This morning, as I was listening to the latest news about the impact of the Iceland volcano on European air travel, I had that classic science fiction notion: what if what we’re seeing in Europe currently were a simple fact of life all around the globe? And what if it had always been the case?
Think about how the history of flight would have changed if there was a functional barrier to flight at say 12,000 feet. Think about how the history of the 20th century would have changed – perhaps impacting WWII. Yeah, sure, you can fly a jet at 10,000 feet, but it consumes a lot more energy to do so – just that much of a technological challenge could have made a difference in the geopolitical structure of the world. Most cargo is transported by ship or trains, so that wouldn’t change too much, but would the world now rely on ships and trains for most passenger transport? Would we have developed high-speed trains earlier and more completely, perhaps even introducing trans-oceanic train technology?
Or what if something happened now to impose such a limit on jet transport worldwide as we’re seeing in Europe? How would that change our world in the present and going forward? Again, we’d probably find work-arounds – that’s what we do in this technological age – but how would those changes and challenges shape our reality?
There’s an awful lot of interesting fiction waiting to be written with just this one change . . .
I grew up reading post-apocalyptic science fiction – it was part & parcel of the world of the 1960s and 70s, and so helped to shape my view of things. Unsurprisingly, this had an influence on my own writing, and shows up in my novel. From the homepage for Communion of Dreams:
Communion of Dreams is an “alternative future history” set in 2052 where the human race is still struggling to recover from a massive pandemic flu some 40 years previously. Much of the population is infertile. National borders and alliances have shifted. Regional nuclear wars have prompted some countries to turn to establishing settlements in space, and there’s a major effort to detect Earth-like planets in nearby star systems for future colonization. Fringe eco-religious groups threaten to thwart the further advancement of science and technology, and resist any effort to spread humanity to the stars.
Post-apocalyptic, but not in the sense that civilization has completely collapsed – though that is a threat which does show up in the book. Anyway, it is an interesting topic, and a popular one, leading to all manner of websites, books, and religions.
For me, the interesting thing is not the apocalyptic event itself – I have very little interest in disaster films or books – but how a civilization picks itself up from the ruins and moves forward (or doesn’t). Having had any number of personal setbacks and failures in my life, I suppose I’m just interested in the human drive to survive and rebuild. And so it is that I find this completely fascinating:
Today we received another email about creating a record of humanity and technology that would help restart civilization. The latest one is inspired by an essay that James Lovelock published in Science over 12 years ago called A Book For All Seasons (excerpt):
We have confidence in our science-based civilization and think it has tenure. In so doing, I think we fail to distinguish between the life-span of civilizations and that of our species. In fact, civilizations are ephemeral compared with species. Humans have lasted at least a million years, but there have been 30 civilizations in the past 5000 years. Humans are tough and will survive; civilizations are fragile. It seems clear to me that we are not evolving in intelligence, not becoming true Homo sapiens. Indeed there is little evidence that our individual intelligence has improved through the 5000 years of recorded history.
Over the years these proposals have been in different forms; create a book, set of books, stone tablets, micro-etched metal disk, or a constantly updated wiki. I really like the idea of creating such a record, in fact the Rosetta Disk project was our first effort in this direction. These Doomsday Manuals are a positive step in the direction of making a softer landing for a collapse, and the people creating them (like ourselves) are certainly out to help people. It took millennia for the world to regain the technology and levels of societal organization attained by the Romans, so maybe a book like this would help that.
The Long Now Foundation is an interesting organization in its own right, and one I should probably get involved with, but life is so hectic and rushed as it is . . .
. . . and I do mean *really* back in the day, I worked in advertising. This was between college and grad school. Like 207 years ago. I wrote ad copy for local radio, and was recruited to work for a large ad firm in the MidWest (which I declined).
Anyway, because of this, I have always had this really disturbing tendency to pay attention to clever advertising. I’ve even remarked upon it. Thankfully, my friends and family have forgiven me this quirk.
But thanks to this particular twist of personality, I want to share this gem with you: sound in the mail. Via MeFi. Clever. I approve of clever.
In college (I graduated in 1980) I suffered repeatedly from peptic ulcers. My senior year it seemed that I lived largely on a diet of Maalox (which I came to loathe) and Tagamet, supplemented by Pepto-Bismol when I just couldn’t bring myself to drink any more Maalox. “Everyone knew” that ulcers were caused by stress, which produced an overabundance of gastric acid – technology had allowed for better studies of the production of gastric acid and the mechanism of it eroding stomach/intestinal lining – and there were more than a few occasions when my doctor recommended that I consider some kind of mild tranquilizer to help calm me down. I drank, instead.
Which, frankly, didn’t help my ulcers much. In fact, it just made me worse. My senior year was hell, and I actually got quite sick my final semester. Graduation helped, in that a big part of the stress was removed, and I backed way off of how much I drank, but I still had ulcer problems for the next few months.
But in the fall or winter of that year I developed a pretty nasty case of pneumonia (I’m prone to it), and had to go on a couple of courses of broad-spectrum antibiotics before I beat it.
I didn’t think much about it at the time, but the following year I didn’t have any ulcer problems. In fact, since then, I haven’t had any ulcer problems. It wasn’t until several years later that medical science came to understand why. No, it had nothing to do with me, though I had inadvertently stumbled upon the same thing that researchers came to discover: that stomach ulcers are predominantly caused by a bacteria (H. pylori). And the best treatment is a combination of powerful antibiotics with bismuth subsalicylate, the active ingredient in Pepto-Bismol. Yes, stress can be a factor in the development of an ulcer, but the real culprit is a bacterium. It wasn’t until the 1990s that this came to be the accepted model in the medical community.
This was my first personal, direct experience with how a paradigm shift can make a difference in our lives and health. Had I not gotten lucky with a combination of drugs and Pepto-Bismol, I might have been miserable with ulcers for another dozen years before medical science changed treatment regimens.
Now, I knew about Kuhn’s work – had read him in High School, I think, or at least in college. And his ideas were very influential in the science fiction I read, even my understanding of history (which I have written about before). And all of that plays out in Communion of Dreams, which is largely about a shift in perspective of what it means to be human.
This morning I came across another wonderful case study of this very same phenomenon of paradigm shift changing medical science, and how technology actually played a role in causing a misunderstanding of the mechanism involved, leading to more death and misery until a new paradigm came along:
First, the fact that from the fifteenth century on, it was the rare doctor who acknowledged ignorance about the cause and treatment of the disease. The sickness could be fitted to so many theories of disease – imbalance in vital humors, bad air, acidification of the blood, bacterial infection – that despite the existence of an unambigous cure, there was always a raft of alternative, ineffective treatments. At no point did physicians express doubt about their theories, however ineffective.
Now, I had been taught in school that scurvy had been conquered in 1747, when the Scottish physician James Lind proved in one of the first controlled medical experiments that citrus fruits were an effective cure for the disease. From that point on, we were told, the Royal Navy had required a daily dose of lime juice to be mixed in with sailors’ grog, and scurvy ceased to be a problem on long ocean voyages.
But here was a Royal Navy surgeon in 1911 apparently ignorant of what caused the disease, or how to cure it. Somehow a highly-trained group of scientists at the start of the 20th century knew less about scurvy than the average sea captain in Napoleonic times. Scott left a base abundantly stocked with fresh meat, fruits, apples, and lime juice, and headed out on the ice for five months with no protection against scurvy, all the while confident he was not at risk. What happened?
It’s a long but fascinating article. And it perfectly recounts how technological improvements contributed to a misunderstanding of scurvy. One more passage from the article:
Third, how technological progress in one area can lead to surprising regressions. I mentioned how the advent of steam travel made it possible to accidentaly replace an effective antiscorbutic with an ineffective one. An even starker example was the rash of cases of infantile scurvy that afflicted upper class families in the late 19th century. This outbreak was the direct result of another technological development, the pasteurization of cow’s milk. The procedure made milk vastly safer for infants to drink, but also destroyed vitamin C. For poorer children, who tended to be breast-fed and quickly weaned onto adult foods, this was not an issue, but the wealthy infants fed a special diet of cooked cereals and milk were at grave risk. It took several years for infant scurvy, at first called “Barlow’s disease”, to be properly identified. At that point, doctors were caught between two fires. They could recommend that parents not boil their milk, and expose the children to bacterial infection, or they could insist on pasteurization at the risk of scurvy. The prevaling theory of scurvy as bacterial poisoning clouded the issue further, so that it took time to arrive at the right solution – supplementing the diet with onion juice or cooked potato.
How is it, being born in 1958 and growing up in the era of MAD (and with a teenage fascination with nuclear weapons), that I never heard of this insane/brilliant project before?
Originally carried out at Livermore, California, the work was moved to new facilities constructed for $1.2 million on eight square miles (21 km²) of Jackass Flats at the NTS, known as Site 401. The complex consisted of six miles (10 km) of roads, critical assembly building, control building, assembly and shop buildings, and utilities. Also required for the construction was 25 miles (40 km) of oil well casing which was necessary to store the million pounds (450 t) of pressurized air used to simulate ramjet flight conditions for Pluto.
The principle behind the nuclear ramjet was relatively simple: motion of the vehicle pushed air in through the front of the vehicle (ram effect), a nuclear reactor heated the air, and then the hot air expanded at high speed out through a nozzle at the back, providing thrust.
The notion of using a nuclear reactor to heat the air was fundamentally new. Unlike commercial reactors, which are surrounded by concrete, the Pluto reactor had to be small and compact enough to fly, but durable enough to survive a 7,000 mile (11,000 km) trip to a potential target. The nuclear engine could, in principle, operate for months, so a Pluto cruise missile could be left airborne for a prolonged time before being directed to carry out its attack.
That’s just the intro from the Wikipedia article. To get a better sense of just how demented this project was, check out this article from 1990: The Flying Crowbar. A couple of bits from that that gives you an idea:
Pluto’s namesake was Roman mythology’s ruler of the underworld — seemingly an apt inspiration for a locomotive-size missile that would travel at near-treetop level at three times the speed of sound, tossing out hydrogen bombs as it roared overhead. Pluto’s designers calculated that its shock wave alone might kill people on the ground. Then there was the problem of fallout. In addition to gamma and neutron radiation from the unshielded reactor, Pluto’s nuclear ramjet would spew fission fragments out in its exhaust as it flew by. (One enterprising weaponeer had a plan to turn an obvious peace-time liability into a wartime asset: he suggested flying the radioactive rocket back and forth over the Soviet Union after it had dropped its bombs.)
* * *
Because of its combination of high speed and low altitude, Pluto promised to get through to targets that manned bombers and even ballistic missiles might not be able to reach. What weaponeers call “robustness” was another important advantage. “Pluto was about as durable as a bucket of rocks,” says one who worked on the project. It was because of the missile’s low complexity and high durability that physicist Ted Merkle, the project’s director, called it “the flying crowbar.”
* * *
Meanwhile, at the Pentagon, Pluto’s sponsors were having second thoughts about the project. Since the missile would be launched from U.S. territory and had to fly low over America’s allies in order to avoid detection on its way to the Soviet Union, some military planners began to wonder if it might not be almost as much a threat to the allies. Even before it began dropping bombs on our enemies Pluto would have deafened, flattened, and irradiated our friends. (The noise level on the ground as Pluto went by overhead was expected to be about 150 decibels; by comparison, the Saturn V rocket, which sent astronauts to the moon, produced 200 decibels at full thrust.) Ruptured eardrums, of course, would have been the least of your problems if you were unlucky enough to be underneath the unshielded reactor when it went by, literally roasting chickens in the barnyard. Pluto had begun to look like something only Goofy could love.
But consider also the brilliance behind Project Pluto. It required fundamental advancements in technology on the order of what was required for the Apollo missions. Again, from the Air & Space Magazine article:
The success of Project Pluto depended upon a whole series of technological advances in metallurgy and materials science. Pneumatic motors necessary to control the reactor in flight had to operate while red-hot and in the presence of intense radioactivity. The need to maintain supersonic speed at low altitude and in all kinds of weather meant that Pluto’s reactor had to survive conditions that would melt or disintegrate the metals used in most jet and rocket engines. Engineers calculated that the aerodynamic pressures upon the missile might be five times those the hypersonic X-15 had to endure. Pluto was “pretty close to the limits in all respects,” says Ethan Platt, an engineer who worked on the project. “We were tickling the dragon’s tail all the way,” says Blake Myers, head of Livermore’s propulsion engineering division.
I can see the appeal – but I’m glad they didn’t decide to wake that particular dragon.
Ah, very cool. A new demo toy via the brilliant minds at Google: Liquid Galaxy.
Right now it seems to be primarily computer constructs, rather than tied in to actual satellite or StreetView images. It most reminds me of the data arcologies of William Gibson’s Burning Chrome collection.
But what a fun toy. Imagine what this will be like by the end of the decade.
As I have done for the lastcouple of years, I like to look at the stats for my sites on New Years Day – numbers don’t lie.
But they can be a bit confusing. Here’s how. In 2009, I could say that 9,619 people downloaded some or all of Communion of Dreams. That would break down as 5,877 downloads of the original “complete” .pdf of the book, 156 copies of the revised version, 3,183 of the first mp3, and 403 copies of the first chapter. Or I could say that there were a total of 6,765 downloads, using the numbers for the “complete” .pdfs plus the minimum downloads of both the mp3 and individual chapter files (on the theory that those numbers reflect “complete” downloads of the book in those formats.) For my year-end numbers in the past I have used the latter formula, and I will do so again.
So, 2009 had 6,765 downloads. That compares to 6,288 in 2007, and 6,182 in 2008. How many people have actually read the book, I have no idea – I have heard from people that they have passed on the .pdf they downloaded to friends, and others have told me that they printed the thing out and gave copies to others. So that would boost the numbers. Then again, just because someone downloaded the thing, doesn’t mean they read it. Lord knows I have plenty of books I own but have never gotten around to reading.
Which brings up another item – back in August I mentioned that I was working on a revision because there was a publisher who was interested in the book. In November I mentioned that I had submitted the manuscript with the revisions, and was waiting for them to take another look at it. Well, I’m still waiting, though the publisher said that he was going to assign it to one of their readers and go through it himself, and would get back to me soon. I’m not complaining about the wait – six weeks or so is not at all unreasonable – but I do wonder whether he just didn’t want to give me the bad news leading up to the holidays. So, we’ll see what comes of that.
I’m also in a “wait and see” mode on my two other writing projects. My co-author on the caregiving book Her Final Year still has to finish his editing before we can proceed with that, and I haven’t had a chance to get together with my sister to really get started on My Father’s Gun. But now that the end of the year is past, I hope to make progress on both of those soon.
Other aspects of life in 2009? A mix. I did get a lot of good conservation work done, though losing the one big client in the fall due to the economy hurt a lot – I have other work, but nowhere near as much, so that has hindered my efforts to resolve long standing debt leftover from the gallery. My health is better than it was a year ago, but I still need to lose several stones. The BBTI project was a huge success through 2009, and I’m sure will continue to be a source both of work and pleasure in the coming year. Otherwise, well, if you read this blog you probably already have had your fill of my introspection.
So, goodbye 2009, and best wishes to one and all for a better 2010.
Charles Babbage, the man whom many consider to be the father of modern computing, never got to complete any of his life’s work. The Victorian gentleman was a brilliant mathematician, but he wasn’t very good at politics and fundraising, so he never got the financial backing to finish any of his elaborate machine designs. For decades, even his fans weren’t certain whether his computing machines would have worked.
But Doron Swade, a former curator at the Science Museum in London, has proven that Babbage wasn’t just an eccentric dreamer. Using nothing but materials that would have been available to Babbage in the 1840s, Swade and a group of engineers successfully built Babbage’s Difference Engine — and a version is now on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.
Having just watched “Longitude” about the construction and restoration of the first functional marine chronometers (and having seen reproduction of same at Greenwich), this seems, er, timely.
Communion Of Dreams 