The BBC is talking about immortality again. This time, springboarding off Maria Esther de Capovilla’s death. The obligatory poll asks, “Would you want to live to 1,000?”. Currently “yes” is at about 45% and “no” is at 55%. I think we can take this as saying that most people above middle age have resigned themselves to death, while most people below haven’t (of course there are exceptions on both sides). Here’s a clip from the article:

And it’s the stuff of fairytales. Various mythical stories tell of a Fountain of Youth, a mystical spring that grants eternal vitality to all who drink from it.

These are pipe dreams. For most of us getting older, frailer and eventually popping our clogs are simple facts of life.

Now, however, there is a growing band of scientists and philosophers who truly believe that biological boundaries can be pushed back, allowing humans to live to 200, 300, 1,000 and maybe even longer.

Calling themselves “transhumanists”, they argue that it is time humans broke free of their “biological chains”.

Pipe dreams to the public, but not to those who understand the notion of taking an engineering approach to biogerontology.

WIRED has a short and barely informative article on robotics. I’m just referencing because its these type of articles which are on the radar of the mainstream.

A short, non-insightful review of TSIN got dugg yesterday, leading to all the usual comments. Discussions like these come around quite frequently, transhumanists who have neglected to sign up on digg on are missing out on valuable argumentation opportunities. First comment on the digg site:

The inherent flaw is that if you live forever, in a relatively youthful state, you must constantly be working.

This sucks. Death is a good thing. It thins the population. Immortals having immortal children is a problem.

…non-immortals having exponential offspring is a problem, too. We need to decrease our reproductive multiplier to something polynomial rather than exponential, is all.

Tech stuff:

Word is that Nanosolar is making good progress on their 430MW solar fab plant. There could be a small revolution in the adoption of solar power once their products hit the market.

The ballotechnics article on Wikipedia has been properly updated, along with the article for induced gamma emission. Ever used one of those sodium acetate hand warmers, that provide a bit of heat when exposed to air? Well, ballotechnics would be like this, but instead of releasing a few watts over hours, they would release orders of magnitude more energy over the course of seconds. Their energy density may be as high as 10 times that of the best explosives, creating worry that they could replace the fission-based primary in fusion weapons. If so, preventing nuclear proliferation could become impossible.

Brian Wang has some amazing news on a potential 1000-times improvement in remote viewing technology, which would allow satellites to image features on the surface of the earth with a resolution of up to 2 microns. Similar advances in optical technology would allow “ultra-high capacity all-optical arbitrary waveform generation covering optical bandwidth of ~100 THz”, which could give us bandwidth improvements of 10,000 over the best current fiber optics. There is a $9.5M DARPA project currently working on it. This technology could also be applied towards the more advanced technology of phased array optics, which, if used on the battlefield, could create perfectly realistic illusions of troops, tanks, or ships as big as your optical array. Even with binoculars or a telescope, you couldn’t tell the difference between the fake image and a real ship. The gigapixel imaging technology could also be applied towards extremely effective nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons sensors.

Better neural imaging techniques are showing us that the module of the brain we thought was used exclusively to recognize human faces actually has many other purposes.

Superconducting electromagnetic coils are being manufactured and will hit the market in 2007. I assume they’re based on the high-temperature ceramic superconductors, the ones where we don’t understand the physical mechanism underlying their operation. Brian has multiple links to further material, as always. The bottom line is that the technology will allow us to make engines are that weigh three times less and are half as big. He also has an article on wind power turbines from late last year that I somehow missed.

Solar energy without a collector, and high capacity hydrogen-storing materials.