Category: Science

Technical Innovation 2030 – Part 2

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Alright, so I got the no-brainer out of the way.  I identified a critical technology that’s been allowed to languish for sixty years.  Now let me look at actual innovation.

Probably the most powerful new technology is the current ability we have to modify the living genome.  This is the CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) technology.  With this set of tools or techniques we can replace genes inside of living organisms and even produce gene lines that include or exclude traits that biology identifies for these changes.  This kind of control over the machinery of life is unprecedented.  Currently it is being used to create treatments for everything from genetic diseases to cancer.  In the future once the risks have been measured it may be used to edit the genes of human embryos to eliminate disease.  And obviously, as much as the idea is currently denounced by medical ethicists, in the future it will be used eugenically.  In some future time, in the same way as we currently inoculate our children against measles and chicken pox, we will modify our children’s genes against cancer and other diseases.  And after that we will alter their genetic code to make them more intelligent and longer lived.  And finally, after that we’ll use this technology for trivial purposes like making them taller and better looking.

And these things will happen because they can happen and because some of them will make human life better and happier.  Of course, sometime far in the future we may regret tampering with our DNA.  But the same can be said for all of the changes that man’s ascent out of the jungle have created.  These will be just the most premeditated.

And this CRISPR technology can also be used to modify all the other plants, animals and microbes that share the planet with us.  Imagine designing an insect whose only reason for existing is eating ticks so that they won’t have a chance to bite humans and spread disease.  Or how about a robber fly that is designed to eat specific mosquitoes that transmit malaria or even just live in my backyard in Dunwich?  Or how about a caterpillar whose favorite food is poison ivy?  And these are just parlor tricks.  The plant side is where the real benefits accrue.  Currently we have to plant grain every year.  This is expensive and fraught with problems.  What if corn and wheat and rice weren’t annuals but perennials.  What if we could chop the tops off of these plants and leave the root and the stem to grow again next year?  What if all plants could fix nitrogen from the air and thus reduce their need for fertilizers?  What if we could come up with microorganisms that attack the pathogens that cause tree blights like the ones that have decimated chestnut, elm and ash trees?  We can build living things that do a lot of the things we currently use chemistry to do.  And they’ll be a lot better at it.  Pesticides and herbicides can be biological.  We can even design creatures that excrete octane (well, maybe something a little less volatile).  Now that’s a trick I’d like to see come to fruition.

Anyway, you get the idea.  Biology is the next frontier.  But what will the third post in this series be about?

Technical Innovation 2030 – Part 1

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We’re in an odd moment technologically speaking.  The only thing anyone talks about is AI.  It’s the alpha and the omega.  It will bring on the singularity or it will usher in a golden age where we all live like the Eloi in H.G. Wells’ “Time Machine.”  On second thought maybe that would be the singularity since being lunch for troglodytes doesn’t sound like much of a golden age (unless you’re a troglodyte that is).

But I think it’s time to start looking beyond the glory of AI and begin to think of what comes next.  After all, in a manner of speaking AI is kind of like this century’s electronic calculator.  It made engineering work much more efficient but it didn’t eliminate the need for humans to look for answers to problems that needed to be solved.  It just made the process faster.  So once all the tech companies get through firing their engineers and computer scientists the industrial world is going to find that they’re still going to need to design “stuff” and solve new problems that are supposed to make the world a better place.

And contrary to present expectations AI isn’t going to plan and design the next bridge that spans a couple of miles across a bay or between mountains.  Sure, the engineers will use AI to find out the state of the art in civil engineering but eventually a human being will have to sign off on the drawings and take the legal responsibility that the bridge won’t collapse and kill a bunch of people.  And only an idiot would assume that the answer that AI gives him is worth risking prison time without making sure that he knows that the answers are correct.

So, let’s put AI into the category of modern tools and instead look at what problems are in our near future to solve.

Regardless of what everyone has said for the last thirty years, solar and wind energy are not the future energy sources we need.  But there will come a time when hydrocarbons will not be sufficient.  So, I would say that a replacement for oil and gas is the largest technical problem that humanity will face toward the end of this century.  But that means it’s already long overdue to start working out the details of what that will look like.  There may be several technologies that will exist.  I’ve questioned (and not just in a fictional setting) whether geothermal might become a significant source of global energy but if I were to make an educated guess, I’d say that nuclear fission will be the main energy source.

But just because fission has been a stable part of the energy grid in places like France for more than half a century doesn’t mean that the form currently employed is even close to what will power the world for the next century and more.  The science and technology of fission power is in its infancy.  The research in the United States that was going on in the 1950s and 1960s was strangled in its crib by the whole anti-nuclear movement of the time.  There will need to be a rebirth of nuclear power technology that will combine government, industry and academia.  And it will require energy policy to be handled by intelligent people in government.  And that is something we haven’t seen in half a century in this country.  Because it is a massive effort.  Eventually we will have to decide whether battery technology is a better storage medium for things like transportation than something like synthetic hydrocarbons or hydrogen.  And these questions should be answered based on efficiency and other important factors like safety.  But definitely not decided by idiots like Al Gore, Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

Let’s see what’s next after power in Part 2.

Aloha Fellow Hominidae

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Both the mountain gorilla of Africa and the orangutan of Southeast Asia are critically endangered in their native areas.  The gorilla in particular are down to about a thousand creatures.  And the primary reason for this is that humans in their ranges are extremely poor and look on these creatures as “bush meat.”  The conservation societies have done quite a bit to encourage eco-tourism to produce funds to increase the law enforcement to protect these primates from the locals.  But there are many risk factors that end up adding to the cumulative mortality of these animals.  The pet trade steals young apes for rich collectors and there are various markets for body parts (heads, hands and feet) of the great apes.

Now, these two species are far from unique in the conservation problems faced by rare animals.  Rhinos, elephants and other megafauna are in danger of disappearing from Africa and Asia along with the mountain gorilla and orangutan.  But I think there is an extenuating circumstance for making them a special case.  Namely, they are remarkably close to the human family.  Now the chimpanzee is actually closer.  They really are a close cousin.  But there are a lot more chimpanzees in the wild than either of these two species.  Also, I dislike chimpanzees.  They’re too much like humans.  The level of aggression they demonstrate makes them far from an attractive target for my crusade.  I think the personalities of the mountain gorilla and the orangutan make them a much more sympathetic and interesting subject for my project.

In a nutshell I propose that two small Hawaiian Islands be made into a permanent refuge for each of these species.  Now I will confess I haven’t really worked out any of the logistics.  Are there two islands big enough to support a large colony of each of these species?  Does the US government have sole jurisdiction over any of these smaller islands?  So right now, this idea is a pipe dream.

But I think if it can be organized, it would provide an enormous service for humanity.  The extinction of either of these species would be a terrible waste of biological knowledge about species that are important relatives of humans.  Even from the point of view of medicine and biological science they are priceless resources that shouldn’t be allowed to go extinct just because they currently live in third-world hellholes.  Even from the point of view of neurological research, having two other primates so closely related to humans is something that in the future will provide enormous insights into the evolution of our brains.

And going along with the idea of eco-tourism, millions of people would pay good money to view these apes in an environment that doesn’t expose themselves to the dangers of entering the third world areas where these two species are native.

But from a non-utilitarian perspective, these are magnificent creatures that are fascinating for humans to observe and learn from.  And I’ll bet if they were brought into a safe environment like Hawaii, I think they would start exhibiting behavior characterized by lower levels of stress.  Aloha fellow Hominidae.

The Day After the Day After Tomorrow

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In the comments for yesterday’s post on anti-matter there was some discussion about the methodology for interstellar travel; matter/anti-matter annihilation as a form of impulse power versus the use of a worm hole to poke in and out of space as needed.  As was intimated (being turned inside out) the current understanding of general relativity does not present any clear mechanism for human beings to utilize such a phenomenon and remain alive.  And that got me thinking.

Five hundred years ago if you wanted to go from Portugal to India you would get on a sailing ship and circumnavigate the continent of Africa and then cross the Indian Ocean.  And when you returned from this trip thirty months would have passed.  Today, a direct flight from Lisbon to Calcutta would take about twelve hours.  Call it a day for a round trip.  That’s about 900 times faster than the old way.  A trip to Mars at its shortest takes about six months.  Adding in the return trip makes the whole voyage something like 26–34 months.  If somehow, we could increase our speed by the same 900 times we could go round trip to Mars in a day.

Of course that’s impossible.  But only in the sense that we would be trying to improve the same means of travel in the future case.  So, if you told Vasco da Gama he could make a round trip to India in one day he would assume you were either joking or insane.  Because the very idea of a jet plane was an impossibility in his world.  Before you can have jet planes you need Galileo, Newton and Maxwell.  In other words, you need the mathematics, physics, chemistry and engineering of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to know that a jet plane could exist.

What if the mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and engineering of the twenty second, twenty third and twenty fourth centuries conspire to make the round trip to Mars only one day by finding a completely novel approach to travel.  What if wormholes really could be harnessed for human transport?  Then a day long trip would just be a convenience for meals whereas actual travel time would be zero.  But you argue, “wormholes are a theoretical aspect of relativity that have never been observed and if they exist would be as inimical to human life as a black hole would be.  And I would counter that feeding flammable liquids like octane into a machine that produces electric sparks and depends on metal parts rotating thousands of times per minute is much too dangerous a method for transporting humans from place to place.

So, I won’t say I know that we’ll ever reach the stars.  But I think anyone who says categorically that we cannot is making assumptions that cannot be taken as fact.  They are conjecture based on the current understanding of physics and engineering.  So, I guess we’re free to fantasize about galactic empires and worm holes and warp drives and anything that makes us happy.  And some days I want to read about the day after tomorrow and other days I’ll dream about galactic empires.  Why not?

FedEx Boldly Goes Where No Man Has Gone Before

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When Scotty needs a shipment of anti-matter does he expect to see an Amazon truck or maybe FedEx?  Well, maybe not yet but who knows about tomorrow?

Antimatter has been transported for the first time ever — in the back of CERN’s truck

“On 24 March, a team at CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, transported 92 antiprotons in a specially designed bottle that traps the particles using magnetic fields. The bottle travelled on the back of a truck, taking a 30-minute journey around the lab’s site.”

Alright, to be realistic, the Starship Enterprise couldn’t reach Warp Factor 8 on 92 antiprotons.  In fact, you probably couldn’t lift your pinky off the table with the energy produced by that amount of matter/anti-matter annihilation.

https://youtu.be/0xD9qEdHFIE?si=zCKTeF3RTXgm51yZ&t=52

But if we can send anti-matter by delivery truck today who knows what next week will bring?  Someday I may be able to order up a bushel basket of Higgs bosons or a peck of top quarks.  The sky’s the limit.

I read somewhere that the folks dreaming about interstellar travel were hypothesizing that anti-matter could be more easily stored if it was cooled down to just above absolute zero.  I remember thinking, “Does this sound like we’re making it easier or harder by requiring it to reach such a difficult state.  But maybe I’m wrong.  My whole experience with cryogenics had to do with trying to build a cooling jacket for a chemical reactor that used liquid nitrogen to run some organic synthesis steps at ridiculously low temperatures.  And to be totally honest, I wasn’t convinced that the chemists really had any specific reactions that needed these conditions.  They just wanted to make sure that the system they built couldn’t possibly be unable to produce the temperatures, pressures and chemical corrosion resistance parameters that they had promised to their boss.  But anyway, if you can imagine anti-matter travelling in a truck then you can further reckon with anti-matter at 0.01 K sitting in the hold of a star ship waiting to be combined with normal matter to produce impulse to accelerate the ship toward Proxima Centauri.  I just know I won’t be volunteering for that first trip, thank you very much.

So, since we’re discussing anti-matter, I’m still waiting to hear where all the anti-matter in the universe is hiding.  After all, I seem to remember that according to all the theories out there, the universe should have exactly equal quantities of matter and anti-matter.  Well, where is it?

Somewhere out there shouldn’t there be an anti-photog, out there running an anti-OFC website and publishing his novel “The Anti-Sniper”?  Maybe all the missing antimatter is also, all the missing dark matter they’re always looking for.  But whatever the reality, if we’re starting to ship anti-protons around it’s only a matter of time before the commodities exchanges start listing anti-matter on the big board and before you know it, I’ll be able to trade puts and calls for anti-matter.  What would a butterfly spread on anti-neutrons cost on expiration Friday.  Hmmm.

Alone or Unique?

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There are several YouTube channels that use an AI generated voice and image of Richard Feynman (Feynman Reborn, Think Like Feynman, Physics with Feynman) to discuss scientific topics; physics, astronomy, technology, etc.).  Now this does seem a little weird.  Why use the AI simulation of a scientist whose heyday was eighty years ago?  But if you watch a few of them you realize that Feynman’s voice has a very natural and unpretentious style and the authors have tried to match his approach of making the mysteries of science accessible to people who don’t possess sophisticated technical expertise.  Whether he’s explaining quantum mechanics or the impact of mass to energy conversion in a fission reaction, his reasonable, clear speaking style is highly engaging.

Today I was watching a video in which he took the position that the chances of us ever receiving a message from another intelligent civilization travelling around another star was basically zero.  Now, he wasn’t dogmatic.  He freely admitted that the calculations involved contained at least four or five variables that no one really knows the correct probability of.  In other words, how do you determine what the “average” length of time that a technological civilization lasts?  Ours has lasted at most a few hundred years.  But even that is not a real data point.  We still don’t have a way to “send” a signal out to other star systems powerfully enough to be heard.  And we definitely don’t know how long our civilization will last.  So, each of the “factors” for figuring out how many interstellar civilizations there are is either somewhat speculative or just plain guessing.  And by the end of the video, he was championing the case that we will never “hear” from anyone “out there.”

But what was nice was that he openly admitted that he had no authoritative proof and in fact negative proof would always be inconclusive.  And he also said he would love very much to be proven wrong.  I guess I’m really saying I like the way that the maker of the video remained humble in making his case.  Of course, you could say he’s hiding behind the great man by using his image.  But I will admit he’s picked a very good “spokesman” in Feynman.

And of course, this is all very timely with the recent opening of the very popular movie “Project Hail Mary.”  Right now, “Rocky” is a box office star and everyone’s favorite intelligent extraterrestrial rock crab.  But the fact that “Feynman” just told me that Rocky doesn’t exist and that we could never meet him doesn’t destroy the fun and excitement of the story.  Because at the end of the video “Feynman” sums up the situation by saying that even if we are the only intelligent life in the whole cosmos that in no way takes away from the wonder of our existence.  In fact, he counters that if we are unique that makes everything about us more astounding and everything around us more precious; the air, the warmth, the miraculous mechanism of life itself.

The Earth’s Planned Maintenance Schedule – Part 2

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Let us speculate that humanity survives its intellectual infancy.  Let’s imagine that it’s now 10,000 A.D. (that’s right, the Year of the Lord) and our smartest Earth scientists have calculated that by 100,000 A.D. the Earth’s magnetic field is going to shut down for good.  I have no reason to believe this is an accurate number.  By all accounts we should have many millions of years on the warranty for the magnetic field but just let’s say for the sake of discussion it will.

Well, there we are ultra-modern humans with a world government, a genetically engineered genome that includes a third set of teeth and a three-hundred-year lifespan.  We hear that our distant descendants are going to lose their atmosphere, oceans and have to wear SPF 50,000 rated sunscreen for days at the {dry) beach.  So, what will they do?  Well, with a ninety-thousand-year window of opportunity, if they’re my descendants they’ll probably waste the first twenty thousand years dithering.  After that they’ll start engineering the crap out of their options.  But what will that be?  Let me try to guess.

So, the Earth’s liquid iron core produces a magnetic field because it is a moving electric field.  So, all we have to do is produce a moving electric field between Earth’s atmosphere and the sun (and to a lesser extent all of the universe around us.  Well then shouldn’t we install solar panels in orbit around the Earth and run a current through a really long piece of copper wire that is moving and thereby set up an electromagnet?  Now someone with any kind of electrical engineering knowledge or a physicist who specializes in E-M would slap me across the face and say, “What the hell are you rambling about?”  And he would be right.  But just for the sake of getting through this exercise let’s say that it is theoretically possible to have a framework around the Earth that converts solar energy into enough of a moving electric field to induce a magnetic field as strong as the current field we enjoy today.

Postulating that, is it technically feasible?  Or would the amount of mass needed to create this device be completely ridiculous from the point of view of the energy needed to boost it into space ?  Would the weight of the conductive material and the photoelectric cells be just so enormous that it would be beyond all of the resources of even a distant future civilization to put in orbit from Earth?

Now this is a cheat.  I don’t know the answer.  I haven’t tried to estimate the amount of material needed to produce such an enormous electrical field.  Something with a diameter of more than 24,000 miles and with the structural integrity that that requires seems absurd.  I, of course am aware of the science fiction convention of a ring or (Dyson) sphere around a star used to harness some significant portion of the energy output of the fusion reaction going on inside every star but I don’t know that anyone with enough of a technical background has tried to do a back of the envelope calculation to see if the numbers are just too scary to make any sense.

So, I’ll throw this one out to the readership.  What have you heard?

The Earth’s Planned Maintenance Schedule – Part 1

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Human beings of one sort or another have existed on this planet for a few million years.  But only in the last ten thousand years have we existed above the level of stone age hunter-gatherers.  And only for the last five hundred years have we begun to understand the rudiments of science at a level high enough to give us a glimpse of what surrounds us in the universe. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton began opening up the window to what the Earth is and how it interacts with the Sun and the Moon and how we are related to the other planets and just how far away the stars really are.

And because this knowledge is only a few hundred years old I guess I should forgive us for not having thought deeply enough about what our future looks like and what things should be on our list of stuff to think about.  For instance, only recently have planetary scientists started asking why are all the other planets completely unfit to sustain life?  And this may seem like a silly question but look at it by asking the inverse question, “How did Earth win the jackpot and have basically everything we need to make this place a paradise stuck in the middle of a series of hells.  We’ve got the right distance from the Sun.  We’ve got a molten iron core to produce a strong magnetic field to protect us from solar and cosmic radiation.  We’ve got a deep atmosphere.  We’ve got liquid water in abundance.  We’ve got all of the chemical elements available due to vulcanism.  And most importantly we’ve got life in absolute abundance.

Now look at the rest of the planets.  Mercury is ridiculously close to a titanic fusion reactor.  Venus and Mars are close to the habitable zone in terms of solar orbit.  But Venus is a greenhouse oven and Mars is a frozen lifeless ball with no atmosphere to speak of and no water.  As for the outer planets they’re not even close to being places where life could even start.  Jupiter is more like a failed star and Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are frozen hells where liquid nitrogen takes the place of water.  A case could be made that some of the moons of Jupiter and the other gas giants may have subsurface oceans of liquid water underneath thick layers of ice.  And due to magnetic interaction with their primary world, they could be at temperatures and pressures where life is theoretically possible to exist.  Sure.  Why not?

But once we get a little smarter and a little more organized it’s going to be time to start thinking about what challenges will planet Earth be faced with in the distant future.  Now, I’m not specifically talking about the distant future, billions of years from now when the Sun runs out of hydrogen and starts becoming a red giant.  That’s too far in the future for even me to worry about.  But as a for instance, what happens if the magnetic poles switch off and then reverse direction?  That sounds kind of crazy but it does happen fairly regularly.  And sometimes the field just weakens significantly like the last one about 42,000 years ago.  If the field disappears soon, it would probably wreak havoc with all of our satellites that currently benefit from the Earth’s field protecting them from charged particles to a greater or lesser extent.

Now things like this have been postulated in science fiction stories but when we get around to growing up, we will have to spend a good amount of time figuring out how much time we have before the Earth starts reaching its middle age and stuff starts working less optimally.  I’ll think about some “for instances” in the next installment.

It’s Just a Thought

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Asteroid 2024 YR4 is not going to hit Earth.  Yay?  It’s also not going to hit the Moon either.  Yay?  Apparently, this celestial rock which is 200 ft in length and weighs about 310,000 tons will be sliding by our orbit in a few years and will miss the moon by a couple of thousand miles.  Apparently, there are now safeguards in place to check if any known asteroids have the potential to hit Earth and also evaluate what potential damage they could do.

A2024 YR4 is considered a city killer.  It has been estimated that its impact would be the equivalent of 7.7 megatons of trinitrotoluene (TNT) detonating, which is a pretty big explosion.  Once they refined their calculations, they became convinced that it would miss Earth by a good large margin.  When a lunar impact looked more likely they began fussing because they speculated that an explosion on the Moon would throw up a lot of debris and it might destroy many satellites around Earth.  But when they used the James Webb telescope and measured the orbit more carefully even this scenario was ruled out.  It’s not going to hit anything.

The YouTube video author concluded that the investigation and analysis of the asteroid’s trajectory was a major victory for science and global cooperation.  Well, maybe.  But up until someone started checking the paths of asteroids, haven’t we been at this risk basically forever?  I guess the last sizable asteroid (or maybe comet) that collided with Earth was the Tunguska blast in 1908.  That was more than a hundred years ago.  And it took forever for anyone to even figure out what the hell happened.  Based on this track record something like this will happen less frequently than once a century.  And no one will be killed but a lot of trees will be flattened.  But something like once in 66 million years an asteroid 8 miles long will hit Earth causing a mass extinction event.  That rock was 200 times bigger than A2024 YR4.  How about if we stop worrying about anything less than 1% of the extinction rock.  So that would be twice as big as the recent rock.  So, if a 400 ft asteroid is crowding Earth, then maybe I’ll start getting nervous.  Or maybe I won’t.  We already have nuclear war, earthquakes, tsunamis, super-volcanoes, “global warming,” plagues (like COVID) and transgender mass murderers to worry about.  I don’t think I have the bandwidth to start worrying about rogue asteroids rolling into Earth or now into the Moon and destroying my wi-fi reception.

You know, maybe I’d be happy if an asteroid hit the Moon and sent a million meteors raining into the various satellites we have clogging up the sky over our heads.  Maybe that’s exactly what we need.  If cell phones stopped working and once we walk away from our desks we couldn’t be reached by every idiot on the planet maybe we’d actually be happier.  It’s just a thought.

Guest Contributor – ArthurinCali – 27FEB2026 – AI, Yes and No

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I’m no Luddite regarding technology advances, especially regarding AI. It definitely has a place in the 21st century and in society as a powerful tool and emergent technology that can help humanity progress. However, the almost childlike faith many exhibit on its ability to never be mistaken is a troublesome factor. Numerous examples have been pointed out where AI LLMs get historical facts incorrect, or outright repeat Progressive-Liberal dogma verbatim when asked to clarify a social issue. Not really a good development to polarize public opinion on a technology they are promising will revolutionize the world. Over 400 AI data centers are currently under construction with another 900+ scheduled in the US alone. With over 1500 expected to be in operation around 2030, these questions of authenticity and quality of information provided will become more salient to the viability of AI. As to the effects on entertainment, I believe that the AI slop will become popular to a segment of the public, but another effect of this will be that human crafted works of art; whether in cinema and literature will also become more valuable to many. It will be the difference between “store bought” and “homemade” so to speak.