Filed under: Amazon, Brave New World, Feedback, General Musings, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Singularity, Space, Writing stuff | Tags: Amazon, Apparent Gravity, blogging, Communion of Dreams, cosmology, Dan Falk, Einstein, feedback, jim downey, Nova, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, physics, predictions, reviews, Science Fiction, Sean Gryb, Shape Dynamics, space, Stephen Hawking, WGBH, Wikipedia, writing
From Chapter 3 of Communion of Dreams:
Apparent Gravity was the third major application of the theories set forth in Hawking’s Conundrum, the great opus of Stephen Hawking which was not published until after his death in the earlier part of the century. He hadn’t released the work because evidently even he couldn’t really believe that it made any sense. It was, essentially, both too simple and too complex. And since he had died just shortly before the Fire-flu, with the chaos that brought, there had been a lag in his theory being fully understood and starting to be applied.
But it did account for all the established data, including much of the stuff that seemed valid but didn’t fit inside the previous paradigms. Using his theories, scientists and engineers learned that the structure of space itself could be manipulated. The first major application led to practical, safe, and efficient fusion power. Rather than forcing high-energy particles together, the forces keeping them apart were just removed. Or, more accurately, the manifestation of space between them was inverted. It took very little energy, was easy to control, but only worked in a very localized fashion
Then there’s this excellent non-technical explanation of a new theory of Shape Dynamics. An excerpt or two:
Their latest offering is something called “shape dynamics.” (If you’ve never heard of shape dynamics, that’s OK—neither have most physicists.) It could, of course, be a dead end, as most bold new ideas in physics are. Or it could be the next great revolution in our conception of the cosmos. Its supporters describe it as a new way of looking at gravity, although it could end up being quite a bit more than that. It appears to give a radical new picture of space and time—and of black holes in particular. It could even alter our view of what’s “real” in the universe.
* * *
In most situations, shape dynamics predicts what Einstein’s theory predicts. “For the vast majority of physical situations, the theories are equivalent,” Gryb says. In other words, the two frameworks are almost identical—but not quite.
Imagine dividing space-time up into billions upon billions of little patches. Within each patch, shape dynamics and general relativity tell the same story, Gryb says. But glue them all together, and a new kind of structure can emerge. For a concrete example of how this can happen, think of pulling together the two ends of a long, narrow strip of paper: Do it the usual way, and you get a loop; do it with a twist and you get a Möbius strip. “If you glue all the regions together to form a kind of global picture of space and time, then that global picture might actually be different.” So while shape dynamics may recreate Einstein’s theory on a small scale, the big-picture view of space and time may be novel.
Another prediction come true?
Not really — there were intimations of this theory when I was working on CoD, and it is a *very* long way from being accepted as valid, as the Nova article discusses.
But still …
Jim Downey
PS: new review of Communion of Dreams was put up yesterday. Check it out.
Filed under: Art, Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, Connections, movies, NPR, Phil Plait, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Singularity, Slate, Space, tech, Wired, YouTube | Tags: ALMA, art, astronomy, Bad Astronomy, blogging, Blood Sweat & Tears, Interstellar, jim downey, Kip Thorne, movies, music, NPR, Phil Plait, photography, predictions, reviews, science, Science Fiction, space, technology, video, www youtube
The reviews have been mixed, but one aspect of the new movie Interstellar is pretty cool: the rendering of the black hole depicted in the movie. Even moreso since it is as scientifically accurate as possible, based on close collaboration with noted astrophysicist Kip Thorne:
Still, no one knew exactly what a black hole would look like until they actually built one. Light, temporarily trapped around the black hole, produced an unexpectedly complex fingerprint pattern near the black hole’s shadow. And the glowing accretion disk appeared above the black hole, below the black hole, and in front of it. “I never expected that,” Thorne says. “Eugénie just did the simulations and said, ‘Hey, this is what I got.’ It was just amazing.”
In the end, Nolan got elegant images that advance the story. Thorne got a movie that teaches a mass audience some real, accurate science. But he also got something he didn’t expect: a scientific discovery. “This is our observational data,” he says of the movie’s visualizations. “That’s the way nature behaves. Period.” Thorne says he can get at least two published articles out of it.
The video is remarkable. Seriously. Go watch it.
And in a nice bit of serendipity, there’s another fantastic bit of astrophysics in the news just now: actual images of planetary genesis from ALMA. Check it out:
A new image from ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, reveals extraordinarily fine detail that has never been seen before in the planet-forming disc around a young star. ALMA’s new high-resolution capabilities were achieved by spacing the antennas up to 15 kilometers apart [1]. This new result represents an enormous step forward in the understanding of how protoplanetary discs develop and how planets form.
ALMA has obtained its most detailed image yet showing the structure of the disc around HL Tau [2], a million-year-old Sun-like star located approximately 450 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Taurus. The image exceeds all expectations and reveals a series of concentric and bright rings, separated by gaps.
That’s not computer-rendered theory. That’s an actual image, showing the formation of planets around this very young star.
Wow.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Augmented Reality, Brave New World, Connections, Humor, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Singularity, Space, Stephen Hawking | Tags: augmented reality, black holes, blogging, Communion of Dreams, humor, jim downey, physics, predictions, science, Science Fiction, singularity, space, St. Cybi's Well, Stephen Hawking, technology, writing
From Chapter 3 of Communion of Dreams:
Apparent Gravity was the third major application of the theories set forth in Hawking’s Conundrum, the great opus of
Stephen Hawking which was not published until after his death in the earlier part of the century. He hadn’t released the work because evidently even he couldn’t really believe that it made any sense. It was, essentially, both too simple and too complex. And since he had died just shortly before the Fire-flu, with the chaos that brought, there had been a lag in his theory being fully understood and starting to be applied.But it did account for all the established data, including much of the stuff that seemed valid but didn’t fit inside the previous paradigms. Using his theories, scientists and engineers learned that the structure of space itself could be manipulated.
Of course, that is the reality of St. Cybi’s Well, not our own. In our reality, there’s been no fire-flu (at least yet), Stephen Hawking is still alive, and the laws of physics are still the same.
Black holes are in crisis. Well, not them, but the people who think about them, theoretical physicists who try to understand the relationship between the two pillars of modern physics, general relativity and quantum physics. Judging from the current discussions, one of the two must go, at least in their present formulation. On January 22nd, Stephen Hawking posted a paper where he bluntly stated that black holes, in the sense of being objects that can trap light and everything else indefinitely, are no more. And that’s a big deal.
Sometimes I wonder what reality I am actually plugged into, since it seems that I keep getting leaks from the other one.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Charlie Stross, Failure, Feedback, General Musings, New Horizons, Predictions, Publishing, Science Fiction, Singularity, Society, Steampunk, Survival, tech, Writing stuff | Tags: blogging, Charlie Stross, jim downey, literature, predictions, reviews, Science Fiction, space, technology, writing
I’ve mentioned Charlie Stross several times here. As I’ve said previously: smart guy, good writer. I disagree with his belief in mundane science fiction, because I think that it is too limited in imagination. Which leads almost inevitably to this formulation on his blog today (and yes, you should go read the whole thing):
We people of the SF-reading ghetto have stumbled blinking into the future, and our dirty little secret is that we don’t much like it. And so we retreat into the comfort zones of brass goggles and zeppelins (hey, weren’t airships big in the 1910s-1930s? Why, then, are they such a powerful signifier for Victorian-era alternate fictions?), of sexy vampire-run nightclubs and starship-riding knights-errant. Opening the pages of a modern near-future SF novel now invites a neck-chillingly cold draft of wind from the world we’re trying to escape, rather than a warm narcotic vision of a better place and time.
And so I conclude: we will not inspire anyone with grand visions of a viable future through the medium of escapism. If we want to write inspirational literature with grand visions we need to dive into to the literary mainstream (which is finally rediscovering fabulism) and, adding a light admixture of Enlightenment ideology along the way, start writing the equivalent of those earnest and plausible hyper-realistic tales of Progress through cotton-planting on the shores of the Aral sea.
But do you really want us to do that? I don’t think so. In fact, the traditional response of traditional-minded SF readers to the rigorous exercise of extrapolative vision tends to be denial, disorientation, and distaste. So let me pose for you a different question, which has been exercising me for some time: If SF’s core message (to the extent that it ever had one) is obsolete, what do we do next?
Well, I dunno about Charlie, but I plan on writing a couple of prequels to Communion of Dreams, which I understand have touched something of a nerve in people precisely *because* it is hopeful in the face of a harsh reality.
Jim Downey
(PS: sometime today we should break through the level of 500 total sales/loans of CoD so far this month. Which is almost twice the previous month’s tally. Thanks for affirming my vision, folks!)
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, Expert systems, General Musings, Music, Predictions, Ray Kurzweil, Science, Science Fiction, Singularity, Society, TDG, Writing stuff
Just now, my good lady wife was through to tell me that she’s off to take a bit of a nap. Both of us are getting over a touch of something (which I had mentioned last weekend), and on a deeper level still recovering from the profound exhaustion of having been care-givers for her mom.
Anyway, as she was preparing to head off, one of our cats insisted on going through the door which leads from my office into my bindery. This is where the cat food is.
“She wants through.”
“She wants owwwwt.”
“Any door leads out, as far as a cat is concerned.”
“Well, that door did once actually lead out, decades ago.”
“She remembers.”
“She can’t remember.”
“Nonetheless, the memory lingers.”
* * * * * * *
Via TDG, a fascinating interview with Douglas Richard Hofstadter last year, now translated into English. I’d read his GEB some 25 years ago, and have more or less kept tabs on his work since. The interview was about his most recent book, and touched on a number of subjects of interest to me, including the nature of consciousness, writing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Singularity. It’s long, but well worth the effort.
In discussing consciousness (which Hofstadter calls ‘the soul’ for reasons he explains), and the survival of shards of a given ‘soul’, the topic of writing and music comes up. Discussing how Chopin’s music has enabled shards of the composer’s soul to persist, Hofstadter makes this comment about his own desire to write:
I am not shooting at immortality through my books, no. Nor do I think Chopin was shooting at immortality through his music. That strikes me as a very selfish goal, and I don’t think Chopin was particularly selfish. I would also say that I think that music comes much closer to capturing the essence of a composer’s soul than do a writer’s ideas capture the writer’s soul. Perhaps some very emotional ideas that I express in my books can get across a bit of the essence of my soul to some readers, but I think that Chopin’s music probably does a lot better job (and the same holds, of course, for many composers).
I personally don’t have any thoughts about “shooting for immortality” when I write. I try to write simply in order to get ideas out there that I believe in and find fascinating, because I’d like to let other people be able share those ideas. But intellectual ideas alone, no matter how fascinating they are, are not enough to transmit a soul across brains. Perhaps, as I say, my autobiographical passages — at least some of them — get tiny shards of my soul across to some people.
Exactly.
* * * * * * *
In April, I wrote this:
I’ve written only briefly about my thoughts on the so-called Singularity – that moment when our technological abilities converge to create a new transcendent artificial intelligence which encompasses humanity in a collective awareness. As envisioned by the Singularity Institute and a number of Science Fiction authors, I think that it is too simple – too utopian. Life is more complex than that. Society develops and copes with change in odd and unpredictable ways, with good and bad and a whole lot in the middle.
Here’s Hofstadter’s take from the interview, in responding to a question about Ray Kurzweil‘s notion of achieving effective immortality by ‘uploading’ a personality into a machine hardware:
Well, the problem is that a soul by itself would go crazy; it has to live in a vastly complex world, and it has to cohabit that world with many other souls, commingling with them just as we do here on earth. To be sure, Kurzweil sees those things as no problem, either — we’ll have virtual worlds galore, “up there” in Cyberheaven, and of course there will be souls by the barrelful all running on the same hardware. And Kurzweil sees the new software souls as intermingling in all sorts of unanticipated and unimaginable ways.
Well, to me, this “glorious” new world would be the end of humanity as we know it. If such a vision comes to pass, it certainly would spell the end of human life. Once again, I don’t want to be there if such a vision should ever come to pass. But I doubt that it will come to pass for a very long time. How long? I just don’t know. Centuries, at least. But I don’t know. I’m not a futurologist in the least. But Kurzweil is far more “optimistic” (i.e., depressingly pessimistic, from my perspective) about the pace at which all these world-shaking changes will take place.
Interesting.
* * * * * * *
Lastly, the interview is about the central theme of I am a Strange Loop: that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon which stems from vast and subtle physical mechanisms in the brain. This is also the core ‘meaning’ of GEB, though that was often missed by readers and reviewers who got hung up on the ostensible themes, topics, and playfulness of that book. Hofstadter calls this emergent consciousness a self-referential hallucination, and it reflects much of his interest in cognitive science over the years.
[Mild spoilers ahead.]
In Communion of Dreams I played with this idea and a number of related ones, particularly pertaining to the character of Seth. It is also why I decided that I needed to introduce a whole new technology – based on the superfluid tholin-gel found on Titan, as the basis for the AI systems at the heart of the story. Because the gel is not human-manufactured, but rather something a bit mysterious. Likewise, the use of this material requires another sophisticated computer to ‘boot it up’, and then it itself is responsible for sustaining the energy matrix necessary for continued operation. At the culmination of the story, this ‘self-referential hallucination’ frees itself from its initial containment.
Why did I do this?
Partly in homage to Hofstedter (though you will find no mention of him in the book, as far as I recall). Partly because it plays with other ideas I have about the nature of reality. If we (conscious beings) are an emergent phenomenon, arising from physical activity, then it seems to me that physical things can be impressed with our consciousness. This is why I find his comments about shards of a soul existing beyond the life of the body of the person to be so intriguing.
So I spent some 130,000 words exploring that idea in Communion. Not overtly – not often anyway – but that is part of the subtext of what is going on in that book.
* * * * * * *
“Any door leads out, as far as a cat is concerned.”
“Well, that door did once actually lead out, decades ago.”
“She remembers.”
“She can’t remember.”
“Nonetheless, the memory lingers,” I said, “impressed on the door itself. Maybe the cat understands that at a level we don’t.”
Jim Downey
(Related post at UTI.)
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, Expert systems, Predictions, Ray Kurzweil, Science, Science Fiction, Singularity, Singularity Institute, Society, tech
As I’ve said before, I’m a late-adopter of tech. I’m probably the last person in the US under the age of fifty and with an IQ above room temp who has made the transition over to Firefox.
Oh, it’s not as bad as it sounds – I’ve been running Mozilla for several years, and Netscape in one variety or another before that, all the way back to when I first got online in about ’93. But with the additional options available in Firefox2, it made sense to make the jump. So, with my good lady wife’s help (she’s the resident geek, not me) I switched yesterday, and then spent much of the rest of the day enjoying the much improved surfing experience, tweaking the set-up, learning the little quirks of the new software.
And also teaching it my own preferences and habits. This was the bit that I found amusing – that in one sense, I’m teaching Seth’s great-whatever-grandpappy his ABCs. Oh, we’re about 30 iterations of Moore’s Law away from the S-Series A.I. I have in Communion of Dreams, and a couple of computer ‘generations’ (if you consider that we’re currently in the fourth generation, that quantum computing will be the fifth, with my Tholin gel tech following that.) But it really does feel like something akin to a baby expert system I’m dealing with here, as we learn from one another.
I still don’t expect that we’ll experience a true Singularity such as Kurzweil and others have predicted, and the novel is in large part an exploration of why that is. But it is certainly the case that we’re moving towards a major threshold of technological change at an ever-increasing rate. Even late-adopters like me.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, Astronomy, BoingBoing, Fermi's Paradox, Gene Roddenberry, General Musings, movies, NYT, Predictions, Quantum mechanics, Ray Kurzweil, Religion, Science, Science Fiction, Singularity, Sir Arthur Eddington, Space, Star Trek, tech, Writing stuff
“Grrrr.”
“Easy, Alwyn.”
“Grrrrr! GRR!” His growls grew from a distant throaty rumble into a near bark, as we came around the corner across from the lawn with the sprinkler. Yeah, my dog was growling at a lawn sprinkler. This is not normal behaviour for him.
But in fairness, it was an odd lawn sprinkler. A big plastic dog lawn sprinkler. White, with black spots. Looked vaguely like a St. Bernard in size and shape, but a Dalmation in coloration. The hose attached to the tail, which fanned water all over while doing this odd jitterbug wag. Looked like some overgrown kid’s toy. Which it might well be. Since I don’t have kid, I don’t keep track of these things.
Anyway, it was clear that my dog thought that it was some kind of bizzaro-dog with a serious bladder problem. Perhaps an Alien Zombie Dog or something. So, he did the natural thing: he growled.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
As I’ve noted before, I’m a big fan of the original series Star Trek and of Gene Roddenberry. But one of the things which has always bothered me about that series and most other SF television or movies is the fact that so often the Aliens are depicted as some variation of humanoid, albeit with a little makeup and prosthetics as the budget would allow. Though, in fairness to Roddenberry (and others in different series now and then), sometimes there was an attempt made to depict alien life as being just completely odd, unlike anything we’ve known or seen. This notion that extraterrestrial life might be difficult to even identify is a staple of good Science Fiction, of course, and one of the topics which I explore at some length in Communion of Dreams (and part of the reason why we never meet the aliens responsible for the creation of the artifact). It gets back to “Haldane’s Law“:
Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we CAN suppose.
(Which is decidedly similar to Sir Arthur Eddington‘s attributed comment: “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.” But since I am talking more about life here than astrophysics, I thought I’d go with the evolutionary biologist…)
But now actual science has perhaps caught up with Science Fiction. From the New Journal of Physics comes a paper discussing what seems to be the discovery of inorganic life. The abstract:
Abstract. Complex plasmas may naturally self-organize themselves into stable interacting helical structures that exhibit features normally attributed to organic living matter. The self-organization is based on non-trivial physical mechanisms of plasma interactions involving over-screening of plasma polarization. As a result, each helical string composed of solid microparticles is topologically and dynamically controlled by plasma fluxes leading to particle charging and over-screening, the latter providing attraction even among helical strings of the same charge sign. These interacting complex structures exhibit thermodynamic and evolutionary features thought to be peculiar only to living matter such as bifurcations that serve as `memory marks’, self-duplication, metabolic rates in a thermodynamically open system, and non-Hamiltonian dynamics. We examine the salient features of this new complex `state of soft matter’ in light of the autonomy, evolution, progenity and autopoiesis principles used to define life. It is concluded that complex self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter that may exist in space provided certain conditions allow them to evolve naturally.
That’s a bit dense, so let’s go to the critical bit from the Press Release:
‘It might be life, Jim…’, physicists discover inorganic dust with lifelike qualities.
Until now, physicists assumed that there could be little organisation in such a cloud of particles. However, Tsytovich and his colleagues demonstrated, using a computer model of molecular dynamics, that particles in a plasma can undergo self-organization as electronic charges become separated and the plasma becomes polarized. This effect results in microscopic strands of solid particles that twist into corkscrew shapes, or helical structures. These helical strands are themselves electronically charged and are attracted to each other.
Quite bizarrely, not only do these helical strands interact in a counterintuitive way in which like can attract like, but they also undergo changes that are normally associated with biological molecules, such as DNA and proteins, say the researchers. They can, for instance, divide, or bifurcate, to form two copies of the original structure. These new structures can also interact to induce changes in their neighbours and they can even evolve into yet more structures as less stable ones break down, leaving behind only the fittest structures in the plasma.
So, could helical clusters formed from interstellar dust be somehow alive? “These complex, self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter,” says Tsytovich, “they are autonomous, they reproduce and they evolve”.
Obviously, there’s more to it, and it is worth reading at least the entire press release, or the full paper if you have a chance.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
There’s another possibility, of course. This one can best be summed up as being that life is “a dream within a dream“. The latest popular version of this is “The Matrix“, wherein life is an artificial reality construct, designed to keep the human ‘power cells’ docile. But this too is an idea extensively exploited in Science Fiction, with many different variations on the theme. Of late, this idea has been more and more tied to the concept of a ‘Singularity’ , with speculation being that we are just some version of post-human research/recreation as a computer construct. And in a piece published yesterday in the NYT titled “Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch” this gets the mainstream religion treatment:
Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims.
But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.
. . .
David J. Chalmers, a philosopher at the Australian National University, says Dr. Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis isn’t a cause for skepticism, but simply a different metaphysical explanation of our world. Whatever you’re touching now — a sheet of paper, a keyboard, a coffee mug — is real to you even if it’s created on a computer circuit rather than fashioned out of wood, plastic or clay.
You still have the desire to live as long as you can in this virtual world — and in any simulated afterlife that the designer of this world might bestow on you. Maybe that means following traditional moral principles, if you think the posthuman designer shares those morals and would reward you for being a good person.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
My own prediction is that unless we are extremely fortunate, and extremely open-minded, we’ll stumble badly in our first encounter with any real extra-terrestrial intelligence. Chances are, we’ll completely mistake it for something else, or try and see it through our limited perspective, not unlike how my dog mistook a lawn sprinkler for a wierdly-colored St. Bernard. If we’re lucky, we’ll survive that first contact, and then go on to see the universe with less prejudiced eyes.
If we’re *very* lucky.
Jim Downey
(Some material via BoingBoing.)
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Ansari X Prize, Babylon 5, Burt Rutan, Charlie Stross, General Musings, Global Warming, Heinlein, Heinlein Centennial, J. Michael Straczynski, Jeff Greason, JMS, Peter Diamandis, Predictions, Robert A. Heinlein, Science, Science Fiction, Singularity, Society, Space, tech, XCOR
Standing there, looking out the window to the driveway just below, I saw the fox take the unwitting squirrel. One quick, quiet leap from behind a tree, a snap, pause to snap again at the struggling grey mass, and it had breakfast. A pretty, lethal thing, yellow-red short fur, characteristic long legs and bushy tail, eyes sharp as it looked around. Probably weighed twelve to fifteen pounds, lean and long. Made me consider keeping the cats inside.
******************************
Peter Diamandis received a standing ovation for his presentation on the absolute need to go into space. It wasn’t just that the attendees at the Heinlein Centennial Gala were predisposed to his message – it was because his energy and enthusiasm swept away all doubts that this was *going* to happen, that it was economically inevitable, once we realized that it was actually possible. What’s that? Charlie Stross and others have said that while something like asteroid mining might be possible, it won’t lead to colonization? Yeah, that’s the argument. But Diamandis calculates that one 0.5 kilometer metallic asteroid will contain a *lot* of valuable metal…to the tune of 20 Trillion dollars worth. Sure, such asteroids only comprise about 8% of the known bodies anywhere near our space…but still, you’re talking tens of thousands of such asteroids of varying size. That’s a damned big incentive to build infrastructure, and once the infrastructure is in place, once the basic research has been done and there are multiple private corporations, countries, and even private citizens exploiting this resource, there are going to be some who find it advantageous to actually locate in space (semi-)permanently.
Diamandis joked that his strategy is going to be to issue a lot of ‘put options’ for the precious metals, then announce that he is going to go grab one of these asteroids and use the procedes to finance the expedition. Hey, when a man worth that kind of money makes such a joke, people should take it seriously.
******************************
I watched, one afternoon last week, while my mother-in-law suffered a slight TIA. She was sitting in her wheelchair, having just gotten up from her afternoon nap, and was finishing some yogurt. I was sitting and talking with her, when she just slowly sort of folded in on herself. While she is 90 and suffers from Alzhemer’s, she is usually capable of responding to direct questions about immediate events (how she feels, if she likes her yogurt, et cetera), but she suddenly went quiet, almost insensate. I checked to see whether something like a heart attack was in process, and asked if she was hurting or if there was some other indicator of a serious emergency. Eventually I got enough information to conclude it was likely ‘just’ a TIA or some similar event, and got her back in bed. I monitored her, and all seemed to be well. She woke two hours later, with no evidence of damage. But it was an indication of her condition, and likely a hint at things to come.
******************************
I want to have Jeff Greason’s baby.
Greason (pronounced ‘Grey-son’) is the head of XCOR Aerospace, and is one of the many companies trying to build the infrastructure of private commercial spaceflight. He and his company have accomplished a lot in the development of dependable, reusuable, and powerful rocket engines…engines sufficiently well engineered that they show no indication of wearing out after even thousands of operating cycles (being turned on and off). As he explains, the two biggest problems previously with rocket engine design was that there was wear leading to failure on both the throat of the engine (where the burning fuel exhausts) and on the nozzle (which creates the high thrust needed). The XCOR designs have engineered these problems out, and they’re still waiting to find out what other life-span problems the engine might have. And once you have dependable rocket engines, you can build a reusable and dependable vehicle around them.
But that’s not why I want to have his baby. Yes, dependable reusable rockets is a critical first-step technology for getting into space. But as Greason says, he didn’t get interested in space because of chemical rockets – he got interested in chemical rockets because they could get him into space. For him, that has always been the goal, from the first time he read Rocket Ship Galileo by Robert Heinlein when he was about 10. It is somewhat interesting to note that similar to the setting and plot of the book, XCOR Aerospace is based on the edge of a military test range, using leased government buildings…
Anyway. Greason looked at the different possible technologies which might hold promise for getting us off this rock, and held a fascinating session at the Centennial discussing those exotic technologies. Simply, he came to the same conclusion many other very intelligent people have come to: that conventional chemical rockets are the best first stage tech. Sure, many other possible options are there, once the demand is in place to make it financially viable to exploit space on a large enough scale. But before you build an ‘interstate highway’, you need to have enough traffic to warrant it. As he said several times in the course of the weekend, “you don’t build a bridge to only meet the needs of those who are swimming the river…but you don’t build a bridge where no one is swimming the river, either.”
******************************
In one of the sessions, people got to talking about what drives technological development, and one of the big things that people focused on was war. This has been a common theme in a lot of SF, including my favorite series Babylon 5 (see the Shadow War arc). I don’t entirely buy it. I tend to think that economics are a bigger force in tech development – even in wartime, most of the tech developed isn’t something like a pure weapon such as the atomic bomb; it is all the support infrastructure which has dual-use and can be adapted easily after a war because it is economically advantageous.
But this discussion took another familiar turn: that only after we have threatened ourselves with extinction through something like a nuclear war, would we find the will to go into space in a big way. That, actually, is one aspect of Communion of Dreams, but I don’t see mankind being able to survive a major nuclear exchange and then still have the capability to get into space. The infrastructure necessary to support a space-faring tech is really quite extensive, even if you have just small private companies and individuals building and using the rockets/spaceplanes to get to low-earth-orbit. Take out that infrastructure…wipe out the industrial base of the major nations, or even kick it back 50 years…and you will not have access to the kinds of composite materials, computing systems, et cetera, which are necessary components of any spacecraft. Burt Rutan will not be making SpaceShipTwo unless he has the parts – it’s that simple.
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There are a few things I’ve learned in my 49 years here. One is that we age, and we will die (sure, I’d love for Heinlein’s rejuvenation technology to come into play, or some version of ‘Singularity’ to save me from personal extinction…but I’m not counting on it.) It might be through something like the advancing senescence of global warming which we should see coming but act on too late. It might be something quick and unexpected, perhaps one of Diamandis’ $20 trillion rocks taking us out before we get around to using it for other purposes.
We should be like the fox, not the squirrel. The quick-witted one. The one who takes the future and makes it his own, rather than the one who is unpleasantly surprised for a brief and painful moment.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
