Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Danila Medvedev asked me to make a list of actual projects that can reduce the likelihood of global catastrophe.

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

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

Any ideas or missed projects?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is interesting to note that the technical possibility to send interstellar Ark appeared in 1960th, and is based on the concept of “Blust-ship” of Ulam. This blast-ship uses the energy of nuclear explosions to move forward. Detailed calculations were carried out under the project “Orion”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) In 1968 Dyson published an article “Interstellar Transport”, which shows the upper and lower bounds of the projects. In conservative (ie not imply any technical achievements) valuation it would cost 1 U.S. GDP (600 billion U.S. dollars at the time of writing) to launch the spaceship with mass of 40 million tonnes (of which 5 million tons of payload), and its time of flight to Alpha Centauri would be 1200 years. In a more advanced version the price is 0.1 U.S. GDP, the flight time is 120 years and starting weight 150 000 tons (of which 50 000 tons of payload). In principle, using a two-tier scheme, more advanced thermonuclear bombs and reflectors the flying time to the nearest star can reduce to 40 years.
Of course, the crew of the spaceship is doomed to extinction if they do not find a habitable and fit for human planet in the nearest star system. Another option is that it will colonize uninhabited planet. In 1980, R. Freitas proposed a lunar exploration using self-replicating factory, the original weight of 100 tons, but to control that requires artificial intelligence. “Advanced Automation for Space Missions” http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/ Artificial intelligence yet not exist, but the management of such a factory could be implemented by people. The main question is how much technology and equipment should be enough to throw at the moonlike uninhabited planet, so that people could build on it completely self-sustaining and growing civilization. It is about creating something like inhabited von Neumann probe. Modern self-sustaining state includes at least a few million people (like Israel), with hundreds of tons of equipment on each person, mainly in the form of houses, roads. Weight of machines is much smaller. This gives us the upper boundary of the able to replicate human colony in the 1 billion tons. The lower estimate is that there would be about 100 people, each of which accounts for approximately 100 tons (mainly food and shelter), ie 10 000 tons of mass. A realistic assessment should be somewhere in between, and probably in the tens of millions of tons. All this under the assumption that no miraculous nanotechnology is not yet open.
The advantage of a spaceship as Ark is that it is non-specific reaction to a host of different threats with indeterminate probabilities. If you have some specific threat (the asteroid, the epidemic), then there is better to spend money on its removal.
Thus, if such a decision in the 1960th years were taken, now such a ship could be on the road.
But if we ignore the technical side of the issue, there are several trade-offs on strategies for creating such a spaceship.
1. The sooner such a project is started, the lesser technically advanced it would be, the lesser would be its chances of success and higher would be cost. But if it will be initiated later, the greater would be chances that it will not be complete until global catastrophe.
2. The later the project starts, the greater are the chance that it will take “diseases” of mother civilization with it (e.g. ability to create dangerous viruses ).
3. The project to create a spaceship could lead to the development of technologies that threaten civilization itself. Blast-ship used as fuel hundreds of thousands of hydrogen bombs. Therefore, it can either be used as a weapon, or other party may be afraid of it and respond. In addition, the spaceship can turn around and hit the Earth, as star-hammer — or there maybe fear of it. During construction of the spaceship could happen man-made accidents with enormous consequences, equal as maximum to detonation of all bombs on board. If the project is implementing by one of the countries in time of war, other countries could try to shoot down the spaceship when it launched.
4. The spaceship is a means of protection against Doomsday machine as strategic response in Khan style. Therefore, the creators of such a Doomsday machine can perceive the Ark as a threat to their power.
5. Should we implement a more expensive project, or a few cheaper projects?
6. Is it sufficient to limit the colonization to the Moon, Mars, Jupiter’s moons or objects in the Kuiper belt? At least it can be fallback position at which you can check the technology of autonomous colonies.
7. The sooner the spaceship starts, the less we know about exoplanets. How far and how fast the Ark should fly in order to be in relative safety?
8. Could the spaceship hide itself so that the Earth did not know where it is, and should it do that? Should the spaceship communicate with Earth? Or there is a risk of attack of a hostile AI in this case?
9. Would not the creation of such projects exacerbate the arms race or lead to premature depletion of resources and other undesirable outcomes? Creating of pure hydrogen bombs would simplify the creation of such a spaceship, or at least reduce its costs. But at the same time it would increase global risks, because nuclear non-proliferation will suffer complete failure.
10. Will the Earth in the future compete with its independent colonies or will this lead to Star Wars?
11. If the ship goes off slowly enough, is it possible to destroy it from Earth, by self-propelling missile or with radiation beam?
12. Is this mission a real chance for survival of the mankind? Flown away are likely to be killed, because the chance of success of the mission is no more than 10 per cent. Remaining on the Earth may start to behave more risky, in logic: “Well, if we have protection against global risks, now we can start risky experiments.” As a result of the project total probability of survival decreases.
13. What are the chances that its computer network of the Ark will download the virus, if it will communicate with Earth? And if not, it will reduce the chances of success. It is possible competition for nearby stars, and faster machines would win it. Eventually there are not many nearby stars at distance of about 5 light years — Alpha Centauri, the Barnard star, and the competition can begin for them. It is also possible the existence of dark lonely planets or large asteroids without host-stars. Their density in the surrounding space should be 10 times greater than the density of stars, but to find them is extremely difficult. Also if nearest stars have not any planets or moons it would be a problem. Some stars, including Barnard, are inclined to extreme stellar flares, which could kill the expedition.
14. The spaceship will not protect people from hostile AI that finds a way to catch up. Also in case of war starships may be prestigious, and easily vulnerable targets — unmanned rocket will always be faster than a spaceship. If arks are sent to several nearby stars, it does not ensure their secrecy, as the destination will be known in advance. Phase transition of the vacuum, the explosion of the Sun or Jupiter or other extreme event can also destroy the spaceship. See e.g. A.Bolonkin “Artificial Explosion of Sun. AB-Criterion for Solar Detonation” http://www.scribd.com/doc/24541542/Artificial-Explosion-of-S…Detonation
15. However, the spaceship is too expensive protection from many other risks that do not require such far removal. People could hide from almost any pandemic in the well-isolated islands in the ocean. People can hide on the Moon from gray goo, collision with asteroid, supervolcano, irreversible global warming. The ark-spaceship will carry with it problems of genetic degradation, propensity for violence and self-destruction, as well as problems associated with limited human outlook and cognitive biases. Spaceship would only burden the problem of resource depletion, as well as of wars and of the arms race. Thus, the set of global risks from which the spaceship is the best protection, is quite narrow.
16. And most importantly: does it make sense now to begin this project? Anyway, there is no time to finish it before become real new risks and new ways to create spaceships using nanotech.
Of course it easy to envision nano and AI based Ark – it would be small as grain of sand, carry only one human egg or even DNA information, and could self-replicate. The main problem with it is that it could be created only ARTER the most dangerous period of human existence, which is the period just before Singularity.

Introduction
At a fundamental level, real wealth is the ability to fulfill human needs and desires. These ephemeral motivators are responsible for the creation of money, bank ledgers, and financial instruments that drive the world—caveat the fact that the monetary system can’t buy us love (and a few other necessities). Technologies have always provided us with tools that enable us to fulfill more needs and desires for more people with less effort. The exponential nanomanufacturing capabilities of Productive Nanosystems will simply enable us to do it better. Much better.

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

The main ways of solving the Fermi Paradox are:
1) They are already here (at least in the form of their signals)
2) They do not disseminate in the universe, do not leave traces, and not send signals. That is, they do not start a shock wave of intelligence.
3) The civilizations are extremely rare.
Additional way of thinking is 4): we are unique civilization because of observation selection
All of them have a sad outlook for global risk:
In the first case, we are under threat of conflict with superior aliens.
1A) If they are already here, we can do something that will encourage them to destroy us, or restrict us. For example, turn off the simulation. Or start the program of probes-berserkers. This probes cold be nanobots. In fact it could be something like “Space gray goo” with low intelligence but very wide spreading. It could even be in my room. The only goal of it could be to destroy other nanobots (like our Nanoshield would do). And so we will see it until we create our own nanobots.
1b) If they open up our star system right now and, moreover, focused on total colonization of all systems, we are also will fight with them and are likely to lose. Not probable.
1c) If a large portion of civilization is infected with SETI-virus and distributes signals, specially designed to infect naive civilizations — that is, encourage them to create a computer with AI, aimed at the further replication by SETI channels. This is what I write in the article Is SETI dangerous? http://www.proza.ru/texts/2008/04/12/55.html
1d) By the means of METI signal we attract attention of dangerous civilization and it will send to the solar system a beam of death (probably commonly known as gamma-ray burst). This scenario seems unlikely, since for the time until they receive the signal and have time to react, we have time to fly away from the solar system — if they are far away. And if they are close, it is not clear why they were not here. However, this risk was intensely discussed, for example by D. Brin.
2. They do not disseminate in space. This means that either:
2a) Civilizations are very likely to destroy themselves in very early stages, before it could start wave of robots replicators and we are not exception. This is reinforced by the Doomsday argument – namely the fact that I’m discovering myself in a young civilization suggests that they are much more common than the old. However, based on the expected rate of development of nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, we can start a wave of replicators have in 10–20 years, and even if we die then, this wave will continue to spread throughout the universe. Given the uneven development of civilizations, it is difficult to assume that none of them do not have time to launch a wave of replicators before their death. This is possible only if we a) do not see an inevitable and universal threat looming directly on us in the near future, b) significantly underestimate the difficulty of creating artificial intelligence and nanoreplicators. с) The energy of the inevitable destruction is so great that it manages to destroy all replicators, which were launched by civilization — that is it is of the order of a supernova explosion.
2b) Every civilization sharply limit itself — and this limitation is very hard and long as it is simple enough to run at least one probe-replicator. This restriction may be based either on a powerful totalitarianism, or the extreme depletion of resources. Again in this case, our prospects are quite unpleasant. Bur this solution is not very plausible.
3) If civilization are rare, it means that the universe is much less friendly place to live, and we are on an island of stability, which is likely to be an exception from the rule. This may mean that we underestimate the time of the future sustainability of the important processes for us (the solar luminosity, the earth’s crust), and most importantly, the sustainability of these processes to small influences, that is their fragility. I mean that we can inadvertently break their levels of resistance, carrying out geo-engineering activities, the complex physics experiments and mastering space. More I speak about this in the article: “Why antropic principle stopped to defend us. Observation selection and fragility of our environment”. http://www.scribd.com/doc/8729933/Why-antropic-principle-sto…vironment– See also the works of M.Circovic on the same subject.
However, this fragility is not inevitable and depends on what factors were critical in the Great filter. In addition, we are not necessarily would pressure on this fragile, even if it exist.
4) Observation selection makes us unique civilization.
4a. We are the first civilization, because any civilization which is the first captures the whole galaxy. Likewise, the earthly life is the first life on Earth, because it would require all swimming pools with a nutrient broth, in which could appear another life. In any case, sooner or later we will face another first civilization.
4b. Vast majority of civilizations are being destroyed in the process of colonization of the galaxy, and so we can find ourselves only in the civilization which is not destroyed by chance. Here the obvious risk is that those who made this error, would try to correct it.
4c. We wonder about the absence of contact, because we are not in contact. That is, we are in a unique position, which does not allow any conclusions about the nature of the universe. This clearly contradicts the Copernican principle.
The worst variant for us here is 2a — imminent self-destruction, which, however, has independent confirmation through the Doomsday Argument, but is undermine by the fact that we do not see alien von Neuman probes. I still believe that the most likely scenario is a Rare earth.


Paul J. Crutzen

Although this is the scenario we all hope (and work hard) to avoid — the consequences should be of interest to all who are interested in mitigation of the risk of mass extinction:

“WHEN Nobel prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen coined the word Anthropocene around 10 years ago, he gave birth to a powerful idea: that human activity is now affecting the Earth so profoundly that we are entering a new geological epoch.

The Anthropocene has yet to be accepted as a geological time period, but if it is, it may turn out to be the shortest — and the last. It is not hard to imagine the epoch ending just a few hundred years after it started, in an orgy of global warming and overconsumption.

Let’s suppose that happens. Humanity’s ever-expanding footprint on the natural world leads, in two or three hundred years, to ecological collapse and a mass extinction. Without fossil fuels to support agriculture, humanity would be in trouble. “A lot of things have to die, and a lot of those things are going to be people,” says Tony Barnosky, a palaeontologist at the University of California, Berkeley. In this most pessimistic of scenarios, society would collapse, leaving just a few hundred thousand eking out a meagre existence in a new Stone Age.

Whether our species would survive is hard to predict, but what of the fate of the Earth itself? It is often said that when we talk about “saving the planet” we are really talking about saving ourselves: the planet will be just fine without us. But would it? Or would an end-Anthropocene cataclysm damage it so badly that it becomes a sterile wasteland?

The only way to know is to look back into our planet’s past. Neither abrupt global warming nor mass extinction are unique to the present day. The Earth has been here before. So what can we expect this time?”

Read the entire article in New Scientist.

Also read “Climate change: melting ice will trigger wave of natural disasters” in the Guardian about the potential devastating effects of methane hydrates released from melting permafrost in Siberia and from the ocean floor.

Peter Garretson from the Lifeboat Advisory Board appears in the latest edition of New Scientist:

“IT LOOKS inconsequential enough, the faint little spot moving leisurely across the sky. The mountain-top telescope that just detected it is taking it very seriously, though. It is an asteroid, one never seen before. Rapid-survey telescopes discover thousands of asteroids every year, but there’s something very particular about this one. The telescope’s software decides to wake several human astronomers with a text message they hoped they would never receive. The asteroid is on a collision course with Earth. It is the size of a skyscraper and it’s big enough to raze a city to the ground. Oh, and it will be here in three days.

Far-fetched it might seem, but this scenario is all too plausible. Certainly it is realistic enough that the US air force recently brought together scientists, military officers and emergency-response officials for the first time to assess the nation’s ability to cope, should it come to pass.

They were asked to imagine how their respective organisations would respond to a mythical asteroid called Innoculatus striking the Earth after just three days’ warning. The asteroid consisted of two parts: a pile of rubble 270 metres across which was destined to splash down in the Atlantic Ocean off the west coast of Africa, and a 50-metre-wide rock heading, in true Hollywood style, directly for Washington DC.

The exercise, which took place in December 2008, exposed the chilling dangers asteroids pose. Not only is there no plan for what to do when an asteroid hits, but our early-warning systems — which could make the difference between life and death — are woefully inadequate. The meeting provided just the wake-up call organiser Peter Garreston had hoped to create. He has long been concerned about the threat of an impact. “As a taxpayer, I would appreciate my air force taking a look at something that would be certainly as bad as nuclear terrorism in a city, and potentially a civilisation-ending event,” he says.”

Read the entire article at New Scientist. Read the NASA NEO report “Natural Impact Hazard Interagancy Deliberate Planning Exercise After Action Report”.

Nature News reports of a growing concern over different standards for DNA screening and biosecurity:

“A standards war is brewing in the gene-synthesis industry. At stake is the way that the industry screens orders for hazardous toxins and genes, such as pieces of deadly viruses and bacteria. Two competing groups of companies are now proposing different sets of screening standards, and the results could be crucial for global biosecurity.

“If you have a company that persists with a lower standard, you can drag the industry down to a lower level,” says lawyer Stephen Maurer of the University of California, Berkeley, who is studying how the industry is developing responsible practices. “Now we have a standards war that is a race to the bottom.”

For more than a year a European consortium of companies called the International Association of Synthetic Biology (IASB) based in Heidelberg, Germany, has been drawing up a code of conduct that includes gene-screening standards. Then, at a meeting in San Francisco last month, two of the leading companies — DNA2.0 of Menlo Park, California, and Geneart of Regensburg, Germany — announced that they had formulated a code of conduct that differs in one key respect from the IASB recommendations.”

Read the entire article on Nature News.

Also read “Craig Venter’s Team Reports Key Advance in Synthetic Biology” from JCVI.

I recently began to worry that something/someone, some field, force, disease, prion, virus, bad luck and/or natural causes could threaten and perhaps destroy the most valuable entity in the universe, an entity more valuable than life itself. Consciousness. What good is life extension without conscious awareness? What is consciousness?

We know the brain works a lot like a computer, with neuron firings and synapses acting like bit states and switches. Brain-as-computer works very well to account for sensory processing, control of behavior, learning and other cognitive functions. These functions may in some cases be non-conscious, and other times associated with conscious experience and control. Scientists seek the distinction – the essential feature, or trick for consciousness.

Some suggest there is no trick, consciousness emerges as a by-product of cognitive computation among neurons. Others say we don’t know, that consciousness may indeed require some feature related to, but not quite the same as neuron-to-neuron cognition.

In either case, humans and other creatures could in principle become devoid of consciousness while maintaining cognitive behaviors, appearing more-or-less normal to outside observers. Such hypothetical non-conscious behaving entities are referred to in literature, films and philosophical texts as ‘zombies’. Philosopher David Chalmers introduced the philosophical zombie, a test case for whether or not consciousness is distinct from cognitive neurocomputation.

I’ve studied and researched consciousness for over 35 years, and work as an anesthesiologist, erasing and restoring consciousness several times per day for surgery. Patients under anesthesia are not zombies. They lack consciousness but also lack cognition. On the other hand, for a very brief period after first emerging from anesthesia following surgery, my patients seem like zombies, behaving purposely but blankly. Like in the old song “She’s not there” by…..The Zombies.

During a routine surgery recently, one of the nurses was talking about a book called ‘Patient Zero’ in which a terrorist group turned people into zombies the terrorists were then able to control. I later discovered there exists an entire genre of zombie terror books and films (‘Invasion of the body snatchers’ being perhaps the original). Could it be possible? How could we protect ourselves from consciousness-snatchers who want to turn us into zombies? Well, we need to understand what consciousness is (but, so do ‘they’).

We do know consciousness correlates with a particular coherent EEG gamma synchrony. Somehow selectively blocking EEG brain-wide coherence while sparing neuron-to-neuron computation and cognition could conceivably erase consciousness. But I would bet on an even more subtle and profound feature or trick. For example I personally believe (with Sir Roger Penrose) that consciousness involves quantum computations in microtubules inside brain neurons.

Microtubules are the major structural component of the neuronal cytoskeleton whose disruption is an essential feature of Alzheimers disease. Microtubules dynamically organize intra-neuronal and synaptic activities, conduct signals, have collective vibrational and electromagnetic modes and quite possibly mesoscopic quantum states. Motor proteins and biomolecular agents traverse and interact with microtubules.

I became obsessed with microtubules in medical school in the early 1970s. Their cylindrical lattice structure of ‘tubulin’ protein subunits looked to me like a computing switching circuit. Through the 1980s, colleagues and I developed models of microtubule information processing in which states of tubulin subunits were bits interacting with lattice neighbor tubulins. With about 107 (10 to the seventh) tubulins per neuron switching at 10^−9 seconds, we calculated a potential for 1016 operations per second in each neuron. This was, and remains unpopular in AI/Singularity circles because it potentially pushes the goalpost for brain capacity significantly. Recent evidence has shown collective microtubule excitations at 10^−7 seconds (rather than the 10^−9 seconds we assumed), indicating a neuronal information capacity of ‘only’ 1014 operations per second.

But here’s the really good news. Microtubules self-assemble. With proper conditions tubulins polymerize into microtubules, and with associated proteins into networks of cross-linked microtubules. In principle, tubulin and other necessary proteins can be genetically mass-produced, and then self-assemble into large arrays. If microtubules process molecular-scale information (quantum or classical), appropriate arrays of microtubules could serve as a repository of consciousness — a ‘Lifeboat’.

These could be useful. Evil forces aside, consciousness-snatchers include aging, disease and death. In 1987 I wrote a book about microtubule information processing based entirely on classical (non-quantum) processes. The brief, concluding chapter considered arrays of microtubules as orbiting consciousness Lifeboats. It foreshadowed the Singularity, and in retrospect also applies to quantum processes. The chapter follows below. And we should understand consciousness not just to preserve it, but to enhance it in any way possible.

From
Ultimate computing: Biomolecular consciousness and nanotechnology
Elsevier, 1987
http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/ultimatecomputing.html

11 The Future of Consciousness

Nanotechnology may enable the dream of Mind/Tech merger to materialize. At long last, debates about the nature of consciousness will move from the domain of philosophy to large scale experiments. The visions of consciousness interfacing with, or existing within, computers or mind piloted robots expressed by Moravec, Margulis, Sagan and Max Headroom could be realized. Symbiotic association of replicative nanodevices and cytoskeletal networks within living cells could not only counter disease processes, but lead to exchange of information encoded in the collective dynamic patterns of cytoskeletal subunit states. If these are indeed the roots of consciousness, a science fiction-like deciphering and transfer of mind content may become possible. One possible scenario could utilize a small window in a specific brain region. Hippocampal temporal lobe, a site where memories enter and where electromagnetic radiation from outside the skull penetrates most readily and harmlessly, is one possible area where information distributed throughout the brain may perhaps be accessed and manipulated. Techniques such as laser interferometry, electroacoustical probes scanned over brain surfaces, or replicative nanoprobes immunotargeted to key hippocampal tubulins, MAPs, and other cytoskeletal components might be developed to perceive and transmit the content of consciousness.

What technological device would be capable of receiving and housing the information emanating from some 1015 tubulin subunits changing state some 109 times per second? One possibility is a customized array of nanoscale automata, perhaps utilizing superconducting materials. Another possibility is a genetically engineered array of some 1015 tubulin subunits (or many more) assembled into parallel tensegrity arrays of interconnected microtubules, and other cytoskeletal structures. Current and near future genetic engineering capabilities should enable isolation of genes responsible for a specific individual’s brain cytoskeletal proteins, and reconstitution in an appropriate medium. Thus the two evident sources of mind content (heredity and experience) may be eventually reunited in an artificial consciousness environment. A polymerized cytoskeletal array would be highly unstable and dependent on biochemical, hormonal, and pharmacological maintenance of its medium. Precise monitoring and control of cytoskeletal consciousness environments may become an important new branch of anesthesiology. Polymerization of cell-free cytoskeletal lattices would be limited in size (and potential intellect) due to gravitational collapse. Possible remedies might include hybridizing the cytoskeletal array by metal deposition, symbiosis with synthetic nanoreplicators, or placement of the cytoskeletal array in a zero gravity environment. Perhaps future consciousness vaults will be constructed in orbiting space stations or satellites. People with terminal illnesses may choose to deposit their mind in such a place, where their consciousness can exist indefinitely, and (because of enhanced cooperative resonance) in a far greater magnitude. Perhaps many minds can comingle in a single large array, obviating loneliness, but raising new sociopolitical issues. Entertainment, earth communication, and biochemical mood and maintenance can be supplied by robotics, perhaps leading to the next symbiosis-robotic space voyagers (shaped like centrioles?) whose intelligence is derived from cytoskeletal consciousness.

Yes, this is science fiction. Will it become reality like so much previous science fiction has? Probably not precisely as suggested; but if past events are valid indicators, the future of consciousness may be even more outrageous.

50 years ago Herman Khan coined the term in his book “On thermonuclear war”. His ideas are still important. Now we can read what he really said online. His main ideas are that DM is feasable, that it will cost around 10–100 billion USD, it will be much cheaper in the future and there are good rational reasons to built it as ultimate mean of defence, but better not to built it, because it will lead to DM-race between states with more and more dangerous and effective DM as outcome. And this race will not be stable, but provoking one side to strike first. This book and especially this chapter inspired “Dr. Strangelove” movie of Kubrick.
Herman Khan. On Doomsday machine.