American history teachers praise the educational value of Billy Joel’s 1980s song ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’. His song is a homage to the 40 years of historical headlines since his birth in 1949.

Which of Joel’s headlines will be considered the most important a millennium from now?

This column discusses five of the most important, and tries to make the case that three of them will become irrelevant, while one will be remembered for as long as the human race exists (one is uncertain). The five contenders are:

The Bomb
The Pill
African Colonies
Television
Moonshot

Article

My previous column concentrated on the Hall Weather Machine[1], with a fairly technocentric focus. In contrast, this column is not technical at all, but considers the premise that if we don’t know our past, then we don’t know what our future will be.

American history teachers praise Billy Joel’s 1980s song ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ for its educational value. His song is a homage to the 40-years of historical headlines since his birth in 1949. Before reading further, go to http://yeli.us/Flash/Fire.html to hear it and to see the photographs that go with each phrase of the song.

Which of Joel’s headlines do you think will be most important, when considered by people a millennium from now? A thousand years is a long time.

Many of the popular figures Joel mentions from politics, entertainment, and sports have already begun to fade from living memory, so they are easy to dismiss. Similarly, which nation won which war will be remembered only by historians, though the genetic components of descendants affected by those wars will reverberate through the centuries. An interesting exercise would consider the most significant events of the eleventh century. English-speaking historians might mention the Battle of Hastings, but is Britain even a world power any longer? Where are the Byzantine, Ottoman, Toltec, and Holy Roman empires of a thousand years ago?

Note that there may be a difference between what most people 1,000 years from now will consider to be the most important and what may actually be the most important. In this case, just because the empires mentioned above are gone doesn’t necessarily mean they didn’t have a significant role in creating our present and our future — we may simply be unconscious of their effect.

I will consider a few possibilities before arguing for one headline that is certain to be remembered, rightfully so, ten thousand years from now — if not longer.

The Bomb

First, most thoughtful people would include the hydrogen-bomb. A few decades ago, almost everyone would have agreed wholeheartedly. At that time, the policy of Mutual Assured Destruction hung heavily over every life in the USSR and the United States (if not the world). With the USSR now gone, and Russia and USA not quite at each others throats, the danger from extinction via a full-out nuclear exchange may be lower. However, the danger of a nuclear attack that kills a few million people is actually more likely.

Up till now, for a nation to become a great power and thereby wield great influence, it needed the level of organization that depended on civilization. No matter how brutal their government or culture — such as Nazi Germany, Communist Soviet Union, or Ancient Rome — their organization depended on efficient education, competent administration, large-scale engineering, and the finer things in life — to motivate at least the elite. Even then, some of the benefit would trickle down as “a rising tide raises all boats”. Competent and educated slaves were a key to Roman Civilization, just as educated bureaucrats were essential to the Nazi and Soviet systems.

Now, however, we are getting into a situation in which atomic weapons give the edge to the stark-raving mad — anyone who is willing to use them. This situation could be most destructive to prosperous, open, humanistic, and civilized nations, because they may be less willing to give up their comfort and freedom to defend against this threat. It appears very likely that within a decade or less, any ragtag collection of pip-squeak lunatics will be able to level the greatest city on Earth, even if it is defended by the world’s strongest army. This is because the advances in nuclear enrichment technology (along with all technology) will make it easier for pip-squeak lunatics to acquire or manufacture nuclear bombs.

That being said, however, it is also true that really advanced technology — specifically privacy-invasive information technology, perhaps in the form of throwaway supercomputers in a massive network of dustcams — might stop the pip-squeak lunatics before they can build and deploy their nuclear bombs.

In addition, another decade of technological development will result in nanobots. By the way, this isn’t just my prediction (the defense of which is a subject of a future column), but also the opinion of inventive dreamers such as Raymond Kurzweil, and of conservative achievers such as Lockheed executives. The development of nanobots means that cellular repair of radiation damage may also become possible (though the problems of controlling trillions of nanobots and of how to detect and repair radiation damage are additional separate and very difficult engineering and biological issues). Michael Flynn examined some of the nuclear strategic issues of this nanotech application in his short story “Washer at the Ford”.[2]

The problem is that there may be a five year window during which our only defense against nuclear-bomb-wielding pip-squeak lunatics will be privacy-invasive information technology, run by the FBI, NSA, and CIA, and their counterparts around the world. Yes, you should be worried, but probably not for the reasons you may think. The danger is not as much that these government agencies may infringe on your rights, but that the very nature of their jobs means that they won’t be able to apply Kranstowitz’s weapon of openness[3] against those who want us dead. To make matters worse, the U.S. intelligence agencies will likely follow the complex laws[3] that protect the privacy of U.S. persons[4] — to the exclusion of catching the nuclear lunatics. This is one reason that FBI, NSA, and CIA directors get new gray hairs every night.

Another problem is that the pip-squeak lunatics will also be able to buy cheap, privacy-invasive information (and other) technologies. Petro-dollars, peasant-made knickknacks, and mining rights have given ethically-challenged individuals in third-world countries astonishing wealth. Many of the world’s richest men live in the world’s poorer countries.[5] They have also learned cruel and clever means by which to keep their peasants down. The question is whether or not they can run the expensive technology they bought with their wealth and power. Buying cheap technology is one thing, but controlling it requires skilled people, and skilled people are more difficult to control. Can the dictators keep a small cadre of trusty elites to run the technology? North Korea and Iran are interesting (and rather scary) test cases at the moment.

Another wild card is that while some dictatorships have become more totalitarian, there comes a point at which the downtrodden peasants (and students, and factory workers, and shopkeepers) don’t have anything to lose but their miserable lives. Meanwhile, totalitarian governments can’t keep up with technology as quickly as free ones can. This is when the system collapses of its own weight, and that is what happened to the USSR. The cell phone, Facebook, and Twitter-fed revolutions in Egypt, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere also seem to prove this point. Thus far, the Chinese leaders have been smart enough to adapt their economy without adapting their government. The jury is still out as to what will happen to them next (it may not be pretty for us if it ends badly, and there are many ways it can end badly).

Another wild card to consider is that most of the existing nuclear warheads are in the United States, Russia, and China. Americans conveniently forget, but non-Americans are very aware that the United States is (thus far) the only nation that has actually used an atomic bomb to kill people. On the other hand, America doesn’t have highly corrupt officials in charge of our nuclear arsenal (Pakistan), nor is it controlled by a near-dictator (Russia), nor by a totalitarian crazed nut-job (North Korea). In addition, a number of important Japanese leaders have publicly said that that controversial decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the correct one–“It could not be helped.“[6] A similar case might be made for Israel, which is surrounded by overwhelming numbers of Arab nations. Given the tensions in the area, a preemptive strike by Israel seems possible, if not likely. The important question then becomes: Under what grounds, if any, could such usage be justified? Of course, Iranian and other Arab leaders have often called for the total destruction of Israel, and eventually one of them may be willing to try it. On what grounds could they be justified?

Another issue is that once we lose New York or some other major city, Americans will accept any solution — including a totalitarian police state. So will the people of other democratic republics if they lose a major city to nuclear terrorists. But the solution is not necessarily a police state. David Brin has answered the “who guards the guardians” question with a clever answer: “We all do.” Over-simplified, his solution is to kiss most of your privacy goodbye. Either that or kiss your life, your liberty, and property, and your privacy all goodbye. Brin proposes that we should all submit to being on camera most of the time — as long as the camera essentially points both ways so we know who is watching us — i.e. the police, our neighbors, the pervert three blocks away, and our governments will know that we are watching them too. We must all shoulder the responsibility of policing our neighborhoods and our governments. The world will be like big village in which everyone knows everyone else’s business, but it’s OK because we are all accountable for our actions. Given the fact that human beings only behave when held accountable, it is the only real solution.[7]

Some may think it naive to expect that governments would ever allow their citizens to observe them in return for their observing us. On the other hand, between the increasing calls for government transparency, and the fact that even the chief of the IMF can be taken down by an lowly maid (with the help of the rule of law), there is hope. Not only that, but many of us have already given away much of our privacy on Facebook and YouTube. Don’t worry about it. Maybe I’m still a wide-eyed optimist, but look at the fall of the USSR empire. Nobody with two brain cells to rub together could have possibly predicted that it could have been so bloodless.

DARPA will certainly look for technological answers for nuclear bomb-related problems such as the nightmare of screening shipping containers. They will probably find some solutions, but during the critical transition phase towards productive nanosystems, will they be able to make those solutions affordable?

One nanotech solution to stopping nuclear bombs that are hidden in shipping containers is to stop all physical shipping altogether and just trade files over the internet, printing whatever you want on our desktops (BTW, you can build a very large printer in two steps). Our only problem then would be keeping our computer virus detectors up to date so that we don’t print something nasty.

To summarize, if anybody is around 1,000 years from now, then the nuclear bomb will not be considered an important issue.

The Pill

The second historically consequential development in the past 50 years that many people will propose as significant is the contraceptive pill.

Some claim that the Pill is necessary because we have a population problem. When I was in college in the 1970’s, it was “proven” to me, with the aid of computer models, that overpopulation was going to be the reason we were going to have food riots in the United States by 1985. So naturally, I’m as skeptical about overpopulation as I am about the imminent rapture. Everyone probably agrees that overpopulation results when the population exceeds the sustainable carrying capacity of the environment. But what determines that capacity? Technology multiplies it while ignorance, injustice, and war decrease it. On Earth today, there is currently no correlation between standard of living and population density.[8]

That being said, in a closed system, unlimited human population growth could result in a situation worse than simple human extinction. Natural ecosystems have population boom/crash cycles all the time, but other species don’t have access to nuclear bombs and other devices that can obliterate habitats. The overpopulation disaster on Easter Island occurred with a primitive culture. It still has grass, but not much of an ecosystem. Imagine what could have happened with modern technology.

The Pill fundamentally changed the relationship of men and women, the place of children in a family and, on the macro level, population dynamics. The family is the basic building block of society and civilization, not only because it is an economic unit (you don’t pay your spouse to wash the dishes or take out the garbage), but more importantly, because the family critically shapes the next generation. Therefore, a large change in family structures will have far-reaching effects, at least in the “short run” of five to ten generations. However, to steal from Jerry Pournell and Larry Niven: “Think of it as evolution in action.“[9] The people who embrace contraception as a path to “the good life” will (evolutionarily speaking) remove their vote for influencing their future within a few generations. It is true that for humans, memes may carry as much weight as genes, but the same process applies — as long as meme propagation is kept below a critical level, perhaps by co-traveling xenophobic memes. On the other hand, people who don’t have much of their material resources tied up in children may have more time to devote to meme propagation. However, many studies have shown than the people who have the greatest impact on teens and pre-teens are their parents.[10]

One possible result is that a millennium from now, the Pill will be a small blip, as inconsequential as the Shakers, and for essentially similar reasons. Nanotechnology-enabled life extension techniques will extend that blip for a while, but because the prolific pro-natalists will continue having even more children for their longer lives, more pro-natalists will be born to outvote the anti-natalists. This is why the Jewish Knesset now has a significantly higher percentage of Ultra-Orthodox than when it began,[11] why Utah’s government is almost 100% Mormon,[12] and why the Amish are one of the fastest growing minority in the world, with an average of 6.8 children per family.[13]

The opposing trend is controlled by a number of factors. First, the birth rate goes down as women’s educations go up. This occurs partially because practically speaking, it is more difficult to go to school while being married and raising children. More subtly, however, it is because school is an investment in learning a professional trade — it is a different investment than children. In addition, women and men are implicitly and explicitly taught that a better career is more important than raising more children.

The problem isn’t that women are being educated. The problem is that if they are taught something that results in the extinction of our egalitarian, humanistic, and liberal society by one that is misogynistic, xenophobic, and unjust, then something is wrong.

One weapon of the contraceptive culture is the reeducation of the pro-natalist’s children. Proponents of secularization would call this “giving people free access to all information” not “reeducation”. But when Bibles are banned from the classroom, and students are taught in many ways that they are just animals, it seems like imposition of a secular viewpoint. At least they could teach the debate — and at the end of the semester, the students could try to guess the teacher’s bias (if they can’t, then the teacher presented both views with equal force).

There are more than a million home-schooled children in the U.S., up to two-thirds of whom are there primarily because their parents fear the imposition of our government’s ideas on their children.[14] This quiet protest is so feared by governments that parents are prosecuted for doing this, not only in all totalitarian countries but even in some democratic nations.[15] The alternative is that the governments of open, liberal, and secularized nations (that accept contraception) will decide that the vote of the increasing minority is wrong. Could their right to vote be taken away? Of course it can; it has happened before.

A pessimistic view of this possibility of disenfranchisement is also supported by the prevalence of abortion in liberal democracies. Given the accuracy of ultrasound imagery, if we can ignore the right to life for our most innocent and helpless, then how safe is something as meager as the right to vote? Niemöller’s poem about trade unionists, Communists, and Catholics comes to mind.[16] So do the events in ancient Egypt, during the three or four hundred years between the famines that Joseph ameliorated (Genesis 50:22). The Egyptian upper class used contraception[17], and they felt threatened by the increasing numerical growth of the Jews, who had strict injunctions against it.

Is it good for our country that more than a million children are being taught by their parents? What if rebellious parents are teaching strange and dangerous ideas? How do we decide which ideas are dangerous? Do we censor and suppress them? After all, ideas have consequences.

The answer is that there are limits to what parents can do, but very few — if any — on what they teach. The whole point about freedom of religion is that we can believe what we want, as long as we do not destroy society or individuals with our actions. Our constitution was written not to limit individuals, but to put strict limits on government, since it is inherently more powerful.

The temptation to avoid having children is not limited to any particular culture. The reason is simple: raising children is an expensive, risky, and difficult investment. Parents must be willing to give up fancy vacations, luxury cars, time to themselves, a good night’s sleep, stress on their marriage, and many other things, thus weighing against the pro-natalist agenda. However, the culture that teaches that children are a blessing and a worthwhile investment instead of a cost will overcome those that do not — even if it tends to encourage people to be ignorant, misogynist, racist, and illogical (like two polygamist religions that start with the letter “M“[18]).

Cyril M. Kornbluth’s 1951 short story “The Marching Morons” illustrates another potential downside to the anti/pro-natalist issue by portraying a scenario in which selective pressure resulted in smart people breeding themselves out of existence. It also, despite the derogatory title, provides a warning: the originator of the “Final Solution” (placing all the fertile morons onto one-way rockets to nowhere) ends up screaming futilely as he himself is loaded on one of the last rockets. Kornbluth’s main premise seems logical. People are often willing to trade children for the better material things and higher standard of living, and those with more education are more willing to do so. But is the resulting cost to society worth it?

What will happen when productive nanosystems and advanced software lowers the price of goods and services to very low levels? Many other things will happen at the same time, but in a society of economic abundance, the expense of children will drop significantly — and will be limited only by attention span and desire (and possibly expanded by reproductive-enhancing technologies including parthenogenesis and male pregnancy). Is there a gene for liking children? Or is it a meme that is culturally transmitted? Evolution favors both. Of course, evolution may also favor a “Boys from Brazil“[19] scenario (in which numerous clones of a dictator are grown to reinstate his rule). This strategy may be successful as long as the clones survive to adulthood and can reproduce.

While a contraceptive culture is non-sustainable, especially in the face of a competing culture whose population is growing, it must be noted that a pro-natalist culture is also non-sustainable. Isaac Asimov pointed out that even if we could overcome all technological obstacles, any growth rate will eventually result in humanity becoming a big ball of flesh, expanding at the speed of light (BOFESOL, or BOF for short). At a modest 3% rate, we will reach the initial BOF in only 3,584 years. After that, the speed of light will limit growth.

However, the fact that a contraceptive culture is non-sustainable in a significantly shorter term than the pro-natalist one is why it makes sense for governments to support traditional religions in their efforts to maintain traditional morality and fertility. The difficult problem is finding ways to ensure the survival of a culture without it becoming xenophobic. This is difficult to do when we think that we have Absolute Truth and the One True Religion on our side. But then exactly how do we know that our particular set and ordering of values is the objectively correct one? Note that the denial of the existence of any objectively maximum set of values exists is itself a particular set of values. And note also that sustainability and tolerance are also values that, like all values, must be assumed because they cannot be proven.

Given the contradictory evidence and shifting values, it is likely that equilibrium between pro-natalist and contraceptive meme sets can never be reached. Instead, humanity will likely experience benign (and sometimes not-so benign) boom and crash cycles similar to those that natural ecosystems suffer from. Only for us, our cycles will be constrained by opinions and technological capabilities, not by predators.

African Colonies

A third historical event that may be of consequence a thousand years from now is “Belgians in the Congo”. The Belgian regime in the Congo was about as brutal and inhuman as any the Europeans imposed on its colonies. However, the European Empires spread Christianity in Africa — where it remains a fast-growing religion. This African event may be as significant as when the Spanish and Portuguese spread Christianity in Latin America, and will bring about a fundamentally different world than if Africa had gone Islamic, Hindu, or Confucian. Think of Latin American worshiping the Aztec gods with human sacrifice, or the impact on us if it were an Islamic Civilization. We would live in a very different world.

Then again, Africa may still turn Islamic. After all, Islam generally values large families, just like the fast-growing Mormon and Amish religions do. On the other hand, when Muslims become secularized, they reduce the number of their offspring, just like secularized Christians do — hence their accompanying philosophies will suffer the same fate. The result will be that in order to survive in the long term, future generations must be hostile to secularization, and probably hostile to each other’s religious views also (not a pleasant thought, even if they do share many of the same values). Over the next thousand years, in view of the exponential increase in technological power, which viewpoint will win? The answer depends on science, theology, and demographics.

A handful of nominal Christians destroyed the Aztec civilization, not because of their technology (though that helped), but because the Aztec civilization was based on a great and powerful falsehood — that in order for the sun to rise every morning, human blood needed to be shed — thereby earning the hatred of the neighboring tribes whose blood it was that was usually shed. Islam is not as false as the Aztec religion — otherwise it would not have lasted this long. But the jury is still out on whether it can survive the extreme technological advancement that productive nanosystems will bring. Will fanatical Muslims be able to design and build the nanotech equivalent of 747 jets that they can fly into the skyscrapers of their enemies? Or will they just learn how to use it in unexpected and terrorizing ways? Given the high level of technological advancement in the Muslim empire a thousand years ago, the answer seems to be “yes” to both questions. However, Islam’s ultimate rejection of reason is its Achilles heel, and in the past it helped lead to the decline of the Ottoman Empire after its peak in the 1300s. This is because Islam’s idea of Allah’s absolute transcendence is incompatible with the idea that the universe is ordered and knowable. Psychologically, the problem is that if the universe is not ordered and knowable, then why bother learning and doing science? Meanwhile, Hinduism has many competing gods, and this leads (like in ordinary paganism) to its rejection of the logical principle of contradiction — without which science is impossible. Confucianism seems to be more a moral code than a religious one, so it seems that it could be accommodating to technology — but that didn’t seem to help its practitioners develop it before they collided with the West. Similarly with Buddhism. Meanwhile, the decadent West’s deconstructionism and nihilism is gnawing at its parent’s roots, rejecting reason and science as merely tools of power.

It can be claimed that religious views will keep changing and splitting into new orthodoxies. In that case, the result will be an ever-shifting field of populations and sub-populations with none winning out completely over the others. But as far as I can tell, neither Judaism, Catholicism, Buddhism, nor Islam have changed any of their core beliefs in the past few millennia. In contrast, the Mormons have changed a number of their major doctrines, and so have the Protestants. This does not bode well for their long-term survival as a coherent organization, though the Mormons do have their high fertility on their side.

At the moment, the whole world is copying the Christian-rooted West, as many of their scientific elite are educated in Europe and the United States. It is difficult to say to what extent they understand the philosophical underpinnings of science. When their own universities start to educate their elite, their cultural assumptions will probably displace the Judeo-Christian/Greek philosophy of the West. Then what? It depends if science, which is the foundation of technological superiority, is simply a cargo cult that works. My claim is that science will only continue working for more than a generation or two if its underlying assumptions come with it — that the universe is both ordered and knowable.

These Judeo-Christian assumptions are huge — though atheists, agnostics, and (maybe) Muslims and Buddhists should also be able to accept them. However, every scientist still faces the question of why the universe is ordered and knowable (and if you’re not constantly asking the next question, especially the “why” question, then you’re not a very good scientist). The theistic answer of design by creator[20] is not too far away from the assumption of an ordered and knowable universe, and from there, one begins skating very close to the concept that we are made “Imago Dei”–in God’s image. Some people think that there is too much hubris and ego to that belief, but you don’t see dolphins landing on the Moon, or chimpanzees creating great symphonies (or even bad rap).

“Imago Dei” is the most logical conclusion once we can explain why the universe is predictable and knowable. And being made in God’s image has other implications, especially in terms of our role in this universe. Most notably, it promotes the idea of human beings as powerful stewards of creation, as opposed to subservient subjects of Mother Nature, and it will pit Nietzschean Transhumanists and Traditional Catholics against Gaian environmentalists and National Park Rangers.

Television

Writing has been around for thousands of years, while the printing press has been around for almost 600. It would seem that the printing press was the one invention that, more than anything else, enabled the development of all subsequent inventions. Television could be considered an improvement over writing, and given that large amounts of video can be subject to slightly less interpretation than an equal amount of effort writing text, our descendants might get a better, more complete depiction of history than they could get from just text or physical artifacts. However, the television that Joel mentioned was controlled by the big three television networks. This was because the cost to entry was so high (currently from $200,000 to $13 million per episode). So the role of television of the 1960s was similar to the role of books in Medieval Europe, where the cost of a book was equivalent to the yearly salary of a well-educated person). For this reason, Joel’s headline will not be considered significant, though he was close.

He was close because television’s electronic video display offspring, the computer — especially when connected to form the Internet — will certainly be significant. It will be as significant as the nuclear bomb and the Pill combined, if and when Moore’s Law ushers in the Singularity. But Joel was writing a song, not engaging in future studies. We might as well criticize him for not mentioning the coining of the word “nanotechnology”.

Moonshot

A few of Billy Joel’s headlines may be remembered 1,000 years from now, but none mentioned so far will really be significant.

I would go out on a limb and say that other than the scientific and industrial revolutions, the American Constitution, and the virtual abolishment of slavery, little of consequence has happened in the last thousand years. There is, however, one significant event that happened in the 1400s. No, it’s not Spain kicking out the Muslims. It’s not even Admiral Zheng He, Admiral of China’s famed Dragon Fleet, sailing to Africa in the 1420s, though we’re getting warmer. As impressive as they were, Zheng’s voyages did not change the world. What did change the world was the tiny fleet of three ships that returned from the New World to Spain in 1492.

Apollo and Star Trek both pointed to the next and final frontier. It is true that little has happened in the American space program since Apollo, and with the retirement of the 1960s-designed Space Shuttle, even less is expected. This poor showing has occurred because the moon shot, as awe-inspiring as it was, was a political stunt funded for political reasons. The problem is that it didn’t pay for itself, and we therefore have a dismal space program. However, with communication, weather, and GPS satellites, we have a huge space industry. It’s all about the value added.

On the other hand, it’s the governmental space programs that seem to make the initial (and necessary) investments in the basic technology. More importantly, these programs give voice to that which makes us human — “to look at the stars and wonder”.[21]

Realistically, looking at the historical records of Jamestown and Salt Lake City, space development will occur when prosperous upper class families can sell their homes and businesses to buy a one-way ticket and homesteading tools. In today’s money, that would be about one or two million dollars. We have a long way to go to achieve that price break, though it helps that Moore’s Law is exponential.

There have only been a dozen men on the Moon so far, but Neil Armstrong will be remembered far longer than anyone else in this millennium. After the human race has spread throughout the solar system, and after it starts heading for the stars, everyone will remember who took the first small step. The importance of this step will become obvious after the Google Moon prize is won, and after Elon Musk and his imitators demonstrate conclusively that we are no longer in a zero sum game.

That is something to look forward to.

Tihamer Toth-Fejel is Research Engineer at Novii Systems.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Andrew Balet, Bill Bogen, Tim Wright, and Ted Reynolds for their significant contributions to this column.

Footnotes

1. Tihamer Toth-Fejel, The Politics and Ethics of the Hall Weather Machine, https://lifeboat.com/blog/2010/09/the-politics-and-ethics-of…er-machine and http://www.nanotech-now.com/columns/?article=486
2. Michael Flynn, Washer at the Ford, Analog, v109 #6 & 7, June & July 1989.
3. Arthur Kantrowitz, The Weapon of Openness, http://www.foresight.org/Updates/Background4.html
4. United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18, 27 July 1993, http://cryptome.org/nsa-ussid18.htm
5. e.g. Mexico, India, Saudia Arabia, and Russia http://www.forbes.com/lists/2010/10/billionaires-2010_The-Wo…_Rank.html Also, the petro-dollar millionaires in the Mideast http://www.aneki.com/millionaire_density.html
6. There is an interesting discussion at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings…d_Nagasaki
7. David Brin,The Transparent Society, Basic Books (1999). For a quick introduction, see The Transparent Society and Other Articles about Transparency and Privacy, http://www.davidbrin.com/transparent.htm.
8. Tihamer Toth-Fejel, Population Control, Molecular Nanotechnology, and the High Frontier, The Assembler, Volume 5, Number 1 & 2, 1997 http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/9701_05.html#_Toc394339700
9. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Oath of Fealty. New York : Pocket Books, 1982
10. KIDS COUNT Indicator Brief, Reducing the Teen Birth Rate, July 2009. http://www.aecf.org/~/media/Pubs/Initiatives/KIDS%20COUNT/K/…0brief.pdf
11. From a small group of just four members in the 1977 Knesset, they gradually increased their representation to 22 (out of 120) in 1999 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haredi_Judaism). The fertility rate for ultra-Orthodox mothers greatly exceeds that of the Israeli Jewish population at large, averaging 6.5 children per mother in the ultra-Orthodox community compared to 2.6 among Israeli Jews overall (http://www.forward.com/articles/7641/ ).
12. As of mid-2001, the Governor of Utah, and all of its Federal senators, representatives and members of the Supreme Court are all Mormon. http://www.religioustolerance.org/lds_hist1.htm
13. Julia A. Ericksen; Eugene P. Ericksen, John A. Hostetler, Gertrude E. Huntington. “Fertility Patterns and Trends among the Old Order Amish”. Population Studies (33): 255–76 (July 1979).
14. 1.1 Million Homeschooled Students in the United States in 2003. http://nces.ed.gov/nhes/homeschool/
15. HOMESCHOOLING: Prosecution is waged abroad; troubling trends abound in US http://www.bpnews.net/BPnews.asp?ID=34699
16. http://timpanogos.wordpress.com/2010/02/26/quote-of-the-mome…speak-out/
17. http://www.patentex.com/about_contraception/journey.php
18. I should note that almost all of the people I have personally known from these two religions are trustworthy, intelligent, and a pleasure to meet. Despite what they are taught in their sacred texts.
19. Ira Levin, Boys from Brazil, Dell (1977)
20. There are many question to follow. How did He do it? Why is He masculine? Why did He do it? How do we know? That last question is especially relevant.
21. Guy J. Consolmagno, Brother Astronomer: Adventures of a Vatican Scientist, McGraw-Hill (2001)

J. Storrs Hall’s Weather Machine is a relatively simple nanofabricated machine system with significant consequences in politics and ethics.

After a brief technical description, this essay analyzes the ends, means, and circumstances of a feasible method of controlling the weather, and includes some predictions regarding secondary effects.

 
Article

When a brilliant person possesses a fertile imagination and significant technical expertise, he or she is likely to imagine world-changing inventions. J. Storrs Hall is the epitome of those geniuses, and his Utility Fog [1] and Space Pier [2] are brilliant engineering designs that will change the world once they are reduced to practice. His most recent invention is the Weather Machine [3], which has been examined by none other than Robert Freitas and found to be technically reasonable—-though Freitas may have found an improved method for climate control that avoids some of the problems discussed below [4].

The Hall Weather Machine is a thin global cloud consisting of small transparent balloons that can be thought of as a programmable and reversible greenhouse gas because it shades or reflects the amount of sunlight that hits the upper stratosphere. These balloons are each between a millimeter and a centimeter in diameter, made of a few-nanometer thick diamondoid membrane. Each balloon is filled with hydrogen to enable it to float at an altitude of 60,000 to 100,000 feet, high above the clouds. It is bisected by an adjustable sheet, and also includes solar cells, a small computer, a GPS receiver to keep track of its location, and an actuator to occasionally (and relatively slowly) move the bisecting membrane between vertical and horizontal orientations. Just like with a regular high-altitude balloon, the heavier control and energy storage systems would be on the bottom of the balloon to automatically set the vertical axis without requiring any energy. The balloon would also have a water vapor/hydrogen generator system for altitude control, giving it the same directional navigation properties that an ordinary hot-air balloon has when it changes altitudes to take advantage of different wind directions at different altitudes.

Four versions of balloons are possible, depending on nature of the bisecting membrane.

• Version 1. Transparent/Opaque: The bisecting membrane is opaque, and rotates from the horizontal to the vertical in order to control the amount of solar radiation that it allows through (the membrane might be replaced by a immobile liquid crystal that has two basic states: transparent and opaque).
• Version 2. Emissivity Control: The membrane is white on one side, black on the other. When it is horizontal, either side can be presented upwards; white to scatter the solar radiation into space, black to absorb it into the upper atmosphere.
• Version 3. Reflection Control: The membrane is black on one side, with a reflective metallic coating on the other. This can direct solar energy in specific directions to increase the effectiveness of solar farms, or to steer hurricanes. Another feature of this version is that it enables the multiple reflection of light from sunlit to dark areas.
• Version 4. Advanced Photon Control: The balloon would be filled with an aerogel-density metamaterial that could not only control reflectivity via diffraction, but also control the frequency and phase of outgoing photons (with or without stimulated emission). Technically, designing and controlling these kinds of balloons would be a magnitude or two more complex than the earlier versions.

What is impressive about the Weather Machine is that by controlling a tenth of one percent of solar radiation is enough to force global climate in any direction we want. One percent is enough to change regional climate, and ten percent is enough for serious weather control.

 
The Problems

Every human-designed system has unintended bugs, and may cause negative consequences. That is why we have professional engineering societies, non-profit standards organizations, and government bureaucracies—to help protect the public. There is, therefore, some concern that the Weather Machine will accidentally cause catastrophic weather. However, given the accuracy of weather predictions and global warming models, and the slow movement of masses of air, and the fact that humans are in the loop (and in an emergency, could use a failsafe mode to force all the balloons to drop from the sky), the danger of accidental harm is minimal. At any rate, this article is more concerned with the ethical issues, with accidental unintended consequences to be examined elsewhere.

Many people would be happy to stop global warming, though others (currently living in Siberia or Iceland) might be happier without brutally cold winters. This level of climate control raises some problematic issues that may pit one group of people against another. The intended results could be taken care of the same way we normally take of similar issues in a representative democracy—we vote. This sounds nice, except that we’re not just talking about the United States (or any single nation), but the entire world. And we all know how well the United Nations handles its affairs. Perhaps deciding whether or not we want global warming is a small enough decision that the U.N. can handle it. If not, we can always rely on the world government that evil geniuses want to run, and that conspiracy theorists worry about.

Within the USA, trial lawyers would be especially interested in unintended effects, including trivial ones like rain on parades, or more serious ones like floods and tornadoes. The tremendous inefficiency of this legal nightmare might be meliorated by a “weather tax” that would fund a program to recompense people who are willing to put up with bad weather.

The more advanced versions of balloons are problematic because then the Weather Machine wouldn’t just control the intensity of solar and terrestrial radiation, but could also redirect and concentrate energy. In addition to increasing the effectiveness of solar farms, this would give more powerful and precise control over the weather. Unfortunately, energy concentration is exactly the capability that transforms the Weather Machine into an awesome weapon of mass destruction. Concentrated solar energy has not been used much since 212 BCE [5] when Archimedes used it to set fire the Roman ships that were attacking his city-state of Syracuse. However, the global coordination of the reflective Weather Machine allows bouncing concentrated solar energy around the globe, making it possible to set cities on fire. By fire, I mean the type of fire caused by dropping a nuclear bomb per second for as long as you want. The potential for abuse is rather large.

The most advanced version of the balloon is even better or worse—it contains an aerogel-density (i.e. extremely light and porous) programmable metamaterial that controls the frequency, direction, and phase of the reflected or transmitted radiation. Fully deployed, such a Weather Machine could become a planet-sized telescope—or laser. Small portions of such a system could be used as an effective missile defense system. Configured as a planetary laser, it might be able to defend Earth against stray asteroids such as Apopois, which is due for a flyby in 2029 (and might impact in 2036—especially if some terrorist group places an ion motor on it). Also, a planetary laser could push fairly large rockets rather quickly to Alpha Centari. But if you thought Version 3 was a weapon of mass destruction, Version 4 makes them, and the Transformers look like children’s toys (No wait—that’s what they are ). Optical divergence (currently 1 miliradian for commercially available lasers) will not keep planets from shooting at each other and frying them in their orbits, but the lack of energy density will—unless the balloons can store energy. On the other hand, even primitive laser focusing mechanisms will work fine for lunar infighting.

Given the almost unimaginable weaponization of the Hall Weather Machine, an important reaction is to ask if there any defenses against them. There are two types: those that attack the control algorithms (i.e. cyberware attacks) and those that physically attack the balloons, such as swarms of hunter-killer balloons or larger high-flying “carnivores”. In addition, there are some de-weaponization strategies that will be discussed below.

 
Ethical Issues

In some ways, ethics is like engineering–solving big problems is most easily done by splitting the problem in to smaller pieces. This means that the best way to determine the ethics of any action (such as building and operating a weather machine) is to determine the ethical considerations of each of the ends, means, and circumstances.

As far as “ends” are concerned, the weather machine passes with flying colors, if nothing else because it can fix global warming (or impending ice ages). Depending on a number of variables, we might even increase the number of nice weekends and increase the biome sizes of certain species.

One counter to these benefits claims that by controlling the weather we would be playing God and that the Weather Machine is equivalent to eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. In my view, if God didn’t like us messing with technology, then He should have let us know a long time ago. At any rate, the Bible doesn’t speak against technology per se. Admittedly, the Bible’s tower of Babel story does condemn the pride and arrogance that may result from technology, but that is another story.

A non-theistic (but just as religious) counter to the main intent of the weather machine is made by deep ecology environmentalists. They often claim that controlling the weather is unnatural, that Mother Nature bats last, or that the very idea of weather control is the reason that the global human population should be reduced to the low millions. These sort of arguments represent metaphysical differences regarding the value of individual human beings and the stewardship role we should have with the environment, and I’m not sure how we can address those issues in a book, much less in 3,500 words or less.

The “means” judges the actual methods used to control the climate and the weather. In this case, modulating the Sun’s energy with many small, high-altitude balloons seems ethically neutral. Even the transformation of a 100 million tons of carbon into diamondoid balloons is ethically neutral (unless one gets the carbon from the living bodies of endangered animals, pre-born fetuses, ethnic minorities, or other humans). By some viewpoints, the sequestering of 100 million tons of atmospheric carbon would be considered virtuous (except that this particular sequestration makes the global warming problem go away, to be possibly replaced by bigger ones).

The ethical analysis leaves “circumstances” as the remaining issue, and here is where things get complicated. Circumstances include things like unintended (especially foreseeable) and secondary consequences, such as whether the means or the end may lead to other evils. In general, a consequentialist argument would likely accept some small risk of some harm, and might accept mechanisms (like lawsuits or something more efficient) to provide feedback to fix any inequities. But this is where things get really complicated.

The first possibility, and most often raised, is that building and operating the Weather Machine might result in severe, unpredictable, unintended consequences. There are a few classes of these consequences, the most obvious centered on out-of-control superstorms or droughts. After all, we aren’t that great at predicting hurricane paths. On the other hand, this is because hurricane paths are inherently unstable—precisely because we don’t have any weather control. If we take a car out to the Bonneville salt flats, tie a car’s steering wheel absolutely straight, and then put a brick on the pedal, we cannot predict whether it will eventually circle left or right. But we allow cars on the road all the time precisely because we have such good feedback and control systems (well, except when they’re getting home late on a Saturday night).

Increased predictability would ameliorate the unintended weather problem, and could be reached by using altitude control (and differently-directed winds) for the balloons to remain over a particular piece of land. Then many tests could be run better predict possible harms and to lower the risk of them ever happening. In general, almost all accidental problems caused by a misbehaving Weather Machine (including computer viruses, rogue controllers, broken balloons, and the environmental toxicology of a million tons of inert diamond falling all over the earth) can be ameliorated by good design, adequate testing, and accurate modeling [6].

Others classes of severe, unintended consequences are secondary effects in the environment, the world economy, politics, and other areas. For example, by successfully moving heat from the tropics to the northern areas, we might turn off the Gulf Stream and other important ocean currents? How will the stock market react to California constantly selling it’s bad weather to Michigan? How will a totalitarian tropical country react if Iceland buys 20% of their neighbors’ sunlight for a much higher price than for theirs?

A second possibility is that the Weather Machine is impossible, and working on it may be a waste of money that could be better spend on more worthwhile projects. Given our knowledge of physics, however, this is unlikely. A caveat is that it will be a race to 2030, when diamond mechanosynthesis should be able to crank out the 100 million tons (the equivalent of 100 miles of freeway) of diamond balloons, and when the worst-case scenarios predict the beginning of serious negative effects of anthropogenic carbon [7]) . Will the Hall Weather Machine be built in time to stop Florida from being inundated by the ocean? The answer depends on when nanosystems will achieve top-down bootstrapping or bottom-up Turing equivalence (which is a technical topic for another time).

A third possibility—if the balloons are not location-controllable—might occur if a nation doesn’t want a foreign nation’s balloons over its territory. The obvious hostile response would be to build hunter-killer balloons to destroy any invaders, as this seems to be permitted by current concepts of sovereignty. Such an arms race could (and probably will) escalate ad infinitum, but open source hardware and software might help prevent it. Any military or intelligence personnel (of any country) would freak at the idea of handing the keys to a weapon of mass destruction to the public, but that may be the only viable solution if the control algorithm works using genetic or market mechanisms — maybe like American Idol or Wikipedia. After all, distributed systems should have distributed control systems. Imagine the balloons controlled by many different radio frequencies with a many different authentication algorithms with open source software. Unfortunately, if such public control is our solution against weather weaponization, we will still need to worry about the “tragedy of commons” and “not in my backyard” secondary effects.

There are other issues of international policy. Suppose we want more sunlight in the Dakotas for growing crops. We could buy it from poor tropical countries, or take it from international ocean territories, where it might affect other countries. Depending on the state of the art and it’s acceleration, but especially at the beginning, it is likely that only rich countries will be able to build Weather Machines. More certainly, only rich countries will be able to fund the early experiments to understand what large numbers of balloons will actually do.

Some might object that knowledge is free and can travel anywhere via the Internet. This is true, but consider the BP disaster. Technical expertise on underwater drilling is international; marine science is international; the disaster receiving tons of press coverage; and yet there is large disagreement within the largely free scientific community about the importance of the spill, how long it will take to clean up, etc. In contrast, connecting a large base of nanofactories to the Internet will enable the global spread of atomically-precise physical devices (such as balloons) in seconds, whether or not the experiments are ever done.

A fourth possibility is that the Weather Machine could be used as a weapon of mass inconvenience—a means of unjust coercion by making possible the threat of bad weather. But the ethics of this application use the same principles as the ethics regarding weapons of mass destruction. I have already pointed out the possible use of the Weather Machine as a weapon—the ethical issues surrounding the more advanced versions of the Weather Machine are basically the same as those concerning weapons of mass destruction, though amplified somewhat by their power (tens of megatons of TNT equivalents per second) and precision of control (+/- one degree Fahrenheit).

Fifth, there is the possibility that psychologically, being in control of the weather is not good for developing character. What if human beings are supposed to cower in their caves when lightning and blizzards strike? After all, that is how we evolved, and there are many things we enjoy that are bad for us [8]. Perhaps having so much control and power over the vicissitudes of life is psychologically bad for us. For evidence, look at the rates of depression in advanced nations.

Finally, what is the cost of not building a Weather Machine? If the cost drops low enough, some nation with the chutzpah will build one. And if they are at all successful, the rest of the world will jump in. But what will the cost be if they design it wrong?

Are the Ethics of the Hall Weather Machine Relevant?

The main problem with thinking about the ethics of the Hall Weather Machine is that by the time we can build 100 million tons of atomically precise anything, controlling the weather is going to be the least of our problems. This is because the nanotechnology revolution will bring about a new set of big, hairy problems—some of which I’ve written about elsewhere [9][10], but I fear that most of them we can’t even imaging yet.

May we live in interesting times!

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

Acknowledgements

Thanks to James Bach and Chris Dodsworth for valuable contributions.

 
Footnotes

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

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

[3] J. Storrs Hall, The Weather Machine, (transcript from Global Catastrophic Risks 2008 conference, posted by Jeriaska on December 20th, 2008), http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/people-blog/?p=2637

[4] Robert A. Freitas, Diamond Trees (Tropostats): A Molecular Manufacturing Based System for Compositional Atmospheric Homeostasis, 2010 IMM Report 43, 10 February 2010; http://www.imm.org/Reports/rep043.pdf

[5] Before the Christian Era smile

[6] The details will be examined elsewhere (as time permits).

[7] Coincidentally, it is also when the USA Social Security System is supposed to collapse.

[8] “The killer app for medical nanotechnology will be compensating for poor lifestyle choices like overeating and indiscriminate sex—i.e. diabetes II and AIDS” — a grad student at the 2010 Gordon Conference on Nanostructure Fabrication.

[9] T. Toth-Fejel, “Humanity and Nanotechnology”. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, V4N2, Summer 2004.

[10] T. Toth-Fejel, “A Few Lesser Implications of Nanofactories: Global Warming is the least of our Problems.” Nanotechnology Perceptions, March 2009.

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.

——————————————————————————–

[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-…atfound-20

[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

Productive Nanosystems
The National Nanotechnology Initiative defines nanotechnology as technologies that control matter at dimensions between one and a hundred nanometers, where unique phenomena enable novel applications. For particles and structures, reducing dimensions to the nanoscale primarily affects surface area to volume ratios and surface energies. For active structures and devices, the significant design parameters become exciton distances, quantum effects, and photon interactions. Connecting many different nanodevices into complex systems will multiply their power, leading some experts to predict that a particular kind of nanosystem—Productive Nanosystems that produces atomically precise products—will dramatically change the world.

Productive Nanosystems are programmable mechanoelectrochemical systems that are expected to rearrange bulk quantities numbers of atoms with atomic precision under programmatical control. There are currently four approaches that are expected to lead to Productive Nanosystems: DNA Origami[1], Bis-Peptide Synthesis[2], Patterned Atomic Layer Epitaxy[3], and Diamondoid Mechanosynthesis[4]. The first two are biomimetic bottom-up approaches that struggle to achieve long-range order and to increase complexity despite using chaotic thermodynamic processes. The second two are scanning-probe-based top-down approaches that struggle to increase productivity to a few hundred atoms per hour while reducing error rate.[5]

For the bottom-up approaches, the tipping point will be reached when researchers build the first nanosystem complex enough to do error correction. For the top-down approaches that can do error correction fairly easily, the tipping point will be reached when subsequent generations of tip arrays no longer need to be redesigned for speed and size improvements while using control algorithms that scale well (i.e. they only need generational time, synthesized inputs, and expansion room). When these milestones are reached, nanosystems will grow exponentially—unnoticeably for a few weeks, but suddenly they will become overwhelmingly powerful. There are many significant applications foreseen for mature Productive Nanosystems, ranging from aerospace and transportation to medicine and manufacturing—but what may affect us the hardest may be those applications that we can’t foresee.

Thus far, no scientific reason has been discovered that would prevent any of the four approaches from leading to Productive Nanosystems, much less all of them. So when an early desktop nanofactory prints out the next generation of Intel’s processor (without a $8 Billion microphotolithography fab plant), or a sailboat goes out for a weekend cruise and collects a few kilograms of gold or plutonium from seawater, people will sit up and take notice that the world has changed. Unfortunately, by then it will be a bit late — they will be like Neanderthals staring at a jet fighter that just thundered by overhead, and is already half-way to the horizon.

Combined with sufficient medical knowledge of how the human body should operate at the nanoscale, Productive Nanosystems may also be able to cure all known diseases, and perhaps even reverse the seven mechanisms of aging. For example, replacing red blood cells with microscopic artificial red blood cells (consisting of pressurized tanks and nanocomponents) will enable people to hold their breath for four hours.[6] Such simple nanobots (with less complexity than a microwave oven) may save the lives of many patients with blood and heart disorders. Other nanostructures, such as artificial kidneys with biocompatible nanomembranes, may prevent end-stage renal failure. One important caveat however, is that Productive Nanosystems can only move atoms around—they are useless when we don’t know where the atoms are supposed to go. Discovering the optimal positions of atoms for a particular application is new science, and inherently unpredictable.

In contrast to inventing new science, connecting nanodevices together to form a Productive Nanosystem is an engineering problem. If done correctly, it will make possible nanofactory appliances that can “print” anything (caveat the flexibility of the output envelope, the range and limits of the input molecules, the “printing” process, and the software).[7] These developments should increase our average standard of living to levels that would make Bill Gates look like a pauper, while reducing our carbon footprint to negative numbers, and replacing the energy and transportation infrastructures of the world.
Maybe.

After all, we currently have a technologically-enhanced standard of living that kings and pharaohs of old would envy, but we certainly haven’t reached utopia yet. On the other hand, atomically precise products made by Productive Nanosystems will be able to reduce economic dependency to a square meter of dirt and the sunshine that lands on it, while simultaneously lowering the price to orbit to $5/lb. Those kinds of technological capabilities might buy a significant amount of economic and political freedom.

Economics
The collisions between unstoppable juggernauts and immovable obstacles are always fascinating—we just cannot tear our eyes away from the immense conflict, especially if we have a glimmer of the immense consequences it will have for us. So it will be when Productive Nanosystems emerge from the global financial meltdown. To predict what will happen in the next decade or so, we must understand the essential nature of wealth, and we must understand the capabilities of productive nanosystems. Plus we must understand the consequences of their confluence. This is a tall order. Like any new technology, the development of Productive Nanosystems will depend on economics and politics, primarily the Rule of Law and enforceable contracts. But then the formidable power of Productive Nanosystems to do more with less will significantly affect some of the rules that govern economics and politics.

In the past few months, many people have panicked over plummeting retirement accounts, tumbling real estate values, and the loss of jobs by their coworkers (if not themselves). The government’s subsequent response has been equally shocking, as government spending has skyrocketed with brain-numbing strings of zeros being added to the national debt. Historically in both the U.S. and abroad, an expansion of the money supply in excess of the production of real goods and services has invariably produced inflation.

To make some sense of what is happening, and of how we might get out of this mess, it might be useful to re-examine the concept of wealth. Karl Marx’s “labor theory of value” identified human labor as the only source of wealth, but there are at least three major errors with this view. First, valuable material resources are spread unequally over this planet (which is why mining rights are so important). Second, tools can multiply the value of a person’s labor by many magnitudes (and since tools are generated by human labor and other tools, the direction and specific accomplishments of human labor become important). Third, political and social systems that incentivize different types of human behavior (and attitudes) will significantly increase or decrease the amount of real wealth available. Unfortunately, the tax rates of most political systems decrease the incentive to produce real wealth, and few of them provide an incentive to encourage the ultimate source of real wealth: the valuable ideas in the minds of inventors and innovators.

But what is that real wealth? Basically, it is the ability to fulfill human needs and desires. This means that (as subjective value theory claims), one person cannot know the needs and desires of another, and therefore all central planning schemes will fail. Statistics are fallible for a number of reasons, but mostly because reality is too complex: In the chaotic interplay of causal forces in the real world, the injection of a brilliant idea into a situation that is sensitive to initial conditions can change the world in very unpredictable ways. Also, central planning fails because human beings in power (i.e. politicians) are too susceptible to temptation (as in rent-seeking), and because the illogical passions that drive many human decisions cannot be encompassed by bureaucratic rules (or bureaucratic minds, for that matter).

By its very nature, real wealth requires government to uphold the inalienable rights of its citizens (including property rights), to provide for the common good by creating and orderly environment in which free citizens may prosper with their work, and to protect the weak from the strong. So government plays an important role in creating real wealth.

Wealth is often associated with money, but money is simply a counter: it replaced the barter of objects and services because it is an efficient marker that facilitates the exchange and storage of real wealth.[8]

Productive Nanosystems will only rearrange atoms, so they will not change what money and real wealth are. However, because Productive Nanosystems will provide a precise and powerful mechanism for rearranging atoms, they will be able to fulfill more human needs and desires than ever imaginable. But it still won’t be free.

Nanotechnologies and their applications will not be easily bartered, and atoms of different elements will still have relative scarcities (along with energy), so money will still be very useful. Unfortunately, it also means that deficit spending will still be inflationary. But will that be bad?

Early medieval Christian, Jewish, and Islamic societies all denounced usury as immoral, thereby preventing fractional reserve banking and inadvertently reducing the supply of available capital for business expansion. Some people are suspicious of the consequences and ethics of fractional reserve banking, based on an instinctive uneasiness that it seems like a Ponzi-scheme — creating money out of nothing. But while a Ponzi scheme is always based on extravagant promises and fraudulent misrepresentation, fractional reserve banking can serve a beneficial role (i.e. generate real wealth) as long as the fraction that banks choose to lend is commensurate with the velocity of money, risk weighted credit exposure, and the productivity of different forms of real wealth.[9] In today’s non-agricultural post-industrial society, the optimum reserve percentage has been calculated to be around 10%, and that is what the legal limit has been for some time. Unfortunately, greed being what it is, people have found loopholes in that law. In the United States this began occurring most notably in the early 1990s with the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 and the creation of Collateralized Debt Obligations.[10]

In the olden days, monetary expansion occurred when the king called in all the coins, shaved them or diluted the alloy that made them up, and then re-issued them. This was the old-fashioned form of deficit spending. This trick became easier with the invention of paper money, and became even more easy as financial services moved into electronic bits. Other than being a theft from future lenders by present borrowers, deficit spending skews the value decisions of consumers and investors, causing them to spend and invest money differently than they would if they knew how much real money actually existed. Another problem develops when bankers start underwriting government bonds, giving them powerful incentives for pressuring governments to maximize profit for themselves—not to benefit the country or its citizens (this is especially true when those in power build monopolies to reduce competition).

The expenses of running a bank, along with the expansion of the money supply via fractional reserve banking means that lenders must charge a reasonable interest rate to stay in business (at the same time, the exploitation of the poor by charging exorbitant interest is certainly unjust). The expansion of the money supply then maximizes the productivity of human labor as population grows and technology improves. This is why most economists think that the money supply should expand at the same rate as the growth in goods and services. Otherwise deflation occurs as the exchange value of the money increases to meet the expanded demand. At best, deflation only makes it more difficult for businesses get loans for expansion; at worst it signals the beginning of a deflationary spiral, in which falling prices give consumers an incentive to delay purchases until prices fall further, which in turn reduces overall economic activity, etc.

Thus deficit spending skews the economical signal between production and consumption. This is why it is harmful, especially as deficit spending increases, and especially if the spending is politically charged. With respect to nanotechnology, the salient point is that deficit spending incentivizes short-run gains over long term investments. The real problem is that this bias makes the investment necessary for nanotechnology-enabled productivity much more difficult to attain, even though such an investment could ameliorate the negative impact of the current deficit spending.

Nanotechnology can do nothing about correcting distorted economic signals. However, nanotechnology can increase productivity. And if it increases productivity as fast as the money supply grows, then we may not suffer from hyperinflation—though admittedly outracing politicians on a spending binge will be no mean trick. Whether it does or doesn’t depends on some sensitive initial conditions that may or may not trigger a psychological tipping point at which many people realize that more claim-tickets (dollars) to wealth have been printed (or stored as zeros in some computer’s memory) than can ever be redeemed. So they start selling panic- selling—exchanging paper or electronic money for anything with a more solid aspect of reality. The enhanced properties of primitive nanotech-enabled products will certainly have a dramatic effect on reality—this will be even more true with Productive Nanosystems—many of which may seem miraculous. Why worry about whether the numbers in your checking account are “real” as long as they cover the credit card bill next month for medical nanobots we would buy online and download today? The big question is *if* the medical nanobots will really be available or not.

Unfortunately, even in the best case many individuals will suffer because hyper-increased productivity may cause hyper-increased money flows. If the flow of money hyper-accelerate does (and even if it doesn’t), the hyper-acceleration of productivity will undoubtedly cause more economic and social turbulence than most people can handle. This is a matter for concern, because many scenarios predict very significant amounts of turbulence as Productive Nanosystems reach a tipping point. By analogy, the recent financial meltdown is to the nanotech revolution what a kindergarten play dress rehearsal is to the Normandy invasion.

Why is the advent of Productive Nanosystems so significant, why is it bad (if it is), and what are we going to do about it?

First, it seems obvious that a rapid commercialization of Productive Nanosystems will cause turbulent economic fluctuations that hurt people who aren’t fast enough to adjust to them. But how do we know that Productive Nanosystems will cause massive fluctuations?

Briefly, it is because they are so powerful. For example, building nanoelectronic circuits on a desktop “printer” instead of a fab plant will probably bankrupt the many companies needed to build the fab plant (no matter whether it is a mere $2B as it is today, or whether it may top $50B as expected a few Moore’s generations from now). It is difficult to predict what would happen if the desktop “printer”, or nanofactory, could print a copy of itself, but a continuation of “business as usual” would not be possible with such an invension.

Second, why is the quick development of Productive Nanosystems bad? Or is it?

Though many Americans today have adequate material comforts, we do not have some of the freedoms taken for granted by kings of old. Trinkets and baubles are not equivalent to freedom, and nanotech-enabled trinkets are trinkets nonetheless. On the other hand, atomically precise products made by productive nanosystems will be able to reduce economic dependency to a square meter of dirt and the sunshine that lands on it, and lower the price to orbit to $5/lb. Those kinds of abilities will buy a significant amount of economic and political freedom, especially for those with more than a square meter of dirt and sunshine. Just as the settlement of the New World had large effects on the Old, an expansion off-planet would have huge implications for those who stay behind. Given such possibilities and pushing Bill Joy’s overwrought fears of nanotechnology aside,[11] it seems that there is cause for concern, but there is also cause for hope.

Third, what are we going to do about it?

Part of the problem is that the future is not clear. Throwing more smart people at the problem might help reduce the amount of uncertainty, but only if the smart people understand why some events are more likely to occur. Then they need to explain to us and to policy makers the technical possibilities of Productive Nanosystems and their social consequences.

Second, we need to invest in Productive Nanosystems. Historically, we know that companies such as Google and Samsung, who increased their R&D spending after the dotcom bubble of 2001, came out much stronger than their competition did. In 2003, China ranked third in the world in number of nanotechnology patents, but in recent months Tsinghua University has often had more than twice as many nanotechnology patents pending as any other U.S. university or organization. Earlier, the Chinese had duplicated [12] Rothemund’s DNA Origami experiment within months of the publication of his seminal article in Nature. Those who invest more money with more wisdom will do much better than those who do not invest, or who invest foolishly.

The other part of the problem is that we often don’t have the intestinal fortitude to do what is right, even when we know what it is. As human beings, we are easily tempted. Neither increased intelligence nor mature Productive Nanosystems will ever help us get around this problem. About the only thing we can do is practice ethical and moral behavior now, so that we get into the habit now before the consequences become enormous. Then again, judging from the recorded history, legends, and stories from ancient sources, the last six thousand years of practice has not done us much good.

Some of our current financial meltdown occurred because we were soft-hearted and soft-headed, encouraging the making of loans to people who couldn’t pay them back. Other financial problems occurred because of greed—the attempt to make money quickly without creating real wealth. Unfortunately, the enormous productivity promise of Productive Nanosystems may only encourage that type of risky gambling.

There is also the problem that poverty may not only be the lack of money. This means that in a Productive Nanosystem-driven economy, poverty will not be the lack of real wealth, but something else. If that is true, then what is real poverty? Is it ignorance? Self-imposed unhappiness? The suffering of injustice? I don’t know, but I suspect that just as obesity plagues the poor more than the rich, a hyper-abundant society will reveal social dysfunctions that seem counterintuitive to us today. Some characteristic disfunctionalities, such as wealth producing sloth, are obvious. Others are not, and they are the ones that will trap numerous unsuspecting victims.

Eric Drexler has identified a few things that will be valuable in a hyper-abundant society: new scientific knowledge, and land area on Earth (the limit of which has been a cause of wars since humans first left Africa). Given the additional gifts of disease-free and ageless bodies, I would add a few more valuables, listed by increasing importance: the respect of a community, the trust of friends outside the increasingly byzantine labyrinth of law, the admiration of children (especially your own), the total lifelong commitment of a spouse, and the peace of knowing one’s unique destiny in this universe. We should all be as lucky.

Footnotes
1. Paul W. K. Rothemund, Folding DNA to create nanoscale shapes and patterns, Nature, Vol 440, 16 March 2006.
2. Christian Schafmeister, Molecular lego. Scientific American 2007;296(2):64–71.
3. John Randall, et al., Patterned atomic layer epitaxy — Patent 7326293
4. Robert A. Freitas Jr., Ralph C. Merkle, “A Minimal Toolset for Positional Diamond Mechanosynthesis,” J. Comput. Theor. Nanosci. 5(May 2008):760–861; http://www.MolecularAssembler.com/Papers/MinToolset.pdf
5. The Zyvex-led Atomically Precise Manufacturing Consortium has recently met their DARPA-funded Tip-Based Nanofabrication project’s Phase I metrics by writing 100 dangling bond wires, half of them 36.6nm x 3.5nm and half 24.5nm x 3.5 nm in 5.66 minutes. That is 1.5 million atoms per hour, but the error rate was ±6.4%, which is unacceptable for Productive Nanosystems (unless they implement error correction, which for Patterned Atomic Layer Epitaxy may or may not be easy because the high mobility of hydrogen at the operating temperature of the process).
6. Tihamer Toth-Fejel. Respirocytes from Patterned Atomic Layer Epitaxy: The Most Conservative Pathway to the. Simplest Medical Nanorobot. 2nd Unither Nanomedical and Telemedicine Technology Conference. Quebec, Canada. February 24–27, 2009. www.unithertechnologyconference.com/downloads09/SessionsDayOne/TIHAMER_web.ppt
7. Chris Phoenix and Tihamer Toth-Fejel, Large-Product General-Purpose Design and Manufacturing Using Nanoscale Modules: Final Report, CP-04–01, NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, May 2005. http://www.niac.usra.edu/files/studies/final_report/1030Phoenix.pdf
8. The Federal Reserve distinguishes value exchange as M1 and the [storage] of value as M2. For a good description of the history and role of money, see Alan Greenspan, Gold and Economic Freedom. http://www.constitution.org/mon/greenspan_gold.htm
9. Karl Denninger describes the benefits and drawbacks of fractional reserve banking, pointing out that the key determinate is whether or not the debts incurred are productive (e.g. investments in tooling, land, or education) vs. consumptive (e.g. heating a house, buying a bigscreen TV, or going on vacation). See http://market-ticker.denninger.net/archives/865-Reserve-Banking.html
10. Marc and Nathalie Fleury, The Financial Crisis for Dummies: Securitization. http://www.thedelphicfuture.org/2009/04/financial-crisis-for-dummies.html
11. Bill Joy, Why the future doesn’t need us. Wired (Apr 2000) http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html On some issues, Bill Joy was so far off that he wasn’t even wrong. See “Why the Future Needs Bill Joy” http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/BillJoyWhyCrit.htm
12. Qian Lulu, et al., Analogic China map constructed by DNA. Chinese Science Bulletin. Dec 2006. Vol. 51 No. 24

Acknowledgements
Thanks to Forrest Bishop, Jim Osborn, and Andrew Balet for many excellent critical comments on earlier drafts.

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

President Obama disbanded the President’s Council on Bioethics after it questioned his policy on embryonic stem cell research. White House press officer Reid Cherlin said that this was because the Council favored discussion over developing a shared consensus. This column lists a number of problems with Obama’s decision, and with his position on the most controversial bioethical issue of our time.

Bioethics and the End of Discussion

In early June, President Obama disbanded the President’s Council on Bioethics. According to White House press officer Reid Cherlin, this was because the Council was designed by the Bush administration to be “a philosophically leaning advisory group” that favored discussion over developing a shared consensus. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/us/politics/18ethics.html?_r=2

Shared consensus? Like the shared consensus about the Mexico City policy, government funding of Embryonic Stem Cell Research for new lines, or taxpayer funded abortions? All this despite the fact that 51% of Americans consider themselves pro-life? By allowing publicly-funded Embryonic Stem Cell Research only on existing lines, President Bush made a decision that nobody was happy with, but at least it was an honest compromise, and given the principle of second effect, an ethically acceptable one.

President Obama will appoint a new bioethics commission, one with a new mandate and that “offers practical policy options,” Mr. Cherlin said.

Practical policy options? Like the ones likely to be given by Obama’s new authoritative committee to expediently promote the license to kill the most innocent and vulnerable? But that is only the start. As the baby boomers bankrupt Social Security, there will be a strong temptation to expand Obama’s mandate to include the aging “useless mouths”. Oregon and the Netherlands have already shown the way—after all, a suicide pill is much cheaper than palliative care, and it’s much more cost-effective to kill patients rather than care for them. (http://www.euthanasia.com/argumentsagainsteuthanasia.html)

Evan Rosa details many problems with Obama’s decision to disband the Council (http://www.cbc-network.org/research_display.php?id=388), but there are additional disturbing implications:

First, democracies are absolutely dependent on discussion. Dictators have always suppressed free discussion on “sensitive” subjects because it is the nature of evil to fear criticism. This has been true here in the United States, too—in the years leading up to the Civil War, Southern senators and representatives tried to squelch all discussion on slavery. Maybe their consciences bothered them.

Second, no matter how well-meaning the participants may be, consensus between metaphysically opposed parties is impossible in some matters (such as the humanity of a baby a few months before he or she is born, the existence of God, consequentialist vs. deontological reasoning, etc.). The only way to get “consensus” in such situations is by exercising the monopoly of force owned by the government.

Third, stopping government-sponsored discussion on bioethics sets a dangerous precedent for the ethics surrounding nanotechnology. There are numerous ethical issues that nanotechnology is raising, and will continue to raise, that desperately require significant amounts of detailed discussion and deep thinking.

Tyrants begin by marginalizing anyone who disagrees with them, calling them hate-mongering obstructionists (or worse). In addition, they will use governmental power to subdue any who dare oppose their policies.

The details of the dismissal of the Council clearly shows this tendency, though the Council members are not acting very subdued. As one of them supposedly put it, “Instead of meeting at seminars, now we’ll be meeting on Facebook.”

On March 9, Obama removed restrictions on federal funding for research on embryonic stem cell lines derived by means that destroy human embryos.

On March 25, ten out of the eighteen members of the Council questioned Obama’s policy (http://www.thehastingscenter.org/Bioethicsforum/Post.aspx?id=3298).

In the second week of June, Obama fired them all.

Could it be that Obama doesn’t want discussion? We can see what happens if someone gives him advice that he doesn’t want.

Oprah Winfrey’s favorite physician Dr. Mehmet Oz, told her and Michael Fox that “the stem cell debate is dead” because “the problem with embryonic stem cells is that [they are]… very hard to control, and they can become cancerous” (http://www.oprah.com/media/20090319-tows-dr-oz-brain). Besides, induced pluripotent cells can become embryonic, thereby negating the very difficult necessity of cloning.

So “harvesting” embryonic stem cells is not only ethically problematic (i.e. wrong), but it is also scientifically untenable. Obama supports it anyway.

Maybe he could fire Oprah.

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

In the next decade or so, a new type of desktop appliance will be developed—a nanofactory that consists of very many productive nanosystems—atomically precise nanoscale machines that work together to build bulk amounts of atomically precise products.

The Foresight Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems has identified a number of different approaches for building these atomically precise systems of machines that can produce other nanosystems http://www.foresight.org/roadmaps/. These approaches include Paul Rothemund’s DNA Origami, Christopher Schafmeister’s Bis-proteins, Joe Lynden’s Patterned Atomic Layer Epitaxy, and Robert Freitas and Ralph Merkle’s Diamondoid Mechanosynthesis http://www.rfreitas.com/Nano/JNNDimerTool.pdf, http://e-drexler.com/d/05/00/DC10C-mechanosynthesis.pdf, and http://www.molecularassembler.com/Papers/JCTNPengFeb06.pdf. Each of these approaches has the potential of building the numerous nanoscale electronic, mechanical, and structural components that comprise productive nanosystems.

The ultimate result will be a nanofactory that can build virtually anything—limited only by the laws of physics, the properties of the input feedstock, and the software that controls the device.

The concern is that this relatively primitive application—if successfully deployed as expected—will pose significant challenges, even if nobody accidentally makes a mistake or puts it to evil ends. Consider the simple, safe, and optimistic possibilities made possible by a nanofactory that can build a wide variety of atomically precise, large-scale products out of a few different input elements (say carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, iron, silicon, germanium, boron, phosphorus, and titanium) http://www.MolecularAssembler.com/Nanofactory. The factory itself would not be nano-sized; it would be an appliance that is approximately the same size as a desktop printer. However, its multi-material 3D output products would be atomically precise at the nanoscale.

The first and most valuable product of a nanofactory will be another nanofactory. The second most valuable product will be a system that refills the nanofactory’s “inkjet cartridge” using inexpensive feedstock, and the third will be a machine that turns sand into photovoltaic solar cells (with which to power the nanofactory). It is not clear what would one would print next. Programmable material for a holodeck? Wearable supercomputers? A few pounds of medical nanobots?

In any case, a few months to a few years after the first commercial release of a nanofactory, almost everyone will have one. It is not clear what the price might be—perhaps $1000. The price could not drop to zero, though it might approach the cost of dirt, sunshine, and the time required to print a nanofactory.

Diamond and its carbon-based relatives are an engineer’s best friend; being 50 times stronger than steel, only their atomic structure differentiates it from coal. Once people have a printer that can inexpensively make arbitrary, atomically perfect diamondoid nanostructures out of carbon, they are going to make everything out of it—from wearable supercomputers and skyscrapers that reach Low Earth Orbit to medical nanobots and flying cars—anything that doesn’t violate the laws of physics and has a CAD file description available on the web. Therefore, any cheap sources of carbon will be snatched up quickly.

Because human desire is essentially infinite, the demand for carbon will reach very high levels fairly quickly.

Air is free, and so is the carbon dioxide in it.

If taking carbon dioxide out of the air became economically favorable (and with inexpensive solar power it probably will be), then the result will be a ‘tragedy of the commons’. This would solve CO₂-caused global warming with a vengeance, but would result in global freezing—and worse. If enough carbon dioxide in the air was removed, plant life would start to die.

Futurist Keith Henson has predicted that to counteract this outcome, the Sierra Club will frantically strip-mine all the coal under Wyoming and burn it as dirty a manner possible to save the rain forests. If Henson is correct, then Congress might pass laws that make it illegal to take CO₂ from the air. But how will the government enforce a ban against unauthorized CO₂ extraction?

Nanotechnology, of course.

Unfortunately, a government with unfettered nanotechnology-enhanced enforcement powers would likely be a dictatorship that makes the totalitarian regime of Orwell’s 1984 look like a kindergarten playground.

An alternative to a dictatorship would involve ownership of air. This sounds strange and preposterous until we remember that the American Indians thought that land ownership was strange and preposterous.

A more jarring alternative might involve the re-engineering of plants so that they can live without carbon dioxide, perhaps by using silica as a structure material (as diatoms do). Do we really trust ourselves to recreate Earth’s biosphere in such a drastic manner? Some optimists will tell us not to worry about such drastic genetic modification on the ecosystem; we will back up the whole thing on the web somewhere, and use modern software revision-tracking software to keep it safe http://tortoisesvn.net/.

Admittedly, these scenarios seem rather far-fetched. However, as Foresight Institute co-founder Christine Peterson put it, “If you look out into the long-term future 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” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04…28_pf.html.

We are not yet at the level of technological maturity at which we can confidently assert that widescale nanofactory development and distribution is inevitable. Of the four main approaches to Productive Nanosystems, only the most rudimentary lab demos have proven the concepts. Therefore, the suggestion that nanofactories will alter the conditions of anthropogenic global warming may be met with skepticism — as it should. However, in light of the exponential progress in nanotechnology in the past few years, it is likely that some version of the carbon dioxide tragedy of the commons will happen in some form or another. Researchers, policy makers, and the public at large must become aware of these possibilities, and thoughtfully analyze them. Otherwise disruptive events may cause panic, as most scenarios predict a quick transition from initial invention to wide distribution of these technologies.

Ultimately, this prediction means two things. First, that wasting precious time, money, and effort on stopping global warming will increase the risk of other, more serious catastrophes. Second, we will need to set aside any conservative values regarding the preservation of the Earth’s ecosystem as it currently exists. Change will happen. The good news is that a Space Pier http://autogeny.org/tower/tower.html and other low-cost methods to orbit will be available for conservatives who are intent on preserving the status quo biosphere elsewhere in the solar system. Of course, these are the same people who are probably the most emotionally resistant to leaving, which might lead to conflicts.

Howard Bloom gently points out that “Nature is not a motherly protector”. Putting it more bluntly and extending the anthropomorphism, Mother Nature is a brutal psychopath who uncaringly tortures and slaughters her children. She does not build nice little eco-friendly Gardens of Eden. In fact, there have been 148 major die-offs, and six much bigger mass extinctions (in which over 90% of species on this planet were wiped out—each and every time). Those die-offs resulted from natural physical disturbances in a universe that is fine-tuned to allow carbon-based life to emerge. It’s a mixed message, but the message is simple: Adapt or die. Nanotechnology will not change that message. However, it will provide us with better biotech tools that will enable us to (for better or worse) manipulate our bodies and brains.

As the nanotechnology revolution begins, we will need to think hard about its secondary effects and ethical implications. The sheer magnitude of changes will cause us to consider carefully our ultimate role in the universe, our essential nature as human persons, the meaning of our lives, and what we really, really desire.

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