Programmed Reality

Nick Bostrom wrote an interesting article for the MIT Technology Review about how he hopes that the search for life on Mars finds nothing. In it, he reasons that inasmuch as we haven't come across any signs of intelligent life in the universe yet, advanced life must be rare. But since conditions for life aren't particularly stringent, there must be a "great filter" that prevents life from evolving beyond a certain point. If we are indeed alone, that probably means that we have made it through the filter. But if life is found nearby, like in our solar system, then the filter is probably ahead of us, or at least ahead of the evolutionary stage of the life that we find. And the more advanced the life form that we find, the more likely that we have yet to hit the filter, which implies ultimate doom for us.

But I wonder about some of the assumptions in this argument. He argues that intelligent ETs must not exist because they most certainly should have colonized the galaxy via von Neumann probes but apparently have not done so because we do not observe them. It seems to me, however, that it is certainly plausible that a sufficiently advanced civilization can be effectively cloaked from a far less advanced one. Mastery of some of those other 6 or 7 spatial dimensions that string theory predicts comes to mind. Or invisibility via some form of electromagnetic cloaking. And those are only early 21st century ideas. Imagine the possibilities of being invisible in a couple hundred years.

Then there is the programmed reality model. If the programmers placed multiple species in the galaxy for "players" to inhabit, it would certainly not be hard to keep some from interacting with each other, e.g. until the lesser civilization proves its ability to play nicely. Think about how some virtual reality games allow the players to walk through walls. It is a simple matter to maintain multiple domains of existence in a single programmed construct!  More support for the programmed reality model?...

(what do you think about the possibilities of life elsewhere? take our polls!)

Tags: bostrom, filter, life, mars, extraterrestrial, reality, programmed
Categories: AI | Cosmology | Future Tech | Life | Programmed Reality

A recent article on popularmechanics.com got me thinking about military robotics and the future of war.  Although the story remains vague, these iRobot SWORDS units were apparently taken off the battlefield due to unanticipated actions.  “The gun started moving when it was not intended to move,” according to the Army’s Program Executive Officer for Ground Forces, Kevin Fahey.

War is an unfortunate consequence of having humanity's social evolution severely outstripped by our technological evolution.  And the idea of having robots fight our battles certainly has its pros and cons.  On the one hand, fewer lives would be lost on the side of the deployers of the robots.  On the other hand, how fair is it to throw flesh and blood humans in the ring with terminators?  I would not be surprised to see an amendment to the Geneva convention regarding robotic warfare at some point in the near future.

Of course, robots are only the next stage in the application of technology to warfare.  Mines, predator drones, WMDs, laser-targeting bombs, and "Star Wars"-like anti-missile defenses have all been steps taken to remove the human risk progressively further from the battlefield.  Have nations can simply beat up on Have-not nations at will. 

Then, of course, will come the day, when all combatants are fighting remotely.  In the future, will wars be run by teens (because their contract rate is less than adults) trained on "Missile Command" type video games, where the side with the best technology, best gamers, and biggest budget wins by wearing down the opponent's arsenal of robots and munitions.  I guess the Haves will always have the edge.

Tags: robotics, warfare, irobot
Categories: Future Tech | Robotics

In the standard model of particle physics, every particle has an antiparticle, a particle which has opposite properties, such as charge (e.g. a positron is the antiparticle of the electron).  Currently, it takes a fairly high energy particle accelerator to generate antiparticles artificially and actual antimolecules were created only recently (at CERN in the 1990s).  When an particle encounters its antiparticle, they annihilate each other and release a burst of energy equivalent to e=mc^^2.  As this is the most efficient conversion of fuel possible, it was a source of fascination for endless science fiction writers, especially with respect to the anti-matter drive, which is based on the idea of generating energy via the annihilation of matter and antimatter.

My idea, however, was sort of the reverse idea - that once somebody figured out a good energy source and a reverse reaction that would produce a steady stream of matter and antimatter, there was a great opportunity for a clean and efficient engine for a flying car.  It starts with the generator of nitrogen and antinitrogen.  Since air is 78% nitrogen, if you shoot your stream of antinitrogen out the front of the vehicle, it will annihilate the nitrogen in the air, creating a vacuum that sucks the car into it, propelling the car forward.  At the same time, the other byproduct of the reaction, nitrogen, can be shot out of the back of the car creating additional propulsion in the same direction.  Since the same amount of nitrogen would be created as destroyed, there would be no harm to the environment (ignoring for the moment all of the high energy gamma rays emanating from around the car).  Through a network of plumbing, the stream of antinitrogen could be squirted out of the bottom of the car (for lift), top of the car (descent), sides of the car (parallel parking), simultaneously from a front bumper to the side and the opposite rear to the other side (banking), and any other kind of maneuver that you could desire.  The possibilities would be endless.

Limitless fuel, high efficiency, ultimate maneuverability, and eco-friendly (again, except for the gamma rays).

So where are we in relation to this technology?  CERN has their antiproton decelerator, perhaps the closest system to trapping antiprotons for study.   But it is still a few hundred meters in diameter, barely controls enough antiprotons to be useful, and only generates one kind of antiparticle.  We area a long way from the Anti-Nitrogen Cruiser.  I predict seeing one in the showrooms around...

2050

Tags: antimatter, matter, drive, antiparticles
Categories: Future Tech | Particle Physics

This one felt really important during the height of the cold war.

All H-Bombs have an A-Bomb at their core.  The A-Bomb is needed to generated the million of degree temperature to begin the fusion reaction in the H-Bomb fuel.  So, all nukes, therefore, have at their core, a hunk of fissionable material, generally Uranium-235 or Plutonium-239.  U-235, for example, works well as a nuclear fission fuel because when the nucleus absorbs a neutron, it becomes unstable and splits into two smaller nuclei (e.g. Barium and Krypton), releasing more neutrons which then generate more reactions.  A critical mass of fissionable material will explode because the number of neutrons needed to maintain the reaction is exceeded by the number generated.  But, U-235 can also safely absorb a neutron and not undergo fission, transmuting in non-fissionable U-236 before further decay.  But if some process (for example, creating the perfect neutron energy) were to be discovered that caused absorption rather than fission, the core of the nuke could be neutralized.

So, my thought was to blanket the earth with a "rain" of the right particles to neutralize all nuke cores, regardless of where they are buried or hidden, thereby ending all fear of nuclear strikes.

My naivete may have been to think that we could generate enough particles at high enough density to neutralize a nuke core at any given point on the earth without having that particle beam have an adverse effect on plant and animal life.

So where are we today?  Actually, there are a number of nuclear remediation technologies (for example see Gary Vesperman's "Comparison of My List of 27 Methods of Neutralizing or Disposing of Radioactive Waste with PACE’s 9 Methods") that can clean up cores of nukes or fissionable material in general.  None can be accomplished on the "earth blanketing" scale that I envisioned.  However, maybe nanotech can come to the rescue.  Imagine a healthy swarm of nanobots, all carrying the materials needed for a nuclear remediation technique, such as RIPPLE Fission, and instructed to seek out all U-235 and P-239 and unleash the neutralization technique.  

Time frame?  I'm thinking...

2040

Tags: nuclear remediation, nukes, nanotech, fission
Categories: Future Tech | General | Nanotech

When I was a geeky teenager, I remember dreaming up these wild inventions that I though could revolutionize the world in some way.  Since that was 30 years ago, I thought it might be kind of fun to take stock of the likelihood of these ideas it today's time.  Please try not to laugh.  Here was idea #1 - The Invisible Cloaking Device...

My thought was this - how cool would it be to be somewhere and put on a jacket and just become invisible.  Of course, the back pages of Popular Mechanics always had see-through glasses but of course, they were a gaff.  But I wondered if the cloaking concept could really work.  I didn't see why not.  The way I figured it, if they could make transistors that were pretty much microscopic, and LED's that were based on transistors, why not little cameras that were just as small?  All you had to do is put zillions of these cameras all over your cloak as well as zillions of LEDs.  But the LEDs had to be able to generate any color of light.  And each point of the cloak would have many cameras pointing in each direction, the signals of which were collected at a central computer.  The computer would figure out what part of the cloak was at the exact opposite position for each camera and each direction of view.  And so, that signal would get routed to the LED so as to generate the image that was the same as if you were looking through the cloak.  An engineering nightmare to be sure, especially in determining the position of every point of the coat. 

 

So imagine how excited I was in 2006 when I first heard of experiments being done with cloaking devices.  Unfortunately, however, the technology is still woefully weak.  As shown in the figure below, you have to put a camera directly behind the subject and a combiner device between the viewer and the subject and it only works in one direction.  So, nobody is going to get fooled any time soon.

But still, the resulting effect is kind of cool.  See below...

So when will we have true invisibility?  I have seen projections of 10-20 years for single color with a cloak of a well-defined shape.  "Sometime this century" for a Harry Potter type invisible cloak.  I think that nanotech will facilitate the process by enabling microscopic devices that can image in all directions and are self aware of their position.  So, I say...

2030

Tags: invisible, cloaking, invisibility
Categories: Future Tech | General