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Dear Ray;

I’ve written a book about the future of software. While writing it, I came to the conclusion that your dates are way off. I talk mostly about free software and Linux, but it has implications for things like how we can have driverless cars and other amazing things faster. I believe that we could have had all the benefits of the singularity years ago if we had done things like started Wikipedia in 1991 instead of 2001. There is no technology in 2001 that we didn’t have in 1991, it was simply a matter of starting an effort that allowed people to work together.

Proprietary software and a lack of cooperation among our software scientists has been terrible for the computer industry and the world, and its greater use has implications for every aspect of science. Free software is better for the free market than proprietary software, and there are many opportunities for programmers to make money using and writing free software. I often use the analogy that law libraries are filled with millions of freely available documents, and no one claims this has decreased the motivation to become a lawyer. In fact, lawyers would say that it would be impossible to do their job without all of these resources.

My book is a full description of the issues but I’ve also written some posts on this blog, and this is probably the one most relevant for you to read: https://lifeboat.com/blog/2010/06/h-conference-and-faster-singularity

Once you understand this, you can apply your fame towards getting more people to use free software and Python. The reason so many know Linus Torvalds’s name is because he released his code as GPL, which is a license whose viral nature encourages people to work together. Proprietary software makes as much sense as a proprietary Wikipedia.

I would be happy to discuss any of this further.

Regards,

-Keith
—————–
Response from Ray Kurzweil 11/3/2010:

I agree with you that open source software is a vital part of our world allowing everyone to contribute. Ultimately software will provide everything we need when we can turn software entities into physical products with desktop nanofactories (there is already a vibrant 3D printer industry and the scale of key features is shrinking by a factor of a hundred in 3D volume each decade). It will also provide the keys to health and greatly extended longevity as we reprogram the outdated software of life. I believe we will achieve the original goals of communism (“from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”) which forced collectivism failed so miserably to achieve. We will do this through a combination of the open source movement and the law of accelerating returns (which states that the price-performance and capacity of all information technologies grows exponentially over time). But proprietary software has an important role to play as well. Why do you think it persists? If open source forms of information met all of our needs why would people still purchase proprietary forms of information. There is open source music but people still download music from iTunes, and so on. Ultimately the economy will be dominated by forms of information that have value and these two sources of information – open source and proprietary – will coexist.
———
Response back from Keith:
Free versus proprietary isn’t a question about whether only certain things have value. A Linux DVD has 10 billion dollars worth of software. Proprietary software exists for a similar reason that ignorance and starvation exist, a lack of better systems. The best thing my former employer Microsoft has going for it is ignorance about the benefits of free software. Free software gets better only as more people use it. Proprietary software is an inferior development model and an anathema to science because it hinders people’s ability to work together. It has infected many corporations, and I’ve found that PhDs who work for public institutions often write proprietary software.

Here is a paragraph from my writings I will copy here:

I start the AI chapter of my book with the following question: Imagine 1,000 people, broken up into groups of five, working on two hundred separate encyclopedias, versus that same number of people working on one encyclopedia? Which one will be the best? This sounds like a silly analogy when described in the context of an encyclopedia, but it is exactly what is going on in artificial intelligence (AI) research today.

Today, the research community has not adopted free software and shared codebases sufficiently. For example, I believe there are more than enough PhDs today working on computer vision, but there are 200+ different codebases plus countless proprietary ones. Simply put, there is no computer vision codebase with critical mass.

We’ve known approximately what a neural network should look like for many decades. We need “places” for people to work together to hash out the details. A free software repository provides such a place. We need free software, and for people to work in “official” free software repositories.

“Open source forms of information” I have found is a separate topic from the software issue. Software always reads, modifies, and writes data, state which lives beyond the execution of the software, and there can be an interesting discussion about the licenses of the data. But movies and music aren’t science and so it doesn’t matter for most of them. Someone can only sell or give away a song after the software is written and on their computer in the first place. Some of this content can be free and some can be protected, and this is an interesting question, but mostly this is a separate topic. The important thing to share is scientific knowledge and software.

It is true that software always needs data to be useful: configuration parameters, test files, documentation, etc. A computer vision engine will have lots of data, even though most of it is used only for testing purposes and little used at runtime. (Perhaps it has learned the letters of the alphabet, state which it caches between executions.) Software begets data, and data begets software; people write code to analyze the Wikipedia corpus. But you can’t truly have a discussion of sharing information unless you’ve got a shared codebase in the first place.

I agree that proprietary software is and should be allowed in a free market. If someone wants to sell something useful that another person finds value in and wants to pay for, I have no problem with that. But free software is a better development model and we should be encouraging / demanding it. I’ll end with a quote from Linus Torvalds:

Science may take a few hundred years to figure out how the world works, but it does actually get there, exactly because people can build on each others’ knowledge, and it evolves over time. In contrast, witchcraft/alchemy may be about smart people, but the knowledge body never “accumulates” anywhere. It might be passed down to an apprentice, but the hiding of information basically means that it can never really become any better than what a single person/company can understand.
And that’s exactly the same issue with open source (free) vs proprietary products. The proprietary people can design something that is smart, but it eventually becomes too complicated for a single entity (even a large company) to really understand and drive, and the company politics and the goals of that company will always limit it.

The world is screwed because while we have things like Wikipedia and Linux, we don’t have places for computer vision and lots of other scientific knowledge to accumulate. To get driverless cars, we don’t need any more hardware, we don’t need any more programmers, we just need 100 scientists to work together in SciPy and GPL ASAP!

Regards,

-Keith

1: Extropian, as in “Transhumanists tend to believe that Kurzweil’s extropian Law of Accelerating Returns will ultimately trump the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.”

2: Bemes, as in “By uploading her bemes, the transhumanist was able to create a mindfile to serve as a basis for a future cyber-conscious analog of herself.” The singular form, beme, refers to a digitally-inheritable unit of beingness (such as a single element of one’s mannerisms, personality, recollections, feelings, beliefs, attitudes and values) as in “The transhuman survivalist had a very strong beme for paranoia.”

3: Singularity, as in “The Singularity — that era, no more than a few decades hence, when transhumanists believe machine intelligence will merge with and surpass biological intelligence.”

4: Ectogenetic, as in “Many transhumanists look forward to growing replacements for all or part of their body via controlled differentiation of stem cells in an ex vivo ectogenetic process.”

5: Mindclone, as in “Transhumanists are often accepting of the notion that one identity can simultaneously operate across multiple physical and virtual instantiations, via wireless synchronization, with each such instantiation being a mindclone of a biological original mind.”

6: Vitology, as in “Some transhumanists believe biology is simply a subset of vitology, the study of self-replicating Darwinian code subject to mutation and Natural Selection, with the codes expressed in particular molecules for biology and more generally in differing voltage states for vitology.”

7: Beman, as in “A person created with bio-nanotechnology, a cyborg, a virtual person with a human mind, and a person who integrates electronics into their life are four examples of a bio-electronic human, also known as a beman.

8: Nanobot, as in “Transhumanists have a strong tendency to wish for an acceleration of the date when many problems could be solved with large numbers of microscopic, wirelessly networked, intelligent machines, each of which are called a nanobot.”

9: Techno-progressive, as in “Transhumanists tend to be socially-conscious libertarians, also known as techno-progressive, because they believe technology will solve most of the world’s problems.

10: Transhuman, as in “People who believe it is good to transcend our human biological inheritance, such as by modifying our DNA, our bodies or the substrate for our minds, and/or by leaving the earth to live in space habitats or on other celestial bodies, are considered transhuman.”

If the WW II generation was The Greatest Generation, the Baby Boomers were The Worst. My former boss Bill Gates is a Baby Boomer. And while he has the potential to do a lot for the world by giving away his money to other people (for them to do something they wouldn’t otherwise do), after studying Wikipedia and Linux, I see that the proprietary development model Gates’s generation adopted has stifled the progress of technology they should have provided to us. The reason we don’t have robot-driven cars and other futuristic stuff is that proprietary software became the dominant model.

I start the AI chapter of my book with the following question: Imagine 1,000 people, broken up into groups of five, working on two hundred separate encyclopedias, versus that same number of people working on one encyclopedia? Which one will be the best? This sounds like a silly analogy when described in the context of an encyclopedia, but it is exactly what is going on in artificial intelligence (AI) research today.

Today, the research community has not adopted free software and shared codebases sufficiently. For example, I believe there are more than enough PhDs today working on computer vision, but there are 200+ different codebases plus countless proprietary ones.

Simply put, there is no computer vision codebase with critical mass.

We can blame the Baby Boomers for making proprietary software the dominant model. We can also blame them for outlawing nuclear power, never drilling in ANWR despite decades of discussion, never fixing Social Security, destroying the K-12 education system, handing us a near-bankrupt welfare state, and many of the other long-term problems that have existed in this country for decades that they did not fix, and the new ones they created.

It is our generation that will invent the future, as we incorporate more free software, more cooperation amongst our scientists, and free markets into society. The boomer generation got the collectivism part, but they failed on the free software and the freedom from government.

My book describes why free software is critical to faster technological development, and it ends with some pages on why our generation needs to build a space elevator. I believe that in addition to driverless cars, and curing cancer, building a space elevator, getting going on nanotechnology, and terraforming Mars are also in reach. Wikipedia surpassed Encyclopedia Britanicca in 2.5 years. The problems in our world are not technical, but social. Let’s step up. We can make much of it happen a lot faster than we think.

Did you know that many researchers would like to discover light-catching components in order to convert more of the sun’s power into carbon-free electric power?

A new study reported in the journal Applied Physics Letters in August this year (published by the American Institute of Physics), explains how solar energy could potentially be collected by using oxide materials that have the element selenium. A team at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, embedded selenium in zinc oxide, a relatively affordable material that could make more efficient use of the sun’s power.

The team noticed that even a relatively small amount of selenium, just 9 percent of the mostly zinc-oxide base, significantly enhanced the material’s efficiency in absorbing light.

The main author of this study, Marie Mayer (a fourth-year University of California, Berkeley doctoral student) affirms that photo-electrochemical water splitting, that means using energy from the sun to cleave water into hydrogen and oxygen gases, could potentially be the most fascinating future application for her labor. Managing this reaction is key to the eventual production of zero-emission hydrogen powered motors, which hypothetically will run only on water and sunlight.

Journal Research: Marie A. Mayer et all. Applied Physics Letters, 2010 [link: http://link.aip.org/link/APPLAB/v97/i2/p022104/s1]

The conversion efficiency of a PV cell is the proportion of sunlight energy that the photovoltaic cell converts to electric power. This is very important when discussing Pv products, because improving this efficiency is vital to making Photovoltaic energy competitive with more traditional sources of energy (e.g., fossil fuels).

For comparison, the earliest Photovoltaic products converted about 1%-2% of sunlight energy into electric energy. Today’s Photo voltaic devices convert 7%-17% of light energy into electric energy. Of course, the other side of the equation is the money it costs to produce the PV devices. This has been improved over the decades as well. In fact, today’s PV systems generate electricity at a fraction of the cost of early PV systems.

In the 1990s, when silicon cells were 2 times as thick, efficiencies were much smaller than nowadays and lifetimes were reduced, it may well have cost more energy to make a cell than it could generate in a lifetime. In the meantime, the technological know-how has progressed significantly, and the energy repayment time (defined as the recovery time necessary for generating the energy spent to produce the respective technical energy systems) of a modern photovoltaic module is generally from 1 to 4 years depending on the module type and location.

Usually, thin-film technologies — despite having comparatively low conversion efficiencies — obtain significantly shorter energy repayment times than standard systems (often < 1 year). With a normal lifetime of 20 to 30 years, this means that contemporary photovoltaic cells are net energy producers, i.e. they generate significantly more energy over their lifetime than the energy expended in producing them.

The author — Rosalind Sanders writes for the solar pool cover ratings blog, her personal hobby weblog focused on tips to help home owners to save energy with solar power.

Abstract

J. Storrs Hall’s Weather Machine is a relatively simple nanofabricated machine system with significant consequences in politics and ethics.

After a brief technical description, this essay analyzes the ends, means, and circumstances of a feasible method of controlling the weather, and includes some predictions regarding secondary effects.


Article

When a brilliant person possesses a fertile imagination and significant technical expertise, he or she is likely to imagine world-changing inventions. J. Storrs Hall is the epitome of those geniuses, and his Utility Fog [1] and Space Pier [2] are brilliant engineering designs that will change the world once they are reduced to practice. His most recent invention is the Weather Machine [3], which has been examined by none other than Robert Freitas and found to be technically reasonable—-though Freitas may have found an improved method for climate control that avoids some of the problems discussed below [4].

The Hall Weather Machine is a thin global cloud consisting of small transparent balloons that can be thought of as a programmable and reversible greenhouse gas because it shades or reflects the amount of sunlight that hits the upper stratosphere. These balloons are each between a millimeter and a centimeter in diameter, made of a few-nanometer thick diamondoid membrane. Each balloon is filled with hydrogen to enable it to float at an altitude of 60,000 to 100,000 feet, high above the clouds. It is bisected by an adjustable sheet, and also includes solar cells, a small computer, a GPS receiver to keep track of its location, and an actuator to occasionally (and relatively slowly) move the bisecting membrane between vertical and horizontal orientations. Just like with a regular high-altitude balloon, the heavier control and energy storage systems would be on the bottom of the balloon to automatically set the vertical axis without requiring any energy. The balloon would also have a water vapor/hydrogen generator system for altitude control, giving it the same directional navigation properties that an ordinary hot-air balloon has when it changes altitudes to take advantage of different wind directions at different altitudes.

Four versions of balloons are possible, depending on nature of the bisecting membrane.

  • Version 1. Transparent/Opaque: The bisecting membrane is opaque, and rotates from the horizontal to the vertical in order to control the amount of solar radiation that it allows through (the membrane might be replaced by a immobile liquid crystal that has two basic states: transparent and opaque).
  • Version 2. Emissivity Control: The membrane is white on one side, black on the other. When it is horizontal, either side can be presented upwards; white to scatter the solar radiation into space, black to absorb it into the upper atmosphere.
  • Version 3. Reflection Control: The membrane is black on one side, with a reflective metallic coating on the other. This can direct solar energy in specific directions to increase the effectiveness of solar farms, or to steer hurricanes. Another feature of this version is that it enables the multiple reflection of light from sunlit to dark areas.
  • Version 4. Advanced Photon Control: The balloon would be filled with an aerogel-density metamaterial that could not only control reflectivity via diffraction, but also control the frequency and phase of outgoing photons (with or without stimulated emission). Technically, designing and controlling these kinds of balloons would be a magnitude or two more complex than the earlier versions.

What is impressive about the Weather Machine is that by controlling a tenth of one percent of solar radiation is enough to force global climate in any direction we want. One percent is enough to change regional climate, and ten percent is enough for serious weather control.


The Problems

Every human-designed system has unintended bugs, and may cause negative consequences. That is why we have professional engineering societies, non-profit standards organizations, and government bureaucracies—to help protect the public. There is, therefore, some concern that the Weather Machine will accidentally cause catastrophic weather. However, given the accuracy of weather predictions and global warming models, and the slow movement of masses of air, and the fact that humans are in the loop (and in an emergency, could use a failsafe mode to force all the balloons to drop from the sky), the danger of accidental harm is minimal. At any rate, this article is more concerned with the ethical issues, with accidental unintended consequences to be examined elsewhere.

Many people would be happy to stop global warming, though others (currently living in Siberia or Iceland) might be happier without brutally cold winters. This level of climate control raises some problematic issues that may pit one group of people against another. The intended results could be taken care of the same way we normally take of similar issues in a representative democracy—we vote. This sounds nice, except that we’re not just talking about the United States (or any single nation), but the entire world. And we all know how well the United Nations handles its affairs. Perhaps deciding whether or not we want global warming is a small enough decision that the U.N. can handle it. If not, we can always rely on the world government that evil geniuses want to run, and that conspiracy theorists worry about.

Within the USA, trial lawyers would be especially interested in unintended effects, including trivial ones like rain on parades, or more serious ones like floods and tornadoes. The tremendous inefficiency of this legal nightmare might be meliorated by a “weather tax” that would fund a program to recompense people who are willing to put up with bad weather.

The more advanced versions of balloons are problematic because then the Weather Machine wouldn’t just control the intensity of solar and terrestrial radiation, but could also redirect and concentrate energy. In addition to increasing the effectiveness of solar farms, this would give more powerful and precise control over the weather. Unfortunately, energy concentration is exactly the capability that transforms the Weather Machine into an awesome weapon of mass destruction. Concentrated solar energy has not been used much since 212 BCE [5] when Archimedes used it to set fire the Roman ships that were attacking his city-state of Syracuse. However, the global coordination of the reflective Weather Machine allows bouncing concentrated solar energy around the globe, making it possible to set cities on fire. By fire, I mean the type of fire caused by dropping a nuclear bomb per second for as long as you want. The potential for abuse is rather large.

The most advanced version of the balloon is even better or worse—it contains an aerogel-density (i.e. extremely light and porous) programmable metamaterial that controls the frequency, direction, and phase of the reflected or transmitted radiation. Fully deployed, such a Weather Machine could become a planet-sized telescope—or laser. Small portions of such a system could be used as an effective missile defense system. Configured as a planetary laser, it might be able to defend Earth against stray asteroids such as Apopois, which is due for a flyby in 2029 (and might impact in 2036—especially if some terrorist group places an ion motor on it). Also, a planetary laser could push fairly large rockets rather quickly to Alpha Centari. But if you thought Version 3 was a weapon of mass destruction, Version 4 makes them, and the Transformers look like children’s toys (No wait—that’s what they are ). Optical divergence (currently 1 miliradian for commercially available lasers) will not keep planets from shooting at each other and frying them in their orbits, but the lack of energy density will—unless the balloons can store energy. On the other hand, even primitive laser focusing mechanisms will work fine for lunar infighting.

Given the almost unimaginable weaponization of the Hall Weather Machine, an important reaction is to ask if there any defenses against them. There are two types: those that attack the control algorithms (i.e. cyberware attacks) and those that physically attack the balloons, such as swarms of hunter-killer balloons or larger high-flying “carnivores”. In addition, there are some de-weaponization strategies that will be discussed below.


Ethical Issues

In some ways, ethics is like engineering–solving big problems is most easily done by splitting the problem in to smaller pieces. This means that the best way to determine the ethics of any action (such as building and operating a weather machine) is to determine the ethical considerations of each of the ends, means, and circumstances.

As far as “ends” are concerned, the weather machine passes with flying colors, if nothing else because it can fix global warming (or impending ice ages). Depending on a number of variables, we might even increase the number of nice weekends and increase the biome sizes of certain species.

One counter to these benefits claims that by controlling the weather we would be playing God and that the Weather Machine is equivalent to eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. In my view, if God didn’t like us messing with technology, then He should have let us know a long time ago. At any rate, the Bible doesn’t speak against technology per se. Admittedly, the Bible’s tower of Babel story does condemn the pride and arrogance that may result from technology, but that is another story.

A non-theistic (but just as religious) counter to the main intent of the weather machine is made by deep ecology environmentalists. They often claim that controlling the weather is unnatural, that Mother Nature bats last, or that the very idea of weather control is the reason that the global human population should be reduced to the low millions. These sort of arguments represent metaphysical differences regarding the value of individual human beings and the stewardship role we should have with the environment, and I’m not sure how we can address those issues in a book, much less in 3,500 words or less.

The “means” judges the actual methods used to control the climate and the weather. In this case, modulating the Sun’s energy with many small, high-altitude balloons seems ethically neutral. Even the transformation of a 100 million tons of carbon into diamondoid balloons is ethically neutral (unless one gets the carbon from the living bodies of endangered animals, pre-born fetuses, ethnic minorities, or other humans). By some viewpoints, the sequestering of 100 million tons of atmospheric carbon would be considered virtuous (except that this particular sequestration makes the global warming problem go away, to be possibly replaced by bigger ones).

The ethical analysis leaves “circumstances” as the remaining issue, and here is where things get complicated. Circumstances include things like unintended (especially foreseeable) and secondary consequences, such as whether the means or the end may lead to other evils. In general, a consequentialist argument would likely accept some small risk of some harm, and might accept mechanisms (like lawsuits or something more efficient) to provide feedback to fix any inequities. But this is where things get really complicated.

The first possibility, and most often raised, is that building and operating the Weather Machine might result in severe, unpredictable, unintended consequences. There are a few classes of these consequences, the most obvious centered on out-of-control superstorms or droughts. After all, we aren’t that great at predicting hurricane paths. On the other hand, this is because hurricane paths are inherently unstable—precisely because we don’t have any weather control. If we take a car out to the Bonneville salt flats, tie a car’s steering wheel absolutely straight, and then put a brick on the pedal, we cannot predict whether it will eventually circle left or right. But we allow cars on the road all the time precisely because we have such good feedback and control systems (well, except when they’re getting home late on a Saturday night).

Increased predictability would ameliorate the unintended weather problem, and could be reached by using altitude control (and differently-directed winds) for the balloons to remain over a particular piece of land. Then many tests could be run better predict possible harms and to lower the risk of them ever happening. In general, almost all accidental problems caused by a misbehaving Weather Machine (including computer viruses, rogue controllers, broken balloons, and the environmental toxicology of a million tons of inert diamond falling all over the earth) can be ameliorated by good design, adequate testing, and accurate modeling [6].

Others classes of severe, unintended consequences are secondary effects in the environment, the world economy, politics, and other areas. For example, by successfully moving heat from the tropics to the northern areas, we might turn off the Gulf Stream and other important ocean currents? How will the stock market react to California constantly selling it’s bad weather to Michigan? How will a totalitarian tropical country react if Iceland buys 20% of their neighbors’ sunlight for a much higher price than for theirs?

A second possibility is that the Weather Machine is impossible, and working on it may be a waste of money that could be better spend on more worthwhile projects. Given our knowledge of physics, however, this is unlikely. A caveat is that it will be a race to 2030, when diamond mechanosynthesis should be able to crank out the 100 million tons (the equivalent of 100 miles of freeway) of diamond balloons, and when the worst-case scenarios predict the beginning of serious negative effects of anthropogenic carbon [7]) . Will the Hall Weather Machine be built in time to stop Florida from being inundated by the ocean? The answer depends on when nanosystems will achieve top-down bootstrapping or bottom-up Turing equivalence (which is a technical topic for another time).

A third possibility—if the balloons are not location-controllable—might occur if a nation doesn’t want a foreign nation’s balloons over its territory. The obvious hostile response would be to build hunter-killer balloons to destroy any invaders, as this seems to be permitted by current concepts of sovereignty. Such an arms race could (and probably will) escalate ad infinitum, but open source hardware and software might help prevent it. Any military or intelligence personnel (of any country) would freak at the idea of handing the keys to a weapon of mass destruction to the public, but that may be the only viable solution if the control algorithm works using genetic or market mechanisms — maybe like American Idol or Wikipedia. After all, distributed systems should have distributed control systems. Imagine the balloons controlled by many different radio frequencies with a many different authentication algorithms with open source software. Unfortunately, if such public control is our solution against weather weaponization, we will still need to worry about the “tragedy of commons” and “not in my backyard” secondary effects.

There are other issues of international policy. Suppose we want more sunlight in the Dakotas for growing crops. We could buy it from poor tropical countries, or take it from international ocean territories, where it might affect other countries. Depending on the state of the art and it’s acceleration, but especially at the beginning, it is likely that only rich countries will be able to build Weather Machines. More certainly, only rich countries will be able to fund the early experiments to understand what large numbers of balloons will actually do.

Some might object that knowledge is free and can travel anywhere via the Internet. This is true, but consider the BP disaster. Technical expertise on underwater drilling is international; marine science is international; the disaster receiving tons of press coverage; and yet there is large disagreement within the largely free scientific community about the importance of the spill, how long it will take to clean up, etc. In contrast, connecting a large base of nanofactories to the Internet will enable the global spread of atomically-precise physical devices (such as balloons) in seconds, whether or not the experiments are ever done.

A fourth possibility is that the Weather Machine could be used as a weapon of mass inconvenience—a means of unjust coercion by making possible the threat of bad weather. But the ethics of this application use the same principles as the ethics regarding weapons of mass destruction. I have already pointed out the possible use of the Weather Machine as a weapon—the ethical issues surrounding the more advanced versions of the Weather Machine are basically the same as those concerning weapons of mass destruction, though amplified somewhat by their power (tens of megatons of TNT equivalents per second) and precision of control (+/- one degree Fahrenheit).

Fifth, there is the possibility that psychologically, being in control of the weather is not good for developing character. What if human beings are supposed to cower in their caves when lightning and blizzards strike? After all, that is how we evolved, and there are many things we enjoy that are bad for us [8]. Perhaps having so much control and power over the vicissitudes of life is psychologically bad for us. For evidence, look at the rates of depression in advanced nations.

Finally, what is the cost of not building a Weather Machine? If the cost drops low enough, some nation with the chutzpah will build one. And if they are at all successful, the rest of the world will jump in. But what will the cost be if they design it wrong?

Are the Ethics of the Hall Weather Machine Relevant?

The main problem with thinking about the ethics of the Hall Weather Machine is that by the time we can build 100 million tons of atomically precise anything, controlling the weather is going to be the least of our problems. This is because the nanotechnology revolution will bring about a new set of big, hairy problems—some of which I’ve written about elsewhere [9][10], but I fear that most of them we can’t even imaging yet.

May we live in interesting times!

Tihamer Toth-Fejel, MS
General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems
Michigan Research and Development Center

Acknowledgements

Thanks to James Bach and Chris Dodsworth for valuable contributions.


Footnotes

[1] J. Storrs Hall, Utility Fog: The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of, http://autogeny.org/Ufog.html

[2] J. Storrs Hall, The Space Pier: A hybrid Space-launch Tower concept, http://autogeny.org/tower/tower.html

[3] J. Storrs Hall, The Weather Machine, (transcript from Global Catastrophic Risks 2008 conference, posted by Jeriaska on December 20th, 2008), http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/people-blog/?p=2637

[4] Robert A. Freitas, Diamond Trees (Tropostats): A Molecular Manufacturing Based System for Compositional Atmospheric Homeostasis, 2010 IMM Report 43, 10 February 2010; http://www.imm.org/Reports/rep043.pdf

[5] Before the Christian Era smile

[6] The details will be examined elsewhere (as time permits).

[7] Coincidentally, it is also when the USA Social Security System is supposed to collapse.

[8] “The killer app for medical nanotechnology will be compensating for poor lifestyle choices like overeating and indiscriminate sex—i.e. diabetes II and AIDS” — a grad student at the 2010 Gordon Conference on Nanostructure Fabrication.

[9] T. Toth-Fejel, “Humanity and Nanotechnology”. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, V4N2, Summer 2004.

[10] T. Toth-Fejel, “A Few Lesser Implications of Nanofactories: Global Warming is the least of our Problems.” Nanotechnology Perceptions, March 2009.

(End of series. For previous topics please see parts I-IX)

Power plants. Trees could do a lot, as we have seen — and they’re solar powered, too. Once trees can suck metals from the soil and grow useful, shaped objects like copper wire, a few more levels of genetic engineering could enable the tree to use this copper wire to deliver electricity. Since a tree is already, now, a solar energy converter, we can build on that by having the tree grow tissues that convert energy into electricity. Electric eels can already do that, producing enough of a jolt to be lethal to humans. Even ordinary fish produce small amounts of electricity to create electric fields in the water around them. Any object nearby disrupts the field, enabling the fish to tell that something is near, even in total darkness. We may never be able to plug something into a swimming fish but we can already make batteries out of potatoes. So why not trees that grow into electricity providers all by themselves? It would be great to be able to plug your electrical devices into a tree (or at least a socket in your house that is connected to the tree). Then you would no longer need to connect to the grid, purchase solar panels, or install a windmill. You would, however, need to keep your trees healthy and vigorous! Tree care specialists would become a highly employable occupation.

Greening the desert. The Sahara and various other less notorious but still very dry deserts around the world have plenty of sand and rocks. But they don’t have much greenery. The main problem is lack of water. Vast swaths of the Sahara, for example, are plant free. It’s just too dry. However this problem is solvable! Cacti and other desert plants could potentially extract water from the air. Plants already extract carbon dioxide molecules from the air. Even very dry air contains considerable water vapor, so why not extract water molecules too. Indeed, plants already transport water molecules in the ground into their roots, so is it really such a big step to do the same from the air? Tillandsia (air plant) species can already pull in water with their leaves, but it has to be rain or other liquid water. Creating plants that can extract gaseous water vapor from the air in a harsh desert environment would require sophisticated genetic engineering, or a leap for mother nature, but it is still only the first step. Plants get nutrients out of the soil by absorbing fluid that has dissolved them, so dry soil would be a problem even for a plant that contained plenty of water pulled from the air. Another level of genetic engineering or natural evolution would be required to enable them to secrete fluid out of their roots to moisten chunks of soil to dissolve its minerals, and reabsorb the now nutritious, mineral-laden liquid back into their roots.

Once this difficult task is accomplished, whether by natural evolution in the distant future or genetic engineering sooner, things will be different in the desert. Canopies of vegetation that hide the ground will be possible. Thus shaded and sheltered, the ground will be able to support a much richer ecosystem of creatures and maybe even humans than is currently the case in deserts. One of Earth’s harshest environments would be tamed.

Phyto-terraforming. To terraform means to transform a place into an Earth-like state (terra is Latin for Earth). Mars for example is a desert wasteland, but it once ran with rivers, and it would be great if the Martian surface was made habitable — in other words, terraformed. Venus might be made habitable if we could only get rid of its dense blanket of carbon dioxide, which causes such a severe greenhouse effect that its surface is over 800 degrees Fahrenheit, toasty indeed. And why not consider terraforming inhospitable terrain right here on earth, like the Sahara desert, or Antarctica. Phyto-terraforming is terraforming using plants. Actually plants are so favored for this task that when people discuss terraforming, they usually mean phyto-terraforming. Long ago, plants did in fact terraform the Earth, converting a hostile atmosphere with no oxygen but plenty of carbon dioxide into a friendly one with enough oxygen that we can comfortably exist. Plants worked on Earth, and might work on Mars or even Venus, but not on the moon. The reason is that plants need carbon dioxide and water. Venus has these (and reasonable temperatures) high in the atmosphere, suggesting airborne algae cells. Mars is a more likely bet as it has water (as ice) available to surface-dwelling plants at least in places.

If Mars is the most likely candidate for phyto-terraforming, what efforts have been made to move in that direction? A first step has been to splice genes into ordinary plants from an organism that lives in hot water associated with deep ocean thermal vents. This organism is named Pyrococcus furiosus (Pyro- means fire in Greek, coccus refers to ball-shaped bacteria, hence “fireball”). Pyrococcus is most comfortable living at about the boiling point of water and can grow furiously, double its population in 37 minutes. It has evolved genes for destroying free radicals that work better than those naturally present in plants. Free radicals are produced by certain stressors in plants (and humans), cause cell damage, and can even lead to death of the organism. By splicing such genes into the plant Arabidopsis thaliana, the experimental mouse of plant research, this small and nondescript-looking plant can be made much more resistant to heat and lack of water. These genes have also been spliced into tomatoes, which could help feed future colonists. Of course Mars requires cold, not heat tolerance, but the lack of water part is a good start. The heat and drought parts might be useful for building plants to terraform deserts here on Earth, bringing terraforming of Earth deserts a couple of steps closer. With several additional levels of genetic modification, we might eventually terraform Mars yet.

Recommendations

When the advances described here are likely to happen would be good to know. Will they occur in your lifetime? Your grandchildren’s? Thousands or millions of years into the future? If the latter, there is not much point in devoting precious national funds to help bring them about, but if the former, it might be worth the expense of hurrying the process along. To determine the likely timing of future technological advances, we need to determine the speed of advancement. To measure this speed, we can look at the rate at which advances have occurred in the past, and ask what will happen in the future if advances continue along at the same rate. This approach is influential in the modern computer industry in the guise of “Moore’s Law.” However it was propounded at least as early as about 2,500 years ago, when Chinese philosopher Confucius is said to have noted, “Study the past if you would divine the future.” It would be nice to know when we can expect to grow and eat potatoes with small hamburgers in the middle, pluck nuggets of valuable metals from trees, power our homes by plugging into electricity-generating trees growing in our back yards, or terraform Mars.

Opening the floodgates of genetic engineering innovation. Properly regulated to optimally benefit society, genetic engineering of plants has enormous potential, from better and better-tasting food to growing amazing things on trees. However governmental regulation is currently suppressing such advances. Preparing applications to government regulatory agencies for permission to commercially grow genetically engineered plants currently costs many millions of dollars in many countries. Thus only genetic modifications to major commodity crops like corn and soy are generally cost-effective to commercialize. Worse, only big agribusinesses can afford the costs. And why should they object? After all, who needs small, game-changing startup companies moving in, upending the status quo, creating new economic growth and value with new kinds of crops, and generally making life complicated for the giant agribusinesses? Simpler just to keep the costs of applying for permission to grow so high that such upstarts are kept out of the picture. That way predictable profits flow in even if, overall, innovation and the consequent economic expansion is suppressed. But you can’t blame the giants, which are legally obligated to serve the interests of their shareholders. It is illegal for a corporation in the US to further the interests of society at substantial expense to its shareholders! Governments should regulate commercialization of genetically engineered crops optimally, protecting the world from harmful frankenplants while promoting exciting, progressive and beneficial crop innovations.

References

“We may never be able to plug something into a swimming fish, but we can already make batteries out of potatoes.” A. Golberg, H. D. Rabinowitch, and B. Rubinsky, Zn/Cu-vegetative batteries, bioelectrical characterizations, and primary cost analyses, Journal of Renewable Sustainable Energy (2010), Vol. 2, Issue 3, http://jrse.aip.org/jrsebh/v2/i3/p033103_s1, doi:10.1063/1.3427222.

“This organism is named Pyrococcus furiosus…”: G. Fiala and K. O. Stetter, Pyrococcus furiosus sp. nov. represents a novel genus of marine heterotrophic archaebacteria growing optimally at 100°C, Archives of Microbiology (June 1986), vol. 145, no. 1, pp. 56–61.

“By splicing such genes into the plant Arabidopsis thaliana…this small and nondescript-looking plant can be made much more resistant to heat and lack of water.” W. F. Boss and A. M. Grunden, Redesigning living organisms to survive on Mars, NASA Institute for Advance Concepts Annual Meeting (2006), http://www.niac.usra.edu/files/library/meetings/annual/oct06/1194Boss.pdf

“They have also been spliced into tomatoes, which could help feed future colonists.” W. Boss, http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/plantbiology/BossLab/hfiles/overview.html, 5/29/10.

Will our lumbering industrial age driven information age segue smoothly into a futuristic marvel of yet to be developed technology? It might. Or take quantum leaps. It could. Will information technology take off exponentially? It’s accelerating in that direction. The way knowledge is unraveling its potential for enhancing human ingenuity, the future looks bright indeed. But there is a problem. It’s that egoistic tendency we have of defending ourselves against knowing, of creating false images to delude ourselves and the world, and of resolving conflict violently. It’s as old as history and may be an inevitable part of life. If so, there will be consequences.

Who has ever seen drama/comedy without obstacles to overcome, conflicts to confront, dilemmas to address, confrontations to endure and the occasional least expected outcome? Just as Shakespeare so elegantly illustrated. Good drama illustrates aspects of life as lived, and we do live with egoistic mental processes that are both limited and limiting. Wherefore it might come to pass that we who are of this civilization might encounter an existential crisis. Or crunch into a bottleneck out of which … will emerge what? Or extinguish civilization with our egoistic conduct acting from regressed postures with splintered perception.

What’s least likely is that we’ll continue cruising along as usual.

Not with massive demographic changes, millions on the move, radical climate changes, major environmental shifts, cyber vulnerabilities, changing energy resources, inadequate clean water and values colliding against each other in a world where future generations of the techno-savvy will be capable of wielding the next generation of weapons of mass destruction.

On the other hand, there are intelligent people passionately pursuing methods of preventing the use of weapons, combating their effects and securing a future in which these problems mentioned above will be solved, and also working towards an advanced civilization.

It’s a race against time.

In the balance hangs nothing less than the future of civilization.

The danger from technology is secondary.

As of now, regardless of theories of international affairs, in one way or another, we inject power into our currency of negotiation, whether it be interpersonal or international, for after all, power is privilege, hard to give up, especially after getting a taste of it, and so we’ll quarrel over power, perhaps fight. Why deny it? The historical record is there for all to see. As for our inner terrors, our tendency to present false egoistic images to the world and of projecting our secret socially unacceptable fantasies on to others, we might just bring to pass what we fear and deny. It’s possible.

Meantime there are certain simple ideas that remain timeless: For example, as infants we exist at the pleasure of parents, big hulks who pick us up and carry us around sometimes lovingly, sometimes resentfully, often ambivalently, and to be sure many of us come to regard Authority with ambivalence. As Authority regards the dependent. A basic premise is that we all want something in a relationship. So what do we as infants want from Authority? How about security in our exploration of life? How about love? If it’s there we don’t have to pay for it. There are no conditions attached. Life, however, is both complicated and complex beyond a few words, and so we negotiate in the ‘best’ way we have at our disposal, which in the early stages of life are non-verbal intuitive methods that in part enter this life with us, genetically determined, epigenetically determined and in part is learned, but once adopted, a certain core approach becomes habitual, buried deeply under layers of later learned social skills, skills that we employ in our adult lives. These skills are however relatively on the surface. Hidden deep inside are secret desires, unfulfilled fantasies, hidden impulses that wouldn’t make sense in adult relationships if expressed openly in words.

It has been said repeatedly that crisis reveals character. Most of the time we get by in crisis, but we each have a ‘breaking point,’ meaning that under severe enduring stress we regress at a certain point, at which time we’ll abandon sophisticated social skills and a part of us will slip into infantile mode, not necessarily visible on the outside. It varies. No one can claim immunity. And acting out of infantile perception in adult situations can have unexpected consequences depending on the early life drama. Which makes life interesting. It also guarantees an interesting future.

Meantime scientists clarify the biology of learning, of short term memory, of long term memory, of the brain working as a whole, of ‘free will’ as we imagine it, but regardless of future directions, at this time we need agency on the personal and social level so as to help stabilize civilization. By agency I mean responsibility for one’s actions. Accountability, including in the face of dilemmas. Throughout the course of our lives from beginning to end we encounter dilemmas.

Consider the dilemmas the Europeans under German occupation faced last century. I use the European situation as an illustration or social paradigm, not to suggest that this situation will recur, nor to suggest that any one ethnic group will be targeted in the future, but I do suggest that if a global crisis hits, we’ll confront moral dilemmas, and so we can learn from those relatively few Europeans who resolved their dilemmas in noble ways, as opposed to the majority who did nothing to help the oppressed.

If a European in German occupied territory helped a Jew he or she and family would be in danger of arrest, torture and death. How about watching one’s spouse and children being tortured? On the other hand, if she or he did not help they would be participating in murder and genocide, and know it. Despite the danger, certain people from several European countries helped the Jews. According to those who interviewed and wrote about the helpers, (see references listed below) the helpers represented a cross section of the community, that is, some were uneducated laborers, some were serving women, some were formally educated, some were professionals, some professed religious convictions, some did not. Well then, what if anything did these noble risk takers have in common? What they shared in common was this: They saw themselves as responsible moral agents, and, acting on an internal locus of moral responsibility, they each acted on their knowledge and compassion and did the ‘right thing.’ It came naturally to them. But doing the ‘right thing’ in the face of life threatening dilemma does not come naturally to everyone. Fortunately it is a behavior that can be learned.

Concomitant with authentic learning, according to research biologists, is the production of brain chemicals that in turn cultivate structural modification in brain cells. A self reinforcing feedback system. In short, learning is part of a dynamic multi-dimensional interaction of input, output, behavioral change, chemicals, structural brain changes and complex adaptation in systems throughout the body. None of which diminishes the idea that we each enter this life with certain desires, potential and perhaps roles to act out, one of which for me is to improve myself.

Good news! I not only am, I become.

Finally, I list some 20th century resources that remain timeless to this day:

Millgram, S. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. Harper & Row. 1974.

Oliner, Samuel P. & Pearl. The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe. Free Press, Division of Macmillan. 1998

Fogelman, Eva. Conscience & Courage Anchor Books, Division of Random House. 1994

Block, Gay & Drucker, Malka. Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust. Holms & Meier Publishers, 1992

I gave the following speech at the Space Elevator Conference.

——

“Waste anything but time.”

—Motto of the NASA Apollo missions

The consensus amongst those of us who think it is even possible to build a space elevator is that it will take more than 20 years. But how can you say how long it will take to do something until you specify how many resources it will require and how many people you’ve assigned to the task?

For the first part of this speech, let’s pretend we can make the nanotubes and focus on the remaining 99%. When analyzing a task you generally know how to do, it is best to take a top-down approach. If you are painting a room, you would divide this task into the prep, the actual painting, and the cleanup, and then organize the work in each one of those phases.

In my former life at Microsoft, I learned to appreciate the power of educated and focused large-scale teams as the best tool to beat the competition. With a 1,000 person team, 1 man-year of work is accomplished every 2 hours. Work is generally fungible so a 20 year project could definitely use more people and go faster.

The goal in a project is for everyone to always be moving ahead full speed and to finish on the same day. What slips schedules is when you have people with dependencies on each other. If one person needs something from another to do their work, you have the potential for that person to go idle and to slip the entire project.

You can prevent that from happening with strong leadership. In the recent BP oil spill, Louisiana tried to get permission to build berms, but the EPA and the other agencies took a long time to analyze the environmental impact. The federal bureaucracy with all of its technology moved slower than lifeless oil floating in the ocean. A good leader can cut through red tape and bring in outside assets to unblock a situation.

The various big pieces of the space elevator have clear boundaries. Those building the solar panels need work with the climber team only to come up with a way to attach the panels. The physical shape of the climber impacts little on the anchor station. The primary issues are the throughput of tons per day and the process to load a climber. Even mission control looks at pieces as black boxes. Mega-projects can be broken down into efforts with clear boundaries so this means that in general, once commenced, everyone should be able to work in parallel.

The robotic climber is one of the most complicated pieces of hardware that the space elevator needs, and it has many of the same requirements as one of Seattle’s Boeing airplanes: both will move a few hundred miles per hour, and have to deal with difficult changes in temperature, pressure, and radiation.

Boeing is at least on a 7 year timeframe with its 787, compared to NASA which seems to takes decades to do anything. The goal is to be the quality of NASA, but faster than the speed of Boeing. Engineering is about humans and their computers, and both can be improved.

At least some of the 787’s delays were not technically related, as the local papers documented months of labor disputes. Boeing is also working more closely with its suppliers over the Internet than ever before, and learning how to do this.

Man landed on the moon 7 years after Kennedy’s speech, exactly as he ordained, because dates can be self-fulfilling prophecies. It allows everyone to measure their work against their plan and determine if they need additional resources. If you give out a few years of work per person, and allow for time for ramp-up and test, then about 7 years is quite reasonable. Long timelines encourage procrastination. If you want something to happen more slowly, you can find always ways to succeed.

It is cheaper to get loans for shorter terms, so it is cheaper to build something in 7 years than in 20. A 20-year plan is almost a guaranteed way to get a “no” answer. Even the U.S. Congress doesn’t think more than a few months ahead.

Boeing has the requisite technical skills, and they have 160,000 employees, so we could use them as a baseline of an estimate on how many people it would take. Here is what those 160,000 people work on:

Boeing Projects

2018 Bomber

737 Airborne Early Warning and Control (AEW&C)

737 AEW&C Peace Eagle

737 AEW&C Wedgetail

767 Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS)

A-10 Thunderbolt II

A160 Hummingbird

AC-130U Gunship

Aegis SM-3

Airborne Early Warning and Control

AGM 86-C Conventional Air-Launched Cruise Missile (CALCM)

AH-64 Apache

AV-8B Harrier II Plus

Airborne Battle Management (ABM)

Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS)

Airlift and Tankers (A&T)

Advanced Global Services & Support

Advanced Tanker

Air Force One

Airborne Battle Management (ABM)

Airborne Laser Test Bed (ALTB)

Ares I Crew Launch Vehicle

Arrow Interceptor

Avenger

B-1B Lancer

B-2 Spirit

B-52 Stratofortress

BattleScape

Boeing 376 Fleet

Boeing 601 Fleet

Boeing 702 Fleet

Boeing 702MP Spacecraft

Boeing Australia

Boeing Launch Services

Boeing Military Aircraft

Boeing Satellites

Brigade Combat Team Modernization (BCTM)

Brimstone Precision Guided Missile

C-17 Globemaster III

C-130 Avionics Modernization Program

C-32A Executive Transport

C-40A Clipper Military Transport

C-40B Special-Mission Aircraft

C-40C Operational Support and Team Travel Aircraft

Canard Rotor/Wing

CH-46E Sea Knight

CH-47D/F Chinook

Cargo Mission Contract (CMC)

Checkout, Assembly & Payload Processing Services (CAPPS)

Combat Survivor Evader Locator (CSEL)

Commercial/Civil Satellite Programs

Constellation/Ares I Crew Launch Vehicle

Conventional Air-Launched Cruise Missile (CALCM)

Cyber and Information Solutions

DataMaster

Defense & Government Services

Delta II

Delta IV

Directed Energy Systems (DES)

DIRECTV 1, 2, 3

DIRECTV 10, 11, 12

DRT

E-3 AWACS

E-4B Advanced Airborne Command Post

E-6 Tacamo

EA-18G Airborne Electronic Attack Aircraft

Engineering & Logistics Services

F-15E Strike Eagle

F-15K — Republic of Korea

F/A-18 Hornet

F/A-18E/F Super Hornet

F-22 Raptor

F/A-18E/F Integrated Readiness Support Teaming (FIRST)

Family of Advanced Beyond Line-of-Sight Terminals (FAB-T)

Global Broadcast Service (GBS)

Global Services & Support

Global Positioning System

Global Positioning System (GPS) IIF

Global Security Systems

GSA

GOES N-P

Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) System

Harpoon

Harrier

Hornet

I&SS Mission Systems

Insitu

Integrated Logistics

Integrated Weapons System Support Program

Intelligence and Security Systems

Intelsat

International Space Station (ISS)

Iridium

Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance (ISR) Services

Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM)

Joint Effects-Based Command and Control (JEBC2)

Joint Helmet-Mounted Cueing System (JHMCS)

Joint Recovery and Distribution System (JRaDS)

Joint Tactical Radio System Ground Mobile Radios (JTRS GMR)

KC-10 Extender

KC-135 Stratotanker

KC-767 Advanced Tanker

Lancer

Laser & Electro-Optical Systems (LEOS)

Laser Joint Direct Attack Munition (LJDAM)

Leasat

MH-47E/G Special Operations Chinook

Maintenance, Modifications & Upgrades

Measat-3

Military Satellite Systems

Milstar II

Mission Operations

Mission Systems

Military Satellite Systems

Network and Space Systems

Network and Tactical Systems

Network Centric Operations

NSS-8

Orbital Express

P-8

Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3)

Peace Eagle

Phantom Works

Raptor

Rotorcraft Systems

SQS

ScanEagle

Sea Knight

Sea Launch

SBInet

SkyTerra

Small Diameter Bomb (SDB)

SoftPlotter

SOSCOE

Space and Intelligence Systems

Space Based Space Surveillance (SBSS) System

Space Exploration

Space Flight Awareness

Space Shuttle

SPACEWAY 1, 2 North

Special Operations Chinook

Spectrolab

Spirit

St. Louis Flight Operations

Standoff Land Attack Missile Expanded Response SLAM ER

Strategic Missile & Defense Systems

Strategic Missile Systems

Stratofortress

Super Hornet

Supply Chain Services

T-45 Training System

Tacamo

TACSAT I

Tanker

Thuraya-2, 3

Training Support Center

Training Systems and Services

Transformational Wideband Communication Capabilities for the Warfighter

UH-46D Sea Knight

UHF Follow-On

Unmanned Airborne Systems

Unmanned Little Bird

V-22 Osprey

VSOC Sentinel

Wedgetail

Wideband Global SATCOM (WGS)

X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle

X-51 WaveRider

XM Satellite Radio

XM-3, 4

XSS Micro-Satellite

The news in Seattle was how Boeing’s 787 was continually being delayed, but they are involved in so many military and space efforts, it is surprising they find any time at all to work on their Dreamliner!

Boeing is working on 150 projects, so they have 1,100 people per project. Averages are more prone to error, so we can assume a space elevator is 10 times bigger than average. This gives you 11,000 people. If you knew the size of the teams at Boeing, something which is not public information, you could better refine the estimates. A 11,000 person team would be a sight to behold.

If we landed on the moon 7 years after Kennedy told us we would, and if Boeing can build the 787 in 7 years, they we can build the rest of the space elevator in 7 years. It is just a matter of having enough of the right people. So 11,000 people in about 7 years is a first estimate. But this is the 21st century, and we landed on the moon 40 years ago.

Software

Software is my training, and what I will turn to now. Ford Motor Company made an ad that said before they build a car, they build it inside a computer. If you are satisfied with the design inside a computer, you are ready to start production. What is true for a car is even more true for an airplane, and there is a lot of software involved in designing, testing, running and maintaining an airplane, and I’ve had the chance to talk to some Boeing engineers in my years in Seattle. It would not be surprising if the majority of engineers at Boeing knew how to program, and that software is a large part of Boeing’s investments. On the Wikipedia page for the 787, their (proprietary) software is mentioned several times as being a reason for delays.

Setting aside the space elevator, the key to faster technological progress is the more widespread use of free software in all aspects of science. For example, I believe there are more than enough computer vision PhDs, but there are 200+ different codebases and countless proprietary ones. Simply put, there is no computer vision codebase with critical mass, and this problem exists for a number of problem domains. The lessons of Wikipedia have not been learned.

We are not lacking hardware. Computers today can do billions of additions per second. If you could do 32-bit addition in your head in one second, it would take you 30 years to do the billion that your computer can do in that second.

While a brain is different from a computer in that it does work in parallel, such parallelization only makes it happen faster, it does not change the result. Anything accomplished in our parallel brain could also be accomplished on computers of today, which can do only one thing at a time, but at the rate of billions per second. A 1-gigahertz processor can do 1,000 different operations on a million pieces of data in one second. With such speed, you don’t even need multiple processors. Even so, more parallelism is coming via GPUs.

I have written a book that has ideas on how to write better software faster. Today, too many programmers of this world have not adopted free software and modern programming languages. I cannot speak for the shortest amount of time it would take to build the hardware for the space elevator, but I can speak a little bit about the software. Software is interesting because it seems there is no limit on the number of people who can work together.

Linux’s first release in 1991 was built by one programmer and had 10,000 lines of code. It is now 1,000 times bigger and has 1,000 times as many people working on it. Software is something like Wikipedia, which started with a handful but now has millions of people who have made contributions. I grabbed a random article on Wikipedia: it was 5,000 words which is a decent hunk of intellectual property, about as long as this speech which is half-over. It had 1,500 revision and 923 contributors. Each person noticed something different; not every change is perfect, but newer changes can further polish the work, and it usually heads in the right direction evolving towards a good state. A corollary of the point is the line by Eric Raymond that with enough eyeballs, all bugs in software are shallow.

Leonardo Da Vinci said that: “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” This is true of software as well because both are perfectable to an arbitrary degree. Every software programmer has had a feeling in his gut that if he had more resources, he could do more things. Software is different than Wikipedia, but I have found generally that problems in software, assuming you have the right expertise, can be broken up into arbitrarily small tasks. Every interesting problem can be expressed as a functional interface and a graph of code that someone else can maintain.

Some think that the AI problems are so hard that it isn’t a matter of writing code, it is a matter of coming up with the breakthroughs on a chalkboard. But people can generally agree at a high level how the software for solving many problems will work and there has been code for all manner of interesting AI kicking around for decades.

What we never built, and still don’t have, are some places where lots of people have come together to hash out the details, which is a lot closer to Wikipedia than it first appears. Software advances in a steady, stepwise fashion, which is why we need free software licenses: to incorporate all the incremental advancements that each random scientist is making. Even if you believe we need more scientific breakthroughs, it should be clear that things like robust computer vision are complicated enough that you would want 100s of people working together on the vision pipeline. So, while we are waiting for those “breakthroughs, let’s just get the 100 people together.

A big part of the problem is that C and C++ have not been retired. These languages make it hard for programmers to work together, even if they wanted to. There are all sorts of inefficiencies of time, from learning the archane rules about these ungainly languages (especially C++), to the fact that libraries often use their own utility classes, synchronization primitives, error handling schemes, etc.

It is easier to write a specialized and custom computer vision library in C/C++ than to integrate OpenCV, the most popular free computer vision engine. OpenCV defines an entire world, down to the matrix class so it cannot just plug into whatever code you already have. It takes months to get familiar with everything. Most people just want to work. To facilitate cooperation, I recommend Python. Python is usable by PhDs and 8 year olds and it is a productive, free, reliable and rich language. Linux and Python are a big part of what we need. That gives a huge and growing baseline, but we have to choose to use it.

This is a screenshot of a fluid analysis of an internal combustion engine, and is built using a Python science library known as SciPy that can also do neural networks, and computer vision.

We might come up with a better language one day, but Python is good enough. The problem in software today is not a lack of hardware, or the technical challenge of writing code, it is the social challenge of making sure we are all working together productively. If we fix this, the future will arrive very fast. Another similarity between Wikipedia, free software, and the space elevator, is that all are cheaper than their alternatives.

So given all this technology at our disposal, we should be able to build this elevator in less than 7 years. Few would have predicted that it would take the unpaid volunteers of Wikipedia only 2.5 years to surpass Encyclopedia Britannica. Anything can happen in far less time than we think is possible if everyone steps up today to play their part. The way to be a part of the future is to invent it. We need to focus our scientific and creative energy towards big, shared goals. Wikipedia, as the world’s encyclopedia, is a useful and inspiring tool, and so people have come pouring in.

Future software advancements like cars that drive themselves will trigger a new perspective on whether we can build a space elevator. My backup plan to hitching a ride on the space elevator is to encourage people to build robot-driven cars first. Today, I’m trying the reverse approach.

The way to get help for a project is to create a vision that inspires others, but it would also be helpful if we got ten billion dollars. If the US can afford a $1.4 trillion dollar deficit, we can afford a space elevator.

There are already millions of people working in the free software movement today, so in a sense there already are millions of people working on the space elevator. If we had people with the right skills working, we could start writing the actual software for the space elevator. We could in principle write all of the software for the space elevator, just as Boeing and Ford do, which would further shrink the estimates.

Unfortunately, writing all the software now is theoretically possible but not practical. The problem is that a lot of what we need are device drivers. There are many ways to design the cargo door of the climber, and what the various steps of opening this door are. The software that controls the opening and closing of that door is a device driver, a state machine that coordinates all the littler pieces of hardware. You can even think of mission control as the software that orders all of the hardware pieces around. It is a meta-device-driver, so it can’t be written yet either. So, we are mostly stuck with our attempts to write too much software now, but there are a few things we can do.

We could use hardware designs. The hard part about us talking about a design aspect of a climber at a conference like this is that there is no canonical designs or team. Today, there is much interesting intellectual property locked up besides software.

Free data is also important however. Wikipedia has 2.6M lines of code to edit and display the encyclopedia, but it is gigabytes of data. Different projects have different ratios but software is useless without data. Everything Boeing does is proprietary today. We should fix that for the space elevator to encourage faster progress. If we all agree on free software and formats as baseline, it means people can work together. One big challenge is there is no free Solidworks replacement.

Even today, not everything that Boeing has locked up is innovative and strategic. They use standard military encryption algorithms which are public and free. Much of software is boring infrastructure code.

With free software and free formats, we can most quickly build the space elevator. So while it is bad news is that much of the required software efforts will be device drivers, the good news is that are some little software things we can work on today.

Dave Lang’s work on tethers is very useful, and it could use a team of people to work with him to port it from Fortran to Python. Dave started, but he didn’t know Python and the interop tools well enough to make progress. It would also be nice to get some people with supercomputers analyzing ribbon designs, and ways to bootstrap and repair a ribbon. NASA has people, but they don’t have this as their job.

I am hosting spaceelevatorwiki.com on my server and I plan on handing it over to ISEC, and it could serve as a place to coordinate various kinds of software or other R&D. If we could get some people to work, it would push others to get going. Nobody wants to be the only worker on a project. Even millions of dollars of money can be useful to jumpstart software efforts.

The 1% of the Carbon Nanotubes


Okay, so now on to the carbon nanotubes. This is not my area of expertise so it will be short. I am satisfied to make the case that a space elevator is 99% doable in less than 7 years and leave the resolution of the last 1% for another day. To adapt a line from Thomas Edison: success at building a space elevator is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.

Many futurists believe that nanotechnology is the next big challenge after information technology. When analyzing a system you know how to build, it is best to work top-down. But when trying to do something new, you work your way up. When learning to cook, you start with an egg, not filet mignon. A good way to attack a big problem like nanotechnology is to first attack a small part of it, like carbon nanotubes. A Manhattan Project on general nanotechnology is too big and unfocused of a problem. Protein folding is by itself a Manhattan project!

A carbon nanotube is a simple and useful nanoscale structure and could be a great way to launch atomically precise manufacturing. The ribbon needs some science related to the design of the ribbon, dealing with friction, damage, and decay, but that work can be done today on supercomputers. There are people at NASA that have the expertise and equipment, but they don’t have this as a goal. One of the points Kennedy made is that sending a man to the moon served as a goal to: “organize and measure.”

One concern is that there is a lot of money being spent on nanotube manufacturing research, but it is doled up in amounts of $100K. I am not convinced that such a small investment can bring any major new advancements.

Nanotubes might require the existing industrial expertise of a company like Intel. We all know that NASA has not seriously considered building a space elevator, and similarly, I think that no one at Intel has considered the benefits to creating the world’s best nanotube threads. They already experimenting with nanotubes inside computer chips because metal loses the ability to conduct electricity at very small diameter, but they aren’t producing them as an independent product for purchase now.

Intel is working in the 35 nm scale today which is a long way from the 2nm nanotube scale. But Intel’s only goal today is faster and cheaper. Intel can fit 11 of their Atom processors on the surface area of a penny. Such a powerful processor is small enough for iPhone sized devices, let alone laptops which is their actual market.

Size is just a side-battle in their goals of more speed and lower production cost. So perhaps Intel would build a nanotube fabrication plant that looks nothing like what they are trying to do today:


Intel Itanium Processor

The first nanotube threads will likely not be good enough for the space elevator, but Intel learns how to build a better and smaller chip in the process of designing and building their current chip. So after they build this manufacturing plant, they could sell their product while they build their next one. Who knows how many of these iterations it would take, or ways to speed the progress up.

Brad Edwards tells me that with one-inch fibers, you can spin arbitrarily long carbon nanotube threads, using the textile process we’ve been following for centuries. Carbon nanotube are the simplest interesting nanoscale structure. Carbon nanotubes were discovered in 1991, and growing fibers in an oven and spinning them into threads is something we could have done back then. Companies like Hexcel, one of the world’s leaders in carbon fiber, is afraid to invest in carbon nanotubes even though they are the company in the world closest to being able to produce them. They are afraid of failure. I have discovered in software that it is about constantly adding new features which enable the new scenarios. Software is therefore constantly about generalizing. From where I sit, carbon fiber and carbon nanotubes are nearly the same thing! Even if it required new investments, Hexcel should be able to do it faster, better, and cheaper than anyone else, and they should have the most customers lined up who might want their new product. Hexcel, the company that should be leading in this market, is paralyzed into inaction by fear of failure. There is a moral obligation to innovation.

In conclusion, there is a new generation of kids maturing known as the Millennials. Their perspective is unique because they’ve been using Youtube and Google for as long as they can remember. They expect to get an answer to any question they pose in 100 milliseconds on their phone. The fact that Social Security is bankrupt is not acceptable. E=mc2 is sufficient proof that nuclear power is a good idea. If you tell them you’ve got a 20-year plan, they will reply that you don’t know what you are doing yet, and you need to develop better plans. Waiting 20 years for a space elevator once makes as much sense as waiting 30 minutes at the gas station. And they are right — they don’t need to change their perspective, the rest of us need to change ours.

I’m not a Millennial, I’m a Generation X’er, and we are the ones building it. But I’m a software person. It would require 10,000 of my first computer to have the same capacity as an iPhone. I see today’s hardware as magic, so I believe someone can conjure up high quality nanotube rope if they invested enough resources. It might not be good enough for the elevator, but it could be a revenue-generating business. In Kennedy’s Rice speech, he mentioned that the Apollo program needed “new metal alloys” that hadn’t been invented. He didn’t think it would be a problem back then and we shouldn’t be 100% convinced now either.

The International Space Station is a tin can in space. We can do a lot better. A space elevator is a railway to space. Scramjets, space tethers, rockets, or reusable launch vehicles, none of them are the way. Perhaps the Europeans could build the station at GEO. Russia could build the shuttle craft to move cargo between the space elevator and the moon. The Middle East could provide an electrical grid for the moon. China could take on the problem of cleaning up the orbital space debris and build the first moon base. Africa could design the means to terraform Mars, etc. This could all be done completely in parallel with the space elevator construction. We went to the moon 40 years ago, and the space elevator is our generation’s moon mission. Let’s do as Kennedy exhorted and: “Be bold”.

There are legal issues to consider. But when this project commences, we need to tell the bureaucrats to get out of the way. We should also approach the global warming crowd and tell them that even better than living in rice patties, and driving electric rickshaws, the best way to help comrade mother earth is with a space elevator. Colonizing space will changes man’s perspective. When we feel crammed onto this pale blue dot, we forget that any resource we could possibly want is out there in incomparably big numbers. This simple understanding is a prerequisite for a more optimistic and charitable society, which has characterized eras of great progress.

We have given this program a high national priority — even though I realize that this is in some measure an act of faith and vision, for we do not now know what benefits await us. But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun …, and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out — then we must be bold.

John F Kennedy, 1962

The Lifeboat Foundation has been on to this guy for years.

The overview: “We would like the nuclear terrorist Adnan G. El Shukrijumah to be captured. There is a $5 million reward for assisting in his capture” (https://lifeboat.com/ex/nuclear.terrorist).

Now the AP reports “a suspected al-Qaida operative who lived for more than 15 years in the U.S. has become chief of the terror network’s global operations, the FBI says, marking the first time a leader so intimately familiar with American society has been placed in charge of planning attacks”… that suspected operative? Adnan Shukrijumah.

According to the AP piece, his mother claims that he’s non-violent. If so, that could suggest new directions for al-Qaida; but it seems rather unlikely that al-Qaida will become a charitable NGO if Jose Padilla’s account is to be believed. It’s old news now that Padilla claims to have trained in terrorist tactics using natural gas with Shukrijumah back in the summer of 2001 (http://edition.cnn.com/2004/LAW/06/01/comey.padilla.transcript/).

See also: https://lifeboat.com/ex/nuclear.shield

A. Shukrijumah

[AN INCENTIVE: “You give us Adnan G. El Shukrijumah and in return we will give you rewards. We assure you that all information would be kept secret”, reads a matchbox handed out by the U.S. government, which is offering a $5-million reward. (TARIQ MAHMOOD, AFP/Getty Images)]

Within the next few years, robots will move from the battlefield and the factory into our streets, offices, and homes. What impact will this transformative technology have on personal privacy? I begin to answer this question in a chapter on robots and privacy in the forthcoming book, Robot Ethics: The Ethical and Social Implications of Robotics (Cambridge: MIT Press).

I argue that robots will implicate privacy in at least three ways. First, they will vastly increase our capacity for surveillance. Robots can go places humans cannot go, see things humans cannot see. Recent developments include everything from remote-controlled insects to robots that can soften their bodies to squeeze through small enclosures.

Second, robots may introduce new points of access to historically private spaces such as the home. At least one study has shown that several of today’s commercially available robots can be remotely hacked, granting the attacker access to video and audio of the home. With sufficient process, governments will also be able to access robots connected to the Internet.

There are clearly ways to mitigate these implications. Strict policies could reign in police use of robots for surveillance, for instance; consumer protection laws could require adequate security. But there is a third way robots implicate privacy, related to their social meaning, that is not as readily addressed.

Study after study has shown that we are hardwired to react to anthropomorphic technology such as robots as though a person were actually present. Reports have emerged of soldiers risking their lives on the battlefield to save a robot under enemy fire. No less than people, therefore, the presence of a robot can interrupt solitude—a key value privacy protects. Moreover, the way we interact with these machines will matter as never before. No one much cares about the uses to which we put our car or washing machine. But the record of our interactions with a social machine might contain information that would make a psychotherapist jealous.

My chapter discusses each of these dimensions—surveillance, access, and social meaning—in detail. Yet it only begins a conversation. Robots hold enormous promise and we should encourage their development and adoption. Privacy must be on our minds as we do.