The Science of the Future of War

Book excerpt from Wired:

TODAY'S MOST BRUTAL WARS are also the most primal. They are fought with machetes in West Africa, with fire and rape and fear in Darfur, and with suicide bombs and improvised explosive devices in Israel, Iraq, and elsewhere. But as horrifying as these conflicts are, they are not the greatest threat to our survival as a species. We humans are a frightening animal. Throughout our species’s existence, we have used each new technology we have developed to boost the destructive power of our ancient predisposition for killing members of our own species. From hands and teeth tearing at isolated individuals, to coordinated raids with clubs and bows and arrows, to pitched battles, prolonged sieges, and on into the age of firearms, the impulse has remained the same but as the efficiency of our weapons has increased, the consequences have grown ever more extreme.

The evidence of history is that no advance which can be applied to the killing of other human beings goes unused. As scientific knowledge continues to explode, it would be naïve, to expect any different. As if we needed any more reasons to confront the role of warfare in our lives, the present supply and future potential of WMDs should convince us that the time has come once and for all to bring our long, violent history of warring against each other to an end.

The nineteenth century was dominated by discoveries in chemistry, from dyes to dynamite. The twentieth century belonged to physics, from subatomic particles and black holes to nuclear weapons. The twenty-first century is set to see great advances in biological knowledge, from our growing understanding of the genome and stem cells to, it’s a shame to say, new and expanded forms of ...

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New Longevity Drugs Coming Soon?

From Wired.com

Cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, heart disease: All have stubbornly resisted billions of dollars of research conducted by the world's finest minds. But they all may finally be defied by a single new class of drugs, a virtual cure for the diseases of aging.

In labs across the country, researchers are developing several new drugs that target the cellular engines called mitochondria. The first, resveratrol, is already in clinical trials for diabetes. It could be on the market in four years and used off-label as an all-purpose longevity enhancer. Other drugs promise to be more potent and refined. They might even be cheap.

"It's going to revolutionize western medicine," said Doug Wallace, a pioneer of mitochondrial medicine at the University of California at Irvine. "All the things that are common for an aging society, and nobody worried ...

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Physics of the Impossible - a review

This hypothetical spacecraft with a “negative energy” induction ring was inspired by recent theories describing how space could be warped with negative energy to produce hyperfast transport to reach distant star systems (credit: NASA’s Glenn Research Center).


This review was originally published in the eSkeptic newsletter.

Tauriq Moosa reviews Michio Kaku’s book entitled Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration of the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation and Time Travel. (Allen Lane/Penguin, 2008, ISBN 9780715999921).

From Science Fiction to Science Fact

by Tauriq Moosa

The horizon of possibility is stretched before us, penetrated by the shadowy undiscovered, terrain of the impossible. Our light of knowledge feebly illuminates a small circle of comprehension, but according to the New York University physicist and string theorist Michio Kaku, there is hope. More than ever, he believes, we are closer to raising our tiny light to shine everywhere to make that which was fiction into fact, to take the impossible and make it possible.

Who holds the world record for travelling furthest into the future? Where did scientists create materials that were once thought to defy the laws of optics? Why is King Kong’s existence impossible? If you are surprised by the questions, Kaku’s answers will surprise even more.

In this highly readable and exciting work, Kaku builds a case for achieving Arthur C. Clarke’s 3rd law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Kaku shows how the terrain of the impossible, typically found only in science-fiction, is being systematically conquered by science. Force-fields, teleportation, robots, time-travel, and starships are dealt with seriously and on a time continuum: how long until we achieve these. By classifying these various “fantastical” ideas into three different ranges of time, Kaku argues for when we’ll see them.

Class 1 Impossibilities: technology that is not possible today but within the realm of physics. These are possible within a century or two. In this class, Kaku lists force-fields, invisibility, phasers and death-stars, teleportation, telepathy, psychokinesis, robots, ETs and UFOs, starships, antimatter and anti-universes.

Class 2 Impossibilities: Technology that lies on the cusp of our knowledge of physics. These are possible perhaps within millennia or millions of years. In this class, we find faster than light travel, time-travel, and parallel universes.

Class 3 Impossibilities: Technology that violates known physical laws. Here we find perpetual-motion machines and precognition. That’s it, only two.

Kaku is more concerned with how “fantastical” ideas are being rendered into workable methods of science, rather than on how to actually make a time-machine, a teleportation device and so on. And he does this very well. He estimates, for example, how far we must go before we are able to literally “pop” into a grocery store; create force-fields that could create buildings in an instant; and create perpetual motion machines that would grant us ever-lasting renewable energy.

Kaku writes lucidly and with a touch of boyish charm. He seems like a child in toyshop, able to taste all the varieties and communicate his understanding. Each chapter opens with the science from a sci-fi book or television-show. He then translates these “fantastical” ideas into workable, present-day and evidential-based science. If you don’t mind the too-frequent Star-Trek references, Kaku really shine when he traces the history of an idea. In Time-Travel for example, he recounts St. Augustine’s wonderings about the constant flow of time whereby next Wednesday will be the past of next Thursday, just as this paragraph will be the past as you move to the next paragraph, which at the moment is the future.

This Newtonian idea of time as an arrow was overthrown by Einstein. One second on earth was thought to be one second anywhere in the universe. But, says Kaku: “[Einstein] showed that time was more like a river that meandered across the universe, speeding up and slowing down as it snaked across stars and galaxies. So one second on the Earth is not absolute; time varies when we move around the universe.”

This appears to make time even more incomprehensible and incapable of manipulation. On the contrary, considers Kaku: “Time travel to the future is possible and has been experimentally verified millions of times”. Yes that’s right, millions of times.

Who holds the world record for travelling furthest into the future, then? Currently, it is held by the cosmonaut Sergei Avdeyev, who was in orbit for 748 days and “hence hurled 0.2 seconds into the future”. It isn’t much, but astronauts travelling near the speed of light would experience a passage of time dramatically different from their friends on earth. This fits into Einstein’s special theory of relativity; that is, time-travel is consistent with the laws of physics.

So much for the future. What about the past? How can the past possibly fit into the laws of physics? This is a bit more complicated. Kaku lists five ways of time-travelling to the past:

1. Wormhole: You could journey through a wormhole, since space and time are amalgamated in Einstein’s relativity theory. This, however, is a one-way trip.
2. Spinning Universe: If you travelled around (an assumed spinning) universe fast enough, you could find yourself before you left. This would be journeying into the past.
3. Rotating Cylinder: If you walk around an infinitely long cylinder, rotating constantly, you might arrive before you even left.
4. Cosmic Strings: The collision of two gigantic cosmic strings (from the Big Bang) could catapult you back in time, if you travelled around them.
5. Transversable Wormholes: This involves a time machine with two spherical chambers (A & B), using a method of implosion to remove one of the spheres to create negative energy. (You would use the Casimir effect, which means the space between two parallel uncharged metal plates can be used to gain less-than-zero energy, from the removal of kinetic energy.) Using a wormhole, you connect both chambers. You would take a chamber (A) and send it into space, at light-speed. This first chamber (A) would be slower in time. If you are in the second chamber (B), you could immediately use the wormhole to travel to the first (A). Thus you have gone backward in time (from B–A).

This is all within the realms of physics (Class 2) and that is essentially Kaku’s point. And if it is not within the current realms of physics, there is a possibly of shifting physics and not necessarily the technology. He is not setting up step-by-step guidelines on how to create Douglas Adam’s type machines (like Deep Thought and Eddie); nor is he attempting to defend the creation of such things as ray-guns and Deathstars. This might be seen as a fault: How can Kaku rejoice in the creation of a technology that can destroy our planet?

Bertrand Russell once said: “There is no method of securing what is pleasant in science without what is unpleasant. We can do so, of course, by refusing to face the logic of the situation; but if so, we shall dry up the impulse to scientific discovery at its source, which is the desire to understand the world.” We have to take the one with the other — gaining greater understanding of Perpetual Motion Machines could mean an endless supply of energy eliminating poverty, or a fanatical tyrant using it for control.

Like all good science books, Physics of the Impossible should help alter your perception of possibility and (like space-time in the future possibly) bend it.

Save the world, play Superstruct

Check out Superstruct, the world's first massively multi-player forecasting game.

I will be playing, look for Future_Dave, I published the FAQ set from the site below.

Q: What is Superstruct?
A: Superstruct is the world's first massively multiplayer forecasting game. By playing the game, you'll help us chronicle the world of 2019--and imagine how we might solve the problems we'll face. Because this is about more than just envisioning the future. It's about making the future, inventing new ways to organize the human race and augment our collective human potential.

Q: Why should I play Superstruct?
A: Here are some of our favorite reasons: Because you're curious about the future, because you want to make friends and collaborators all over the planet, because you want to learn how to become a future forecaster, and because you want to change the world.

Q: What does "superstruct" mean?
Su`per`struct´ v. t. 1.To build over or upon another structure; to erect upon a foundation.
Superstructing is what humans do. We build new structures on old structures. We build media on top of language and communication networks. We build communities on top of family structures. We build corporations on top of platforms for manufacturing, marketing, and distribution. Superstructing has allowed us to survive in the past and it will help us survive the super-threats.

Knowledge will increase 100 fold by 2050

I just purchased a paper titled "55 Trends Shaping Tomorrow's World" from the World Future Society. It is very worthwhile, below is one interesting conjecture from the paper.

The pace of technological change accelerates with each new generation of discoveries and applications.

The design and marketing cycle—idea, invention, innovation, imitation—
is shrinking steadily. Thus, products must capture their market quickly, before the competition cancopy them. As late as the 1940s, the product cycle stretched to 30 or 40 years. Today, it seldom lasts 30 or 40 weeks.

Almost any new consumer product can be exactly duplicated by Chinese
factories and sold on eBay within a week after it is introduced.

Implications: All the technical knowledge we work with today will represent only 1% of the knowledge that will be available in 2050.

E-books finally suck less

New e-books are being released over the coming months that are starting to provide decent alternatives to paper. Some remaining issues to be solved are slow refresh rates (8/10 of a second) which prevent support of animation and video and lack of color. Color versions are supposed to be availble next year, and video is forecast to be supported by 2012.

The iRexReader 1000 which will be released in the coming months will have options such as touchscreen, bluetooth, wifi, and 3G cell connection.

My opinion is that this niche product for reading books/magazines etc. will become a true convergence device and in about 3-5 years will start to replace laptops for some uses and even mobile phones, assuming the form factor can be figured out, as well as replacing print.

Peter Drucker on Marketing

Jack Trout is a major thinker in the area of marketing strategy and spouts some good stuff in this article on Forbes.com, although he does wander a bit.

Jack starts with Drucker’s conception of marketing and tries to explain how to generate marketing success. I have tried to distill his four steps down into simpler terms below, and have also included Drucker’s quote, for if you remember just one thing from this article, it should be Drucker’s words.

1. Understand your competitors and your positioning relative to them in the customer’s minds
2. Develop a differentiated value proposition
3. Have a compelling argument based on direct comparisons with competitors
4. Do some good marketing

"Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two--and only two--basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business." -Peter Drucker

Obama Suddenly Panicked After Gazing Too Far Into Future

Its from the Onion, and is damn funny.

MADISON, WI—Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) fell deathly silent in the middle of a speech on education before the Wisconsin Teachers Union Tuesday, his failure of words reportedly a result of the Democratic nominee's forward-looking tendencies suddenly bringing him a harrowing glimpse of a future world shaped by madness and horror. " click through to read the rest

Is the semantic web really the next big thing?

I really hate the web 2.0 et al terminology because it doesn't mean anything, and in general I'm not much for bullshit terms.

However, I am very interested in the future direction of the Internet, and recently found an interesting article on this topic from Forbes talking about what the author calls Web 3.0.

In Web 3.0: What's Next After What's Next the author makes his pitch, primarily about the semantic web, and I'm sure that it will lead to a number of speaking engagements for him.

Its an interesting read and a good conversation starter, although I’m not sold that the author has much of a clue about what the future of the web holds.

There is little discussion of ubiquitous or mobile computing for example, but he does dive a bit into software as a service and cloud computing. The author seems to have planted his flag firmly on the top of mount "semantic web", and waxes semi-eloquent on the topic for a number of pages.

I do believe that benefit will be derived from some of the approaches grouped under the semantic web topic, but that they will be felt most in areas where someone has the power to drive compliance with standards. Some of the arguments sound a bit like the next wave of "EDI will change the world" which then became "XML will change the world.

Additionally, some of the concepts fall prey to the dismal science's core tenet - humans are self-interested. People are not altruistic (if you think so, lets talk about utility), therefore they will do things that benefit themselves to the detriment of others.

In this particular context, they will abuse definitions of objects, global taxonomies, and anything else they see fit, unless someone has the power to stop them, or at least make them feel a little pain. This implies also that someone spends time and money monitoring and ensuring compliance, which given the scale of the web, is more than just an enormous undertaking.

So, I'm not so sure that the semantic web will truly change the world, but it is more likely than not that we will continue our steady advance towards SkyNet, at which point we will all either die or spend our days fighting cybernetic terminators. :)

Why rednecks may rule the world

Great stuff from the BBC, a snippet is below, you'll have to click through to the BBC for the rest.

By Joe Bageant
Author of Deerhunting With Jesus

During this US election cycle we are hearing a lot from the pundits and candidates about "heartland voters," and "white working class voters."

What they are talking about are rednecks. But in their political correctness, media types cannot bring themselves to utter the word "redneck." So I'll say it for them: redneck-redneck-redneck-redneck.

The fact is that we American rednecks embrace the term in a sort of proud defiance. To us, the term redneck indicates a culture we were born in and enjoy. So I find it very interesting that politically correct people have taken it upon themselves to protect us from what has come to be one of our own warm and light hearted terms for one another.

On the other hand, I can quite imagine their concern, given what's at stake in the upcoming election. We represent at least a third of all voters and no US president has ever been elected without our support.

Consequently, rednecks have never had so many friends or so much attention as in 2008. Contrary to the stereotype, we are not all tobacco chewing, guffawing Southerners, but are scattered from coast to coast. Over 50% of us live in the "cultural south", which is to say places with white Southern Scots-Irish values - redneck ...

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Artificial Super Muscles

Researchers have developed methods for creating nanotube reinforced composites which hold the possibility of one day being used as artificial muscle or skin.

Original research paper is here.

Bolo Tanks in the Near Future?

Next Big Future has a great article on how to a build a Bolo tank out of technology that is either available or relatively near term, with some interesting results.

My vote is on the hovercraft.

Super Soldier Program

Maybe we can join the military when we turn 70 and get rejuvenated, like in Old Man's War.

We are investing billions into a super soldier program, which is seeking to achieve transhumanism within a few decades. Gene therapy also holds some great promise to enable average people to gain the ability to perform at or above human maximum.

Augmented Reality

Imagine a world that can be overlayed on the existing reality - the possibilities are nearly endless.

Augmented Reality from Wikipedia

Augmented Reality discussion

Everybody Dies!

Continuing in the vein of global catastrophic risk, here a list of top 10 world ending disasters, apparently written by some guy who didn't want his name associated with it.

Will Robots Replace Humans?

Video from HowStuffWorks with a phd from Georgia Tech, basically stating that we are just emerging from the infancy of robotics to the toddler stage and that huge advances will come in the reasonably near future.

Material that is 200 Times Stronger than Steel!

Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms attached to each other in a honeycomb pattern.

According to Columbia Professor James Hone, “It would take an elephant, balanced on a pencil, to break through a sheet of graphene the thickness of Saran Wrap.” It is approximately 200 times stronger than steel and is the strongest material know to man at this moment.

This is a true sci-fi material that has the potential for all sorts of real world applications, assuming that scientists can find a way to actually manufacture it at sizes greater than the microscopic.

A story about graphene-enhanced plastics can be found here.
, and a Next Big Future post about Graphene is here.

Global Catastrophic Risks Conference

It won't be the Dark Overlord of the Universe, or Galactus, Y2K or even rap music that will wipe out life as we know it. No, it's most likely that we will do ourselves in as a race with our own technology. A group of "experts" (not sure how one can be an expert on this topic) got together in London had some interesting discussions and was reported by CNN.

LONDON, England (CNN) -- A group of experts from around the world will Thursday hold a first of its kind conference on global catastrophic risks.

Some experts say humans will merge with machines before the end of this century.
They will discuss what should be done to prevent these risks from becoming realities that could lead to the end of human life on earth as we know it.
Speakers at the four-day event at Oxford University in Britain will talk about topics including nuclear terrorism and what to do if a large asteroid were to be on a collision course with our planet.

On the final day of the Global Catastrophic Risk Conference experts will focus on what could be the unintended consequences of new technologies, such as superintelligent machines that, if ill-conceived, might cause the demise of Homo sapiens.
"Any entity which is radically smarter than human beings would also be very powerful," said Dr. Nick Bostrom, director of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, host of the symposium. "If we get something wrong, you could imagine the consequences would involve the extinction of the human species."

Bostrom is a philosopher and a leading thinker of transhumanism -- a movement that advocates not only the study of the potential threats and promises that future technologies could pose to human life but also the ways in which emergent technologies could be used to make the very act of living better.

"We want to preserve the best of what it is to be human and maybe even amplify that," Bostrom told CNN. Transhumanists, according to Bostrom, anticipate a coming era where biotechnology, molecular nanotechnologies, artificial intelligence and other new types of cognitive tools will be used to amplify our intellectual capacity, improve our physical capabilities and even enhance our emotional well-being.

The end result would be a new form of "posthuman" life with beings that possess qualities and skills so exceedingly advanced they no longer can be classified simply as humans.
"We will begin to use science and technology not just to manage the world around us but to manage our own human biology as well," Bostrom told CNN. "The changes will be faster and more profound than the very, very slow changes that would occur over tens of thousands of years as a result of natural selection and biological evolution."
Bostrom declined to try to predict an exact time frame when this revolutionary biotechnological metamorphosis might occur. "Maybe it will take eight years or 200 years," he said. "It is very hard to predict."

Other experts are already getting ready for what they say could be a radical transformation of the human race in as little as two decades.
"This will happen faster than people realize," said Dr. Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and futurist who calculates technology trends using what he calls the law of accelerating returns, a mathematical concept that measures the exponential growth of technological evolution.
In the 1980s Kurzweil predicted that a tiny handheld device would be invented sometime early in the 21st century allowing blind people to read documents from anywhere at anytime -- earlier this year such a device was publicly unveiled. He also anticipated the explosive growth of the Internet in the 1990s.
Now Kurzweil is predicting the impending arrival of something called the Singularity, which he defines in his book on the subject as "the culmination of the merger of our biological thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that is still human but that transcends our biological roots."
"There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality," he writes.

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Singularity will approach at an accelerating rate as human-created technologies become exponentially smaller and increasingly powerful and as fields such as biology and medicine are understood more and more in terms of information processes that can be simulated with computers.
By the 2030s, Kurzweil tells CNN, humans will become more non-biological than biological, capable of uploading our minds onto the Internet, living in various virtual worlds and even avoiding aging and evading death.
In the 2040s, Kurzweil predicts non-biological intelligence will be billions of times better than the biological intelligence humans have today, possibly rendering our present brains as obsolete.
"Our brains are a million times slower than electronics," said Kurzweil. "We will increasingly become software entities if you go out enough decades."
This movement towards the merger of man and machine, according to Kurzweil, is already starting to happen and is most visible in the field of biotechnology.
As scientists gain deeper insights into the genetic processes that underlie life, they are able to effectively reprogram human biology through the development of new forms of gene therapies and medications capable of turning on or off enzymes and RNA interference, or gene silencing.
"Biology and health and medicine used to be hit or miss," said Kurzweil. "It wasn't based on any coherent theory about how it works."
The emerging biotechnology revolution will lead to at least a thousand new drugs that could do anything from slow down the process of aging to reverse the onset of diseases, like heart disease and cancer, Kurzweil said.
By 2020, Kurzweil predicts a second revolution in the area of nanotechnology. According to his calculations, it is already showing signs of exponential growth as scientists begin test first generation nanobots that can cure Type 1 diabetes in rats or heal spinal cord injuries in mice.
One scientist is developing something called a respirocyte -- a robotic red blood cell that, if injected into the bloodstream, would allow humans to do an Olympic sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath or sit at the bottom of a swimming pool for hours at a time.
Other researchers are developing nanoparticles that can locate tumors and one day possibly even eradicate them.
And some Parkinson's patients now have pea-sized computers implanted in their brains that replace neurons destroyed by the disease -- new software can be downloaded to the mini computers from outside the human body.
"Nanotechnology will not just be used to reprogram but to transcend biology and go beyond its limitations by merging with non-biological systems," Kurzweil told CNN. "If we rebuild biological systems with nanotechnology, we can go beyond its limits."
The final revolution leading to the advent of Singularity will be the creation of artificial intelligence, or superintelligence, which, according to Kurzweil, could be capable of solving many of our biggest threats, like environmental destruction, poverty and disease.
"A more intelligent process will inherently outcompete one that is less intelligent, making intelligence the most powerful force in the universe," writes Kurzweil.
Yet the invention of so many high-powered technologies and the possibility of merging these new technologies with humans may pose both peril and promise for the future of mankind.
"I think there are grave dangers," said Kurzweil. "Technology has always been a double-edged sword."

Respirocytes: A Mechanical Articificial Red Blood Cell

Respirocytes are hypothetical robotic red blood cells that, if injected into the bloodstream, would allow humans to do an Olympic sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath or sit at the bottom of a swimming pool for hours at a time.

Abstract: Molecular manufacturing promises precise control of matter at the atomic and molecular level, allowing the construction of micron-scale machines comprised of nanometer-scale components. Medical nanomachines will be among the earliest applications. The artificial red blood cell or "respirocyte" proposed here is a bloodborne spherical 1-micron diamondoid 1000-atm pressure vessel with active pumping powered by endogenous serum glucose, able to deliver 236 times more oxygen to the tissues per unit volume than natural red cells and to manage carbonic acidity. An onboard nanocomputer and numerous chemical and pressure sensors enable complex device behaviors remotely reprogrammable by the physician via externally applied acoustic signals. Primary applications will include transfusable blood substitution; partial treatment for anemia, perinatal/neonatal and lung disorders; enhancement of cardiovascular/neurovascular procedures, tumor therapies and diagnostics; prevention of asphyxia; artificial breathing; and a variety of sports, veterinary, battlefield and other uses.

Wikipedia entry for respirocytes here

Walking robot video

Check out this video of a robot that can walk in deep snow, ice, steep hills, etc. If a method to power it for long periods of time can be developed, I could see these things following soldiers around carrying extra ammo, etc. Add some camera's and a weapon mount, and it could be used as an armed scout.