A Bit More Detail

Ryan Davidson, over at Law and the Multiverse, has an essay analyzing the Avengers‘ S.H.I.E.L.D.

He comes to the conclusion that, as depicted, makes most sense to see the organization as an American one with token representation from allies.

On balance, from a legal perspective and making allowances for artistic license, it would be better if S.H.I.E.L.D. were an American organization. Movies pretty consistently ignore what would be acts of war in the real world, even in non-speculative/comic book political and military thrillers. So if we give them a pass on that bit, the way S.H.I.E.L.D. acts a lot of the time really looks like a domestic military force. There’s still a problem though, given that The Council does appear to have members from multiple nations, but there might actually be a way of fixing that. There isn’t actually any obvious reason the U.S. couldn’t start a military force completely under domestic authority but, in a spirit of international cooperation, permit representatives from select foreign nations to participate in its operations. Given that S.H.I.E.L.D. is involved in some pretty hairy and advanced weapons R&D, this might actually be a decent way of convincing our allies to support the project, as they could exercise some control over the organization, trying to keep it focused on extra-terrestrial threats. This is, of course, not discussed in the movie at all, but there isn’t any obvious reason it couldn’t work.

Livejournaler dewline has posted on the nature of S.H.I.E.L.D., the paramilitary agency of great power in the Avengers universe that’s of uncertain constitutional status. He favours the idea of the agency as a paramilitary first-response team.

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.

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.

io9 has featured an interesting book excerpt, “Straight, Gay, or Binary?: HAL Comes Out of the Cybernetic Closet”, taken from one Mark Dery‘s latest book. In it, Dery argues that the figure of HAL, the artificial intelligence from 2001 and sequels, is marked by a certain queerness notwithstanding the repression of sexuality in Clarke’s book and Kubrick’s movie, indeed because of this repression.

In the movie, the few female characters who flit through the novel have lost even their chauvinist, neo-colonial charm: Clarke’s “charming little stewardess” from the “largely unspoiled” island of Bali, who entertains Dr. Floyd with some zero-gravity dance steps during his flight to the moon, is reimagined by Kubrick as a weirdly sexless creature in a white uniform and bulbous cap that gives her a distinctly brachycephalic look, somewhere between an overgrown fungal spore and one of the walking, talking sperm in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex by Woody Allen.

Still, the repressed has a nasty way of returning. If HAL could cry digital tears, as the AI theorist Rosalind Picard speculates in Hal’s Legacy: 2001′s Computer as Dream and Reality, wouldn’t he also be capable of sexual arousal? Although her inquiry into machine emotion leads her to conclude that “emotion appears to be a necessary component of intelligent, friendly computers like HAL,” noting that “too little emotion wreaks havoc on reasoning,” Picard gives love a wide berth (many researchers don’t consider it a “basic” emotion, she says) and studiously avoids any mention of sexual desire, save for a passing remark about the slipperiness of a concept like “lust.”

This is a notable sin of omission, since the question is less laughable than it sounds. Turing believed that a true thinking machine would be a feeling machine, too—a computer with a sex drive as well as a hard drive. In a 1951 radio broadcast, he epater’d the bourgeoisie by declaring that a machine that thinks would be capable of being “influenced by sex appeal.” It seems only likely that an ultra-intelligent computer like HAL would, as Sir Geoffrey Jefferson put it in a lecture Turing was fond of quoting, “be warmed by flattery, be made miserable by its mistakes, [and] be charmed by sex.”

As for the question of HAL’s sexual preference, it seems significant, somehow, that the modern chapter of cybernetic smartness—Turing’s 1950 essay, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”—opens with a tongue-in-cheek bit of gender-bending, dreamed up by a gay man. Although the scenario commonly known as the Turing Test is usually envisioned as a human interrogator in a room with two terminals, one connected to a computer, the other to a human, attempting to determine by sending and receiving messages which of the unseen conversationalists is a machine, Turing’s original “imitation game” involved an isolated interrogator trying to decide, through written communications, which of two people in another room was male and which was female. Intriguingly, the woman is instructed to tell the truth and the man to lie, which means that he has to engage in a sort of electronic transvestism, or MorFing, as on-line crossdressing is known (“MorF” = “Male or Female”).

Turing writes, “We now ask the question, ‘What will happen when a machine takes the part of [the man] in this game?,” reformulating the question of gender identity as one of machine intelligence. As the cultural critic Hillel Schwartz points out in The Culture of the Copy, “Turing reframed the debate about the limits of mechanism in terms of the limits of our ability to see through social simulation. Without surgery but from close-up, onstage or at a party, a woman can pass as a man, a man as a woman. What we think we know about maleness and femaleness is a social knowledge.” And so, by extension, is what we think we know about human intelligence or, alternatively, hetero- and homosexuality.

Is HAL queer? As Dery suggests, his tone of voice and choice of language is suspicious, as is the stridently and entirely male environment in the halls of the military and academia where HAL grew up, and his multi-year mission on the spacecraft Discovery with its all-male crew. And, well, there’s the music:

When Dave unplugs HAL’s brain, the computer’s swan song is easily the movie’s most powerfully affecting moment (and a close second, for Wagnerian romanticism, to the dying android’s soliloquy in Blade Runner). In Hal’s Legacy, Clarke recalls, “In the early 1960s at Bell Laboratories I had heard a recording of an Iliac computer singing ‘Bicycle Built for Two.’ I thought it would be good for the death scene—especially the slowing down of the words at the end.” If we presume HAL’s homosexuality, however, the song begins to sound like a deathbed confession of star-crossed love.

I’d made note myself back in 2005 of the queerness of Arthur C. Clarke’s fictional universes expressed via lacuna, in the description of heterosexual relationships that take place outside the scope of the book or don’t take place at all (the homosexual relationships that actually are explicitly described play a secondary role in this case, and are not themselves necessarily diagnostic of anything).

I really quite like seeing Clarke’s impressive body of work be explicitly reclaimed in a queer context; I like the recuperation, or perhaps reconstruction, of themes which could have been/should have been explicit yet are easily recovered.

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”.

This article on the dire economy of Panem, the far-future North American state of The Hunger Games trilogy, was written by one Kevin Baier, writer for the student paper of St. Mary’s College in Maryland (The Point News). Without giving away any spoilers, I can say that he has got the political economy of Panem down but good.

The President and senior government officials of Panem must have slept through ECON 101 back in their heyday at District 13 University (or maybe they were too busy rebelling). Minus The Capitol, Districts 1 through 12 have to suffer through the awfulness of pre-industrial agrarian economies. Many economists estimate that the GDP per capita of Districts 1 through 12 is a measly one loaf of bread, a two pound bag of berries, and one haunch of squirrel meat (approximately $7) whereas the GDP per capita in The Capitol is three supersonic trains and one eccentric wardrobe (approximately $36 million). Whereas The Capitol is home to approximately eight million people, all 12 districts house the other 300 million Panemians. Some welfare economists estimate the gini coefficient of Panem to be approximately .992.

The economic structure of Panem creates a net loss of human capital each year as some of the countries brightest and innovative entrepreneurs are forced to kill each other. Even human capital superstars like Katniss Everdeen are used inefficiently as her labor specialization lies far away from coal-mining, the main economic activity of her district (12). The Capitol has removed virtually all capital and labor incentives and has suspended all investment and capital flows to the outlying 12 districts. In District 12, for example, The Capitol has forced a labor intensive coal-mining operation where historical economic records note that before the rebellion District 12 grew at an average rate of six percent thanks to its capital intensive economy. The few Capitol scholars who say more than “punishment for the rebellion” when asked about District growth rates said District 12 is one of its more promising cases, growing at -26 percent every year.

Eventually, the inefficient allocation of resources to labor-intensive operations will skyrocket costs so the high the CBO estimates that Panem’s unemployment rate will increase from 35 percent to 62 percent. Real wages have been so depressed for years that consumption and savings levels are at historic Panem lows. Because the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) is approximately one, the citizens of Districts 1 through 12 have fallen into the “poverty trap.” With such low levels of consumption and savings, and subsequently output, the tax base will shrink incredibly. This shrinkage will force The Capitol to dramatically increase marginal tax rates for its citizens from zero percent to 91 percent, a level not seen since the Kennedy administration, which will eventually cause severe contractions of capital, investment, and labor because of the low-value of work and the high level of leisure. The inevitable substitution effect will eventually cause The Capitol to resemble something like a Hooverville.

Savage Minds’ Rex reviews The Captains, a 2011 documentary film by William Shatner wherein the actor most famous for his portryal of Captain James T. Kirk interviews the five other actors playing Captains in the Star Trek universe. His review of the film, informed by Rex’s own knowledge ethnographic practice, makes me curious as to whether I should actually try to find a copy.

Things get interesting quickly because it becomes obvious that the subject of the documentary is not the interviewees but the interviewer: Shattner’s real intention is clearly to make a documentary about himself and the long road he’s trod in life, and particularly to let the entire world know that he was once a classical thespian in the mould of Olivier and Gieldgud. The other major theme is how ennobled and wise he has become being forced to carry the entire weight of the Star Trek franchise on his back across the course of his career.

As a result the show focuses prominently on the fact that the other captains also started out in theater, mostly so Shattner can ask tell them about his time treading the boards. He asks them how Star Trek has changed them, so he can tell them how it has changed him. He asks them their views on life after death and the nature of infinity so that he can brood over his inevitable mortality. It is, in short, a clinic on how not to interview people, with special focus on the preoccupied and narcissistic interviewer. Absolutely fascinating to watch.

Actually, at times, the movie is almost unwatchable — most notably when Shattner asks Kate Mulgrew how women can realistically expect to be considered for leadership positions given the fact that they menstruate. But a lot of the time Shattner gets it right: his interviewees are seasoned respondents, indeed they are people whose lives importantly revolve around talking over and over again about their experience on Star Trek. As a result, it is very easy for them to slip into well-established stories and self narrations. But Shattner doesn’t give in, ‘probing’ (as we say in the business) for real answers in a way that is both boorish, but often get results.

Normally, of course, you can’t expect to get much fieldwork done when you ask blunt questions about people’s divorces or act like a raging misogynist. But it is the wider psychodrama of these interviews that is so interesting: clearly, each of the people interviewed pretty much had no choice but to participate. I’m not sure why, but I have this strange sense that in the world of Trek when Bill wants to make a documentary about the captains, you pretty much have to talk to him. As a result, the interviews have a strong flavor about them of captive respondents doing their best to contain the interviewer, knowing that their throw-away 90 minute meeting will eventually appear on the big screen and, like what they had for breakfast, be canonized in the Trekverse forever. Talk about prolepsis.

And contain him they do, largely because each of the people being interviewed are obviously amazing. Especially — and I don’t mean to be cruel here, but it’s true — especially when compared to Shatter. I had never watched Voyager before, but I was simply amazed by Kate Mulgrew’s charisma, articulateness, and intelligence as she attempts to deal with Shattner at what is probably his worst. Although perhaps that award goes to the interview with Avery Brooks, who when not being a star fleet officer is apparently a combination of Miles Davis, Paul Robeson, and Wittgenstein. Brooks is so gnomic that it is difficult to say, but he appears to be a total genius and also the only respondent who really seems to be trying to teach Shattner, to draw him out of himself. But what we get instead is a bizarre improvised jazz crooning session between the two of them reminiscent of the beatnik scenes that appeared in sixties surf films.

What say you all?

• 80 Beats reports that NASA’s Mercury probe Messenger has determined that the innermost planet in our solar system is almost entirely solid iron, with a much thinner mantle and crust than had been believed before.
• Centauri Dreams describes how self-replicating probes might set up–might already have set up?–an interstellar communications network, slowly spreading out from a point.
• Daniel Drezner makes the point that books claiming to trace the origins of economic prosperity in certain policies can’t be overly reductive–how did North Korea keep up economically with South Korea until the mid-1970s, for instance?
• Extraordinary Observation’s Rob Pitingolo is unimpressed by playwright/performer Mike Daisey’s claims that, notwithstanding actual errors of facts and near-certain lies on his part in his piece on workers issues at an Apple manufacturer’s plant in China, he speaks to a deeper truth.
• Geocurrents reports on conflicted responses to immigrant childrearing practices in Norway and Argentina’s Tierra del Fuego electronics manufacturing industry.
• Language Hat reports that defenders of Chomsky’s theory of language are responding to anthropologist Dan Everett’s apparent disproof of Chomsky’s thesis with the language of the Piraha by getting him banned and calling him a racist. Not cool.
• Steve Munro links to and summarizes a recent city report making the case for light rail in Scarborough, as opposed to subway extension.
• Torontoist points out that Rob Ford’s call for a referendum on subway construction was legally ill-founded and near-pointless.
• Towleroad links to a neat video on life on the isolated South Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha.