Cloth $73.00sc 0-226-10032-4 Fall 2006
Paper $29.00sp 0-226-10033-2 Fall 2006
People-especially Americans-are by and large optimists. They’re much
better at imagining best-case scenarios (I could win the lottery!) than
worst-case scenarios (A hurricane could destroy my neighborhood!). This
is true not just of their approach to imagining the future, but of their
memories as well: people are better able to describe the best moments of
their lives than they are the worst.
Though there are psychological reasons for this phenomenon, Karen
A.Cerulo, in Never Saw It Coming, considers instead the role of society
in fostering this attitude. What kinds of communities develop this
pattern of thought, which do not, and what does that say about human
ability to evaluate possible outcomes of decisions and events?
Cerulo takes readers to diverse realms of experience, including intimate
family relationships, key transitions in our lives, the places we work
and play, and the boardrooms of organizations and bureaucracies. Using
interviews, surveys, artistic and fictional accounts, media reports,
historical data, and official records, she illuminates one of the most
common, yet least studied, of human traits - a blatant disregard for
worst-case scenarios. Never Saw It Coming, therefore, will be crucial to
anyone who wants to understand human attempts to picture or plan the
future.
Funny how one of the most common of human traits is to ignore the risks with the greatest negative impact.
Peter Thiel puts his weight behind Dr. Aubrey de Grey’s engineering blueprint for alleviating the debilities caused by aging
San Francisco – Peter A. Thiel, co-founder and former CEO of online payments system PayPal, Founder and Managing Member of Clarium Capital Management, a San Francisco-based hedge fund, and angel investor in social networking site Facebook, has announced his pledge of $3.5 Million to support scientific research into the alleviation and eventual reversal of the debilities caused by aging, to be conducted under the auspices of the Methuselah Foundation, a charity co-founded and Chaired by Dr. Aubrey de Grey.
Mr. Thiel commented “Rapid advances in biological science foretell of a treasure trove of discoveries this century, including dramatically improved health and longevity for all. I’m backing Dr. de Grey, because I believe that his revolutionary approach to aging research will accelerate this process, allowing many people alive today to enjoy radically longer and healthier lives for themselves and their loved ones.
Mr. Thiel will donate a total of $500,000 over the next three years to fund pilot research projects intended to deliver early stage validation of the “SENS” approach to combating the debilitation caused by aging.
Additionally, from now until the end of 2009, Mr. Thiel promises to match every Dollar donated to the Methuselah Foundation for SENS research with a 50 cent matching contribution from himself, up to a maximum of $3 Million of matching funds.
Dr. de Grey said “I am extremely grateful to Peter for his bold and visionary initiative. I have been working with leading biologists and biochemists around the world in identifying promising research projects, and with this generous donation we will go to work straightaway.”
About SENS
SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) is a detailed plan for alleviating the debilitation caused by human aging. SENS is an engineering project, reflecting the fact that aging is a medical condition and that medicine is an engineering discipline. Aging is a set of progressive changes in body composition, at the molecular and cellular level, which are side-effects of essential metabolic processes; each of these changes has the potential to be mitigated and eventually reversed. Further details of SENS can be found at: www.sens.org
I was fortunate to meet with Aubrey when he was in San Francisco to formally accept Thiel’s gift, talking with reporters and filming a promotional video. Aubrey attended a meeting of BA-Trans that I organized. Other attendees were Bruce Klein and Susan Fonseca-Klein, who were original founders of the Immortality Institute, and Adam Kamil, a frequent poster on ImmInst who flew in from LA to be at this event. Some photos can be downloaded here. Following is a photo of myself and Aubrey after a few drinks:
By 2020, and potentially as early as 2010, we will know enough about carbon chemistry, kinematic self-replication, and nanoscale positional control to build a desktop nanofactory - a machine that uses many trillions of tiny arms to put together macro-scale products. Because tiny arms can move incredibly fast, they will be radically productive. It has been estimated that a 100 kg nanofactory will be able to manufacture its own weight in product in about three hours, perhaps less.
Nanofactory technology will begin with an assembler - a reprogrammable molecular machine capable of making a copy of itself. An assembler would be extremely small, composed of maybe a couple million atoms. This is about the same as a ribosome. For a reference, see this picture of some nanoparts next to a virus:
An assembler would basically be an artificial ribosome. Ribosomes are the little machines in the cell that manufacture every protein in your body. Its basic design hasn’t changed in over a billion years.
Feasibility arguments for molecular nanotechnology (MNT) are well-documented in the literature. Its not a question of if, but when. The technological and sociological impact of personal nanofactories (PNs) is certain to be extreme. If regulations permit it, you will be able to construct, right in your very home, just about any structure allowed by the laws of chemistry and available feedstock. All current manufacturing, communication, and transportation processes will be fundamentally restructured over a period of mere years or even months. The first nanofactories are likely to use carbon feedstock, meaning most of the products will be made out of diamond. Water may be used as a ballast for some diamond products.
Products built using MNT will be extremely cheap: around the cost of their raw materials. This is because human labor, the primary cost of manufacturing today, is largely subtracted from the equation. Carbon is extremely cheap, and can be mined by the megaton from practically anywhere. Power requirements are modest. Made of diamond, a nanofactory will not require much maintenance.
Quickly, typical products made of plastic, ceramic, or metal will be redesigned to accommodate the new diamondoid medium. There will be diamond plates, diamond tables, diamond cutlery, ovens, coffee makers, microwaves, tiles, walls, chairs, televisions, cameras, printers, scanners, shelving, windows, computers, pens, notepads, pottery, showerheads, and so on. Something like 90% of all manufactured products will be replaced by diamondoid versions. This is what Neal Stephenson was thinking when he wrote a book called The Diamond Age.
The father of nanotechnology, Eric Drexler, lists a few things which would become possible with MNT on his website:
desktop computers with a billion processors inexpensive, efficient solar energy systems medical devices able to destroy pathogens and repair tissues materials 100 times stronger than steel superior military systems additional molecular manufacturing systems
MNT has been called “magic”, and the word choice is not entirely inappropriate. We will be able to build products with greater performance and more diverse functionality than anything you or any university Ph.Ds have imagined. All shortages of energy, food, water, and shelter will be rapidly solved, as long as nanofactories are made available to developing countries. Subdermal heaters, nanoproducts designed to do little more than generate waste heat, will eliminate the problem of obesity practically overnight. The size and range of products will be limited only by whatever regulations are built into the first round of nanofactories. And I hope that these regulations are extremely strict. You see, nanofactories will be the most dangerous technology that mankind has ever faced, thousands of times more dangerous than nuclear weapons.
Given an unrestricted nanofactory and a few million dollars worth of programming and engineering, here are a few products that I could manufacture in almost arbitrary quantities, given a couple months manufacturing time:
sniper rifles that weigh less than 5 kg, capable of firing a lethal projectile at Mach 10 towards any target within my line of sight. extremely light and strong armor capable of stopping 10 kg explosive shells moving at faster than 10 km/sec. Metal Storm systems which fire as many as 1,000,000 projectiles per minute through ballistics arrays. UAV swarms capable of actively neutralizing very large rockets, providing comprehensive area denial, working together to disassemble buildings, etc. highly maneuverable VTOL craft able to destroy almost any number of F-22 Raptors or F-35 Lightnings. gigawatt-class, solar array or nuclear-powered microwave beams capable of completely melting tanks, aircraft, destroyers, incoming missiles, etc. from hundreds of miles away. isotope separation systems that enrich uranium efficiently, at great speeds, giving enough fissile material to make bombs in days rather than years. gigantic lenses capable of redirecting sunlight towards arbitrary coordinates in extremely high concentrations; a solar furnace. missile swarms composed of individual missiles about 1 meter long, carrying 1 kg warheads, manufactured by the millions, capable of traveling through the upper atmosphere and surviving reentry.
Because products made out of diamond can be extremely strong and light, 100 kg of carbon gives you a very large bang for your buck. For example, a Mercedes S-class today weighs about 2,000 kg, but with diamondoid building materials, this weight could be reduced tremendously, if desired - the primary motivation to preserve the vehicle’s current weight would be the preservation of inertia, rather than engineering limitations. An automobile made out of nanodiamond could have an absurdly low weight, on the order of a hundreth of an ounce, not including fuel. If this sounds fantastic to you, take a look at what is already possible today:
This tiny block of transparent aerogel is supporting a brick weighing 2.5 kg. The aerogel’s density is 0.1 g/cm^3.
Anyway, the point of all this is simple: nanofactories need to be extremely restricted in the products they can build, or there is going to be big problems. The open source, anti-digital rights management, P2P-generation needs to get this. Information may want to be free, but if weapons designs are readily available and manufacturable in the post-MNT world, there are going to be problems of the likes we’ve never seen. To minimize the risk of danger, the safest option is to have all product designs authenticated by a central authority. Yes, that scary phrase, “central authority”. This central authority needs to be capable of determining which designs are safe, maintaining an extremely high level of nanofactory security, and enforcing the law when people try to circumvent it. The libertarian dream of minimalist government, unfortunately, must be discarded.
Now, in general, I’m extremely against big government. It can be a huge waste, and extremely inefficient relative to market-driven competition. But when it comes to managing magic, decentralized solutions simply won’t do. There needs to be a global standard and global regulations. Rogue states won’t do, either. One rogue nation could use MNT to manufacture enough weapons to turn the capitals of any opposing nation, no matter how large, into a series of smoking craters. This is a risk we shouldn’t be willing to take, and once the potential of MNT starts to sink in with higher-level government officials, they won’t.
Life extensionists: realize that the greatest risk to living longer is not actually aging, which we will eventually defeat cleanly, but existential risks of the type I frequently discuss, including superintelligence and nanotech arms races. You can extend your expected future life more by lowering the probability of these disasters than through any other means.
When it comes to getting into space, traditional rocketry is the pits. Gigantic tanks that cost millions of dollars, massive fuel requirements, trajectories that fight against the atmosphere instead of using it to their advantage. Out of the five space shuttles built, two have gone boom. If you’re going to build a Lifeboat in orbit, deploy solar power satellites, or visit spacehotels, you’re going to need a better way to get into space.
Luckily, there are numerous ideas, including rocket planes, orbital airships, the space elevator, and the space pier. 3/4 of these ideas already have companies putting serious resources towards their realization. Let’s take a look at the details, shall we?
The rocket plane is currently the idea getting the most attention and funding. All current rocket planes are only capable of taking people to the edge of space and back, rather than going into orbit. Thus, trips on rocket planes are called suborbital space flights. The typical rocket plane launch consists of a larger plane that helps a smaller unit ascend to about 14km, where the air is several times thinner than at ground level, then releasing it.
The first rocket plane to reach space, as defined by 100km altitude, was the North American X-15, which was flown almost two hundred times throughout the 60s. Today, we have SpaceshipOne, with SpaceShipTwo on the way by 2008. Virgin Galactic, the company largely funding the present effort, has stated that if SpaceShipTwo is successful, it will follow up with a craft capable of making it into orbit, SpaceShipThree:
In general, craft that suck material directly from the atmosphere to use for oxidation offer superior specific impulse to traditional chemical rockets:
Earlier this year, Virgin Galactic started constructing the world’s first purpose-built commerical spaceport, SpacePortAmerica, in southwest New Mexico. Space Adventures Ltd. is partnering with the people behind the Ansari X Prize to plan and eventually build the Ras Al Khaimah spaceport in the United Arab Emirates, and the Singapore Spaceport in Singapore. Here’s what they would look like upon completion:
Spiffy, yes?
So what is an orbital airship? Proposed by JP Aerospace, the orbital airship concept is a three-staged process which includes a conventional airship, a permanent sky base, followed by a helium-filled, solar-powered ascender unit that slowly accelerates horizontally until it reaches escape velocity. Here’s a look into the crotch of the Y-shaped ascender unit:
Here’s a look at the inside:
The JP Aerospace website has several videos of both real flights and CG mockups. Problem is, engineers on the sci.space newsgroup confirmed that their plan is physically impossible. You can’t gather enough energy with solar cells to overcome the atmospheric drag on the ascender unit. Interesting idea, but seems as if it will require major breakthroughs to be feasible, if ever. Time to move on to the space elevator…
The space elevator is a concept being championed by the Liftport Group. It’s one of the older alternative space ideas, dating back several decades. The proposed contruction method, as I understand it, is to guide an asteroid into geostationary orbit, launch a series of rockets filled with carbon nanotube fiber to it, and lower a thin “seed elevator” to the earth’s surface. From this point on, the elevator could be strengthened by using robotic climbers to add additional material to the initial thread.
The space elevator concept is very popular, in no small part due to its common presence in sci-fi, Tower of Babel-esque connotations, and the numerous CG mockups floating around on the net. I used to be a big space elevator advocate, but I’ve started to think that in the short term, it is not the ideal means of getting to space. To quote extropy list veteran Eugen Leitl:
I have problems with terrestrial space elevators (much less so with lunar elevators), largely because of need of actively moving the ribbon to avoid perforation by debris, because the tensile strenth required is borderline to what physics gives you, with not much safety margin, and if you fail only once you’ve wrapped all your infrastructure around the equator.
Forming a continuous rigid strand from earth to space, a space elevator would interfere with all sorts of low earth orbits, and also be an ideal target for terrorists of the future. Once that cable snaps, it would practically take the power of a god to grab the two ends and reconnect them without imminent disaster. My preferred alternative is the Space Pier:
The Space Pier is an idea from J. Storrs Hall, a pioneer in the field of nanotechnology and my colleague on the CRN Global Task Force. His site explaining the idea can be found here. Essentially, it’s a 100km-tall, 300km-structure topped with an electromagnetic linear accelerator. Air resistance at this altitude is lessened by a factor of one million, and the plan is less cumbersome and catastrophe-prone than a taut string that reaches six earth radii from the surface. It would be a compressive tower, that is, standing under its own weight rather than using a geosyncronous counterweight. If one of the legs were K.O.ed by a nuclear terrorist attack, the structure as a whole would still stand. Utility fog distributed around the legs would provide yet another failsafe. The trip to the top is much shorter than climbing up a 36,000 km space elevator, and the way to low earth orbit is fast and easy. Once in LEO, one could employ ion drives or other techniques to get to GEO or out of the earth’s gravity well.
Well, that’s my summary… dozens of other exotic earth-to-orbit schemes can be found on this site. Happy flying.
Keith Elis’ statement from a discussion on the newly-created Singularity list:
Hi all,
There is a possibility that at some point in the future, government
agencies, wealthy foundations, and non-profits will significantly
increase expenditures as to AGI development. When the purse-strings
open, and the money flows, it will flow like tax dollars, bequests, and
donations do — toward politically tenable projects. Yudkowsky’s
Friendliness theory, whether you agree with it’s technical feasibility
or not, is very effectively positioning the Singularity Institute’s
future AGI projects to be Politically Friendly.
In the summer of 2003, the US media reported on an attempt by DARPA to
put a futures market in place which would ostensibly be able to forecast
certain undesirable events such as terrorist attacks, assassinations and
the like. The idea was to find a way to elevate our awareness before a
threat materialized, and so DARPA was studying these prediction methods.
Now, while the idea itself has theoretical and practical merit, some
members of Congress sensed an easy victory against an injured opponent
and piled on. There was no debate; there was no thoughtful consideration
of the project’s chances for success; there was no collective desire to
learn more about the idea. The project was incinerated by fiery
political soundbites, and no opposing voice was willing to be
incinerated along with it. The incident caused Adm John Poindexter to
resign in disgrace and we will never hear of the US government playing
with prediction markets again in our lifetimes.
There is a lesson here for everyone working on an AGI project that “just
needs funding to get there.” You must be politically tenable. Funding
your project must be justifiable in a soundbite. And it should take a
Ph.D. droning on and on for pages in technical jargon to present an
argument against you, your theory, your design, and your most likely
outcome. As an exercise, and remembering that you’re really, really
smart, and the rest of us aren’t, how do you debate against the
following statement?
“We should ensure, in fact guarantee, that AGI doesn’t wipe out
humanity.”
Do you not see that lining up against this statement for whatever
technical mumbo-jumbo reason is suicidal? But forget funding for a
moment. Think about what happens when Congress gets involved in
regulating this field, and guys in jackboots come knocking. Is it
smarter to have publicly stated ‘Friendly AI is bunk’ or to have said
‘It’s the only kind AI worth building’?
Please, everyone working on a real AGI project that might hasten a
Singularity, you must learn this lesson from Yudkowsky. He’s not wrong.
Keith
The point of this message is that explicitly including a well-thought-out Friendliness strategy in an AGI project is likely to garner more approval from the higher-ups. Not to mention minimizing the risk of the human race being replaced by indifferent machine intelligence.
The most frequently heard objection to using science to make people live longer is the issue of overpopulation. Our world is totally filled up as it is, right? Well, maybe. Let’s take pause for a moment, and look at a few numbers.
The United States has about 10,000,000 km² of land. The average population density is 30/km². The earth as a whole has about 150,000,000 km² of land and 350,000,000 km² of water, for a total area of roughly 500,000,000 km². The average population density on land is 40/km².
My hometown of Burlingame, CA, a typical suburb, including some very large houses, has an average population density of 2,000/km². The housing unit density is about 1,000/km². It is a calm suburban town, and certainly isn’t overcrowded.
New York City has an average population density of about 10,000/km². While it could be considered somewhat crowded, many people love living there, staying for the entirety of their busy and urban lives. Hong Kong has a population density of about 6,000/km², but despite this, is considered one of the greenest cities in Asia and has devoted 40% of its land to Country Parks and Nature Reserves. The population density of San Francisco is also about 6,000/km², and it is very pleasant to live here.
Population density by country:
So it turns out that if 5% of the United States were converted into urban area with a population density of 6,000/km², and 45% were converted into suburban area with a population density of 2,000/km², with the remaining 50% left for rural area, parks, and farms, there would be enough room for 3 billion in the urban areas, and 9 billion in the suburban areas, for a total population of 12 billion. This is in the US alone. This scheme could be extended to the other countries and continents for a total population of around 100 billion. Everything between the Arctic and Antarctic circles are potential targets for colonization. This is about 130,000,000 km² of land area (the circumpolar regions have about 20,000,000 km² of land).
Five primary obstacles to this 100 billion-person population scheme are colonizing the deserts, colonizing the highlands, providing energy, food, and disposal of waste.
colonizing the deserts: primarily a matter of air conditioning/heating and water sources, which can also be used to grow abundant plant life. To decrease the intensity of sunlight, dozen-square-kilometer sunshades can be deployed a few km above the ground in urban areas, held aloft with solar-powered airships. For heating during the night, grilles placed beneath the streets could radiate energy gathered during the day, warm enough to create a temperate atmosphere but not so hot as to create a fire hazard. Desalinization plants can produce fresh water in gigantic quantities, to serve the needs of billions of desert-dwellers. Including agricultural and industrial uses, the average person needs about 120,000 litres of water per year, which is 12 cubic meters of water. The world’s largest desalinization plant in Ashkelon, Israel, is capable of producing 100 million cubic meters of water per year, enough for over 8,000,000 people. Drilling down to the water table could provide similarly abundant sources of fresh water. The only problem remaining would be the sandstorms, which people could endure either by wearing adequate masks or going inside when they occur.
colonizing the highlands: people assume this is impossible, because there aren’t many roads there already. But the reason there aren’t many people living there is because few roads go there, and few roads go there because few people live there. Chicken and egg problem. To eliminate this, we switch to personal flying machines, on their way to general affordability by the mid-10s. Terraces can be created with simple dynamite, or less destructively with earthmoving aircraft. For altitude problems, you get injected with respirocytes, which we’ll see in the early 20s at the latest. As artificial red bloods cells, these simple diamond spheres will be capable of holding 236 times the oxygen per unit volume as their biological equivalents. Not only will you will able to breathe at very high altitudes, you’ll be able to sprint at high altitudes and hold your breath for minutes at a time without incident. Abundant tunneling through the mountains could also make them very fun and spacious place to live. Think of the part during Lord of the Rings when they’re wandering through the mountain caverns, but well-lit and filled with plants and animals that thrive under artificial light. Modern-day drilling techniques can remove ~50,000 tonnes of earth per day.
providing energy for 100 billion people requires different technology than our current fossil-fuel-based regime. The thorium fuel cycle, which could be implemented with current reactors, eliminates both nuclear proliferation and waste dangers, while costing much less than a uranium fuel cycle. Nuclear fusion, while it could take a few more decades to go commercial, will provide energy dozens or hundreds of times more abundant than fission reactors for less cost, using deutrium extracted from water for fuel. A kilogram of deutrium can produce a hundred million kilowatt hours of power. In the longer term, Helium-3 can be harvested from the moon, which provides much greater power output than deutrium. Chemist Ouyang Ziyuan from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, leader of the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program, is making the mining of Helium-3 a major goal. He is quoted as saying, “each year three space shuttle missions could bring enough fuel for all human beings across the world.” The efficiency of photovoltaic panels is increasing, year by year, while manufacturing costs are steadily decreasing. Arrays of hundred-kilometer-wide solar panels put in geosynchronous orbit will give us enough energy to boil all the oceans in the world, if we wanted to.
to provide food, we can exploit all of the world’s arable land, about 21% of all land mass, or 31,000,000 km². We should also start thinking in three dimensions rather than just two. Vertical farming will provide us with more food than we could possibly eat, even if there were a trillion of us. Terraforming Mars and Venus into farming planets will be entirely unnecessary. We can build oceanic cities that manufacture all types of seafood cheaply, including the super-nutritional algae spirulina, which we can process into a variety of textures. Marshall T. Savage describes this process in detail in his book The Millenial Project. Dr. Martin Schreibman of Brooklyn College has been in national media in the past few months for his efforts to encourage urban fish farming, where fish are kept in carefully-regulated tanks.
disposal of waste: we will genetically engineer bacteria to break down anything organic into mineral constituents. The “principle of microbial infallability“, commonly accepted across university biology departments, asserts that there is truly no biomatter that some microbe cannot consume. It’s just a matter of diligently determining which microbes can break down which compounds, and setting them to work. For artificial compounds such as plastics, we can incinerate them in gigantic sealed autoclaves, burying the ash in km-deep caverns carved out for the purpose, or, more simply, only produce recyclable plastics and ensure that the recycling process is as efficient and waste-free as possible. For manufacturing pollution, we’ll need to employ nanotechnology and bottom-up manufacturing techniques to ensure that our products are created without releasing waste into the environment. It can be done - chemists regularly oversee reactions with no byproducts, and with positional control over our atoms in our manufacturing economy, we will make certain that none go to waste.
The above is just an outline to buy us some time before we really do fill things up. But current trends are hopeful: when women are educated and contraceptives are made available to them, the birth rate plummets. The Vatican cannot hold back the pill for long.
The above image shows that in many developed countries, the birth rate is less than 1%/year and is sometimes even negative. As the death rate decreases, the birth rate will need to decrease in synch to preserve minimal population growth. I think this is doable, and we will probably be able to decrease the world population doubling rate from once every 25 years to about once every 50 years, and then possibly once every 100 years. For those who want to breed prodigously, there is always the rest of the solar system, which has the resources to support approximately 10^25 humans, by my estimate. Nick Bostrom points out that our local supercluster could support around 10^38 individuals.
In summary, there is plenty of room for everybody.
desktop computers with a billion processors
