Rich and Strange Aeons

Do we live in a time of accelerating progress, or one of slowdown and diminishing returns?  I used to think the former, for years have thought the latter.  It seems to boil down to whether you pay attention to computers or to everything else, like speed or energy use or the general conditions of life.

Krugman reviews a book arguing most of the big transformation happened between 1870 and 1940.

For support, I add Tom Murphy's old post, comparing 1885 to 1950 to 2015.

And finally, a 2013 article talking particularly about America's great slowdown.  It invokes both the 1700s first industrial revolution and the late 1800s second revolution, saying the second happened to pick up right as the first tapered off, so by sheer luck we had an extended run of rapid growth.

Edit: I'd note this isn't a claim that there'll never be big transformation. True AI could well be big, though not necessarily positive for most of us. Advanced biotech could be cool. But they're also distant. I'm not seeing anything analogous to electrification of the home, people moving off the farm and then out of the factories, etc. LED lights are neat, but they just lower electricity bills a bit, they're nothing as radical as going from candles and oil to the electric bulb.

One recurrent debate I see is whether technological progress is progressing ever further and faster toward Singularity or something, or whether transformative invention has slowed down or mostly stopped outside of IT. (And then, in the latter case, whether Internet and smartphones are as transformative as telegraph, electricity, home appliances, and farm automation.)



A guest blog post I just read made me wonder if there's potentially transformative stuff we're refraining from out of fear of the consequences. The post/essay is on "a new technology that has made the precise editing of genes in many different organisms much easier than ever before" -- editing via an intracellular mechanism, and the precise editing can include copying that mechanism, and operation in gamete-producing cells. So you can make an organism all of whose offspring will have some high-precision genetic change you specific, including editing out genes acquired from other parents! Not just your GMO lacks some gene, but all of its descendants can lack that gene. Potentially very powerful for altering wild populations of sexually reproducing pest species, like malaria mosquitoes, or Australian rabbits, or malaria itself. Altering them by reducing fitness traits or their numbers outright, like a higher-tech version of flooding a population with sterilized males. And low risk to domesticated species whose mate choice is constrained. Not useful for asexual species so won't help the Age of Antibiotic Resistance.

Sounds pretty neat, and superficially I think we should use it, but I expect lots of hesitation, doubt, and fear. Which led to wonder what potentially world-transforming things we might be doing but aren't. Most of these aren't nearly as high tech, just cases of "the world could look a lot different if we wanted."

Ocean fertilization: just as many deserts bloom by adding water to them, so the open oceans are nutrient deserts, and may potentially bloom by adding iron and other nutrients; one study adding iron and silicon (for diatoms) thought biomass increased 1000 tons for every ton of nutrient. Good outcome: massive more amounts of fish. Bad outcome: waves of anoxic layers falling through the oceans.

Similarly, bandaid geo-engineering for global warming via adding sulfate or other particles to the atmosphere to reflect sunlight seems cheap and doable, by all accounts, though here even the best outcome is simply slowing down warming while the oceans still acidify (from CO2) and building up a need to keep on engineering unless we use the time to reverse CO2 emissions. Also acid rain if you use sulfates and not some alternative.

Eugenics research: so, we're at the point why our ability to sequence and edit genomes far exceeds our understanding of more than the simplest edits, especially for human traits. At $5000/person (a recently reached price) you could sequence a million people for $5 billion; with detailed medical and life studies, you might build up a better idea of what genes do and how they interact. Long term, you could sequence every American born for $20 billion/year. [To be fair, this isn't something we've even been able to do for long, so not really case of refraining from it yet.] If successful, the research would then drive actual human engineering.

Free and mandatory paternity testing: this could be folded into a medical genetic assay for newborns. I'm not sure what the effects would be, but seems like there should be some, to knowing that any reproductive cheating would be caught without having to imply lack of trust by asking. If combined with a national database, perhaps from the prior idea, that'd identify most straying fathers as well as mothers.

The Beta Colony implant: there's no one-size fits all solution, but between copper and hormonal IUDs and hormonal implants, arguably we could put all women on some form of long term contraception from puberty, reducing accidental pregnancy and unwanted children to near zero.

Keynesian 'technology': I think it likely that we could sustain full employment most of the time, with economic power shifting from capital to labor, and inequality falling, just by listening to Krugman et al., and unlike more radical ideas like full basic income or Communism the social risk seems pretty low. Arguably, so's the transformation potential, but still: US GDP being 10% higher, median income being even higher than that due to income distribution changes, workers not being terrified of their bosses or of unemployment.

Similarly, carbon taxes to internalize pollution costs, and market price parking, would make a big change, though here we can say "would look a lot more like urban Europe or Japan."

Space?: No, I don't include this. We aren't choosing not to exploit space resources, it's just hideously expensive to do so. We *could* have more telescopes and orbiters and rovers, which would bring in a lot more data, but this isn't a high-certainty way of changing our lives a lot.

US prison population has declined for the past 3 years
http://www.samefacts.com/2013/01/crime-control/the-strangely-underreported-decline-in-the-incarceration-rate/

2012: in many ways, the best year in history
http://www.psychologytoday.com/collections/201301/the-year-in-review/2012-the-greatest-year-all-time-humanity

Inspired by a thread on plausible alien invasions.

As I think I've blogged before, in a sense we may be quite close to being technically capable of sending a ship to a nearby star. At the raw physics level, we already have the energy sources. The Newtonian kinetic energy of mass at 0.03 c is comparable to the energy density of fission fuels, and means getting to Alpha Centauri in 140 years. The tricky part is delivering the energy into exhaust of such speeds; thermal engines melt, mass drivers quench, ion drives I'm not sure about, plasma drives ditto, photon drives have too much exhaust 'velocity' to be efficient, fission fragment rockets would be just right but the atoms that want to fission aren't the ones in a good surface position to send fragments out the back.

Still, it's possible that an ion drive, or plasma drive, would in fact work. The extreme case is Project Longshot, where a fission reactor is used to force D-He3 fusion pulses, getting you the energetic plasma needed (and more, it's like a fusion afterburner) while ducking the problem of fusion power reactors being among the hardest things the human race has ever tried to do. (Here, plasma squirting out is a feature, not a bug.) And of course there's always Project Orion, another fission-fusion combination, and maybe one that could use the much cheaper D-D reaction. Or fragments.

Of course, then there's the matter of having something that lasts 95 (Longshot) to 140 (pure fission) years, in hard radiation to boot; this might well be harder than simply making something go fast. Even more so if you want to send live beings.

But... there's a common assumption that if you can send a ship like that, you don't need to invade, you can build space colonies and such. But it's not true. Leaving aside whether people want to live in space colonies, the problems are different. The ship 'just' needs to last over a century; air leaks can be replenished from ice supplies, breakdowns can be compensated for by redundancy, spare parts, and a portable machine shop; people need some combination of a few generations, stasis, or longevity (possibly including partial longevity through partial stasis, or slowdown.) While a colony needs to be more permanently robust, and to contain or have access to a complete industrial ecology.

So invading your neighbors with the desperate hope and need of taking them over, and using their labor and industry, may in fact be easier than a self-contained space colony, and at any rate is a different problem.

Another key note: the sort of "we could expensively build it soon" fission-fusion interstellar ship above does not include ground to orbit capability for Earthlike planets. Moon landers sure, Mars maybe, but for anything we could send, taking capsules down to the surface of an Earth would be a one-way trip. We don't know how to get off again without an army of thousands building the return vehicle.

And of course for any rocket a one-way trip is a lot cheaper than a planned round-trip without guaranteed refueling. And if you need lots of fissionables, refueling may be hard and chancy.

So while the probability of having near neighbors to invade seems very low, and it'd be expensive, there's actually a certain plausibility to would-be conquistadors not much more advanced than us coming and trying to bluff/conquer/trade their way in, without any option to go back home, or even get back off the surface once landed without help. Not very plausible -- but the alternatives, that anyone crossing interstellar distances must be magically more advanced, are not clearly true. You just need fission, you don't need indefinite life support (if you're counting on another ecosystem you've observed with telescopes), you can't necessarily get off the planet, or zip around a solar system arbitrarily.

Papers on the Fermi Paradox, aka "the universe is huge and old, space is transparent, colonization doesn't seem that hard, where are all the aliens or signs of their existence?"

http://www.kschroeder.com/weblog/the-deepening-paradox/
Karl Schroeder linking to the next paper, and briefly mentioning his own idea of Rewilding, that advanced technology for some reason ends up looking like nature.

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/...111.6131v1.pdf
13 page PDF by Keith Wiley, "The Fermi Paradox, Self-Replicating Probes, and the Interstellar Transportation Bandwidth", reviewing the potential impact of SRPs and flaws in various arguments against them, including Landis's percolation model, and Sagan's "mutations would be just too dangerous". Percolation stoppage requires unrealistic assumptions, and modern tech shows that we can reduce viable error rates to very low levels. For that matter, the number of replications in our own bodies is at least comparable to that involved in sweeping a galaxy -- he actually cites a much higher number, 10,000 trillion -- without having all that many cancers.

Comments to the blog post include David Brin pointing out that his 1983 review paper on the Great Silence is online:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1983QJRAS..24..283B
27 page PDF, oldie but goodie. Modifies the Drake Equation, as does Wiley.

Me, I've long been in the camp of what Brin calls the Uniqueness Hypothesis, allied with the Anthropic Principle. Someone has to be first, and if von Neumann probes can sweep the galaxy easily, then the first can be the last. If we get as far as being able to envision such probes, probably no one else has yet, and we will. Unless we do ourselves in first, but that sort of thing doesn't help the number of aliens be larger than 0 either. As for why we might be first: planets are common, and life might be fast to develop where it can (but see Hanson on hard steps), but *stable* planets might be a lot rarer; we could be unusual in not having had total mass extinctions. Or human level intelligence is rare. Or industrial civilization -- heck, humans were around for maybe 90,000 years without developing agriculture; why?

( Other papers )

( How long? calculations )

A draft, for the Bujold list, contrast of the Abh and Bujold's haut.
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I recently watched the anime Crest of the Stars, and liked it a lot. It's part space opera, part character romance, part worldbuilding regarding the Abh race by a wannabe science fictional Tolkien (we can has conlang). But I'm not out to specifically review it here; rather, I kept being reminded of Bujold as I watched, and I want to geek out about that.

(FWIW, the Crest of the Stars novels started in 1999, and Cetaganda came out in 1996.)
(Spoilers for backstory ahoy.)
(ETA: the Abh are allegedly all atheists. Cetagandan religious data is even scarcer than for other polities in Bujold's Nexus, but one guesses atheist.)
(ETA2: might be more accurate to say they're strongly non religious. "No belief in a Higher Power", "ridicule all organized religions", no belief in Heaven. I'd call the first one de facto atheist but people get nervous about labels.)

( Read more... )
We, alas, don't have gestation machines, and I wouldn't hold my breath for them. We do have a fair bit of fertility control -- planning, birth control, abortion -- which have had some social impacts already, and we might imagine might have more over evolutionary time. I've been thinking for the past day about the impact of widespread paternity testing, e.g. if such tests weren't used mostly only in cases of disputed child support but as a matter of course, even for married births, just to check for the father or as a side effect of genetic health screening. How does behavior change in the short term if fathers can be as certain as mothers of their children, and women (and men) know that reproductive cuckoldry just isn't possible? What are the long term selective pressures on human sexuality if such conditions (paternity testing and fertility control, and perhaps child support laws as well) are maintained for a long time?

Self-replicating printer in development. Another article.

Not to overhype the things: they're made of a couple of plastics and a local melting point metal, plus chips, and the goal is to have it handle all three materials, and to be able to print all of its parts apart from the chips, and lubricating grease, and it won't be make its raw materials either. Or assembling the parts, a human will have to do that. So they're nowhere near being released into the desert. But it's a step.

“We know that people are going to use the printer to try to make weapons [and] sex toys and drug paraphernalia,” he says. “This is obviously not what we’re hoping they are going to build. We are hoping they are going to build more and better RepRaps.”

Oh no, people might make cheap plastic sex toys.

Over on rpg.net there's a Traveller thread going on which has included a bunch of transhumanist debate, of sorts. Some people saying the tech assumptions of Traveller are ridiculously retro and out of date, and others sniping at the transhumanism trend, full of fantasy and wish-fulfillment, no more realistic than Traveller and already dying to be replaced by the Mundane SF trend. Which strikes me as nutty.

( Friendslist mercy cut )

Along the way, I had a couple of posts about Bujold and transhumanism. And a brief note on how we're living transhumanism -- or what would be the build up to it if it's going to happen.