Science & Civilization March On! (Non-political)
One of my principal themes is the importance of remembering what we are fighting for. It isn't only justice, liberty and accountability -- although those would be sufficient... and they have been horrendously betrayed. There is also the other side of the Enlightenment... the wondrous things that we do, that only a free and open civilization can do.
Despite the War on Science and the War against Professionalism -- and the deliberate fomenting of struggle between professionals and amateurs -- it is still possible to see a civilization forging ahead in countless directions!
Read on for a list of fascinating items from the frontlines of science and technology --
First a brief puff. I’m told that the wonderful old Dreamcast game - Ecco the Dolphin -- has been re-issued as a downloadable for the Nintendo Wii. It happens I wrote that game! Or... at least, I wrote the storyline and scenario and introduction. I admit that the other stuff -- like graphics and game-play -- are also terrific. Under-rated as all get-out. (Somebody report back here if it still has the same, lengthy/lyrical introduction?)
The WorldChanging site has an offering by Alex Steffen appraising the harm done by our sprawling suburban lifestyle, and tabulating the argument for higher urban density, in cities where people simply don’t need cars, or anywhere near as much concrete. (Hint... don't raise this with your favorite "ostrich." Attacking suburbia is not a win-win issue, yet.)
On a related topic, I introduce and moderate the theme of a video - and conference - discussing Jonas Salk’s notion of the “Good Ancestor Principle”... the question of whether our descendants will judge us to have been wise... or profligate and destructive of their chances for a decent life and world.
From the same idea-generating program (run by my friend Tom Munnecke) see a fascinating “apology” by Mark Friesse to Tim Berners-Lee for having rejected TBL’s original paper on the potential of a URL-based Web.
More affordable solar energy? Energy from fusion? Reverse-engineer the brain? Those three are among the 14 "grand challenges" for the 21st century announced today by the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE).
The NAE's web site has descriptions of all 14 challenges leaving it to the public to vote on which should be given top priority. Rather than focus on predictions or gee-whiz gadgets, the NAE said the goal was to identify what needs to be done to help people and the planet thrive. (Thanks Bandit)
-----
All of us -- all of you -- ought to watch this brief talk by Jonathan Haidt, showing an extremely persuasive and well research model for the wellsprings of both liberalism and conservatism. To know and understand is to better grasp when how and who to compete with. I’ve cited him before. This is backed up by quite a lot of research and he seems to accomplish something quite rare -- he makes sense of the American culture wars and shows how all of us may need to give a little. Budge a little.
There is also much that Haidt misses! For example, I think Haidt underestimates the way older, solidarity-loyalty conformity-purity imperatives still influence liberals, and especially leftists (an important distinction!) Possibly because his research questions are biased toward older rather than newer forms of group identification. (If he'd asked questions about purity in terms of food rather than sex, the conservatives would have been impure, the liberals obsessed with purity! Likewise, liberals... and especially leftists... have their own “in-groups” and authority figures. Indeed, his oversimplifications abound and miss, I believe, a profound separation in personality between (on the one hand) indignation-junkies of the far right and left, and (on the other hand) the more frontal-lobe-driven variety of liberals and conservatives.
Recall Hillary Clinton’s book “It Takes a Village” (to raise a child)? That seems to be a “lattice world” statement and the right wing response “No, it takes parents!” was resoundingly atomistic.
Above all, what Haidt is missing is the perspective offered by looking at how liberals and conservatives differ over the matter of “horzions.” Horizons of danger, inclusion, opportunity and so on. I believe that it is just as likely that you can separate liberals and conservatives according to how they feel about the process of horizon expansion, with liberals pledging fealty to that general process -- often at the expense of older group loyalties (like the nation) -- while conservatives reacting with deep suspicion toward horizon expansion and fetishistic inclusion while touting reflexive loyalty to older in-groups.
Nevertheless, Haidt provides five extremely useful metaphors that help us grasp just how different the liberal enlightenment mentality is. Moreover, he is right that educated and thoughtful people in our civilization bear a responsibility to try harder, much harder, to understand the underpinnings of their own beliefs... and even their opponents. If we don’t try, then who will?
-----
Had enough about Star Wars? Or want more? Here’s an essay by the brilliant Athena Andreadis, that she wrote before ever hearing of my book Star Wars on Trial. While she noticed many of the same things I did, her fresh perspectives -- and hilariously-scholarly sentences -- are wonderful and make terrific reading.
----
John Kao believes the United States has an innovation crisis, and he’s calling on today’s corps of young technology professionals to sound the alarm. Citing technology pioneer Vannevar Bush’s assertion more than 60 years ago that “A nation that loses its science and technology will lose control of its destiny,” John Kao said the United States is in peril of becoming a technology laggard.
-----
...and an interesting... possiblyrelevant(?)... news item...
DVD in firefighter's coat blocks bullet: A South Carolina man is thankful for a DVD that ended up taking a bullet for him. Colleton County Fire and Rescue Director Barry McRoy says he was leaving a Waffle House restaurant in Walterboro on Saturday morning when two men ran in fighting over a gun. Police say a bullet hit one of the struggling men, shattered a window and then hit McRoy. The bullet hit a DVD McRoy was carrying in his pocket. He suffered a bruise but didn't realize he had been shot. As he told a police officer what happened he noticed a bullet hole in his jacket, the shattered DVD case and a piece of the bullet. The DVD was nicked. It was a gift from an employee who had recorded a TV show about fire extinguishers.
Um... any chance that it was my “Architechs” episode about future firefighting tools? Any conceivable way to find out?
-----
...and now a tech-news tsunami...
The demonstration site for the Implicit Association Test. (Someone try it & report!)
A space station astronaut does peculiar things with balls of floating water: (Thanks Stefan.)
A fascinating science blog entry about how rats use their whiskers to build accurate maps of their surroundings. A way-fun blog in-general!
When scientists found out that chimps had better memories than students, there were unkind comments about the caliber of the human competition they faced. But now an ape has gone one better, trouncing British memory champion Ben Pridmore. Ayumu, a seven-year-old male brought up in captivity in Japan, did three times as well as Mr Pridmore at a computer game which involved remembering the position of numbers on a screen. And that's no mean feat - the 30-year-old accountant is capable of memorizing the order of a shuffled pack of cards in under 30 seconds. The reason this is fascinating is that humans specialize in having a vast RANGE of abilities. The best human mimics can mimic other animal sounds better than any animal mimic, for example. For an average chimp to chomp a human champ into a memory chump, well... it indicates something deep and systematic.
In the race to perfect "regenerative medicine," stem cell therapy for animals is ahead of treatment for humans because it is not so strictly regulated. It's not experimental -- it's here.
Medicine’s dream of growing new human hearts and other organs to repair or replace damaged ones received a significant boost when University of Minnesota researchers reported success in creating a beating rat heart in a laboratory. But the researchers cautioned that the dream, if it is ever realized, is still at least 10 years away. The researchers removed all the cells from a dead rat heart, leaving the valves and outer structure as scaffolding for new heart cells injected from newborn rats. Within two weeks, the cells formed a new beating heart that conducted electrical impulses and pumped a small amount of blood.
Oy! Under the category of notions that attract dopes every generation... Bruce Bueno de Mesquita claims that mathematics can tell you the future. In fact, the professor says that a computer model he built and has perfected over the last 25 years can predict the outcome of virtually any international conflict, provided the basic input is accurate. What’s more, his predictions are alarmingly specific. His fans include at least one current presidential hopeful, a gaggle of Fortune 500 companies, the CIA, and the Department of Defense.
During an experiment originally intended to suppress the obese man's appetite, electrodes were pushed into the man's brain and stimulated with an electric current. Instead of losing appetite, the patient instead had an intense experience of déjà vu. He recalled, in intricate detail, a scene from 30 years earlier. More tests showed his ability to learn was dramatically improved.
The world's rush to embrace biofuels is causing a spike in the price of corn and other crops and could worsen water shortages and force poor communities off their land, according to a U.N. official.
But a biofuel startup in Illinois can make ethanol from just about anything organic for less than $1 per gallon, and it wouldn't interfere with food supplies...
...and bacteria into fuel uses 65% less energy than making ethanol.
The Toshiba Micro Nuclear Reactor mentioned in a previous posting does not exits! Apparently a hoax.
Just to show that all the liars out there aren't those we entrusted with power. There are scoundrels everywhere. And the only "disinfectant" - as Louis Brandeis said - is plenty of light.
.
Despite the War on Science and the War against Professionalism -- and the deliberate fomenting of struggle between professionals and amateurs -- it is still possible to see a civilization forging ahead in countless directions!
Read on for a list of fascinating items from the frontlines of science and technology --
First a brief puff. I’m told that the wonderful old Dreamcast game - Ecco the Dolphin -- has been re-issued as a downloadable for the Nintendo Wii. It happens I wrote that game! Or... at least, I wrote the storyline and scenario and introduction. I admit that the other stuff -- like graphics and game-play -- are also terrific. Under-rated as all get-out. (Somebody report back here if it still has the same, lengthy/lyrical introduction?)
The WorldChanging site has an offering by Alex Steffen appraising the harm done by our sprawling suburban lifestyle, and tabulating the argument for higher urban density, in cities where people simply don’t need cars, or anywhere near as much concrete. (Hint... don't raise this with your favorite "ostrich." Attacking suburbia is not a win-win issue, yet.)
On a related topic, I introduce and moderate the theme of a video - and conference - discussing Jonas Salk’s notion of the “Good Ancestor Principle”... the question of whether our descendants will judge us to have been wise... or profligate and destructive of their chances for a decent life and world.
From the same idea-generating program (run by my friend Tom Munnecke) see a fascinating “apology” by Mark Friesse to Tim Berners-Lee for having rejected TBL’s original paper on the potential of a URL-based Web.
More affordable solar energy? Energy from fusion? Reverse-engineer the brain? Those three are among the 14 "grand challenges" for the 21st century announced today by the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE).
The NAE's web site has descriptions of all 14 challenges leaving it to the public to vote on which should be given top priority. Rather than focus on predictions or gee-whiz gadgets, the NAE said the goal was to identify what needs to be done to help people and the planet thrive. (Thanks Bandit)
-----
All of us -- all of you -- ought to watch this brief talk by Jonathan Haidt, showing an extremely persuasive and well research model for the wellsprings of both liberalism and conservatism. To know and understand is to better grasp when how and who to compete with. I’ve cited him before. This is backed up by quite a lot of research and he seems to accomplish something quite rare -- he makes sense of the American culture wars and shows how all of us may need to give a little. Budge a little.
There is also much that Haidt misses! For example, I think Haidt underestimates the way older, solidarity-loyalty conformity-purity imperatives still influence liberals, and especially leftists (an important distinction!) Possibly because his research questions are biased toward older rather than newer forms of group identification. (If he'd asked questions about purity in terms of food rather than sex, the conservatives would have been impure, the liberals obsessed with purity! Likewise, liberals... and especially leftists... have their own “in-groups” and authority figures. Indeed, his oversimplifications abound and miss, I believe, a profound separation in personality between (on the one hand) indignation-junkies of the far right and left, and (on the other hand) the more frontal-lobe-driven variety of liberals and conservatives.
Recall Hillary Clinton’s book “It Takes a Village” (to raise a child)? That seems to be a “lattice world” statement and the right wing response “No, it takes parents!” was resoundingly atomistic.
Above all, what Haidt is missing is the perspective offered by looking at how liberals and conservatives differ over the matter of “horzions.” Horizons of danger, inclusion, opportunity and so on. I believe that it is just as likely that you can separate liberals and conservatives according to how they feel about the process of horizon expansion, with liberals pledging fealty to that general process -- often at the expense of older group loyalties (like the nation) -- while conservatives reacting with deep suspicion toward horizon expansion and fetishistic inclusion while touting reflexive loyalty to older in-groups.
Nevertheless, Haidt provides five extremely useful metaphors that help us grasp just how different the liberal enlightenment mentality is. Moreover, he is right that educated and thoughtful people in our civilization bear a responsibility to try harder, much harder, to understand the underpinnings of their own beliefs... and even their opponents. If we don’t try, then who will?
-----
Had enough about Star Wars? Or want more? Here’s an essay by the brilliant Athena Andreadis, that she wrote before ever hearing of my book Star Wars on Trial. While she noticed many of the same things I did, her fresh perspectives -- and hilariously-scholarly sentences -- are wonderful and make terrific reading.
----
John Kao believes the United States has an innovation crisis, and he’s calling on today’s corps of young technology professionals to sound the alarm. Citing technology pioneer Vannevar Bush’s assertion more than 60 years ago that “A nation that loses its science and technology will lose control of its destiny,” John Kao said the United States is in peril of becoming a technology laggard.
-----
...and an interesting... possiblyrelevant(?)... news item...
DVD in firefighter's coat blocks bullet: A South Carolina man is thankful for a DVD that ended up taking a bullet for him. Colleton County Fire and Rescue Director Barry McRoy says he was leaving a Waffle House restaurant in Walterboro on Saturday morning when two men ran in fighting over a gun. Police say a bullet hit one of the struggling men, shattered a window and then hit McRoy. The bullet hit a DVD McRoy was carrying in his pocket. He suffered a bruise but didn't realize he had been shot. As he told a police officer what happened he noticed a bullet hole in his jacket, the shattered DVD case and a piece of the bullet. The DVD was nicked. It was a gift from an employee who had recorded a TV show about fire extinguishers.
Um... any chance that it was my “Architechs” episode about future firefighting tools? Any conceivable way to find out?
-----
...and now a tech-news tsunami...
The demonstration site for the Implicit Association Test. (Someone try it & report!)
A space station astronaut does peculiar things with balls of floating water: (Thanks Stefan.)
A fascinating science blog entry about how rats use their whiskers to build accurate maps of their surroundings. A way-fun blog in-general!
When scientists found out that chimps had better memories than students, there were unkind comments about the caliber of the human competition they faced. But now an ape has gone one better, trouncing British memory champion Ben Pridmore. Ayumu, a seven-year-old male brought up in captivity in Japan, did three times as well as Mr Pridmore at a computer game which involved remembering the position of numbers on a screen. And that's no mean feat - the 30-year-old accountant is capable of memorizing the order of a shuffled pack of cards in under 30 seconds. The reason this is fascinating is that humans specialize in having a vast RANGE of abilities. The best human mimics can mimic other animal sounds better than any animal mimic, for example. For an average chimp to chomp a human champ into a memory chump, well... it indicates something deep and systematic.
In the race to perfect "regenerative medicine," stem cell therapy for animals is ahead of treatment for humans because it is not so strictly regulated. It's not experimental -- it's here.
Medicine’s dream of growing new human hearts and other organs to repair or replace damaged ones received a significant boost when University of Minnesota researchers reported success in creating a beating rat heart in a laboratory. But the researchers cautioned that the dream, if it is ever realized, is still at least 10 years away. The researchers removed all the cells from a dead rat heart, leaving the valves and outer structure as scaffolding for new heart cells injected from newborn rats. Within two weeks, the cells formed a new beating heart that conducted electrical impulses and pumped a small amount of blood.
Oy! Under the category of notions that attract dopes every generation... Bruce Bueno de Mesquita claims that mathematics can tell you the future. In fact, the professor says that a computer model he built and has perfected over the last 25 years can predict the outcome of virtually any international conflict, provided the basic input is accurate. What’s more, his predictions are alarmingly specific. His fans include at least one current presidential hopeful, a gaggle of Fortune 500 companies, the CIA, and the Department of Defense.
During an experiment originally intended to suppress the obese man's appetite, electrodes were pushed into the man's brain and stimulated with an electric current. Instead of losing appetite, the patient instead had an intense experience of déjà vu. He recalled, in intricate detail, a scene from 30 years earlier. More tests showed his ability to learn was dramatically improved.
The world's rush to embrace biofuels is causing a spike in the price of corn and other crops and could worsen water shortages and force poor communities off their land, according to a U.N. official.
But a biofuel startup in Illinois can make ethanol from just about anything organic for less than $1 per gallon, and it wouldn't interfere with food supplies...
...and bacteria into fuel uses 65% less energy than making ethanol.
The Toshiba Micro Nuclear Reactor mentioned in a previous posting does not exits! Apparently a hoax.
Just to show that all the liars out there aren't those we entrusted with power. There are scoundrels everywhere. And the only "disinfectant" - as Louis Brandeis said - is plenty of light.
.
posted by David Brin at 2:16 PM
109 Comments:
A teacher writing a paper about moder education practice wanted to quote the following paragraph of mine, but had no citation point. I'll provide one here, even though I certainly posted it as part of a longer missive on education, some time ago.
"What had been the unsung glory of the American approach to education - something never measured in those international tests (on which U.S. youths score so badly) - is the way a tradition of open class discussion has fostered free thinking and rambunctious argumentativeness. And yes, confident creativity, to some degree. (At least among the upper half of students.)
"And here's a startling irony that illustrates the point. While we rush, rather thoughtlessly, to copy the rote memorization techniques that enable kids in in Asia and elsewhere to score so well on standardized tests, the education ministries in Japan, China and India are frantically dispatching minions into the field, exhorting teachers to "teach in a more American fashion," in order to stop squelching the creativity, imagination and argumentative confidence that we encourage (or used to encourage) so well.(1)"
Anyone know where this originally was posted? (I just tweaked it a bit.)
"The best human mimics can mimic other animal sounds better than any animal mimic"
I presume you are leaving out the lyrebird from this rather broad statement.
I originally ran into Haidt's "Five Pillars" theory not long after reading Altemeyer's The Authoritarians; I found the latter extremely compelling, and the former much less so (though still possibly a good starting point for further understanding). The theory that liberals actually have no sense of in-group loyalty, authority/respect, or purity/sanctity completely contradicts my experience of the many liberals I have known (bless their little furry hearts).
As for the atom vs. lattice model -- well, Dr.B poked a good hole in that one already, and I see a bunch more raising their hands and going "ooh, ooh, pick me!" but I'll leave them for another discussion if anyone really wants to hear about it.
I think Haidt was getting closer to the truth (albeit in a kind of euphemistic way) when he spoke about the belief that social structures contain embedded wisdom that you don't tinker with lightly.
In other words: we don't understand how it works, and if it stopped working we could be in deep trouble, so just leave it alone!
Once you break it down that way, the drivers seem obvious: ignorance (of how society works) and fear (that it is delicate and might collapse). {Fear of making mistakes} trumps {willingness to learn from error}.
Or, at any rate, that's *my* theory...
Yes, I was about to mention the lyrebird too.
Pentagon tells drunk-driving C student in Oval Office "climate change should be upgraded to a national security concern."
A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.
Latest polls show Obama up 57% to Hillary's 43% in Texas and 54% to 46% in Ohio.
Great news because the consensus now says Hillary must win both Texas and Ohio by at least 20% or she's history. I don't have the hate-on for Hillary some other folks do, but she's the wrong person for the Presidency right now. We need someone who doesn't practice politics as usual, and that means Obama.
(You may to register or use bugmenot.com to read this next one)
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/19/science/19carb.html?_r=2&ex=1361077200&en=d23ec5df5017adbc&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
"If two scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory are correct, people will still be driving gasoline-powered cars 50 years from now, churning out heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — and yet that carbon dioxide will not contribute to global warming.
"In a proposal by two scientists, vehicle emissions would no longer contribute to global warming. (..)
"The idea is simple. Air would be blown over a liquid solution of potassium carbonate, which would absorb the carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide would then be extracted and subjected to chemical reactions that would turn it into fuel: methanol, gasoline or jet fuel.
"This process could transform carbon dioxide from an unwanted, climate-changing pollutant into a vast resource for renewable fuels. The closed cycle — equal amounts of carbon dioxide emitted and removed — would mean that cars, trucks and airplanes using the synthetic fuels would no longer be contributing to global warming."
Has anyone tried the Chimp-V-Human memory test with humans from non-literate societies?
That would be something worth testing, methinks.
Oh, BTW, I think Clinton is pulling an Edwards, and staying in to get donations to defray debt. In the last three days, we've had three comments from her about how the party would certainly be united before the convention.
I think we're looking at our first female VP, and the more I ponder, the better an idea it seems.
That paragraph on education reminds me of something you posted in 05 or 06. I'll dig in your archives and see if I can find anything.
Tintinaus: I would love to see a contest between a lyrebird and that mutant fellow who could mimic any bird -- or sound -- any time, anywhere.
Zorgon: Oh right, so let’s suck all the CO2 out of the air and make an ice age! ;-)
Jester: excellent point about non-literate humans, who had those bards... and also memorized detailed mental maps of hunting trails and water holes.
But save us from a Hillary Veep. Make her Ambassador to Londond and Bill to Paris (where they won’t notice shenanigens) and they can share a house weekends.
Wow, that trip into the archives brought back some memories. I saw everything from your fight with John Robert to the story about the teacher who wouldn't shave his beard until bin Laden was caught.
Oh yeah, and I found your posts about American style education.
From June 2005:
What had been the unsung glory of the American school system - something never measured in those international tests (on which Americans score so badly) - is the way open class discussion has fostered free thinking and rambunctious argumentativeness. And yes, confident creativity, to some degree. And here's a startling irony. While we run thoughtlessly to copy the rote memorization techniques that enable kids in Japan to score so well on standardized tests, the education ministries in Japan, China and India are exhorting teachers to "teach in a more American fashion," in order to stop squelching the creativity and imagination that we encourage (or used to encourage) so well.
Because science relies upon processes like imaginative hypotheses and laboratory experience that are hard to measure on tests, there has been a creeping de-emphasis on science across the board. My own kids see their science classes become the catch-all dumping ground, within which all the sex education, abstinence training, drug education, self-esteem, anti-bullying, and other remedial socialization topics are thrown. Even PE is spared this stuff, thus illustrating the way that sports have a vastly higher priority in American life than science.
From May 2006:
You cited this article (and the link still works): “Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post recently reported on South Koreans paying for U.S. couples to adopt their children so that they can gain access to Western education.” This illustrates a trend that I have spoken of for years. Unmentioned in the US press is the fact that - while we wring our hands and institute testing, in order to make American schools more like those in the Orient (e.g. No Child Left Behind) - similar handwringing takes place over there, yearning for education to be “more American.”
http://www.theglobalist.com/DBWeb/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=5265
Ecco the Dolphin, eh? So I guess the name must be a direct hat-tip to Lilly's off-the-deep-end Earth Coincidence Control Office stuff. I had always wondered.
Education -- my tuppence is that you need both the memorization and the disputation. You can't be usefully creative if you have to work from first principles or thin air.
Zorgon, good to see your logon working.
David, I haven't heard the man you are talking about, but since you are refering to him as a mutant it may be unfair to judge the whole of humanity based on this one indivdual. Oh can he do a chainsaw?
Well, the point of citing the Los Alamos CO2 proposal is to show that even though oceanic iron-dumping looks like a bust after detailed analysis, it's far from the only way of removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
Of course this new proposal may also fall apart under examination. They're talking about using nuclear power to get the energy to raise temperatures high enough to make this reaction work. That raises the question of the total carbon footprint for building nuclear power plants. We'd also want to use thorium breeder reators and those havevn't been fully tested yet. The there's the issue of toxic byproducts from the chemical reactions needed to turn the CO2-conatining postassium carbonate solution into usable fuels. There's also the issue of toxic byproducts from burning fossil fuels, which is something we really need to get away from entirely.
Carbon-composite fixed-body vacuum-enclosing dirigibles, electric light rail powered by electricity from nuclear plants, and electric cars represent a better solution long-term, along with redesigned cities and a slow (but sure) phasing-out of current suburbia in favor of either redesigned urban areas, distributed population in small towns connected by gigabit internet fiber, or (if we want to get visionary and all Paulo Soleri) some arcologies with hundreds of miles of parkland around 'em.
The point remains that the "Olduvai Cliff" Peak Oil doomsters, which predictably includes the Pentagon crowd, have a pessimistic view of human beings as stupid reflexive unimaginative creatures. Whereas the reality is that the human mind remains infinitely flexible, boundlessly imaginative and capable of the most astonishing feats of deduction and leaps of imaginative fancy building on previous discoveries, in an exponential progression which has few obvious limits other than the imperfectly understood laws of physics (as we know them right now).
My own take on the Peak Oil/gobal warming doom-and-gloom is that the solution is likely to arise from 15 different amazing new technological and scientific breakthroughs we can't yet imagine, because no one has thought of 'em yet. I suspect that looking back from 100 years in the future, generations to come will find themselves as amused by current worries about runaway global warming and Siberia in Britain and the mass collapse of civilization, as we find ourselves when perusing "expert" predictions from the 19th century that New York City would find itself hip deep in horse manure, and vast new surgical clinics would be needed to perform lung resections on all the tens of millions of new incurable tuberculosis patients by the year 2000.
Oh, and in case you thought I was being wildly overoptimistic and starry-eyed in the previous post, feast your eyes on this, buckaroos:
Yale lab engineers virus that can kill deadly brain tumors.
And you're telling me global warming or Peak Oil is going to wipe us out? Or even put a serious crimp in our style as a species?
Please. You think we've got technology and science and social enlightenment now, wait half a century. You ain't seen nothin' yet.
We're by no means finished, but "we'll come up with something, because we always come up with something" doesn't really cut it.
Humanity has been in the industrial revolution -yes, many peoples are just starting to experience it - for less time than the Viking colony on Greenland remained vibrant and thriving.
Many of us realize that hunting seals and fishing is a good idea, but we've got convince others rather than waiting for regular trade ships to start comming.
If they do, great, but let's learn to make decent harpoons from walrus Ivory while we wait, eh?
Jester, your pessimism is showing -- also the weakness of your straw man argument. Caricaturing my claims as "we'll come up with something because we always do" misrepresents what I said in 4 important ways:
[1] I provided at least 3 practical realistic ways of avoiding an Olduvai Cliff catastrophe, and suggested that there were potentially many more using current well-tested realistic technologies (which happens to be true);
[2] Our global warming problems are human-created, and, unlike the faulty analogy of the Vikings in Greenland, are therefore all potentially human-solvable;
[3] I explicitly acknowledged potential problems with the Los Alamos solution, but realistically pointed out that we seem able to generate hypothetical solutions faster than the problems get worse, unlike the case with the Vikings in Greenland;
[4] Lastly, I pointed out humans have always had this capacity, which does in fact set us apart from most other creatures on this planet. So in that sense, to take your challenge -- exactly, yes, quite right: we'll come up with something because we always do. That's what sets humans apart evolutionarily from other animals. We are uniquely adaptable. Change other animals' environment and they flounder or die. Plunge a uniquely adpatable human into an Ice Age, or toss us into the middle of the Sahara Desert...and we still survive. In fact, that aspect of our evolutionary heritage is precisely what has created our current climate problems -- there are so damn many of us humans, precisely because we're so good at adapting and surviving in an insane variety of climatic conditions and this population increase is what's mainly responsible for our current greenhouse gas problem. So the major premise of your defective syllogism actually contains its own self-destructing internal contradiction. Thanks for arguing in such a way as to prove me correct.
Secondly, and even more importantly, your facts are in error. The industrial revolution is not 200 years old. In reality, the current exponential takeoff of technological innovation began around the year 1050, and, in medieval Europe, included such innovations as the water-wheel-powered blast furnace, the water clock, the three-year fallow farming system, and astonishingly sophisticated mining and ore-extraction technologies pioneered by the medieval Germans (although they weren't really Germans, since the entity we call "Germany" today did not then exist).
See The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages by Jean Gimpel, 1992, for more details.
Before you post these kinds of provably false claims that "Humanity has been in the industrial revolution...for less time than the Viking colony on Greenland remained vibrant and thriving" you'll want to brush up on your history.
Seems to me that (one or both of) the following two technologies will eventually solve the transportation problem:
1. AI-driven street vehicles (think "Johnny cab" from Total Recall, only less idiotic). Cost-of-entry is minimal, as no significant new infrastructure is required and they can be deployed one vehicle at a time to meet needs, so even small towns could have a few (perhaps starting with private entrepreneurship). Cities will deploy fleets of them, leaving individuals with all the freedom of personal vehicle ownership without the hassles. We don't even need to get rid of suburbs, though people may find it convenient to live closer to where the cabs hang out. Community parking lot acreage can be vastly reduced, as unused vehicles can be stacked in a garage/warehouse near the maintenance facility.
This eliminates the need for most people to have a "general purpose" personal vehicle capable of longer trips; some people will still want to have such, but they will be primarily "recreational use" and will constitute a much smaller footprint in terms of energy use and carbon emissions (for those still burning hydrocarbon fuel). The "cabs" can be specifically for shorter-range transportation, and hence can make use of battery power (even if there are no further improvements in the tech, which seems extremely unlikely).
2. I'm less certain of this one, but I keep coming back to the idea: automated tunneling and digging (some AI probably required so the machines can do "manual" tasks which currently require a worker's actual hands).
Why is it so expensive to dig subways and subterranean living spaces? I'm sure there's a lot of engineering involved to make sure the structure doesn't collapse or fill up with groundwater, probably a fair amount of energy (shovels and blasting and lifting/hauling debris) and of course the excavating equipment is expensive -- but it seems to me that the primary expense must be the human workers, who must be more skilled than average construction workers and are also in considerably more danger (hence hazard pay and higher insurance rates).
What happens to the cost of, say, digging a uniform-sized tunnel on a pre-set course when you can put (say) $1,000,000 worth of machinery down there to do the actual work, plus a shared supervisor off-site (keeping an eye on several projects), plus a group of engineers and other top experts on tap for helping with any really tricky problems that come up? You don't have to worry about cave-ins trapping/killing people, just equipment. Your cost is the interest on the equipment loan, insurance for the equipment, insurance against incidental damage (sinkholes? accidentally knocking out a buried pipe? not sure what the risks are), plus fuel and maintenance expenses, plus part of the supervisor's salary and the engineering group's consulting fee.
Now maybe this isn't feasible; I don't know. But what might happen if, via this scenario or any other, it became much, much cheaper to dig underground structures -- like, say, subway tunnels? Might smaller cities be able to afford subway networks corresponding to a substantial portion of their existing street networks, with a stop in every suburb and shopping center? Might we be able to run train tracks underneath all major highways, offering (at last) a true alternative to cars and planes for long-distance travel within the US? (Yeah, the scenery might be dull... but I'd still take 5-10 hours of being able to do light work, reading, or sleep, over driving the same distance. No worse than your typical cube-farm job. The trains would have free gigabit wifi, of course... and being largely underground, they could probably be extremely fast -- so a 5-hour car trip might be only 3 hours with station stops, or less for an express.)
Another significant point might come if it became cheaper per foot to build down than to build up or out.
This leads to some very SFnal scenarios, of course, where only the rich get to see the light of day much. Very Asimov (capital-d Doors, and Caves of Steel).
(And I've probably lifted both of these ideas from somewhere-or-other... but at least #1 seems like a very realistic likelihood for the near future, and not one that I see discussed much.)
Zorgon:
I think you’re equating technological innovation with the industrial revolution. Technological innovation has been going on a long time (the water clock, for example, goes back to ancient Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia), but the industrial revolution is surely a more recent and distinct event? While it is a product of technological innovation and remains connected with it, the industrial revolution refers more specifically to mass production and the replacement of manual labor with machines.
Now to something unrelated:
Here’s a piece on Russia from the Sunday Times. The writer Jonathan Dimbleby makes the argument that Russians do not share Western values of democracy and transparent government but prefer national strength and are ruled by paranoia. A point Dr. Brin made in one of his articles on his website I believe.
Thank you for mentioning my Star Wars critique, David! "Hilariously-scholarly" reminds me of humorist Sandra Boynton's self-definition as "warmly ridiculous" (*laughs*). There are a few more essays about science and culture along the same spirit here, in the Stories and Blog sections: Starship Reckless
Personally, I think that the optimum combination is thoughtful implementation of technological innovation interwoven with a lattice society (shorn of its tyranny of custom). Atomism violates a deep human biological need. We are fundamentally social, an attribute that has not changed since Homo sapiens first arose.
Google is your friend, people.
http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en-us&q=brin+%22teach+in+a+more+American+fashion%22&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
One thing that we as a species needs to focus on is on creating an inexpensive and efficient method of transforming seawater into potable (and decent-tasting) drinking water. The wars of the future may very well be fought over water... and water rights could eventually risk tearing the U.S. apart as coastal regions demand their fair share of water, while inland regions use more and more water to grow crops and help their own infrastructure.
Should a method of large-scale treatment of salt water be proven viable... then coastal cities will likely start using the world's largest source of water for its own drinking needs and in turn assist in food and other assorted needs... indeed, with viable irrigation for the interior and water purification on the coasts, the green footprint of countries will grow and carbon consumption will increase. This in turn will help in lowering the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
------
Google has created a contest to encourage private industry to send a probe to the moon. I must admit I've been putting my own mind to the issue. The primary problem is that the prize money will not defray the traditional costs of sending a probe to the moon. So I've been considering methods of breaking Earth orbit... and in turn pushing outward to lunar orbit.
One possibility is using one of the new materials that I recall hearing about that was being bandied about for use in weather balloons because it was far stronger than traditional materials, and could make it to the uppermost levels of the atmosphere without bursting. From there, far less fuel is needed to break to a low Earth orbit, which significantly reduces the cost to get into orbit to probably a couple million dollars (though don't quote me on this, I'm just brainstorming and don't have precise details available).
From there, the use of a solar sail could be used to push a probe slowly into a larger orbit, eventually using the sun's own energy to propel the probe to the moon. It would be tricky and needs precision calculation to ensure the probe reaches the Moon at the right time... but it would cost far less than traditional chemical engine propulsion.
The final problem would be in landing the lunar probe. In that, a possibility would be in using a page from NASA's landing probes on Mars... in essence, airbags to "bounce" the probe, lessening the amount of fuel needed to soft-land the probe. In addition, it may be possible to try and use the solar sail in tacking the probe around the Moon, using the Moon's gravity to encourage landing, but solar radiation as a boost to help slow descent onto the Moon's surface. In short... a landing that utilizes minimal fuel.
I've not considered the probe itself, but considering the number of universities that work on robotics and the like, once the calculations are done on getting a probe to the Moon are complete, gaining access to a probe would be undoubtedly far easier.
But I'm just the idea man. The actual viability of this scenario is probably low.
Robert A. Howard, Tangents Reviews
Thanks Kelsey.
Steve said "Education -- my tuppence is that you need both the memorization and the disputation. You can't be usefully creative if you have to work from first principles or thin air."
Have you ever heard american teens argue? We have bred a generation of lawyers, who can win any argument... based on zero knowledge.
Z: welcome back to the land of modernist-optimism! Now to cheer up that grouch, Jared Diamond.
Dig this. I've been touting Periclean Athens as the one candle in a long darkness before our Enlightenment and industrial revolution. And a weak candle at that. Oh, and I guess the Renaissance. But ponder this. In 2700 BCE, the entire Egyptian civilization built only with mud brick and straw. By 2500, the pyramids had been completed, all of them.
W: Right on. Tunnel-digging is a huge item. I fantacized tuning microwaves (masers) to bust the SiO2 bond like a scalpel, instead of brute force heating....
Athena! Thanks for dropping by! You are welcome here any time.
Robert, solar sails don't work till you get beyond mid-earth-orbit or MEO because of the Van Allen radiation belts and residual atmosphere.
What DOES work very well in there is the electrodynamic tether I describe in Tank Farm Dynamo. See:
http://www.davidbrin.com/tankfarm1.html
It's not intuitive. But solar power panels plus a long conducting tether, plus a simple cathode emitter... and you can cruise around MEO at will!
Above which, THEN a sail could unfurl. My rare collection PROJECT SOLAR SAIL tried to raise funds for a lunar "sail regatta" to commemorate Columbus, in 1992. Didn't happen.
Separate matter: You may have heard that Sky Horizon is up for a Hal Clement Award. I feel deeply honored to be in such company.
> > Sky Horizon, David Brin, ISBN 978-1-59606-109-5
> > Reap the Wild Wind, Julie E. Czerneda, ISBN> 978-0-7564-0456-7
> > A War of Gifts, Orson Scott Card, ISBN> 978-0-7653-1282-2
> > True Talents, David Lubar, ISBN 978-0-765-30977-8>
> Righteous Anger, Lynda Williams, ISBN> 978-1-894063-38-8
Of course Sky Horizon is at a disadvantage being a special, limited edition. I should seek some way to let the voters know how to get copies. If necessary, I could supply PDF copies... Anybody know any of the voters?
This post has been removed by the author.
David's been touting magnetic tethers for years. I noted it was being proposed for future space probes to Jupiter, where they've got plenty to push against!
RH: attach a large weight at each end of your tether and the gravity gradient will do the rest.
Nice to see Zorgon's firing on all cylinders (or should that be solar panels?). I agree we muddle on through (civilisation being an emergent property of the system called h. sap), but we still have to do the muddling.
200 years eh? Interesting what putting the fear of God(s) into the population can achieve! Snark aside, what happened to give the Egyptians the resources to do all that ?
Alfred might be considered another weak flicker in the gloaming. Burning the cakes was just the entree. He then went on to halt the Danes, overhauled the saxon legal system, and raised the general standard of learning and literacy.
But, you know, kings: they come and go.
Speaking of candles, sorry to light the murky wick. In a proportional voting system I would laud Nader's recent candidacy announcement. As it is (and considering I think his popularity is left of centre), I have four questions:
1. Why didn't he run in 2004?
2. Given his rant about big business interests, why does he wait until 'grass roots' Obama is looking increasingly likely to win dem nomination?
3. What has he got against the dems, anyway?
4. What have the puppet masters got against him?
(Of course, it might just be a case of those with predictable reactions attracting predictable stimuli...)
@ Tony
To answer your questions about Nader.
1: He did, but didn't get as much attention that time.
2: He usually announces that he's running once the candidate for either party is pretty much decided. In 2004 he announced that he was running in February too.
3: He has said that Republican party and Democratic party are the same in that they are both corrupt and don't represent the people. Plus he blames Democrats for not stopping the Iraq War
4: He only runs for president and has no chance of winning. If he actually wanted to change the way government was run, he'd try to get elected as a representative or a senator, or he'd offer to be one of Obama's advisors (Obama thought of him as an heroic figure). He's egotistical and uncompromising.
There are also Democrats who think he gave the election to Bush in 2000, but I consider that point irrelevant now. The Democratic Party should be able to win this election in a landslide with or without Nader. And if they want to prevent a repeat of 2000, they'll fix the winner-take-all system.
Since we are listing candles in the dark, it may do to remember the almost-always-forgotten Byzantium, that held the gates for one thousand years, introduced much knowledge to both East and West (its own as well as that of ancient Greece and Rome) and brought alphabets to the Slavs.
According to Senator Obama, Nader contacted him several times and stormed off in a fit when his policy advice was taken with a polite "Thank you for your input". Senator Obama of course said all of that much more politely.
Nader won't sap squat from Obama if he's the nominee. He could probably take about 1-2% from Clinton.
At this point, I think Kucinich could do more damage as a third party candidate.
Nader really ought to chill and take a position as a Consumer Protection czar, but he likes peeing into the tent too much.
___________
Zorgon, the Antikythera mechanism dates to 100BC, and I know all about Babbage, but the "computer age" still starts in the 60's.
We'll always come up with something, untill we don't. Then a couple billion people - at least - will die. Nothing short of a massive comet is going to wipe us all out, we're a resourcefull and adaptable breed to be sure, but excessive confidence in the idea that "someone or something will save us" is a path to destruction on a grand scale.
We're going to have to make some hard choices, and change the way we live, or we're going to be in a world of shit for a couple of hundred years. The longer we delay making those choices, the worse it's going to be.
Tinkering on a grand scale with a life support system we don't really understand makes a lot less sense than giving up our habit of pooping in the air vents.
We've got the technology we need to massively reduce our CO2 out put.
We know how we need to change our lifestyles.
Some genius farm boy might invent sustainable cold fusion tomorrow while out riding a tractor. After all, that's basically how we got television.
It's sure not something to bank the lives of a few billion on, though.
Calling an attorney! Dave Wright points to a toy company offering one of my Traeki for sale!
http://www.courant.com/business/custom/consumer/hc-toyprices0224.artfeb24,0,6107840.story
Look, I know there were many periods of progress in history. Much was done in the Hellenistic period, including batteries. The Song Dynasty was China's best. Hadrian had his good points. But these weren't systematically seismic. They did not reverberate changes in the very way that humanity looked at itself and the universe. They are impressive, but second-order.
Nader could have one benefit. With him screeching the dems and goppers are the same, it might be harder for Bloomberg to attempt a silly-ass run for the center, crying out that the two parties are "too polarized. Especially with the electorate already having chosen the least biliously partisan in each party.
Still, big money may push Bloomberg, as a way to bleed the dems. (Remember months ago, when it looked as if November would feature THREE NEW YORKERS going head to head?)
Has anybody done a full investigation of how much money Nader gets from goppers, whenever he runs? There have been a few news stories.
Then there is the third type of 3rd party run. The George Wallace wing. McCain may feel he has to pick a rightist veep (not the uncontrollable Huckabee) in order to forestall such an insurrection. But that would be a terrible mistake, even so far as possibly endangering his own life.
For his sake, and ours, I hope he chooses a moderate statesman, instead. (1) because it's responsible, (2) because it would make him no longer a prime "martyr candidate", (3) because it would let him go for the center and draw back the moderates who are fleeing to Obama, actually reducing Obama's overall vote count (though not his margin), (4) because he would thus lay a seed crystal for a new Republican consensus that rejects neoconservatism madness.
And (5) because it WOULD cause a far right secession, doing the country (and the reborn GOP) great good, but dooming his chance of election. (It is doomed anyway.)
It is my dream happenstance, since at that point, McCain could enter the American pantheon as a Weldell Wilkie type, who mattered far more than most of his fellow citizens would ever know. Deserving our honor and gratitude.
It could also keep him alive.
Alas, fear of that insurrection, plus fantasies of the White House, will make him pick some awful person. And while GOP unity will reduce Obama's margin a bit, it will vastly increase his vote total.
The effect, either way, will be a blow-out... unless a convenient national disaster happens. Or Obama slips back into smoking or some other filthy habit. On stage.
Of course, all of the above is moot. One of you convinced me. It will be Condi.
Shudders.
Hola Athena, your article on Star Wars was excellent. It makes me want to keep my children from watching it. Well, that and all the other appalling things Star Wars offers.
Do you keep a blog yourself?
"The best human mimics can mimic other animal sounds better than any animal mimic"
I presume you are leaving out the lyrebird from this rather broad statement.
Depends... Do the Humans get to use the tools they were able to build with their huge, succulent brains?
------------------------
Have you guys heard of the Launch Loop, a proposed alternative to space-elevators that requires no revolutions in material science or physics to build?
A steel cable stretches 2000 KM across the equator, 80 KM high and touching the ground at the endpoints. The whole thing is held aloft because the steel cable is circulating (it doubles back along the same path) at 14 KM per second within a vacuum-sealed sheath, and the two are prevented from touching by magnetic levitation. The upward force is provided by momentum transfer as the sheath curves earthward during its ascent. Payloads (with almost entirely plywood/plastic launch vehicles!) are accelerated to an appropriate velocity using magnetic forces on the circulating cable.
There are some introduction slides here (PDF).
#1 Oops! (Check the facts, Fisk!)
#2 OK. It still looks suspiciously like Nader doesn't check his facts either (to see what it is he's railing against).
#3 A rhetorical point, but thanks for answering.
#4 ie the 'spoiler' label sticks (Huckabee likes him!). Being egotistical and uncompromising suggests he's easily manipulated, primed and pointed. I hope it doesn't matter, Still...
Lyrebirds make pretty good camera motors, too (In the days we had such things)
Nope, Alfred wasn't seismic. He was part of a gradual, progressive shift, however, which set the scene for such punctuations as 'the enlightenment'.
Launchloop: on first (brief) look, I'm afraid I'm too thick to see it! I don't even see how it stays up! (centripetal force? If so, what about the effect of the return section of the cable moving counter to the Earth's rotation?)
I do like the buffers on the trolleys, though! Quaint, at those speeds!
The Launch loop appears almost at a throwaway in some 25-year old papers from the JBIS on "Orbital Ring Systems and Jacob's Ladders".
And, David, note my qualifying adverb "usefully" -- when it comes to engineering, facts beat rhetoric.
A launch loop of a sort also appears in Robert L. Forward's novel Starquake.
Meanwhile, the original post contains the phrase "Had enough about Star Wars? Or want more? Here’s an essay" where it seems it should instead say "Had enough about Star Wars? Or want more? Here’s a 404". :P
Another launch loop appeared in the anime series "Bubblegum Crisis 2040" though the anime's English dub billed it as a space elevator. Looking back at the anime and at these schematics, and it seems likely it was a launch loop.
Rob H.
Dr. Rice doesn't want to run for elected office. She's done everything short of lighting her hair on fire and running through the halls screaming "No"!
I'm sure she has her own reasons, and I suspect there are things in her past that would make her a greater liability than any of us realize.
David, thank you for the warm welcome!
Derek, I'm glad you liked the Star Wars critique. I do keep a blog at www.starshipnivan.com/blog/. You can find more of my essays at www.starshipnivan.com/stories/ and www.toseekoutnewlife.com/portfolio.html.
Athena,
Another perfect example for your Snatchismo essay - Rob Roy in the 1995 film, played by Liam Neeson.
You've got some great stuff there.
Brief foray into politics: Is Senator Clinton's allegations that Senator Obama would be another Bush in terms of foreign affairs going to torpedo any hope of reconciliation within the Democratic party? I mean, it seems lately that evoking comparisons of the Shrub is much like invoking Hitler and/or Nazis in internet arguments. In addition, Clinton's allegations are off the mark, considering that Obama was on the Senate's Committee on Foreign Relations, whereas I cannot recall any foreign relations experience with the Shrub.
It seems like the Clinton campaign is starting to flail about and causing damage to itself and to Obama without considering the ultimate consequences. I halfway suspect that we'll be seeing some of the Democratic leadership taking Clinton aside and quietly telling her that she's lost their approval and that they're backing Obama.
Indeed... if the vast majority of the Superdelegates swung their vote over to Obama right now, then once the March primaries are done, Obama would likely wrap up the nomination. While the Superdelegates stated they wanted to wait it out and do the will of the people... it might be necessary to rally behind Obama now to minimize what damage Clinton does rather than wait to see if the will of the people for the rest of the country lies with Obama.
Rob H.
Jester said:
"Another perfect example for your Snatchismo essay - Rob Roy in the 1995 film, played by Liam Neeson."
You are absolutely right! How could I have forgotten him? I must revise my essay!
Here is an interesting article on Obama's advisers that should make David feel good: The Audacity of Data
Barack Obama's surprisingly non-ideological policy shop.
...
Cutler told me Obama is adamant about consulting bona fide experts. "The staff kept saying, 'What he wants to know is that he's really talking to experts in the field. When you go see him, you know, make it clear that you're an expert.'" When it comes to economics, it's very difficult to achieve expertise without an academic background. It's a field that prizes rigorous results, supported by reams of painstakingly sifted data.
...
In economics, it's the academics who are first-rate engineers and the nonacademics who are either dreamers or technicians. In foreign policy, it's often the practitioners whose engineering prowess stands out. And so it's no surprise that Obama would attract the latter.
...
I have been indulging in a guilty pleasure lately and I thought I would share:
Tell a republican friend that Barak has made a deal with Hillary, if she bows out, she gets nominated to the Supreme Court. Their heads explode shortly after ;-)
occam's comic
Take a look at the Norwegian Doomsday Vault!
http://green.yahoo.com/news/afp/20080224/sc_afp/norwayarcticenvironmentwarmingcrops.html
It a series of three crypt-like structures intended to store samples from all varieties of all earths crops. It was carved into the limestone under the permafrost, a mere 600 miles from the north pole. It is kept safe by airtight seals, armed guards, and polar bears.
Sorry, reading it really brought out the DnD player in me.
The problem with the launch loop as shown in the slides something not mentioned in detail. Before you can get a payload on the "West Station" end of the track you have to get your cargo up 80km(270,000ft)! A lot of energy will be needed to get things that initial distance.
It may be simpler and more efficient in the end to build the space elevators (ala Vanilla Needle in Sun Diver or Arther C Clark's Tower of Kalidasa's in Fountains of Paradise).
Occam please!!!
You just canceled out ALL of my "arguments to rouse an ostrich"! Just tell an ostrich that scenario and bang! Head will explode and the new one they grow back (a la Men in Black) will be more troglodytic than ever.
Yes, I know it's satisfying. But please DON'T SAY THAT!
(In fact, she's smart and would probably not do badly. But no. Keep her in the Senate. Send Bill to Paris. Everybody's happy.
tintinaus: Actually, my Vanilla Needle is EXACTLY what would made the launch loop work. It can get cargo balloons up to near that altitude!
You know, one of the things that bugged me the whole time about episodes I-III was the complete lack of a Han Solo character.
That, and Anakin just got really annoying.
The whole "chosen one" character in so much fantasy (and I count Star Wars as fantasy) just made me feel left out as a kid. I liked the movies, but I couldn't identify with the hero.
Now, Indiana Jones on the other hand... not only is a regular guy with no special powers (and, if you've seen the trailer for the new movie, he gets old) but, hey, he's a friggin' scientist !
Oh, I don't know... young Obi Wan had a certain level of swashbuckling to him.
('This.. is not good!')
Jar Jar Binks was a pretty decent pilot... of submarines
As for whip wielding scientists... 'cracking tongue, Jar Jar!'
(No! This is *not* good!)
(Admit it , Matt! You're just another Harrison Ford fan ;-)
Harry's the man, I hope I'm half as cool when I'm 60 something.
I grew up on MacGuyver too, between Indy and Mac there was always hope that us geeky guys could grow up to be cool action heros. Of course, it didn't work, but I can dream.
Matt, you're MY hero... for saying dat stuff.
See, I could never believe Indy as a scientist. He never treats any of his finds the way a respectable archaeologist would. Even when he isn't on the run from nazis and cultists he just wants to run in and get the treasure.
For a laugh, read BACK FROM YET ANOTHER GLOBETROTTING
ADVENTURE, INDIANA JONES CHECKS HIS MAIL AND DISCOVERS THAT HIS BID FOR TENURE HAS BEEN DENIED.
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2006/10/10bryan.html
McGyver was cool, but eventually I learned that most of his stuff didn't work, and my dreams were crushed.
Dr Brin I was never sure how your tower operated. I don't remember there being any mention of the mechanics in Sun Diver and if you wrote about it somewhere else I must have missed it.
Doing a search on the space elevator I found the LiftPort Group who state their goal is to provide the world a mass transportation system to open up the vast market opportunities that exist in space, many of which haven't even been imagined yet, to even the smallest entrepreneur. These new markets can only become viable through safe, inexpensive, routine access to space. Our motto is, "Change the world or go home," and we strive each day to make that change a reality.
Here is the link to their disertation about the Space Elevator
@tintinaus
On page 18 in the overview, it mentions the west-station has an elevator to hoist up the cargo. (I don't know if this is the 'detail' you wanted, though). I can't imagine it being more or less efficient than a space-elevator.
Honestly I wish there was a brinopedia out there somewhere, so our host could explain some of his ideas outside of prose. "The Vanilla Needle worked by . . . "
Another example was Kiln People. To this day I'm fuzzy on how civil liens worked. Or what national boundaries existed. Stuff like that.
Well, now, Z... I like to leave lots to the imagination. In any well-textured universe, the more interesting stuff you reveal... the more threads lead off in fresh directions!
But the Needles are pretty simple. In Equador and Kenya, the Vanilla and Chocolate Needles are hollow spires held up by internal air pressure, kept pumped by atomic power plants at the base. High pressure not only keeps them rigid and tall, but lets cargo balloons rise upward very high and efficiently.
At the top you can meet a launch loop... or send out rockets. Or meet a whirl-tether that swoops down to snatch cargos. (Best method. The Launch loop really is quite silly. Fun, but silly.)
Still...a better wiki-brin wouldn't be a bad thing when it comes to trying to remember who was who in the vast Uplift Universe.
Of course, I could just gather then all up again and read through them in one swoop. I read them as they originaly hit paperback, a few years apart.
Also, while I know this isn't the "Stroke Dr.Brins Ego" site, thanks for not going all David Eddings and just pumping out an Uplift book every year to pay the mortage.
On tunneling, IANA geologist, but --
The price of tunneling depends *drastically* on local geology. For instance, the Chunnel was practical because the boring machines were passing through the Dover chalk layer the entire distance (and thus hardness, hydrological properties, etc.) were assured.
Contrast this to Boston's Big Dig, which cost about the same amount to tunnel a mere mile and a half... because that mile and a half was composed of swamp loam and garbage fill from 17th century Boston, about the worst possible material to tunnel through. $15B and engineering marvels galore... but the thing *still* leaks, and probably always will.
The inconsistency of the Earth's surface means your tunnel engineering must adapt constantly to local conditions. I suspect tunneling is much easier in those rare places where the parent material is soft, waterproof, above the water table, and identical for hundreds of meters in all six directions. Such places are not common.
To give just a taste of why it seems to ridiculous to me to be pessimistic about the near human future right now, let me blue-sky it with five technologies which right now are well under development, and not "lab tests" or "theories," but at present solid and workable and practical:
[1] Biotechnology. Freeman Dyson has suggested that very soon we'll simply bioengineer plants to generate fuel as we need it. Want electricity? Bioengineer organisms to generate that too. Need super-strong composite nano-materials? Bioengineer a critter to produce it.
[2] Fabricators. Both Bruce Sterling and Cory Doctorow have recently written stories about what happens when we get cheap mass-produced washing-machine-sized widgets that take in cabron nanofibers and fabricate...well, anything you want. Need a laptop? Fabricate it. Want food? Print it out. Need a new heart for a trasplant? Print it out. Captitalism goes away when fabricators become widespread and factories disappear. This sounds like wild science fiction, but fabricators exist now, albeit using cheap plastic. Printers are now being used to print out human cell cultures, laying down the basis of new organs. Look ahead a few years, and when we move from plastic to something more durable, and then add dopants for room-temp superdonducting pathways, you'll soon do away with factories entirely. Everybody becomes wealthy. Want something? Fabricate it. Hungry? Print out dinner.That changes the game entirely.
[3] Radical new living arrangements like arcologies. The first mini-arcologies are being built right now, in Moscow. 10,000 people will live and work in Crystal Island. Scale those up, and you eliminate a lot of he problems with suburbs, transportation, etc. Paolo Soleri and Bucky Fuller both foresaw this long ago, and proposed truly huge arcologies. Once genetic engineering gets cranked up, why couldn't we grow our houses? Bioneingeer in the waste reclamation facilities and thermoelectic and photoelectric comopnents, plus organic insulation and air conditioning.
[4] New materials. We don't now have materials strong & light enough to produce a space elevator, but we will eventually. Materials science continues to advance at a breakneck pace. Soon, we'll be able to create much higher-compression car engines that are much lighter because they'll be made out of composites, not steel or aluminum, and the shells of cars may be harvested from plants bioengineered to produce super-strong ultra-lightweight "smart" materials that change their properties drastically in response to the environment. A sufficiently streamlined vehcile, something like Buky Fuller's Dymaxion car, could easily attain 90 mph using today's technology and transport one or two people, but use less than 1% of the energy currently burned up on hauling around heavy steel and cutting through huge wind resistance.
[5] Radical new air and sea transportation technologies. The most ingenious idea I've seen for air travel (can't find the original URL) was proposed by a NASA scientist who suggested pumping air out of a lifting body to increase its buoyancy, then when it reaches altitude, harvest the kinetic energy to recharge the pumps which in turn pump the air out (rinse, wash, repeat). Only a small amount of forward motive power would produce amazingly efficient air travel, much faster than a dirigible, and far more energy-inexpensive. For sea transportation, it's not obvious why we couldn't bionegineer living creatures able to transport cargo yet which only need to feed on krill.
These remain only the most obvious and crude well-worn ideas reiterated by many others, as long as 60 years ago. The really
radical new technologies are the ones we can't foresee, and which will have a much greater impact on improving energy efficiency and enhancing peoples' lives. As just one example, Woozle's idea of AI cars is great -- what about super-energy-efficient smart bicycles built from near-indestructible composites (including tires), with brakes that reclaim energy, and a tiny induction motor that gives you a boost travelling up hills, then reclaims the energy when coasting down the other side.
For tunnels, the obvious end goal remains the gravity train, a totally efficient method of long-range transportation.
There's just so much right around the corner, in develompent now, that it's impossible to be pessimistic about the near future.
I can remain pessimistic. Research has shown (via ice cores in Greenland) that we have been in a weather lull for the last ten thousand years. Earlier? Our weather underwent drastic changes. Why did it stabilize? It may very well be due partly to the Himalaya mountains disrupting air patterns and slowing the upper air winds as a result.
Should we increase our temperature sufficiently, our weather patterns will alter and truly nasty weather patterns may emerge. Air travel may become a thing of the past. Sea travel will likely be fraught with peril, even with high technology. It may be almost impossible to send anything into orbit and materials that might be strong enough in twenty years to build a space elevator for today's weather systems may prove unable to cope with the drastic alterations in weather systems (though the equator may remain fairly static). Land travel will likewise be more perilous due to rapid storms rushing across the country, ripping apart regions with tornadoes and unstructured wind storms.
We need to get a handle on carbon emissions now, before it's too late and we bump our planet's weather systems into a new pattern that is far more disruptive. Indeed, we need to get off planet to truly stand a chance. We need viable space habitats and to expand outward and colonize asteroids and the like. Because if we don't do it in the next hundred or so years... I suspect we won't have the capability to do so once the Earth's weather goes south.
Side note: has there been any consideration of building the space elevator at the Southern polar axis? I'd think that this would reduce stresses on the elevator, though you'd have to be careful to make sure the structure didn't wobble too much or it would turn into a whip and tear itself apart. Though I admit I'm not a mathematician and don't have the physics behind it... I understand the outlying concepts but calculus kind of killed me when I was younger.
Rob H.
Whoa! Zorgon, I love the optimism, but it is definitely CITOKATE time.
[i][1] Biotechnology. Freeman Dyson has suggested that very soon we'll simply bioengineer plants to generate fuel as we need it.[/i]
CITOKATE: such critters still have to be [i]fed[/i]. I've worked in biotech; making batches of bugs big enough for production, and keeping them happy enough for high yield, is a decidedly nontrivial task.
[i][2] Fabricators....Need a laptop? Fabricate it. Want food? Print it out. Need a new heart for a trasplant? Print it out. Captitalism goes away when fabricators become widespread and factories disappear. [/i]
No, it doesn't, because you still need three very important things for your fabricator to work:
a) plans
b) material feedstocks
c) energy.
Capitalism simply shifts its basis once again as the 'means of production' are altered. A fabricator makes for a somewhat simpler economy, as it reduces commodities more clearly to their physical basis --
a) negative entropy
b) matter
c) energy
-- but it doesn't take them away at all. Nor would I want it to -- there has to be some way to maintain CITOKATE. Charles Stross' [i]Singularity Sky[/i] and [i]Iron Sunrise[/i] posit a galaxy where a thousand cultures are dropped on a thousand planets with fabricators. Some make farms and factories, and live well. Others make nukes and tailored viruses, and don't live well... or even live.
[i][3] Radical new living arrangements like arcologies.[/i]
Humans are not meant to live in hives. Growing our own houses is likely, but unless there are compelling [i]economic and social[/i] reasons to do so, people spread out. Megacities exist because of trade, manfacturing, and high culture. An arcology must have a truly profound and attractive living arrangement, or it will rapidly fail. That said, I think growing our own houses will be likely in the mid-21st. Living things are so much better at maintenance, after all.
[i][4] New materials. We don't now have materials strong & light enough to produce a space elevator, but we will eventually.[/i]
In another 10-20 years we will know enough nanotech to start spinning space elevator cable. Earthly applications in bridgebuilding and such will likely be the test applications.
[i]...but use less than 1% of the energy currently burned up on hauling around heavy steel and cutting through huge wind resistance.[/i]
Please, be reasonable. As long as we are using heat engines, thermodynamics constrains us to something on the order of 70% efficiency, and you can't evade the basic kinetic energy requirements for the human body. Reducing our energy use per car by one order of magnitude is probably doable; two is unlikely.
[i]There's just so much right around the corner, in develompent now, that it's impossible to be pessimistic about the near future.[/i]
Now that I agree with; you just have to be realistic and know that only a fraction of the mud thrown at the wall will stick.
I'm just waiting for the open source people to try and get in on the Google 'send something to the moon' prize. [edit: team frednet is planning on employing free talent, but... I am hoping for something more ... ambitious].
You know how many geeks have an extra 1k lying around? Say it's a million (that's less than one percent of America, btw). A stake, and good plans (endorsed by independent scientists) -- it's investment from the people, not the government.