Accelerating Future

A couple of videos demonstrating cymatic phenomena.

The last part of the final video is the most unusual of all.

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Only eight results, is Google censoring, or are there really only eight pages that have this phrase? The front page story in the Chronicle yesterday was that polonium was available cheaply online, yet this CNN article calls it “one of the world’s rarest elements”, with only 100 grams being produced each year. Wikipedia says that even tiny amounts are dangerous, so maybe only a microgram is enough to kill?

“How to make polonium” also appears to be censored on Google, though it could just be that polonium was almost entirely disregarded up until now, or that most of the literature concerning it is holed up in scientific journals or classified documents.

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Mike Treder at the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology reminds us that a 5-minute introduction to the concepts behind molecular manufacturing is available online, here’s how it begins:

“Molecular manufacturing refers to a revolutionary near-future manufacturing technology. Whereas today’s manufacturing uses large and imprecise machines, molecular manufacturing will use molecular machines to build engineered molecular products. The performance, value, and scope of this technology will be revolutionary and disruptive.

The root idea of molecular manufacturing is that molecule-scale fabricators can output their own mass of product in a few minutes. Built from precisely positioned and strongly bonded molecules, the products will be precise and strong. Computer control will enable a wide range of products, including more manufacturing systems. Doubling the number of fabricators every hour would scale a single fabricator into a kilogram-scale personal nanofactory (PN) in a few days. The fully automated PN would contain arrays of fabricators and equipment to join their output into large-scale, integrated, heterogeneous, complete products…”

Read the rest.

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Brian Wang forwarded this along:

Thorium Power Co. is talking to India about their Thorium energy tech, they and DBI are involved in putting on a forum in Washington DC to inform the DC media and others about Thorium on Nov 30.

Clean Nuclear Energy: Thorium 2006

DBI, a California-based aerospace company involved in the research and development of thorium-fueled reactors, will host a forum on Thursday, November 30, from 10:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m. at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, on thorium as an abundant source of clean energy to meet the world’s growing energy needs.

The forum will address the role of thorium in three key areas: the environmental benefits of thorium; the safety and national security aspects of thorium; and the economic benefits and commercial applications of thorium. A detailed agenda and list of speakers can be found below.

WHO:
DBI, a California-based company established in 1965 and involved in the research and development of thorium-fueled reactors joined by Thorium Power, Ltd., of Virginia

WHAT:
Forum on thorium as an alternative source of clean nuclear energy

WHERE:
National Press Club
529 14th Street, N.W.
Holeman Lounge (13th Floor)

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From IOL Technology in NZ:

Reports in the US suggest that ideas either on the drawing board, or else already in development, include killer satellites that could destroy an enemy’s satellites, a Common Aero Vehicle (CAV) that could swoop with hypersonic speed up to 3000 miles to attack a target, Hyper-Velocity Rod Bundles which would fire tungsten bars weighing 100kg from a permanently orbiting platform - and even a space-based laser that uses mirrors to direct the sun’s rays against ground targets.

I talked about rods earlier… also, I’m starting to get worried about trends in the direction of solar weapons, i.e., weapons that use the sun’s power to incinerate things. These have a lot of potential, and are potentially much stronger than nuclear weapons. It’s one of three superweapons that should be banned forever - nuclear (ICBMs), solar (beams), and kinetic weapons (meteors), with ascending severity. Following is a (rough) excerpt from a work in progress that reviews twelve major existential threats in detail, “Catastrophic Technological Risk”:

Solar weapons are a serious concern because there is both the tendency to underestimate what the world’s superpowers will be capable of within this area in the next 20-50 years, and the general feel-good sensation associated with solar power that makes it seem so utterly harmless.

For this risk, the biggest worry is the threat of an arms race between two or more powerful countries. Bigger, faster weapons and shields precipitate the creation of newer, bigger, and faster weapons and shields, still followed by weapons and shields that are yet bigger and faster, and so on. The only natural endpoints of such a world-endangering endeavor would be victory for a single country, which would probably consist of the creation of a system capable of instantaneously immobilizing an entire enemy nation, or an explosive, all-out war, which may include nuclear weapons, but would be post-nuclear in its scope and severity.

Solar weapons are especially attractive to militaries because they would trump nuclear weapons. Intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) are physical objects that must propel themselves to their destination – directed energy moves at the speed of light, and requires sophisticated active shielding to effectively protect against. At the highest intensities, shielding may be impossible, even in principle. This gives attackers a first strike advantage on the solar battlefield.

One might say that solar energy and directed energy are not the same thing, and that what I’m actually talking about is directed energy, not ‘solar weapons’ per se. But there is a reason I am talking about solar weapons specifically. Fossil fuels could not possibly produce the output necessary to power the weapons that are being foreseen here – it would simply be too expensive. Nuclear is definitely a possibility, but it’s easier to talk about ‘solar weapons’ than ‘nuclear-powered electromagnetic weapons’, so just consider the latter included in this category of risk.

In the past, directed energy has been plagued by various development problems. Most weapons only work when skies are relatively clear, though newer models attempt to be more flexible. Weapons of the future will circumvent the limitations of the past. The most powerful solar weapons will push aside air molecules before sending the primary energy arc down the channel, and this will all happen within fractions of a second, even when the target is dozens of km away. Infrared, auditory, electrical, laser, and particle-based superweapons are all conceivable. ‘Artificial lightning’ will be available to the military commanders of the future. This is not speculative – hundreds of millions of dollars went towards directed energy research in 2005, and dozens of projects are either on the drawing board or already in development.

Directed energy weapons will be mounted on ships, planes, jeeps, helicopters, even individual soldiers. The directed energy weapons of concern are in the TW range, and are likely to be mounted on ships, though next-generation power plants may offer MW/g power densities, allowing the superweapons to be miniaturized. A terawatt-level electric discharge would be equivalent to hundreds of lightning strikes, though the intensity of a lightning strike is not necessary to destroy most targets.

To imagine the long-term potential of solar weapons, consider concentrating the energy of a substantial area of sunlight (100 km2) within a 0.5 km2 area, causing the intensity of sunlight to be a hundred times greater (assuming 25% efficiency) in that region. Or, if it is night, projecting energy a hundred times greater than if the sun suddenly rose. Because air is practically transparent to thermal energy, there would be nowhere to run, except underground, or underwater. People on the street would be boiled alive in the intense heat. All moisture would on the air and ground would quickly be converted to steam, some with explosive force.

Welcome to the Future!

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Since the “Fact or Fiction” story generated so much indignation, here I’ll describe what I think could be done to negate the threat described.

For the ebola virus, I remember some article in the SF Chronicle about fish being used as bio-terror detectors for city water supplies. So I type “fish water supply terror” into Google, and sure enough, bluegill fish are being used to detect dangerous chemicals in the water supplies of San Francisco, New York, and Washington because they are better than the best artificial sensors. However, it seems they don’t respond to bacteria, or perhaps not viruses… luckily, there was recently a news item about a super-improved virus detector, that can detect a virus in seconds. I assume that we are starting to use them to observe our municipal water supplies more carefully nowadays. With more technology, maintaining security will become easier, as long as the white hats stay ahead of the black hats. As Brian Wang also mentioned in the comments, we need to improve our intelligence. Luckily, bio-terror is a high-profile terrorist risk, like conventional explosives, and most cops are probably trained on what to do in the event that an outbreak occurs - quarantining, etc.

For nuclear weapons, there are very effective uranium detectors nowadays, that can sense uranium through crates even. Thanks to post 9-11 vigilance, we can hope that an atomic bomb won’t make it into the country. For nonproliferation activities, I recommend “Preventing Nuclear Terrorism” by Matthew Bunn. Apparently the President isn’t doing enough. We need to get enriched uranium out of sensitive sites overseas with inadequate security. Also, to eliminate the cheap enrichment of uranium in the future, it might be a good idea to ban nanofactories, or at least be absolutely sure that no desktop manufacturing appliance can be used to create any device that enriches uranium, or breeds it. We need to switch over to solar, fusion, and ‘denatured’ thorium energy sources as soon as possible.

Unrelated: fascinating post by Paul Gowder from Overcoming Bias.

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Found on John Baez’s weekly finds in mathematical physics:

K. Eric Drexler writes:

Dear John,

John Baez wrote:

> […] with a perfectly tuned dynamics, an analogue system
> can act perfectly digital, since each macrostate gets
> mapped perfectly into another one with each click of
> the clock. But with imperfect dynamics, dissipation
> is needed to squeeze each macrostate down enough so it
> can get mapped into the next - and the dissipation
> makes the dynamics irreversible, so we have to pay a
> thermodynamic cost.

Logically reversible computation can, in fact, be kept on track without expending energy and without accurately tuned dynamics. A logically reversible computation can be embodied in a constraint system resembling a puzzle with sliding, interlocking pieces, in which all configurations accessible from a given input state correspond to admissible states of the computation along an oriented path to the output configuration. The computation is kept on track by the contact forces that constrain the motion of the sliding pieces. The computational state is then like a ball rolling along a deep trough; an error would correspond to the ball jumping out of the trough, but the energy barrier can be made high enough to make the error rate negligible. Bounded sideways motion (that is, motion in computationally irrelevant degrees of freedom) is acceptable and inevitable.

Keeping a computation of this sort on track clearly requires no energy expenditure, but moving the computational state in a preferred direction (forward!) is another matter. This requires a driving force, and in physically realistic systems, this force will be resisted by a “friction” caused by imperfections in dynamics that couple motion along the progress coordinate to motion in other, computationally irrelevant degrees of freedom. In a broad class of physically realistic systems, this friction scales like viscous drag: the magnitude of the mean force is proportional to speed, hence energy dissipation per distance travelled (equivalently, dissipation per logic operation) approaches zero as the speed approaches zero.

Thus, the thermodynamic cost of keeping a classical computation free of errors can be zero, and the thermodynamic cost per operation of a logically reversible computation can approach zero. Only Landauer’s ln(2)kT cost of bit erasure is unavoidable, and the number of bits erased is a measure of how far a computation deviates from logical reversibility. These results are well-known from the literature, and are important in understanding what can be done with atomically-precise systems.

With best wishes,

Eric

For an introduction to Drexler’s plans for atomically-precise reversible computers, see:

28) K. Eric Drexler, Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation, John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1992.

The issue of heat dissipation in such devices is also studied here:

29) Ralph C. Merkle, Two types of mechanical reversible logic, Nanotechnology 4 (1993), 114-131. Also available at http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/mechano.html

I need to think about this stuff more!

The upshot of this is that by running our minds on reversible molecular computers, we can live forever and expend no energy.

Anthropics alert: if this is so, why weren’t we born in the future era of infinite free computation and lifespan?

Answer: we still know practically nothing about the physical delineations of our reference class, so we can’t say what the probability distribution of our likelihood of birth looks like with much accuracy.

Read more on reversibility from Robin Hanson and anthropics from Milan M. Cirkovic.

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