system of social organization, whose behavior is unpredictable and too prone to a domino effect, and replace them on the linear repetitive production system – that is, opposition to economic globalization.
16. Certification and licensing researchers in bio, nano, AI and nuclear technologies. Legislative requirement to check all their own and others’ inventions for the global risks associated with them, and the commitment to develop both a means of protection in the event of their inventions go out of control.
17. Law on raising intelligence of people half the population of fertilization from a few hundred of the best fathers in terms of intelligence and common sense and dislike of the risks. (Second half of the breed in the usual manner to maintain genetic diversity, the project is implemented without violence due to cash payments.) Plus education reform, where the school is replaced by a system of training, which given the important role of good sense and knowledge of logic.
18. Limitation of capitalist competition as the engine of the economy, because it leads to an underestimation of risk in the long term.
19. Leading investment in the field like nanotechnology breakthrough in the best and most critical facilities, to quickly slip dangerous period.
20. The growth of systems of information control and surveillance of the total, plus the certification data in them, and pattern recognition. Control of the Internet and the personal authorization for network logons. Continuous monitoring of all persons who possess potentially dangerous knowledge.
This could be creating a global think tank from the best experts on global risks and the formulation of their objectives to develop a positive scenario. Thus it is necessary to understand which way to combine these specialists would be most effective, so A) they do not eat each other because of different ideas and feelings of their own importance. B) that it does not become money feedbox. B) but that they received money for it, which would allow them to concentrate fully on this issue. That is, it should be something like edited journal, wiki, scientific trial or predictions market. But the way of association should not be too exotic, as well as exotic ways should be tested on less important matters.
However, the creation of accurate and credible for all models of the global risk would reduce by at least twice the probability of global catastrophe. And we are still at the stage of creating such a model. Therefore, how to create models and ways of authentication are now the most important, though, may have already been lost.
I emphasize that the main problems of global risks lies within the scope of knowledge, rather than to the sphere of action. That is the main problem that we do not know where we should prepare, not that we do not have instrument of defence. Risks are removed by the knowledge and expertise.
Implementation of these measures is technically and economically possible and could reduce the chance of extinction in the XXI century, in my estimation, 10 times.

Any ideas or missed projects?

It is a refreshing fact that the prospects for survival of the human race are substantially higher if we live on two worlds, instead of just the current one, Earth. The moon, say, or Mercury – every extraterrestrial body poses unique technical challenges to colonization, and nearly all are at least potentially habitable (in theory). Survival prospects climb higher for three worlds, higher still for four… The more worlds we colonize, the more likely a colony on at least one of them will still exist at any given moment in future history. It’s like flipping quarters: the more quarters you flip, the more likely at least one of them will land heads – the probability calculations are the same.

Let’s start near the sun and work our way out.

Colonizing Mercury: the major roadblocks and their solutions. Mercury is the planet closest to the sun, and we begin by giving our putative future settlement a name – Mercuria. To found Mercuria, the basic problems of heat and vacuum need to be solved, because Mercury is close to the sun and has no atmosphere. These problems apply both to the trip there and to the colony itself. Space ships of course solve the vacuum problem nicely by providing an airtight enclosure to live in. Appropriate shielding, including a thin and light reflective coating can in principle solve the heat problem for the craft. Given such a ship it seems natural, after landing it on the planetary surface, to use it as the initial structure housing the colony itself. Later, larger domes can be constructed and underground caves dug.

Some places on the planet are better prospects than others for placing our new community of Mercuria. Water is good to have, for us humans. Luckily water ice is present on the Mercurian surface, so Mercuria should naturally be located there. You might wonder how a planetary surface that regularly reaches around 800 degrees fahrenheit could contain ice – well, there are craters near the poles that are in perpetual shadow, because sunlight hits the pole areas at very oblique angles, shading low points in the craters. Without an atmosphere to provide a hot wind from the mid-day 800° F places into the shaded craters, these craters stay extremely cold. A good place to build Mercuria would be where ice is present in the bottoms of these craters.

Water ice is good to have nearby, yet it wouldn’t do to have Mercurians shiver or even freeze from the cold, especially being so near the sun and on such a hot planet. Warm clothing can be useful but will only go so far. Fortunately sunlight is intense outside the shadows and so the abundant solar energy could be tapped as a source of heat and light, both to warm the community of Mercuria and to support growing crops and algae in tanks.

A good place to collect solar energy would be one that stays lit 24/7 (or the Mercurian equivalent, where daytime generally lasts a year and each year is 88 Earth days long). Fortunately, the poles are not only relatively cool, they also have a few special spots that receive sunlight all or almost all of the time. This is nice because nighttime on Mercury is as long as daytime – another 88 Earth days. One wouldn’t want to be without power generation for that long. Earth’s moon has certain ever-sunny spots on certain mountain tops. They are called peaks of eternal light. The perfect spot for Mercuria would thus be in an icy “pit of eternal shadow” at the bottom of a crater, near a “peak of eternal light” at the top of a neighboring mountain.

Once the new community of Mercuria gets underway, population will likely begin a steady increase. Offshoot communities will soon be needed at other hospitable locations. I say soon because at a population increase rate of 2% per (Earth) year, 100 Mercurians will become a million in just 467 years – and ten billion in another 467 years. Successively less ideal locations will need to be colonized, using successively more well-developed methods for taming progressively harsher conditions. Assuming unlimited cheap solar energy is sufficiently enabling, Mercury is actually a great place to be. Underground caves could be drilled to house colonies because caves keep a steady temperature (on Mercury one would do this preferentially at locations with a human-friendly average surface temperature (well below the blistering heat of the Mercurian day but much warmer than the sub-freezing cold at night). Caves at less ideal locations could be made habitable by cooling them with powerful air conditioners or even warming them with heaters, as colonization technologies improve over the generations. Habitable areas of Mercury will soon become overpopulated, posing a bridge that will need to be crossed, just like on Earth.

Next time: Part 2 – Venus

Ever have a day when everything went wrong? You predicted you would have a normal day, but your alarm clock didn’t ring. Already running late, you couldn’t find your briefcase or backpack. Staggering out the door, your car won’t start. Later, you find out you missed a surprise meeting or maybe a quiz. It’s not you, it’s the whole prediction game…

#1 – Observer effect; #2 – Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle; #3 – Quantum tunneling; #4 – Butterfly effect (last time); #5 – External perturbations;#6 – Why care I…Existential unmeaning, or why predict if it doesn’t matter? (last time); #7 -Why care II…The “so what?” horizon (this time).

This post is the last in the series “Chasing the Future.” Next time will begin a new series, “Space Empire.”

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Chasing the Future: spoil sports of the prediction game #7 — Why care II…the “so what?” horizon

How much is the future of the human race worth? We’ll increase it later, but let’s start with an admittedly bargain basement $100. If you had $98.04 now, and put it in the bank at an interest rate of 2% per year, then in a year you’d have $100. That means getting $100 one year from now is only worth having $98.04 now, at least from a “Time Value of Money” perspective. Similarly, getting $100 in 2 years is only worth $96.12 now, because adding 2% to $96.12 gives $98.04 in one year, and compounding by adding another 2% gives $100 a year later. Extending this reasoning further, the human race in a modest 233 years would be worth just under a dollar now. In 466 years? Less than a penny.

It’s safe to say that a hundred dollars is an underestimate for the value of the entire human race, at least to us. So let’s increase it to a fair (or at least fairer) price. We might multiply the number of people by the value of the life of each and every person on the planet. What is the value of a person’s life? Economics (known as the dismal science, even to economists) tells us that the de facto value society places on a human life can actually be calculated, and courts of law in fact sometimes do such calculations. Answers vary, of course, but a few million dollars is often not that far off the mark. Multiply that by the number of people in the world and you get a biggish number, $100 quadrillion at the most for the value of the human race.

But wait – maybe you don’t trust the financial and legal wizards with something so important. After all, we already trust them with some pretty important things, and they periodically betray that, seriously screwing things up. Maybe we should use a higher number, just to be more sure we aren’t under-valuing ourselves.

How about a dollar for every single atom in the known universe? That’s around $10^80 (1 followed by 80 zeroes dollars)? It is a lot of cash. Way (way way) more than the United States has ever printed. There are literally not enough atoms in the known universe to even print that much money. Yet, if that is the value of humanity’s existence 9070 years from now, the value at present would be…$100! A scant 466 years after that? Less than a penny. How about the present value of humanity existing in a million years? The answer is a fraction of a penny so tiny that popular spreadsheets, calculators and computer programming languages can’t even state it. They typically just think it is 0, but if you must know, it’s actually about  $0.000[insert 8,513 more zeroes here]0001.

Wait – someone in the back has a question – yes? “But it’s not just the value in year on million we’re after. We also need to add in the value in year 1,000,001, year 1,000,002, etc., forever and ever. That’s got to add up, eventually.” Well, only a little, it turns out. The value now is “bigger,” but still less than $0.000[insert 8,511 more zeroes here]0001 even at a dollar an atom. The upshot of all this is that there is no good reason to care whether humanity exists in ten thousand or a million years, at least according to the time value of money approach favored by economists. Therefore there is no need to plan that far into the future, or go to trouble and expense to preserve the Earth indefinitely, or even to bother predicting that far ahead. The time value of money seems indeed to be a spoil sport of the prediction game.

Making it personal. Maybe you are still unconvinced. Such sophistry fails to capture the real facts at a gut, common sense level, you might say. Then consider the following argument.

You care about yourself, so you don’t want humanity to end while you are still alive (it might not be pleasant). You care about your children (or you will if you have any some day, or maybe you care about some or even all other children), so you don’t want humanity to end during their lifetimes, even if you are already gone. You probably even care (or will care) about your grandchildren because you will hopefully get to know them personally. Furthermore, you care about their grandchildren (if maybe a little less) simply because you care about your grandchildren, who care about theirs. But you have no gut level reason to care about the generations after that, because neither you, nor anyone you care about will ever know them. To put it another way, how much do you care about your grandparents’ grandparents, and how much did they care about you? Still care in some more abstract, dispassionate sense? Then see the previous paragraph.

Maybe you are a fast enough breeder, and long enough liver, that you’ll care about your great grandchildren and theirs, instead of just grandchildren. Yet that is still only 6 generations into the future, not even the biblical 7, a couple of centuries or so at the most. So relax, quit worrying, eat dessert first…. In particular, don’t bother with predicting past the 2-century “care horizon,” because there’s little point to it. The care (or “so what?”) horizon is, thus, our last spoil sport of the prediction game.

Postscript. Are you still fascinated by the future, despite all the arguments to the contrary? If so, you are like me. Read my next blog post series, “Space Empire: from Mercury to Pluto.”

References

“Time Value of Money”: TVM is standard terminology in the finance and accounting world.

“Well, only a little, it turns out.” There is a formula for calculating the sum of a geometrically decreasing, infinite series. Look it up (or play with a spreadsheet instead).

Because of the election cycle, the United States Congress and Presidency has a tendency to be short-sighted. Therefore it is a welcome relief when an organization such as the U.S. National Intelligence Council gathers many smart people from around the world to do some serious thinking more than a decade into the future. But while the authors of the NIC report Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World[1] understood the political situations of countries around the world extremely well, their report lacked two things:

1. Sufficient knowledge about technology (especially productive nanosystems) and their second order effects.

2. A clear and specific understanding of Islam and the fundamental cause of its problems. More generally, an understanding of the relationship between its theology, technological progress, and cultural success.
These two gaps need to be filled, and this white paper attempts to do so.

Technology
Christine Peterson, the co-founder and vice-president of the Foresight Nanotech Institute, has said “If you’re looking ahead long-term, and what you see looks like science fiction, it might be wrong. But if it doesn’t look like science fiction, it’s definitely wrong.” None of Global Trends 2025 predictions look like science fiction, though perhaps 15 years from now is not long-term (on the other hand, 15 years is not short-term either).

The authors of Global Trends 2025 are wise in the same way that Socrates was wise: They admit to possibly not knowing enough about technology: “Many stress the role of technology in bringing about radical change and there is no question it has been a major driver. We—as others—have oftentimes underestimated its impact. (p. 5).”

Predicting the development and total impact of technology more than a few years into the future is exceedingly difficult. For example, of all the science fiction writers who correctly predicted a landing on the Moon, only one obscure writer predicted that it would be televised world-wide. Nobody would have believed, much less predicted, that we wouldn’t return for more than 40 years (and counting).

Other than orbital mechanics and demographics, there has been nothing more certain in the past two centuries than technological progress.[2] So it is perplexing that the report claims (correctly) that “[t]he pace of technology will be key [in providing solutions to energy, food, and water constraints],” (p. iv) but it then does not adequately examine the solutions pouring out of labs all over the world. To the authors’ credit, they foresaw that nanofibers and nanoparticles will increase the supply of clean water. In addition, they foresaw that nuclear bombs and bioweapons will become easier to manufacture. However, the static nanostructures they briefly discuss are only the first of four phases of nanotechnology maturation—they will be followed by active nanodevices, then nanomachines, and finally productive nanosystems. Ignoring this maturation of nanotechnology will lead to significant under-estimates of future capabilities.

If the pace of technological development is key, then on what factors does it depend?

The value of history is that it helps us predict the future. We should therefore consider the following questions while looking backwards as far as we wish to look forward:

Where were thumb drives 15 years ago? My twenty dollar 8GB thumb drive would have cost $20,000 and certainly wouldn’t have fit on my keychain. How powerful will my cell phone be 15 years from now? What are the secondary impacts of throwaway supercomputers?
In 1995 the Internet had six million hosts. There are now over 567 million hosts and 1.4 billion users. At this linear rate, in 15 years there will be a trillion users, most of them automated machines, and many of them mobile.
In 1995 there were over 10 million cell phone users in the USA; now there are around 250 million. Globally, the explosion was significantly larger, with over 2.4 billion current cell phone users. What will the effect be of a continuation of smart, mobile interconnectedness?
The World Wide Web was born in 1993 with the release of the Mosaic browser. Where was Google in 1995? Three years in the future. What else can we have besides the world’s information at our fingertips?
The problem with using recent history to guide predictions about the future is that the pace of technological development is not linear but exponential—and exponential growth is often surprising: recall the pedagogical examples of the doubling grains of rice (from India[3] and China[4]) or lily pads on the pond (from France[5]). In exponential growth, the early portion of the curve is fairly flat, while the latter portion is very steep.

Therefore, to predict technological development accurately, we should probably look back more than 15 years; perhaps we should be looking back 150 years. Exactly how far we should look back farther is difficult to determine—some metrics have not changed at all despite technological advances. For example, the speed limit is still 65 MPH, and there are no flying cars commercially available. On the other hand, cross-country airline flights are still the same price they were thirty years ago, despite inflation. Moore’s Law of electronics has had a doubling time of about 18 months, but some technologies have grown much slower. Others, such as molecular biology, have progressed significantly faster.

More important would be qualitative changes that are difficult to quantify. For example, the audio communication of telephones has a measurable bit rate greater than that of the telegraph system, but the increased level of understanding communicated by the emotion in people’s voices is much greater than can be quantified by bit rate. Similarly, search engines have qualitatively increased the value of the Internet’s TC/IP data communication capabilities. Some innovators have pushed Web 2.0 in different directions, but it’s not clear what the qualitative benefits might be, other than better-defined relationships between pieces of data. What happens with Web 3.0? Cloud computing? How many generations of innovation will it take to get to wisdom, or distributed sentience? It may be interesting to speculate about these matters, but since it often involves new science (or even new metaphysics), it is not possible to predict events with any accuracy.

Inventor and author Ray Kurzweil has made a living out of correctly timing his inventions. Among other things, he correctly predicted the growth of the Internet when it was still in its infancy. His method is simple: he plots data on a logarithmic graph, and if he gets a straight line, then he has discovered something that grows exponentially. His critics claim that his data is cherry-picked, but there are too many examples in a wide variety of technologies. The important point is why Kurzweil’s “law of accelerated returns” works, and what its limitations are: it applies to technologies for which information is an essential component. This phenomenon, made possible because information does not follow many of the rules of physics (i.e. lack of mass, negligible energy and copying costs, etc.) partially explains Moore’s Law in electronics, and also the exponential progress in molecular biology that began to occur once we understood enough of its informational basis.

Technology Breakthroughs
The “Technology Breakthroughs by 2025″ foldout matrix in the NIC report (pp. 47-49) is a great start on addressing the impact of technology, but barely a start. It is woefully conservative–some of the items listed in the report have already been proven in labs. For example, “Energy Storage” (in terms of batteries) has already been improved by ten-fold[6] (Caveat: the authors correctly point out that there is a delay between invention and wide adoption; usually about a decade for non-information based product—but 2019 is still considerably before 2025.) Hardly any other nanotech-enhanced products were examined, and they should have been.[7]

The ten specific technologies represented, and their drivers, barriers, and impact were well considered, but there were no clear criteria for picking these ten technologies. The report should have made clear that the most important technologies are those that can destroy or reboot the world’s economy or ecosystem. Almost as important are technologies that have profound effects on government, education, transportation, and family life. Past examples of such technologies include the nuclear bomb, the automobile, the telephone, the birth control pill, the personal computer, the internet, and search engines.

Though there were no clear criteria for choosing critical technology; however the report correctly included the world-changing technologies of ubiquitous computing, clean water, energy storage, biogerontechnology (life extension/age amelioration), and service robotics.

The inclusion of clean coal and biofuels is understandable given a linear projection of current trends. However, trends are not always linear—especially in information-dependent fields. Coal-based energy generation is dependent on the well-understood Carnot cycle, and is currently close to the theoretical maximum. Therefore, new knowledge about coal or the Carnot cycle will not help us in any significant way—especially since no new coal is being made. In contrast, photovoltaic solar power is currently expensive, inefficient, and underused. This is partially because of our lack of detailed understanding of the physics of photon capture and electron transfer, and partially because of our current inability to control the nanostructures that can perform those operations. As we develop more powerful scientific tools at the nanoscale, and as our nanomanufacturing capabilities grows, the price of solar power will drop significantly. This is why global solar power has resulted in exponential growth (with a two-year doubling time) for the past decade or so. This also means that in the next five years, we will likely reach a point at which it will be obvious that no other energy source can match photovoltaic solar power.

It is puzzling why exoskeleton human strength augmentation made the report’s list. First, we already commercialized compact fork-lifts and powered wheelchairs, so further improvements (in the form of exoskeletons) will necessarily be incremental and therefore will have little impact. Second, an exoskeleton is simply a sophisticated fork-lift/wheelchair and not true human strength augmentation, so it will not elicit the revulsion that might be generated by injecting extra IGF-1 genes or implanting electro-bionic actuators.

While being smarter is certainly a desirable condition, many forms of human cognitive augmentation elicit fear and loathing in many people (as the report recognizes). In terms of potential game-changing potential, it certainly deserves to be included as a disruptive technology. But this is a prediction of new science, not new engineering, and as such, should be labeled as “barely plausible.” If human cognitive augmentation is included, so should other, very high impact but very highly unlikely scenarios such as “gray goo” (i.e. out-of-control self-replicating nanobots), alien invasion, and human-directed meteor strikes.

What should have made the list are many forms of productive nanosystems, especially DNA Origami,[8] Bis-proteins,[9] Patterned Atomic Layer Epitaxy,[10] and Diamondoid Mechanosynthesis.[11],[12],[13]. Other technologies that should have been on the list include replicating 3D printers (such as Rep-Rap[14]), the weather machine,[15] Solar Power Satellites (which DoD is currently investigating[16]), Utility Fog,[17] and the Space Pier.[18]

Technologically Sophisticated Terrorism
The report correctly notes that the diffusion of technologies and scientific knowledge will increase the chance that terrorist or other malevolent groups might acquire and employ biological agents or nuclear devices (p. ix). But this danger is seriously underestimated, given the exponential growth of technology. Also underestimated is the future ability to clean up hazardous wastes of all types (including actinides, most notably uranium and plutonium) using nanomembranes and highly selective adsorbents. This is significant, especially in the case of Self-Assembled Monolayers on Mesoporous Supports (SAMMS) developed at Pacific Northwest National Labs,[19] because anything that can remove parts per billion concentrations of plutonium and uranium from water can also concentrate it. As the price drops for this filtration technology, and for nuclear enrichment tools,[20],[21] eventually small groups and even individuals will be able to collect enough fissile material for nuclear weapons.

The partial good news is that while these concentrating technologies are being developed, medical technology will also be progressing, making severe radiation exposure significantly more survivable. Unfortunately, the end result is an increasing likelihood that nuclear weapons will be used as “ordinary” tactical weapons.

The Distribution of Technology
While it is true that in the energy sector it has taken “an average of 25 years for a new production technology to become widespread,” (p. viii) there are a few things to keep in mind:

Informational technologies spread much faster than non-informational technologies. The explosion of the internet, web browsers, and the companies that depend on them have occurred in just a few years, if not months. Even now, for example, updates for the Firefox Mozilla browser are spread worldwide in days. This increase in distribution will occur because productive nanosystems will make atoms as easy to manipulate as bits.

Reducing monopolies and their attended inefficiencies is necessary. Even sufficiently powerful technologies have trouble emerging in the face of monopolies. The report mentions “selling energy back to the grid,” but understates the value that such a distributed energy network would have on increasing our nation’s security. The best part about building such a robust energy system is that it does not require large amounts of government investment – only the placement of an innovation-friendly policy that mandates that utilities buy energy at fair rates.

Mandating Gasoline/Ethanol/Methanol-flexibility (GEM) and/or electric hybrid flexibility in automobiles could break the oil cartel.[22] This simple governmental mandate would have huge political implications with little cost impact on consumers (a GEM requirement would only raise the cost of cars by $100-$300).

Miscellaneous Technology Observations
The 2025 report states that “Unprecedented economic growth, coupled with 1.5 billion more people, will put pressure on resources—particularly energy, food, and water—raising the specter of scarcities emerging as demand outstrips supply (p. iv).”

This claim is not necessarily true. The carrying capacity of an arbitrary volume of biome is dependent on technology—increased wealth can pay for advanced technologies. However, war, injustice, and ignorance drastically raise the effort required to avoid scarcities.

The report listed climate change as a possible key factor (p. v) and stated that “Climate change is expected to exacerbate resource scarcities” (p. viii). But even the most pessimistic predictions don’t expect much to happen by 2025. And there is evidence that by 2025, we will almost certainly have the power to stop it with trivial effort.[23], [24]

The Foresight Nanotech Institute and Lux Research have also identified clean water as being one of the areas in which technology will have a major impact. There are a number of different nanomembranes that are very promising, and the Global Trends 2025 recognizes them as being probable successes.

The Global Trends 2025 report identified Ubiquitous Computing, RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), and the “Internet of Things” as improving efficiency in supply chains, but more importantly, as possibly integrating closed societies into the global community (p. 47). SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) which is used to run everything from water treatment plants to nuclear power plants, is a harbinger of the “Internet of Things”, but the news is not always good. An “Internet of Things” will simply give more opportunities for hackers and terrorists to do harm. (SCADA manuals have been found in Al-Qaeda safe houses.)

Wealth depends on Technology
The 2025 report predicts that “the unprecedented transfer of wealth roughly from West to East now under way will continue for the foreseeable future… First, increases in oil and commodity prices have generated windfall profits for the Gulf states and Russia. Second, lower costs combined with government policies have shifted the locus of manufacturing and some service industries to Asia.”(p. vi)

But why would that transfer continue? If the current exponential growth of solar power continues, then within five years it will be obvious that oil is dead. Some of the more astute Arab leaders understand this; one Saudi prince said, “The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones, and the oil age won’t end because we run out of oil.”

China and India have gained a lion’s share of the world’s manufacturing, but is there any reason to believe that this will continue? Actually, there is one reason it might: most of the graduate students at most American Universities are foreign-born, and manufacturing underlies a vital part of the real wealth of a society; this in turn depends on its access to science and engineering. On the other hand, many of those foreign graduate students remain in the United States to become U.S. citizens. Even those who return to their home countries maintain personal relationship with American citizens, and generally spread positive stories about their experiences in the U.S., leading to more graduate students coming to the United States to settle.

The prediction that the United States will become a less dominant power is a sobering one for Americans. However, of the reasons listed in the report (advances by other countries in Science and Technology (S&T), expanded adoption of irregular warfare tactics, proliferation of long-range precision weapons, and growing use of cyber warfare attacks) the only significant item is S&T (Science and Technology). This is not only because S&T is the foundation for the other reasons listed, but also because it can often provide a basis for defending against new threats.

S&T is not only the foundation of military might, more importantly it is a foundation of economic might. However our economy rests not only on S&T, but also on economic policy. And unfortunately, everyone’s crystal ball is cloudy in this area. Historically , our regulated capitalism seems to be the basis for much of our wealth, and has been partially responsible for funding S&T. This is important because while human intelligence and ingenuity are scattered relatively evenly among the human race,[25] successful inventions are not. This is because it generally requires money to turn money into knowledge—that is research. After the research is done, the process of innovation—turning knowledge into money—begins, and is very dependent on the surrounding economic and political environment. At any rate, the relationship between the technology and economics is not clear, and certainly needs closer examination.

Wealth depends on Technology depends on Theology
The 2025 report contained some unspecified assumptions regarding economics, without defining what real wealth is, and on what it depends. At first glance, wealth is stored human labor—this was Marx’s assumption, and is slightly correct. However, one skilled person can do significantly more with good tools, hence the conclusion that tools are the lever of riches (hence Mokyr’s book of the same name[26]).

But tools are not enough. As Zhao (Peter) Xiao, a former Communist Party member and adviser to the Chinese Central Committee, put it:

“From the ancient time till now everybody wants to make more money. But from history we see only Christians have a continuous nonstop creative spirit and the spirit for innovation… The strong U.S. economy is just on the surface. The backbone is the moral foundation.” [27]

He goes on to explain that we are all made in the image and likeness of God, and are therefore His children, this means that:

The Rule of Law is not just something to cleverly avoid, but the means to happiness.
There is a constraint on unbridled and unjust capitalism.
People become rich by working hard to create real wealth, not by gaming the system—which creates waste and inefficiency. [28]

Xiao does not believe in “prosperity gospel” (i.e. send a televangelist $20 and God will make you rich). He understands that a economic system works more efficiently without false signals and other corruption—i.e. a nation will only have a prosperous economy if it has enough moral, law-abiding citizens. In addition, he may be hinting that the idea of Imago Dei (“Image of God”) explains how human intelligence drives Moore’s Law in the first place—if God is infinite, then it makes sense that His images will be able to endlessly do more with less.

Islam
The 2025 report mentions Islam fairly often but does not analyze it in depth. Oddly enough, the United States has been at war with Islamic nations longer than any other; starting with the Barbary pirates. So it behooves us to understand Islam to see if there are any fundamental issues that might be the root cause of some of these wars. Many Americans have denigrated Islam as a barbaric 6th century relic, not realizing the Judeao-Christian roots of this nation go back even farther (and are just as barbaric at times). Peter Kreeft has done an excellent job of examining the strengths of Islam, exhorting readers to learn from the followers of Mohammed.[29] But the purpose of this white paper is to investigate how Islamic beliefs hurt Muslims—and us.

There is no question that most Islamic nations have serious economic problems. Islamabad columnist Farrukh Saleem writes:

Muslims are 22 percent of the world population and produce less than five percent of global GDP. Even more worrying is that the Muslim countries’ GDP as a percent of the global GDP is going down over time. The Arabs, it seems, are particularly worse off. According to the United Nations’ Arab Development Report: ‘Half of Arab women cannot read; One in five Arabs live on less than $2 per day; Only 1 percent of the Arab population has a personal computer, and only half of 1 percent use the Internet; Fifteen percent of the Arab workforce is unemployed, and this number could double by 2010; The average growth rate of the per capita income during the preceding 20 years in the Arab world was only one-half of 1 percent per annum, worse than anywhere but sub-Saharan Africa.’[30]

There are two possible reasons for the high rate of poverty in the Muslim world:

Diagnosis 1: Muslims are poor, illiterate, and weak because they have “abandoned the divine heritage of Islam”. Prescription: They must return to their real or imagined past, as defined by the Qur’an.

Diagnosis 2: Muslims are poor, illiterate, and weak because they have refused to change with time. Prescription: They must modernize technologically, governmentally, and culturally (i.e. start ignoring the Qur’an).[31]

Different Muslims will make different diagnosis, resulting in a continuation of the simultaneous rise of both secularized and fundamentalist Islam. This is the unexplained reason behind the 2025 report’s prediction that “the radical Salafi trend of Islam is likely to gain traction (p. ix).” While it is true that economics is an important causal factor, we must remember that economics are filtered through human psychology, which is filtered through human assumptions about reality (i.e. metaphysics and religion). The important question about Islam and nanotechnology is this: How will exponential increases in technology affect the answers of individual Muslims to the question raised above? One relatively easy prediction is that it will drive Muslims even more forcefully into both secularism and fundamentalism—with fewer adherents between them.

We must also address the underlying question: What is it about Islam beliefs that causes poverty? Global Trends 2025 points out that there is a significant correlation between the poverty of a nation and female literacy rates (p. 16). But the connection goes deeper than that.

A few hundred years ago, the Islam world was significantly ahead of Europe–technologically and culturally—but then Islamic leaders declared as heretics their greatest philosophers, especially Averroes (Ibn Rushd) who tried to reconcile faith and reason. Christianity struggled with the same tension between faith and reason, but ended up declaring as saints their greatest philosophers, most notably Thomas Aquinas. In addition, Christianity declared heretical those who derided reason, such as Tertulian, who mocked philosophy by asking “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem”. Reason is vital to science and technology. But the divorce between faith and reason in Islam is not a historical accident; just as it is not an accident in Christianity that the two are joined—these results are due to their respective theologies.

In Islam, the relationship between Allah and humans is a master/slave relationship, and this is reflected in everything–most painfully in the Islam concept of marriage and how women are treated as a result (hence the link between poverty and female literacy). This belief is rooted in more fundamental dogma regarding the absolute transcendence of Allah, which is also manifested in the Islamic attitude towards science. The practical result, as pointed out earlier, is economic poverty (documented in Mokyr’s The Lever to Riches, and recognized in the 2025 report (p. 13) where it points out that science and technology is related to economic growth). Pope Benedict pointed out that If Allah is completely transcendent, then there is no rational order in His creation[32]—therefore there would be little incentive trying to discover it. This is the same reason that paganism did not develop science and technology. Aristotle started science by counterbalancing Plato’s rationalism with empiricism, but they (and Socrates) had to jettison most of their pagan beliefs in order to lay these foundations of science. And it still required many centuries to get to Bacon and the scientific method.

The trouble with most Americans is that we have no sense of history. Islam has been at war (mostly with Judaism and Christianity) for millennia (the pagans in their path didn’t last long enough to make any difference). There is little indication that anything will change by 2025. Israel and its Arab neighbors have hated each other ever since Isaac and Ishmael, almost 4000 years ago (if the Qur’an is to be believed in Sura 19:54). The probability that the enmity between these ancient enemies will cool in the next 15 years is infinitesimally small. To make matters worse, extracts of statements by Osama Bin Laden indicate that the 9/11 attack occurred because:

America is the great Satan. Actually, many Christian Evangelicals and traditional Catholics and Jews sympathize with Bin Laden’s accusation in this case (while deploring his methods), noting our cultural promotion of pornography, abortion, and homosexuality.
American bases are stationed in Saudi Arabia (the home of Mecca), which many Muslims see as a blasphemy. It is difficult for Americans to understand why this is so bad—we even protect the right to burn and desecrate our own flag.
Our support for Israel. Since Israel is one of the few democracies in the Mideast, and since it’s culture doesn’t raise suicide bombers, it seems quite reasonable that we should support it—it’s the right thing to do. As an appeal to self-interest, we can always remember that over the past 105 years, 1.4 billion Muslims have produced only eight Nobel Laureates while a mere 14 million Jews have produced 167 Nobel Laureates.

Given the history of Islam’s relationship with all other belief systems, the outlook looks gloomy. If the past 1400 years are any guide, Islam will continue to be at war with Paganism, Atheism, Hinduism, Judaism, and Christianity—both in hot wars of conquest and in psychological battles for the hearts and minds of the world.[33]

Muslim Demographics
The 2025 report made a wise decision in covering demographic issues, since they are predictable. But it did not investigate the causal sources (personal and cultural beliefs) of crucial demographic trends. The report writes that “the radical Salafi trend of Islam is likely to gain traction” in “those countries that are likely to struggle with youth bulges and weak economic underpinnings. (Page ix)”

This is certainly an accurate prediction. But what human beliefs lead to behavior that leads to youth bulges and weak economies? The answer is quite complex, partially because the Quran is not crystal clear on this issue. But generally “Muslim religiosity and support for Shari’a Law are associated with higher fertility” and that better education, higher wealth, and urbanization do not reduce Muslim fertility (as it does with other religions). The result is that while religious fundamentalism in Islam does not boost fertility as much as it does for Jewish traditionalists in Israel, it is still true that “fertility dynamics could power increased religiosity and Islamism in the Muslim world in the twenty-first century.”[34]

Other Practical Aspects of Islam Theology
One of the reasons the Western world is at odds with Islam is because of different views on freedom and virtue. Americans generally value freedom over virtue. In Islam, however, virtue is far more important than freedom, despite the fact that virtue requires an act of free will. In other words, Muslims don’t seem to realize that if good behavior is forced, then it is not really virtuous. Meanwhile, here in the USA we seem to have forgotten that vices enslave us—as demonstrated by addictions to drugs, gambling, and sex; we have forgotten that true freedom requires us to be virtuous—that we must bridle our passions in order to be truly free.

A disturbing facet of Islam is that it requires the death of an apostate. Theologically, this is because Allah is master, not father or spouse (as most often portrayed in the Bible), and submission to Allah is mandatory in Islam. While it is true that Christianity authorized the secular authorities to burn a few thousand heretics over two thousand years, these were in extreme situations of maximum irrationality that were fixed fairly quickly hundreds of years ago (often a single thoughtful bishop or priest stopped an outbreak). In contrast, fatwahs demanding the death penalty for apostates and heretics are still common in Islamic countries.[35]

Theology, Technological Progress, and Cultural Success
Religions do not make people stupid or cowardly. President Bush may have called the 9/11 Islamic terrorists cowardly, but they were not. They went to their deaths as bravely as any American soldier. Nor were they stupid—otherwise they never would have been able to pull off the most devastating terrorist attack on the U.S. in our relatively short history, cleverly devising a way to use our open society and our technology to maximal effect. But as individuals they were deluded, and their culture could not design or build jumbo jets; hence they used ours. This means that Islamic terrorists will be glad to use nanotechnological weapons as eagerly as nuclear ones—once they get their hands on them. The problem, of course, is that nano-enhanced weapons will be much easier to develop than nuclear ones.

Conclusion
Ever since the time of the Pilgrims, Americans have considered themselves citizens of a “bright, shining city on the hill” and much of the world agreed, with immigrants pouring in for three centuries to build the most powerful nation in history. Our representative democracy and loosely-regulated capitalism, regulated by individual consciences based on a Judeo-Christian foundation of rights and responsibilities, has been copied all over the world (at least superficially). But will this shining city endure?

It is the task of the U.S. National Intelligence Council to make sure that it does, and their effort to understand the future is an important step in that direction. Hopefully they will examine more closely the impact that technology, especially productive nanosystems, will have on political structures. In addition, they need to understand the theological underpinnings of Islam, and how it will affect the technological capabilities of Muslim nations.

Addendum
For a better government-sponsored report on how technology will affect us, see Toffler Associates’ Technology and Innovation 2025 at http://www.toffler.com/images/Toffler_TechAndInnRep1-09.pdf.

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[1] National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World http://www.dni.gov/nic/PDF_2025/2025_Global_Trends_Final_Report.pdf and www.dni.gov/nic/NIC_2025_project.html

[2] Earlier exceptions are rare, though technology has been lost occasionally—most notably 5th century Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, and 15th century China after the last voyage of Admiral Zeng He’s Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne.

[3] Singularity Symposium, Exponential Growth and the Legend of Paal Paysam. http://www.singularitysymposium.com/exponential-growth.html

[4] Ray Kurzweil, The Law of Accelerating Returns. March 7, 2001. http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1

[5] Matthew R. Simmons, Revisiting The Limits to Growth: Could The Club of Rome Have Been Correct, After All? (Part One). Sep 30 2000. http://www.energybulletin.net/node/1512 Note that technological optimists always quote the chess example, while environmental doomsayers always quote the lily pad example.

[6] High-performance lithium battery anodes using silicon nanowires, Candace K. Chan, Hailin Peng, Gao Liu, Kevin McIlwrath, Xiao Feng Zhang, Robert A. Huggins & Yi Cui, Nature Nanotechnology 3, 31 – 35 (2008). http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v3/n1/abs/nnano.2007.411.html

[7] See Nanotechnology’s biggest stories of 2008 http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16340-nanotechnologys-.....-2008.html and Top Ten Nanotechnology Patents of 2008 http://tinytechip.blogspot.com/2008/12/top-ten-nanotechnolog.....-2008.html

[8] Paul Rothemund. Folding DNA to create nanoscale shapes and patterns, Nature, V440N16. March 2006.

[9] Christian E. Schafmeister. The Building Blocks of Molecular Nanotechnology. Conference on Productive Nanosystems: Launching the Technology Roadmap. Arlington, VA. Oct. 9-10, 2007.

[10] John N. Randall. A Path to Atomically Precise Manufacturing. Conference on Productive Nanosystems: Launching the Technology Roadmap. Arlington, VA. Oct. 9-10, 2007.

[11] Ralph Merkle and Robert Freitas Jr., “Theoretical analysis of a carbon-carbon dimer placement tool for diamond mechanosynthesis,” Journal of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology. 3(August 2003):319-324; http://www.rfreitas.com/Nano/JNNDimerTool.pdf

[12] Robert A. Freitas Jr. and Ralph C. Merkle, A Minimal Toolset for Positional Diamond Mechanosynthesis, Journal of Computational and Theoretical Nanoscience. Vol.5, 760-861, 2008

[13] Jingping Peng, Robert. Freitas, Jr., Ralph Merkle, James Von Ehr, John Randall, and George D. Skidmore. Theoretical Analysis of Diamond Mechanosynthesis. Part III. Positional C2 Deposition on Diamond C(110) Surface Using Si/Ge/Sn-Based Dimer Placement Tools. Journal of Computational and Theoretical Nanoscience. Vol.3, 28-41, 2006. http://www.molecularassembler.com/Papers/JCTNPengFeb06.pdf

[14] Adrian Bowyer, et al. RepRap-Wealth without money. http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/WebHome

[15] John Storrs Hall, The Weather Machine. December 23, 2008, http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=2922

[16] National Security Space Office. Space-Based Solar Power As an Opportunity for Strategic Security: Phase 0 Architecture Feasibility Study. http://www.scribd.com/doc/8736624/SpaceBased-Solar-Power-Interim-Assesment-01

[17] John Storrs Hall, Utility Fog: The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of. http://autogeny.org/Ufog.html

[18] John Storrs Hall, The Space Pier: A hybrid Space-launch Tower concept. http://autogeny.org/tower/tower.html

[19] Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, SAMMS: Self-Assembled Monolayers on Mesoporous Supports. http://samms.pnl.gov/

[20] OECD Nuclear Energy Agency. Trends in the nuclear fuel cycle: economic, environmental and social aspects, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development 2001

[21] Mark Clayton. Will lasers brighten nuclear’s future? The Christian Science Monitor/ August 27, 2008. http://features.csmonitor.com/innovation/2008/08/27/will-las.....rs-future/

[22] Paul Werbos, What should we be doing today to enhance world energy security, in order to reach a sustainable global energy system? http://www.werbos.com/energy.htm See also Robert Zubrin, Energy Victory: Winning the War on Terror by Breaking Free of Oil. Prometheus Books. November 2007.

[23] John Storrs Hall, The weather machine. December 23, 2008, http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=2922

[24] Tihamer Toth-Fejel, A Few Lesser Implications of Nanofactories: Global Warming is the Least of our Problems, Nanotechnology Perceptions, March 2009.

[25] Exceptions would be small groups who were subject to selective pressure to increase intelligence, such as the Ashkenazi Jews.

[26] Joel Mokyr , The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford University Press, USA (April 9, 1992). http://www.amazon.com/Lever-Riches-Technological-Creativity-.....0195074777

[27] Zhao (Peter) Xiao, Market Economies With Churches and Market Economies Without Churches http://www.danwei.org/business/churches_and_the_market_econom.php

[28] ibid.

[29] Peter Kreeft, Ecumenical Jihad: Ecumenism and the Culture War, Ignatius Press (March 1996). More specifically, Kreeft points out that Muslims have lower rates of abortion, adultery, fornication, and sodomy; and higher rates of prayer and devotion to God. Kreeft then repeats the Biblical admonition that God blesses those who obey His commandments. For atheists and agnostics, it might be more palatable to think of it as evolution in action: If a group encourages behavior that reduces the number of capable offspring, then it is doomed.

[30] Farrukh Saleem, Muslims amongst world’s poorest weakest, illiterate: What Went Wrong. November 08, 2005 http://islamicterrorism.wordpress.com/2008/07/01/muslims-amo.....ent-wrong/

[31] ibid.

[32] Pope Benedict XVI. Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections. University of Regensburg, September 2006. http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2006.....rg_en.html

[33] Note that this report is not a critique of Muslim people—only their beliefs (though it may not feel that way to them).

[34] Kaufmann, E. P. , “Islamism, Religiosity and Fertility in the Muslim World,” Annual meeting of the ISA’s 50th Annual Convention: Exploring the Past, Anticipating the Future. New York, NY. Feb 13-15, 2009. http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p312181_index.html

[35] On the other hand (to put things in perspective), compared to the atheists Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, even the most deadly Muslims extremists are rank amateurs at mass murder. Perhaps that is why Communism has barely lasted two generations, while Islam has lasted fourteen centuries. You just can’t go around killing people.

Tihamer Toth-Fejel, MS
General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems
Michigan Research and Development Center