Unabashed

I’ve been known to ruminate about our distant future before. Truth is, I’ve spent quite a chunk of time considering it, and one theme continues to repeat itself, running through my mind over and over. The impossibility of it making it that much more enticing for some reason, a thought that really doesn’t make any sense at all. But still, I think about it often, and it’s run around in my head for years. The idea is this: that eventually, technology will render technology obsolete. Is that even possible? Maybe: once we’ve invented the machine that will create anything we can imagine, we will no longer have to invent things ourselves. That may well be the point we all like to refer to as the “Singularity.” In order to create such a machine, I think we would have to solve, ultimately, mathematics. I don’t think there would be any unsolved equations any more. We would know exactly what happens to matter when it crosses the event horizon of a black hole, and we would be able to calculate the precise moment of a star’s demise, even though that moment might be a billion years away. Once every mathematical problem is solved, we will then program ourselves according to whatever schematic we choose, and our wishes will become fulfilled with only a thought. Ask, literally, and ye shall receive.

I’m working on a book (yes, my hiatus didn’t last very long did it? What can I say, I lay awake thinking about a story line for four hours two nights ago…), or I’ve been working on a book set in the distant future, and a man named Augustus Dane, a great thinker, at some point in the story’s history, stated, “Technology has made technology obsolete.” This was right after the ultimate mathematical equation was finally solved, by a blond-haired boy not yet a teen (the blond hair is a significant part, since in this future, every one’s shade has pretty much become a standard cafe au lait, and very few people are born with anything but brown or black hair. It’s going to be very difficult to be a racist in this future :-) I’m sure people will figure out a way, though. They always do), a prodigy of immense promise, who has also figured out how to and taken up the hobby of granting consciousness to animals. Once humanity discovers it’s possible to grant consciousness to animals, of course, all the animals are granted it, and the world population explodes due to the vast numbers of sentient beings now living here. (There’s a cutoff, of course, the brain must be of a certain capacity or it won’t work. Chickens and snakes, for example, were never able to gain consciousness. No birds at all, as a matter of fact. Gives credence to the slander “bird brain,” aye?). But wolves, elephants, whales, bears, sharks…all manner of animals have been given this “gift,” which of course turns out to be not all that great of an idea.

I’m thinking that, when offered the “gift,” a cow will turn it down on behalf of its species, because of the sudden horror of knowing what has been happening to its kind throughout history. Dogs, likewise, will choose not to accept the gift, because they realize once they can think that they had it much better before.

Now, this is a pretty raw idea, keep that in mind. I haven’t done any research and I’m not a mathematician, so I don’t even know what I’m talking about when it comes to science. Forgive me. I hope it’ll sound better once it’s written down. Anyway, that’s the premise, the basic idea of an idea, in its most rudimentary form, and I’m posting it here so someone else can say, “Gee, what a great idea,” and write it so I won’t have to. Or–this is one of those points where the Great Doubt slips in and makes its voice heard–It’s really a crappy idea.

What do you think?

written by Matt Mitchell

MIT’s article “Hope on the Horizon” brims with observations on the kinds of advancements that illustrate, profoundly, that life is about to change, inexorably, for all humans, forevermore. In the article, they ask a panel of researchers to point out some economy-boosting technologies that are imminent.

Life extension, sustainable cities, robots, biosolar cells, electromechanical energy–advancements that are in the pipe right now, and have the potential not only for economic stimulus, but could also mark a metamorphosis moment for mankind (AKA the Singularity).

Embedded electronics

One transformation on the near term horizon is the embedding of low-cost electronics into almost every object that we encounter on a day-to-day basis. A pair of sunglasses may have the ability to project a visual display accessing the Internet, have an embedded cell phone and actuate other devices as one glances at them. The technology for this already exists. Flexible electronic paper and electronic clothing will change the way information is projected and harnessed at a personal level. Everyday objects may sense, detect and constantly adjust to our environment, controlling temperature, lighting, noise level, etc.

Digital fabrication

The most significant coming technology is the digitization of fabrication, the impact of which will be analogous to the digitization of communication and computation. Like those earlier revolutions, the consequence will be personalization, in this case, allowing anyone to make almost anything, anywhere.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: advancements, biosolar, cells, digital fabrication, electromechanical, electronics, embedded, Energy, extension, Life, MIT, robots, Singularity, sustainable cities

Yes, the ubiquitous “they” are about to open up a black hole in France which will devour the Earth and possibly the entire solar system. Global warming doesn’t quite seem so bad now, does it? Seriously, the LHC is a pure geek thrill for those of us who love discovery and exploration. Because it is exploring; the LHC is exploring the micro-multi-uni-verse, in hopes of bringing us closer to some of the fundamental reasons for life, the universe, and everything.

In some ways the LHC is the equivalent of Deep Thought, the computer Douglas Adams created for the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that was tasked with answering that same question–of life, the universe, and everything. Or, if you keep up with your science news, the answer has already been discovered–A.K.A. the “God Particle“–in which case the LHC would actually be the descendent of Deep Thought, which, you’ll know, turned out to be Planet Earth. Earth was designed to provide the actual question itself–the question of life, the universe, and everything.

When activated, it is hoped that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson — often dubbed the God Particle — the observation of which could confirm the predictions and ‘missing links’ in the Standard Model of physics, and explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass. The verification of the existence of the Higgs boson would be a significant step in the search for a Grand Unified Theory which seeks to unify three of the four fundamental forces: electromagnetism, the strong force, and the weak force. The Higgs boson may also help to explain why the remaining force, gravitation, is so weak compared to the other three forces.

If the God Particle is the answer, then the LHC is intended to provide the proof of concept, at least, along with a few million other questions, including: 

• Are there other dimensions?
• What is Dark Matter?
• What is Dark Energy?
• Why is the universe expanding?
• What did the universe look like immediately after the Big Bang?
• I haven’t read about this any where, but I have to wonder if the LHC will be able to give us a proof of concept for fusion…
• Will a fabricated black hole suck me into it and what will it feel like to be spaghettificated?

And to surf through the billions of terabytes of data the LHC is going to churn out? (Yes, this just keeps getting better and better…) Well, they’ve built a new, better internet and called it “the Grid.”

The Grid will not only enable sharing of documents and MP3 files, but also connect PCs with sensors, telescopes and tidal-wave simulators …  focusing on a project in which resources from Pan-European research institutions will analyze data generated by a new particle collider being built at Swiss particle-physics lab CERN

And amidst all this clarifying chaos, I will only add that the Singularity is near.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: , Accelerator, CERN, collider, god particle, grid, hadron, higgs boson, LHC, Particle, Singularity, spaghettification, the grid

This is brilliant, really. Freightliners on transoceanic voyages guzzle gas like nobody’s business. A company called Skysails, based in Hamburg, Germany, has unveiled a product that can reduce fuel consumption of those vessels by up to 35%.

The best apparatuses and advancements in the world, to me, are those which utilize traditional concepts and methods while at the same time capitalize on modern technology. They’re nostalgic–in a good way–but at the same time they’re modern and technological. This may seem like an oxymoron–past/future; historical technology?–but they combine the quaint with the futuristic in a way that’s very appealing. To me at least. I love reading about the Age of Sail, the era of tall ships, and I’ve pined for the romanticism of sailing ships exploring the world. (My love of old things-made-new manifests itself, obliquely, in my reading: I love equally to read Charlie Stross and Patrick O’Brian, Joe Haldeman and Shelby Foote.) The Skysail concept doesn’t go so far as to suggest a regression, but augments modern apparatuses with forward-thinking modifications to historical concepts, improving historical technologies.

I like new stuff, too. Like microwaves. Love microwaves :-)

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: , age of sail, freightliner, futuristic, historical, nostalgia, sail, sailing, ship, ships, skysails, tall ship, transoceanic

Yes, I am prone to ruminate about the future for some reason. But it’s not always in the line of doomsday odds and possibilities, sometimes it’s about simple things, like light. I think about light a lot. We need light; even people who sleep all day and wish they were vampires will have a few lights on during their awake hours, you know, so they can see. There was a time in our recent history when people only had a few lights in the whole house, and those often dim, leaving a room murky and shadow-filled. A lamp by a chair and a bulb-sometimes naked-in the ceiling, and when the sun went down folks went to bed. Because it was dark and all. But now we can expel virtually every shadow in a house. I’ve got around sixty light bulbs inside my 4br house so, as it is with most modernized folk these days, I don’t have to go to bed when the sun goes down, because the darkness is outside of my walls.

And it is often these simple ideas that keep me wondering. Light: what will we be doing in the distant future to keep the darkness at bay? There’s emerging technology that will allow us to illuminate anything using quantum dots:

The light bulb is made out of metal and glass using primarily mechanical processes. Current LEDs are made using semiconductor manufacturing techniques developed in the last 50 years. But, if the quantum dot approach pans out, it could transform lighting production into a primarily chemical process. Such a fundamental change could open up a wide range of new possibilities, such as making almost any object into a light source by coating it with luminescent paint capable of producing light in a rainbow of different shades, including white.

I wrote a story once (that I subsequently deleted) in which the opening few paragraphs followed a guy walking around in the dark holding a lantern. The lantern in question, and the only part of the story I’m getting into right now, was a nostalgic bit of tech. It was designed to look like an old-time whale-oil device. It would hang on a gimbal, just like a shipboard lantern, so that in heavy seas it could swivel. But, looking more closely at it, you could see that it was actually a very high-tech gizmo, even though it only had a single switch (on/mode/off), a button, and a small dial.

It was powered by an organic, bioengineered blue pea, grown right in the back yard, using an extremely efficient power transference system. It could run for a long time on a single pea, never needing to be recharged or plugged in, but it could hold a dozen peas in its little power slot. In the story, the lantern was just a way to give an example of the living conditions for this character. It was a sample of the appliances he had in his home, a statement to the fact that the people in this future lived lives as gardeners in a high-tech, unplugged world. Compared to our world today, it would be like having the internet and all our little gizmos, television and computers, light and communications, without a single wire attached to the home.

Ultimately I went on a bit too long about the lantern for the piece to be an effective an entertaining piece of fiction. It might have been interesting, but it probably read like a technical manual. But just for giggles, and since I’m feeling the future lately, I’m going to extrapolate just briefly on this amazing lantern of the future.

The light will illuminate in any shade of the color spectrum imaginable. The light can flicker, giving the impression of a flame. Despite it’s broad range of available spectrum, though, it’s defaulted to the orange-yellow glow of old incandescent bulbs or firelight (the default setting is modifiable).  (As the main character was walking along across a grassy hillside, he had the lantern set to the default, flickering “lantern” selection. Looking at him walking along, he could just as easily have been a man in the 1800s. And that was one of the key facets of the story: his clothing and the lantern looked like relics of the 19th century, but there was a lot of incorporated tech that wasn’t noticeable.)

The lantern default beamwidth was omni-directional, like a light bulb, but it could be split into any number of sectors of any width, all the way down to a beam as compact and powerful as a laser. It could dim to nothing, and it could glow as bright as sunshine. He could turn the knob and illuminate a football stadium well enough to play a game. It could be used as a very powerful spotlight. He didn’t have to worry about an accidental glance in the direction of such a bright source of light: his eyes were equipped with implants that would immediately shade his vision to specified comfort levels. He could also see the infra-red spectrum and X-ray and his vision could telescope and microscope. (Since I wrote this story, I’ve read recently that the University of Washington is in the process of designing a set of contacts that will perform some of these functions already.)

By this time in the future people will probably be wearing light-emitting clothing, but I still believe in the power of nostalgia, and I think there will be people in the future who, like the character in this story, want the tech but also want the comfort they feel emanating from the past.

You know, now that I’m thinking about this story I may have to sit down and give it another try. There are juxtapositions I haven’t mentioned here that are still very interesting to me.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: , beamwidth, bioengineering, green power, illumination, lantern, light, spotlight, tech, technology, whale oil

If science is right, the sun still has a good 5 billion years worth of fuel left to burn. At that point it’ll turn into a red giant and swallow Mercury and Venus, possibly Earth as well. So a million years really, in the Universal time frame, is still just a smidgeon. Our entire history, as a species, on the Universal timeline, might occupy a single pixel on an image a hundred feet long. All I’m asking is: what will our history look like when we’ve got a few inches worth of history to look back at?

I think about this often. Our civilization is so young, our species is so young, and even though we’ve come so far in so little time, humanity is still in its infancy, even though the planet we live on (as well as our Sun) is middle-aged. I think of the history we’ve accumulated so far, how much of it is actually recorded, rather than speculated on. Realistically, we have recorded history from two to three thousand years ago. Beyond that, back into the last ice age and beyond, it’s all just speculation. And the Universe is roughly 13 billion years old. And here we sit, a fledgling species, at the cusp of many remarkable discoveries and accomplishments. What will the human race be like when it’s a million years old? I rarely hear any speculation. Even in science fiction, the future we explore is normally what could be classified as near, within, say, one hundred to one thousand years. Maybe even ten thousand if the author is really stretching it out. But a million years…that’s something that kind of makes my mind shiver and turn to water.

Even in that near future of SciFic we see mankind exploring the universe. Rarely is he evolved, though. Sure, there are usually some technological modifications to the bodies, but I don’t think I’ve ever read a story in which man was evolved. Maybe one where the pancreas had disappeared, but what about skin: will we all be cafe aulait colored? Will our hair be all the same color? Will we still have hair?

And this history we’ll have piled up… it’s staggering to think of the amount of information that might be immediately available to us, to any one. Only recently, since the advent of the Internet, have we really begun to make information available, to sufficiently put the world to record. If we continue to chronicle our lives and store the data, if the petabits keep piling up, the possibilities are limitless. Just think of it from one aspect, like ancestry. I’ve tried searching back through the census records to find my ancestors, and I have found some, back into the 1700s, but even that is only 300 years. At the rate our data is being stored a person in a million years will be able to track their lineage across that entire gulf of time, have pictures, video, imprints of lives. We are a nostalgic people, and I can’t help but think that we will still pine for the days of yore, even then.

How many ice ages will we have endured? How many catastrophic events? How many species will be extinct? Will we still have a moon? Will Saturn still have rings? Will we have finally solved the riddle of time? Space travel? We’re so close to so many things, and the possibilities are so exciting, it’s almost a shame that I won’t be there to see it. But maybe my great grandson (x1000) will be able to look back across the ages and see his old papa, in that little white house on that six acre patch of grass in Montevallo, Alabama, and smile. And, whether my book ever gets published or not, he’ll have a copy of it that he can read, because people will still love the feel of a good hardback in their hands. Of course it’ll be translated, and the antiquity of its ideas might seem simple, but it’ll be a connection, something I don’t have even with my father’s father, who died when I was very young.

There’s been a lot written about how rotten the future might be. But usually when I think of it I try to send some positive thoughts that way, I paint a nice picture of it in my mind. I still see grass and mountains with billy goats on top of them. I still see little houses where people farm for their food. But I see a people who have solved many of the big problems our civilization has today. Sure, they’ll have their own batch of problems, but they’ll have fixed a lot, too. One thing’s for certain: at some point, a few generations of humans will have to dedicate themselves to cleaning up the mess we left them.

I think that they will. I’m sorry that they’ll have to, but I believe they will.

What do you think life will be like in a million years?

written by Matt Mitchell

I’ll have mine with telescopic and xray, plz. Oh, and a HUD. Yes, a HUD, with a Terminator-style readout. So far the speculation for these contacts, which are being engineered by the University of Washington, is that they’ll be capable of zoom, possibly wired to monitor the body’s sugar levels for diabetics along with a few other medical possibilities. But something like this opens my eyes to many, many other possibilities, and who knows how much capability something like this could have? They’ve speculated as to the gaming potential, which doesn’t interest me that much right away, but I would be very interested in having this thing wired into the web, giving me immediate access to a HUD-like display of weather radar, GPS, traffic conditions, email, danger warnings (like brake lights ahead), and even restaurant and movie listings, updateable by whatever street you’re walking down. That’s a lot of usability to pack into a dime-sized piece of silicone, but hey, if I’m gonna dream, I’m gonna dream big.

The model is still in testing, and they’re still trying to figure a way to power it wirelessly, but once they do that…. :-)

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: , bionic, contacts, eyes, vision