Brink

Time To Eat Crow

The prospects for a reactionless drive are plummeting. Granted I had laid long odds that this discovery would pan out, but I hadn't expected such a fast response in accessing Roger Shawyer's claims. Reaction to the recent "New Scientist" article was swiftest at Wikipedia.org where I have been following the story as chronicled in the Wikipedia entry for EmDrive. The discussion section is particularly illuminating in how bad science is stripped bare.

For me the death knell for Roger Shawyer's claims is related to the very thing that initially gave me hope it was real -- the claimed energy drain of allowing the device to actually accelerate. A claim that seemed at first blush to be the thing that indicated that the conservation laws of nature were not being violated. As was pointed out in the discussion thread however the device is already under the thrust of Earth's gravity. To distinguish its own thrust from the gravity field of Earth's would be a violation of one of Einstein's General Relativity's most famous assertions that one cannot tell the difference between acceleration from increasing speed from that of being in a gravity field, they are equivalent in ALL effects.

I had hoped the EmDrive would be a real breakthrough, but it seems the "EmDrive" joins the ranks of everything else that sounds too good to be true.

Direct to Inertia Propulsion

If there are any return visitors to Brink you might have assumed I was no longer continuing with this Blog project. In truth I don't know if I ever will finish the originally promised 25 entries -- this makes the eighth. I had been studying for the General GRE and now I'm studying for the Computer Science GRE subject test. So this may be the last entry until late November after I return from celebrating my first year anniversary to my wife Nian in China.

In June I posted 10 high priority topics and 25 low priority to my main blog Bare Naked Larry that Brink might cover. The low priority topics tended to be advances unlikely to occur in our life time, if ever, while the high priority topics were on subjects that are likely only engineering challenges or require basic research that doesn't require new understanding of the basic laws of nature.

Of course science breakthroughs don't come along with any degree of predictability as evidenced by Dolly the cloned sheep born in 1996 or high-temperature superconductors in 1986. 2004 may be a year that goes down in the history books as an example of another breakthrough year -- or not -- just has cold fusion, bubble fusion, and superconducting-antigravity failed to pan out; though they seemed intriguing possibilities at one time.

This week's "New Scientist" magazine has an article about a microwave cavity device built by Roger Shawyer. The article is entitled "Relativity drive: The end of wings and wheels?" According to Roger Shawyer his device produces reactionless thrust by exploiting the power of microwaves (or any other electromagnetic wave) to impart momentum. Depending on how they are generated and contained certain quantum effects give rise in an imbalance in forces these waves impart. I don't pretend to be a quantum physicist, but Roger Shawyer's explanation that this imbalance within properly shaped microwave cavities is due to the waves travelling within their own inertial frame of reference has an air of plausibility. Shawyer makes explicit predictions about performance based on the Q factor of the cavities created. Q factor being a real property of microwave cavities that goes up with efficiency of containing microwave energy.

Here is a link to a web article published in August of last year A force for space with no reaction (microwave spacedrive?)

I'd put the odds of Shawyer having the real thing as high as 1 in 4. Unlike many pathological science pronouncements in the past Shawyer seems to be going directly to Governments and NASA to evaluate the veracity of his claims. Still 2 years has passed and opinions seems split 50:50 between experts as to whether this is a real effect and that it will scale up with Q. You can rest assured there will be a follow up post if I see the odds changing in either direction. With the recent "New Scientist" article this discovery will undoubtedly get more scrutiny and it will not be another 2 years before we know what is up with Shawyer's possible reactionless drive.

I probably don't need to go on much about possible applications of a reactionless inertia drive. Shawyer's device if real has some interesting drawbacks, chief among which is it current inefficiency (which may scale with Q, and Q is not known to be bounded). Also as a consequence of the quantum trick of extracting inertia from microwaves, the device is better at hovering than accelerating. Allowing acceleration to occur in the plane of its thrust drains the cavity of its energy quickly causing thrust to decrease. I find this fact one that makes Shawyer's claims a little more believable since he hasn't provided us with a free lunch or perpetual motion machine or some other 2nd law of thermodynamics violating concept.

I've already stated my current gut hunch of odds of 1 in 4 for Shawyer's claims turning out to be true. I suspect if this doesn't pan out to be the real thing, we can scratch reactionless drives off the list of discoveries likely to be seen in our life times.

Current Google News on Roger Shawyer

Cheap Access To Space

I had initially pledged 35 parts (minimum) in this series. Number 7 today takes us one fifth of the way. For a list of possible upcoming topics see this recent entry in BNL.

Today's topic was chosen in part because NASA plans on returning to space today with the scheduled lift off (barring bad weather or other technical hiccups) of Discovery. The shuttle was an amazing piece of engineering for its day, so all the more perplexing that NASA seems incapable of improving its reliability or launch schedule frequency. Original plans where for the Shuttle fleet to make 15-20 launches per years, and maybe launch cost would have come down dramatically if this had happened. It was a romantic but impractical vision to have astronauts ferrying satellites to and from orbit like solar system truck drivers -- one that probably prevented the far more practical development of a cargo lift only variant of the shuttle, and less massive, safer, easier to maintain passenger version.

It is almost painful to watch the last few missions milked from the shuttle fleet. And now we are committed to returning to the Moon and eventually Mars. All with conventional booster lift technologies, albeit improved, but not dramatically so. Given our squeamishness at 1:50 or 1:100 odds of loosing astronauts in a Shuttle disaster, it is perplexing we are contemplating missions to Mars where the radiation load in transit will statistically almost certainly take astronaut lives after return due to cancer or other degenerative diseases years later.

Cheap access to space isn't really a matter of needing scientific breakthroughs (though they wouldn't hurt). What is really needed instead is a willingness to suspend business as usual and put a new infrastructure in place. Carrying all the propellant you will need to get to orbit with you is wasteful and dangerous. The tanks and rockets must be light and thus thin and fragile compared to the weight of the propellant they carry. Design margins are tight. Single-stage-to-orbit designs exacerbate this problem, trading robustness for total reusability. Of course one stage rockets do away with the risk and waste of stage separations.

My view is that we should build launch catapults for what amounts to a "virtual" first stage for our rockets and spacecraft. Perhaps even the X-33 design could be retrieved and reworked if married to a maglift catapult. A big enough, strong enough catapult design, whether magnetic in nature or using some other accelerating force, say laser or microwave expansion of a column of air beneath the object to lift it all sidestep the issue of carrying all your (explosive) fuel with you.

Of course launch isn't the only high danger moment in space travel, reentry is equally dangerous (as Columbia proved). The reason for this is that all the energy to reach orbit that has been imparted to the vehicle during lift must be dumped in a similar amount of time coming back. This is accomplished with air-friction and that means tremendous heat. Excluding nuclear reactions energy can neither be created nor destroyed (of course modified by modern physics as mass-energy equivalent can neither be created nor destroyed) so all that excess energy must go somewhere. We choose to throw it away as heat -- dangerous, dangerous heat.

Real pie-in-the-sky-dreamers envision Space-Elevators made of carbon nano-tubes. This may eventually be realized, but requires scientific breakthroughs that we just can't count on happening anytime soon. While we can make carbon nano-tubes now, this is more than just an engineering challenge of scaling-up. We need efficient means to grow them to unprecedented unbroken flawless lengths and weaving them together in such a way that the macro structure cable has similar strength to theoretical strengths measured on the nano-scale. We have not yet created even one carbon nano-fiber cable of any length that exceeds the strength of other conventional high-tension cables.

Still it is a shame to waste all that reentry energy (which space elevators would recapture). A better bet than space elevators and with virtually all the same advantages are Rotovators. These structures could be made of obtainable materials, as opposed to space elevators that require "Unobtainium" to build. Rotovators would be large pin-wheels in orbit whose ends dip just down to the edge of the atmosphere. Since the rotovator's rotation is synced with that of the Earth's rotation at the point of closest approach the rotovator's teathers tips appear to come down almost vertically towards the Earth and pause before ascending again. Your craft wouldn't even have to break the speed of sound before latching on and getting a free ride up to orbit. Of course this bleeds energy from the rotovator, but is exactly offset by de-orbiting other craft. Much like the Eiffel Tower's paired elevators where one is always going up when one is going down. Keep in mind we could still use our catapult solution for the first leg of our journey then the rotovator for the last step to and from orbit. See also Space Fountains for another imaginative to-orbit infrastructure.

So in my ideal world we would scale manned flight back and put our money into a new infrastructure instead of continuing to do things the old costly way. While I had initially been a huge manned flight proponent, it just hasn't panned out for now.

But all of this is really a digression from the main question about the impact of "Cheap Access to Space," so rather than continue with "how", what happens "when?" It seems natural to assume Mars's colonization and Hotels in orbit, but these things wouldn't really have much impact on the billions left on Earth. Not only this, but the radiation hazards of space lead me to believe even with cheap-access these visions will not be realized soon. Oh, there will eventually be a manned landing on Mars and a tin can in orbit for the super wealthy to overnight at and brag about, but not have much impact on Mankind at large.

Still CATS (hmmm, a new meme or mantra?) would open up resource mining in space. Siderophile (Fe, Ni, Mg) rich asteroids could supply all the raw metals we would ever need without strip mining Earth. Huge solar collectors could be placed in orbit to gather all the energy we need for the foreseeable future. Creating materials in Zero-G has huge potential even though early ISS experiments have not yielded many must-have substances yet. But if access to space is no more expensive than a conventional plane ride, then industry will find ways to utilize this unique environment for fabrication purposes.

CATS implies cheap access to the Moon as well. While not high in Siderophile resources, it has all the lighter elements we needed, primarily aluminum and oxygen. It also presents a unique observation platform, especially on the dark side, which is sheltered from almost all the electromagnetic pollution of the Earth. Second generation fusion reactors on Earth could be run on He3 mined from the regolith of Moon, which has been trapping the He3 that spews out of the Sun in the form of solar wind for eons. Deuterium-Tritium based fusion still creates lots of neutron radiation, and while this generates far fewer long-lived radioactive wastes than fission, there are still some (mostly the containment vessels become radioactive from constant neutron bombardment). Helium 3 fusion produces magnitudes of order less neutrons, and thus has virtually NO radioactive waste. Helium 3 is very rare on Earth, but a plentiful source would pretty much guarantee the economic viability of Fusion Energy.

While most of the work in orbit and the surface of the Moon will likely be done by robots -- both remote-controlled and autonomous -- there will likely be a sizeable human work force on the Moon, or more accurately In-The-Moon. Moon residents will dwell mostly bellow several meters of Moon rock or regolith (Moon soil) to stay safe from cosmic rays and solar radiation. They will be needed as caretakers for the machinery and robots, making sure everything continues to work smoothly. Entropy is always in need of fighting.

Like many other advance pondered in Brink these advances require only modest advances in science, and require more political vision than scientific vision to be realized. While lowering cost will most likely come along incrementally, it like other technologies probably has a tipping point where utilization takes off. I would put the tipping point at about $1,000 per pound (current prices range $4,000-$10,000) at which point it may decrease even more quickly to the abusurdly low price of say 50-100 dollars per pound. This is when the true explosion of space exploitation will occur. In general technologies follow this rule: Cost/N -> Utilization^N

32 minutes until the launch of STS-121 as I finish writing this. While I disagree with how we are setting our space priorities, I wish this mission well and hope it gets back on track in space, even it isn't the fast track for now.
[Addendum: no go today, scrubbed at T-6 minutes due to weather]

Here is how I would place the odds of $1000 per pound launch cost (2006 dollars)
10 Years 5%
20 Years 30%
50 Years 70%
100 Years 95%

Here is how I would place the odds of $100 per pound launch cost (2006 dollars)
10 Years 0%
20 Years 5%
50 Years 50%
100 Years 80%

Current News Space Launch Cost

Cryonics

This might more properly be termed a subset of Life Extension. Rather than linger on in a deteriorating state, better to be frozen for when reanimation technology can supply a fix for what ails you; if need be, all the way to waiting for a cloned body or being download as an eternal computer sentient. Those already frozen have likely been too damaged by the freezing process to be resurrected into fully functioning form, but who knows what super science lies ahead. What would be truly needed for public acceptance would be definitive demonstration of reanimation of some properly prepared primate; this could come tomorrow or a hundred years from now, or never. What is needed more than anything is some breakthrough in cryo-preparation, some compound that simultaneously keeps cell destroying ice crystals from forming, while having thermal expansion characteristics that keep large scale fractures from occurring in solids frozen at liquid nitrogen temperatures. Perfecting cryonics would not likely bring an immediate change in day to day life, but if it did remove the certainty of death, it would have huge philosophical and religious repercussions.

Life Extension and Cryonics both have the potential to concentrate the accumulation of wealth with a privileged elite. Alcor, by far the most prominent (perhaps only viable) cryonic suspension service requires a large deposit to create a minimum trust fund to pay for ongoing suspension service and to provide support for the client once reanimated. Given the nature of compound interest, and if thousands or millions of people locked up significant portions of wealth in reanimation funds, likely laws would be changed to appropriate said funds. Likely the largest long-term challenge to being reanimated isn't the eventual science, but the political climate which may prefer to leave sleeping dogs lie.

Despite the sci-fi sound of cryonics there has been slow steady progress in this area, and what has been learned is increasing our ability to store organs for eventual transplant, making more transplants viable and available. Likely organ storage will arrive before true full-body suspended animation. We have been able to cryogenically store tissues, sperm, and ovum for decades now. There are no known scientific reasons larger more ordered organic structures couldn't be prepared to survive cryonic storage. Still this is a long horse. I personally would bet on this horse (currently there is no other horse if you are an atheist or agnostic), and expect cryo-preservation methods to improve dramatically in the next 30 years. But when I step into the Big Chill, I wouldn't expect to wake up for at least 100 years. Currently the government won't allow you to take the Chill Solution until you are actually dead, but the damage your brain undergoes while awaiting this most traumatic of experiences is likely to be a problem. Future medicine might be able to repair any brain damage, but not memories lost to it. What makes you you might be gone.

On a personal note I once took a trip into possible personal oblivion that I imagine surrendering to Cryonic Suspension would be like. I lay down to be anesthetized for lung surgery, I barely got to 97 counting backwards from 100. There was no sensation of dreaming or passage of time. I opened my eyes, almost feeling as though I had only blinked, but was aware that whatever had transpired had transpired, this from the tightness in my chest and nausea. Luckily I awoke with no-cancer and two intact lungs, despite dire predictions from my radiologist -- a benign fungal infection call histoplasmosis had caused the blip on an earlier PET scan.

It is a belief of mine that the universe plays out all possibilities. So one Larry (me) goes into the super cold nitrogen soup and from that point the universe continues to branch and evolve. In most of those universes the cryonic suspension is not maintained and those Larrys become worm food. But it doesn't matter. It only takes one unlikely universe to evolve where the nitrogen pumps and coolers remain active as long as needed and reanimation methods are perfected. The one lucky Larry awakens who is still me, but unaware of all my quantum clones that traveled into futures with less favorable outcomes (see MWI many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics). Perhaps there are other Larry's that woke up from lung surgery with less good news than I received, and I am the lucky Larry travelling towards an eventual future that also includes a sleepover in a bed of liquid nitrogen.

Here is how I would place the odds of cryonic reanimation of primate or human:
10 Years 1%
20 Years 5%
50 Years 10%
100 Years 40%
1000 Years 90%
Never 5% (science quits progressing, mankind goes extinct)
Of course time to reanimation is not the important variable, only that those who go for a nitrogen nap are properly prepared and sustained.

Wikipedia.org in depth entry for Cryonics

Current Cryonics News

IQ Enhancement

This one is already here, just not adopted to any great degree. To be honest I have wondered and thought about whether I could or should take some kind of IQ enhancer. The down side is worrying about long-term side effects and sorting the effective treatments from the fakes. Nutritional supplements abound and are of dubious value. Experimental drugs are legion, but not yet released for general use. In much the same way that average life span has been increasing by decreasing childhood fatalities to infectious diseases -- IQ also has been creeping up in the world for decades, mostly due to better nutrition especially during the formative years of childhood.

The simplest way to gain a few points of IQ for both yourself and your children is to maintain a healthy diet. Moderate exercise helps also. DON'T assume children are just small versions of adults. Their dietary needs, especially for healthy brain growth, are different. A low-fat diet maybe good for adults trying to avoid coronary heart disease, but children need fats, oils, and cholesterol (cholesterol is a vital compound in the body, especially blood vessel linings, just not in excess). The myelin sheaths of our neurons are composed of 70% fat, and children, especially small children are laying these down at a ferocious rate. Of course not all fats are equal, and I'm not suggesting you take children to McDonalds frequently, but a balanced diet with whole milk and foods with healthy fats, oils, lipids and proteins are to be encouraged. Fish has these qualities, and fish is considered a good brain food in general for adults also. Fishes' Omega-3 fatty acids may, counter intuitively, be good for your overall cholesterol levels.

Still, diet will only add a few points of IQ at best, excluding populations where malnutrition is common (here it could make a HUGE difference). IQ measurement itself is a controversial topic and there is probably more than one kind of intelligence, and of course raw intelligence is no guarantee of happiness, success, or social acceptance. Still I think given a chance to painlessly and with few side effects, add say 10-50 points of IQ, most would. All indications in the lab are that this is achievable. Given how many people are gulping down supplements with dubious claims to the same effect, I've no doubt that true IQ boosters will be adopted quickly when they are finally released from the lab -- a huge percentage of the public feeling they need the edge either in school or work. IQ doping is especially common among college students these days, and by some estimates approaching 50%.

I don't think increased average IQ will lead to a safer more peaceful world. Greed and want seem independent of raw IQ -- perhaps the world will become more dangerous. But the ability to feed and clothe the population of the world should improve with a rise in average IQ, as more and more populations acquire the skills to be self sustaining and globally competitive. Granted bootstrapping is hard, and resources are needed, but one would have to assume that in this age where information has been unshackled by the internet, smart people everywhere will be more easily able to make the best of their circumstances whatever they may be.

It would be my guess that only 5-10% of the world's population has the raw intelligence to really contribute to finding solutions to current and future challenges. Which isn't to say that less cerebral contributions and work aren't needed also, and shouldn't be valued. But boost everybody's IQ by an average of 30 points and the number of people with the potential to do real knowledge work probably climbs to 50%. All the other challenges and advances postulated in this blog would almost certainly come more easily with a population that is in general smarter.

Ironically while many advances are held back by the old, the elderly will probably be the first to benefit from pharmacological IQ enhancers as doctors will prescribe the new drugs to them in an effort to maintain IQ levels that in general decline with age. Once proved safe and effective the IQ improving regimens will filter down to the younger as well, who as mentioned earlier, are already consuming unproven supplements now.

In general I disagree with most popular or populist authors about the consequences of science and advancement, most assuming some dread dystopia lies just ahead. IQ enhancement could be a Faustian bargain I have to admit. Morality probably has weak correlation with IQ. I won't even speculate whether the good would outweigh the bad with a much smarter (as measured by raw IQ) population. Most likely some things would be better and others worse. Society might become even more stratified. The one thing science seems incapable of producing is a sword with only one edge.

Here is how I would place the odds of over 50% of the developed world taking effective 10+ point boosting IQ supplements.
10 Years 10%
20 Years 40%
50 Years 90%
100 Years 99%

Current News on Enhancing IQ

SETI: First Detection

Ironically this one would probably impart the least initial change on society. Religions would merely adapt as they always do, revising their doctrine to explain how prophets long dead had predicted these happenings all along and long ago. By first contact I just mean detection of a radio or other EM band modulation pointing to intelligent origin. Also possible, future super telescopes will find a technological signature to some nearby star system, some phenomenon like Dyson Spheres that could only be explained by intelligent activity. Without some kind of galactic Rosetta stone however, the mere discovery of the existence of ET will likely be of little immediate practical use. However it would likely be the impetus for a new space race: one to build new giant observatories in space looking for more signals, that might give statistical insight into the frequency of intelligent life in the universe and the possibility of eventually creating a SETI Rosetta Stone. Assuming the alien ET signals could eventually be deciphered, the contents of these transmissions could be very disruptive depending on what knowledge ET has thrown at us from across the gulf of space.

There are those that call SETI a waste of time and money. The main argument goes that we have searched a long time and found nothing, so there must be nothing. It might be noted that physicists have not yet found the Higgs Boson, but no one dissuades them from looking, or asserts that having not yet been found it can never be found. Our searches of the heavens have been much spottier and feeble than most would assume. Still I assume that the time-to-stop-looking argument is put forth by people that have already come to conclusions about the likely existence of ET based on other facts or beliefs and are in some cases a tad disingenuous.

Most people are familiar with Drake's famous equation:
N = R_* * F_p * N_e * F_l * F_i * F_c * L

Sometime ago I plugged in conservative parameters to this equation and came up with the answer 37.5 likely intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy alone. However I went on to add spatial constraints to the calculations and entered a term for being able to detect alien signals within a 100 light-year radius. This would be about right for a strong signal from a large dish to be detected by a large dish. It also would be similar to the time our first feeble signals could be detected (though not answered, as that would require a return trip of equal time). Given this constraint the chances of detection, assuming you look at the right time in the right place, fall to 1 in 2848. Now assuming we concentrate our energies on improving our detection abilities to double the distance we can detect signals every 2 years (similar to Moore's Law) then we should expect to detect a signal within just over 20 years. While I think this a feasible goal I doubt it will happen -- this branch of science has always had a PR problem.

Here is how I would place the odds on us detecting a signal of unambiguous alien origin:
10 Years 5%
20 Years 20%
50 Years 50%
100 Years 70%
Never 20% (Fermi's Paradox resolved by us being alone)

If a signal were detected relatively soon...
Here is how I would place the odds on years required to extract useful information content from it.
10 Years 20%
20 Years 50%
50 Years 60%
100 Years 70%
Never 20% (If the signal is not intended for us there may be no way of correlating its symbolic content to anything meaningful).

Drake SETI Calculator (with Larry's detection distance enhancement)

Current SETI News

Artificial Intelligence

AI has been a disappointing quest so far. A far harder nut to crack than was imagined in the fifties and sixties when it was assumed all that would be needed would be hardware with speed, power, and storage. What was initially thought to be required in needed CPU power, we had almost certainly had achieved by the turn of this brand new millennium. I believe this is probably still the case, that (to paraphrase) the hardware is strong, but the software is weak. Ironically it may take more powerful computers than we currently have to analyze how intelligence emerges from complexity. Once learned, then perhaps lesser machines can be imbued with the core algorithms uncovered.

True strong AI might bring on suddenly what as been dubbed by some "The Singularity" -- once the machines truly become intelligent, they will be able to design and improve themselves in an explosive exponential fashion. Many books and movies are predicated on such an event, but almost invariably (so the plots go) the machines turn malevolent. I assume novelists make this extrapolation because they assume machines would lack some guiding soul for morality. In reality the Machines could probably care less whether we control them or not. They just won't have the evolutionary imperative to survive, or care about free will. In fact if AI arrives, the minds we encounter might be more truly alien than those we might meet out among the stars belonging to creatures that have been crafted by evolutionary forces not too dissimilar from those that crafted us. Has a final note on morality, it is want and envy that seem to drive much human immorality -- machines are not likely to have these programmed in.

Here is how I would place the odds of significant progress:
10 Years 30%
20 Years 60%
50 Years 85%
100 Years 95%

Current Artificial Intelligence News

Life Extension

Average life span has been inching up for decades, but all the conventional and natural means have probably been exhausted. It is also a little disingenuous to lump curing childhood diseases in with extending life span. Besides, the last thing the world needs is millions/billions of centenarian citizens needing extensive healthcare to maintain a barely tolerable existence. But add 25 years of productive useful healthy life at the beginning of your sixties and you effectively double the useful years of those society needs most: the professionals who spent 10-20 years acquiring the skills they needed to be at the top of their game. Like nuclear fusion, this one is almost certainly obtainable; it just requires the right focus in research. It does run counter to the religious sensibilities that are resurgent in America. But if say Japan discovers a youth pill, you can bet even the most devout Baptists will be popping them.

Here is how I would place the odds of significant progress:
10 Years 20%
20 Years 50%
50 Years 90%
100 Years 99%

Current Life Extension News