Accelerating Future

The first “skylight”, as in big hole in the ground like the amazing ones on Mars, has been found on the Moon by Japan’s Kayuga spacecraft. They are thought to be the collapsed ceilings of lava tubes. There has not been volcanic activity on the Moon for about 2.5 billion years, but it is volcanic activity that created the maria (”seas”) on the Moon, and at one point the entire Moon was a glowing ball of magma.

“Lunar underground”, lunar subterrane, what could possibly be cooler than that? Not much.

A certain Dresden Codak comes to mind.

The new Lunar X-Prize: “Navigate a robotic probe to that hole on the Moon and bring us back pictures!”

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Holy crap, the Moon has a ton of water. 25 gallons were kicked up by the probe that impacted it a month ago. This is huge, huge news, because everyone thought that the Moon was as dry as a bone. I see that various studies predicted this recently. A pessimistic article from Space.com from a month ago said “one ton of the top layer of the lunar surface would hold about 32 ounces of water”, but now it’s looking like a lot more.

Now all we need to do is ship nitrogen and other essential nutrients there in huge amounts using mass drivers, a nuclear cannon, or space elevator, put up a few aerogel-insulated domes, and start partyin’! (Well, maybe not exactly, but water does give us huge amounts of oxygen, which we need to breathe, and hydrogen, which can be used as fuel.) This article from LiveScience has more details.

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You can see more at Next Big Future.

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Robin Hanson, economist and author of Overcoming Bias, recently appeared in USA Today talking about SETI. He appears as a counterpoint to Seth Shostak, a guy who I believe is totally out of it. Here’s the relevant section:

But researchers such as Robin Hanson of George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., wonder whether the big picture really looks so promising when it comes to advanced life. Hanson supports SETI but finds it telling that humans haven’t come across anything yet. “It has been remarkable and somewhat discouraging,” Hanson says, “that the universe is so damn big and so damn dead.”

Great quote, love it. To quote Marshall T. Savage, author of that superlative masterpiece, The Millennial Project:

There is a program to actively search for signals from other civilizations in the galaxy: SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). This is a noble cause, but it seems slightly absurd. Scientists huddle around radio telescopes listening intently to one star at a time for the sound of dripping water, when what they are seeking would sound like Niagara Falls. The most cursory radio snapshot of the sky should reveal K2 civilizations as clearly as the lights of great cities seen from orbit at night. That we don’t see any such radio beacons in the skies probably means there are no Kardasahev Level Two civilizations in this galaxy.

Perhaps advanced civilizations don’t use radio, or radar, or microwaves. Advanced technology can be invoked as an explanation for the absence of extra terrestrial radio signals. But it seems unlikely that their technology would leave no imprint anywhere in the electromagnetic spectrum. We have been compared to the aborigine who remains blissfully unaware of the storm of radio and TV saturating the airwaves around him. Presumably, the aliens use advanced means of communications which we cannot detect. What these means might be is, by definition, unknown, but they must be extremely exotic. We don’t detect K2 signals in the form of laser pulses, gamma rays, cosmic rays, or even neutrinos. Therefore, the aliens must use system that we haven’t even imagined.

The argument, appealing thought it is, cannot survive contact with Occam’s razor — in this case Occam’s machete. The evidence in hand is simply nothing — no signals. To explain the absence of signals in the presence of aliens, demands recourse to what is essentially magic. Unfortunately, the iron laws of logic demand that we reject such wishful thinking in favor of the simplest explanation which fits the data: No signals, no aliens.

The skies are thunderous in their silence; the Moon eloquent in its blankness; the aliens are conclusive by their absence. The extraterrestrials aren’t here. They’ve never been here. They’re never coming here. They aren’t coming because they don’t exist. We are alone.

If Dr. Shostak wants to find some aliens, perhaps he should try ingesting some powerful hallucinogens. Then he will be able to see all the aliens he wants.

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‘Space headaches’ come out of the blue:

Researchers are calling for space headache to be established as a new secondary disorder after carrying out a study of 17 astronauts, published in the June issue of Cephalalgia.

Their study jettisons the theory that astronauts’ headaches are normally caused by space motion sickness, after showing that more than three-quarters of those studied had no connection.

“Our research shows that space flights may trigger headaches without other space motion sickness symptoms in otherwise super healthy subjects” says lead researcher Dr Alla Vein from Professor Michel Ferrari’s Headache Research team at the Department of Neurology, Leiden University Medical Center, The Netherlands.

Space headaches in “super-healthy” subjects! Just great. If you go up there, enjoy your atrophying muscles, cramped rooms, boredom, cosmic rays, micrometeorites, crappy toilets, foliage-free environment, etc.

Big, air-filled bubbles with self-healing membranes and spinning colonies with artificial gravity. It’s the only way.

Launch costs need to be brought WAY down. J. Storrs Hall’s Space Pier or Brian Wang’s nuclear cannon. Our clique has all the answers, y’know?

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Here’s a nicely worded press release that touts research into asteroid deflection:

You may want to thank David French in advance. Because, in the event that a comet or asteroid comes hurtling toward Earth, he may be the guy responsible for saving the entire planet.

French, a doctoral candidate in aerospace engineering at North Carolina State University, has determined a way to effectively divert asteroids and other threatening objects from impacting Earth by attaching a long tether and ballast to the incoming object. By attaching the ballast, French explains, “you change the object’s center of mass, effectively changing the object’s orbit and allowing it to pass by the Earth, rather than impacting it.”

Sound far-fetched? NASA’s Near Earth Object Program has identified more than 1,000 “potentially hazardous asteroids” and they are finding more all the time. “While none of these objects is currently projected to hit Earth in the near future, slight changes in the orbits of these bodies, which could be caused by the gravitational pull of other objects, push from the solar wind, or some other effect could cause an intersection,” French explains.

So French, and NC State Associate Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Andre Mazzoleni, studied whether an asteroid-tether-ballast system could effectively alter the motion of an asteroid to ensure it missed hitting Earth. The answer? Yes.

“It’s hard to imagine the scale of both the problem and the potential solutions,” French says. “The Earth has been hit by objects from space many times before, so we know how bad the effects could be. For example, about 65 million years ago, a very large asteroid is thought to have hit the Earth in the southern Gulf of Mexico, wiping out the dinosaurs, and, in 1907, a very small airburst of a comet over Siberia flattened a forest over an area equal in size to New York City. The scale of our solution is similarly hard to imagine.

“Using a tether somewhere between 1,000 kilometers (roughly the distance from Raleigh to Miami) to 100,000 kilometers (you could wrap this around the Earth two and a half times) to divert an asteroid sounds extreme. But compare it to other schemes,” French says, “They are all pretty far out. Other schemes include: a call for painting the asteroids in order to alter how light may influence their orbit; a plan that would guide a second asteroid into the threatening one; and of course, there are nukes. Nuclear weapons are an intriguing possibility, but have considerable political and technical obstacles. Would the rest of the world trust us to nuke an asteroid? Would we trust anyone else? And would the asteroid break into multiple asteroids, giving us more problems to solve?”

The asteroid risk is a great one to get people acquainted with the concept of catastrophic risk in general because it is statistically pinned down very well. However, according to some calculations, the risk of a civilization-ending asteroid hitting Earth in the next 100 years is only 1/5,000, leading to a 1/500,000 annual probability. Say we give a 1/500 annual probability estimate of the end of civilization due to nuclear war. (Seems like quite the underestimate.) According to standard cost-benefit analysis, we should assign roughly 1,000 times more importance to the task of minimizing the chance of catastrophic nuclear war than to deflecting asteroids.

We may see some common miscalculations on this score, as asteroids are new and exciting and nuclear war is the same boring old risk that has been around for over half a century.

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Lots of people are into the idea of space travel, but as I’ve remarked before, space is relatively boring and dangerous. Many have an irrational emotional attachment to space, due to Star Trek and other fictional material which many have over-consumed. A glance at the Lifeboat Foundation’s website makes it look like the organization’s primary goal is to create space arks, but this would cost billions of dollars, which I can fairly say our organization will never raise. Instead, the LF’s primary value consists in networking together scientists and thought leaders concerned about extinction risk and occasionally getting them to publish reports.

I was reminded of the great danger of space yesterday when I read about Charles Simonyi, that creepy software developer who recently married someone 32 years younger than him (my age) after his 15-year relationship with Martha Stewart disintegrated, and his latest exploits visiting the International Space Station. What happened?

Officials said the crew, a US astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut, had overridden the spacecraft’s automatic pilots to dock manually after a glitch in an engine caused the Soyuz’s computer to stop the process.

“One of the engines had a fault which the computer considered was serious and it began to move the Soyuz away from the ISS at a rate of one metre per second,” mission control official Vladimir Sovlov told RIA-Novosti news agency.

“We decided not to allow that and asked the crew to intervene. The commander judged the engine was working normally and we authorised him to approach in manual mode, which was carried out successfully.”

The crew checked to ensure there were no leaks in the airlock between the capsule and the space station before the crews of the two vessels joined up, spokesman Valery Lyndin told Interfax news agency.

Um, yeah. This “little issue” reminds me of the sad death of the entire crew of Soyuz 11 in 1971. Looking back at the history of space exploration, 5% of people to launch into space have died from the experience.

I’m not saying that space colonization is a bad idea in general, just that we need radically better safety technology. Molecular nanotechnology (MNT) could offer this, but there are tens of thousands of people wasting their time working on incrementally better space technology instead of working on basic research for MNT that would make space colonization actually viable. That incrementally better space technology they’re working on will still have high error rates that cause our husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters to perish when they try to launch into orbit.

It is important to remember that space colonization will not solve the “problem” of overpopulation (which isn’t a problem of too many people so much as lack of vertical farming, nuclear fusion, and clean manufacturing processes combined with an observer selection effect of most people living in crowded cities), nor will it solve the problem of extinction risk — deadly microbes could spread into space stations through aid of launches, and superintelligence could easily reach up into space to kill any unwanted challengers. Much of the glamor of space colonization is entirely unwarranted, because the Earth (and our virtual realities) have much room for hundreds of billions more people before things genuinely get overcrowded. (We will carve out sunny worlds underground, for one thing.)

Another appeal of space, I think, is the libertarian fantasy that people would be able to escape the politics and governments of Earth if they went to the Moon. This is silly — the influence of Earth will still extend there, probably more there than to obscure places on the Earth — space will always get tons of media coverage, which attracts political attention in large amounts. Obscurity is achieved through blending in with the environment, which is nigh impossible in space, where the ambient background temperature is extremely low and humans stand out like nuclear explosions on an Antarctic ice sheet.

I predict there will be 3 negative knee-jerk comments to my criticism of juvenile space fantasies based on non-MNT technology. (Adult space fantasies involve sophisticated MNT.) No more, no less.

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Read about Brian Wang’s design for a nuclear bomb-powered cannon. The idea is to detonate a nuke underground (under a mile-wide dome to contain the fallout), and use the the expanding hot gases to propel an Orion Project-style projectile weighing tens of thousands of tons into space (with 1000 Gs of acceleration). The bottom of the projectile would be covered in ablative oil to reflect heat, producing the maximum possible thrust. This would be a one-shot trip to space (or the Moon), eliminating the need for nuclear explosions in the atmosphere or in space. Brian describes his plan:

“This mode of operation could start within 2-3 years. Just build the simple facility to contain the fallout. Requisition a nuclear bomb from one of the arsenals. Make a big metal projectile with ablative oil slathered on the bottom and tee it up. Talk a bit to the other nuclear nations, get some signoffs and light them up and start the space age. Get water, fuel, food, any hardened electronics and any other tough supplies up and available for the crews in chemical rockets to get.”

He makes it sound so easy — but unfortunately I doubt the world community would like such things. I’m at somewhat of a loss here, because I advocate the elimination of all nuclear weapons, but this method of getting to space just sounds so cool and cost-effective. At the very least, Brian deserves congratulations for the high hubris and technical creativity that it takes to conceive of and run the numbers on such a design.

Brian initially presented in the idea on February 29th, with the post “The Nuclear Orion Home Run Shot, All Fallout Contained”. He then elaborated on further points in “Pieces of a True Nuclear Cannon: Underground Nuclear Tests, Salt Formations and One Shot Kick Start to the Space Age”, “Containment of Underground Nuclear Tests”, and “If the Nuclear Cannon Jump Started Space Development”.

Wouldn’t be interesting if we used all the world’s nuclear arsenals to put hundreds of thousands of tons of advanced hardware into space and used it to mine asteroids and build self-sustaining space colonies? Subsequent nuclear weapons would only be manufactured for cannon fuel, so I could have my dream of zero military nuclear weapons alongside this new approach to getting into space.

I still think it sounds dangerous to live in space without MNT, though many of the sources of danger in space stem from insufficient shielding and redundancy. Brian’s design addresses so many of my concerns about the feasibility and cost of space travel at once, it seriously makes me reevaluate my stance on the whole issue.

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It looks like I had a point on Friday when I was talking about the dangers of space junk. There’s a press release on PhysOrg titled, “Space crash called ‘catastrophic,’ lots of debris”.

Russian Mission Control chief Vladimir Solovyov: “debris from the collision could stay in orbit for up to 10,000 years and even tiny fragments threaten spacecraft because both travel at such a high orbiting speed.”

James Oberg, aerospace engineer: “At physical contact at orbital speeds, a hypersonic shock wave bursts outwards through the structures. It literally shreds the material into confetti and detonates any fuels.”

David Wright, Union of Concerned Scientists: “The collision had possibly generated tens of thousands of particles larger than 1 centimeter (half an inch), any of which could significantly damage or even destroy a satellite.”

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Note: most of the first half of this post may be made irrelevant by the Orion space laser proposal. Most of the last four paragraphs are valid, though. Still, the architects of the laser acknowledge that it would be useless for large pieces of space debris. I also added the phrase “in the near term” in the sixth paragraph.

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Two satellites, Iridium 33 and Kosmos-2251, slammed into each other at 12 km/sec on Tuesday, obliterating one another and creating a major junk cloud. The junk cloud will probably continue orbiting the Earth until we deploy a mote of utility fog hundreds of miles wide to clean it up. This is the first step on the road to the dreaded Kessler Syndrome, a phenomenon whereby more and more fragments of space junk are created in collisions giving rise to more collisions. The eventual result will be that it will be impossible to launch spaceships that aren’t heavily shielded, and you won’t be able to engage in extra-vehicular activity without a thick, unflexible, and well-armored power suit. We sure as hell won’t be able to build a space elevator without major risk, because a cable a couple centimeters thick will get snapped easily by space junk with that much kinetic energy, unless heavily shielded.

The Liftport FAQ gives a 1/625 chance of catastrophic failure of a space elevator given a heavy meteor shower from the Leonids, and those rocks are about 3 inches big at most. Space junk can be much larger. You can move the anchor around to dodge most pieces of junk, but at some point it gets difficult, plus, if tourists are risking their lives every time they go up there, who will want to use it? Bits of space junk going at 12 km/sec travel about 10 times faster than a bullet, which gives them not 10 times as much kinetic energy, but, you guessed it, 100 times as much. That can hurt, even if you did the smart thing and replaced all your bones and muscles with fullerenes before going up there.

Space elevators, space elevators, space elevators. Who says transhumanists are excessively optimistic about technology? Here I am, criticizing space elevators and constantly going on about the risks of nanotech, robotics, synthetic biology, and AI. Meanwhile, yesterday I read an article by some conservative Christian who is criticizing transhumanists by saying we are “embracing any and all forms of the new technologies”, with “almost no qualms about all the controversial technologies of the day”. Working for the Lifeboat Foundation, qualming is practically all I ever do all day. What else? Two weeks ago, when I published the benefits of uploading post, some people were going on about how I was only focusing on the upsides and not the downsides. But notice how the category “risks” on this blog has the second-most posts out of any tag, second only to “transhumanism”. I act positive for one minute, write a post short enough that people might actually read it, thereby necessitating my leaving out the potential downsides, and someone’s there to jump on me.

In fact, there’s been points in the past where all I do is talk about risks and possible roadblocks and people say I’m being too Apocalyptic. Then, I write something about the benefits of some possible future technology, and get people who say I’m being too Utopian. Make up your mind! If I had to choose one, I would definitely take Apocalyptic. Given the stupidity of humans and the power of our technology, I think you’d have to be uneducated not to be Apocalyptic, frankly.

Back to the space situation. The more we colonize space, the more junk we will create and the more heavily shielded every craft will need to be. So you can forget rockets. We’re already just throwing away money right now by even bothering to send people up into space on rockets, which have the terrible tendency of spontaneously exploding (what else would you expect from a bomb with a hole poked in the side?) We should be investing all our money in novel ways to get to space, like developing better manufacturing technologies to actually build spacecraft that are truly strong and light. Meanwhile, all the articles on the satellite collision are saying, “Litter in orbit - caused in part by the break-ups of old satellites - has increased to such an extent that it is now the biggest threat to a space shuttle in flight.” If it’s a threat now, when there’s only been one major satellite-satellite collision, I can’t wait to see what it will be in a few decades, when we see more of these events occurring. Of course, even if we start making spacecraft out of fullerenes, fullerene debris will be generated soon enough.

It’s hard to get around it — space junk is going to be a showstopper when it comes to colonizing orbit in the near term. That’s alright, though, because we have a lot of other colonization to do. How about colonizing the oceans? They’re empty. Or hey, what about colonizing the deserts? Barely anyone lives in them, and they’re brimming over with solar and thermal energy. How about mountains? 25% of the world’s land area is mountainous, including 67% of Asia, but barely anyone lives on the things. How about colonizing Antarctica? Way, way, way easier and cheaper than colonizing space. People don’t think of these wonderful opportunities because they grew up letting television (Star Trek) think for them.

Space has no air, warmth, water, life, pressure, or much matter to speak of. Antarctica has all these things. Before we colonize space, we should be able to colonize Antarctica easily. If we can’t colonize Antarctica, then what are we doing in space? Without molecular manufacturing, it will lead to nothing but tears and broken dreams. Even with it, colonizing Antarctica would be much more exciting. Of course, there’s the Moon, but the Moon is freezing, geologically boring, and there’s nothing there that isn’t already here. Plus, there’s the danger of solar storms, which can kill anyone in the open in mere minutes. That will ruin your day.

The excitement of space will end when people go there and get over the novelty of eating M&Ms in weightlessness and the ability to see the Earth. People will realize the shocking fact that there’s nothing there. Hence the term space, as in empty space. What matter does exist up there will be constantly threatening to punch a hole right through your body, like a rail gun, moving at 12 km/sec. If you think the Earth is crowded now, try living in a space station. Until we gain the ability to create huge (miles wide or larger) air bubbles in space enclosed by rapidly self-healing transparent membranes, it will be cramped and overwhelmingly boring. You’ll spend even more time on the Internet up there than down here, and your connection will be slow.

Why life extensionists would want to go up in space without advanced molecular nanotech (MNT) to protect themselves is beyond me. If you take a look at the history of space exploration, it often consists of people dying in unpleasant and unexpected ways. Death by depressurization. Death during launch. Death during reentry. If the Apollo 13 crew didn’t stir their oxygen tank on the way to the Moon, earlier than they planned, then they would have stirred it while one astronaut was in lunar orbit and the other two were on the surface. The astronaut in lunar orbit would have died due to freezing to death, meanwhile the two on the Moon’s surface would be stuck there until their oxygen ran out. Imagine the impact that would have had on getting the new generation excited about space travel. How many more have to die before we realize that sending people into space without MNT is stupid?

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This is Stephen Hawking on the unexplained mystery of the universe he’d most like to know, space travel, the children’s book he wrote with his daughter, and on whether he is religious/spiritual. Sorry, the video is in Flash format and nothing else is available. You can download it here.

Simple questions, intelligent answers.

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