Monthly Archives: June 2005

Welcome to the Future!!!

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Are you ready for the future? Are you sure? And more importantly, is the future ready for you?

We’re so glad to have you here. You’ve landed on an archive page, so if you want to see what we’ve been up to lately, click here. For a quick dose of good news, visit out sister blog, L2si, where we feature dispatches from a rapidly changing, rapidly improving world. Or you can go here to see what’s happening with both blogs and find links to our podcasts.

So please, make yourselves at home. Have a look around. We’re glad to see you!

Canine Cryonics

Looking back over The Speculist, I was surprised to find that we haven’t written much about cryonics (Phil has mentioned it in passing). The whole subject has been on ice, so to speak. What’s there to say? You freeze people (not really), and wait around for nanotech or whatever to come to the rescue. No Alcor clients have been successfully revived (yet), so it’s considered the last hope of terminally ill rich people.

This is the view, at least, of the general public.

Actually there is plenty to say about cryonics. But cryonics will never gain mainstream medical acceptance until it can be developed into a provable treatment – perhaps as a short-term therapy for serious emergencies.

US scientists have succeeded in reviving dogs after three hours of clinical death, paving the way for trials on humans within years.

Pittsburgh’s Safar Centre for Resuscitation Research has developed a technique in which subject’s veins are drained of blood and filled with an ice-cold salt solution.

The animals are considered scientifically dead, as they stop breathing and have no heartbeat or brain activity.

But three hours later, their blood is replaced and the zombie dogs are brought back to life with an electric shock.

Zombie dogs? Not really. These revived dogs have no brain damage. They don’t seem to be craving brains either.

“It’s so unfair and so bizarre,” [said Dr. Patrick Kochanek, the director of the Safar Center for Resuscitation Research]. “Somebody must have thought the title ‘zombie dog’ would be a catchy phrase. Obviously they were right, but obviously that is the farthest thing from what we are doing, which is trying to save lives.”

The process involves replacing the blood with a saline solution that’s just a few degrees above freezing. This quickly chills the body to 7 degrees Celsius (44 degrees F). The cold temperature postpones tissue deterioration, but it is also important that the dogs aren’t frozen. Freezing (unlike vitrification) damages tissues.

The dogs are brought back by returning blood to their bodies, administering 100% oxygen, and restarting their hearts with electrical defibrillation.

Because this involves temperatures above 0 Celsius, this might be considered something less than full cryonics. But whatever it’s called, this therapy could give doctors sufficient time to save many people. EMT’s or battlefield medics could stabilize people that would be considered dead and gone today.

As this therapy becomes a standard medical procedure, doctors might reconsider the entire field of cryonics. If tissues can be perfectly preserved without freezing, why shouldn’t we try to save terminally ill patients with cryonics?

I told Phil recently that uploading my mind to a computer is my least favorite path to immortality. Being cryo-preserved before it’s proved to work is my next least favorite. It’s the sort of thing that’s done only when all other options are gone. But for those who are at that point, why not?

FastForward Radio, Episode 3

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FastForward Radio is back and is sporting some new features – better sound quality and same-page streaming.

In this episode Phil and Stephen discuss Napster, Geocaching, Cosmos 1, and Humvee Roombas. Don’t miss it.


Or, download the MP3.

UPDATE: If you would like to subscribe to the Fast Forward Radio podcast, copy the following URL into your podcast receiver program:

http://stephentg.audioblog.com/rss/fforward.xml

Click here to find a podcast receiver program.

Episode hyperlinks below…

A Roomba With A View

Roomba hacking sounds promising, but THIS seems a little extreme doesn’t it?

The iRobot company is opening the Roomba’s robotic vacuum to third part developers.

In early July the company will post instructions for controlling its Roomba vacuum cleaner via the built-in serial port, so programmers can modify it however they want — from equipping it with a camera to, yes, adding an arm and training it to retrieve brewskis. iRobot hopes the move will foster the development of Roomba accessories — like the ecosystem of add-ons that has sprung up around the iPod — thus driving sales.

Others are already contemplating using the Roomba as a sort of robotic security camera – allowing you to control a mobile home camera from a webpage.

This is just in time for the third generation Roombas that will be released later this summer.

Carnival of Tomorrow 5.0

Time travel is one of our favorite topics here at the Speculist. Whenever we take a moment to reflect on what might be or what might have been, we journey through time, if only in our imaginations. That’s a good start, but of course it isn’t enough.

What we really want is time travel of the practical variety. Some kind of do-it-yourself approach.

However, we have to watch out for shoddy substitutes that the unscrupulous will try to pass off to the unsuspecting:

Napolean Dynomyte Time Machine.jpgUncle Rico: Kip, I reckon… you know a lot about… cyberspace? You ever come across anything… like time travel?

Kip: Easy, I’ve already looked into it for myself.

Uncle Rico: Right on… right on.

…

Kip: So are you ready?

Napoleon: Yeah. Hold on. I forgot to put in the crystals. OK, turn it on. Ow! Ow! Ow! Kill it! Turn it off! Turn it off Kip! It’s a piece of crap! It doesn’t work!

Uncle Rico: I coulda told ya that.

Don’t let that happen to you. If you want to travel to the future, right now the only way to get there is to live to see it. But it’s definitely going to be worth the trip.

Here are some previews of what you’ll find when you arrive.

On our list of favorite accessory items of the future, solar-sail-spacecraft would have to be right up there with time machines. Emily Lakdawalla has been dutifully reporting the ups and downs of the launch of Cosmos 1, the first space vehicle ever to be powered by solar sail. The story ends on a poignant note:

With failure of Cosmos 1 virtually certain, the team members that have been staffing Project Operations Pasadena have elected to return to their homes. Thanks to the Internet, if our spacecraft miraculously reappears, each of us will still be able to keep watch over the mission from our individual remote locations. Greg returns to Berkeley, Jim and Brent to Utah, and Paul to his usual life at the Jet Propulsion Lab, just up the valley from Pasadena. Lou will be returning from Moscow in a couple of days. I took off for home a couple of hours ago in order to begin to catch up on sleep.

The team may be scattering, but it’s not over. The search for the spacecraft continues. The search continues in the present, as several observatories have offered to try to look for a signal from the spacecraft. (If you, too, have a spare observatory, feel free to search at a frequency of 401.5275 Hz, but I am afraid that I can’t offer any advice on where to point your antenna.) The search also continues into the past, as Strategic Command is working through its “unknown objects bucket” (as Jim called it this morning) to find where the spacecraft and its launch vehicle ended up.

Too bad. Even if they never find Cosmos (and it hardly seems possible that they will) we can hope that the investigation reveals what went wrong and that we’re better prepared next time.

Some say it’s our mortality that makes us human. Reason from Fight Aging! counters that it’s our mortality that makes us dead.

Want a smart baby? Eat fish. But go easy on the mercury. FuturePundit explains.

Curmudgeons Corner has the scoop on an intriguing scenario (one we’ve explored here recently): the moon as the Persian Gulf of the future.

Hmmmmm…

Well, if that’s the case, maybe this isn’t such a hot idea after all.

Rand Simberg directs us to an article about anti-hurricane technology. Sounds like a good idea.

In the future, we won’t have time for lengthy IQ tests. (We aren’t sure precisely why this is the case, but work with us, here.) Eric of Eric’s Grumbles Before the Grave directs us to a “quick and dirty” IQ Test. Can you guess which member of the Speculist team’s results are shown below?

Your IQ Is 135

Your Logical Intelligence is Genius

Your Verbal Intelligence is Genius

Your Mathematical Intelligence is Genius

Your General Knowledge is Exceptional

W.E.C.: Obviously, this is Phil — seeing as his general knowledge is only “exceptional.”

Allow me to present my card:

coyote.gif

Chris Phoenix of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology has some thoughts on the new roadmaps for nanotechnology recently published by the Foresight Nanotech Institute.

Speaking of nanotechnology, Howard Lovy has taken a hiatus from his nanobot site while he continues his job hunt. Here’s hoping it’s a short hiatus.

Best wishes, Howard.

Meanwhile, let’s get a six degrees of separation thing going, here. If you need the services of the USA’s leading nanotechnology journalist, the “the best documentor of the nanotech political scene” (per this impeccable source), then you need to get in touch with Howard.

Moreover, if you know someone who needs such services

Or if you know someone who knows someone who does

Or if you know someone who knows someone who knows someone who does…

Etc.

Then you know what to do, right?

Virginia Postrel on the relationship between technology, science, and art:

The burgeoning demand for aesthetic expertise overturns the cultural assumptions we’ve inherited from the romantics, who opposed art to technology and feeling to rationality; from the modernists, who treated ornament as crime and commerce as corruption; and from the efficiency experts, who equated function with value and variety with waste. In the age of look and feel, technology and art cooperate

Oh, yeah. She has pictures to back it up, too.

Paul Hsieh directs us to an article on the amazing Japanese plans to build a full-scale lunar colony where all the colonists are robots. Diana Mertz Hsieh of Noodlefood comments:

Overlord master robots, I hope? I mean, if it’s not with overlord master robots, it’s not worth doing…

We couldn’t agree more. We offer a hearty welcome to our new lunar robotic overlords.

robot.jpgSpeaking of Robotic overlords, Project Nothing! points us to this article about real-life Robocops in Japan.

Equipped with a camera and sensors, the “Guardrobo D1,” developed by Japanese security firm Sohgo Security Services Co., is designed to patrol along pre-programmed paths and keep an eye out for signs of trouble.

The 109-cm tall robot will alert human guards via radio and by sending camera footage if it detects intruders, fires, or even water leaks.

This is less an issue of taking human jobs than filling jobs that there are insufficient people around to do. Read the whole thing.

Apparently we weren’t the only ones inspired by the latest Batman movie. For all of you who would like to be a super-hero in the future, the Winds of Change points to a must-read Forbes article on the cost of Being Batman.

In our Forbes Fictional Fifteen, we estimated [Bruce Wayne's] net worth at $6.3 billion. If he were a real guy, he’d be the 28th richest person in America, right behind News Corp.’s (nyse: NWS – news – people ) Rupert Murdoch…

But you don’t have to be a billionaire to become a caped crusader. Using commercially available training, technology and domestic help, the average guy could conceivably equip himself to become a real-world superhero, provided he’s got at least a couple million to spare.

And we thought they had no fun over at Forbes.

Want to participate in the next edition of the Carnival of Tomorrow? Just write to us:

mrstg87 {@ symbol} yahoo {dot} com or
bowermaster {@ symbol} gmail {dot} com

Don’t forget to check out the all-new (and unplugged) edition of FastForward Radio.

See you in the future!

Fast Forward Unplugged

You’ve waited for it, and now it’s here. The second edition of Fast Forward Radio. Only this time…it’s live.

Well, sort of. Anyway, check it out. Stephen and Phil sounding off on Batman, De-Industrialization, Fab Labs, Google’s Legal Problems, and Personality Uploading.

What are you waiting for? Give it a listen!

UPDATE! If you listened to the show yesterday and wondered why you couldn’t hear Stephen and why Phil was talking over him, check out the remixed version (also linked above). The problems are fixed.

Left clicking streams the audio to you. If you right-click you can choose “Save Target As…” or the “Save Link As…” option to download the MP3.

Key Fab

Last week my wife came home excited about the key machine at our local Wal-Mart. “This thing makes practically perfect copies because its computer controlled.” Sure enough, the three keys we had made for our van all worked perfectly. Having had limited success with keys made by hand, I took note and decided this is how I’ll have keys made from now on.

So when my mother asked about getting some keys made, I directed her to Wal-Mart and told her why. “It’s all done by computer, Mom, there’s little chance of human error creeping in.”

This morning, I got a call from my mother, “I asked for the computer-controlled key machine and they laughed at me.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Let me call you right back.” I called my wife and confirmed that I had sent my mother to the right store.

Then I called my mother back; “You have the key machine operator there?”

“Yes.”

pr-key-machines-cutting-machines-luna-2000-dm326.jpg“Could you put him on the phone?”

“O.K.”

“Hello?” It was the key machine operator.

“I need to ask you about your key machine. Do you have to hand-grind the keys?”

“No, it’s all automatic. I put the key and the blank in one side and it spits out the copied key on the other. This lady was asking if it was computer controlled. There’s no computer screen or anything.”

“Thank you. Let me visit again with my mother.”

“Hello.”

“Mom, you’ve got the right store and the right machine. Give your key to that clerk and he’ll stick it in the automatic key machine that’s controlled by the magical Wal-Mart pixies.”

“Heh.”

I swear to Glenn she actually said “heh.”

Anyway, it just goes to show that computers really are disappearing into everyday machines (to the point that even the operators may not know they are present). AND simple, specialized computer controlled fabrication is already here and doing jobs too mundane to make headlines.

More Places to Look

In this artist’s conception, a Neptune-sized gas giant orbits M-dwarf star Gliese 436 Credit: NASA/G. Bacon. This star is similar in size to Gliese 876 where a newly discovered rocky planet was found in a close orbit.

Last February Phil wrote about the discovery of a brown dwarf solar system. The article Phil referenced added this tidbit:

What is more, these would-be planets could be habitable. The surface temperature of the mini brown dwarf is about 2000°C, which means that any planet 1.5 to 7 million kilometres away could maintain liquid water. The disc probably straddles this range.

Mention of a habitable zone around brown dwarves led to a discussion within the comments on tidal lock. Briefly, tidal lock is the tendency of two close celestial objects to always present the same face to one another. The Moon, for example, presents only one face to the Earth. The thought has been that any body close enough to a small star to have liquid water would tend to be tidally locked to that small star – one side burnt, the other rare. Obviously, that would not be conducive to life.

But now the SETI folks are reevaluating the possibility of habitable planets around small stars.

With the recent announcement of a planet seven to eight times the Earth’s mass circling an M dwarf star, the chances for habitable worlds seem greater than ever. “It may well be that there are far more habitable planets orbiting M dwarfs than orbiting all other types of stars combined,” explained Frank Drake, the Director of the SETI Institute’s Center for the Study of Life in the Universe.

And the problem with tidal lock?

M stars have historically been considered unsuitable for SETI observations. The “Goldilocks” analogy suggested that planets whose temperature was “just right” for life would orbit so close to their star that they would be tidally locked… These stars also flare, producing X and UV radiation that will challenge any life on the surface…

“Simple theory said that terrestrial planets in orbit around M stars will be uninhabitable, and uninhabited,” explained Jill Tarter, Director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute. “But we are not confined to simple theory any more. Recent models predict sustainable atmospheres and substellar liquid water regimes,” she said. “A growing appreciation for natural sun screens that developed early in the evolution of life on Earth, and a speculation that niche sterilizing events might actually speed evolution towards complex life, make M stars worth considering once again…”

Hmmm. I’m wondering whether this will move the Foresight Exchange.

i-gl876bc.jpg

Gliese 876

De-Industrialization

factory.bmpGlenn Reynolds’s latest TCS column is a quick recap of the history of human civilization. He starts out by describing the lives of our remote ancestors, some 10,000 years ago:

What material possessions exist are homemade, except for a very small amount of stuff purchased from itinerant traders carrying a few rare luxuries. Children aren’t sent off to school, but hang around the adults as they go about the business of the day. A few activities, like big-game hunting, are off-limits to the kids, but in general they grow up quickly, and are a part of what goes on.

Breezing through several millenia of agriculture, empires, and industrialization, Glenn demonstrates how radically human societal structures have been altered by technology:

Big organizations doing big things: It’s the story of the 19th and 20th Centuries. In fact, it was so much the theme of those centuries that it’s easy to forget what a departure this was from the rest of human history. But it was a huge departure, brought about by the confluence of some unusual technological and social developments.

And it was a mixed bag. On the one hand, it made people in industrialized countries a lot richer. On the other hand, it created a lot of social strain, as traditional ways of living were disrupted by the new ways of doing business.

Parents and children were separated. Husbands and wives were separated. “Work” became something separate from the rest of life, and itself became different. An old-style blacksmith made a plowshare or a sword from beginning to end. A worker in Adam Smith’s needle factory, or Henry Ford’s automobile factory, performed a single repetitive task with no real connection, emotional or intellectual, to the overall product.

Then, of course, along comes the information revolution and Moore’s Law. When the tiny microchip replaces the massive deisel engine as the driver of economic growth, vast organizational structures start to look…well, if not obsolete, maybe a little superfluous.

Years ago, just when desktop publishing was becoming huge, I worked for a software company that sold a typographical and page layout system. One of our favorite marketing tag lines was a quote (variously attributed to Ben Franklin, W. R. Hearst, and others):

“The power of the press belongs to those who own one.”

This quote has since taken on new meaning in the age of blogs. After 20 years or so, it’s easy to forget that a small revolution in its own right occured when, all of a sudden, virtually anyone anywhere could produce typeset copy. If you wanted to be a publisher, all you needed was a computer, a laser printer, and access to a photocopier. Publishing, or at least a good-sized piece of it, was de-industrialized. That is to say, the big industrial components that only a big company could afford to purchase, house, and operate — in this case, a linotype machine and an offset press — were made optional.

Over the past two decades, de-industrialization has emerged in many other areas. The recording industry has been massively de-industrialized. The equipment for making a musical recording has been simplified, but that’s nothing compared to the change in infrastructure used to distribute a recording. We no longer need factories to press vinyl records; at this point, even burning CDs is starting to seem kind of quaint and clunky. Likewise, in his TCS piece, Glenn talks about how someone with a digital camera, an internet connection, and some good software can do things the big three networks couldn’t even imagine doing back in the 60′s.

But de-industrialization is not limited to publishing and other communications technology. As Glenn mentions in his column (and as Stephen has written about extensively here and here and lots of other places) the end of industrialization as we know it comes when individuals can produce their own goods, and possibly even the energy to produce those goods, on their own. The industrial revolution came about in the first place because bigger was better: a factory was far more efficient at producing widgets than a single skilled widgetman. With fab technology, that will no longer necessarily be the case. The desktop fabricator won’t be specialized to produce one particular thing (or kind of thing) and it is no more or less efficient if it produces one or a thousand units.

As Glenn correctly points out, de-industrialization will not completely undo industrial society. There will still be large corporations and government entities; many of us will continue to live “standardized” lives, with sharp distinctions between the home and the office, recreation and work, career and family, etc. But as these distinctions are increasingly seen as optional — as is already the case for many who now work from home, their employers having partially de-industrialized the notion of “workplace” — human society will begin to evolve into something new.

To be sure, these new ways of organizing oursleves will have some things in common with our remote past that industrial society did not. Easing the distinction between workplace and home sounds nice; easing the distinction between work and play sounds fantastic. But we aren’t moving back to the hunter-gatherer days, or to any model we can easily identify. De-industrial society will be as much as a surprise to us (or our descendants) as industrial society was to the descendants of our agrarian ancestors.