Minor bit of trivia: the early information on the JWST which was available helped me to come up with the design idea for the ‘Advanced Survey Array’ in Communion of Dreams. I never really get into a description of the ASA, but I had to think through for myself how the thing worked to use it consistently in the book.
Several things of interest, some personal, some news, some related to the book . . .
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I am struck with how powerful just random chance is in determining the course of events. Whether you agree with the Administration’s handling of it or not, just consider how the BP oil leak in the Gulf has come to dominate the attention and course of politics. Who could have predicted that of all the things happening in the world, this would happen? It’s like getting in a car crash – it sort of shuts out every other factor in your life.
I’ve written about Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity previously. Simply put, I find the idea interesting but unconvincing. Kurzweil and the others involved in this ‘Singularity University’ are smart people, and I like that they are pushing for research and the development of technology which will benefit all, but it strikes me as mostly as the technological equivalent of the ‘afterlife’ of most religions – more hope than reality. This quote from the article sums up my thoughts pretty well:
William S. Bainbridge, who has spent the last two decades evaluating grant proposals for the National Science Foundation, also sides with the skeptics.
“We are not seeing exponential results from the exponential gains in computing power,” he says. “I think we are at a time where progress will be increasingly difficult in many fields.
“We should not base ideas of the world on simplistic extrapolations of what has happened in the past,” he adds.
Which isn’t to say that there cannot be revolutionary breakthroughs which could radically change our lives. I’ve also written about how hydrogen sulfide (H2S) seems to be connected to hibernation, and now comes a fairly breathtaking bit of news that is related:
Yeast and worms can survive hypothermia if they are first subjected to extreme oxygen deprivation, a new study finds.
The results could explain a long-held mystery as to how humans can be brought back to life after “freezing to death,” the scientists say.
The study uncovered a previously unknown ability of organisms to survive lethal cold by temporarily slowing the biological processes that maintain life.
But the really interesting bit was this:
Documented cases of humans successfully revived after spending hours or days without a pulse in extremely cold conditions first inspired Roth to study the relationship between human hypothermia and his own research in forced hibernation.
In the winter of 2001, the body temperature of Canadian toddler Erica Norby plunged to 61 degrees Fahrenheit (16 degrees Celsius) as she lay for hours in below-freezing weather after wandering outside wearing only a diaper. Apparently dead, she recovered completely after being re-warmed and resuscitated.
The same curious fate befell Japanese mountain climber Mitsutaka Uchikoshi in 2006, who was discovered with a core body temperature of 71 degrees F (22 degrees C) after 23 days after falling asleep on a snowy mountain.
23 DAYS? Holy shit, I hadn’t been aware of that.
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And lastly, you probably heard about this:
KABUL, Afghanistan – U.S. geologists have discovered vast mineral wealth in Afghanistan, possibly amounting to $1 trillion, President Hamid Karzai’s spokesman said Monday.
Waheed Omar told reporters the findings were made by the U.S. Geological Survey under contract to the Afghan government.
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Americans discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, including iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium, according to the report. The Times quoted a Pentagon memo as saying Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and cell phones.
Sounds like a brilliant bit of good news? Think about it again. As someone on MetaFilter commented:
Oh man, I wish I could feel optimistic about this… but a homeless guy with no hope and no prospects, who finds a gold watch, still has no hope and no prospects, but now he’s in for a beating too.
Did you ever read The Prize? Same thing. The ore sources for some of these minerals are very rare, they are critical for many high-tech products, and there is going to be a scramble to make sure who winds up in control of them.
Last week I mentioned the genetic breakthrough accomplished by J Craig Venter and his team: the creation of functional man-made DNA. Since then, lots of very smart people have been trying to sort through the implications of this development. One of the better collections of such discussion I have seen can be found at Edge.
Here’s a bit from PZ Myers (also on his blog) that I find particularly insightful:
Nature’s constant attempts to kill us are often neglected in these kinds of discussions as a kind of omnipresent background noise. Technology sometimes seems more dangerous because it moves fast and creates novelty at an amazing pace, but again, Venter’s technology isn’t the big worry. It’s much easier and much cheaper to take an existing, ecologically successful bug and splice in a few new genes than to create a whole new creature from scratch…and unlike the de novo synthesis of life, that’s a technology that’s almost within the reach of garage-bound bio-hackers, and is definitely within the capacity of many foreign and domestic institutions. Frankenstein bacteria are harmless compared to the possibilities of hijacking E. coli or a flu virus to nefarious ends.
Let me repeat that last sentence: Frankenstein bacteria are harmless compared to the possibilities of hijacking E. coli or a flu virus to nefarious ends.
As you likely know, the Space Shuttle program is coming to an end, and each of the shuttles are on their final launch schedules. Take a few minutes and watch this amazing time-lapse vid:
The action starts in the hangar-like Orbiter Processing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, where Discovery has been outfitted for its STS-131 mission. The vehicle is then towed to the 525-foot-high Vehicle Assembly Building, hoisted into a vertical position and lowered onto its external fuel tank and twin solid rocket boosters. Then it’s off to the pad on the giant Mobile Launcher Platform, where the shuttle is encased in its protective Rotating Service Structure until just before launch on April 5, 2010.
Sometimes the things we do impress the hell out of me.
Now, this scientific team headed by Drs. Craig Venter, Hamilton Smith and Clyde Hutchison have achieved the final step in their quest to create the first synthetic bacterial cell. In a publication in Science magazine, Daniel Gibson, Ph.D. and a team of 23 additional researchers outline the steps to synthesize a 1.08 million base pair Mycoplasma mycoides genome, constructed from four bottles of chemicals that make up DNA. This synthetic genome has been “booted up” in a cell to create the first cell controlled completely by a synthetic genome.
I feel sure of only one conclusion. The ability to design and create new forms of life marks a turning-point in the history of our species and our planet.
In listening/reading about the Toyota car crashes earlier this year, a thought had occurred to me: if it was a software problem with controlling the brakes or throttle, could that be something which could be used maliciously against the owner of a car? I mean, I could see where it would make an interesting plot point in a mystery – someone gets into the car’s computer system, mucks around, and then a couple of days later the car crashes, killing the driver. But since I don’t write mysteries (though there are elements of that in Communion of Dreams), I let the idea just slip away.
Now it seems that I wasn’t thinking on nearly a large enough scale:
Automobiles, which will be increasingly connected to the Internet in the near future, could be vulnerable to hackers just as computers are now, two teams of computer scientists are warning in a paper to be presented next week.
The scientists say that they were able to remotely control braking and other functions, and that the car industry was running the risk of repeating the security mistakes of the PC industry.
“We demonstrate the ability to adversarially control a wide range of automotive functions and completely ignore driver input — including disabling the brakes, selectively braking individual wheels on demand, stopping the engine, and so on,” they wrote in the report, “Experimental Security Analysis of a Modern Automobile.”
Well, it’s too late to enter this year’s Fifth Annual Movie-Plot Threat Contest by Bruce Schneier, but that’d be a great one: terrorists design a computer worm which targets the control systems of cars, and when the worm is activated on a certain date, all the cars will suddenly go out of control on America’s roads, killing thousands and spreading mass panic. Given the level of dependence we have on cars & trucks in the US, this would quickly cripple the economy and destroy the country.
Make a hell of a book or movie, wouldn’t it? It could even be done as a 24 style TV show, where the protagonist has to track down and stop the mad computer genius behind the plot.
Gah. Now I suppose Homeland Security will be paying me a visit for coming up with such an idea . . .
. . . about Stephen Hawking’s caution regarding contacting alien civilizations.
LONDON (AFP) – Aliens may exist but mankind should avoid contact with them as the consequences could be devastating, British scientist Stephen Hawking has warned.
“If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans,” said the astrophysicist in a new television series, according to British media reports.
And:
THE aliens are out there and Earth had better watch out, at least according to Stephen Hawking. He has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist — but that instead of seeking them out, humanity should be doing all it that can to avoid any contact.
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Alien life, he will suggest, is almost certain to exist in many other parts of the universe: not just in planets, but perhaps in the centre of stars or even floating in interplanetary space.
Hawking’s logic on aliens is, for him, unusually simple. The universe, he points out, has 100 billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars. In such a big place, Earth is unlikely to be the only planet where life has evolved.
Man, it really makes me wish that Communion of Dreams was currently in print. Because this is all stuff that I discuss, at length, there. The topic of alien contact is as old as science fiction, but it comes and goes in popularity – and right now it’d be great to have my book on the shelves of bookstores.
The Air Force launched a secretive space plane into orbit Thursday night from Cape Canaveral, Florida. And they’re not sure when it’s returning to Earth.
Perched atop an Atlas V rocket, the Air Force’s unmanned and reusable X-37B made its first flight after a decade in development shrouded in mystery; most of the mission goals remain unknown to the public.
The Air Force has fended off statements calling the X-37B a space weapon, or a space-based drone to be used for spying or delivering weapons from orbit. In a conference call with reporters, deputy undersecretary for the Air Force for space programs Gary Payton acknowledged much of the current mission is classified.
The X-37B looks like a miniature space shuttle, and evidently the design was based on that system. The much smaller size (about one quarter the size of the shuttle) does give some indications of the limitations of the missions it could be used on, and it seems to not be quipped for life support – but beyond that, not much is publicly known.
One particular reason I find this of interest is that in the ‘future history’ in which Communion of Dreams occurs, this is exactly the sort of secret tech which has been developed by joint US & Israeli efforts – a fleet of these sorts of unmanned vehicles forms the basis for a concerted effort to establish a colony on the Moon, which are then supplied with personnel by use of new full-size shuttles which have built using the same technology but equipped to handle human life support. One of the main characters of Communion of Dreams, Darnell Sidwell, is heavily involved in this effort, and his role is mentioned in CoD. In my future history, this whole development is about ten years ahead of what is indicated by the news of the X-37B launch. In fact, most of this story forms the background for the prequel to CoD which I have mentioned previously, titled St. Cybi’s Well.
But then, who knows how much of what we’re now finding out is the actual truth? I mean, the Atlas lift capability has been around since the Apollo days. The basic shuttle design goes back to the 1970s. Do you really think that they stopped improving the tech for military applications until just ten years ago?
Communion Of Dreams 