The modern future: brain prostheses

See MIT's Technology Review: Brain Coprocessors.

Now, this has some disturbing aspects, I won't deny -- particularly if you couple it with some of the latest schemes coming out of DARPA. But the fact is that we're already well along the path toward the integration of organic and mechanical, as we learn to attach devices to nerve endings, provide paraplegics with exoskeletons, and so forth -- and so far, no Borg-like "assimilation" seems imminent.

What's intriguing about the idea of a brain prosthesis is just the way it refocuses what's been happening for some time now anyway, with the Internet in general, Google in particular -- something foreseen perhaps in the title of Vannevar Bush's famous and prescient essay 60 some years ago: "As We May Think". Consider, for example, how we do think now when we're trying to remember something -- we know we know it, we just don't have it, and we typically perform a kind of algorithmic search of our memory's contents by riffling through as many associations with "it" as we can think of, hoping that this will flush out other associations, one of which will be the "it" we're looking for. And now consider how quickly we -- or at least I -- resort to Google to do much the same process for us, whenever we're at a keyboard -- typing in some random associations with a term or concept we're looking for, and letting Google flush out the thing itself, which it so often does with an ease and accuracy that we can't match. We don't need brain-reading helmets, in other words, to experience this extension of memory into the cloud of the global network. And when you think, too, of how we're not only internalizing that cloud, we're also externalizing more and more of our selves -- our memories, thoughts, wants, dreams, activities, etc. -- in the burgeoning social networks of blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc., then it becomes apparent we're already engaged in a cultural process that is tending to blur the boundaries between self and environment, mental and physical, internal and external worlds.

It took a while for people to become reconciled to the idea that human beings were just another species of animal. But ever since Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, at least, and from Metropolis to the Terminator flics, we've been culturally haunted by a fear of the machine vs. the human. Ironic if we're now being gradually forced to the conclusion that that distinction too is dissolving. This post on "explanatory models" has more.

Time to boldly go ...

... to, you know, where no one has gone before. Space, dummy. The Final Frontier.

So says Stephen Hawking, at least: "'We have made remarkable progress in the last 100 years but if we want to continue beyond the next 100 years our future is in space.'" I concur, as Bart would say. Quite apart from the sort of cosmic safety concerns that Hawking raises, there is the simple fact that we cannot grow indefinitely if we remain bound to Earth. And without growth, this is not a civilization that will simply stagnate (much less settle into some bucolic steady-state) -- it will tear itself apart in a zero-sum war of all against all.

So with that in mind, some links pertaining:

• Al Globus' plan to colonize space through government sponsored prizes, "A U.S. Space Program for Space Settlement":

"Imagine a space program based on a vision of settlement, rather than exploration. A vision of billions of people living in hundreds of thousands of orbital colonies serenely orbiting Earth, the planets and our Sun. The current vision is about putting small numbers of people very far away entirely at government expense. Space settlement is about putting very large numbers of people in space primarily at their own expense, and making sure it’s nice enough that they stay and raise the kids. While the current exploration vision is expected to cost about $100 billion up to the first visit to the Moon, the settlement vision is many orders of magnitude more expensive, making government funding impossible. But government can play crucial role. Specifically, perhaps we could use something close to the current NASA budget to stimulate much larger private investments. In this vision, government funds are devoted to prizes, test facilities and technology development, along with NASA’s traditional science and aeronautic activities. Operations are left to the private sector."

• Reaction Engines Ltd., a UK firm, with their sleek Skylon Single Stage to Orbit spaceplane as the working basis for a mission to Mars. Here's their "Troy Mars Mission" page, and here's an animated presentation.

• Before this, of course, there was Zubrin's "Mars Direct" (modified to "Mars Semi-Direct"). But much more to the point is the Buzz Aldrin endorsed "Mars to Stay" proposal -- in his words:

"In recent years my philosophy on colonizing Mars has evolved. I now believe that human visitors to the Red Planet should commit to staying there permanently. One-way tickets to Mars will make the missions technically easier and less expensive and get us there sooner. More importantly, they will ensure that our Martian outpost steadily grows as more homesteaders arrive.

Instead of explorers, one-way Mars travelers will be 21st-century pilgrims, pioneering a new way of life. It will take a special kind of person. Instead of the traditional pilot/ scientist/engineer, Martian homesteaders will be selected more for their personalities—flexible, inventive and determined in the face of unpredictability. In short, survivors.

But for this dream to happen, NASA needs to dramatically change its ways. Its myopic Vision for Space Exploration will never get us to Mars. Progressive innovation and enlightened international cooperation will. President Obama and Congress need to set NASA right—and soon.

There, I've said it. No regrets this time."

"Climate change" 3 - a solution?

In the first post in this series, I talked about the radical uncertainty, as well as the futility, involved in any serious effort, over the course of many decades, through any and all economic upheavals, and even as most of the world's people are still industrializing, to suppress global carbon emissions to some early 20th century level. In the second post, I talked about how the irrationality of current political moves in this direction might be better understood as the result, not of science, but of a kind of pseudo-science used to cover a quasi-religious belief system. You can see this manifested in the moralistic, even messianic terms so often used to talk about everything from "wasteful lifestyles" (SUVs being a particularly despised symbol) to "saving the planet".  Now, the adherents of such a belief system, particularly given its pseudo-scientific cover, will of course disagree that there's anything irrational about their fervent backing of carbon emission reduction schemes and will insist that they're really just concerned with the potentially disastrous, or at least very costly, effects of AGW. But the test of this is their reaction to alternative possibilities for atmospheric CO2 reduction, an obvious one being direct carbon extraction, as in the Scientific American article cited previously ("Washing Carbon out of the Air", June/10). Such projects typically involve some sort of sequestration of the carbon extracted. But another, and much better possibility, if economically feasible, would be to use the carbon to produce transportation fuel again -- no longer "fossil" fuel now, but re-cycled fuel. And that, as I understand it, is just what a new carbon extraction technology called "STEP" claims to offer -- see "Solar-powered process could decrease carbon dioxide to pre-industrial levels in 10 years":

By showing how to take advantage of both the sun’s heat and light for capturing and splitting carbon dioxide, the STEP process is fundamentally capable of converting more solar energy than either photovoltaic or solar thermal processes alone. The experiments in this study showed that the technique could capture carbon dioxide and convert it into carbon with a solar efficiency from 34% to 50%, depending on the thermal component. While carbon could be stored, the production of carbon monoxide could later be used to synthesize jet, kerosene, and diesel fuels, with the help of hydrogen generated by STEP water splitting.

“We are exploring the STEP generation of synthetic jet fuel and synthetic diesel,” Licht said, “and in addition to carbon capture, we are developing STEP processes to generate the staples predicted in our original theory, such as a variety of metals and bleach."

No doubt there are a lot of problems to be solved yet, and a serious decrease in atmospheric CO2 would in any case be a costly project even if and when they're solved.  But for eco-True Believers, a process like this isn't even a potential solution but a threat, since it seems like it would take away the biggest opportunity they've yet seen to have a serious impact on "wasteful lifestyles", "the consumer society", etc. -- why, SUVs might proliferate like rabbits! So there's the test: if you think there's a rational basis to be concerned about carbon emissions -- and I do, for example -- then a process such as this and/or other extraction possibilities both known or yet to be developed should give you serious hope. If, on the other hand, your real concern is this quasi-religious moralizing about waste, and the concomitant desire to impose a personal ethos on everyone (everyone else, as a rule, as we can see from Al Gore's mansion), then you'll want to give serious effort to finding ways to debunk and otherwise undermine such a hope.

Mars IS the answer!

Now, okay, maybe the sing-song sounds a little funny at first, and the refrain gets a bit repetitive toward the end, but I still think this is inspiring:



(Notice the blue sunset at the 22 second mark? We're not in Kansas.)

A quick point: eco-people have been predicting dire events -- global catastrophe, apocalypse, etc. -- since at least Malthus (an early Greenie?), and have been proven wrong time after time after time. Hasn't stopped them from continuing to generate their "scary scenarios", and of course there's always a market for that sort of "End is Nigh!" sandwich-board advertising anyway. But it has at least helped many people see their proselytizing for what it is.

They do, though, have one ultimate point that rests on logic, not events: you cannot grow indefinitely given a finite resource. Mars -- and space generally -- is the logical answer to that logical point.

(The emphasis in the post's title, by the way, is just a result of a bumper sticker I remember seeing a while back, that had some allusion to the "limits to growth" and the line "Mars is not the answer". )

Tip to Speculist

TED talks - life, the universe, and everything

I love these things -- they're short, crisp, visual, always stimulating, occasionally stunning.

For example, here's a quick tour of the cosmos as it's known circa 2010:



Go back to the opening, and imagine what a cosmic tour might have looked like five centuries back, say, at the time of the "voyages of discovery"....

Or, for a little future shock, Oryx and Crake style, here's some research into living architecture:



Notice that at least they tittered nervously when he mentioned sphincters for doors.

And here's an oldie but goodie -- Hans Rosling's demolition of the myths of global development, using "the best stats you've ever seen" (or maybe never seen):

Geeks's rapture: the movie

A review of what seems like a kind of docu-drama based on Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near (h/t Instapundit). What's intriguing is the description of the character of "Ramona", who begins as a crude construction in Second Life, but ends as something else altogether:

Could such a simple construct of vocabulary and interaction cues really evolve into a thinking and feeling person? The answer is...maybe. Maybe Ramona can one day become like us.

But the movie doesn't end there. It ends with Ramona, speaking to us from the future she has helped to create, inviting us to hang in there long enough so that we might live to join her in that world. So the question then is flipped: can we someday become like Ramona?

Halfway to anywhere

A space elevator in 7 years?

h/t Instapundit