Rich and Strange Aeons

Because it's awesome. If your screen is short enough to make you scroll, do so slowly, savoring the panels until you get to the end.

( Teh Awesome )

Yesterday I read Maelstrom, by Peter Watts, the sequel to Starfish and still about the Little Bug That Could, Far Far Too Well. Like Andromeda Strain with references and a bunch of other science, like quantum consciousness (cough) and neurohacking, and a world both advanced and falling into ecological disaster, such that North American can't think of anything more productive ot do with 40 million Indian ecological refugees than to fence them up in Oregon and throw free food with antidepressants at them. Also where I have no idea how the place is governed: governments get mentioned by name but all the decisions seem to be taken by some vaguely accountable crisis management agency, with the word "corporate" thrown around a lot. But despite all that it was a good and fun read, if you don't mind the general darkness of Watts.

Also yesterday, a terraforming thread included someone mentioning indoor ski and surf resorts. So I went googling on [indoor ski resort] and [indoor surf resort] and [indoor beach]. Whee! Such things exist! Dubai's got a big indoor ski resort, along with an underwater hotel (maybe under construction, but some exist elsewhere, at less luxurious levels) and artificial islands. Indoor surf's out there, and Japan and Germany have indoor beaches. Germany's is the biggest freestanding building in the world, a converted zeppelin hangar, at 6.6 hectares. Japan's is 300 meters from a natural beach, which sounds silly until you remember "winter" and "Pacific ocean temperatures at latitudes which have winter". The anime Ouran Host Club had a beach episode at an indoors tropical resort, which I thought was cool fiction but might have been based on the real thing.

All that fascinates me because I *like* the idea of weather and climate control, and if you can't control the planet then, well, control your own. I was charmed to learn of the climate control (heating *and* cooling) termites and honeybees do for their mounds and hives. And while I love the ideas of Jane Jacobs and would pick city over mall, I also think most cities would be improved by a smart roof.

Which (smart matter) leads to today's book, Hacking Matter by Wil McCarthy. Something I'd known about for a while, and the ideas weren't too new. The high level idea is about programmable matter, matter whose properties and functions you can change through simple information. An LCD screen is a specialized form of such, as is, at a crude scale, those advertising billboards which change displays through mechanically rotating their component pixels. Something similar could be done on houses, with a surface composed of triangular pieces with white, gray, and black sides, and rotating those to get a desired reflectivity.

But McCarthy isn't actually talking at such an abstract level; instead he talks about quantum dots and artificial atoms. A qdot is a block of doped semicondutor such that electrons can't get in and out of it easily; also it's small, so the electrons are confined on the scale of an atom. But there's no nucleus, just walls, and you can control the shape of those. Also, you can pump electrons in and out of it. The electron configuration is what causes the chemical, optical, electrical, thermal, luminous and magnetic properies of matter, so by building lots of qdots on a surface, or in a solid, with associated control electrodes, you can potentially control all those properies at will, with a block of silicon changing from being transparent and insulating like glass to reflective and conductive like silver (or, more realistically, an otherwise impossible silver-silicon alloy with the mass of silicon), or shining like an LED, or...

Mass isn't controllable, and there'd be limitations, especially on chemistry and material strength due to the substrate. But you could probably still do some fun catalytic chemistry, and he has a chapter on what a smart house built out of this stuff could be like, with the building changing thermal and optical properties to manage heat. Black in the early morning, to absorb heat and store electricity, transparent panes later when the people get up, reflective at high noon after the capacitors are full, though still black in the shade so as to dump heat. If a refrigerator is part of an outside wall, the section of wall can be conductive in the winter to use the outside to cool off, while insulating and a (silent!) heat pump in the summer. The foundation can exchange heat with the ground, too. By his numbers 3/4 of the energy use of a US household is in heating and cooling things, so this is actually worth all the effort. Which isn't much effort if the stuff can be build cheaply enough; the various changes described are easily automatable.

He does note a drawback of all that: it may actually be antisocial en masse. Yes, it is saving energy, but it can also lead to a pedestrian walking among black or silver buildings, all optimized for stealing or dumping heat... stealing from or dumping into the same space the pedestrian is walking in. Ordinances might control how efficient buildings can be, or at least mandate that tall buildings only dump heat from their upper levels. But it gave me a vision of a gritty cyberpunk techno-noir feel: an unzoned city where the buildings wored to their full selfish potential, and were all mixes of black and chrome for good, functional, reasons.

Of course, if the city managed its climate collectively, via a roof and such, the problem wouldn't even come up. :)

Another cyberpunkish thing was, well. There are magneto-rheological and electro-rheological properies, which simplistically mean you can apply a magnetic or electric field and the material gets stronger. Powered toughness. So if you could sprinkle the right artificial atoms into someone's skin, balanced between not looking weird normally but still being functional, they might be able to turn on the power and suddenly have really tough skin. Instant HIT Mark!

"When technology looks like magic, the world itself becomes a fairy tale."