Resilience Technology Part II: Simple measures to thwart possible collapse

Soon I will post about the passing of my colleague, science fiction author and unique American Jerry Pournelle. And of course much of what I post about today will be altered after we see what is wrought by Hurricanes Irma, José and Katia.  But this series conclusion is already prepared.

And it is about preparedness.

== What holds us back ==

There have been nasty pundits contrasting Houston’s recent experience with that of New Orleans during Katrina, snidely implying that some difference in civic character was responsible -- with possible racist implications. These nasty ingrates, of course, are ignoring the fact that a goodly part of the Cajun Navy – heroically swooping in to rescue Houstonians -- came from NOLA and surroundings, in all races and colors. 

Was the difference one of better preparation? For all their mighty virtues, Texans blatantly do not elect politicians who believe in foresight, preparation, planning, or even sapience. Houston's famous hatred of zoning and building codes blatantly contributed to tens of billions in damage that we'll all be paying for.

But in fact, we now know what may have made the biggest difference between Katrina and Harvey.

It seems that breakdown of the cell phone system was a chief factor that exacerbated every problem during the Katrina Crisis, crippling citizens of New Orleans from organizing themselves or collaborating with first responders. In contrast, partly due to post Katrina efforts by Verizon, AT&T and the others, cell systems in Houston proved more robust, serving people in many districts when they needed it most. And yes, this was also a matter of pure luck. 

Which brings up a pet peeve. For this entire century (so far) – and then some – I’ve said we could double North America’s resilience with one, simple reform…  demanding that phone-makers and cell providers give every unit the capability to pass along text messages peer-to-peer.

One anecdote from the Fukushima Disaster tells of a woman who was trapped and later found dead of dehydration in a basement. On her phone were dozens of outgoing texts. People had been walking and driving by for days, but the cell towers were down. If their phones all had a backup peer-to-peer texting capability, those messages would packet-hop until they reached a cell tower; then they go out to the world.

== Peer-to-peer text-passing. Small step; huge implications ==

The capability is inherent to “packet switching,” the underlying tech of the Internet, and hence we have known how to do this for 50 years. In fact, those clever tech innovators at Qualcomm have already incorporated this basic capability into their chips!  Qualcomm’s Matt Grob told me that P2P modes:

1.) Are now standardized (published in the 3gpp cellular standards.)

2.) They have done extensive tests/trials with partners – “it works great!”

3.) P2P capability has been developed to commercial trial grade.

Matt avows that much further work would be needed for AT&T phones to share texts with Verizon phones. But even if you were limited to one company, this could be a life-saver. Suppose you were a Verizon subscriber in an afflicted area, your send help texts could hop from one Verizon phone to the next until someone reached a working cell tower, at which point all the texts stored on her phone would leap forth across the planet.

Two important considerations:

FIRST - If we were to do this, we would gain unbelievable robustness. Take an extreme case: a hypothetical disaster that took down nearly all cell towers across the continent. Set up a few repeaters across the Great Plains and the Rockies, and Peer-to-Peer text passing (P2PTP) could give us a crude telegraphy system – just via texts hopping from phone to phone all the way from Atlantic to Pacific, uniting the country during any level of emergency. P2P telegrams. The Greatest Generation did pretty well with less.

== Well then, why the heck not? ==

It sounds blatantly simple even obvious. And yet, all calls for implementation of this emergency utility have been met with skepticism or opposition from the likes of AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, T-Mobile, and even some device makers. All know what Qualcomm’s chips are capable of. And not one of them will turn the service on – not for the profit-potential or for the common good.

This article talks about their myopic obstinacy… and hopes that Hurricane Harvey might budge such unimaginative and unpatriotic fools. Though in fact, the report is about a much more timid thing that response agencies have asked for -- simple enhancement of the one-way alert system. We shouldn’t be satisfied with such measly steps; that is nowhere near enough.

In truth, there is no good reason for cell-co executives to fight against backup P2P texting! They could program their phones no to do this, if they detect a cell tower! Moreover, each AT&T and Verizon phone could be programmed to report such text-passings and bill the sender a small surcharge! (Giving small rewards to those who pass messages along.) The only net effect would be to gain a small revenue stream from dark zones that their current towers do not reach!

And yes, before many of you chime in, there are attempts to set up grid or mesh networks using Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth or other ways to get around the problem.  Here’s a walkie talkie app.  

Then there’s the Serval Network…. 

… and Fire Chat. 

Jott’s AirChat feature allows users to send data and texts without a connection to the Internet, using Bluetooth and Wi-Fi radios within 100-feet of each other. 

More recent: with the arrival of Hurricane Harvey, a free app called Zello WalkieTalkie that lets your phone communicate as a two-way radio so long as you have a network or Wi-Fi connection, has shot to the top of Apple’s App Store, making it the go-to service for rescue workers in the Houston area, seeing as many as 7,000 new registrations per minute.

And people have written in to me with many others. (Feel free to offer more, below. under comments.) So sure, the super-skilled and savvy can already go P2P… and that barely begins to enhance our overall robustness. Not when they are limited to one user in ten thousand, and to places with easy-access WiFi.

No, Hurricane Harvey has made it clear. We need to start putting the screws on your favorite people, the cell phone providers. They could turn on this capability tomorrow! (Well, in maybe 6 months.) And they would gain business, not lose it!  That is, if they have technical brains higher than a cryptobiotic tardigrade.

And if the next disaster brings major losses of life and property -- losses that might have been avoided with a simple, robust comm system? Then it is time to bring out the lawyers. I mean it. Some law firm should start preparing this case, in advance, that a life-saving backup service was available the whole time, and that refusal to turn it on was tantamount to negligent manslaughter. They can pounce and then get 40% of billions.

== Coda ==

It looked like sci fi when a Hollywood film portrayed three hurricanes at a time in the Caribbean area.  Now see a picture of reality. 

All across Red America, folks tune into the Weather Channel. They make plans based on advanced satellites and storm models, peering days ahead with breathtaking accuracy.  The meteorologists who do this - having transformed the old, pathetic 4-hour "weather report" of my youth into forecasts that are now useful up to TEN days...  these geniuses are very well paid by a wide variety of eager customers from governments to insurance companies to shippers, agriculture, industry... and they have no need for piddling "climate grants."

And yet, lo and behold, all of them - every last one of them - will tell you human generated climate change is real and a danger to your children. The same gas-dynamics modeling equations that they use to track hurricane paths also feed into longer term models that fit global warming exactly. The same equations. They understand and use them. Fox News screeching shills do not. So, where do you get your science?

Dear Texans and Floridians, you have our prayers and comradeship. The nation stands with you.  You show fantastic resilience and courage. But you elect the worst politicians on the planet. Lying, thieving scoundrels who have betrayed you and our country, and your children in every conceivable way. As the media that you watch and listen to has betrayed you, by urging you to hate every fact-using profession. Their incantations are lies and the shiny "squirrel!" distractions they wave in front of you are beneath contempt.

The Republican party has sabotaged and slashed many of the satellites and instruments we need, in order to understand these things. They forbid state officials from looking at changes or preparing for them. They forbid NASA and other experts from even looking downward at the Earth! They scream slogans to over-rule evidence. They lie : "There's been no warming!" and lie and lie and outright pants-on-fire lie to you... and then they get YOU to repeat such outright, insane, dumbass lies.

Please, when the mud is cleared away and the tax dollars that we send to you are spent and when you get some breathing room, consider taking a community college class in some of this stuff? An online course? (See "Hurricanes: a Science Primer.") Visit the nearest university and wander the halls asking people who actually know something about what's actually going on? Ask your smartass niece or nephew. You'll find that fact-people aren't demons or commies! 

 And if you refuse to do any of these things, can we ask at least that you stop pretending you know stuff, just because Hannity croons it at you? American conservatism use to have intellects like Goldwater and Buckley and 40% of U.S. scientists.  (It's now 3% and plummeting.) 

American conservatism does NOT have to be lobotomized and self-destructively stupid. Your movement has been hijacked by monsters - you've been talked into electing them in great, howling packs. 

We're not asking you to become lefty flakes! Or even moderate liberals. We're asking you to take your movement back from lying shills and then bring a rational, science-friendly American conservatism to the bargaining table. 

We'll negotiate, I promise.

Super hurricanes and solar storms and EMP… lessons about resilient tech (Part I)

We’ll get to the solar storm alert and its implications, in a minute. But first… the devastation wrought by Hurricane Harvey tears open our hearts in empathy for our fellow humans and citizens in Texas. (See a list of ways you can help.)

It also forces us to think about bigger scales – like what will it take for civilization to endure and thrive, amid an onrushing future filled with shocks? Harvey is, after all, the third “500 year event” to strike Texas in the last three years, and the tenth in a decade. Confronted with this “coincidence,” the state’s director of emergency planning – a confirmed climate denialist – snarked that “anyone can toss ten heads in a row.”

Sure, but I invite you to go without eating till you manage it. Better yet, go win ten 1:500 quick-pick tickets in a row. Do that and someone’s gonna check into your cousin working at the Lottery. (See an earlier posting of a chapter from my 1989 novel EARTH, portraying a future (2038) Houston persevering after hurricane flooding.) 

Of course climate change doesn’t explain everything.  It blatantly increases the frequency and severity of bad news – like Hurricane Irma, a category 5 and bearing down on Florida, just a week after Harvey. (Irma is the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic basin, and two more storms are forming, as we speak.) But some nasty events were going to happen, anyway.  

Separately, the topic that should be foremost is getting ready for when – inevitably – the sky will fall or the earth will shift, beneath our feet.

California's past and coming superstorm: This article reminds us, for example, of great floods that struck California in 1862, swamping the entire Central Valley and crushing towns all across the west.  Nor was this the worst that nature can bring. “Scientists looking at the thickness of sediment layers collected offshore in the Santa Barbara and San Francisco Bay areas have found geologic evidence of megastorms that occurred in the years 212, 440, 603, 1029, 1418, and 1605, coinciding with climatological events that were happening elsewhere in the world.”

The core issue is: shouldn’t we be preparing better? Especially since climate change is actually real?

== Cyclones only begin our list of perils ==

Likewise, we’ve had other natural catastrophes on our minds -- and variable levels of sagacious preparation. Does it surprise you that, in what can safely be called opposite-to-wise governance, the Trump Administration has been yanking support from both earthquake and tsunami-warning systems?

Few prophesied dangers raise hand-wringing as much as civilization-wide disruption by an Electromagnetic Pulse, or EMP. After all, what do you figure Kim Jong Un imagines he might accomplish with the one or two bombs he might get through to North America? Even landing one amid a city would be little more than another disaster to overcome, with a resilient and mighty nation swooping in to help the afflicted, rebuilding and mourning with one hand… while stomping him flat with the other. Kim knows this…

…but he might convince himself that one nuke exploded high over our continent could neutralize all our satellites and throw America back to a pre-electronics stone age. 

(In which case, we should ask ourselves: “which power would benefit most from a no-America vacuum? And might this explain why Pyongyang’s technicians have grown so ‘capable,’ all of a sudden?” I know one sentence that could - possibly - get that major power to back down.)

Okay, set aside the threat that a single, North Korean nuke might cause, popping an EMP over North America. What about natural versions of the same calamity, courtesy of our sun? Speaking to you as the discoverer of the Great Solar Flare of 1972 – (I was the duty observer at the Big Bear Observatory that summer, when it burst) – let me tell you them things can be fierce! The resulting Coronal Mass Ejection can be rough, especially when a CME happens to flow right at our planet. As seems likely this week, according to NOAA!

The effects can be beautiful, when our protective magnetosphere channels solar particles from a small-to-moderate CME away from temperate climes and toward the magnetic poles, charging atmospheric gases to glow in gaudy aurorae. (Any high-rollers out there; I’ll be guiding an arctic aurora expedition, next March.) And to be clear so there’s no cause for immediate panic; this week’s event isn’t likely to do much more than make a show for people north of Chicago. But when a big CME strikes us head-on, the effects can be much more serious.

We’ve has ‘sunspot’ disruptions of our communications within living memory, but nothing like the Carrington Event of 1859, that fried telegraph systems around the world. And tree ring analysis suggests that another solar event may have made the 1859 one look tame by comparison, several thousand years before written records. Almost annually, for decades, I have urged various defense agencies to pay more attention to our civilization’s vulnerability to a deliberate or natural EMP.

EMP/CME impact on our electricity grid has long been foreseen - and more of a risk than nuclear war or an asteroid strike. See James Cameron’s Dark Angel post EMP apocalypse TV show. Now The Economist is highlighting it. My own tech sense is that a higher fraction of our tools would survive or reboot. But we’re fools not to be spending 20x as much on this. 

Without any doubt, human activity – e.g. climate change or enemy action -- is making our dangers far more serious. But even without deliberate meddling, this kind of thing is going to happen! We’d best spend time, energy and money making sure that we’re robust.  

Hence, I urge you all, as individuals to give some thought to your family’s emergency plans and supplies.  And look into getting trained for CERT – your local Community Emergency Response Team – which does civil defense prep in your area.

And reiterating -- for decades I have hectored (by invitation) members of our Protector Caste at the Pentagon, CIA, OSTP, ODNI, DTRA and many other alphabet agencies, that they cannot carry this burden alone.

As revealed by the heroic neighborliness of the “Cajun Navy,” it’s clear that the Cincinnatus tradition of America can still rely on a resilient citizenry! In fact, on 9/11, every single good and useful thing that was accomplished that day – including fighting back against the hijackers of flight UA93 – was done by average folks, empowered by … cell phones.  (See Rebeccas Solnit’s book: A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster.) 

So that’s what I'll talk about next, in Part 2.

Resilience and Reliability - keys to tomorrow

Whenever I go talk to corporations, agencies or public groups about the future, one word I emphasize is "resilience." Try as you might, to predict the future and anticipate threats -- neutralizing enemies and preparing your professional responders -- sooner or later some surprise is going to hit, hard.  And when anticipation fails, resilience is our 'other thing.'  Our ability as individuals, families, communities to pull together and maintain islands of civilization -- till the islands can swiftly knit back together again.

That's the theme underlying The Postman, which was my answer to all the gleeful, Mad Max type celebrations of apocalypse. It's why I have pushed peer-to-peer text passing for our cell phones, and other simple reforms that could make a vast difference in our empowerment as citizens, to hang on, till help arrives.  Or to be the help for those across the valley, or the nation, or world.

 ==  Resilience on our rooftops and in our pockets ==

Why Elon Musk's Batteries Scare the Hell out of the Electric Company: “(Elon) Musk’s giant battery factory may soon become an existential threat to the 100-year-old utility business model. Beyond electric cars, the facility will also churn out stationary battery packs that can be paired with rooftop solar panels to store power." writes Mark Chediak in Bloomberg Business.

Musk's SolarCity Corp is already delivering solar panels and batteries to power California homes, schools, government agencies and companies including Wal-Mart, eBay and HP. Tesla plans to allow owners to swap old battery packs for new, with the old ones then being ideal to place in solar powered homes, helping them to get off the grid.

One thing I mentioned to Elon… and to sober-minded worriers in Washington: Currently a million homes in the U.S. with solar on their roofs will shut down if there is a power blackout. Instead of being islands of power for their neighborhoods, they are just another problem in an emergency.  

This is intolerable! Picture the increased resilience that we might gain, as a civilization, if those million homes could power just one plug in the kitchen, even during outages.  Enough to preserve much of the neighborhood’s perishable food and medicines like insulin, and to run re-chargers by-day, even if it shuts down at night.

This is a problem that’s a matter of national security… like making sure our cell phones have a backup, peer-to-peer text passing capability, if the networks go down.  I have only been preaching about this resilience issue for 30 years.  Maybe Elon will solve it because no one in D.C. seems to have a clue what really matters.

Want a hint of who has been blocking all this?  “The mortal threat to entrenched interests that ever cheaper on-site renewables pose” comes from systems that include storage, said Amory Lovins, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a Snowmass, Colorado-based energy consultant. “That is an unregulated product you can buy at Home Depot that leaves the old business model with no place to hide.” And “In Germany, the rapid rise of tax-subsidized clean energy has undermined wholesale prices and decimated the profitability of coal and natural gas plants.”

Ah... yes,  I know some of you (dinosaurs) keep claiming nothing will change! Coal is forever! Fortunately, world changers like Elon are more important than cultish dinosaurs.

Are there other resilience techs that can make a huge difference? Tons!  And some have been reported here, like new systems for water desalination or purification. And local, self-made internet systems.  And the Maker movement, which is restoring can-do competence to new generations.  This should be a priority for our concerned leaders...

... and we citizens should insist.

==  Problems in our roots ==

Very interesting: Sex, Status, and Reproductive Success in the Contemporary United States. Contrary to the anthropological mythology that’s widely spread around, it appears that: 

(1) hunter gatherer (hg) and other low-technology societies have had inter-personal violence rates easily as great as contemporary city populations.  

(2) Those hg and low-tech societies had social stratification, hierarchy and dominance interactions that were statistically similar to modern societies, only without those modern societies’ accountability amelioration systems.  And (3) across the spectrum – even leading to today - high status males appear to both get more sex and reproduce more.

The last seems surprising, in the context of modern, urban society. But we should not be shocked.  This study teases apart high status from high education levels, in which there does seem to be a penalty, the higher you go! What is sad is that the sharpest effect appears to be on women with graduate degrees, whose repro success is severely diminished below less educated women.

 “…for men, intelligence works at cross purposes with income. For men, income increases both potential and achieved fertility, while intelligence decreases potential and achieved fertility for both men and women.”

We cannot get better if we romanticize olden times, or refuse to take into account our biological background.  We can and must choose to be better than our past, baseline modus operandi!  We can transcend best and improve if we admit the baseline was… and remains lurking… and deal with it.

==  Science Miscellany! ==

A clever notion for cooling our cities while side-stepping the greenhouse effect: “There's a kind of heat window in the atmosphere that no naturally occurring substance, trace gas or otherwise, can block.” So?  Use radiative rooftop cooling that emits in these wavelengths that bypass those absorbed by Methane and other greenhouse gases.  I am dubious in the short term.  Still, a “cool” concept!

A startup with $143 million in funding aims to create “a sentient distributed artificial intelligence that sounds like a nice-guy version of Skynet from the cinema flick Terminator.”  One step beyond neural networks? I have my own opinions on what might bring AI of various kinds and threat/opportunity levels.

What are the “Seven Wonders of the Modern World” - to hold up against the Pyramids and Great Lighthouse, of old?  Slate’s compilation ignores feats of architecture in favor of unseen miracles that allow people more leverage and power in life… like the vast network of undersea fiber-optic cables that give us instant connection across the globe, and the air traffic control systems that have quietly allowed us to stack incoming and outgoing flights at busy airports, like boxes on a conveyor belt. Drinking water systems… you get the idea… the things we take for granted.

Catch this: a new gear transmission mechanism with no touching parts, based on magnetic forces that prevent friction and wear and make lubrication unnecessary.  “The design uses a magnetic gear reducer, that is, a mechanism that transforms speed from an input axle to another in an output axle (as in a bicycle chain mechanism or the gearbox of an automobile). But unlike a conventional gear reducer, this transmission is produced without contact between the pieces thanks to the use of magnetism.”

Cool and beautiful art forms take shape when top quality single malt whiskey dries in the bottom of a shot glass.  See it scientifically explained.

Looking to the Future: An Interview

As I prepare to speak to the European Union's Horizon 2020 Congress in Vilnius, Lithuania, on November 6, here is an interview that I gave to one of the major European journals covering the event:

• 1. Mr. David Brin, you are a science fiction writer and in the past you had a chance to consult some of the world’s most largest corporations. So my question is – what can be predicted considering the future by a writer, that can’t be predicted by executives of the largest corporations?

Organs in our brains - the prefrontal lobes - uniquely compel human beings to do "thought experiments" about what might come to pass. We do this obsessively, despite knowing full-well that our forecasts won't come true, because the process still enables us to confront a myriad bad decisions and outcomes, eliminating many of those and making up stories that might lead to success.

All human civilizations invested heavily in prediction. In the past, shamans read goat entrails or the stars. Our current society employs millions to engage in this kind of work, from stock market analysts to politicians and business leaders whose job -- after all -- is to appraise approaching needs and opportunities, allocating resources accordingly. Trained as a scientist, I tend to view those professions as ill-disciplined! But even science can be murky as it looks ahead.

It is in my role as a science fiction author that I get to stretch a bit, peering beyond the typical five-year horizon. It is the sort of long-gaze shown by the medieval cathedral builders.  In science fiction we seldom try to "predict" the future, so much as illustrate trends, extrapolate possibilities… and occasionally to issue stark warnings. George Orwell's classic novel NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR  was a "self-preventing prophecy" that stirred millions of terrified readers into action, working to prevent the author's vision from coming true.

• 2. What are the most common questions asked by representatives of the largest corporations? What are they trying to learn from you? Do they want to know predictions about the evolution of the technology, or they want to learn how the new technology might influence people’s life in the future?

In the near term, they want hints about business opportunities and dangers.  For example, what trends might make the current motif for cell-phones (a rectangular slab in your pocket) obsolete?   Will rising world education levels, decentralization of skill, and the rise of desktop manufacturing mean the return of cottage industry, replacing large-scale manufacturing? Will biological synthesis follow its own Moore's Law pattern, the way computers have, leading to an Internet of organic chemistry?

The biggest forces are social. What will happen when the 20th Century's relentless drive to "professionalize everything" comes to an end -- as it must. Will we see a rising era of amateurs? Will ubiquitous cameras -- getting smaller, faster, cheaper and more mobile each year -- lead to a Big Brother state, or to hyper-empowered individualism?  And if all individuals get to see, like gods, will this lead to tyranny by mobs? Or increased autonomous respect?

I do not offer answers, only lots of questions.

• 3. Is it possible to state, that the vitality of a corporation directly depends on ability to identify how the world will change in next decade?

Our prefrontal lobes compel us to anticipate, and new tools for anticipation are arriving in a flood, from Big Data to vision and behavior analytics, from social modeling systems to face recognition and even artificial intelligence. Setting aside (for now) the implications for freedom, the biggest concern is how uneven these tools will be, how fraught with error. No

matter how effective, they will fail, sooner or later! And when anticipation fails, there is just one trait that can save the day.  For ten thousand years it has been the partner of anticipation.

That trait is resilience.

• 4. When we talking about future predictions, how much are those predictions  important to small players? For example to small companies, or individuals who want to start a business? Maybe for a student, who want’s to become a dentist, isn’t important how the teeth will be fixed in the next decade, because in any case he will get all the necessary knowledge at the university? 

The corporation is one method by which human beings organize themselves to pursue common goals.  It has been remarkably successful, though there is nothing sacred about it, nor about any one form of government. (Indeed, both types of system become brittle when they are top-heavy.)

A counter-trend has been building momentum. It is the agility of self-organizing groups of highly skilled individuals.  At first this manifested in "non-governmental organizations" like Amnesty International, or Medicins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) who copied corporate structures in order to allow millions to sort their pooled efforts according to interest and passion.

Lately, we have seen bolder experiments with ad-hoc structures, most famously in quasi-legal entities like WikiLeaks and Anonymous. Online ratings systems, for example on Amazon, Yelp, and eBay, only crudely coordinate what will soon become a crucial matter of our era -- reputation management. These primitive efforts are not yet the "smart mobs" portrayed in some science fiction.  Self-organizing systems may empower the new Age of Amateurs to spectacular achievements, like those accomplished by the 20th Century's Age of Professionals.

• 5. What do you think about a prediction and a vision, that maybe in the year 2050 nobody will be able to lie, because devices like Google Glasses will be able work as a 100% correct lie detectors? No more populists who try to win a president election by lying? 

My 1980 novel SUNDIVER dealt glancingly with a future in which it became difficult to lie, because all citizens could track the gaze of politicians or salesmen and the eyes would involuntarily reveal deception.  Recent scientific work suggests that something like this may be coming.  In which case, we will have to decide what kind of society we want.  We have several options.  If we try to ban these technologies, that will only ensure that we -- you and I -- don't have them, but elites will get them anyway, in secret.

Or we may all grab these methods and then use them against each other, dissolving into a morass of accusations and recriminations. A war of all against all.

Or we could decide to moderate this world of vision with good sense, by cultivating a general social norm of forgiveness for small mistakes… because we will all need it. Catching dangerous or malicious lies, we may also forgive and shrug-off the inevitable foolish exaggerations and slips of the tongue that are deeply part of human life.

• 6. In your opinion, how will the world  look in a year 2050? People with artificial body parts and cyborgs all around? Or maybe every disease can be healed in seconds, and lost body parts regrown in minutes? How about a vision, where everyone is living in a virtual world, where androids do all the work in "real“ world? Will people live longer, and our world will be much safer place? (If possible please justify your arguments in more details)

People should become familiar with the term "social singularity" which is today much discussed by the brightest young people. It is the notion that human knowledge has been accelerating for generations and that acceleration will rise even faster across the next few decades. Just one technology -- artificial intelligence -- could arrive from any of six different directions. If it does come… and assuming the new minds are friendly … then our rise in knowledge and capability may accelerate even faster.

Some believers in this "singularity" expect that we organic humans will get to join the rapid rise in intelligence, through improvements in brain function or through augmentations, or by linking our minds with external components, much as our ancestors did when they added another layer -- when mutation gave them the  spectacular prefrontal lobes. They, too, had to adjust to becoming much smarter, very rapidly.

We cannot know what life will be like for those descendants.  (Indeed, some believe it will happen so quickly that such godlike leaps will be provided to you, the person reading this, within a few years!)

Whether it happens fast or slow, we can hope that our best, most central human values (like honor and charity and a sense of humor) will be deeply embedded in that world to come. If that happens, then the mighty beings who follow us will still be… human.

• 7. Which of the currently emerging technologies will lead to major changes in how we work, how we consume, and how we produce goods?

Desktop fabrication will probably not eliminate manufacturing, mass-production and delivery systems. But it will become a factor, when people can upload design patterns and create their own small parts or machines. Even factory-produced items will be personally tailored to the needs of particular customers. Impatience with old-fashioned delivery systems may provoke the return of pneumatic tube transport for small or medium-scale packages. If asteroidal resources become available, all metals will plummet in price, including gold and platinum.

The late 20th Century obsession with efficiency in production and delivery improved profit margins and quality in many industries, like automobiles. But we saw fads like Just-in-Time parts delivery hit a devastating wall in the calamity of Fukushima, Japan. There - and in other disasters - we have learned that Nature does not only want us to be efficient. Our bodies are also resilient.  Governments and societies need to encourage this trait in our production and supply chains.

For example: laws that tax the warehousing of parts must be changed to instead encourage factories to keep on-hand supplies -- stockpiles that can keep businesses going during disruptions. Beyond that, local production will reduce vulnerabilities and dependence on trans-oceanic shipping. A global economy is great, but local self-sufficiency will be a counter trend of real value.

• 8. Let’s go back to the year 2050. What car we will drive then? Some people say that we'll have better batteries for electric cars, others say that future belongs to hydrogen powered electric cars. What is your opinion? Maybe we won't have cars at all and travel in glass tubes from one city to another?

I portray hydrogen powered cars being used by 2050 in my novels EARTH and EXISTENCE. There are real potential advantages… but not in the near term.  The required infrastructure, if we copy gasoline distribution, would be insane. Hydrogen will make sense only when solar power becomes so plentiful that you fill your tank at home.

The big news has been the spectacular improvement in electric cars. The motors and control systems were more than ready and battery improvements, including super-capacitors, are clearly on the horizon.

What few people -- including science fiction authors -- expected was for the the self-driving car to burgeon so rapidly. Science fiction tales envisioned that it would require "smart roadways" with embedded cables and centralized computer control. But onboard vision and analysis systems have progressed to the point where cars can see us, anticipate trouble and avoid accidents. The implications are astounding.

• 9. Another tough question – oceans and the human future? Will we have cities underwater? There is a lot of most needed resources under ocean flour, when we will be able to get our hands on them? Our maybe asteroid mining is the future? 

Asteroid mining is a dream that only a few of us shared in the 1980s.  Ocean settlement goes even farther back.  Both frontiers offer the potential (still speculative but well-based) for spectacular benefits that might enrich human society far beyond any memory of poverty. Both must overcome serious obstacles. In accessing the vast resources from asteroids -- which include almost everything we currently tear out of the Earth through mines -- we must first decide to be ambitious. To become again a people who invest boldly in space. That dream has been almost crushed by cynicism, but the numbers suggest that cynics are wrong. The dreamers were right.

The sea is an immense problem and opportunity that we can only handle with care and plenty of science.  It will do us no good to exploit the riches below if we harm or kill Mother Ocean. At the same time, recall that 75% of the seas are "desert" areas, poor in nutrients and almost barren of life.  Ways may be found to "fertilize" some stretches, creating new fisheries and removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.  There is a careful middle ground, exploring these concepts with care, but refusing to be daunted into sitting on our hands.

• 10. In the fifth decade of the last century science fiction writers predicted that by year 2000 we would have colonies on Moon, and a lot of people will be live in space stations orbiting Earth. That didn't happen. What is correct year for Moon base? And if we ever construct a Moon base, how this will affect humanity's thinking? Can a new philosophy or view to life emerge from space conquest? Will people still believe in God, when they will know that it takes only 15 minutes flight to an amusement park in Moon?

When the year 2001 came around, I had to answer many questions like: "where are the moon bases we were promised?" But watch again the film by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick. It portrayed a civilization that by the year 2001 had made greater leaps in spaceflight than we've achieved. But society had progressed much less on a human plane. It conveyed a world commanded by patronizing, smug white-male-American bosses who operated in habitual secrecy. Now, you may claim that was accurate! But put aside the reflex. Today's world - for all its flaws - is far more open and diverse -- even at pinnacles of power -- than Kubrick and other science fiction writers expected or imagined. In other words, space proved to be hard! But we have made progress in areas that seemed even harder, including the human heart.

Do facts support this claim? In his book "The Better Angels of Our Nature," Professor Steven Pinker shows how violence per-capita, worldwide, has declined steeply, every decade since 1945, propelled largely by the self-criticism habit that leaves us never satisfied, always eager to improve. Likewise, most of the world's children now live in homes with basic sanitation and electricity.  Pinker had better be right!  If he is, then our heirs may have the wisdom to manage not only society and a planet, but a solar system filled with opportunities and wonders.

• 11. Last, but the most important question for us. What kind of future you predict for small countries like Lithuania? What can you advise for our politicians and scientists? We have limited resources, so where to focus? Do we need to follow niche technology road (like focus on lasers, biotechnology), or try to invest even a small amount of money to every emerging technology? What advice would you give to parents who will have children this year, and those children will start studies in a year 2033?

Globalization has been a mixed blessing. Great positive benefits followed the wave of export-driven development as successive nations had a chance to work hard and send their children to school.  The process was seldom perfectly just -- or easy on the planet -- but the growth of a world-majority middle class has been a miracle, and those educated children will demand more improvements, still.

Globalization also carries dangers: ecological, ethical, and a risk of cultural homogenization as regional and local differences are drenched in a Standard International Culture. Corporate consolidation makes competition difficult for small countries or small businesses or individuals. Oligarchy is a mistake that plagued every society across 6000 years.

But we have seen that there will be opportunities, too. Smaller nations -- like individuals -- must be agile. Opportunities may be sudden and short-lived, the way Finland strode across the world stage of telecommunications for a time. More often, there will be opportunities for alliances our parents could never have imagined. A Lithuanian artists' collective might collaborate with a consortium of independent neural-interface designers in San Diego, plus fabrication experts in Malaysia and a set of encryption crackers in Smolensk.  A new kind of passenger seat for automobiles might be prototyped in Chengdu but produced in Vilnius by a company that never learns the identity of the original designer… an artificial intelligence residing in one of Google's self-driving cars.

Small countries will probably also be the drivers for innovation in governance. You will not get fresh ideas about constitutional freedom from major powers like the United States, China or Russia. We all may have benefited from a generally benign Pax Americana, but that Pax will have to give way to something else, in time. And that next thing is more likely to emerge from small nations that are bold enough to experiment, developing new and quicker ways for individual citizens to exercise sovereignty, freedom, creativity and the rising, agile power to make alliances anywhere on the planet.

Suggestion #10: Enhance our nation's (and civilization's) overall resilience

First a reminder: see me on “The Universe” Tuesday night, on the History Channel. Also, see my cover story on Salon Magazine (online), about “Is the Web helping us evolve?”

Again - this is part of a December 2008 series of “unusual suggestions for America and the Obama Administration.”

== Boosting resilience should be a top priority ==

Restoring our military reserves should be only the beginning. If we are serious about preparing for dangerous times, more should be done to deepen the supply of Americans who are ready to help, rather than be helpless, in future crises.

 This principle holds fast to a basic, grassroots spirit that was the hallmark of the Obama Campaign -- and to traditions that go all the way back through American history.  It certainly ought to be a basic theme of the new administration. Here are just a few (of many) examples that have critical implications for the nation’s defense and (ultimately) survival:

* Admit that the post-Vietnam professionalization of the U.S. Armed Forces may have gone a bit too far.

Nobody denies that today’s military is ultra high tech and few are arguing for a return of the draft. But all previous generations of Americans were called upon, eventually, to augment the “thin blue line,” with waves of volunteers, and we ignore this tradition at our peril.

The services could be encouraged to re-engage this spirit.  Serious attention might be given to shortening recruitment and training ramp-up times, in case of urgent need. A semi-trained corps of “under-reserves” might also be created, with as little experience as a three-month summer camp, especially for people who have badly needed, non-combat skill sets.

(Those who disparage the usefulness of such a “reserve” should consider its psychological value, alone. Never under-rate the effect that raw numbers can have, on the calculations of a potential foe. Note also, a pre-vetted pool of high quality and willing volunteers would be better, by far, than hurriedly trying to ramp up to a draft, in an emergency. Anyway, the “summer camp” option is already on the table, as a way to give millions of young people exposure to many different paths of public service.)

*  Civilians matter, especially on the home front, where first responders can be overwhelmed by sudden disasters.  

Recall that citizens performed every action that proved decisive or effective, on 9/11.  Yet, almost nothing has been subsequently spent on augmenting the abilities of average folk to deal with crises.  For example, today’s modest Citizen Emergency Response Teams (CERT) -- all that is left of Civil Defense -- could be enhanced, preparing millions to be citizen-helpers in an emergency, instead of helpless victims.  No investment might have a bigger payoff, if something terrible ever happens.  And it will.

* Pursue robustness in our communications systems.  

The Internet was originally designed to network messages around areas of devastation, agilely re-routing them anywhere, under any circumstance.  So, why won’t our cell phones work when we need them most, if the nearby cell towers fail in a disaster?  During Hurricane Katrina a quarter of a million people were cut-off, with sophisticated-but-useless radios in their pockets.

Even worse, almost nothing has been done, since then, to correct a potentially devastating design flaw.

But let’s imagine. What if mobile phones were empowered to simply pass along text messages, from one to another, via peer-to-peer packet switching, all the way out of any affected area? (Until finally reaching an intact cell tower.)  This simple bypass capability could ensure coast-to-coast messaging, even during substantial nationwide havoc.  It would cost little to implement and the cell companies needn’t suffer any loss of revenue.  (Not if their billing departments have any imagination, at all.)  In fact, failure to implement such a simple fix could constitute deliberate sabotage, since its potential benefits, during any disaster, are simply overwhelming.

Lack of time and space requires that I forebear listing.many other possible resilience suggestions, for how we could better prepare for an uncertain future, at a tiny fraction of what we spend at the Department of Homeland Security.  But take my word for it, there are plenty that I’ve offered in briefings for the CIA, Defense Threat Reduction Agency and other groups.  In any event, you may notice a common theme, as several of my other suggestions had to do with enhancing the reserves, or empowering citizens with transparency, or reducing our brittle dependence upon just-in-time industrial practices.

One core lesson emerges from all this.

We must rediscover a key role of the state as the principal agent of robustness. 

Economic sub-units like corporations can afford to make rosy, pollyanna assumptions, in pursuit of squeezing the last drop of current-day profits, risking only the equity of stockholders. It’s not their job to plan for just-in-case scenarios of major breakdown.

In contrast, national policy should ensure readiness for the inevitable rainy day.

--Continue to Suggestion #11 Control the Borders