Last summer I wrote a guest article on Charlie Stross's blog about wicked problems.  Some of the characteristics of wicked problems are:There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem (defining wicked problems is itself a wicked problem).

1. There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem (defining wicked problems is itself a wicked problem).
2. Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
3. Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but better or worse.
4. There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem.
5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a "one-shot operation"; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial and error, every attempt counts significantly.
6. Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan.
7. Every wicked problem is essentially unique.
8. Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem.
9. The existence of a discrepancy representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem's resolution.
10. The social planner who tackles a wicked problem has no right to be wrong (planners are liable for the consequences of the actions they generate).

Now Chris Smith has introduced me to a great article on How Complex Systems Fail by Richard I. Cook, MD. It's a very similar summary, but wickedly (if I can use that word) clever and, for anybody who's actually dealt with complex systems, so utterly true. Some of Cook's observations on the failure of complex systems include:

1.  Complex systems are intrinsically hazardous systems.

3.  Catastrophe requires multiple failures - single point failures are not enough.

4.  Complex systems contain changing mixtures of failures latent within them.

and one of my personally favourites:

5. Complex systems run in degraded mode.

For any of us who watched the Fukushima fiasco last summer, some of these will have an uncanny familiarity:

7.  Post-accident attribution of accidents to a 'root cause' is fundamentally wrong.

8.  Hindsight biases post-accident assessments of human performance.

15.  Views of 'cause' limit the effectiveness of defenses against future events.

16.  Safety is a characteristic of systems and not of their components.

...and finally, 

18. Failure free operations require experience with failure.

It's a sobering list and every single item on it bears a great deal of thinking. The article as a whole is brief, but each of the items is explained in enough detail to make the ideas understandable and to provoke some thought.  Everything in here is applicable in many different contexts, from Fukushima and Chernobyl to the Eurozone meltdown, to current electoral issues and the unintended consequences of urban planning decisions anywhere in the world.  Check out the article.

...And stop thinking in terms of root causes, damnit!

I've played this game before--and I will again. I find it clears the mind wonderfully to wonder what you'd do for the world if you had a billion dollars to spend. Build a secret volcanic island lair? Check. Cure necrotizing phlombosis? Check. Oh, there's all kinds of stuff you could do. 

--There's one rule, though: whatever you spend your billion on, it has to be something nobody else is doing--and something that's worthwhile in a completely game-changing way.

After all, in today's market a billion dollars will get you a few miles of subway, or a new sports stadium. Yay. But it can get you so much more, as Elon Musk has demonstrated with his reinvention of the space launch business (and he hasn't spent more than a fifth of a billion on that). In fact, a billion is enough to solve more than one problem, if it's properly distributed. 

I play this game regularly because the world keeps changing, and what's important keeps changing. Some items remain from previous lists; some are new. Here's today's list:

1. $200 million to studying and developing new systems of governance. --No, I don't mean e-voting, or even e-democracy. I'm talking about a systematic study of how humans govern themselves, and how our cognitive biases and interactions at different scales scuttle effective problem-solving among groups. Think this is fringe science? I happen to think it's the most important problem in the world, the only one that counts. Because if we reinvented governance (on the level of individual self-control and choice, on the level of small-group interactions, and all the way up to how millions of people make collective decisions) then every other problem facing us now would become tractable. So I'd be exploring cognitive science, promise theory, structured dialogic design and a lot else besides.  $200 is really far too little to spend on this, but it's a start.
2. $200 million to develop efficient and economical carbon air capture and sequestration. Carbon air capture is the only potentially feasible method of returning Earth's atmospheric CO2 balance to pre-industrial levels in less than a hundred years. Emissions controls won't do it, neither will renewable energy, or even the complete disappearance of human civilization. The CO2's there. It has to actually be removed from the atmosphere. Currently, far less than $1 million is spent per year on how to do this. And that's just crazy.
3. $200 million to develop a microwave space launch system. --Again, this sounds wacky. But the physical resources of the solar system are effectively infinite; and the world looks like a very different place if you play the game of imagining that access to space was really cheap. All sorts of currently impossible problems fall like dominoes if it costs as little to get to space as it does to fly across the Atlantic. And, in space development, there is only one problem, and that's the cost of going the first 100 miles. Literally every other issue becomes tractable if you solve that one. So let's stop dicking around with incredibly expensive launch systems and solve it.  (Why microwave launch and not laser launch? Because microwaves are more energy efficient, and can be done now; and because I think laser launch is a political non-starter, because accidental or deliberate straying of a laser launch beam could blind or fry anything in the sky, including airliners or other nations' satellites.)
4. $200 million to finally realize the dream of nuclear fusion energy. We are that close. Most of the money would be divided up between the chronically-underfunded research projects that are getting close: IEC fusion, magnetized-target fusion, and several others. I'd fund General Fusion's steampunk pneumatic-fusion system, for instance. But I'd also fund one method that nobody's trying right now, but may be the best of all: levitating dipole fusion. 
5. $200 million to prototype the business models, supply chains and build a first-generation Vertical Farm. Because sane governance, free energy, a solution to global warming and unlimited material resources aren't enough if half the planet's starving, which will be the case in forty years if we don't act now. This one seems like a no-brainer, if it can be properly optimized.

An odd set of priorities? But, what if they all worked? Simultaneous breakthroughs in energy, resource access including food, removal of the threat of global warming, remediation of the natural environment destroyed by intensive agrivulture and, most importantly, a Renaissance in collective problem-solving would literally mean the world to us. 

The point of all this should be clear. Even in a global recession, money's not the scarce commodity. Audacity is. 

What can you do with a billion dollars? 

You can build a new sports stadium.

Or, maybe, you can save the world.

Okay, Keith B. Wiley's new paper does have a somewhat daunting title: The Fermi Paradox, Self-Replicating Probes, and the Interstellar Transportation Bandwidth. But it's a pretty easy read and hugely well worth it--because in this paper Wiley provides what may be the clearest discussion yet of the core puzzle Fermi first proposed sixty-two years ago: if alien technological civilization is even possible, then they should be here; at the very least, such civilizations should be visible to us. That we are instead faced with 'the great silence' is one of the most troubling and, yes, paradoxical, results of modern science.

I addressed the Paradox in my novel Permanence, coming up with a possible new solution for it; although Milan Cirkovic and other astrophysicists haven't disproved my central contention, they've since shown that it's not a show-stopper. As Wiley points out in this paper, even if the lifetime of an interstellar civilization is short; even if they're all doomed; there is no credible argument as to why they couldn't create self-reproducing probes (SRPs) to investigate the entire galaxy that, collectively, outlive the originating civilization. This is the very scenario I paint in Permanence. SRPs are a cheaper solution than one-off expeditions. In fact, SRPs are so efficient a solution to exploration and colonization that, plugging in some highly conservative numbers of how many civilizations there might be out there, Wiley shows that hundreds to billions of such probes should actually be here, in our solar system, right now!

Wiley blows up some of the keystone explanations for the Paradox, including Geoff Landis's percolation model, which previously I'd considered a pretty solid argument. Wiley is so good at demolishing easy explanations, in fact, that he brings us almost all the way back to square one, where Fermi had us in 1950. Where are they? We haven't a clue.

The mystery deepens almost by the day, because we've now identified 700 extrasolar planets and the count is increasing rapidly. We should shortly be racking up lists of Earthlike worlds, and we're closing in on good estimates of how many there must be in our galaxy. And the number is in the billions. So one central argument against the existence of alien life--the 'rare Earth' argument that environments to host it must be rare--has been more or less disproven. And that, just this year.

As possible explanations dwindle, we are being drawn inexorably toward the one explanation that is no explanation: that we really are alone. Why should this be? As Wiley shows, all it would take would be one alien species with our capabilities appearing, sometime in the past couple of billion years, and for that species to surpass where we are now technologically by, oh, say, a couple of hundred years... and the evidence for their existence should be present right here in our own solar system. It's an astonishing conclusion.

So are we alone? Well, there is one other possibility, at this point. I've lately been trumpeting my revision of Clarke's Law (which originally said 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'). My revision says that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Nature. (Astute readers will recognize this as a refinement and further advancement of my argument in Permanence.) Basically, either advanced alien civilizations don't exist, or we can't see them because they are indistinguishable from natural systems. I vote for the latter.

This vote has consequences. If the Fermi Paradox is a profound question, then this answer is equally profound. It amounts to saying that the universe provides us with a picture of the ultimate end-point of technological development. In the Great Silence, we see the future of technology, and it lies in achieving greater and greater efficiencies, until our machines approach the thermodynamic equilibria of their environment, and our economics is replaced by an ecology where nothing is wasted. After all, SETI is essentially a search for technological waste products: waste heat, waste light, waste electromagnetic signals. We merely have to posit that successful civilizations don't produce such waste, and the failure of SETI is explained. 

And as to why we haven't found any alien artifacts in our solar system, well, maybe we don't know what to look for.  Wiley cites Freitas as having come up with this basic idea; I'm prepared to take it much further, however.

Elsewhere I've talked about this particular long-term scenario for the future, an idea I call The Rewilding. Now normally one can't look into the future; in the case of the long-term evolution of technological civilization, however, that is precisely what astronomy allows us to do. And here's the thing: the Rewilding model predicts a universe that looks like ours--one that appears empty.  The datum that we tend to refer to as 'the Great Silence' also provides the falsification of certain other models of technological development. For instance, products of traditionally 'advanced' technological civilizations, such as Dyson spheres, should be visible to us from Earth. No comprehensive search has been done, to my knowledge, but no candidate objects have been stumbled upon in the course of normal astronomy. The Matrioshka brains, the vast computronium complexes that harvest all the resources of a stellar system... we're just not seeing them. The evidence for that model of the future is lacking. If we learn how life came to exist on Earth, and if it turns out to be a common or likely development, then the evidence for a future in which artificial and natural systems are indistinguishable is provided by the Great Silence itself.

Check out Wiley's paper. And just think: the Great Silence may turn out to be no paradox at all, but positive data about what our own future will look like.

I've been reading Global Risks 2011, the sixth edition of the World Economic Forum's Risk Response Network report. It reviews the various major issues that face the world--and there's a lot of them. Most interestingly, though, it also mentions, almost in passing, what some of the solutions might be. Many of them are things that are not being done, but that could be done, and could in fact be the basis of entire careers, business models, or academic careers.  So for instance, take the following:

• For the potential problem of global governance failures, they say that "A counterbalance would be a well-informed and well-mobilized global public opinion sharing norms and values of global citizenship, but this is not yet fully developed." Okay, I sense a truly massive business opportunity here. CNN and Al Jazeera were just the beginning; what if we treated all news as local? We've been edging this way for decades, but we can automate things now we couldn't have imagined just a few years ago. So, I want an interactive map of the world that shows all of today's reported murders as red dots; and a weddings overlay as well; and... well, everything. I want to know what's going on. News reports themselves should just be the last level of drill-down in the process.
• For resource security, the WEF advocates something they call sustainable consumption. Becoming an expert in this or getting in on the ground floor of this new business movement could make the next generation of billionaires. There's many opportunities here, eg., garbage design, which should have its own degree programs.
• The WEF views potential retrenchment from globalization as a risk. I understand this position, but see my last post on the perils of interconnectedness; there's a space here in the early 21st century for building local resilience for food, water, energy, and other resources. Call it a new kind of insurance--not a step towards a "new medievalism" but part of a general strategy of keeping our civilization robust. DARPA's recent announcement that they want to put 1000 3d printers in U.S. schools points in this direction. Globalization is a strong trend, naturally; but the counter-trend is also strong and should be encouraged.

There's a lot of worry and hang-wringing today about the financial system and jobs. The fact is, though, that certain aspects of the future are very, very clear. Water will be an issue throughout the U.S. midwest. Some new measure of prosperity other than GDP will become the norm by which nations are compared. Economic growth, in the traditional sense, will have to slow, but something much more interesting could replace it. These things are crises only if you are desperately trying to hang on to old ways of doing this. For those willing to try something new, they're gigantic opportunities.

I found the latest issue of Nature waiting for me when I got home from speaking at this year's Applied Brilliance conference in Jackson Hole. In this issue of Nature (October 2011, Vol. 478) there's a brief article by Jan Helge Solbakk in the News & Views section on "Persons versus Things."  To quote:

Since the time of Roman law, legal thinking has operated with a fundamental distinction between person and thing. Even today, the entities subject to regulation are either persons or things, and there is no third option. This conceptual lacuna continues to generate regulatory paradoxes in the health and life sciences, because many of the entities subject to regulation--including bodies, body parts, organs and tissues, and sperm and oocytes--cannot be considered either persons or mere things.

How interesting. This is what I was talking about at Applied Brilliance--although on a more abstract level. More and more people are starting to realize that we need a third option; I talked about some of the lines of evidence from cognitive science that led this way, and mentioned some names, but I'm sure they flew by too quickly for most people in the audience to write them down.  Here they are.

In her book Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett reminds us that we've been dancing around this third option for centuries. She introduced me to an old English word, deodand, which I've started adapting for my own use. In old English law, a deodand was an object that had killed someone (an cartwheel that had rolled over somebody, or a bag of grain that had fallen on somebody's head). Deodands were neither objects nor people; they had a strange intermediary status. Like a shirt that we might happily put on, unless we found out that it had once been worn by a murderer during his crime.

Bennett's book deals with the 'new vitalism' strand of current philosophy. It's a part of the New Materialism or Speculative Realist school (there are various names for this new phenomenon in philosophy). This school or movement consists of a number of young thinkers who are determinedly steering away from the Continental philosophy of the last 25 years or so--avoiding Deleuze, abandoning Critique and eschewing postmodernism in favour of a return to a belief in the reality of the physical world. Materialism, but a kind of vital materialism in which the third option--of material as vital and self-powered--is being explored.

I ran out of time during my talk at Applied Brilliance to really describe this stuff; all I was really able to do was present an introduction, using the metaphor of the Copernican Revolution.  There've been several such revolutions, I said:

• Newton introduced the idea of motion without a prime mover;
• Darwin presented evidence for design without a designer;
• computers show us thought without a thinker;
• and now, cognitive science is shaking up our fundamental ideas of who and what we are. It is presenting nothing less than a vision of spirit without a soul.

The best summary of this fundamental shift can be found in the works of Thomas Metzinger; The Ego Tunnel is a good place to start, and, for the not-faint-of-heart, the more thorough and daunting Being No One. 

Andy Clark, in books such as Being There and Supersizing the Mind, presents the theory of Extended Cognition, which proposes that the human brain off-loads cognitive activities into the environment whenever possible, and that therefore the mind has to be seen as normally extended into the world around us. And in Cognition in the Wild, Edwin Hutchins presents the theory of distributed cognition, which suggests that what we think of as thought is often carried out by groups of people (and instruments) rather than occurring in the head of any one member of the group.

Similar changes are echoing through other disciplines. For instance, in Where Mathematics Comes From, George Lakoff and Rafael Nunez claim that cognitive science shows exactly how we think when we do math, and those thought processes don't just operate without recourse to some separate realm of mathematical reality--how we actually do math precludes the possibility that a distinct mathematical reality exists. And, after more than twenty years of study into computers and computation, Dean of Information Sciences at the University of Toronto, Brian Cantwell Smith, concludes, in his essay "God, Approximately,"

We will never have a theory of computing, I claim, because there is nothing there to have a theory of. Computers aren’t sufficiently special. They involve an interplay of meaning and mechanism—period. That’s all there is to say. They’re the whole thing, in other words. A computer is anything we can build that exemplifies that dialectical interplay. 

I said during my talk that 'this is the point where some people start to panic.' With this phase of the Copernican revolutions, all agency has been removed from the world. Nothing is left of the spirit that was thought to move material reality, not even our own minds. If there is no special agency (mover, designer, thinker, or spirit) behind the material world, isn't reality left barren and empty? Yet, there is an alternative interpretation to this final step of creative destruction; Jane Bennett's 'enchanted materialism' provides a hint of what that could be.

The new materialists (or speculative realists, or new vitalists) see that what we've done by proving that there is no special agency (mover, designer, thinker, or spirit) behind the material world, is on the contrary to show that material reality itself is its own mover, is its own designer, that thought and thinker are identical, and that material reality is spirit. 'Enchanted materialism' indeed.

I've mentioned Bennett. Other respected scientists and philosophers who are going down this road include:

• Ursula Goodenough, in The Sacred Depths of Nature;
• Timothy Morton, in Ecology without Nature;
• Graham Harman, in books such as The Quadruple Object;
• Stuart A. Kauffman, in Reinventing the Sacred;
• and, most importantly, Quentin Meillassoux, in his groundbreaking new work of speculative realist philosophy, After Finitude. In this (highly technical) book he claims to have solved the problem of knowledge that Kant raised 200 years ago in the Critique of Pure Reason, and if he has, then Meillassoux has breathed new life into the entire project of Western philosophy.

These thinkers all come at the problem from different directions, and their conclusions may seem to be divergent as well. But what they all share is that they are taking the extra step, from the facts of the final Copernican upheaval, to new and positive interpretations of what it means. It's good that their ideas are divergent--this is a creative period. What is important is they all see new vistas of possibility for our self-definition as human beings alive in a vibrant and essentially living universe; and they do this without resorting to mystification, new age formulas, or any turning-away from reality to some soothing metaphysics.

I tried to express all of this in half an hour at Applied Brilliance; I don't think I succeeded. Follow this trail of breadcrumbs, though; you'd be amazed where it leads.

I've been waxing nostalgic lately over the placidity of my blog in comparison to the knock-down, drag-out free-for-all that is Charlie Stross's (where I guest-blogged for a couple of weeks this summer). So I thought I'd share an interesting bit of data that came across the twitterverse yesterday and (while it may not be news to you, is news to me) bears some contemplation. It is simply this:

According to various sources, including apparently the United States Department of Energy, it takes between 4 and 7.5 kWh of energy to refine one gallon of gasoline. To drill and transport that gas takes another 1.5-3 kWh. So, the average energy cost of one gallon of gas is roughly 8 kWh, or even more.

A lot of that energy is provided by fossil fuels, chiefly natural gas; but a big proportion of it is provided in the form of electricity.  Those who have totaled it up find that a gasoline-powered automobile uses more electricity to run per mile than a comparable electric vehicle. The total energy cost of the gasoline economy is therefore at least double that of an electric economy. 

A corollary to this is that a complete conversion to electric vehicles would not place any more strain on the grid than there is now; it would simply distribute it (because right now much of that energy is going to fixed installations, and with an EV economy it would be going, at least potentially, to millions of individual houses). So a 100% EV economy would not require any increase in electricity production, only an upgrade to the grid (and lots of companies, such as GM, are designing that grid). In fact, all things being equal, in a 100% EV world, electricity demand should go down somewhat.

The remaining issue for electric vehicles, then, would be battery disposal, because their toxicity is high when they contain lead, but with Li batteries is becoming lower and lower.

Except that...

This isn't quite the whole story. What remains to be factored in here is the electricity cost of manufacturing the EV's batteries. I haven't yet found numbers for this cost; if anybody can supply it, that would be helpful. 

And while we're at it, we should do a complete parts count for the additional complexity and wear-out rate of internal combustion engines, and factor in the electricity cost of those components...

...And round and round we go.

Just as METAtropolis:  Cascadia teeters on the brink of release, the global conversation about the withering of the nation-state and the rise of cities is heating up.  If you want to know what METAtropolis is about, look no further than the Glasshouse Conversations, or Foreign Policy magazine.  For the first time in history, the majority of human beings live in cities, and the trend will accelerate. By 2030, according to some analysts, China will have more than 200 cities with populations above 1 million each.  The political implications are staggering--especially when you consider that, while leadership of nations is pretty much restricted to the moneyed elites, in many cities, anybody can become mayor.

It's almost time to name Gliese 581d.  

Two billion years or so before our own solar system coalesced, this planet was formed around a dim red star that's now about 20 light years from Earth.  Gliese 581 d is therefore an ancient world, orbiting around a cold star.  But it may be habitable.

That's the conclusion of the latest study, by R. D. Wordsworth, F. Forget1, F. Selsis, J.-B. Madeleine, E. Millour, and V. Eymet (the paper is Is Gliese 581d habitable? Some constraints from radiative-convective climate modeling; you can find it on archiv.org).  They ran simulations based on what we know about the planet and its star, and conclude that if d has a sufficiently thick atmosphere of CO2, it could have liquid water at its surface.  Other studies of so-called "super-earths" like d hint that many or most of them will be water planets, global oceans.  And, when you factor in a recent study of habitable zones that indicates they could be much broader than first assumed, it seems that if this world has any sort of an atmosphere at all, then it's likely habitable.  So, here's what we know about d:

• It's between 7 and 13 times the mass of the Earth, but its radius is unknown (however, likely around 1.15 times Earth's radius).  If it's as dense as the Earth, then its surface gravity is about 2 times Earth's; but Earth is the densest of the solar system's rocky planets.  If d is an ocean world, it's likely a lot less dense and its surface gravity may be the same as Earth's.  In that case, though, it is almost certainly an ocean world, with no accessible land at all.
• It's may be tidally locked to its star, meaning that the sun stays fixed in one spot in the sky, and one whole hemisphere is in permanent darkness.  This is a condition usually taken to mean that the planet in question would be lifeless because the atmosphere would all condense on the cold side; but numerous studies have now shown that tidally-locked planets can retain their atmospheres quite well.  They do, however, tend to be windy.
• It may well have a thick CO2 atmosphere (researchers suspect these are common) in which case, provided minerals are able to leach up from the depths of the planetary ocean, it may have been capable of hosting life for six billion years now.

There's a really good chance that d could support life--though you and I wouldn't want to live there, since we'd weigh twice what we do on Earth and the atmosphere would be toxic.  But it could still be a lush world, overflowing with life.

What does it look like on this world?  The sunlight of its permanent day isn't red, though we call Gliese 581 a "red dwarf."  To us, it would appear to have about the same spectrum as a 60 watt bulb, which is to say, yellowish-white; and daylight is a bit dimmer than it is on Mars, so with the naked eye, it's visually like wearing a good pair of sunglasses.  The human eye adapts to a wide range of light conditions, so you wouldn't really notice the difference.  But, if d has an atmosphere, the sky is blue.  Old as it is, d may no longer have active plate tectonics, so, like Mars, it probably doesn't have mountains or volcanoes.  But it won't be a cratered environment, either, if the atmosphere is thick enough for water to be stable.  --And speaking of water, the weathering effects of high wind and water over billions of years suggest that it's become a very flat world lately, with either a global ocean, many shallow seas and low islands, or vast dry plains.

But this is amazing--because we're talking about a real planet here, not some speculative possible world; and not some science-fictional dream.  d does exist; we'll soon know whether it really is habitable, and within a few years, may be able to detect signatures of actual life in its atmosphere.  Already, we've learned enough to know that there are billions of other planets sailing through the galaxy with ours.  If we learn that Gliese 581 d really could sustain life, we'll be able to begin estimating (roughly, at first) how many habitable planets the Milky Way contains.  Considering how close Gliese 581 is to us, that number could be huge.

So what do we name this new world?  It is ancient, far older than our own worlds; so it would be fitting to name it after one of the Titans, who are older than the Greco-Roman gods we've named our planets after.  If it's a sterile ocean, I vote for Oceanus; if it could host life, then my favoured name would be that of Oceanus's wife, the goddess of rivers and lakes: Tethys.

Welcome, Tethys, and may you divide history into two parts:  the long age in which we wondered whether we were alone in the universe--and a new epoch in which we know we are not.

Here's the panel that Vernor Vinge, Charlie Stross, Aleister Reynolds, and I did at Boskone 47 on "The Technological Singularity:  an Assessment."  We critiqued the idea itself, its effect on science fiction writing, and its influence on our own works. You can watch it below; enjoy!

The Singularity: An Appraisal from Michael Johnson on Vimeo.

Just when I thought life couldn't get any stranger, MacMillan starts releasing my books as iPhone apps!  This is very cool.  Since they apparently don't have the licensing rights to sell the app into Canada, I can't confirm its presence in the iTunes Store; however, you can find my latest Virga novel, The Sunless Countries, at appshopper.com.

Not only that, but The Year's Best Science Fiction: 26th Annual Collection is also available; it contains my popular Virga story, The Hero.  

And here's what they'll look like in your iPod or iPhone:

Few ideas have been so thoroughly misused as Garrett Hardin's notion of the tragedy of the commons.  Hardin's idea was that "multiple individuals acting independently and solely and rationally consulting their own self-interest will ultimately destroy a shared limited resource even when it is clear that it is not in anyone's long term interest for this to happen" (to quote Wikipedia).  There are some historical cases of this happening (i.e. the Boston commons).  There are, however, many more cases where it did not; and the idea is often used to try to justify the privatization of public goods.

I've found when I travel to the United States that the tragedy of the commons is a popular idea there, despite the fact that the historical evidence for it is equivocal, at best.  Commons were a widespread feature of European life for centuries, and mismanagement of them was extremely rare.  Now, New Scientist reports on a new study that shows that forests that are managed locally (i.e. as a commons) sequester more carbon than institutionally, governmentally or privately managed forests. 

One significant comment in the article was the following:

They argue that their findings contradict a long-standing environmental idea, called the "tragedy of the commons", which says that natural resources left to communal control get trashed. In fact, says Agrawal, "communities are perfectly capable of managing their resources sustainably".

This really comes as no surprise.  But it needs to be reinforced, particularly for people who've drunk the koolaid of the notion that public goods either can't exist or can't be managed efficiently.

From worldchanging.com comes an interesting posting about Sourcemap, an open tool for visualizing the supply chains that contribute to the products you buy.  It's a great idea:  name a product, and you can see where its pieces were sourced, who built what and where--in short, who's involved in making your life happen.

This is great, but it's the step after Sourcemap that really interests me:  when the app can fully trace the corporate ownership of the entities involved, as well as their publicly-available information things like campaign contributions.  Because the stuff you buy isn't just made by people and corporations; it's made by political movements and their supporters.  For good or ill, in the near-term future we're looking at being able to instantly, seamlessly, and completely boycott entire polities by simply filtering your buying options. Imagine an iPhone app where you aim the iPhone's camera at a product on the shelf in the store, and the iPhone tells you how in-line with your own political stripe (how green, or how Republican) the aggregate entity that built it is.  Instead of deciding which of sixteen varieties of spaghetti to buy based on the colour of the box or (God forbid) the price, you can do so based on whether the companies owners support progressive family planning programs in Africa.

The prospect is both terrifying and exhilarating.  Terrifying because products can no longer succeed or fail entirely on their own merits.  Politics will enter buying in a big way.  --Exhilarating because of the prospect of laying bare the world as it really is--a world where purchasing decisions have never been innocent, but we have previously never had the ability to follow through on that knowledge.

While our attention was elsewhere, a truly earth-shattering change has been in the wind--a development most experts have dismissed as impossible, but which now increasingly looks like it is going to happen.

According to Lyle Dennis over at the AllCarsElectric blog, EEStor has applied for certification from the Underwriter's Laboratories for its ultracapacitor technology. If this is true, then the secretive company may really have succeeded in creating the ultimate in electricity-storage technology:  a device capable of running your car for hundreds of miles on one charge, and of recharging in under five minutes.  A device that is not a battery, and hence never wears out.  A technology that would make intermittent power generation sources such as windmills directly competitive with baseload generation sources such as coal.

Canadian electric car company Zenn Motors has licensed EEStor's technology for a soon-to-be-built fully electric sedan.  Zenn is betting the farm on EEStor, and they seem remarkably confident.  Naturally, we hear outrageous claims about new technologies nearly every day; and many industry watchers have been skeptically tracking EEStor for years.  The expectation has been that any day now, the company would disappear, and its executives would later be found living high off the land in Ecuador or somewhere.  That hasn't happened, and now the company appears poised to release an actual product--according to Zenn, by the end of the year.

If it happens, this will be a truly disruptive change.  It would be nothing less than the first nail in the coffin of the fossil fuel age.

And here's more on the developing story, from Zenn's point of view.

Cory alerted me to an interesting upcoming event:  The Science Fiction Message Board is hosting Author August, a month of discussions about particular science fiction writers--one per day.  Apparently I'm Mister August 26th (no, there will be no centerfold, unless you make one up yourself).  

The introductory description of the event is here, and the threads themselves will, I gather, be unraveling from the Author Central forum.  

This is pretty cool, although I'd be an idiot if I expected to necessarily be flattered by what (if anything) gets said about me on the day.  The sensible thing for me, in fact, would probably be to steer clear of reading it altogether--but you may want to drop by. 

And, if you do, be kind. :-)

Wolfram's Alpha is not a competitor to Google.  I've been playing with it since it went live the other night, and its limitations are glaring and clear.  It has trouble answering even the simplest and most intuitive query, which makes it seem like it's a spectacularly stupid system.  But what's impressive is that it is able to answer any questions at all.

If I understand Stephen Wolfram's description of the system (and others') correctly, Alpha is an attempt to create a knowledge engine out of a very large library of fairly small algorithms.  Its database is vast; but the code that operates on it is not necessarily complex.  In other words, Alpha's not a monolithic "thought engine" but a collection of heterogenous mini-engines that Wolfram hopes will interact in unpredictable but creative ways.  As Stephen Wolfram puts it in a recent blog entry on the subject:

There is an immensely complex web of systematizable knowledge out there in the world. And before NKS [Wolfram's book A New Kind of Science --K], I would have assumed that to handle something of this complexity would have required building a system that is somehow correspondingly complex—and in practice completely out of reach.

But from NKS we have learned that even highly complex things can have their origins in simple rules and simple programs.

This last statement is the important one--it speaks to what I've been saying for a while now, that the vision of a 'technological singularity' that comes as a result of increasing complexity of information processing systems, is mistaken.  (It is, in fact, an example of the erroneous theory of Intelligent Design.)  Creativity is not correlated to complexity; and as well as being a potentially useful tool, Alpha is an attempt to prove this very non-intuitive idea.

As Wolfram goes on to say in his blog post:

Today, Wolfram|Alpha uses existing models from science and other areas, then does computations based on these models.

But what if it could find new models? What if it could invent on the fly? Do science on the fly?

That is precisely what NKS suggests should be possible. Exploring the computational universe on request, and finding things out there that are useful for some particular specified purpose.

Stephen Wolfram expects Alpha to be more than a data regurgitator or formatter.  He expects it to be creative.  And, he expects this creativity to emerge, not from complexity, but from simplicity. 

These are very interesting ideas.  The next year of Alpha's growth should be interesting to watch.

Solaren corporation has signed a deal with Pacific Gas & Electric to orbit a 200 megawatt solar power satellite by 2016.  I mention this not because the news is amazing (it was inevitable, really) but because their plan gives me some nice numbers to plug into my Verne gun calculations. 

You might remember my enthusiasm over Next Big Future's recent discussion of Project Orion and the spinoff notion of using nuclear bombs to loft very large payloads into space (wheeee!).  I called this idea the Verne gun in a feeble public relations attempt.  Anyway, Brian Wang's calculations over at NBF gave a figure of 280,000 tons as the lift-capacity of a single 10-megaton bomb.  At the time, I suggested using ten or so of these suckers to lift an entire continental powersat infrastructure into space.  But I didn't have hard numbers about how much mass equaled how much power.

Solaren have conveniently stated that their 200 megawatt, self-assembling power transmitter could go up in five launches of 25 tons each.  Solar power satellites are far more efficient per-solar-cell than ground-based plants, so they have a much smaller industrial footprint and almost no environmental footprint at all.  They run 24 hours a day.  So that means that the engineers at Solaren can do 200 megawatts of baseline power with 125 tons orbited.  To put it another way:

1 gigawatt baseline power = 625 orbited tons

Launching this much mass using conventional rockets is expensive, but obviously not entirely out of line, or they wouldn't be doing it.  But, here's a question:  how much baseline power (97% uptime) could be orbited using a 10 megaton Verne shot?  The answer: 448 gigawatts.  

The United States currently uses 4 terawatts of power per year.  About half of that is coal.  So four firings of the Verne gun could orbit enough power to obsolete the entire American coal-power system.

The big problem wouldn't be radiation from the launches (which would be effectively zero) but the astronomical insurance costs attendant on putting so many eggs in one launch basket.  Maybe a few dozen 100 kiloton shots would be better...

With the addition of its final set of solar panels, the international space station is slated to become the second brightest object in the night sky--brighter than Venus.  Now, admittedly the ISS is the size of a football field, but it's also three hundred kilometers away from the Earth directly above the plane of its orbit--but much further away for most of the people who see it.  Thousands of kilometers, for most of us.

Consider this:  on any given night, you can look up (if you're not in a city that already drowns the stars) and see satellites.  They're hundreds of kilometers away, and the biggest are no larger than a compact car--yet you can see them.  Most are the size of a barrel, but perfectly visible.

Consider Bradley Edwards' ribbon design for the space elevator cable.  This would be a meter or two wide and curved, so that it is effectively visible from all angles.  So it's about the width of a barrel, but infinitely longer.  Its reflective surface over one kilometer's distance would be at least as great as the ISS; but please multiply that light output by 35,000 because that's how many kilometers long it would have to be.  A Hoytether (open meshwork) design would presumably reflect less, but how much less?

You could paint the ribbon black.  Then again, how much would a coating weigh that had to cover 1 meter x 35 million meters of area?  The black coating would heat the cable because the sun is so intense in orbit, so you wouldn't want it to be totally absorptive.  But here's the thing:

The moon is black.

Actually, overall the moon's surface is about the shade of an asphalt highway. It absorbs almost all the light that hits it.  The moon appears pearly white to us only because of the tiny fraction of light that's reflected off the lunar blacktop.  So even a mostly-black ribbon would look brilliantly white to us on the ground.

As if all this were not enough, the only practical means of powering the climber cars (which would be visible too) appears to be multi-megawatt lasers, aimed at solar cell arrays on the climbers.  As Wikipedia puts it:

The proposed method is laser power beaming, using megawatt powered free electron or solid state lasers in combination with adaptive mirrors approximately 10 m wide and a photovoltaic array on the climber tuned to the laser frequency for efficiency.

So, the climbers are in the cross-hairs of, essentially, a set of a huge spotlights.  Maybe you could use infrared or ultraviolet lasers, but if not, then even for the most efficient solar cells (40% or thereabouts) 60% of the laser light will be absorbed or reflected.  Add to that light from the sun reflecting off the (presumably large) collectors, and you get something fiercely bright climbing the already bright cable.

This issue doesn't just affect the space elevator, by the way.  It's also relevant to any substantial effort to place solar power satellites at geosynchronous orbit.  Their immense surface area would pretty much guarantee that they'd shed a vast amount of light on the Earth.

But why should we care?  Here again we can refer to Wikipedia, in its entry on light pollution:

Life exists with natural patterns of light and dark, so disruption of those patterns influences many aspects of animal behavior.  Light pollution can confuse animal navigation, alter competitive interactions, change predator-prey relations, and influence animal physiology.

...Studies suggest that light pollution around lakes prevents zooplankton, such as Daphnia, from eating surface algae, helping cause algal blooms that can kill off the lakes' plants and lower water quality.

Lots of other life forms are affect--everything from birds to frogs.  It doesn't take very much light to have a big effect. So, in the absence of any direct physical effects, the space elevator would still have a large, if not catastrophic, ecological impact.

I wish this weren't true.  I'm a big fan of the elevator, and an even bigger fan of solar power satellites.  But the devil, as they say, is in the details.  If these structures cause the amount of light pollution I'm suggesting, then they are very far from being green options for energy and transport--regardless of how much carbon they may offset.

Further to the discussion about Brian Wang's treatment of Orion and its offshoot, the Verne gun, if you look at the comments to my previous post, Adam Crowl suggests that peak acceleration for Brian's gun would be about 3700 gravities.  He also suggests ways of reducing that, primarily by using a nuclear charge to energize hydrogen gas and have that push the ship.  (I'm not sure that's the most efficient way to go, though, because the Orion design depends on the efficiency of energy transfer to the pusher plate and requires close proximity to the charge.)

In any case, this figure of 3700 g's suggests something: some things would be able to take it (like hardened electronics, tight rolls of thin-film solar cells, and liquids like water or rocket fuel) but others (like people and furniture) would not.  In one of Brian's latest posts, he talks about the Mercury laser, which might make practical laser-initiated fusion happen.  This piece makes me wonder what the total mass of the system minus the supporting building structure would be (because that bears on how practical it would be for fusion powered spacecraft) but also reminds me that laser launch systems have only been waiting for this one development to become practical. 

So here's the plan:  launch a few hundred thousand tonnes of rugged stuff using the Verne gun, and send up the rest a tonne at a time using a laser launch system.  You can even run the laser launch system off renewables if you want to be green; and after the first few launches, you end up running it off beamed power from the first solar power sat you put up.  True bootstrapping through hybrid launch technology.

I have to admit I got a bit ahead of myself in the post below, in which I renamed the nuclear cannon the Verne gun and described some of what you could do with it.  As it stands, the idea would only work for cargoes that could withstand tens of thousands of g's of acceleration---which in practice would amount to fuel, raw iron and a few other simple items like that.  Still valuable to orbit, but a bit limiting.

So, here's a proposal to refine the idea a bit:  the sabot.  In this variation of the Verne gun, you don't try to reach escape velocity.  The blast that sends up the ship only needs to loft it about 100 kilometers---above the atmosphere, but not into orbit.  The bulk of the ship's mass is in fact acceleration padding--a sabot or shell around a more conventional rocket-powered craft.  After an initial acceleration (still on the order of hundreds of g's at least) the sabot separates from the cargo at 100 kilometers, lightening the load and permitting the contained rockets to fire.  This lighter craft then enters orbit under rocket power.

An alternative to rockets would be to catch the ship at the top of its trajectory using an orbiting tether (a huge one, if we're catching tens or hundreds of thousands of tonnes!).  In either case, the acceleration shielding for the initial launch falls back into the ocean and what enters space is pure cargo.

Using a sabot might allow us to launch more fragile cargoes than the straight shot version.  I now doubt that you could launch, for instance, solar power sats without a sabot, though sending up a space elevator would probably still work.

Toby Buckell informs me, by the way, that Niven and Pournelle used the idea of the nuclear cannon in their alien-invasion novel Footfall.  Let's get precedent straight here---as far as I know, they did it first in science fiction.

Recently I talked about one of my favourite blogs, Brian Wang's Next Big Future.  He and his team are a veritable fountain of ideas, and this week they've outdone themselves with a series of pieces on Project Orion and its offshoots.  Now, I freely admit that they've done all the heavy lifting here (so to speak) but I'm going to take one of their ideas and run with it anyway.

A couple of the salient posts on Project Orion are The Nuclear Orion Home Run Shot, and Pieces of a True Nuclear Cannon.  Now, Orion was the 1950s-era American project to build a nuclear-bomb powered spacecraft.  Three facts stand out about the project:

1. It could have worked, and would have put unlimited amounts of mass into space for less than $1 a kilo.
2. The biggest vessel contemplated by the Orion team would have weighed 8 million tonnes, and would have been bigger than the Great Pyramid.
3. The sucker wouldn't have incinerated, flattened, and irradiated nearly as much real estate as you might think.

Still, for some reason the project was canceled around 1964.

In contemplating the glory that almost was, it's tempting to imagine what could have been accomplished with Orion.  One thought I had was that, well, maybe you could just use it once:  do the full-out 8-million tonne monster and use it to launch, in one shot, enough solar satellite infrastructure to obsolete every North American coal plant overnight.  According to a rational moral calculus, if Orion works it should be used in such a way, because the number of people who would die worldwide from the beast's fallout would be trivial compared to the number saved by reductions in air pollution from coal.  (Three million people die from air pollution each year; what they point out over at Next Big Future is that Orion could be calibrated to limit its fallout deaths to no more than a few dozen per launch, even for the biggest ship).

Still, there would be some place on Earth that would suffer from such a launch, and one thing we've learned is there is no truly "empty" land.  Even if our moral calculus could be extended to other species that would be saved by greening our power, it would be better if there were some way to launch such huge masses without exposing the biosphere to nuclear explosions and fallout at all.

There is.  I call it the Verne gun because frankly, a name like THE ATOMIC CANNON would just not go over well in certain circles.  In any case, the principle is the same as Verne's original idea, but using modern technology:  you set off a nuclear charge underground where the blast, heat, radiation and fallout can all be contained, and use Orion-type technology to direct its energy into orbiting a very big, very heavy spacecraft.  This vessel would experience hundreds to thousands of g's of acceleration--you couldn't put humans in it.  But Wang calculates that a 10 megaton bomb could put 280,000 tons into orbit with zero radiation escape into the biosphere.  Since dozens of bombs were exploded in exactly this way from the 50's to the 70's, we know this can be done.  And Orion's researchers proved nearly every one of their theories about Orion.  What they couldn't test at the time can now be simulated accurately by today's supercomputers, without the need for a test program.

Such an orbital gun could be used multiple times.  Here's what you could do if you could put 280,000 tons into orbit in one shot:

• Put 1.5 terawatts of clean solar power into orbit with less than ten launches.  Obsolete coal and petroleum power production with green baseline power, using less than a 10th the number of solar cells as you'd have to install on Earth to capture the same amount of sunlight.
• Orbit an entire space elevator with one launch.  Set it up, retire the gun, and get on with a clean space age.
• Do the same thing with an orbiting greenhouse infrastructure.  Drop solar-powered mass drivers on the moon to feed a continual stream of building material to the building sites.
  
• Orbit fuel depots to drop the price of conventional rocketry to orbit through the floor.  One shot and access to space for NASA becomes 10 times cheaper.
• Send up a telescope so big that it can image the continents of planets circling other stars.
  
• Put up one or more of those cool gigantic orbiting space station wheels that are showcased so dramatically in the movie 2001:  A Space Odyssey.
• Send an entire colony's worth of material to the moon or Mars.  With a second shot, put up an interplanetary cycler ring, tether launch system or other permanent mechanism for shuttling people to and from the colonies.
• Toss a couple hundred thousand tons of nuclear waste into the sun, where it won't bother us anymore.  (Trust me, the sun won't notice.)
• Launch an empty Orion ship, send its fuel up the safer space elevator, and send an expedition to Saturn, or a probe to the next star.
  

I'm not going to suggest orbiting a sunshade to head off global warming, because that's no solution for problems like ocean acidification.  --In any case, you can certainly think up other cool stuff we could do; and notice that some of these options, like orbiting fuel depots or a space elevator, can easily bootstrap us out of having to use the gun more than once or twice.

Oh, and of course, there's one more thing you could do with it, but since you'd need to get signoff from all the members of the nuclear club to use it at all, this one's a bit less likely:

• Orbit a huge frikkin death star platform with ATOMIC LASERS and MISSILE RACKS and RAIL GUNS and aim them at anybody you don't like.