2005 Guardian Award Winner is Concerned About Bioterrorism
The Lifeboat Foundation Guardian award is annually bestowed upon a
revered scientist or public figure who has heralded the coming of a
future fraught with danger and encouraged provision against its perils. This year's recipient is Ray Kurzweil.
Ray Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical
character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the
blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, and the first commercially
marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Ray has successfully
founded and developed nine businesses in OCR, music synthesis, speech
recognition, reading technology, virtual reality, financial investment,
cybernetic art, and other areas of artificial intelligence. All of these
technologies continue today as market leaders. Ray's Web site,
KurzweilAI.net, is a leading resource on artificial intelligence.
His book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, was named Best Computer
Science Book of 1990. His best-selling book, The Age of Spiritual
Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, has been published
in nine languages and achieved the #1 best selling book on Amazon.com in
the categories of "Science" and "Artificial Intelligence." His latest
book, coauthored with Terry Grossman, M.D. is Fantastic Voyage: Live
Long Enough to Live Forever.
Ray Kurzweil has grown increasingly worried about bioterrorism and now
advocates a one hundred billion dollar program to accelerate the
development of anti-biological virus technology. He says "We have an
existential threat now in the form of the possibility of a bioengineered
malevolent biological virus. With all the talk of bioterrorism, the
possibility of a bioengineered bioterrorism agent gets little and
inadequate attention. The tools and knowledge to create a bioengineered
pathogen are more widespread than the tools and knowledge to create an
atomic weapon, yet it could be far more destructive. I'm on the Army
Science Advisory Group (a board of five people who advise the Army on
science and technology), and the Army is the institution responsible for
the nation's bioterrorism protection. Without revealing anything
confidential, I can say that there is acute awareness of these dangers,
but there is neither the funding nor national priority to address them
in an adequate way."
Ray Kurzweil goes on to state "the means and knowledge will soon exist
in a routine college bioengineering lab (and already exists in more
sophisticated labs) to create unfriendly pathogens more dangerous than
nuclear weapons."
Finally, Ray thinks the threat of gray goo should not be ignored. He
states "Gray goo certainly represents power — destructive power — and
if such an existential threat were to prevail, it would represent a
catastrophic loss... Although the existential nanotechnology danger is
not yet at hand, denial is not the appropriate strategy."
Artificial Life Forms: a Futuristic Self-Replicating Weapon
Scientists can now build synthetic viruses, a bonus for medical research
but also a risk in the post-9/11 era.
For decades, health officials have been scrambling to stamp out polio
around the world. Six years ago, Eckard Wimmer, a virologist at New
York's Stony Brook University, figured out a way to bring it back. Armed
with funding from the US Department of Defense and a genetic blueprint
for the virus — readily available on the Internet — Wimmer and his
colleagues requested strips of DNA from a biotech company in Iowa. The
order was shipped, the scientists got out their chemical tool kit and
then, like kids assembling LEGOs, they pieced together the pathogen over
a three year period. Wimmer says the experiment was intended as a
wake-up call: "The major purpose was to show that it can be done."
Just as computer technology has gotten faster, cheaper and more
efficient, so, too, has genetic know-how. A year after the artificial
polio virus was created, genome guru Craig Venter announced that his
group had assembled the DNA of a bacteriophage — a virus that attacks
bacteria and has about the same amount of DNA bases as the polio virus — in just two weeks.
SpaceX Works on Fully Reusable Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle
Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) has announced that
it will develop a Falcon 9 booster — an Evolved Expendable Launch
Vehicle (EELV) class vehicle. SpaceX is bankrolled and run by Elon
Musk, a cofounder of PayPal.
A key goal of SpaceX is developing a family of launch vehicles intended
to reduce the cost of access to space by a factor of ten.
The Falcon 9 will be capable of launching approximately 21,000 pounds
(9,500 kilograms) to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) in its medium configuration
and 55,000 pounds (25,000 kilograms) to LEO in its heavy configuration,
a lift capacity greater than any other launch vehicle.
In the medium configuration, Falcon 9 would be priced at $27 million per
flight with a 12 ft (3.6 m) fairing and $35 million with a 17 ft (5.1 m)
fairing. Prices include all launch range and third party insurance
costs, making Falcon 9 the most cost efficient vehicle in its class if
this project is successful.
