Monthly Archives: August 2005

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The Imminent Arrival of the Space Elevator

If you haven’t already read the IEEE Spectrum article on Space Elevators that Glenn Reynolds has linked to twice (at Instapundit and now at Tech Central Station), you really need to.

In the article author Bradley Carl Edwards describes (with some nifty pictures) the process of building a Space Elevator in the near future – perhaps within 15 years. This guy is no idle dreamer. Edwards received a grant from NASA in 2000 to study the concept.

First, Edwards explains why we should build it:

It all boils down to dollars and cents, of course. It now costs about US $20 000 per kilogram to put objects into orbit. Contrast that rate with the results of a study I recently performed for NASA, which concluded that a single space elevator could reduce the cost of orbiting payloads to a remarkably low $200 a kilogram and that multiple elevators could ultimately push costs down below $10 a kilogram.

Let me make this personal. A kilogram is 2.2 pounds. That means it would cost $1,909,090 to haul my 210-pounds into orbit – never mind the cost of air, food, water or other necessities I would need to have with me. Edwards is talking about lowering that cost to $955. I’ll spend that much flying my family to Disney World.

There’s also the issue of safety. Riding to earth orbit atop an explosive rocket is a dangerous system that fails far too often to be acceptible for civilian transport.

Edwards explains the engineering challenges of a space elevator. The biggest hurtle has been developing a material strong enough to withstand the extreme forces involved. When I was a kid I read an article that described the building of a space elevator with an unknown material the author called “fictionite.” We now know what “fictionite” is:

In 1991, Japanese researcher Sumio Iijima discovered carbon nanotubes. These are long, narrow, cylindrical molecules; the cylinder walls are made of carbon atoms, and the tube is about 1 nanometer in diameter.

In theory, at least, carbon-nanotube-based materials have the potential to be 100 times as strong as steel, at one-sixth the density.

The reduced density over steel is as important as the increased strength. Old space elevator ideas had us parking an asteroid in earth orbit just to support the massive weight of the system. Edwards doesn’t think anything near that level of mass will be necessary.

And at this lower density the space elevator material would only have to be about 33 times the strength of steel.

This strength [carbon nanotubes have the potential to be 100 times as strong as steel] is three times as great as what is needed for the space elevator. The most recent experiments have produced 4-centimeter-long pieces of carbon-nanotube materials that have 70 times the strength of steel.

Once we are able to scale up production of sufficiently strong carbon nanotubes, Edwards believes we can put up a space elevator in steps:

0805spacf4.jpgAn initial “deployment spacecraft” and two smaller spools of ribbon massing 20 tons each would be launched separately into low-Earth orbit using expendable rockets. The deployment spacecraft and spools would be assembled together using techniques pioneered for the Mir space station and the International Space Station. The deployment spacecraft would then follow a spiral course out to geostationary orbit using a slow, but fuel-efficient, trajectory.

Upon arrival, the spacecraft would begin paying out the two spools side by side toward Earth. Meanwhile, the deployment spacecraft would fire its engine again, raising it above geostationary orbit. The spacecraft’s motions would be synchronized with the unreeling cable so that the spacecraft would act as the counterweight to the rest of the cable: this would keep the center of gravity of the entire elevator structure in geostationary orbit [see illustration, "View From the Top"]. When the two halves of the ribbon reached Earth’s surface, a special elevator car would be attached that would ascend the elevator, stitching the two side-by-side halves of the ribbon together. This initial system would have a 20-cm-wide ribbon and could support 1-ton climbers.

Other specialized climbers would then be sent up this initial ribbon, adding more small ribbons to the existing one. When one reached the far end of the elevator cable, the climber’s mass would be added to the counterweight, keeping the elevator in balance so that its center of gravity would stay in geostationary orbit. After 280 such climbers, a meter-wide ribbon that could support 20-ton climbers would be complete.

The climbers, like most of the elevator system, would use off-the-shelf components wherever possible. One of the reasons the climbers would be so simple and have so much room for payload is that they would not carry power-generating equipment. Power would be delivered to climbers by lasers beaming 840-nm light from Earth onto an array of photovoltaic cells.

I think one last step would be in order. Once the first elevator ribbon is in place, another should be placed parallel to the first to allow climbers to ascend and descend simultaneously – a gondola to the stars.

They Went So Young

The series finale for Six Feet Under aired earlier this week on HBO. SFU isn’t really the kind of TV show we talk about here at the Speculist. Not to say that it wasn’t a good show, or that it never got into speculist subject matter. As a matter of fact, it did. Twice. The first time, they pulled it off fairly well. It was the opener for season three. Nate Fisher, on his death bed, witnesses multiple versions of his own life and death while his deceased father gives an accurate, if sketchy, explanation of quantum immortality.

(SPOILERS ahead for those planning to watch the show.)

This time out, Allan Ball and company didn’t do so well. The final scenes of the show are a montage of flash-forwards to the deaths of all the principal characters. It’s actually a very nice piece of TV/filmmaking, a touching and satisfying end to the story of the Fisher family.

There’s just one problem.

They all die too young. Check the obits for yourself.

With the exception of Keith, who we see dying at the hands of armed robbers, and Claire, who makes it all the way to 102, the rest of the characters die of natural causes in their 70′s and 80′s. Okay, so maybe life extension won’t have caught on by the year 2025, and there would be nothing that could be done to save Ruth Fisher from dying in her early 80′s. But David, Rico, and Brenda all die over the next 25 years after that. Even so, aging and death are shown to be pretty much what they are today.

Then we come to Claire, on her deathbed in the year 2085. She is 102 years old, and looks every year of it by our standards. Over the next 80 years, we can’t even expect any cosmetic victories over aging.

Or maybe those kinds of treatments are available, but no one in the Fisher or Chenowith families takes advantage of them. Maybe cosmetic aging treatments will be viewed the way Botox (or even, say, breast augmentation) is today. Some do it, most don’t.

I could almost believe that about cosmetic treatments. But real anti-aging treatments? No way. When they’re available, people will use them. If not for themselves, then for their loved ones. Consider Rico dropping dead from (apparently) a heart attack somewhere around the year 2050. I think such deaths will be very rare by then and there is no way that Vanessa would allow Rico not to be prepared for such an eventuality.

Likewise, even if Claire was too “granola” to go for life extension, what about her husband, Ted the Republican? He would probably have extended his own life just to be sure he was there with her when she died.

Ultimately, it’s families, loved ones, and friends who will drive the acceptance of life extension technologies. Randall Parker and Glenn Reynolds do an excellent job of outlining the economic and political cases for life extension. These arguments will be persuasive and will play an important role in the eventual acceptance of life extension. But I don’t think they’ll be determinative.

As Glenn explains it:

I’ve watched people I love age and die, and it wasn’t “beautiful and natural.” It sucked. Aging is a disease. Cataracts and liver spots don’t bring moral enlightenment or spiritual transcendence. Death may be natural — but so are smallpox, rape, and athlete’s foot. “Natural” isn’t the same as “good.”

Yep. Death sucks all, right.

Throughout all the generations of humanity, people have watched their loved ones age and die, and deep down wished they could do something about it. When options are available, people will use them. Of course they will.

The question isn’t really one of “How long should people live?” It’s more like “How long should my parents live?”

Over the weekend, my parents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. In proposing a toast, my father thanked my mother for 50 wonderful years and said that he looked forward to — who knows? Maybe 50 more.

Who knows, indeed? What I do know is this: if I could give them the ability to celebrate their 100th anniversary, looking and feeling more like they did at the original wedding than they did over the weekend, I would. Would they take it? Based on his toast, I’m pretty sure Dad would. And if anyone could talk Mom into it, he could. Then again, she probably wouldn’t need all that much convincing.

Who would?

Utlimately, Ball ends his series on a death-affirming note. For a TV show about a funeral parlor, that’s probably about par for the course. Plus, to be fair, life extension would have been a very strange idea for him to introduce now. Although certainly no stranger than quantum immortality.

I was watching a show about the making of SFU last week wherein Ball and some of the writers were talking about how our culture “avoids” death and “is afraid of it” and “doesn’t deal with it,” etc. So he wanted to do a show about that affirmed the reality of death.

But as others have pointed out, our culture is highly accepting of death in general. We may not affirm it, but we certainly accept it as reality…for everyone else, anyway. We only want to deny it or avoid it when it applies to us and to the people we care about. But far from being some defect that needs to be corrected, I would say that that resistance is what will eventually make death a mere shadow of the threat it is today, and death from aging or disease virtually unknown.

Past Future Shock

Here’s a good illustration of how fast technology is moving: My “Future Healing” post is three days old – and it’s already a past-future.

In my story I imagined a doctor locating a stem cell line that is a near match for his patient. This match was a special type of stem cell now called a CBE (cord-blood-derived embryonic-like stem cells).

Our hero orders these CBE’s and installs a DNA patch to make it a better, “practically perfect” match for his patient. He then coaxes these patched stem cells into becoming brain stem cells that can be used by his patient’s brain to replace damaged neurons.

None of those steps were products of my imagination. This is real research going on right now (as the hyperlinks within the original post show).

But why would our hero go to the trouble of finding a near match at some distant location, ordering it, and then patching it if this technology is available?

Scientists for the first time have turned ordinary skin cells into what appear to be embryonic stem cells — without having to use human eggs or make new human embryos in the process, as has always been required in the past, a Harvard research team announced yesterday.

From hard sci-fi to past future in three days. Didn’t this use to take decades?

Good News on Stem Cells

Randall Parker has obviously been busy lately, keeping his FuturePundit blog up to date with some very encouraging developments on the stem cell front.

Earlier this week, Randall reported on how the notion that stem cells will play a major role in soon-to-come life extension efforts is gaining broad acceptance among researchers. He quotes at length from a recent article in the journal of the European Molecular Biology Organization which begins with this hopeful scenario:

It is the year 2053. A mere century after James Watson and Francis Crick resolved the structure of DNA, scientists at the forefront of medical research have just announced the first successful regeneration of a human heart. After re-routing the blood of Jón Sigurdsson, a terminal heart-failure patient, to an advanced cardiac assist device and removing most of the damaged organ, doctors thawed a frozen tube of Jón’s personalized stem cells—established in 2013 from embryonic stem cells created through somatic nuclear transfer—and injected them into his chest. Thanks to a sophisticated cocktail of growth factors, the new stem cells target the damaged area and rapidly get to work, perfectly rebuilding a youthful heart. Several weeks later, Jón is discharged in excellent health. Regenerative medicine provided him with a new kidney ten years ago, and subsequent double knee regeneration gave him renewed mobility. Now his new heart will soon have him running a six-minute mile again. Jón Sigurdsson is 100 years old.

Randall points out that, in order to realize this kind of scenario, we have to make substantial progress in our understanding of and ability to manipulate both adult and embryonic stem cells. He notes that the “either-or” debate about the ethical superiorty of the former over the latter often distracts from this very real fact.

And speaking of that debate (and all ancillary tiresome arguments), today Randall reports on some encouraging developments:

Cellular dedifferentiation means turning a cell from a specialized state (e.g. muscle cell or liver cell) into an unspecialized cell that has the ability to become other cell types. At the most extreme dedifferentiated state embryonic stem cells are so dedifferentiated that they have the ability to become all more specialized cell types. This extreme state is called pluripotency. Ethical opposition to the use of cells harvested from human embryos to create pluripotent cell lines has led scientists to look for other ways to create pluripotent stem cells. A major figure in stem cell research says a number of labs are getting close to announcing successful techinques for dedifferentiating cells.

Excellent news. This capability might just put this particular argument to bed once and for all. It doesn’t solve the ethical problem of creating an cloned embryo for therapeutic purposes, but it just might make such an approach redundant.

ADDITIONAL READING: Here’s what FuturePundit and Instapundit were saying just last month.

Links from Carnival of Tomorrow 4.0!

And Baby Makes Six!

Congratulations and best wishes to Stephen and Sheralyn Gordon on the birth of their fourth child, a healthy baby boy.

Name and other details TBA at a later time.

Mom and son are doing fine. A very happy birthday to the newest member of the Gordon family!

UPDATE FROM STEPHEN:

Thanks for all the well-wishes! We are all home and Mom and baby are doing great. We’ve named the little guy “Andrew Gideon Gordon.”

andrewgideon.JPG

Future Wealth

Via GeekPress, Joanna Glasner has an interesting piece on Wired
News about the advisability of investing in life extension technologies.
She makes a cautious case that such investments could prove worthwhile,
if entered into carefully, and she ends the piece with this thought:

Still, investors focusing on life-extending breakthroughs have time to be
patient. If it all works out, and we really do live forever, that should provide
plenty of time for a portfolio of biotechnology stocks to turn a profit.

Hmmm…if it does pan out, and we do live forever…or even, say, 500 years…what kinds
of investments make sense? Einstein is reputed once to have quipped that compound
interest is the most powerful force in the universe. For those of us who only
get to piddle around with it for 50 years or so, that may be a little hard to
believe. But given enough time — and that’s what life extension ultimately
promises, more than enough time — we gain some perspective.

Putting money into
a 401K for a few decades is like accidentally leaving the garden hose on overnight.
You get up the next morning, and yeah, it’s pretty squishy back there, but no
big deal. Given enough time, however, even a muddy little trickle like the Colorado
river can carve out the Grand Canyon. Likewise, even a small amount of money,
compounded at a modest rate over sufficient time, will yield a fortune.

Lazarus Long
explained it like this:

$100 placed at 7 percent interest compounded quarterly for 200 years will
increase to more than $l00,000,000—by which time it will be worth nothing.

Not too encouraging. But then again, old Woodrow Wilson Smith tends to be a
little more cynical than he really needs to. Let’s examine that "it will
be worth nothing" thing. I can think of three possible reasons why that
might be the case:

  1. Two hundred years from now, you’ll be dead. So the money is worth nothing
    to you. (Kind of a strange argument for a man who lived more than 1,000 years
    to make.)

  2. Two hundred years from now, for whatever reason — maybe you forgot? —
    you will not care about the money, once again making it worthless to you.

  3. Two hundred years from now, because of inflation, $100,000,000 just won’t
    be worth that much.

money-stacked.jpgFor the sake of simplicity, we can skip the first two interpretations. Let’s
assume that life extension will work and that, 200 years from now, we’ll still
be interested.

How much will our money be worth? I’m going to simplify LL’s formulation a
bit and compound the interest annually rather than quarterly. At that rate,
in 200 years the $100 dollars will have grown "only" to a little more
than $70 million. That still sounds like a lot of money to me.

Of course, we need to adjust for inflation. (I’m not going to try to adjust
for other possibilities, such as the decline of the dollar or its eventual
replacement with another currency. Could happen. I doubt it. Anyway, we’ll assume
that, as savvy, long-term investors, we’ll keep our money in the best currency
to ensure long-term growth and stability. That’s probably going to be the US
dollar, anyway.)

Inflation is a very difficult thing to measure long-term. But if goods and
services tended to go up, on average, 3%
in price over the course of the 20th century, that is probably as good a
guesstimate as any as to what we can expect to happen over the next 200 years.

So, not being an economist I do the math as follows:

Actual Rate of Growth   7%
Rate of Inflation - 3%
Effective Rate of Growth = 4%

If our $100 grew at 4% interest for 200 years, it would be worth about $123,000.

So Lazarus is wrong. Our investment isn’t worthless, it’s just "worth
less" than it looks. In the year 2205, $70 million simply won’t buy what
it used to. What will it buy? Approximately what $123,000 will today. So over
time, you have multiplied your initial $100 worth of spending power by a factor
of more than a thousand.

Not too shabby!

Anyway, whoever heard of just investing a hundred dollars? The real trick would
be to pay into your future wealth account over a period of years and then just
let it go to work."Set it and forget it" as they say on the infomercials.

So let’s put $600 a year into our account (that’s a measly $50 a month) for
twenty years and then revisit it after a total of 150 years has elapsed. After
all, 150 years is just a drop in the bucket to someone with an indefinite lifespan.

By then, our initial disciplined investment will have grown to more than $160
million. After doing the inflation buzzkill adjustment, we see that in the year
2155, $160 million will get you right around what $3 million will today. That’s
not bad. Plus, if you can hang in there for another 50 years — take a part-time
job, write a book, I’m sure you can think of something to kill the time — you
will have a little more than $28 billion (yep, billion with a B) which will
buy you approximately what $21 million (with an M) will today.

That’s the ticket. And you know, even though you may not (to coin a phrase)
live to see it, in a world where lives are getting longer, wouldn’t something
like this be worth a shot? At the very worst, you would be leaving a nice (NICE!)
nest egg for your long-lived children or grandchildren.

Provocative Statements About Space

Category 1: Sensible

Rand Simberg writes:

Shuttle didn’t have to be the way it is, and it’s not the platonic ideal of a reusable (or even partially reusable) launch system, that allows us to extrapolate its flaws to any conceivable space transport. It was a program that was compromised early in its development by the same need to save development costs that seem to be turning the latest plans into another budding disaster, at least from an operational cost standpoint.

He may have a point, there. Read the whole thing and decide for yourselves.

Category 2: Daring

Jerry Pournelle writes:

NASA spends a billion and can’t fix the problem of foam dropoff. Give me a billion and 3 years (and exemption from the Disabilities Act and some other imbecilic restrictions) and I’ll have a 700,000 pound GLOW reusable that will put at least 5,000 pounds in orbit per trip, and be able to make 10 trips a year for marginal costs linearly related to the cost of fuel. Give me $3 billion and I’ll have a fleet of the damn things. Once they’re flying we can work on getting the payload weights up. Give me $5 billion and I’ll have the fleet plus one that’s set up to go Earth orbit to Lunar Surface and return to Earth orbit as often as we like (each trip costing about 10 flights Earth to Earth orbit to refuel it). Costing: 700,000 pounds of fuel at $2 per pound times 4 as a guess. Throw in other stuff and the marginal costs are maybe $10 million a flight Earth to Earth orbit, so about $100 million to go back to the Moon.

Yeah, baby. I say we give the man his three billion!

Heck, if you ask me, he deserves that much just for his half of The Mote in God’s Eye.

Category 3: More than Just Slightly Unglued

Jack Handey writes:

I came here in peace, seeking gold and slaves. But you have treated me like an intruder. Maybe it is not me who is the intruder but you.

No, not me. You, stupid.

And there’s much, much more. Read the whole thing.

(Hat-tip: Blacknail.)

UPDATE:

Contributing in the Sensible category, Homer Hickam writes in today’s Wall Street Journal (link requires paid registration):

As that great American philosopher Kenny Rogers once said, “You’ve got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em.” That’s not just smart poker. That’s smart engineering, too. When your design stinks, Engineering 101 says admit your mistakes and go back to the drawing board. I would like all top NASA managers to read the following words very carefully: The space shuttle is a Rube Goldberg contraption that is never going to be reliable no matter how much money, time, and engineering careers you throw at it. Thank you for your attention.