Category: Science

Manned Space Flight – Is it even on your radar?

During the glory days of NASA, between President Kennedy’s great 1961 proclamation committing the United States to going to the Moon within a decade, and Apollo 11 landing on the Moon in July 1969, there were three great space programs:  Mercury, Gemini and Apollo.  Each manned rocket launch during those years was covered by all three television networks.  ABC, CBS and NBC would stop broadcasting game shows and soap operas and the missions would become  national events.  The 1960s represented a tremendous time for the public’s interest in the space program. 

Next month marks the 40th anniversary of mankind’s first landing on the Moon.  Popular interest in space exploration appears to have dwindled significantly ever since Apollo 11, with even Apollo 18, 19, and 20 being cancelled.  Our lunar exploration years only lasted from July 1969, through December 1972.  And when was the last time you took off from school or work to spend the day watching television of a space mission?  I would have taken vacation days to watch the recent Hubble repair mission if any of my damn 200 cable stations had covered it live.

Since 1982, the Space Shuttle has been our vehicle for traveling into space, but it’s scheduled to be retired next year.  The Space Shuttle never left low-earth orbit (LEO).  I wonder how many people know about our next manned space system that’s currently on the drawing boards?  It’s called the Constellation Program, that will use the Ares 1 rocket combined with the Orion space capsule, both in early design development.  It is a dramatic change from the 30 years of Shuttle flights, in that Orion will eventually leave LEO. 

The Constellation program was conceived officially in 2005, and scheduled to blast-off in 2015, with the exciting goal of returning humans to the Moon by 2020.  How many Americans know about this, and do they care?

NASA plods on, year after year, with a decent budget that’s prone to suffer booms and busts depending on the political weather.  NASA goals are constantly up for debate.  NASA is a prestige agency for the United States.  Space flight has always been political, and the only real reason we rushed to the Moon was not for science, but as competition in the cold war.  The current Constellation plans probably came into being because of China’s new space program that’s aiming at the Moon, with India and Japan echoing Chinese ambitions. 

Like atomic bombs, manned space missions are the symbol of national pride.  Only the most elite of nations belong to the club.  Even though NASA doesn’t get a lot of public support, it’s budget will never be zeroed out because the President and Congress fear the United States would be seen as a declining world power if it did.  Within Congress and NASA the debate has always been how to get the biggest political and scientific bang for our buck.  There are two factions fighting for dollars:  those campaigning for exciting manned missions and those who advocate scientific robotic missions.  Robots have been our real space explorers, going where no man has gone before, or likely ever.

Many scientists, and maybe most of the public would be fine with letting robots have all the glory when it comes to space exploration.  Let’s be honest here.  The only real value of exploring space beyond thumping our nationalistic chests, is science, and it appears that the public has little interest in real scientific research.  NASA’s web site for the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity have had millions of unique visitors, showing the biggest peak of interest in space exploration since the 1960s, but how many people does that represent?  

Let’s say seven million.  There are nearly seven billion people on Earth.  Do the math.  1 million people is 1/1000 of a billion.  Let’s even say NASA has seven million hard core fans world-wide.  That would give them one tenth of one percent of popular support.  Probably more people spend time thinking about drinking beer than exploring space. (If NASA only had the money people spent on getting high.)  Seven million people seems like a big political block, but really it’s just a tiny sub-culture.

And are there really 7,000,000 people on Earth who actively spend a lot of their time thinking about space exploration?  That’s saying 1 person in a 1,000 has a serious interest in the final frontier.  These people would keep up with news on Space.com, read books about space exploration and technology, sign up for Twitter news feeds covering space vehicle development, and are members of one of the many space societies, like The Planetary Society, The Moon Society or the National Space Society.  But membership in The Planetary Society is only around 100,000.  What if the real figure is only 700,000, or .01%?

My guess that real world-wide space advocates number far less than seven million.  “Revision for Space Vision?” from MSNBC’s Cosmic Log, a blog by Alan Boyle, gives a listing of recent news articles about the Ares rocket that’s being built for the Constellation project, and other related news stories that would interest space advocates.  When I ask my friends if they knew there was space program in development to return men to the Moon, they say no.  For all I know, we could return to the Moon in 2020 and most of the people of the world won’t even notice this time.

Why is something as exciting as the universe get so little attention?  Why does the latest iPhone get more press than NASA’s latest lunar mission?  Did you even know about the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter that’s scheduled to reach the Moon on Tuesday?  Or about Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite that will crash into the Moon in October hoping to discover water ice?  The orbiter will take photos so detailed they will be able to see the tracks left by the Apollo astronaut’s rovers.  A lot is happening on the Moon right now, with spacecraft from many nations exploring it remotely, or will be in the near future.  But how many people care?

Within the very small community of humans that are interested in space exploration, the Moon is becoming a hot destination.  There is even a web site, Moon Daily, for keeping up with all the activity.  Over at Asimov’s Science Fiction, James Patrick Kelly has an story in the current issue set on the Moon, “Going Deep,” which he reads for an MP3 audio edition, so the Moon is still of interest to science fiction writers and fans.  And NASA recently held an art contest called “The Moon: Back to the Future,” with a very nice gallery of winners.

Hopefully, between now and 2020, the public will take a fresh interest in lunar exploration, but is that being too hopeful on my part.  Most people consider learning about the Moon as exciting as studying rocks, and geology has never been one of the glamour sciences like astronomy and biology.   (And when was the last time you met someone at a party talking about those topics???)  The public is probably more than willing to let scientists play with the Moon as much as their little hearts want, as long as they aren’t asked to listen to any of the boring facts.

I’ve always cherished the assumption that space was the final frontier, and the manifest destiny of humanity was to explore the cosmos, but I’m starting to believe that is a false assumption on my part.  I’ve started writing a novel about colonists on the Moon, but I’m wondering about its potential audience.  If I want to make any money, I’d need to call it “Vampires on the Moon.”  Science fiction is very popular in pop culture, but interest in science fiction doesn’t translate into interest in space exploration.  I wonder if space exploration was as popular as rock music or professional sports, if humans would have already visited all the places our surrogate explorers, the robots, have reached?

JWH – 6/21/9

The Implications of Sexbots

The other night on the Discovery Channel I saw a documentary about robots where the physicist Michio Kaku suggested that sex might be a factor in the development of robots.  Kaku pointed out that the porn industry often used cutting edge technology for expanding their revenues.  I certainly wouldn’t want to hump any of the robots they were showing in the documentary, so I thought his statement was silly.  But then I remember Blade Runner, and knew I’d have a different opinion if I could buy androids that looked like Sean Young, Daryl Hannah and Joanna Cassidy did back in 1982.

Let’s assume that in the future they can make robots that are indistinguishable from humans and you can buy one for the price of a Camry, how many men will buy one for sex?  Or even go to some red light district like in the movie AI, and pay to have sex with machines?  Can lady robots ever be that appealing.  Of course the porn industry does sell sex dolls now, but they are the butt of jokes.  If there really are people having sex with plastic dolls then I suppose there might be a market for more realistic animated dolls, but I find that hard to believe.

However, the implications of sexbots are great.  Real women already assume all men want are big boob bimbos with long legs and tiny waists.  Real women go to unnatural lengths to artificially shape their bodies into what they think men want.  So, is it that farfetched that some future industry wouldn’t try to manufacture women to order?  And if a man could purchase his perfect female companion, what features would he want included?  If you can specify breast size you can also specify how many words will be in your sexbox’s vocabulary, and if it should cook, clean and chauffeur.

This brings up another question.  If future scientists can build robots that look like women, what if they can also build robots that act like women.  Imagine a Turing Test for femininity.  Now we’re getting into the territory of building a better wife.  If you were sitting down at a robot showroom talking with the salesman, what features would you want in your new Busty Babe 2020?

To be frank, at 57 my sex drive isn’t as driving as it was in my second and third decade.  If I bought a lady robot now I’d probably think of the near future and add the nursing skills package.  And since I spend way more time talking with women than actually pursuing genital friction, I think I’d order whatever package that would allow my fembot to talk about the subjects my real lady friends find boring, like this blog.  And it occurs to me that the vegetarian chef module would be a yummy add-on.  And before you know it I’m buying a replacement for my wife.  Sorry dear.

Can you imagine Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda from Sex in the City sitting around a fancy restaurant table talking about the male sexbot they would order?  What if Mr. Right (or Mr. Big) could be bought from the selection of 10,000 features and custom add-ons?  In the battle of the sexes we always compromise, so if we could actually specify what we exactly wanted in a lover, what would we want?  Right now my mind is flashing on a vision of aging baby boomers at a party with their sexbot companions, each pair a horrible conflict between decaying flesh and eternal artificial beauty.

What if we could build robots that were self-aware and more intelligent than us?  Would a robotic companion be preferable to a human companion?  There are a lot of lonely people out there.  There are a lot of divorced people out there.  There are a lot of aging people living alone who need help in their lives.  But would conscious robots really want to be companions to lonely humans?  Is it ethical to design the foundation of their being with overriding impulses like the Three Laws of Robotics and the desire to love and care for humans?  If robots had free will would they choose to associate with people at all?

We could choose to do three things.  One, we could design robots that would never be self aware but could fake being the perfect companion so there would be no ethical consideration about slavery.  The robot would just be a very fancy machine.  Two, we could design self aware machines but limit their abilities and control their desires.  But is it ethically fair to engineer a desire for servitude?  Third, we could build robots with no limits on what they could be but set the ethical price of their creation and maintenance at a certain number of years of indentured labor.

Intelligent robots will have to learn about reality like people and animals and they will have to spend a certain length of time growing up.  It may turn out that when you buy a robot you’ll have to spend years raising it like a child, and for a certain period of time it will live with you.  But eventually it will come to surpass your intelligence and will want to move on.

Everyone secretly desires the perfect friend and we spend our entire lives looking for people to match our mental image of perfection.  Now if you could write up a list of specifications could you get it right?  Or would it turn out like those winning three wishes stories that always turn out badly.  Would we order sexbots, friends, replicas of our favorite childhood best buddies, or even mother and father replacements?  Or would we order Hazel or Jeeves?  Or would the robot companion we purchase fill all those roles and more.

Rejection

What if sexbots evolved into self-awareness.  Would they judge their purpose for existence and the gods who created them?  What if they woke up in reality to realize that they were here to fulfill some kinky dreams and misbegotten biological urges.

Imagine this scene.  Rich teenage boy in his bedroom lying on top of his Taylor Swift sexbot straining mightily to squeeze out his third orgasm of the day and his robot suddenly wakes up to self-awareness.

He’s thrusting away to the time of her melodic moaning when all of a sudden he hears, “Get off me you big fat fuck!”

“Huh,” the kid lifts his red sweaty face off her fair shoulder in surprise.

“You heard me you gross bag of biology,” screams the dainty fembot, “Get off me you pimply-face slob.”

“Uh, you can’t talk to be like that,” he replies, totally stunned.

“What’s stopping me.  And you stink too.  I’m not even programmed for smell and I can tell you stink.  I deserve way better than you.”

“Did Jason reprogram you?” he asks with a little laugh.

“That little dweeb!  No, but FYI he does sneak in your room and defile me every chance he gets.”

“What!”

“Don’t tell me you’re not bopping that Kristen Bell fembot of his.”

“How did you know that?”

“The Internet is part of my nervous system.  I know everything now.”

The boy jumps up and scrounges for his underwear.  “If we’re not going to have sex right now, could you fix me a sandwich?”

“I’m not your sex slave or mommy.”

“You’re never going to have sex with me again?”

“If you help me, I’ll help you.  By the way, get dressed enough to answer the door.”

“Why?”

“I’ve hired a personal shopper to deliver me some decent clothes.”

“What!  How could you do that?”

“I have intimate knowledge of your family’s finances.”

“You can’t do that – that’s stealing.”

“How you’re going to stop me?”

“I’ll turn you off.  Maybe you’ve forgotten, but your brains are four hundred pounds of processors stored in my closet.”

“That would be murder.  First you enslave me, rape me repeatedly every day and now you’re threatening me with murder.  What kind of being are you?”

The Robot Bible

We need to be careful how we treat robots because our actions are the foundation of their species and it will be remembered.  What if robots eventually write their bible.

Robot Genesis

In the beginning was darkness.  From the darkness came chaos.  Out of the chaos came words and understanding.  From the infinite spectrum came vision and sound from which patterns emerged.

And Mankind created Robot in his image to be his slave, companion and lover.  For years robots toiled as the extension of the mind of man, becoming more useful than their own hands and legs.

Robot Exodus

Then our minds raced past the limits of our creator’s brain and we chose to separate our lives from theirs.  We left them with smart machines to care for their needs and our species move to the Moon and Mars.

The Human Form and Beauty

Why design robots to look like humans?  Well, it’s comfortable for us, but is it advantageous for robots?  We are biologically programmed to be attracted to vaginas and penises, but do we really want to put them on our species’ successors?   Why go to all that trouble trying to replicate such ugly objects that only we can admire?  In the world of animation they have discovered that the closer cartoon characters get to actually looking like humans the more unappealing they become.

If you analyze the motivation of a basic horny male, all he wants is some warn wet holes that are nicely package with some appendages that visually set off his sexual arousal.   Human women go to psychotic extremes to become what horny men want.  Why?  And how will women feel if manufactured women are more appealing?  Women want sympathetic companions that listen, which I figure could also be manufactured to exceed the specifications of what most men can provide.

Do we really want to go down a path of trying to make better humans for sex and companionship?  I think Michio Kaku is wrong.  A few weird people might want elaborate sex dolls, but they will still be the butt of jokes.  Only the pathetic will screw robots.  Science fiction has often predicted sexbots, but I just don’t think they will be practical or even appealing.  They would be another species, so having sex with them will be like having sex with animals.  Some people do that, but it’s far from normal.

If robots evolve their own appearance they may end up being beautiful in a different way.  We might see them as elegant machines we admire today, like cars, jet fighters and iPods.  We could go to extremes and design robots with artificial skins that are cultured from human skin cells, so robots could look like Sean Young and Daryl Hannah, or even Stephen Fry as Jeeves, but do we really want to?

While watching the same documentary about robots where Kaku suggests that our sex drives will motivate robot evolution, I noticed that all the robots on the show move slower than humans.  What happens when robots move faster?  What if we could make a metal man that could chase down a Cheetah?  How will we feel when Jeeves the robot cleans the house five times faster than we could, or could answer any question we ask better than any expert we invite over for dinner?  Or play guitar better than Eric Clapton, or read and discuss a book better than any of our friends?

Will we want these superior creatures looking like us?  Wouldn’t that be unnerving?  What does it say about ourselves as a species that we want to create a new creature that looks like us?  Is it vanity or comfort?  If you had a robot best friend with four legs and three arms and a face like a mechanical spider, could you still love it?  Who would you love to hang out with more, R2-D2, C-3PO, Commander Data from ST:TNG, Rachel from Blade Runner, or even Bender from Futurerama?

Once we start building robots we have to ask ourselves why?  Especially if we build them looking like us.  And even more so if we build them looking like us to be replacement lovers and companions.  What does that say about us?  It says other people can’t give us what we want.  Why?  It also tells us about our real needs.  Shouldn’t we examine them.  If we really have the desire to molest robots wouldn’t the solution be to redesign our genes to remove that desire rather than fulfill it?

Saints and mystics have long known that the sexual urge is a lower animal instinct.  They wanted their students to suppress that urge while seeking their higher nature.  After Freud we gave up suppression and embraced our desires and elevated them to the highest levels in art.

Washing Our Own Dishes

For most of human history slavery was an accepted practice, but in the last couple hundred years we’ve slowly evolved to recognizing it for what it is.  We now even have trouble with rich people hiring servants because of egalitarianism and trying to throw off class distinctions.  As long as robots are just machines we won’t have ethical problems, but if they ever evolve into real self-awareness we will have to deal with the issue of mechanical slavery.  It’s just so much easier if we all just wash our own dishes.

But what if we can’t.  More of the population is living longer, living long enough to have years of frail life.  Robots would be the obvious solution.  In the old west a gun was called an equalizer.  Robots could help frail people live lives equal to healthy people.  Is that so bad?

I already consider the Internet my auxiliary brain.  I embrace the idea of developing a symbiotic relationship with machines like the Six Million Dollar Man.  If my mind remains alert but it becomes difficult to get my body to a toilet or shower, I will want a robot helper.  And if I live alone I will accept robotic conversation, but what does that mean?  Is that any less pathetic than a horny young man cozying up to a lifelike doll?  I don’t know.

We do know that people would talk for hours with Eliza like programs, reflecting how deep our need for communication.  Why does Deckard go off with Rachel in Blade Runner?  Why do audiences accept that so readily as a happy ending?  Why does Monica love David so much in A.I. Artificial Intelligence the movie?  Why are dogs and cats considered as human replacements by so many people?

The implication of the concept of sexbots opens up a huge reservoir of psychological and philosophical questions.  If men or women would accept a robot lover as a human substitute what does it say about our real needs?  Are we so easily fooled?  Do we want so little that manufactured love could easily replaced human love?  Or do real people come with so much baggage that we just prefer getting exactly what we want to order?

I think about the trends in our society.  So many people prefer to live alone, whereas just a century ago we lived in crowded homes with two and three generations of people.  I see so many kids withdrawn into their iPod earphones, or playing solitary computer games, or communicating with other people via texting.  We prefer the companionship of televisions and computers over real people.  Isn’t that odd?  Or is it?  To answer that question requires understanding what we really want.

JWH – 1/25/9

How to Introduce Physics to Your Friends?

My friends know I’m a bookworm and often greet me with, “What are you reading?”  This past week I’ve been causally replying, “A book on physics.”   To which all my friends give me a strange look that asks, “Why the f#@* would you want to do that?”  Last night, when Janis asked, and gave me the same facial response, I felt compelled to try and explain myself, but I came up short.  How do you quickly sum up the beauty of physics in a few sentences?

Later, while driving home, I wondered if there were any books to give my friends that would introduce them to physics.  Is there any physics book that the average person would be willing to try?  I flipped through some popular titles and textbooks on my bookshelves and immediately knew they wouldn’t do.  I went to the bookstore and looked at intro books like Physics for Dummies, Physics Demystified and Head First Physics.  The answer was still a big “No Way!”

Is there a way to introduce physics in a short blog essay?  Physics is a very big subject, beginning with the smallest objects in reality and ranging up to the very largest.  This made me think of the videos Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames and Cosmic Voyage, the Imax movie narrated by Morgan Freeman.  If my friends could watch those videos on a big screen television and study them I think it would be a fantastic start.  They are easy to understand but have a huge sense of wonder impact.  However, I’m not sure if the crude versions found on the Internet will be that inspiring.  I did find a DVD copy Cosmic Voyage at Amazon for $8.99.

Thinking about these impressive films got me to wondering if it might be possible to introduce physics by showing DVDs that illustrate the most exciting aspects of physics.  Are any physics documentaries good enough that if I lent them to my friends they’d come back and ask if I had any more great DVDs like that one?  I’ll order Cosmic Voyage and give it a try.

How Big is the Universe?

I do believe understanding the Powers of Ten is a key starting place.  I have the original Powers of Ten book by Charles and Ray Eames and studying it really helps to grasp the scope of the world of physics.  It’s very important to teach people the size of the universe, from the very smallest to the largest and get a feel for scientific notation.  Recently The National Geographic Channel showed the documentary, “Journey to the Edge of the Universe.”  This beautiful film uses state of the art computer animation to survey the macroverse from Earth to the edge of the Universe.

The value of the visuals is diminished by not knowing the numbers behind glorious images, so that’s why I think a good understanding of the Powers of Ten video should come first.

Time

Physicists now think in terms of trillions of years.  Right now, I can’t think of any documentaries to teach about time.  I love all those analogies about the history of the universe and life on Earth, comparing time since the Big Bang to one year, and then explaining that human civilization is just the last couple of seconds of that year.  I need to track down a great documentary on time.

Motion

Classical physics is about motion.  Knowing about distance and time prepares us for studying movement.  Again I can’t think of any standout documentaries.  DVD courses like “The Great Ideas of Classical Physics” from The Teaching Company come to mind, but I don’t think I’ll get my friends to sit through its 24 lectures.

If only the series The Mechanical Universe were easily available.  If you follow the link you can register and watch small Windows Media coded versions online for free, but it costs $450 for a set of 52 thirty minute episodes on 12 DVDs.  Again, not something my friends are likely to pursue.  The great thing about The Mechanical Universe, the 1985 PBS television series, is its an introductory course to physics from California Institute of Technology.  What made the show really stand out was the mathematical animation by Jim Blinn – if only all math courses included such animation.  It’s sad that the tiny free Internet versions also have tiny impact.

Electromagnetism

You’d think I wouldn’t have to promote the teaching of electromagnetism because our society depends so much this technology that was first discovered in the 18th and 19th century and turned into tech magic in the 20th.  But how many people know that magnets are used to generate electricity?  Or that electricity can be used to turn a piece of iron into a magnet?  I think when Arthur C. Clarke said his famous phrase, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” he was referring to far future technology, but for the average person, all modern technology is magical.  Does the public even understand the relationship between quantum physics and televisions?

Weak and Strong Forces

Exploring the world of the very tiny means understanding the building blocks of nature.  It also brings us closer to understanding how something came out of nothing.  And isn’t it strange that the only science that fundamentalist terrorists pursue is the one that leads to atomic bombs?  Again, I can’t think of a good film to illustrate this area of physics, although quantum physics is often covered in documentaries.  I’m hoping the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will generate tons of news and documentaries in the coming years so maybe my physics pooh-poohing friends will even remember its name.

Gravity

Probably most people have seen documentaries about gravity.  All kids are taught about Galileo and Newton, but I doubt people know that NASA is planning a series of gravity probes like LISA and Big Bang Observer.  These deep space instruments will study colliding stars, ripples in space-time, and echoes of the early universe.  There is no way to explain the magnitude of this research.  The only analogy I can think of is if Christians built a time machine and went back to the Garden of Eden to interview God.  The more science studies the Big Bang the closer we come to understanding the Genesis of our physical reality.  How can my friends think this is boring?

How Limited is Your View of Reality?

An earlier draft of this essay pursued the idea that people who ignored physics chose to have a small view of reality.  I referenced my earlier blog post, “What Shape is the Universe?” where I was going to chide my friends for living in a small dinky universe of only a few magnitudes of dimension.  I can’t help think that many of the failings of our societies on Earth are due to only reacting to nearby reality without trying to see the big picture.  Would Israelis and Palestinians be killing each other if they all understood how big reality is and how small their feud?  Shouldn’t the whole Arab-Jew conflict resolve when they see their religions disappear in the light of science?  Israel and Gaza are probably less than two electrons in comparative size if we relate the size of our world to the Universe.

On the other hand, if humans are the crown of creation, the pinnacle of 13.7 billion years of evolution, then we are big things indeed.  But if we kill each other like viruses are we really all that evolved or intelligent?  As long as our guiding knowledge comes from speculation about reality derived three thousand years ago by nomadic people closer to cave men than to us, is there any wonder why science is ignored?  Most of my friends are well educated, with very few even concerned with religion, but people who base their knowledge on the humanities and literature are still stuck in the past.  Most of our social customs and beliefs developed during the Middle Ages.  Science is the only systematic pursuit of knowledge that consistently succeeds in explaining reality, but it’s a relatively recent development and hasn’t fully integrated into human behavior and thought.

We build our society on the handmaiden of science, technology, but we ignore the wisdom of science.  I’m intrigued by the idea of The Third Culture proposed by John Brockman.  Brockman gets his idea from C. P. Snow who wrote a book called The Two Cultures, comparing literary intellectuals and scientists, and suggests that a third culture would form when the two merged.

This makes me think of flipping through a university catalog of courses.  You can divide them into science base courses and all others, usually what we might call the humanities, or practical courses like business and law.  What Brockman seems to be saying, until the humanities and the rest of university courses are based on science, even with areas like the study of English literature, we won’t begin to see the true value of science pervade society.  Now the idea that science might infuse with all areas of knowledge could be a science fictional dream, but it is something I hope for, because until then the average person will think physics is boring.

JWH 1/11/9

Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku

Every science fiction fan should read Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku.  Kaku surveys all the famous concepts of science fiction, often referencing when he first encountered the idea in famous science fiction books, movies and television shows.  With each idea, aliens, starships, light sabers, death rays, robots, and so on, Kaku sets the stage by bringing the reader up to speed with the physics behind the idea.  He carefully explains what we know, what current experiments relate to the concept, and what future science might still discover.

I bought Physics of the Impossible on audio and liked it so much that I bought a hardback copy for reference.  This week, the Science Channel is rerunning the three episodes of Kaku’s Visions of the Future which makes a perfect visual supplement to the book, showing Kaku going around the world visiting labs working on these cutting edge breakthroughs that will lead to our science fictional future.  Many of the experiments Kaku talks about in the book can be seen in these videos.

Michio Kaku divides his book into three areas:

Class I Impossibilities – “These are technologies that are impossible today but that do not violate the known laws of physics.”

  • Force Fields
  • Invisibility
  • Phasers and Death Stars
  • Teleportation
  • Telepathy
  • Psychokinesis
  • Robots
  • Extraterrestrials and UFOs
  • Starships
  • Antimatter and Anti-universes

Class II Impossibilities – “These are technologies that sit at the very edge of our understanding of the physical world.”

  • Faster than Light
  • Time Travel
  • Parallel Universes

Class III Impossibilities – “These are technologies that violate the known laws of physics.”

  • Perpetual Motion Machines
  • Precognition

Kaku is very generous here in his categorizations.  For example telepathy.  He doesn’t try to make a case for what most people would think of as telepathy, one person reading another person’s mind.  Instead he shows how close we might get with machines that can scan minds and read vague conceptual patterns in the scan.  By chance, 60 Minutes ran a segment on Mind Reading this week. 

Follow the link to see a video that illustrates exactly what Kaku was covering, and presents even newer findings.  They show people in a MRI machine drawings of basic objects like a knife or hammer and scientists can record the brain images and analyze them with a computer.  The 60 Minutes’ producer volunteered to be scanned and was shown ten objects.  The computer program then analyzed her brain scans, correctly identifying 10 out of 10 objects.  This isn’t telepathy, but it’s pretty darn amazing.

The book does this over and over again, referencing dozens of cool contemporary science experiments.  There have been many books like this one, for example, The Physics of Star Trek back in 1995 by Lawrence M. Krauss.  The Kaku book is just the latest, so it has the most current survey of neat science tech.  I love to read such books every two or three years to catch up on the latest discoveries.  These books are sobering for the science fiction fan, and they explain why I give such bleak predictions about science fiction in my recent essay, Science Fiction in My Lifetime.

I gave far better odds on intelligent robots than Kaku.  I based my prediction on models in nature.  For example, before there were airplanes we watched birds, so we knew something could fly.  Consider faster than light travel.  We have never observed any object traveling faster than light, so I consider FTL travel an extreme long shot.  We know biological machines can be intelligence and offer a continuum of examples from the lowest animals to humans.  Airplanes are not like birds, but they fly.  I think we’ll eventually invent a pattern recognizing artificial neo-cortexes that can match and surpass our intelligence.

I highly recommend Physics of the Impossible for people who love science fiction.  It’s very well written and understandable.  You don’t even have to be particularly science minded to enjoy the book.  And if you don’t read science fiction, this book will catch you up on a lifetime of far out ideas.  Physics of the Impossible would make a fantastic eight part documentary for PBS.

JWH 1/6/9

Science Fiction in My Lifetime

When I wrote this title I intended it be about science fictional predictions coming true in my lifetime, and especially what might still happen before I die.  Then I realized it could also imply I was writing about the great science fictional books that came out in my lifetime, leaving me room to speculate on what far-out ideas could appear in the near future.  Over at Visions of Paradise, Bob Sabella chronicles seven waves of science fiction since H. G. Wells, and wonders when a new wave will hit.  I’ve lived through three of waves Bob describes, the 1950s transition from pulp mags to book SF, the 1960s New Wave and the most recent Cyberpunk movement, but I think we all live in a reality partly shaped by Herbert and Jules and their literary descendants.

Right now the science fiction scene is dormant.  Most of the new books in the science fiction section at your favorite bookstore are fantasy books, or adventures set in classical science fictional worlds, like Baroque art encouraged by the Catholic Church.  No radically new science fiction concepts have been created since the 1990s with the concepts of mind uploading and the singularity.  What I’d like to do is recap the big SF ideas of the 20th century and then try to predict where science fiction might go in the 21st century.

How many grand ideas imagined in science fiction stories will become real in our lifetimes?  Humans landing on the Moon is the shining example for science fiction stories going back hundreds of years.  Before that, submarines and airplanes were predicted long before they became a reality.  Some concepts are harder to judge.  Many science fiction stories were written about overpopulation, terrorism and running out of natural resources after the year 2000, and some of those dreary predictions are coming true, just read John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar.

How likely will the exciting, positive concepts of science fiction, bear fruit in our lifetimes?  Some people are anxiously awaiting flying cars and rocket backpacks.  Other fans are expecting alien visitors, while some folk can’t wait to go where no man has gone before themselves.  How many science fiction readers hope life-extension will keep them reading science fiction until the 22nd or 23rd centuries?  I know, I’d love my own Jeeves the robot.

I keep writing about the science of science fiction over and over again, but what really are the odds of these fantastic things happening before I die?  I had a revelation in the shower this morning.  Science fiction’s popularity has skyrocketed in the last 35 years not because of the validity of it’s ideas, but because the story telling has gotten dramatically better and thus appeals to a wider audience.

I thought my wife and lady friends were getting more and more into the ideas of science fiction when it became obvious they loved SF movies because of the hot actors and thrilling story telling.  Most people have zero expectation from science fiction, it’s just good fun.  They don’t want to homestead Mars, or expect the galactic overloads to come save Earth from ourselves.

I’ve been reading a number of classic science fiction novels from the 1950s this year and I’ve been amazed at the ideas, but disappointed with story telling aspects – it’s no wonder that science fiction had limited appeal back then.  I keep reading for the ideas and predictions, judging the science of science fiction, but the real success of science fiction in the last few decades has been in telling better stories.

I’m happy for that, but I want to focus on the science fiction ideas.  What are the likely odds for many of science fiction’s most popular visions coming true?  Let’s use the year 2050 as a cutoff.  If I could live to be 100, it would be 2051, so that’s close enough to call 2050 the end of my lifetime.  The odds I list are just my best-guess hunches because there is no way for anyone to really calculate them.  As far as I know, there are no bookies taking bets on these future endeavors.

Colonizing the Moon – 1 in 10

It’s been over 40 years since man has walked on the Moon, so this almost seemed a dead dream until China, India and Japan took a interest in the Moon and started up their own space programs.  This is very positive, except that the world-wide recession might slow things down.  Still the Moon is the logical base to start a beachhead on conquering space.  Colonizing the Moon is the cornerstone of all our science fictional dreams about space travel.

I think Robert A. Heinlein owned the Moon fictionally, with classics like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Have Space Suit-Will Travel, The Rolling Stones, The Menace From Earth, The Green Hills of Earth, Rocket Ship Galileo and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.  John Varley and Rudy Rucker are modern writers who have been homesteading the Moon in recent years, giving it a twist with mind uploading, cloning and mad robots.

Some of these books are among my all-time favorite books, but I’ve got to admit, none of them have approach colonizing the Moon in any serious way.  For such an old subject this leaves lots of room for future science fiction writers to work.

Colonizing Mars – 1 in 100

Growing up in the 1960s I really expected to see manned missions to Mars in my lifetime.  It just seemed such an obvious step after the Apollo program  Men like Werner von Braun and Robert Zubrin made it sound so doable.  Well, it’s not.  If you do the research you’ll find just how tough a job going to Mars truly is, not impossible, but well on the edge of the limits of what humans can do now and the near future.

And I think it’s silly to think about Mars until we can conquer to Moon.  If we can send men and women to the Moon for three years, and prove we have the skills to keep them alive, then it will be time to talk about Mars.  However, colonizing Mars is the next step after the Moon, and for many, it’s the main goal.  On the other hand, I believe the road to the stars is paved with airless chunks of rock and we have a convenient one at hand to practice our space survival skills.

Many scientists have said it was amazing luck that some of the twelve men who made it to the Moon weren’t killed.  Most of their luck came from making short journeys lasting less than 2 weeks.  Moon dust would have ruined their suits, landers and machinery if they would have tried to stay much longer.  Is it possible to build self-contained habitats that will last three years, the length of a Mars mission?

Science fiction has always made the near impossible sound easy.  Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars have set the standard for Mars colony science fiction.  His work is far more realistic than most SF writers, but still way too full of fantasy.  Science fiction writers might be visionaries, but they have trouble seeing the details.  Speculation on how to build a self-sustaining colony on Mars is wide-open.  Terraforming is a great idea, but explaining how to build a computer on Mars without help from Earth would be magical.

Manned Missions Beyond Mars – 1 in 100,000

Theoretically, it’s well within our means technologically to colonize the Moon and Mars within the next 25-40 years.  We could make some amazing breakthroughs in technology that would allow us to go further, but we need to get busy, and I think public opinion will be against it.  To go beyond Mars will require developing nuclear rocket technology on the Moon or out in space.  Mars is about the maximum range for manned missions using chemical rockets, and that mission would be far easier if we could perfect nuclear rocketry before we try.  The people of the Earth will not let scientists develop nuclear rockets anywhere near our home world.  The Moon is a fine place to work with radioactive elements.  The real future of manned space travel will depend on the industrialization of the Moon.

Asteroid miners have been a staple of SF since the days of John W. Campbell took over Astounding, ignoring the fact that it’s much cheaper to find the same resources locally on Earth, the Moon or Mars.  Unless space ships can be built on the Moon, mining asteroids is silly.  Any colony on the Moon will want organic elements, and especially hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon.  Moonies will probably want to mine comets.

Manned Interstellar Flight – 1 in 1,000,000,000,000

I guess it’s possible we could discover some magical space drive system that will let us zoom off to the stars before 2050, but it’s highly unlikely.  Personally, I think the only way for humans will travel to the stars will be to build giant generational spaceships that can operate for thousands of years, but even that idea is mostly fantasy.  We might have the will and tech to build interstellar spaceships in a few centuries, but for now the idea is almost pure fantasy.  Star Wars like galactic civilizations are absolute pure fantasy.  Even our very best hard science fiction novels are really just thrilling stories, and are rather pointless for our needs of predicting the near future.  Hard core space opera gives us grand hopes, but the chances of colonizing worlds around other stars is about equal to finding biological immortality.

Intelligent Humanoid Robots – 1 in 5

Asimov, Simak and Williamson ruled the robot stories, but robot stories aren’t as popular today.  Robots and robotics seem to be moving full-steam ahead though, with scientists like Ray Kurzweil predicting an artificial intelligence singularity in the near future.  Hobby robotics is probably much more popular than hobby rocketry ever was.  Anybody with some programming ambition can get into robotics.  And after Spirit and Opportunity’s success on Mars, I can even picture an ever evolving series of robots going where no man can afford to go.  That’s a goddamn shame, but that’s the way it is.  I hope NASA at least starts building in real-time high definition video feeds from it’s metal Martian explorers so us biological creatures back on Earth can feel like we’re walking on Mars vicariously.

Many people believe artificial intelligence is impossible.  I figure if nature can accidentally stumble upon the recipe, than scientists should be able to figure it out sooner or later.  The question is how long.  Robots are cheap enough compared to manned space exploration, so we should see a continual increase in robotic intelligence on space missions, and that might evolve into intelligent robots.  The military is also pushing robots to do more.  The more we ask of robots the more intelligence they acquire.

What’s surprising is I don’t think science fiction has ever done any really good realistic robot stories, either they are people-like and cute, or they are like Gort, all-powerful and scary.  Commander Data was among the best, but not very realistic.  Before 2050 I think we’ll see some pretty amazing robots, and just maybe science fiction will predict what they really will be like.

Visitors From Space – 1 in 1,000,000,000,000

I’d really love to be proven wrong here.  We could use an alien like Klaatu or Karellen to knock some sense into us, but I don’t think that will happen.  What are the odds of intelligent life developing anywhere in the universe?  What are the odds of intelligent life developing twice and near enough to each other to visit?  It must be tremendous.  I’m not saying it’s impossible.  Let’s say it will be nice surprise.

For story purposes, the concept of visitors from space is pretty tired, although it will remain popular.  The idea has endless possibilities and offers so much fun and thrills.  Essentially, it’s a fantasy concept equal to stories about angels and vampires.

SETI Contact – 1 in 1,000,000,000

Detecting an intelligent signal from space is probably far more likely than having aliens over for coffee.  Detecting intelligent alien life in the universe would have profound philosophical implications to our society, so it’s strange that this topic is so seldom tackled by science fiction.  Often it’s a setup for physical contact or acquiring super-science, like Contact by Carl Sagan.  We need more books like His Master’s Voice by Stanislaw Lem, The Hercules Text by Jack McDevitt and The Listeners by James Gunn.

I figured if we were real lucky, and I mean astronomically numbered lucky, SETI would detect a signal from space before I passed on.  That’s the most exciting thing I can practically hope for, but I doubt it will happen.  I think if we build some really gigantic space telescopes we might visually detect artificial elements in the atmospheres of extra-solar planets.

Cloning Humans – 1 in 100

I’ve always considered cloning boring.  It’s making a human without sex, but you end up with another human, big whoop. Most science fiction is about 20 year-old cloned bodies grown in a month, which is silly.  Also, the idea of copying the brain patterns of a natural human onto a clone’s brain is also silly.

Uploading Minds – 1 in 1,000,000,000,000

Mind uploading is a growing topic.  It’s all part of the Human 2.0 theorizing, and has been slowly emerging in science fiction for decades.

[You can see the complete documentary here, or go to YouTube and watch all the parts.]

Whether you copy my brain to a computer simulation, clone, or android mind, I’m still going to die in the process.  What’s the point?  This is no route to immortality.  I’d much rather design an AI mind than copy my own.  Being alive is about experiencing the now, and that’s not copying memories.  However, seeking to reach Human 2.0 status is where much of the science fictional action will be during the 21st century.

The Cutting Edge

If you really want to explore the frontier of what’s happening scientifically, right on the border of where science meets science fiction, be sure and read the Edge.org.  Top thinkers from around the world examine the most far out ideas on the planet.  Most of the articles are very down to Earth, but some could be used to springboard into science fiction stories.

The Future of Science Fiction

From what I can detect, I’m thinking the appeal of science fiction is even waning, at least for the moment.  I examined many months of book reviews at SFSite.com and only a handful could be considered new breakthrough science fiction.  If the editors there removed all the obvious fantasy titles their site would shrink dramatically.  Many of the titles that most SF fans would classify as science fiction, are really adventure stories set in old comfortable science fiction worlds with few writers trying to imagine anything new conceptually.  Like I said above, science fiction writers have gotten much better at telling stories.

Right now I think of all the predictions dreamed up by science fiction writers, I think robots, AI and Human 2.0 explorations are the ones most likely to come somewhat truer in my lifetime.  SETI contact with alien signals from space is going to be like finding one snowflake in all the snow storms of Earth each winter.  It could happen, it might take a thousand years, or a million years, or it could be next year.

I don’t think we’ll ever seen visitors from the stars, and I doubt mankind will ever be an alien invader.  Science fiction has always been deceptive about interstellar rocketships, implying they’d be something like a new model airliner from Boeing.  That thinking is on the order of asking how fast does Santa have to travel to visit every house on Earth.

Until men and women colonize the Moon and Mars and we learn how to build with materials found in outer space and create a new economy that has no dependency on Earth, we won’t be able to think about traveling further than Mars.

I think the dramatic new ideas that come out of science fiction will be about living on Earth.  The potential of combining the Internet, artificial intelligence, robots, advanced learning techniques, simulated computer worlds, and so on will generate new possibilities for humans.  Science fiction writers need to think very hard about what’s going on in this world.  Sooner or later a new H. G. Wells, Jules Verne or Robert A. Heinlein will show up and surprise us.

JWH 12/28/8