The nanoassembler as Shmoo 2.0

After the world of literacy opened up to me in the mid 1960's, I read the daily comic strips in Tulsa's newspaper voraciously, including Al Capp's Li'l Abner during its latter years of publication. I remember a story line in Li'l Abner where some seedy politician gave a press conference, and to every question from a reporter about an issue vexing the American people in the late 1960's, the politician gave the answer "Shmoos," then explained how these creatures called shmoos could solve the problem.

Capp introduced the shmoo characters in 1948. Wikipedia's article about the shmoo says the following:

A shmoo is shaped like a plump bowling pin with legs. It has smooth skin, eyebrows and sparse whiskers—but no arms, nose or ears. Its feet are short and round but dexterous, as the shmoo's comic book adventures make clear. It has a rich gamut of facial expressions, and often expresses love by exuding hearts over its head.

Cartoonist Al Capp ascribed to the shmoo the following curious characteristics. His satirical intent should be evident:

* They reproduce asexually and are very prolific. They require no sustenance other than air.
* Naturally gentle, they require minimal care, and are ideal playmates for young children.
* Shmoos are delicious to eat, and are eager to be eaten. If a human looks at one hungrily, it will happily immolate itself itself, either by jumping into a frying pan, after which they taste like chicken, or into a broiling pan, after which they taste like steak. When roasted they taste like pork, and when baked they taste like catfish. (Raw, they taste like oysters on the half-shell.)
* They also produce eggs (neatly packaged), milk (bottled, grade-A), and butter—no churning required. Their pelts make perfect bootleather or house timber, depending on how thick you slice it.
* They have no bones, so there's absolutely no waste. Their eyes make the best suspender buttons, and their whiskers make perfect toothpicks. In short, they are simply the perfect ideal of a subsistence agricultural herd animal.
* The frolicking of shmoon is so entertaining (such as their staged "shmoosical comedies") that people no longer feel the need to watch television or go to the movies.
* Some of the more tasty varieties of shmoo are more difficult to catch. Usually shmoo hunters, now a sport in some parts of the country, utilize a paper bag, flashlight and stick to capture their shmoos. At night the light stuns them, then they can be whacked in the head with the stick and put in the bag for frying up later on.

Apparently Capp invented the shmoo as a modern version of the Cockaigne myth, but he did it ambiguously so that his readers came up with different interpretations of its allegorical meaning. Does the shmoo represent the potentials of post-Depression and post-War 20th Century American capitalism? or the promises of liberal politicians who wanted to build upon the New Deal? or the aspirations of Soviet Communism, which likewise promised abundance? or something else entirely? I doubt Capp knew about cargo cults in the South Pacific when he imagined the shmoo, but his idea appeals to that sort of thinking.

You can probably see where I want to go with this. Eric Drexler rebranded the shmoo, but without Capp's cleverness and sense of humor, when he introduced the world to his idea of the "nanoassembler" in the 1980's, or just "assembler" for short. He even calls assemblers "engines of abundance" in his popular book:

Assemblers will be able to make virtually anything from common materials without labor, replacing smoking factories with systems as clean as forests. They will transform technology and the economy at their roots, opening a new world of possibilities. They will indeed be engines of abundance.

In other words, Drexler thought the shmoo didn't do quite enough for mankind. For example, as far as I know, Capp didn't attribute to the shmoo the ability to produce industrial goods like computers, space ships or machines to revive people in cryonic suspension. So Drexler imagined a kind of trans-shmoo, or Shmoo 2.0, with the power to work these sorts of miracles, "without labor," and without pollution.

Framing the nanoassembler idea in this way shows how ridiculous it sounds. I can see why blogger Scott Locklin mocks it as a fantasy about having "genie-like superpowers."

As a personal note, reading Li'l Abner's stories about its fictional hillbilly community of Dogpatch made me a little uncomfortable because I knew that I had Dogpatch-like people in my family. My mother told me stories about her life as the child of migrant laborers from Arkansas who traveled to the state of Washington in the 1940's and worked on an apple orchard, much like the characters in The Grapes of Wrath. In 1972 she showed me the ramshackle house of her birth in the Ozark town of St. Paul, Arkansas. Its remains leaned against a tree when I saw it, making it unusable; and it has probably long since disappeared. But in its prime it would have looked just like the real estate in Dogpatch. On top of that, mom's birthplace lay near a creek called Dog Branch, so I teased her about the resemblance of the names.

Stupid zombie movies

I wish this fad would go away.

I can see why they appeal to society's marginal young men, however, especially in a bad economy.

In a typical zombie movie, some schlub who has a low-status servility job finds himself in a situation where he no longer has to work; he can help himself to the best of the collapsed society's leftovers, like wheels he couldn't have afforded with the wages from his old job; he discovers that he faces a lot less competition for the surviving young women, especially the most attractive ones, so by the process of elimination he becomes more sexually desirable to them; and he can shoot the undead all day long like in a computer shooter game.

What American hikikomori wouldn't want the zombie apocalypse as an alternative to his current existence?

Jeez. More "nanotech" rent-seeking!

Scott Locklin did not have to make this stuff up:

ASU faculty receive federal nanotech renewal grant

A team of professors at Arizona State University, including three faculty members of the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, has received a quarter-million-dollar federal grant to pursue their research of nanotechnology regulation.

The two-year, $248,230 award from the Ethical, Legal and Social Issues (ELSI) Program in the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science will enable the researchers to evaluate novel “soft law” mechanisms for oversight of the technology. The grant, “Governing Nanotechnology Risks and Benefits in the Transition to Regulation,” was made to Gary Marchant, Ken Abbott and Doug Sylvester, professors at the College of Law, and Elizabeth Corley, an associate professor in the School of Public Affairs and co-principal investigator for the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at ASU.

The context makes it clear that "nanotechnology" refers to mainstream chemistry and materials science, not to Drexler's nanoassembler genie fantasy. Don't we already have laws to regulate those industries, without renaming their products "nanotechnology"?

Economic determinism of the current drug culture

I don't think a Timothy Leary sort of guru could exist in the current culture.

In the 1960's, the U.S. had a booming economy, and people had little problem finding or changing jobs. The available jobs tended to pay decent wages and offered raises which stayed ahead of inflation, resulting in rising real incomes. So in that environment, people who wanted to explore subjectivity through LSD and other substances had priorities in mind other than cognitive efficiency and job performance because they assumed a background of economic sufficiency.

Contrast that situation with today's. We have a weak economy, relatively few jobs, stagnant or declining real wages -- you know the drill. So what kinds of drugs or other cognitive tweaks do Americans want to consume? Stronger brews of coffee, "energy drinks," Ritalin, Modafinil, piracetam -- basically drugs for people who want to stay awake, pay attention longer, study longer, memorize more, pass academic or professional exams and gain cognitive advantages over other people competing with you for a scarce supply of knowledge work.

In my lifetime, the drug culture's values have transformed from bohemian to bourgeois.

Saving human life as a "religion."

We have an Emergency, and we need technological solutions for it.

richiekgb on the Cult Education Forum writes:

The whole cryonics/Life extension thing is like the religion of the people with a IQ of 140 - its like some kind of technological intelligent design movement to sell dodgy alternative "medicine". Its just a shame that its more vocal supporters don't even seem get what they are selling - just because they think they understand the science behind it all doesnt mean they actually do. Its this kind of "misguided good intentions"which will make the money men at the top rich and them look stupid when the scams and abuse are revealed as we have seen.

One, I'd like to see empirical evidence about these "money men at the top" who've allegedly gotten "rich" off of cryonics. Melody Maxim has stated repeatedly that Saul Kent and Bill Faloon have spent millions of dollars from their own fortunes on cryonics-related projects, with little to show for the expenditure. The waste invites comparison with Meg Whitman's apparently doomed campaign to become California's next governor.

Two, suppose for the sake of argument that cryonicists have taken the wrong approach to the Emergency. I agree with some aspect of that criticism. I have openly questioned a key aspect of current cryonicist thinking, namely, this "nanotechnology" fantasy which has become an opportunity for rent-seeking and and source of phony status for people who can't do, or don't want to do, real engineering. (They probably couldn't turn "nanotechnology" into real engineering any way, if it gets the physics wrong.) I also find it likely that cryonics suffers from a second round of initialization failure, and that it needs another rebooting.

Three, does richiekgb have a better plan? I would like to hear it. Instead his attitude amounts to saying something like, "Don't bother rescuing the miners," or "Don't bother trying to cap the oil well in the Gulf," because, according to him, the impulse to solve those kinds of hard problems serves as a "religion" for people with 140 IQ's.

What nonsense. We have an Emergency, and we need technological solutions for it.

A Boomer and cryonics

We have an Emergency, and we need technological solutions for it.

Nobody I know of told the miners trapped in Chile to "get over themselves"; discounted their desire to live because of their demographic characteristics or alleged narcissism; decided it wouldn't pay off to save them because they probably couldn't adapt to life on the surface after so many weeks underground; or dismissed the effort to rescue them as "denial," "false hope" or "pseudoscience," while also questioning the financial motives of the people who offered rescue.

Yet people spout analogous nonsense as criticisms of cryonics, and of the character of cryonicists.

As for the demographic discounting, on the interminable thread about cryonics at the Cult Education Forum, a couple of the posters have ridiculed cryonics as something that attracts "aging Boomers" who don't want to die.

I turn 51 next week, so do the math. I belong to that cohort of "aging Boomers," I suppose, despite my lack of identification with Boomer culture. I never watched That '70s Show because the popular culture of the 1970's sucked the first time around, and I don't feel nostalgic for it. I also don't care to listen to '70s music, even though I recognize much of it, despite what Robert Sapolsky says I should do.

However, I became interested in cryonics literally in my teens, not in "middle age," so-called. In the summer of 1974, the year I turned 15, I bought and read a paperback of Robert Ettinger's Man Into Superman, a much under-appreciated book, in my opinion, despite its "psychedelic" cover art, or the different cover art on the jacket of the hardcover edition. (Remember what I said above about the popular culture in the 1970's?)

Man Into Superman has worn well, with one exception I'll get to presently, because Ettinger, who has masters degrees in both physics and mathematics, grounded his speculations in the scientific literature of the time, he didn't set dates, and he displays a healthy cynicism about human nature. This contrasts with similar writings from the 1970's by the likes of F.M. Esfandiary, Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson, which make for embarrassing reading now because of their naiveté and freedom from science.

Ettinger makes a case that the ground rules of "the human condition" have changed recently because of advances in biology, and we have the opportunity for greatly extended and expanded lives. Cryonic suspension could give us the medical time travel we need to get to that opportunity.

In that long-ago summer, by the standards of current life expectancies, I came away from reading Ettinger's book with a simple but very powerful message:

We have an Emergency, and we need technological solutions for it.

Everything else people say about, or against, cryonics misses this point.

As for the exception: Ettinger published this, his second book, in 1972. He makes the cryonics situation at the time sound more efficient and organized than it turned out from hindsight, and Ettinger probably didn't know any better. Instead cryonics suffered from a massive "initialization failure" in the 1970's, and it required rebooting several years later. The later rebooting has lasted through this year so far, but it has started to show major weaknesses as well. I can see the need now for yet another rebooting which learns from the mistakes of the past and does it even better.

Cryonics needs some fresh minds.

Cryonicists spend too much time talking amongst ourselves, and I think that has led to the reinforcement of some probably untenable ideas in several areas, notable revival scenarios based on Drexler's nanotechnological fantasies. (In my lack of sophistication, I had always assumed that engineers practice evidence-based engineering. The "nanotechnologists" have shown me otherwise.)

What would it take to organize regular, invitation-only conferences where we sought the perspectives of knowledgeable people outside of cryonics who express a willingness to study the project and offer suggestions for improving it?

Or conversely, what about giving talks to groups of capable people outside of the cryonics community and then soliciting their constructive criticism? For example, many major cities, including metro Phoenix, have inventors' groups. What if we present to some inventors an unsolved problem in cryonics and ask the inventors how they would solve it?

I respectfully disagree with part of the analysis.

Charles Platt has posted on Cryonet his "censored" article about the dysfunctions of "Cryoptimism," rejected for publication in Cryonics magazine:

Part 1 of 2

Part 2 of 2

Still digesting it, but I have to dissent from the following in Part 2:

We have also benefited from brilliant people such as Eric Drexler, Ralph Merkle, and Robert Freitas who have mapped out the possibilities for cellular repair, greatly increasing the plausibility of cryonics.

"Nanotechnology," as these gentlemen have defined it, probably cannot exist in our universe. Therefore it cannot make cryonics scientifically "plausible," as many of cryonics' critics have pointed out. Again, I ask: Why has "nanotechnology" failed to thrive as a real field of engineering after nearly 30 years, and has instead turned into a game of status- and rent-seeking for propeller-heads who apparently can't make an evidence-based living?

Platt's other concerns in this article resemble the ones articulated by Eugen Leitl in his lengthy description of the talk he apparently gave this week end at TransVision 2010 in Milan. I hope a free video of Leitl's talk goes online so that I can watch it. Aschwin de Wolf has already posted some of his thoughts based on Leitl's post.

Something I'd like as I begin my next half-century.

I'd like an aftermarket single, child-free woman in her 30's as a companion. (Fat or ugly chicks need not apply, though I like ones a little zaftig, for example Kate Winslet in some of her films where she appears nude.) I probably wouldn't marry her, however, because the odds of marital stability don't look good. (Apparently women have a finite capacity for forming stable pair bonds which depletes surprisingly rapidly.)

Given the curmudgeonly turn my personality has taken in recent years, however, I continue to hold women in suspicion. Despite the propaganda about women's alleged "empathy and sociality," based in female neurology, I've noticed that women have no trouble turning those off when it suits them.

I've debated whether to buy this book.

I found New Scientist's review interesting:

"Extravagant fiction today, cold fact tomorrow" was the bold claim of Amazing Stories, the first of the American magazines devoted to science fiction. Beginning in the 1930s, these sci-fi pulps and comics envisaged that by the year 2000 we would be living in a world with domed underwater cities and travelling in flying cars and by jetpacks. Instead we have mobile phones, laptops and DVDs.

The predictions were off, says James Kakalios, because implicit in the promise of flying cars is the availability of lightweight power supplies capable of producing enormous quantities of energy. In fact, the capacity of batteries to act as reservoirs of energy is limited by the chemical and electrical properties of atoms - and we cannot change the physics of atoms.

Uh, excuse me. Don't nuclear reactions release ~ 10⁷ times more energy per atom than chemical reactions? Not that you could necessarily use nuclear power in a flying car or a jetpack, of course.

Apparently I have to speak with the voice of reason, again.

Cryonicists assert the following: We have an emergency, and we need technological solutions to it.

I haven't spoken with any cryonicists about the Chilean miners, though I hope to bring up the subject when I meet some cryonicist friends this week end. But I, personally, identify with the values of the miners' rescuers. I recognize an outlook kindred to the cryonicists' in their efforts to save human lives under unpromising conditions.

By contrast, cryonics' critics would probably drop a note down the hole to tell the miners to "get over themselves," then walk away.

So it angers me that so many people miss this simple point of cryonics, and instead get caught up on stupid issues like not fitting into a future society, not knowing anyone, not having any money, etc. Basically they just make up excuses so that they don't have to consider it.

Nobody made analogous objections to rescuing the miners, by contrast, even though some of them apparently had mistresses their wives didn't know about, which must have resulted in awkward family reunions. Gee, I guess we should have kept the miners down there to spare them from this horror.

I also lack the complacency I see in many cryonicists about the narrative of revival. The preponderance of evidence implies that Eric Drexler's ideas won't work, and I keep trying to get other cryonicists to acknowledge this, so they can help me search for better ideas. Refer to my recent Cryonet post, for example. People who do real science, like Craig Venter or the connectome researchers, don't have to play this ridiculous rent- and status-seeking game mastered by "nanotechnologists," because they have results to validate their efforts. As Scott Locklin says, "People need to grow up and attempt to achieve real things, rather than imagining how cool it would be if we had nanotech factories which would give us genie-like superpowers."

Why didn't someone just steal Ben Franklin's money?

According to Wikipedia:

Franklin bequeathed £1,000 (about $4,400 at the time, or about $55,000 in 2010 dollars) each to the cities of Boston and Philadelphia, in trust to gather interest for 200 years. The trust began in 1785 when the French mathematician Charles-Joseph Mathon de la Cour, who admired Franklin greatly, wrote a friendly parody of Franklin's "Poor Richard's Almanack" called "Fortunate Richard." The main character leaves a smallish amount of money in his will, five lots of 100 livres, to collect interest over one, two, three, four or five full centuries, with the resulting astronomical sums to be spent on impossibly elaborate utopian projects. Franklin, who was 79 years old at the time, wrote thanking him for a great idea and telling him that he had decided to leave a bequest of 1,000 pounds each to his native Boston and his adopted Philadelphia. As of 1990, more than $2,000,000 had accumulated in Franklin's Philadelphia trust, which had loaned the money to local residents. From 1940 to 1990, the money was used mostly for mortgage loans. When the trust came due, Philadelphia decided to spend it on scholarships for local high school students. Franklin's Boston trust fund accumulated almost $5,000,000 during that same time; at the end of its first 100 years a portion was allocated to help establish a trade school that became the Franklin Institute of Boston and the whole fund was later dedicated to supporting this institute.

This shows that the idea of a reanimation trust kept in existence for over 200 years doesn't sound implausible.

Still working on the Terra-Uranus problem

I want to check the calculations further, but it looks like the energy involved in moving Terra-Uranus from Uranus's orbit to something like Earth's orbit equals about 10³³ J.

Has "nanotechnology" itself become a troll?

According to Wikipedia:

In addition to the offending poster, the noun troll can also refer to the provocative message itself, as in "that was an excellent troll you posted".

I don't think Eric Drexler deliberately published his books as trolls in this sense, but given the evolution of "nanotechnology" into a rent-seeking effort (apparently the view Scott Locklin takes of the phenomenon), reality has turned them into troll-like provocations. They wouldn't have developed the characteristics of trolls if, instead, their ideas paid off in a timely fashion.

Again I go back to the laser analogy. Suppose someone described in writing the idea of the laser as a theoretical possibility in 1960, but he couldn't build one. What would we think of the laser idea if, 50 years later, we still didn't have lasers, but we had people quoting the original text as something like scripture, writing about all the things they thought lasers could do if we could build them, holding conferences on dealing with the social impact of lasers' eventual arrival, warning the U.S. not to fall behind other countries' laser programs, soliciting grants for more theoretical studies of "laserology," etc?

A rational person who witnessed such a circus would dismiss lasers as a fantasy and a scam, most likely.

I keep going back to this problem with "nanotechnology" because cryonics needs rebooting, and to do that we will have to break with some long-entrenched assumptions which defy empirical evidence. Apparently I've run up against a neurological problem with other middle-aged cryonicists; they don't want to deal with the implications of adverse information, probably for the same reasons they don't want to listen to new music or try new foods.

Halcyon Molecular may pass reality testing.

Apparently Halcyon Molecular, a startup company in the Bay Area/Silicon Valley, wants to sequence genomes more efficiently using electron microscopy.

So, they want to apply a real tool to do something to a real thing. That sounds promising so far, unlike the "nanotechnology" vaporware.

This made me smile for some reason.

Where does the 1,000 year life expectancy come from?

I recently ran across a reference to a startup company called Halcyon Molecular, which I might blog about after further investigation. The company's CEO, William Andregg, says in a video interview he wants to live for "millions, billions, hundreds of billions of years."

Well, he does think big. I have to admire him for that. Cosmology might make the upper figures difficult, however.

Andregg refers to the claim that if we stopped aging in the current sort of environment, we might have a life expectancy of circa 1,000 years before a misadventure kills us. I've heard that figure before, so I wonder if it comes from actuarial considerations.

According to the actuarial table, a 10 year old boy has a 1 - 0.000085 = 0.999915 probability of surviving in a year. That probability decreases every year after that. Assuming that you had a population of people who consistently had the probability of surviving every year like a 10 year old boy, then it looks like that population would have a half life L_half, the length of time by which half of the population dies, calculated as follows:

L_half = (ln 0.5)/ln 0.999915) = 8,154 years.

That seems nearly an order of magnitude too high. What if you assume the survival probability of a 20-year-old man? The actuarial table gives that as 1 - 0.001343 = 0.998657. In that case, you'd have a half life:

L_half = (ln 0.5)/(ln 0.998657) = 516 years

And that figure gets to the right order of magnitude. So, apparently, the 1,000 year life expectancy figure must assume something like the survival probability of people in their teen years.

Carbon ephemeralization?

Buckminster Fuller coined the term ephemeralization to describe a sometime trend of extracting more and more performance from a given unit of resources. Julian L. Simon expresses a similar idea in one of his books.

I wonder if this qualifies:

Environmental Visionaries: The Nuclear Revivalist
For environmentalist Jesse Ausubel, going green means land conservation and energy efficiency—and forgetting “boutique” renewables like windmills and biofuels

Part of what alarms his critics is how un-alarmist his conclusions have turned out to be. For example, instead of using policy to change how people will behave in the future, Ausubel prefers exploring technological responses to what he believes people are going to do regardless. His favorite defense of this laissez-faire approach is to explain that, absent any policy dictating that it should happen, energy consumption over the past 100 years has steadily “decarbonized.” That is, humankind has moved to fuel sources with progressively better ratios of carbon atoms to hydrogen atoms—wood at 10:1, coal at 2:1, oil at 1:2, natural gas at 1:4 and, eventually (in the future Ausubel envisions) 100 percent hydrogen. He thinks technology inevitably improves things. “That’s not to say I don’t worry about the downsides of technology,” he says. “A lot of my work is about that. But my general interest is new and high-tech ways of dealing with problems.”

Comparing the two Treks

One of the networks on the motel's cable TV service shows reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation every week night at 23:00. That series ran as a current production from 1987 through 1994, so in our mysterious, far-future year 2010, I catch an episode about 20 years old on average on the nights I stay up that late. I've noticed something odd about the contrast now between The Next Generation and the original series in the 1960's it had rebooted from.

The original Star Trek series ran as a current production in 1966-1969, or about 20 years before The Next Generation, and over 40 years ago from 2010.

Even by the 1970's, the original series, which I saw in reruns in Tulsa, dated quickly in terms of its costumes, haircuts, cheaply made sets and special effects, standards of female attractiveness and retro social attitudes (despite efforts to make the show seem progressive by 1960's standards). It had looked really dated by 1987, when the rebooted version broke with several of the original Trek stereotypes -- female and minority authority figures; an older, bald captain; a trustworthy and non-homicidal android; more emphasis on empathy, understanding and negotiation (symbolized by Counselor Troi), and less on violence, etc. The sets, make-believe technologies and special effects also looked more convincing in the new effort than in the original series. The Next Generation could almost pass for a current show on the SyFy Channel, apart from the fact that it doesn't share the darkness and angst of recent efforts like Battlestar Galactica, Caprica and Stargate Universe. But in general its appearance and social messages don't feel outdated to me.

In other words, the original series dated quickly because it has preserved on video a sample of American culture during a period of rapid transition. The contrast with later reality showed up quickly, because society had changed its look-and-feel quickly.

By contrast, the rebooted Trek captured snapshots of American society during a period of much slower change around 1990, so that it now shows a much smaller contrast with American life in 2010.

Demographic patterns probably account for much of the difference. The original series coincided with a large, socially influential cohort of Baby Boomers all coming of age and exploring novelty around the same time; while this same cohort had settled into adult patterns of responsibility and novelty-avoidance 20 years later, when The Next Generation came out. By that time the Trek franchise had assumed the role of something like the new version of a favorite comfort food from childhood for Boomers in their late 20's, 30's and 40's.

But how much of the difference also reflects the fact that technological progress itself had decelerated dramatically by the late 1980's? The original series had some tangential connection with enthusiasm for reaching the moon and the (disappointed) start of a permanent "space age" in the late 1960's. If I can take that article in Popular Science at face value, the people who produced Star Trek sought advice from scientists and engineers who worked at real jobs in the space program. Twenty years later we just had those kludgy space shuttles going on occasional near Earth orbit missions. Aerospace engineers and other engineers and scientists might have served as consultants (in fact I used to know a software engineer through the cryonics community who claimed he invented "nanites" and "Krieger waves" for the rebooted series); but they didn't have a support system of goal-oriented astronautics behind them like we had in the 1960's, at least for manned missions. We still have a similar situation today, if not a worse one, and that contributes to the slow aging of The Next Generation.

The Next Generation might start to age more rapidly in the next decade, however, if the United States has entered decline. In that case, Americans in the 2020's might look back at the rebooted Trek as a glimpse into a time when the U.S. had its act together, contrasted with their shabby and dysfunctional reality.

A way over-rated exercise in "futurology"

Alvin Toffler's Future Shock came out in 1970, around the time I turned 11 years old. I vaguely knew about it back then, and I think I read parts of it in my teens, and then in its entirety a few years ago. Orson Welles even narrated a documentary of that title in the 1970's, which you can find on YouTube. See the first part below:



I ran across an article about this book's 40th anniversary which reminded me of it.

Frankly, the experience of reading Future Shock left me underwhelmed. I can see why this book might have caused a sensation for a week or two back in 1970 because it seemed insightful, radical, edgy or whatever. I just don't see why it still has that reputation now, given the deceleration of technological progress in the last 40 years, indeed the collapse of progress in many areas.

The idea of widespread "future shock" probably sounded plausible to the generation of adults alive in 1970 who had come of age by 1950 or so, which included my father, born in 1927, the year Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic. (Dad even bought that copy of Future Shock I skimmed through as a teen.) Those adults grew up in a world before computers, antibiotics, the Pill, nuclear power, astronautics, television, etc. became "game changers" in the daily life of developed countries by the late 1960's, and led to many social changes which the older generations found anxiety-inducing. Hence Toffler coined the phrase "future shock," based on the analogy to "culture shock," to describe this anxiety and disorientation.

Fair enough. But Toffler overplayed his hand by arguing that "future shock" would become the normal state of human affairs from then on. And I have to call bullshit on that. I grew up with many of the things in my environment which allegedly caused "future shock" in my elders, so the exposure would presumably inoculate me from their effects. But hardly anything has come along since 1970 to give me future shock, and I turn 51 next month.

Look at the reality of our lives in our mysterious, far-future year 2010: Peak Oil, relinquished manned space exploration, relinquished supersonic air travel, the progressive failure of antibiotics to stop infections, bed bugs in five star hotels around the U.S., the inability to maintain the 20th Century's infrastructure legacy because public employee unions get priority claim on tax money, something like another Great Depression, etc. Do these sound like the characteristics of a society heading in a "futuristic," as in "science fiction-like," direction? I don't think iPads compensate for all the stagnation or regression we see in more important areas, including threats to our literal life support.

The virtues of minimalism

I came across a video on YouTube by fellow Tulsan Brett McKay some weeks back about what he calls the "Menaissance," namely, a trend towards reasserting the positive aspects of male psychology and behavior which our society has let fall into desuetude, and even disrespect, thanks in part to feminism. You could also view the renewed interest in virtue ethics and the revival of Stoicism as part of the same trend in philosophy.

Think about how our grandfathers lived, for example. American men in the first half of the 20th Century, most of them manual laborers of some kind or other, read Ernest Hemingway's novels (if they read novels), watched John Wayne's movies and admired sports figures like Ted Williams because they found their implicit male value system reflected in those parts of the culture.

I realized from the video that I like how McKay thinks, so I added his blog feed, The Art of Manliness, to my Google home page.

McKay lets other bloggers post on his site, and I found this one, "Minimalism Begets Manliness," by Gianpaolo Pietri, of interest. I especially like this point:

2. Action. A man is defined by the actions he takes, not the money he makes. Men love taking action. One of the things that makes communication difficult between men and women is how we react to problems that arise. A man’s first instinct is to come up with a solution and immediately take the required steps to implement it. A women is more concerned with understanding the nature of the problem and talking through it. Guided by minimalism, a man trains himself to focus on only that which matters, which in turn determines the actions he should take.

Money certainly helps in defining a man, of course. But the hunter-gatherer and warrior lifestyles predate the bourgeois lifestyle by many generations, and they probably still reside within us as our default state of flourishing, just as we still seem to do better with paleolithic nutrition than with agricultural nutrition, at least past our peak reproductive years.

But even businessmen prefer to take action to solve problems, and I suspect most men feel annoyed to some extent by women's inclination to talk about problems incessantly instead. (I know that behavior annoys me.)

In fact, I wonder how much of our ability to survive as a species had depended on men's ability to ignore women's prattle when we need to take action. I tend to respect women more who have a practical orientation and who keep the grooming talk down to a minimum, than I do stereotypically feminine women who have to tell everyone about the petty aspects of their lives all the time. (I know a woman about my age who keeps talking even after I leave the room.)

Stop feeding the "nanotechnology" parasite!

Scott Locklin posts again about "nanotechnology" as a phony field:

Technology is what allows us our prosperity, and it must be funded and nurtured, but we must also avoid funding and nurturing parasites. Cargo-cult science and technologists are not only wasteful of money, they waste human capital. It makes me sad to see so many young people dedicating their lives to snake oil like “nanotechnology.” They’d be better off starting a business or learning a trade. “Vaporware technologist” would be a horrible epitaph to a misspent life.

As a potential customer of cryonic suspension, I must really, really insist that cryonics organizations heed the empirical failure of Eric Drexler's ideas after nearly 30 years, and start to look for better ideas, especially in the areas of improved brain cryopreservation and the proper training and qualifications of the people they send out to perform suspensions. (I also want them to stop feeding Drexler's parasite and its offshoots with our dues money, if they still do that.) Oh, and not to neglect the apparently too-boring-to-worry-about problem of reliably finding enough money to stay business!

In other words, I want them to do things which produce empirically observable progress in the here-and-now, instead of all the eye-rolling nonsense about mind-uploading, "nanomedicine" and other transhumanist fantasies. (At least Thomas Donaldson speculates about "24th Century Medicine" based on biological models, not on an attempt to force mechanical engineering to work at a level which defies physics and invites scorn from real scientists.)

Unfortunately that might not happen until some key cryonics leaders (mostly older than me), who have apparently lost the ability to integrate adverse information, have gone into the dewars or cryostats ahead of me. If I stay healthy and can make it to my 90's, like three of my grandparents, I might have some say about this after all. My father's apparent Alzheimer's in his early 80's has me worried, however; not the sort of thing you want in your family medical history. (It probably helps that I've lost nearly 40 lbs. since my branch retinal vein occlusion back in June. I get blood work next month to see whether my LDL has dropped down to a healthier level.)

BTW, my maternal grandmother, who lives in the same nursing home as my father, manages to hang on in her 90's, despite confinement to a wheel chair and her heart failure and kidney failure which cause edema in her legs; yet she still seems mentally competent. Weirdly so, in fact; when I got to see her last year, she talked just like I remembered her talking during my childhood in the 1960's. I wonder if she's reached the stage where, as Michael R. Rose argues, people step off the Gompertz curve, stop aging further and die off at a constant rate.

Hayekian parcel delivery

"I have no idea where your parcel is, sir. And I have no way of knowing its location until it is right in front of me and evident to my senses. The information is dispersed and localized, and beyond the ability of any central authority to know."

Star Trek's "science" background

I question the degree of scientific diligence which allegedly went into the original Star Trek series in the 1960's:




BTW, whom did that "extensive technical library" belong to, and what happened to it, and to all the correspondence with scientists, after the series' cancellation?

Fritz Zwicky's ideas continue to intrigue me.

The Popular Mechanics article says:

One might confidently start work tomorrow on the theoretical and mathematical problems of rebuilding planetary systems, the Caltech astrophysicist says, since enough knowledge is available to guarantee that very little of the work will be found later to have been done in vain.

However, the world of real engineering doesn't have to oblige Zwicky's aspiring solar system engineers. Zwicky assumes that controlled nuclear fusion would do the heavy lifting in re-arranging the solar system, but we still don't have that technology nearly 60 years after the publication of this article.

Something my mother said to me about 30 years ago

In a conversation with my mother in my early 20's about my inability to find a girlfriend, mom said to me, "Why don't you ask out the fat and ugly girls? They don't have boyfriends."

Needless to say, her "advice" stunned me, and I didn't know how to respond. I told the story to a guy friend of mine at the time, and he said that my mother apparently didn't think much of me.

In fairness to mom, she grew up as one of those fat and ugly girls who nonetheless managed to find a husband, so she identified with their situation in life. (Apparently over the long run, about 80 percent of the women, and 40 percent of the men, manage to produce offspring which carry on their respective genetic legacies.)

Mom apologized for saying that some years later, but it still indicated a lack of respect for me, and a signal that she thought I deserved the rewards of low status in the male hierarchy.

This probably sheds some light on my lack of motivation to saved "loved ones" through cryonic suspension.

Uh, Atheists, hello? We have this procedure called "cryonic suspension."

The Atheist blogger Hemant Mehta, who calls himself "The Friendly Atheist," writes the following:

It’s really the most difficult thing about being an atheist: realizing that there’s no afterlife. When your loved ones die, that’s it. But their memory lives on, as does their teaching — they’re never truly gone unless you completely forget about them. There’s something honest and poetic about that.

Religion ignores that entirely and offers a unsupported myth in its place. As Cerise points out, that’s a comfort that’s hard to drop… but if you want to be honest, you have to let it go.

If you can accept that truth, I think it allows you to live a much better life. You know that your actions and legacy matter and will hopefully be remembered. The truth encourages you to make the most of the one life you have and to connect with the people you love — you’re not going to see them in the afterlife, so cherish that time now.

In other words, I've discovered two more Atheists -- Mehta, and the woman named Cerise Morris whose account of her friend's predictable death from cancer led to Mehta's post -- who might live in the 21st Century according to the calendar, but they still live in the past mentally. Atheists have no excuse in the year 2010 for the mystical, spooky beliefs about death they still cling to, when we have experimental emergency procedures to intervene.

BTW, looking forward to seeing "loved ones" revived from cryonic suspension in Future World does not serve as my primary motivation for cryonics activism. I hope my friends in cryonics survive, along with me, and even some non-friends whom I dislike because they deserve to live as well; but my survival takes priority. I might modify that priority if a suitable cryonicist woman comes along. (Even I feel the occasional tug of "altruism needs," for want of a better term, despite what Objectivist cranks might argue about human nature.) But for a variety of reasons, including personal ones, the prospect of finding such a woman seems extraordinarily unlikely, even if cryonics' demographics change to resemble mainstream society's.

"Financially threadbare and vulnerable" cryonics organizations

Ben Best posted a report at Depressed Metabolism about his participation in a cryonics conference earlier this month in Germany. The following paragraph struck me:

Sebastian Sethe is a lawyer who spoke on Ethical Problems in Cryonics. Sebastian asked many questions for which he gave no answers. When challenged on this matter, he said that ethicists are more interested in questions than answers, whereas scientists are the opposite. I sometimes think that ethicists are sadists who enjoy torturing people with questions. As a case in point, Sebastian asked whether if the CI facility caught fire, if Ben Best should be saved or the 100 cryonics patients in storage. Part of his question was entailed in Sebastian’s assertion that “It is reasonable to assume that cryonics is not going to work.” After the lecture I tried to pin Sebastian down on his assertion, asking him why his assertion should be more true than “It is reasonable to assume that cryonics is going to work.” He answered that the true opposite of his assertion is “It is unreasonable to assume that cryonics is not going to work.” I at least got him to say that cryonics has more than a zero chance of working, although I had a hard time nailing down what he thinks the most limiting considerations are — technical, organizational, societal, financial, etc. He suggested that the cryonics organizations are financially threadbare and vulnerable.

Best, the President of the Cryonics Institute, didn't offer a defense of his organization's financial position, which implies the validity of Sethe's observation in CI's case.

Yet Alcor has also had a history of financial vulnerability, even before the current economic dislocations. Alcor's CEO Jennifer Chapman writes in a recent report:

Alcor has long faced the imperative challenge of overcoming financial instability. Over the past decade, it has sustained largely as the result of membership dues from its loyal membership base, donations from its generous benefactors, and a handful of large bequests. Membership dues remain a fairly stable source of income for the organization. However, donations and bequests are difficult to predict and, therefore, relying on them results in a precarious situation.

In June 2011, the LEF/Miller/Thorp grant will expire and we must plan accordingly. The three-year grant, begun in 2008, contributes to salaries, training events, and a host of readiness-related projects, equipment, and activities. Needless to say, the grant has benefitted Alcor’s general operating budget tremendously and we are appreciative to the donors for their generosity.

My recent efforts have largely focused on developing a budget and budget balancing strategies to address the nearly $400,000 deficit Alcor will face in 2011 and 2012, should it receive no income from cases. Although it is unlikely that there will be no cases in a given year, it is Alcor’s tradition to prepare for the worst case scenario. Due to the unpredictable nature of cryonics caseloads, we start with a baseline assumption that no cases will occur. The deficit we face is only partially due to expiration of the grant. Even in 2010, Alcor would have experienced a deficit were it not for case income.

Although the challenges we face are significant, they are not insurmountable. After submitting a detailed analysis of our budgetary situation to the Alcor board and proposing a budget balancing strategy, I am confident Alcor can finally resolve its budget deficit without relying on unpredictable donations or bequests. I look forward to meeting with the Alcor board this weekend during our annual Strategic Meeting to discuss this and other challenges facing the organization.

Ironically Alcor's membership includes some financially successful and sophisticated people, who apparently haven't exerted much influence over Alcor's operations to keep it solvent. I suspect that some cryonicist four-flushers have instead offered Alcor bad financial advice based on their study of, oh, let me think -- "Austrian economics"?

Regardless of Alcor's financial situation, the cryonics skeptics will probably interpret the information negatively because they want it both ways. A "financially threadbare and vulnerable" Alcor will lead them to accuse Alcor's leaders of embezzling money, not running the organization competently and not having the ability to protect its suspendees; and a financially flush Alcor will lead them to say, "See, Alcor runs a scam to get people's money."

These commercials make me want to go there.

A resort town called Daylesford, in Victoria, Australia, has provoked some controversy in that Advanced Civilization because its ad campaign combines religious with secular-hedonistic imagery. Apparently what happens in Daylesford, stays in Daylesford. This clip shows one version of the commercials:



Philosopher Russell Blackford weighs in on the controversy on his blog, defending the validity of the commercials' appeal to worldly values and their ironic use of Christian imagery towards that end. Yes, many Christians just don't like it when people enjoy bodily pleasures, especially sexual ones.

If I had the benefit of growing up in an Advanced Civilization with the values implicit in this video, instead of in Jesus-haunted Oklahoma, I might not have turned out so screwed up as an adult about certain things.

Lazarus Long, hunter-gatherer?

I caught part of the live feed of the Personalized Life Extension Conference. I can see now I'll have to schedule time tomorrow to watch as much of the rest of it as I can.

Michael R. Rose's talk, as near as I can interpret it from the thin slices of it I got to see between interruptions, points to the fact that human mortality curves show increasing death rates through, say, the age of the early to mid 90's. If you make it to that age, then the mortality rate becomes constant instead of increasing, but you will still die because your generally depleted condition at that age leaves you more vulnerable than younger people. Rose defines this flat mortality curve as "biological immortality" for reasons I didn't catch, and he suggests a strategy to attain the flat part of that curve at a much younger biological age. Instead of having a population's death rate to stop increasing and become constant at age 90 or so, why not have that happen by the age of 60?

Rose then argues that evolutionary pressures on Eurasian populations, including their descendants living in other parts of the planet, apparently selected for genes which confer reproductive advantages in young people who live in agricultural societies, characterized by grain-based diets, manual labor and crowded living conditions. But after your prime reproductive years, say, after age 30 and definitely by age 50, Rose suggests, your health would benefit by moving away from an agricultural diet and lifestyle and more towards a hunter-gatherer or Paleolithic diet and lifestyle. (No wonder at my age I prefer to live in the high desert, I try to avoid crowds and I want to eat more salads, fresh fruit and wild Pacific salmon.)

I didn't understand what this has to do with hitting your constant mortality rate at a younger age, however. I'll have to listen to the entire talk when it comes online and perhaps read some of Rose's papers so that I can figure out his reasoning.

What purpose does "Austrian economics" really serve?

Aschwin de Wolf referred me to this post by economist Arnold Kling about Murray Rothbard's economic doomsday prediction for the Reagan Administration in the early 1980's, titled "Rothbard on the Depression":

I started to read it. Should I finish? Some excerpts and my comments.

the timidity and confusion of Reagonomics make very clear what its choice will be: massive inflation of money and credit, and hence the resumption of double-digit and perhaps higher inflation, which will drive interest rates even higher and prevent recovery. A Democratic administration may be expected to inflate with even more enthusiasm. We can look forward, therefore, not precisely to a 1929-type depression, but to an inflationary depression of massive proportions. Until then, the Austrian program of hard money, the gold standard, abolition of the Fed, and laissez-faire will have been rejected by everyone...Perhaps, this present and future economic holocaust will cause the American people to turn away from failed nostrums and toward the analysis and policy conclusions of the Austrian school.

That is from the preface to the 1983 edition, written in September of 1982. What are we to make of this Jeremiad? To me, the prediction in hindsight seems embarrassingly bad. What followed was the opposite of an inflationary depression. Instead, we had the Great Moderation.

Or shall we say that the past five years are a vindication for Rothbard? Hard-core Austrians would say, "We told you so. The Fed distorts patterns of production, creates booms, and then--crash! Fits our model exactly."

The problem for me is that they always tell us so. They always predict horrible macroeconomic events, just as the Marxists always used to predict ever-worsening crises for capitalism. If crises are a refutation of orthodoxy, then periods of normal growth can be refutations of heterodoxy.

Yet the kinds of people drawn to Austrian economics also tend to dismiss Malthusian doomsday scenarios, for example global warming, as discredited crackpot stuff. They want to sell their own doomsday instead.

Basically this behavior signals a crank. Murray Rothbard probably fit the crank profile, which detracted from whatever good ideas he might have had:

1. Cranks overestimate their own knowledge and ability, and underestimate that of acknowledged experts.
2. Cranks insist that their alleged discoveries are urgently important.
3. Cranks rarely, if ever, acknowledge any error, no matter how trivial.
4. Cranks love to talk about their own beliefs, often in inappropriate social situations, but they tend to be bad listeners, and often appear to be uninterested in anyone else's experience or opinions.

Setting aside (1), about Rothbard's standing in the economics community (did mainstream economists consider his work competent, for example?), and (4), which reflects on his personality, what about (2) and (3)? Rothbard apparently claimed that he had made, or at least taught, "urgently important" discoveries which the rest of the economics community didn't find compelling. And did Rothbard ever acknowledge that he made a bad prediction about the economy of the 1980's?

What do I make of this? I get the impression that "Austrian economics" stays in business, through private subsidies, as a way to rationalize certain political grievances, not because it provides enlightenment about economics. Without the private command-and-control economy set up by American businessmen, like Lawrence Fertig for Ludwig von Mises, or the Koch brothers for some of today's "Austrian economists," the field probably would have faded away decades ago because, ironically, it can't compete in a competitive market based on its own merits.

More naive physics applied to the Terra-Uranus project.

I would like physicists to critique this, please.

How much energy, in terms of hours or days of solar output, would it take to strip the atmosphere off of Uranus and get at its valuable rocky core, which I call Terra-Uranus?

Uranus has an escape velocity of 21.3 X 10³ m s^-1. It has a mass of 8.68 X 10²⁵ kg, equivalent to 14.5 Earths. The rocky core has a mass of 0.55 Earth's mass, so the mass of everything else on Uranus you'd want to remove suggests the calculation [(14.5 - 0.55)/14.5] X 8.68 X 10²⁵ kg = 8.35 X 10²⁵ kg.

The kinetic energy E of a mass m moving at a subrelativistic velocity v has the formula E = 1/2 mv².

Therefore I can naively calculate the kinetic energy of moving that much mass away from Uranus at its escape velocity:

E = 1/2 X 8.35 X 10²⁵ kg x (21.3 X 10³ m s^-1)² = 1.89 X 10³⁴ J

The sun has a power output of 4 X 10²⁶ J s^-1, so to calculate how long it would take the sun's power to release that much energy, divide 1.89 X 10³⁴ J/(4 X 10²⁶ J s^-1) = 47.3 X 10⁶ seconds, or about 550 days of solar output, assuming you could capture it at 100 percent efficiency.

More thoughts on Terra-Uranus

Uranus apparently has a rocky core with a mass equivalent to 0.55 Earth's mass. Uranus's radius also equals about four times Earth's radius, and the core has a radius of about 0.2 of Uranus's radius, which therefore equals 0.8 times Earth's radius. This me gives a way to estimate the gravitational acceleration on the surface of the rocky planet inside Uranus, assuming that we could extract it without significant loss of its mass, and that it maintains its current radius. Until someone else comes up with a better name, I denote this new planet Terra-Uranus.

Gravitational acceleration on the surface of a planet varies directly as the planet's mass M, and inversely as the square of the planet's radius r. Earth has a gravitational acceleration on its surface at 9.8 m s^-2. Therefore gravitational acceleration on the surface of Terra-Uranus would approximately equal:

9.8 m s^-2 X 0.55 X (0.8)^-2 = 8.4 m s^-2

Compare this figure, 8.4 m s^-2, to Venus's surface gravity of 8.9 m s^-2. A planet with Terra-Uranus's level of surface gravitation could probably hold onto a substantial atmosphere over geologic time, like Venus and Earth.

The hidden Earth-like bodies in our solar system.

Astronomer Fritz Zwicky circa 1950 thought that a sufficiently advanced civilization could disassemble or shrink the outer gas giant planets to create new Earth-like bodies for human habitation.

According to what I've read on Wikipedia, we already have two such bodies available inside Uranus and Neptune. Only instead of shrinking these planets, you'd just have to strip off their outer gaseous layers to get at their rocky cores.

Uranus apparently has a rocky core with a mass equal to ~ 0.55 Earth's mass (compare to Mars's mass of ~ 0.10 Earth's mass); and Neptune has a rocky core with a mass equal to about ~ 1.2 Earth's mass.

Damn, the problem of creating two new Earth-like planets in our solar system nearly solves itself.

Framing cryonics correctly

Why do we call engineering efforts to solve a hard problem which haven't worked so far "failures," while some people call cryonics' attempts at intervening into the death process "denial"?

The difference seems to involve a double standard. We don't call other efforts to save human life "denial" when they don't work in some cases, and not just in a medical context. The effort to rescue those trapped miners in Chile may not work, for example; but nobody I know of calls the rescue project "denial," wants to stop it as a waste of resources, and admonishes the doomed miners to "Get over yourselves," as one of Ted Williams's relatives has said to cryonicists.

The same goes for medicine in general. How would we react if authority figures scolded us for seeking health care for serious illnesses or injuries, saying that we should instead deal with our "denial" and "fear of death" issues through, say, strength of character, rather than trying to stay alive and functional through modern medicine? Even opponents of recent political efforts to "reform" American health care haven't gone that far, to the best of my knowledge.

I would like to see cryonicists consistently frame "death" as an medical emergency which needs novel bio-engineering solutions, for example medical time travel, instead of assuming the frame which treats death as some spooky "theological event" which exists beyond the realm of technology. Ironically, most atheists, humanists and skeptics still hold the latter mystical view implicitly, even though it conflicts with their own explicit premises. Cryonicists should especially never say they want to "cheat death," because that frames cryonics as an immoral activity involving fraud, deception and the violation of rights, given how we use the verb "to cheat" in other contexts.

I would also like to see cryonics extract itself from the transhumanism bog somehow. Take the transhumanists' "mind uploading" debate, please! In the absence of a definite empirical demonstration, speculations about mind uploading do not help cryonics, especially when cryonicists have real issues to worry about, for example, finding enough money to keep cryonics organizations in business, staying legal and getting people to conduct suspensions in medically professional ways, like knowing how to find the right vasculature to perform perfusions of washout solutions and cryoprotectants in a timely fashion.

Sure, why not reconstruct the solar system?

I found a reference to this Popular Mechanics article from 1952, "Shall We Move to Another Planet?" in Gregory Benford's new book,The Wonderful Future That Never Was: Flying Cars, Mail Delivery by Parachute, and Other Predictions from the Past. The article features astronomer Fritz Zwicky, who argues that humanity could re-engineer the solar system, using nuclear fusion as the power source, to make it more suitable for human habitation. Zwicky credits the problem-solving technique he invented, morphological analysis, for his insights.

For example, Zwicky says, we could send Mars into a new orbit past one of the gas giant planets to pick up more atmosphere, then have it return to its original orbit. (Humans would have to do some large-scale chemical engineering on the new Martian atmosphere so that they can breathe it, of course.) Or we could disassemble or shrink the gas giants to make new Earth-sized planets, stock them with suitable atmospheres, and then move them closer to the sun so that humans could settle on them.

You have to admire Zwicky for bold thinking, and he anticipated Freeman Dyson's later speculations about building some kind of megastructure around the sun to capture as much of the available solar energy as possible. If humanity ever gets into Kardashev Type II territory, it would have to consider this sort of engineering to meet its needs for energy and other resources.

No doubt Zwicky, who understood the physics involved as well as anyone, had performed some back-of-the-envelope calculations to show the plausibility of his ideas. His efforts reminds me of the proposals I've seen over the years for starships based on our current understanding of physics but also assuming an economy which has power levels at its disposal measuring several order of magnitude higher than ours. But as experience has shown, an idea for a new technology which looks physically doable on paper, or in a computer model, often runs into practical obstacles when we try to instantiate it in real engineering.

Ironically, these aspiring planetary engineers and starship builders admit that they can't deliver the goods today because the underlying support system won't exist for many generations, assuming exponential growth in humanity's power consumption and the mastery of nuclear fusion. Therefore we cannot test their ideas empirically for a long time, if ever.

These imaginary engineers therefore have a valid excuse for their inability to produce. Contrast their situation with a certain school of "nanotechnologists" dating from the 1980's who keep saying they can build some fantasy called a "nanoassembler" in short order, if someone would just give them enough money. They don't claim that they need some correlation of forces in a remote century, in other words. One, I don't see why they would need millions of dollars; and two, they've had almost 30 years to make the case for their project. Why can't they pull their act together, if the underlying idea makes physical sense and has merit?

Gliese 581 g: Emperor Hans-Adam the Second's new province

For geeky reasons I've joked that Liechtenstein's prince could become the galactic emperor some day.

One, I think the current prince of Liechtenstein, Hans-Adam II, has a cool name, like a character from Dune.

Two, Liechtenstein has the potential in a few generations to control a lot of capital held in the name of cryonauts, if the project to set up reanimation trusts in Liechtenstein succeeds and results in the trusts' value increasing exponentially over time.

H.G. Wells published a novel in 1910 based on a similar premise: The Sleeper Awakes. As Wikipedia describes it, the novel tells about "a man who sleeps for two hundred and three years, [then wakes] up in a completely transformed London, where, because of compound interest on his bank accounts, he has become the richest man in the world." The trustees for his astounding fortune do not like the loss of status his awakening and resumption of control over his wealth causes them. A future prince of Liechtenstein could likewise punch well above his weight in world affairs just from the fact that his pocket-sized country protects vast fortunes held in trust.

Three, humans naturally form dominance hierarchies, and a planetary democracy might not succeed in uniting dissimilar civilizations under a common planetary sovereignty, whereas a monarchy, which would give everyone an alpha+++ individual to submit to, could do the job. A future prince of Liechtenstein could provide a least-bad, if not acceptable, candidate for the job as emperor of Earth and beyond.

Wil McCarthy apparently had a similar idea for a "Queendom of Sol" in some of his novels. Given the drunkard's walk aspect of human affairs, it wouldn't surprise me if monarchy makes a return in a few centuries as a respectable form of government for advanced civilizations. The possibility of a habitable ribbon world at Gliese 581, about 20 light years away, makes the prospect of an "empire" extending to some exoplanets beyond our solar system sound a tiny bit less implausible, especially if we can find some applied physics to help our imaginations.

Another reason why cryonics needs more women to succeed

Unless we get more Aspergerish women who resemble the relatively "mind-blind" men in cryonics:

The I.Q. of the Crowd

One of the basic findings in modern psychology is that people who are good at one kind of mental task tend to do well at others. A person thus has a “general intelligence” level, which can be quantified, for example on I.Q. tests. Researchers now report that a group can have a general intelligence too. Surprisingly, this collective ability appears to depend more on how “tuned in” group members are to one another than on their average individual intelligence.

“We found that individual intelligence had no more than a weak relationship with collective intelligence,” says the study’s first author, Anita Woolley, an assistant professor of organizational behavior and theory at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business in Pittsburgh, PA. The research was first reported online in Science on Sept. 30. . .

The sturdiest predictor of group intelligence, the researchers found, was a measure of how evenly group-members contributed. “The groups in which everybody was speaking in more equal amounts tended to be collectively more intelligent than the groups in which one person was dominating the conversation,” says Woolley.

Another significant predictor of higher group intelligence was a higher individual average score on a social-sensitivity test known as “reading the mind in the eyes”—a measure of the ability to intuit another person’s feelings from an image of his or her upper face. Related to a key aspect of social cognition, also sometimes known as theory-of-mind ability, the test was originally designed to screen for people with autism spectrum disorders, who typically score poorly on it.

“It also differentiates among people in the more normal end of the continuum,” says Woolley. In particular, women tend to score more highly on this test than men—and thus Woolley’s team found that the groups with a higher proportion of women tended to have higher collective intelligence.

And that probably sheds light on cryonics' failure to thrive. It tends to attract socially retarded men, while acting as female kryptonite to women who might make the social component of cryonics work better through their superior emotional perceptions (or so I've heard about them; the ones I've known say they find me "cold").

BTW, I wonder if mind-blindness or high-functioning autism has something to do with many cryonicists' obsession with mind uploading. Despite my Aspergerish tendencies, I never found the prospect of mind uploading particularly compelling.

Increasing height as a proxy measurement for declining religiosity

Apparently increasing height in a population signals an advanced civilization, at least from the perspective of a trend towards improved human living conditions. Declining religiosity also signals an advanced civilization.

Has anyone studied the relationship, if any, of a population's height versus religiosity? The effort might make sense if you view height as a proxy measurement for the sorts of socioeconomic conditions which determine people's interest in religion.

BTW, I encounter European tourists in their 20's occasionally. Almost uniformly I see European guys nearly 2 meters tall, and their female companions taller than the average for American women of the same age.

I couldn't quite put my finger on it.

Something about her smile hasn't looked quite right to me. Not she falls into the Uncanny Valley or anything; I don't get a zombie vibe off of her.

Then I realized: She doesn't project a genuine Duchenne smile. Could she lack the ability for some medical reason? Or has she lacked sufficient reason lately to make that sort of smile?