A Bit More Detail

What Andrew Barton said at Acts of Minor Treason. Building fiction universes which make sense, and which–when they diverge from the world we know–do so in ways that are readily comprehensible, is something that’s not only important for science fiction, either. Plausible characters and settings and plots count everywhere.

Sometimes it’s difficult to really wrap one’s head about why this is important. Recently I came across an article on Gizmodo regarding the Pentagon’s withdrawal of support from the movie The Avengers. As author Spencer Ackerman put it, their reason was that “the Defense Department didn’t think a movie about superheroes, Norse Gods and intergalactic invasions was sufficiently realistic in its treatment of military bureaucracy.” Presumably, the implied conclusion we’re supposed to draw is that this is ridiculous, hair-splitting stuff, and that the Pentagon is just being a bunch of jerks who want to cramp the movie’s style.

You know what, though? The military is right. According to the Defense Department, their main problem is that they couldn’t figure out where the US military stood in relation to S.H.I.E.L.D., which Wikipedia describes as an “espionage and secret military law-enforcement agency,” which really narrows it down – and, hell, I imagine it’s easy as hell to maintain secrecy over something like a giant flying aircraft carrier. S.H.I.E.L.D. has, from what I understand, been the subject of fan debates over just what it is for a good chunk of the last fifty years.

Answering questions like this is important. They define what you can and cannot do in a story, and as such reduce the unmanageability of everything being possible into more restricted channels that can guide the flow of a narrative. Something that is shadowy, nebulous, and ill-defined even to the people writing it does not lend itself well to the best writing. Creators need to know how their creations work, even if that information never filters down to the audience.

James Warner’s Open Democracy essay “Government Violence, Human Nature, and The Hunger Games” is an essay that takes a look at American writer Suzanne Collins’ trilogy The Hunger Games and Koushun Takami’s 1999 Battle Royale. These two stories feature children set against each other by their governments, forced to fight to the death for their societies’ edification. Warner contens that the brutal conflicts in these two novels reflect a more optimistic view of the human condition than one might find in the earlier Lord of the Flies, say; the earlier novel presumes that bloody conflict is inevitable, while the contemporary novels see conflict as a consequence of decisions made by more powerful outsiders.

In William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies, a group of boys on an island revert to a “state of nature” in the absence of adult supervision. The book is set during, and is on some level about, World War Two, in which Golding served as a Naval officer – but despite the murderous nature of some key governments in that conflict, the point of Lord of the Flies is that the violence ultimately lies within us. Golding wrote of the ending of the novel, “The officer, having interrupted a man-hunt, prepares to take the children off the island in a cruiser which will presently be hunting its enemy in the same implacable way. And who will rescue the adult and his cruiser?”

Neither The Hunger Games nor Battle Royale bother with the ominous landscape descriptions Golding gives us in Lord of the Flies, partly because for Takami and Collins the evil is not in our nature, but in our government. For the same reason, few of the contestants in these books succumb to delirium as the boys in Lord of the Flies do – with only a few exceptions, they handle their predicament as rationally as if they were competing in a video game. One sense in which Lord of the Flies may be the darkest of these books, despite its comparatively modest death toll – only two murders – is that so many of its characters go mad. Even Ralph, the most clear-headed survivor in Lord of the Flies, keeps forgetting the boys’ long-term goal is to be rescued rather than to thrive as savages, and by the end all the other boys are united in trying to kill Ralph — whereas Katniss in The Hunger Games and Shuya in Battle Royale succeed against the odds in maintaining healthy alliances and remaining focused on a strategy, and only a few minor characters in those worlds go insane.

Moreover when a character in Battle Royale behaves evilly, Takami always supplies an explanation – this boy was born a sociopath, this girl was abused, most of the kids are just scared to trust each other in case they’re taken advantage of – evil is not seen as humanity’s default setting as it is in Lord of the Flies. The Hunger Games is less explicit on this ethical question, but the guiding principle of the series seems to be that people are good until power corrupts them. Both Takami and Collins portray the adult world as one of brutal conflict whose rules frustrate our normal instinct to cooperate. For Ralph, after he’s been hunted, wildness loses its attraction, but Katniss draws power from nature – hunting in the woods is how she becomes resourceful enough to stand up to authority, and it’s significant that even the harmful creatures she encounters there are not naturally occurring species, but mutations artificially engineered by her government.

I blogged at the end of March about the apparent birth, in Chicago’s Fermilab, of the first generation of neutrino communications systems. I shared the speculation at the time that communications systems using neutrinos, those elementary particles which travel at the speed of light and hardly intersect matter at all, would be useful in communications with space probes and submarines, i.e. vehicles out of communication for long periods of time because conventional electromagnetic communications systems are blocked by massive quantities of matter. (Oceans, say, or planets.) Now, io9 notes that neutrino communications systems might be useful for stock trading.

Neutrinos may not travel faster than light, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be put to good use. By sending encoded pulses of neutrinos on a 10,000 km shortcut directly through the Earth, financial firms and high-frequency trading companies think they can get a 44-millisecond communication advantage over their competitors.

That might not sound like much of an edge, but in a world where hundreds of millions of dollars change virtual hands in just fractions of a second, even milliseconds become significant.

“Thirty milliseconds is a lot of time in high-velocity trading,” explains former J.P. Morgan Chase options trader Espen Gaarder Haug in an interview with Forbes Magazine.

According to Haug, cities with the greatest distance between them would stand to gain the biggest time boost. Communication between New York and Tokyo would see a 23.7 millisecond time advantage; communications between London and Sydney would see almost double that.

Of course, financial institutions still need the infrastructure to make this all happen, which would basically require a particle accelerator beneath any firm that wanted in on the latest, greatest trading trend. And while that’s not likely to happen anytime soon, something tells us that as soon as one of these firms takes the plunge on neutrino-communication, the rest of them are liable to follow suit.

Over at his blog Infinite Recursion, my old friend Stephen DeGrace wrote a blog post with the above title.

Stephen’s point still stands in the context of Planetary Resources’ announcement, would still stand if it succeeded in its goal of mining asteroids for platinum-group metals. Planetary Resources’ plan wouldn’t involve shipping humans into Earth orbit by the thousands to mine asteroids, but would instead depend on robots. If the robotic asteroid mines were successful, perhaps helping humanity meet its necessary task of producing enough energy to run a high-tech civilization cleanly enough to avoid deterraforming the only world capable of supporting non-trivial numbers of human beings, then manned space travel and even colonization might be viable in the long term. Might. For the time being, getting started on viable robotic asteroid mines is challenge enough.

(Incidentally, after I linked to Stephen’s post on Facebook an extensive discussion got started. The comments are worth reading.)

I feel like manned space travel, especially travel to other planets, is a kind of revenge-of-the-nerds wish fulfillment for many of its proponents. Don’t worry if those ignorant yobs destroy the Earth. They deserve what they get. We will build a new society elsewhere that will be better without their ignorance.

The less negative type of argument is that life on Earth is finite. Since life on Earth will come to an end, humanity will come to an end unless we colonize other worlds. I’m slightly sympathetic to that argument over the very long term, say on a scale of millennia, but over a timescale that matters to any of us, this argument is meaningless.

Note that I am at pains to say manned space flight. I think scientific curiosity is a good enough reason to continue to send unmanned probes into space.

[. . .]

First of all, it is incredibly expensive. Trillions of dollars expensive for major colonization projects. This will represent a significant diversion of resources away from other priorities – it’s not trivial.

Secondly, everywhere in space is very hostile. To put it in perspective, the Antarctic ice cap is a friendly environment compared to anywhere off-Earth in the solar system. Antarctica has water and oxygen, considered major problems to be solved in other settlement schemes, so it already has a leg up. Build thriving cities in Antarctica before you talk to me about the moon.

Thirdly, I am happy to go out on a limb and say that I predict the central speed limit problem of space travel will never go away, i.e., nothing can travel faster than light and we will never find a way around that. So in terms of other solar systems, we would have to put together a mission on a wing and a prayer based on data from automated probes sent to random-ish star systems, with a cycle time of years.

Finally, due to the expense and technical challenges, space travel will never be a mass activity, and any escape hatch into space will be so for only a tiny and privileged few.

No corporation is ever likely to have the resources to do all this, SpaceX notwithstanding, without significant public help. So what, the take-home message is that taxpayers should fund this giant technological whack-off fantasy to the tune of trillions of dollars that will never help most of them in any way out of a nebulous sense of ideological accomplishment in getting some human genes into space? Personally, this is not something I can support.

[. . .]

Space travel was a product of the era of cheap and plentiful energy, which is drawing to a close. Luxuries like space depend on cheap energy, and so to does the ability to feed seven billion people. I think that that latter problem is just slightly more urgent.

Cheap, clean and renewable energy is an absolute prerequisite for humans to have a future more than a generation or two into the future with anything remotely like the lifestyle we want to enjoy and with anything like our present population (i.e., without a massive die-off). Being a humanitarian rather than an environmentalist, this is a vision that I have to endorse. If this problem is solved, then stupid fripperies like space are on the table, but otherwise, space is a waste of valuable time and energy.

Planetary Resources’ announced plan to start evaluating near-Earth asteroids for possible mining is awesome.

Andrew Barton is right: this sort of thing does feel very futuristic.

Can asteroid mining be done safely, in an economic manner? We’ll find out soon enough, I hope. If you could make robotic mining of near-Earth asteroids a viable enterprise in my lifetime, I’d be happy.

A group of wealthy, adventurous entrepreneurs will announce on Apr. 24 a new venture called Planetary Resources, Inc., which plans to send swarms of robots to space to scout asteroids for precious metals and set up mines to bring resources back to Earth, in the process adding trillions of dollars to the global GDP, helping ensure humanity’s prosperity and paving the way for the human settlement of space.

“The resources of Earth pale in comparison to the wealth of the solar system,” said Eric Anderson, who founded the commercial space tourism company Space Adventures, and is co-founder of a new company along with Peter Diamandis, who started the X Prize foundation, which offers prize-based incentives for advanced technology development.

Nearly 9,000 asteroids larger than 150 feet in diameter orbit near the Earth. Some could contain as much platinum as is mined in an entire year on Earth, making them potentially worth several billion dollars each. The right kinds of investment could reap huge rewards for those willing to take the risk.

[. . .]

Despite the promise of astronomical profits, the long time-scales and uncertain return on asteroid mining has historically driven most investors away from such undertakings. But the new company is also backed by a number of other billionaire luminaries, including Google’s CEO Larry Page and executive chairman Eric Schmidt, former Microsoft chief architect Charles Simonyi, and Ross Perot Jr. The venture also counts on filmmaker James Cameron, former astronaut Tom Jones, former JPL engineer Chris Lewicki, and planetary scientist Sara Seager as advisers.

Still, this new undertaking will be much larger and more ambitious than anything Anderson and Diamandis have attempted before. The hurdles are many and high. While the endeavor is technically feasible, the technology has not yet been developed. And beyond their initial steps, the details of Planetary Resources’ plans remain scarce.

[. . .]

In terms of extraction, Planetary Resources hopes to go after the platinum-group metals — which include platinum, palladium, osmium, and iridium — highly valuable commodities used in medical devices, renewable energy products, catalytic converters, and potentially in automotive fuel cells.

Platinum alone is worth around $23,000 a pound — nearly the same as gold. Mining the top few feet of a single modestly sized, half-mile-diameter asteroid could yield around 130 tons of platinum, worth roughly $6 billion.

Within the next 18 to 24 months, Planetary Resources hopes to launch between two and five space-based telescopes at an estimated cost of a few million dollars each that will identify potentially valuable asteroids. Other than their size and orbit, little detailed information is available about the current catalog of near-Earth asteroids. Planetary Resources’ Arkyd-101 Space Telescopes will figure out whether any are worth the trouble of resource extraction.

• Anders Sandberg at Andart approves of entrepreneur Elon Musk’s desire to use space travel to create offworld backups for our biosphere.
• Burgh Diaspora’s Jim Russell believes that the close links between Brazil and Boston–driven by migration, at first strictly economic but then driven by interest in Massachusetts’ education institutes–could serve Boston quite well.
• Two links from Centauri Dreams today, one describing the planetary system of HD 10180, a Sun-like star that supports nine planets to our eight, and the other describing hypothetical laser-based defenses for starships against interstellar dust.
• At Extraordinary Observations, Rob Pitingolo describes the difficulties tourism planners in destination cities have with getting people to visit sites that aren’t the most heavily trafficked.
• Geocurrents’ Asya Pereltsvaig deflates the myth that Chinese men (lacking spouses owing to a male-biased sex ratio at birth) will flood into Russia (especially Siberia) looking for Russian women (lacking spouses owing to a high male death rate). Among other things, there actually isn’t much of a shortage of theoretically marriageable men in Siberia.
• The Global Sociology Blog discusses what happens when celebrity culture and social networking sites like Twitter insect. The answer? It’s easier to get social capital than ever before.
• At GNXP, Razib Khan notes that Argentina–unlike English-speaking countries also products of mass European immigration–still evidences the genetic trace of indigenous populations.
• Open the Future’s Jamais Cascio points out that, at long last, global climate change is kicking off (as expected as early as 1981).
• Registan features a guest post from Uzbekistan commentator Azamat Seitov, who discusses the possibility that the Eurasian Economic Community–a Russia-centered bloc also including Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan–will take off. He’s skeptical.

It’s not often that I see megascale engineering projects like–say–the disassembly of the planet Mercury into a Dyson sphere–appear on my RSS feed, but appear it did via three posts: Alex Knapp’s “Destroying Mercury To Build A Dyson Sphere Is A Bad Idea”, following up with “‘I emailed Astronomer Phil Plait’ now officially a red flag”, and Knapp following up with “A Few More Notes On The Impracticality Of Building A Dyson Sphere”.

Both authors were reacting to a post by George Dvorsky, “How to build a Dyson sphere in five (relatively) easy steps”, which argued that it would be possible to start taking Mercury apart in just a couple of generations (an upper limit of fifty years was mentioned).

Let’s build a Dyson sphere! By enveloping the sun with a massive array of solar panels, humanity would graduate to a Type 2 Kardashev civilization capable of utilizing nearly 100% of the sun’s energy output.

A Dyson sphere would provide us with more energy than we would ever know what to do with while dramatically increasing our living space. Given that our resources here on Earth are starting to dwindle, and combined with the problem of increasing demand for more energy and living space, this would seem to a good long-term plan for our species.

Towards the end, Dvorsky even suggests dissassembling the other planets of the solar system, to maximize the energy collected.

[W]hy go all the way? Well, it’s very possible that our appetite for computational power will become quite insatiable. It’s hard to predict what a post-Singularity or post-biological civilization would do with so much computation power. Some ideas include ancestor simulations, or even creating virtual universes within universes. In addition, an advanced civilization may simply want to create as many positive individual experiences as possible (a kind of utilitarian imperative). Regardless, digital existence appears to be in our future, so computation will eventually become our most valuable and sought after resource.

That said, whether we build a small array or one that envelopes the entire sun, it seems clear that the idea of constructing a Dyson sphere should no longer be relegated to science fiction or our dreams of the deep future. Like other speculative projects, like the space elevator or terraforming Mars, we should seriously consider putting this alongside our other near-term plans for space exploration and work.

And given the progressively worsening condition of Earth and our ever-growing demand for living space and resources, we may have no other choice.

The thing is, the resource shortages that are likely to be experienced are so trivial relative to the energy and resources that would be produced by a Mercury disassembled into energy collectors–and trivial relative to all of the dfferent resources required to develop the technology base capable of disassembling Mercury into energy collectors–that the overshoot is ludicrous. Knapp and Nicoll identify any number of failings, including the immense cost in resources necessary, the need to develop autonomous mining technologies capable of disassembling an entire planet in reasonable time, the question of what to do with the leftover debris of the planet and how, the problems involved with transmitting the produced energy to Earth (including the certainty that if the energy from the sphere was all transmitted to Earth the planet would superheat to a degree that would make Venus look clement), and, as Nicoll pointed out, the problems involved with unleashing self-replicating technology of such power: “[P]roposing we can do this any time soon is silly but yes, given improbable technology taking Mercury apart with solar energy might be doable in a surprisingly short time from first self-replicating machine lands on Mercury to final human tracked down in their Kuiper Belt bolt-hole and processed for raw materials for the Things the Replicators on Mercury Evolved into Thanks to Imperfect but Insanely Rapid Replication and Natural Selection”.

• Andrew Barton at Acts of Minor Treason despairs on the occasion of Earth Hour. Broader recognition of the critical problems facing the environment of Earth is so badly needed.
• Bruce Sterling quotes at length from Michel de Montaigne, pioneering essayist and critical futurist.
• At Crasstalk, LaZiguezon describes, in pictures and words, five haunting abandoned places: a mine in California’s Death Valley, Cyprus’ abandoned international airport, and more.
• The Everyday Sociology Blog’s Janis Prince Inniss comments on the way that the Trayvon Martin shooting case in Florida is polarizing people into two audiences, once seeing his shooter as an inveterate racist and the other blaming the victim. Intermediate situations are possible: class might be more of a factor than race, for instance.
• Eastern approaches notes that after having been stripped of his doctorate for plagiarism, Hungarian president Pál Schmitt has resigned.
• Geocurrents notes South Korea’s significant presence in post-Communist Central Asia.
• The Language Log’s Victor Mair calls for the use of more pinyin in Chinese classes to help boost education.
• At the Naked Anthropology, Laura Agustín comments on the recent ruling on prostitution in Ontario, noting that the ban on public solicitation hits relatively disadvantaged prostitutes worse than their more advantaged peers who can better take advantage of the new liberalization.
• Registan is unimpressed by Mitt Romney’s identification of Russia as the United States’ main enemy.
• Yorkshire ranter Alex Harrowell notes that great efforts are being made to keep new Chinese soldiers depoliticized.

I’ve a post up at Demography Matters that lays out the possibility of a sudden political transition in China and wonders what impact it would have on demographic trends there.

Ideas, anyone?

“Clarke’s fourth law” is the name of Gerry Canavan’s post linking to the blog Next Nature’s post “Any Sufficiently Advanced Civilization is Indistinguishable from Nature”. In the titles of their posts, the two blogs are referring to Clarke’s three laws.

1.When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Next Nature suggests–briefly–that as human technology advances it will stop being a force distinguishable from and opposed to nature, but will instead make use of nature’s techniques and environments in more harmonious ways.

Western cultures, nature is a cosmological, primal ordering force and a terrestrial condition that exists in the absence of human beings. Both meanings are freely implied in everyday conversation. We distinguish ourselves from the natural world by manipulating our environment through technology. In What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly proposes that technology behaves as a form of meta-nature, which has greater potential for cultural change than the evolutionary powers of the organic world alone.

With the advent of ‘living technologies’, which possess some of the properties of living systems but are not ‘truly’ alive, a new understanding of our relationship to the natural and designed world is imminent. This change in perspective is encapsulated in Koert Van Mensvoort’s term ‘next nature’, which implies thinking ‘ecologically’, rather than ‘mechanically’. The implications of next nature are profound, and will shape our appreciation of humanity and influence the world around us.

The Universe of Things, by the British science fiction writer Gwyneth Jones (2010) takes the idea of an ecological existence to its logical extreme. She examines an alien civilization whose technology is intrinsically alive. Tools are extrusions of the alien’s own biology and extend into their surroundings through a wet, chemical network.

The idea of existing in a vibrant, organic habitat is an increasingly realistic prospect as living technologies are now being designed to counter the ravages of global industrialization. These can even be implemented at a citywide scale. For example, Arup’s Songdo International Business District, in South Korea, is being built on 1,500 acres of land reclaimed from the Yellow Sea. Incorporating rainwater irrigation and a seawater canal, this design suggests that the building industry is aspiring to use living technologies to revitalize urban environments via geoengineering. The Korean artist Do Ho Suh had proposed to build a bridge that connects his homes in Seoul and New York by harnessing natural forces and using synthetic biologies to literally ‘grow’ a trans-Pacific bridge.

The apparent science fictional nature of ecological-scale projects has prompted science fiction author Karl Schroeder to observe that the large-scale harnessing of ecologies might explain our current lack of success in encountering advanced alien civilizations. Schroeder explains the Fermi Paradox – the apparent contradiction between the likelihood that extraterrestrial civilizations exist and the lack of evidence for them – by speculating that we have not yet encountered our cosmic neighbors because they are indistinguishable from their native ecology.

This imagining of a technology that surpasses our crude mechanisms to make use of the dynamics of life itself is common, for which see the organic technologytof Babylon 5‘s Vorlons and Shadows, or of 2300AD‘s Pentapods.

My quibbling with the paradigm of superior organic technology is, firstly, that ecologies are dynamic systems which can be shaped profoundly by the actions of component species and the nature of their changing environments, and secondly, that the organic/technological distinction is increasingly arbitrary. Do living cells already make use of nanotechnology, for instance, with their chemical solvents and autonomous mechanisms? Isn’t nanotechnology being shaped by models from the living world? Also, are we at all justified in making any claims about the nature of galactic ecologies, inasmuch as we’re only beginning to detect planets and their environments and developing informed speculations about non-Earth environments and ecologies? Why wouldn’t disequilibria of some scale be present in any ecology, inasmuch as even virgin ecosystems see shifting imbalances of predator and prey? Et cetera.

What say you?