Science Made Cool

Space Prospectors

Crusty old space prospectors mining the asteroid belt for valuable minerals have been a staple of science fiction since the 1930s. In fiction they tended to fit the stereotype of the Klondike Gold Rush veteran: grizzled, fiercely independent, surviving in a patched-up old spaceship while searching for the one big strike that never comes.

Well, the space prospectors are here, and they're considerably more well-groomed. Planetary Resources, Incorporated is hosting a press conference today at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, where they're going to announce a new company which aims to begin mining near-Earth asteroids for valuable minerals within a decade. Among the backers are Microsoft tycoon and space tourist Charles Simonyi, X-Prize founder and serial space entrepreneur Peter Diamandis, space tycoon Eric Anderson, Google moguls Eric Schmidt and Larry Page, Titanic director James Cameron, and a number of other tech bigwigs.

These are serious people with serious money and serious expertise. If they think there's at least a sporting chance of making money on this venture, I'm inclined to belive them.

So does this mean the old science fictional stereotype will come true? Crusty old prospectors cruising the asteroids? Yes: but they'll be crusty old robots, not humans. If they do become ornery and independent-minded, things can get very interesting indeed . . .

Medicine Made Cool

For most of my life, suspended animation has been one of those "someday" developments which are the fodder for pop-science magazine cover stories. Someday humans will visit Mars. Someday we'll have fusion power. Someday we'll have artificial intelligence. Someday . . .

Well, someday may be getting closer, at least as far as suspended animation goes. According to the Arizona Daily Star, Dr. Peter Rhee, at Tucson's University Medical Center, wants to do human trials on suspended animation within a year. The FDA has approved it. He's at the point of getting funding. This isn't "someday," it's "FY 2012" or whatever.

Now, this isn't quite the "human popsicle" suspended animation beloved of science fiction writers. Nobody's talking about long-term suspended animation, at least not yet. What Dr. Rhee wants to do is chill trauma patients down to about 50 degrees to shut down their metabolism almost entirely. Then surgeons can do long and complex operations on the heart or lungs without worrying that the patient's brain is going to die. Apparently he's already done extensive testing on animals.

And for all the hungry grad students trying to figure out how much they'd get paid for letting someone chill them down for a few hours, I've got bad news. Rhee's tests will be at trauma centers, in cases where the procedure might save someone who's pretty much guaranteed to die otherwise.

Suspended animation, or "frozen sleep" or "hypersleep" or "cryosleep" or "low passage" has been a staple of science fiction since before there was "science fiction." Local boy Edward Bellamy used it as a gimmick to get his hero into the year 2000 in his novel Looking Backward, and H.G. Wells pretty much ripped him off entirely in his novel The Sleeper Awakes. In both books, the notion was just a handwave to let a contemporary character visit the distant future. 

Discussions of realistic interstellar travel tend to split into those advocating "generation" starships which would carry an entire self-sustaining biosphere and society for the duration of the voyage, and those which rely on suspended animation to let the passengers snooze away the trip while robots handle the vessel.

Given that Dr. Rhee's work is focused on suspended animation lasting on the order of minutes rather than millennia, I'd say there's still a long way to go. But someday . . .

 

Extinction-Proof

Are humans likely to go extinct? This article from the Daily Mail cites an anthropologist who points out that the invention of agriculture (and, of course, other technologies) have liberated humans from the "natural" risk of extinction that other species face. I tend to agree with this -- humans now live in just about every environment on Earth and our numbers are steadily growing. More people means more brains and hands to deal with problems.

Humanity going extinct is a favorite trope in science fiction, of course. Ever since Mary Shelley's The Last Man, we've been fascinated with the image of a lone survivor wandering through the ruins of human civilization. Disease is a favorite because it leaves behind plenty of infrastructure.

Nuclear war is another favorite, of course. The Mail article makes extensive reference to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the famous "Doomsday Clock" on the cover, which has been close to midnight for half a century now. Frankly, the Clock never scared me much. It was always so blatantly political. The "Atomic Scientists"* moved the Clock to just seconds before Doomsday when Ronald Reagan became President -- yet Reagan is widely credited with ending the Cold War and reducing the threat of nuclear conflict. But the Bulletin's editors didn't vote for him, so therefore he was a menace to our survival.

The only way I can really imagine to make humanity extinct would be to make the whole Earth uninhabitable. That would require massive and intentional effort. (Any kind of deadly pollution or "environmental destruction" would only go on until the population dropped too low to make the activity causing the damage to stop being cost-effective.) Overpopulation, more or less by definition, can't make us extinct.

As I mentioned, I've always been skeptical about humans actually going extinct . . . so long as we don't want to. But demographics tell an interesting tale. The world's richest countries have zero or even negative population growth. Humanity may not go extinct, but Spaniards, Japanese, or Russians might. And someday, if even the poorest yam farmer in New Guinea enjoys the material comforts of a modern American, will the entire human race start to dwindle? How far does that process go -- does it bottom out at some point as the people inclined to put careers or self-gratification ahead of raising families drop out of the population? Will there always be some pool of fecund Noble Savages to fill the gap?

And there's another possibility, once pure science fiction but now well within the realm of the possible. We are steadily working on building machines as smart as we are. Even if humans go extinct through ennui, we may leave behind a successor species, which would preserve some portion of how we think and what we've created.

*The founding editor was a botanist, and the current editor is a public-policy professor. But all scientists are made of atoms.

 

Digging Deep

Humans have explored other planets and looked at distant galaxies, but we still know very little about the planet under our feet. Most of what we know about the Earth's structure and composition is based on the study of how earthquake waves are refracted as they pass through the planet's interior. The fact that it's made of rock and iron does make it hard to have a look at the inside.

Until now, direct study of the Earth's interior has been limited to the crust, but a pair of geologists have proposed drilling down to the Mohorovicic Discontinuity, which marks the boundary between crust and mantle. They wrote about it in Nature, but since that's hidden behind a subscription wall, you can read a news article about it instead.

If it works, let's hope it doesn't produce the same effect as this earlier attempt.

The actual drilling would pass through five or six kilometers of crust, but would have to be done at a place where the crust is thinnest -- a deep ocean trench where nature has already done most of the work. The deepest artificial hole is in Russia, at the Kola Superdeep Borehole. They went down twelve kilometers, but since the operation was on land, it only got part of the way through the crust (and not into Hell, as reported). Drilling at sea means less rock, but the operation is limited by the size of the available drill ships. The hope is that the research ship Chikyu can handle the job.

 

Some Grains of Salt For a Halophile

The geekosphere has been buzzing over yesterday's announcement from NASA about the discovery of arsenic-based life. Specifically, a species of single-celled archaean living in hyper-salty, hyper-alkaline, arsenic-laced Mono Lake in California can actually use arsenic instead of phosphorus in its biological processes. If you Google it, there are already thousands of articles talking about how this dramatically expands the possibilities for life beyond Earth. In other words, we have an example of Life Not As We Know It.

Right?

Well . . . no.

The Importance of Being Wrong

Yesterday was Columbus Day. I've written about Christopher Columbus before, pointing out what a great sailor he was, and what a lousy geographer.

But, of course, if he hadn't been a lousy geographer, he wouldn't have had much chance to show off his superb seamanship with an Atlantic crossing. Perhaps he could have taken service with the Portugese and gotten to sail around Africa to India the proper way, but even that epic voyage would have been mostly coastal sailing.

And if he hadn't been a lousy geographer it would have been decades -- or centuries -- before Europeans blundered into the New World. Maybe the Spanish fishermen who (possibly) knew about the Grand Banks fisheries would have eventually ventured a bit more westward and cruised down the coast of North America, setting up fishing bases at Cape Cod and Chesapeake Bay. Maybe a Portugese ship bound for India could have been blown off course and touched at Brazil, leading to voyages along the coastline to Panama.

A later and more incremental discovery of the Americas would dramatically alter history. Portugal would set the pattern of European contact with other civilizations, rather than Spain: traders, not conquerors.

The Aztec and Inca cultures might have endured better, especially if they could weather the epidemics resulting from contact with Europeans without also having to face them militarily. Their trajectory might resemble Asian cultures -- lots of Westernization, possibly even Christian conversion, but their languages, sciences, and literature would survive. (Of course, the prospect of an Aztec empire surviving into the modern day with all their charming religious customs intact does give one pause . . . )

But all this didn't happen, because Columbus was wrong. Being wrong sometimes is the way to make big discoveries. I'd be happy to be as wrong as Columbus.

Just Another Cyborg Day

Throughout the month of September, Tim Maly of Quiet Babylon has been posting cyborg-themed articles to honor the 50^th anniversary of the first use of the term. I’m reading them with a fair bit of interest: ever since I got my own machine part, I’ve been asking people what they think about the future of cybernetics. One thing I’ve learned – most people think cyborg parts will make you a better ass-kicking machine.

I don’t buy it. I’ve talked to folks who think that someday people will voluntarily chop off their legs to replace them with better, stronger, computer-driven mechanical appendages. None of them can really answer my question: Why should they? Yes, some people do things just ‘because it's cool.’ But if they really want to run 70 miles per hour, they could forgo the surgery and just buy a motorcycle.

I’ve also talked to people – let’s call them cyborg purists – who think that if there’s no feedback loop, it’s not a cyborg. To these people devices like my insulin pump, no matter how high tech, aren’t real cyborg parts because they can’t sense changes in their environment and respond appropriately. But a lot of prosthetics don’t need active feedback systems – some of the newest artificial legs work by passively storing and rereleasing elastic energy at each step. And machines can improve: last year I “upgraded” my pump system by adding a continuous glucose monitor (CGM). The two machines don’t talk to each other – they’re not even made by the same company, but the CGM gives me a constant stream of blood sugar readings, and I can use the data to make more informed decisions about what my insulin pump is doing. In short, it’s a feedback system, which I guess makes me even more cyborgy now. But it still requires a lot of attention.

“Yeah, sure” you say. “How much work could that possibly be?” Let me show you, as I go through

ONE CYBORG DAY

MIDNIGHT: I fold the last pile of laundry and (finally) get into bed. I plug in my CGM receiver to recharge overnight – it reads 135 mg/dl: a little higher than normal for a non-diabetic, but still in my target range. It’s safe to sleep.

4:30 AM: My turn to get up in the middle of the night to walk the puppy. I check the CGM before I stagger downstairs – it’s reading 132 and the trend line is flat, which means I’ve been pretty stable while sleeping. That’s good news: one bad dream can send my blood sugar raging toward maple syrup territory.

Birds of a Feather

Hive minds are a staple of science fiction, going back to Olaf Stapledon's Martians, if not earlier. In mid-century they became a powerful metaphor for the way oppressive societies like Communism and Fascism subsume an individual's identity. Unfortunately, this led to a tendency to map hive minds onto real-world totalitarian systems, with a charismatic leader at the top and ruthless enforcers oppressing the masses. T.H. White did this wonderfully in The Sword in the Stone, when Merlyn magically sends the young Arthur to visit an ant colony in order to learn firsthand what it's like to be the victim of an oppressive system.

But that ignores what makes hive minds so interesting. In reality, the "mind" of an ant colony or a flock of birds doesn't reside in the Queen, or some Head Bird. Instead it's an emergent property of the group, just as human intelligence is an emergent property of our billions of neurons. There's no "seat of intelligence" in our brain (Descartes thought it might be the pineal gland). A Phineas Gage can get big holes blown through his head and remain functional because intelligence is distributed across the entire brain.

A pair of researchers in Hungary have analyzed bird flocking behavior, using tools for modeling the motion of particles. They found that the flock as an entity can switch from flying to sitting on the ground much more quickly than simply a random group of birds would as individuals. In other words, the flock decides to land as a unit, even though the birds which make up the flock are just following some fairly simple behavioral rules about maintaining safe distance from each other, staying in the flock, and so on.

This has its parallel in human societies, too -- a modern market economy is an "emergent property" of billions of individuals pursuing fairly simple, personal goals. There's no master mind controlling the Invisible Hand, yet a market economy is much more efficient than directed ones. Far from being a metaphor for totalitarianism, a hive mind can show the power of individual freedom.

Sail Away

It appears solar sailing is finally making the change from blue-sky speculation to a working technology. The idea isn't new, of course -- the theory dates back to the Russian physicist Pyotr Lebedev before the First World War. In the early 1960s solar sails were all over science fiction stories for a time, and I suspect many of the scientists and engineers working on real-life sail projects got their first exposure to the idea from stories by Arthur C. Clarke or Jack Vance.

The Japanese space agency has scored the first major success with their IKAROS project (bonus points for a nifty acronym), which is going through in orbit before trucking off to Venus.

After a failed start, NASA is getting back in the game with the Nanosail-D project, a small-scale solar sail designed to test how you deploy and control something big and flimsy in space.

It all brings to mind Tennyson's poem "Locksley Hall," in which the narrator has a vision of the future and

"Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales . . . "

The Annual Pilgrimage

Once again, our own Jim Cambias (who feels rather odd writing about himself in the third person) will be a guest at Readercon. Readercon has been running since 1989, and in that time has earned a reputation as a top-notch conference on the literary side of fantastic fiction. If you want to dress up like a Klingon or swap bootleg Indonesian vampire film cassettes, you'll be disappointed at Readercon. But if you want to talk about writing and writers, this is your Mecca. Come to Burlington, Mass., and prostrate yourself toward the glory that is Readercon.

And if you want to throw a few genuflections at JLC, here's his schedule:

Friday 3:00 PM:  Reading (30 min.)
"How Seosiris Lost The Favor of the King."  A new fantasy short story about an Egyptian wizard and a troublesome foreign sorcerer.

Friday 6:00 PM: Workshop (60 min.)
Brainstorming Inclusive Immersive Worlds.  A workshop on creating an imaginary world with realistic social divisions.

Saturday 12:00 Noon:  Talk / Discussion (60 min.)
Travel Literature.  James L. Cambias, Michael Dirda, Debra Doyle, Fred Lerner (L), Howard Waldrop.  Panel discussion on the connection between travel writing and SF/Fantasy.

Saturday 2:00 PM: Talk / Discussion (60 min.)
Great War Geeks Unite.  Victoria Janssen with discussion by Leah Bobet, James L. Cambias, Don D'Ammassa, Debra Doyle, Walter H. Hunt, Barbara Krasnoff, Barry B. Longyear, Alison Sinclair, Howard Waldrop, Paul Witcover.  Panel discussion about World War I in SF and fantasy, along with grumbling about why it's so neglected.

Sunday 2:00 PM: Talk / Discussion (60 min.)
The Appeal of Lovecraft.  Mike Allen with discussion by James L. Cambias, Michael Cisco, Amanda Downum, Theodora Goss, Donald G. Keller, John Langan, Faye Ringel, Diane Weinstein.  Why H.P. Lovecraft is so popular even though he's so flawed.

UPDATE:  All of this wonderful Cambias activity starts this Friday, July 9 at Readercon in Burlington, MA.