25 Theses on Starship, Space Tourism, and Human Futures Beyond Earth.

In this guest editorial, my 40 year pal Joe Carroll... who is "Mr. Tether" for saving that now-useful space technology, back in the '80s... puts forward twenty-five provocative 'theses' or assertions about spaceflight across the next generation or so. 

Joe takes into account what's been announced so far, especially about Elon Musk's SpaceX 'Starship program,' offering some points that may need to be solved... or at least resolved based on sound arguments.

You are all welcome to initiate discussion in comments, below!

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Theses on Starship, Tourism, and Human Futures Beyond Earth 

Context

It is useful to periodically reconsider our prospects and options for living beyond Earth. The theses listed below are intended to stimulate more serious discussion of some currently popular scenarios. These are assertions. Some may be disproved, but most are way-under-considered.

Use the comments below to get the discussion rolling, then restart by consensus elsewhere. 

Regarding SpaceX Starship

S1. Starship’s main business will be delivering payload from Earth to LEO (& back), not beyond.

S2. Starship may cut LEO $/kg by 100 binary (i.e., only 4-fold), but still revolutionize use of space.

S3. Once launch prices drop ~4-fold, most customers will focus on launch vibration & reliability. 

S4. The STS orbiter cost more per kg than its main engines. That may also be true for Starship. 

S5. Simple “Startankers” can cost & weigh ~1/3 less & deliver >1/4 more payload than full Starships. 

S6. Most useful early LEO propellant transfers will be from one Startanker to a Falcon stage 2.

S7. Later transfers will be to lighter (inflatable?) stages, with lower T/W than Falcon or Starship.  

S8. It is better to find local use for most hardware far from LEO than to return it for later reflight. 

S9. Any military point-to-point payloads will land on their own, with Starship landing elsewhere.

 

Tourism and Commercial Space Travel 

T1. Early “point-to-point” travel needs a transfer hub in LEO, to grow markets for direct routes. 

T2. A LEO hub is also a great meeting site, and a hub for orbital tourism & settlement testing. 

T3. For science/health - + for space novices - a LEO hub can rotate-emulate Moon & Mars gravity. 

T4. A  “2001 wheel” won't minimize spin-queasiness. Best is a long, slow-spinning dumbbell.

T5. Outboard capture & de-orbit by tether allow transfers in gravity, and can boost payload ~10%.

T6. Most tourists will want access to 0g, but prefer partial gravity for most of their time in orbit. 

T7. Easy elevator access to a range of gravity levels may be a key attraction for tourists & retirees.

 

Human Futures Beyond Earth

H1. It is harder to live in the best place off Earth than the worst place on Earth (except volcanoes).

H2. The best way to start “mining the sky” is to recycle & reuse most mass now discarded by ISS. 

H3. Growing food in LEO can get us closer to living off Earth than putting people on Mars can. 

H4. The US needed Apollo, in a hurry. We don’t need footprints on the Moon or Mars in a hurry. 

H5. After decades of refining 0g health countermeasures, human health still goes downhill in 0g.

H6. Around our sun, Earth is the only livable ~1g body. All others have 3/8g, ~1/6g, or <0.09g.

H7. We know nothing about sustained human health between 0g & 1g (Apollo stayed 1-3 days).

H8. We can find the effects of 1/6g & 3/8g far safer & cheaper in LEO than on the Moon or Mars.

H9. The only place we can settle off Earth without meters of shielding is LEO inclinations <15^o.

  

Joe Carroll     January 8, 2022     

The “utopian anarchy” that unites most science fictional wish-fantasies

We're heading out the door to San Diego's extravaganza -- even bigger than our famous Zoo -- Comicon International, with overseas guests in tow. And so, in keeping with the elevated theme of adventure and unlimited possibilities, let's set aside the political shenanigans America's civil war and briefly assume that our Great Experiment in a better kind of society continues -- a civilization that grows better as it grows more diverse and interesting and fair.

Ah, but how to get there? Does science fiction show a way?

== A future of freedom ==

Some of you have been following the debate between Elon Musk and Cory Doctorow et. al., over the meaning and ethos that underly the “Culture” series of novels by Iain M. Banks. Musk has called himself a “utopian anarchist” in a way best described by those novels.  (Elon named several of his SpaceX vessels after ships in Iain’s science fictional cosmos.) Doctorow counters with an assertion that Banks was a vigorous proponent of labor unions.

Having known all three of these brilliant gentlemen, let me avow that each has been beneficial to humanity, helping open our eyes to - variously - dangerous problems, daring opportunities and/or visionary goals. I hope all of them continue to influence us to rise into a thoughtful and bold and broadminded civilization. (And I will draw in other SF'nal utopians below, like Ursula LeGuin.)

This essay in the Guardian takes sides and is, I believe, myopically petty, especially about Elon Musk’s utopian anarchism. In fact, Elon is right that science fiction offers us the unique perspective of deep time, helping us squint far ahead to see a strangely common theme.

Three paths to very similar utopias

Libertarians often speak of a future when there will be very few limits on individual autonomy, when sovereign adults are free to form coalitions and make deals to advance both shared and personal goals, without being unduly hampered either by cloying restrictions or by cheaters.

Most folks aren’t aware that this is also — exactly, in every particular — the long range goal of Marxism! Karl Marx did not dwell on it, or supply much detail; he assumed a final withering-away of the socialist, transition state — into coercion-free individualism — would proceed out of elevated proletarian self-interest. 

Flipping that order of events, libertarians assume that individual liberation in market-driven paradise will require first dismantling the nation state.  Equality and freedom will follow.

A fascinating hybrid is the culture of Planet Annares, in The Dispossessed, by my former teacher, the late Ursula K. LeGuin. Although she was definitely a person of the left, she rejected the domineering 'socialist-transition' states she saw behaving so badly, in Leninist and Maoist realms. Her prescription seems akin -- in many ways -- more to the libertarian path: dismantle authority first. Standing on her shoulders (so to speak) is Kim Stanley Robinson, whose novels dissect many of the tradeoffs along the way to utopian freedom.

But let's get back to that simple comparison of libertarian and marxist end goals.

In sharing a perfectly overlapping, ultimate utopia of empowered individualism, these two movements differ from almost every other belief system of our long past, nearly all of which assumed that hierarchy will prevail. A perfect pyramid of Confucian noblesse oblige, for example. Or the post-apocalypse reign of Jesus. Priests for 6000 years were well paid to spread such mythologies, and Joseph Campbell extolled the pattern as fundamental to human psyches. Even today, Hollywood obsesses on wizards, kings, Jedi and demigod superheroes. (Ah, Comicon, here we go.)

Set against that most-common context, aren’t the utopian marxists and libertarians more rambunctiously similar than they are different? Elsewhere I go into detail about this strange overlap of ultimate goals… 

…and how the two movements differ profoundly over the path to get there! How to achieve that apotheosis of individual liberty from all want or coercion.  Indeed, I show that neither methodology can possibly work!  

But there is a third approach that demonstrably can take us close to that aim of utopian anarchy. 

== The Great Attractor Trap ==

For starters, it is vital to consider the human past. Across all of those long, dark eras, which failure modes generally thwarted progress?

Let’s all blame Charles Darwin. In every society that developed metals and agriculture, human males were relentlessly rewarded - reproductively - for cheating. We’re all descended from the harems of strong, ruthless guys who used metal implements to coerce others into serving them. And we carry seeds of similar behavior; a fraction of us will seek dark corners of any type of society, using any rationalization and exploit any opportunity to gain advantage and repress competitors. 

Oh, the surface incantations vary. The old USSR was run by a cabal of coercive harem-keepers no less brutal than the czars, only with different surface theology. The current occupants of the Kremlin simply tossed aside their hammer-sickle pins and returned to czarist  catechisms. (See Vladimir Sorokin’s terrifying novel “The Day of the Oprichnik.”)

No, this is less about left-vs-right than finding a sweet-spot optimization that eluded most of our ancestors. We who finally listened to John Locke and Pericles and Adam Smith have benefited from one trick -- never allowing power and authority to concentrate into toxic pools, but spreading it widely enough dispersed to keep cheating below a dull roar.

It’s nuts to shout “cheating” when fellows like Elon form clever alliances that deliver better goods and services. Only one society ever found the trick to truly unleash human inventiveness through competitive enterprise, and it’s the same one that got rich enough to finally tackle old injustices of poverty, prejudice and environmental neglect. Those who disparage the word “competition” would kill the goose that lays golden eggs.

But we also need context on the other side. Again, look back at 6000 years of dubious “civilization” in which those with power used it to crush any competitor who might rise from below. In 99% of human cultures, vast reservoirs of talent were repressed — vigorously and actively — under fabulated excuses based on race, gender, or what caste you were born into. Markets and institutions were warped to benefit the mighty, and priests taught that it was good for the lords’ sons to inherit your sons and daughters.

Any society that doesn’t confront this age-old attractor condition — the great human failure mode — will not take us to that glimmering goal of genuine utopian anarchy.  Even Ayn Rand declared cheating to be a basic problem! She maintained that some state structure would remain needed, to counter it. (Alas, her prescription then plunges into incantatory silliness that I dissect here.)

In the long debate between Hobbes and Rousseau, it remains Locke — followed by Hume and Smith — who comes out as wise. Human societies must find a balance between curbing our cheater-devils and liberating our better angels. Unleashing the greatest creative force in the universe - competition - but regulated (as in sports) to prevent the cheating that would ruin it all. This is ruining it all.

And what works best is to keep erring, progressively, toward freedom.

== Utopian Anarchism ==

Which brings us full circle back to the Musk-Doctorow argument over the Culture novels of Iain M. Banks.

In Iain’s projected future, organic and enhanced bio-humans experience lives of near total freedom, including the ability (projected earlier, in John Varley’s cosmos) to change sexes at-whim. Personal choice and the right to “pursue happiness” are maximized and just about the only thing that’s forbidden is to interfere with others’ right to do the same.  It sure looks like “utopian anarchy”…

…till you realize that there remains a regulatory framework, a guiding hand that is lighter in daily practice, but ultimately far more powerful than Ayn Rand’s “few courthouses.” That hand is wielded by the all-powerful AI entities who actually rule the Culture. Mostly-benevolently, but sometimes with plot-propelling weirdness or agendas of their own.

Ironies abound, here, and I am not leading you to a particular conclusion. 

Sure, Banks wove tales of a future that has inspired brilliant innovators — like Elon — to help propel us starward. Whatever the terminology, I share a dream of humanity achieving levels where state authority (or any kind) can safely “wither away”… to use a phrase coined by Karl Marx. And yes, I have spoken of this at many libertarian events and conferences.

But we are not yet the kind of beings who can reliably put reason ahead of tribal emotions, or act always in enlightened self-interest. Even among our brilliant, fact-centered professions, I’d say we do that at-best on a 30% level.  And half of Americans have been talked into waging open war upon all fact-centered professions! 

Under such conditions, you can see why those who want to re-impose hierarchy — like the Chinese Communist Party — rationalize that it’s the only solution.

They are wrong. Their approach -- under all the high-tech gloss -- is exactly the one that froze and lobotomized most human societies. If it prevails, we will never have the stars.

== A difficult, achievable path ==

Oh, if we look around today it's clear that Hobbes still has a several point advantage over Rousseau. And those of us who still believe in the passionately-moderate, militantly reasonable revolution of Locke — and Adam Smith and the American Founders — have an upward path to slog. A Great Experiment to save. 

And — alas for those eagerly propounding quick-fixes — this will entail using many of the tools we already have. 

Despite setbacks, like phase 8 of the American Civil War, we are on that upward path!  Ironically, Elon and Iain and Corey and Ursula and KS Robinson were all lights along the way.

But to go much farther, we truly will need to include externalities in our market prices. And elevate all children to a level of opportunity where talent stops being wasted and all competition is joyfully flat-open-fair. And ensure that disparities of power no longer entice many to prefer cheating over innovation.

Until we’ve done all that, and taught wiser generations how to apply their sovereign individuality with truly enlightened self-interest, then we’ll still need some Lockean structure. We’ll still need to fight for a civilization that — despite a myriad flows — has been more generously helpful of our long range goals than any other.

What happens to Starman and the Red Roadster? Post your quick-short story here!

Okay, on sudden impulse*, here's a flash contest for the best very short Sci Fi story about how aliens or future folk might find and misinterpret Elon's Starman Tesla!

The rules: Maximum 100 words!

Post it below, in this comment section. (Regular Contrary Brin commenters... self restraint please? Keep it short and favor our guests.) Host retains control over posted content. Prize will be at host's discretion. You are to have fun and only fun.

Oh, then there's this: "Third burn successful," Musk wrote on Twitter. "Exceeded Mars orbit and kept going to the Asteroid Belt."**

Final note: I may ... maybe ... forward stories to... himself.

Such incentives! ***
Ready, set, go....

DB

* Thanks for the suggestion, Joe Carroll.

** The asteroid belt... orbital aphelion 240 million miles or a hundred million beyond Mars. Hey, that's the setting for the last 1/3 of my novel EXISTENCE, all about what kids of machines we might find already there!

*** Oh, geez! Elon packed the trunk with toys and mementos and such... but did he remember to include the Tesla's KEYS? =====

More Than Human? And science roundup!

First an announcement: Wednesday, May 10th I'll speak at the “Digital Revolution,” a free public forum that the Union-Tribune will hold at the University of San Diego’s Kroc Theater. It starts at 6:30 p.m. All you have to do is register online at uniontribune.com/future."

== More than we are? ==

Elon Musk is backing a brain-computer interface venture that was founded to allow humans to keep up with the advancements made in machines. The interface is intended to work by augmenting that which makes us human: our brains.  I've written extensively, in both science and fiction, about the quandaries of human consciousness and the murky, non-linear paths that might have brought us here. For example.

A panel has recommended the development of an A.I. index, analogous to the Consumer Price Index, to track the pace and spread of artificial intelligence technology. That technical assessment, they said, could then be combined with detailed data on skills and tasks involved in various occupations to guide education and job-training programs.

The Next Human: taking evolution into our own hands. National Geographic offers Beyond Human: how humans are shaping our own evolution. Read this excellent  article, which reviews human genetic change… how many ways we have changed - at the level of genes - since technologies began altering our way if life, letting us occupy Tibetan and Andean highlands or drink the milk of animals, or consume alcohol. The authors go on to examine how techniques like In Vitro Fertilization and CRISPR are opening the science fictional worlds of deliberate gene slicing.  

When asked whether this is ethical, Linda MacDonald Glenn, a bioethicist at California State University, Monterey Bay, comments; “For this sort of technology to be banned or not used is to suggest that evolution has been benign. That it somehow has been a positive. Oh Lord, it has not been! When you think of the pain and suffering that has come from so many mistakes, it boggles the mind.”

And it goes farther: “Hundreds of people have radio-frequency identification (RFID) devices embedded in their bodies that allow them to unlock their doors or log on to their computers without touching anything. One company, Dangerous Things, claims to have sold 10,500 RFID chips, as well as do-it-yourself kits to install them under the skin. The people who buy them call themselves body hackers or grinders.” 

How soon to Molly, from Neuromancer?  Or even my dittoes from Kiln People? But oops, some things are predictable: “Another grinder …wants to implant a vibrator beneath his pubic bone and connect it via the web to others with similar implants."

Yeow. Very interesting article. Though alas, things are much more complicated. Take the implication that we can increase human lifespan and human intelligence by simply finding the right genetic (or nutrition) switches to flick. In both cases, indicators suggest the the smartest or longest lived humans are crowding against glass ceilings that will be very hard to shatter. 

Yes, certainly we have crashed through other limitations before!  But in the case of IQ, it seems that when smart people breed together, their odds of brainy offspring rise in company with their chances of having kids with problems like autism spectrum. (In Existence I portray how tech might overcome this by empowering autistic folks and freeing them.)

== Can we delay aging? ==

This could be among the scariest bits of science, especially in an era of rising aristocracy and wealth disparity. “Researchers at Stanford University led by neuroscientist Tony Wyss-Coray showed in a 2014 study that infusions of blood from young mice reversed cognitive and neurological impairments seen in old ones.” 

If this brings to mind some of the 1950s science fiction tales about rich old coots having young men and women squeezed for their life essence (in some cases it was prescient about blood transfusions) then how about “parabiosis,” a bizarre technique in which two mice were sutured together in such as way that they shared a circulatory system - which found old mice joined to their youthful counterparts showed changes in gene activity making them more youthful. And the younger mice aged.

The article is more optimistic, showing preliminary evidence that the juvenizing factors may be in blood plasma, which millions of teens could easily donate to millions of elderly without it becoming a matter of being preyed upon.  Indeed, science might decipher the elixir components and synthesize them and that will be that… 

And now credible news that billionaire Peter Thiel may be trying it.

Only not so fast.  Results in mice almost never apply to humans, when it comes to lifespan extension - and there are reasons. Sorry.

A chemical switch to slow the aging of cells? Again and again I point out that human are probably slready using all these ‘low-hanging fruit” for lengthening lifespan. anti-senescence treatments that work in mice almost never do a thing in already methuselah humans. Now, to be fair, these results do seem to apply to human cells. Still, see my story "Chrysalis' in my collection, Insistence of Vision to see how this might not go as expected!

== Next Steps in Tech ==

Speaking of our generation's irreplaceable man... Elon Musk has revealed his new tunnel boring machine -- an ambitious plan aimed at reducing traffic congestion. I've thought a lot about tunneling over the years and we spoke about it recently. Though dinner was mostly about Mars.

Oh, and see the next transportation revolution… electric planes!

A game changer? Announced: a water harvester that uses only ambient sunlight to pull liters of water out of the air each day in conditions as low as 20 percent humidity.  

A team has invented a revolutionary way to remove carbon dioxide (CO₂) from air by triggering artificial photosynthesis in a synthetic material — breaking down carbon dioxide while also producing fuel.  Well, tentatively. 

Wish you had this in school? A tiny module you could put on a professor’s lectern and it not only records but transcribes the lecture as text.  Now to have an AI explain it all…

Remember this breakthrough. “Graphene oxide can be produced by simple oxidation in the lab. Then, as an ink or solution, it can be spread on a substrate or porous material. Use it as a membrane, and apparently it can separate salty from seawater. The sought-after development could aid the millions of people without ready access to clean drinking water.”

Have a look at the Deep Space Gateway, the habitat Boeing wants to send to cislunar space. It could house critical research for human exploration and could dock other vehicles using a system similar to the International Space Station’s, though more modern and compact and possibly apropos for  use as an interplanetary spacecraft.

American farmers are using Ukrainian hacker firmware to free their tractors from lock-in to John Deere for all repairs. Seven states are considering laws to allow people to hack or repair their own private property, an issue that has been riling libertarian spirits all over, and where I find my libertarian roots aroused.  Only note, the villains are not exactly "big bad government."

Are we wired for numbers? Human understanding of counting is central to our understanding of the world around us.  Numbers and the Making of Us: Counting the Course of Human History, by anthropologist Caleb Everett examines the evolution of our perception of numbers -- and how it has influenced human behavior in societies across the globe.

An accidental discovery of real potential importance. Wax worms can apparently eat and break down polyethylene plastic bags.

Deriving traces of human DNA(Neanderthals, Denisovans, etc) from ancient caves… but not from bones? Rather from dirt?  

Heroes of Science(!) action figures! Unfortunately, not yet available.

There. Down with the war on science and all of its practitioners.  They want all this to stop.

Space Marvels for 2017

Oh, let's (please) take a break from pondering our current crisis of civilization, and the now explicit war on science. Instead, this time, let us turn our heads to ponder the wonderful cosmos that our children will explore... if we manage to keep a great and brave and thoughtful civilization.

My own space news can be found at the bottom.  A dinner gathering with cool topics. But first... 

Fantastic! Cosmographists have plotted the velocities of hundreds of galaxies within 1.7 billion light years, including all of our galactic super-group.  They subtracted the universal expansion and traced lines of a velocity field.  We had already known that swarms of galaxies were converging on what’s called the “Shapley Attractor.”  But this paper unveils a spectacular discovery named the Dipole Repeller! The DR is a region on the opposite side of our super-group that appears to have a repulsive effect on the velocity field, making the whole thing resemble the pattern of… well… a dipole.  As illustrated in this remarkable video.

But… but gravity isn’t supposed to have a repulsive “pole”, right? Well, there is a void near the Dipole Repeller. So, could just an absence of matter explain… hey, I am digesting this even as you are. Whoa.

(Does anyone else see a resemblance to the human inner ear? Or a chambered nautilus?)

On a much smaller scale.... Here’s proof of an intermediate-mass black hole existing — weighing just 2,200 times the mass of the Sun. 

A decaying binary orbit will lead a close pair of stars to collide, and calculations pin it down (maybe) to the year 2022, when a “red nova” may even be visible to the naked eye. 

In  Welcome to the Universe, An Astrophysical Tour, the incomparable Neil deGrasse Tyson gives you a personal tour through the marvels of the cosmos, delving into big picture topics such as quasars, cosmic strings, supermassive black holes, wormholes, time travel... and the possibility of intelligent life out there. Are we part of an infinite multiverse? Tyson illuminates and entertains with glimpses of the latest research into the scale and mysteries of the universe. 

Download a free ebook: 101 Astronomical Events for 2017 -- from Universe Today. And from Space.com, see the Space Calendar for 2017: listing launches, sky events and more.

== Marvels of our solar system ==

A study published in Nature supports the growing consensus that Pluto may be one of a dozen “roofed worlds” in the Solar System, where liquid water churns beneath protective ice. (In the case of Titan, all of this lies below lakes of methane, lapping at waxy shorelines.) Unlike Europa, Enceledus and other, “inner” ocean moons, Pluto’s ocean is likely to be “rather noxious, very cold, salty and very ammonia-rich—almost a syrup," said William McKinnon, co-author of the study.  Any ‘life’ that developed there would be very different… though not quite as remarkable as any cryo-beings (or cells) that might arise in Titanian lakes.

Utterly cool image of the Earth – Moon system taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.  Amazing.  We are still a mighty and scientific people. Fight for that.

A beautiful movie made by NASA using 100 images of Pluto taken by the New Horizons craft.  And yes, at risk of (necessary) repetition: you are a member of a glorious, scientific civilization.

Cassini is going out gorgeously, providing closeups of Saturn’s hexagonal north-polar cyclone… and soon vivid ring shots.  

Oh, did I mention that you are a member of a civilization which does this: Saturn's rings warped gorgeously by tiny moon, Daphnis?

NASA's Juno probe has sent back gorgeous new images of Jupiter, after its fifth orbit of the gas giant -- such as this swirling "pearl" storm.

NASA Langley’s concept of an ice shelter on Mars would transport a light, inflatable, double-walled dome, then fill the walls with water melted from nearby buried ores, which we now believe to be plentiful there. The concept would create an ideal radiation protection barrier, when the water re-freezes, and has an added advantage in the fact that it can be transported and deployed easily, then filled with water before anyone arrives. It would also serve as a storage tank for water or maybe even used for rocket fuel. Ideally it would be erected and filled robotically, before a human crew even left Earth. 

Go Mark Watney! Footage from a cubesat experiment shows potato plants budding in weightlessness, in Mars-like soils, suggesting that a certain movie (and book) may have been on target in its optimism about growing food on the red planet. Providing you can wash out perchlorates and all that. We'll see. 

The latest wonderful discoveries of our loyal robot on Mars – Curiosity. NASA’s next Martian lander -- Mars 2020 -- will be wowzer! Seeking signs of life....

This innovation may enable a rover on Venus! NASA Glenn Research Center built a computer chip that survived Venus-like conditions for an impressive 521 hours, almost 22 days. Conditions that will incinerate electronics with its 872º F temperatures and seize mechanical components with its immense atmospheric pressures. At 90 times the surface pressure of Earth. In 1982, the USSR’s Venera 13 lasted 127 minutes on the Venus surface. Silicon Carbide transistors make the difference.

See the concept for a Venus sailing rover. We have even more baroque and weird projects, at NIAC! 

Now... China is forging ahead as a major force in space, with plans for upcoming manned and robotic missions to the moon and Mars. Partnering with the government, startups such as ExPace and OneSpace aim to be the Chinese version of SpaceX -- with a rocket launch scheduled for 2018. 

== My dinner with Elon ==

Photo by Amber Heard

Last time, I invited Astrid & Greg Bear and Vernor Vinge. This time, my sci fi colleagues Gregory & Elizabeth Benford and Steve Barnes, plus JPL senior planetary scientists Dave and Joy Crisp. The topic? Mars mostly (of course), plus artificial intelligence (AI) plus much else beyond the immediate horizon. 

Elon served a great dinner and his five boys were terrific, well-mannered fellows. And the rest isn't 'news' so that's it.

== Coda ==

Did I remember to remind you to murmur, now and then "IAAMOAC"?

"I am a member of a civilization."

By most standards of wealth and thoughtfulness and accomplishment and gradually rising ethics and everything else, perhaps the first human civilization. Perhaps the first in the Galaxy to escape traps like feudalism. 

If you have any notions of progress, of wanting your descendants to bestride the stars, then reject the blithering-dopey "cycles of history and "The Fourth Turning" and "we're all doomed" rants of those who would turn away from science and wonder.

IAAMOAC.  Fight for it.

Voices in AI - and life-extension

 On the crucial and ever-more pertinent topic of AI or Artificial Intelligence, have a look at this Top 10 list: people in AI that you should know.  I’ll copy the list in detail, below. But even the most casual of you will recognize two of the names.

== Drones in the wrong hands ==

After giving talks in DC to several packed halls filled with agency civil servants about “threat and danger horizons,” I encountered this Russian video showing a machine-gun armed quad-copter in action. How long before one of these is used to assassinate somebody?  First use will likely lead to the banning, then tight regulation of drones in the US. 

The irony?  We’ll likely be safer in a world of many drones in private hands. Because civilians who see bad actor drones will likely dive their own drones into them. (I referred to this in EXISTENCE.) We need to remember, when it comes to dual use technologies that our safety depends only partly on restrictions - or on a vigilant protector caste (PC).  Over the long run, what will make the crucial difference is a high ratio of good practitioners to bad tech users. 

Keeping that ratio high-and-rising is going to be as important as any investment in the Protector Caste. They complement each other.

== Peak oil… by outgrowing it? ==

Speaking of whales, here’s a quote from energy expert Amory Lovins about how quickly an industry can change:  "In the 1850s, whalers—America’s fifth-largest industry—were astounded to run out of customers before they ran out of whales," he writes.

Among the factors that Lovins weighs: “the energy density of liquid hydrocarbons remains an order of magnitude better than that of the best batteries envisioned today, though electric cars use that energy far more efficiently.”

== People Most Watched by the AI Elite ==

Back to our lead-in story. These are the ten folks who the most selective experts in Artificial Intelligence pay attention to -- that is, according to the network tracking service Little Bird.

1. Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and Tesla; co-founder of Open AI, a new organization dedicated to making sure AI is beneficial to humanity. Elon is the person most followed by the AI thought leaders. 

2. Martin Ford, author of Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future.  

3. Gary Marcus, CEO of Geometric Intelligence, Professor of Psychology & Neural Science, at NYU.

4. Ben Goertzel, founder of OpenCog, is a prolific advocate for an open source artificial intelligence network.

5. David Brin futurist, blogger, and author with a new book coming out in March called Insistence of Vision, which he says "will open doorways into possible (and mind-blowing) tomorrows and alternate realities.”

6. Randy Olson, data scientist researching AI, master curator of great content related to AI, data visualization and more.  

7. Peter Xing, intrapreneur at Deloitte and co-founder of TranshumanismAU, an Australian organization that aims to enhance the human biological condition.

8. Nikola Danaylov is a Singularity-minded public intellectual and host of the Singularity 1 on 1 podcast. 

9. Rodney Brooks, CTO of Rethink Robotics, a company that makes robots that collaborate with humans.

10. Rod Furlan, a Singularity University alum who’s the founder of Lucidscape, a company "building a new kind of massively-distributed 3D simulation engine to power the vast network of interconnected virtual worlds.”

“Follow these people,” Sayeth the Little Bird site, “or ignore them, at your own peril.”

== Paints Preserve Us! ==

The Brain Preservation Foundation (BPF) has awarded a prize to a team that used polymers to stabilize all the cell’s in a mouse brain so it could be cryo frozen without (much) damage.  This will supposedly preserve the location and strength of every neural synapse or the “connectome” which some believe will be enough to allow accurate modeling of all of a suspended person’s thoughts and memories.  Note that the goal is no longer to make the organic brain come alive again, itself. I still deem this approach problematic though.

1) There is evidence that the synapse is not everything. There are signs of substantial intra-cellular computing.

2) The need for freezing at cryo temperatures still leaves the stored brains very vulnerable across a century or more. The "preservation" thing will only become credible when you can put grandpa's fully plasticized head on the mantle - at room temperature. (See this depicted in my just-published collection of stories, Insistence of Vision.)

== Inheritance just got weirder and more like the New Testament ==

Epigenetics is revealing how experiences endured by a child can sometimes affect his/her sperm and /or ova in ways that then are inherited in a somewhat 'Lamarkian' fashion, by the kids of those kids or even grandkids. Changes in regulatory chemistry, rather than the basic DNA code, itself. 

In this study we see a small, isolated Norwegian region that had cycles of starvation and excess that are very well documented.  It appears to be the latter - years when good harvests led to records of "gluttonous" over eating - that apparently had the most severe effects on lifespans, two generations later!  

Studying the massive regulatory stew of the human epigenome will dwarf the Human Genome Project: "…the human genome contains something like 25,000 genes; it took $3 billion to map them all. The human epigenome contains an as yet unknowable number of patterns of epigenetic marks ... certainly in the millions. A full epigenome map will require major advances in computing power. When completed, the Human Epigenome Project (already under way in Europe) will make the Human Genome Project look like homework that 15th century kids did with an abacus."

Almost yearly, scientists announce one more intervention that “increases the lifespan of mice by 25%” or more.  Caloric restriction, various nutrients, blood exchanges with younger animals… and now by killing off “senescent cells” that have stopped all active division processes.  Eliminate those cells and the mouse not only lives longer but appears younger… (much the way Larry Niven portrayed something similar, in RINGWORLD.)  Scientists discovered that senescent cells secrete a tumor-suppressing protein – hence they rewrote part of the mouse’s genetic code to produce the protein caspase when they begin secreting p16—this acts as a kill-switch, which prompts that cell to die.  Clever. 

But also simple, and hence it qualifies as “low hanging fruit.” Any species that desperately needs to switch to a longer lifespan – as we did, half a million or so years ago – is likely to stumble onto this method and hence I’ll bet they’ll find we already do something like this.  See my essay on why we’ll have to find some more difficult and un-natural things, to get real lifespan extension for us already long lived humans. 

 == Science & Tech news ==

Finally, a truly non-volatile memory storage system, laser etching inside disks of pure quartz - could have an indefinitely long lifespan. 

Meanwhile. A Harvard team have devised a way to make virtually any shape out of a flat sheet of paper, using a fundamental origami or tessellation fold.

Google's Project Loon has been doing R&D on a fleet of interconnected, autonomous, cheap balloons that will soon fly high above commercial jets providing ultra cheap internet access all over the world. This is just one of several endeavors that promise an important open door to the world and cosmos for billions. 

The EHang184 quadcopter isn’t exactly your flying car. But it’s a step closer. One-person passenger hauling by an autonomous drone. 

A nice interview with my friend Vint Cerf.

Alex Steffen, late of Worldbuilding.org, has a new kickstarted project: Our Heroic Future - that I have supported, launching the live-performance talk trend some way beyond the TED standard of a mere inspiring 18 minutes. He intends "a remarkable three-part live documentary. Each 90-minute show is centered around a talk, incorporating stage presentation, film and photography, visual design and motion graphics, sound, music and lighting to tell a powerful story of where we are, where we can go, and what it could be like when we get there."  Give it a look. Sure it's similar to things I've been doing. But there's a huge need for future-can-do tent meetings!  Revivals of our most important faith... belief in ourselves and our children.

Google wants to work with university researchers on short-term projects involving the use of its software and technologies in emerging Internet of things applications.

As every other part of optics shrank, the focusing lens – and the necessary space behind it – remained bulky and heavy, especially on space probes and our portable devices. Now comes a flat, lensless array of several million pinholes, giving new impetus behind the oldest principle in optics, opening an amazing diversity of possibilities.

Humans and Neanderthals may have interbred 50,000 years earlier than previously thought.  There may have been a small admixture exodus of African humans long before the main wave emerged. Here’s a better article. 

and about space...

Located about 300 million light-years away in the Coma Cluster, a record-breaking supermassive black hole weighs in at twenty-one billion times the mass of the Sun, several thousand times larger than the mammoth that lurks at the core of our own galaxy.  Long ago, it would have been a quasar. The accretion disc around the black hole would have emitted up to a thousand times the energy output of the Milky Way.

Mapping  asteroids is important to our future - or discovering threats to it. The B612 Foundation plays an important role in this effort. As it progresses, the distribution of discovered objects appears to be pretty much as expected, except in one zone. Close to the Sun. 

== The incredible forgiveness of our fellow creatures ==

I’ve long been fascinated by the ability and willingness of higher animals to parse among and between humans. Of course we know dogs and cats and horses do this, on a personal level. But then there are the whales and dolphins and sea lions who will flee some ships on sight, but approach others either to play or (alas, often) to beg help with a problem, e.g. cutting them free of a tangled fishing net. 

Elephants are special in almost every way. They know that some humans are waging terrible war upon them, poachers slaying them out of greed for ivory.  Yet, they have been known to flee in the direction of game wardens. And last year, in apparent proof of advanced linguistic and memory abilities, a bull who had never been to an animal rescue center led a wounded comrade there, somehow (presumably) having learned of it second-hand.

Now see this video about a matriarchal herd that annually migrates, utterly peacefully, through the lobbyof a tourist hotel, to munch on fruits in the yard beyond. It is elevating – even uplifting – to realize that we are not hated, as a species.  Animals seem to know that we are varied.  And at our best, we are capable of being friends. 

(In EARTH see the self-contained story of a brave young man’s confrontation with a merchant of animal death.  And in INSISTENCE OF VISION, several tales featuring “Elepents” – redesigned as the perfect workers in space.)

== And finally ==

Share  20 Jokes That Only Intellectuals Will Understand. Some are pretty good!