The Speculist

This discrepancy probably has to do with the fact that I have deleted an entry or two along the way. But never mind. After all, this is just the count of entries at blog.speculist.com. Before we moved here, we had done nearly 1000 entries over on speculist.com. Of course, some of those were probably deletions, too, meaning that what you are reading is somewhere between our 1700th and 1800th blog entry.

But it is numbered 1000, and that's good enough for us.

To celebrate this important (yet hard to define) milestone, each of the Speculist bloggers has taken a crack at defining what it means to us to be a Speculist. For this one entry, we've relaxed our normal guidelines about shying away from political or religious content. Anything goes.

So thanks for reading, and here's to 1700-1800 more entries!

Stephen Gordon

Kathy Hanson

Michael Sargent

Phil Bowermaster

Stephen Gordon

Many Moons ago (39 to be exact) Phil defined a Speculist as:

anyone who defines, looks for, attempts to unravel, or otherwise contends with what might be, what might not be, what might have been, whatever — and then who takes that understanding and tries to make it into something useful.

Since joining the Speculist, my writing has concentrated heavily on "what might be." I did recently stray into "what might have been" with a post on real-life Steampunk, but even there I was thinking about our future return to the Moon. My cobloggers also seem to write primarily about the future.

I think the Speculist is future-oriented primarily because the "something useful" that Phil, Kathy, El Jefe and I have come up with is optimism. New problems may be arising as fast as solutions, but the problems are decreasing in potency. This is great, monumental news. But it's something that isn't brought up much outside of a few blogs like this one.

The blogosphere functions as the amateur answer to the perceived deficiencies of the mainstream media. If the MSM seems biased to the left or right, you can answer back from the right or left.

The MSM bias we answer at the Speculist is its obsession with bad news: "If it bleeds it leads." So we hear about the one delinquent who holds up the gas station even if the more important story is how the rest of his classmates are at home doing their homework, or playing sports for school, or otherwise being decent kids.

Big media would argue that it's doing a service to point out problems that need to be addressed. There's some logic to that, but if you accept the MSM narrative as the whole truth, then you'll have a warped, depressed outlook on life. You might get too depressed to do much about the problems that the MSM points out.

In my recent "Serious Optimism" post I mentioned that the United States has gone five years without a terrorist attack. That interim is cause for optimism even though I know that we will almost certainly be attacked by terrorists again. This is big picture optimism. It’s the conviction that things are getting better all the time even though we can't guarantee specific successes in advance.

Karl Hallowell commented about the likelihood of success with specific projects:

The optimist takes on these big projects and tries to make them happen. But the odds are naturally against him so he often fails.

So IMHO, an optimist is usually wrong while a pessimist is usually right. But the really interesting stuff happens when the opposite is true.

Whether the optimist or the pessimist is right in a given circumstance may depend on how you define success or failure. Most projects see some degree of success and some degree of failure. But if a half-full glass quenches your thirst I’d argue that the water pouring project was a success in spite of the spill.

Optimism certainly prevails in the long run. The average annual return of all U.S. stock markets between 1926 and 1999 was 11%. A pessimistic investor who predicts a market crash will be right eventually. But if his pessimism keeps him out of the market, he'll miss the opportunity to make good money in spite of occasional crashes.

I don't discount the importance of specific successes. So let me conclude with a couple of specific things that have me excited.

Desalinization

If we could ever competitively, at a cheap rate, get freshwater from saltwater, that would be in the long-range interest of humanity (and) would dwarf any other scientific accomplishments

President John F. Kennedy

April 12, 1961

Desalinization is finally coming of age. When reverse osmosis was developed for desalinization in the 70's it was a big step up from the previous evaporation techniques. But the cost to get potable water from the ocean was still prohibitively expensive. A simple invention is changing this:

To make it [reverse osmosis] work, you need to pump the water in at very high pressure. Both the brine and the fresh water come out at a very high pressure, though, which is a waste in the case of the brine…

This company has built a new system, and it's just beautiful in its simplicity. There's a rotating gadget with multiple chambers in it. First, a low-pressure pump fills the chambers with seawater. Then the chamber rotates around such that the other end of the chamber is exposed to the high-pressure expelled brine, which pushes the seawater into the osmosis chamber. However, when the brine has pushed out all the non-salty water, the thing has rotated around again, so that chamber gets filled with seawater at low pressure and the brine is expelled...and so on and so forth…

Consequently, instead of the 4.93 kilowatt hours per kilolitre estimated by the Sydney Institute for the Sydney desalination plant proposal, these guys claim a figure of about 2.40 kilowatt hours per kilolitre. That's 50% off the energy cost.

It's a simple device, but the ability to retrieve potable water from the oceans efficiently will be a key technology in the twenty-first century. Whole regions that have been uninhabitable will be opened up for development.

A Quantum Leap Forward

Useful quantum computers are looking more feasible all the time.

A new silicon chip capable of manipulating the spin of a single electron could ultimately allow futuristic quantum computers to be built using conventional electronic technology…

A quantum bit, or "qubit", is analogous the bits used in conventional computers. But, instead of simply switching between two states, representing "0" and "1", quantum physics permits a qubit to exist in more than one state simultaneously, until its state is measured.
This means quantum computers can essentially perform multiple calculations at once, giving them the potential to be exponentially more powerful than conventional computers.

Think of a computer so advanced that it's analogous to the difference between our computers today and an abacus. And the fact that it could potentially be manufactured with chip technology points to the possibility of mass production.

I could go on about individual projects that could change the world. Indeed, that's pretty much what we do here at the Speculist. But it's not just one project that's creating the future. Success in one endeavor contributes to other areas - which leads to further successes. We are "caught" in a distributed cycle of virtue. And like any distributed network, this system can not be brought down by failure of any particular project or person. It is robust.

Therefore, my optimism is robust. Looking at the world this way can be life changing. When you expect success you will look for and find success. Each day is better and more exciting than the last. This is why I am a Speculist.

Kathy Hanson

Why I’m a Speculist

I am a Speculist because I believe in Singularities. In fact, I believe there have been several notable Singularities since—well, the first Big One—and all the Singularities, so far, have been pretty good for humans.

In my humble opinion. these Singularities are the points where God’s realm/dimension intersects with the created universe to accomplish something new and unexpected.

A Singularity launched the laws of physics making this universe possible and habitable; a Singularity happened when organic life began; a Singularity occurred when humans become conscious; and another Singularity happened roughly 2000 years ago—upon which I will elaborate later—that few of us recognized for what it was.

Based on the evidence of the past Singularities, I’m optimistic about the future. You can say I have faith. I define faith as evidence for the things I hope for. I practice this faith by following the evidence where it leads and taking the next step.

The evidence for my future hope comes from studying the history of my chosen faith, Christianity. I’m not asking you to believe as I do—nor am I asking you to critique my beliefs. But I’d appreciate if you’d follow along here.

Going all the way back to the creation narratives of Judaism, I’m struck with the extravagance of the first Singularity.

Some Christians talk as if they believe God made the cosmos so people could be born with souls that could be saved and taken to a spiritual realm, and when there are enough saved souls to satisfy God, all of the created cosmos will be burned up.

When I look around at the created world, and when I study scripture, I realize this doesn’t resonate with all the spectacular Singularities that God has orchestrated so far. God could have skipped all this fire and water and dirt and flesh and blood and excrement and simply created spirit beings to inhabit a nonmaterial realm. But we’re here. And we’re conscious and we’re wondering about things like eternity and love and Singularities.

That’s because we’re hard wired for the job we were commissioned to do.

We’re supposed to be taking care of creation and each other and communing with God.

In fact, we’re supposed to be mastering creation. I take that to mean using our huge brains and opposable thumbs for all they’re worth.

But somewhere, back there, we abdicated our commission. We rebelled. And God had to intervene to call us back into relationship, and re-launch our commission.

That intervention was the Singularity of God being with us in Jesus, and taken further, in his resurrection. Jesus’s resurrection body represented a new intersection in space, time, spirit and matter. It was a spectacular Singularity, a foreshadowing of the one to come.

Jesus called us to participate in the next Singularity. But in order to participate, humans must renounce their rebellion, pride, power mongering, narcissim, and “idol” worship. He called humans to follow him to the place where God’s realm and the natural world would intersect in harmony. In fact, he commissioned us to explain it to as many people who would believe and choose to be active participants.

In the past several centuries, we’ve distorted this message, mainly because we let our huge brains latch on to the fallacy that we are simply body/mind creatures. But that fallacy diminishes the full aspect of consciousness.

If, as the Wikipedia states, consciousness is a “quality of the mind generally regarded to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, self-awareness, sentience, sapience, and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and one's environment,” consciousness must be more than a happy collision between the laws of physics, chemistry and biology.

Consciousness is my proof that we are body, mind and spirit creatures. Sadly, since the Enlightenment and the age of Modernism, we’ve tried to divorce ourselves from this notion, separating the body from the spirit and playing tug-of-war with the mind on both sides of the divide—in hopes of freeing ourselves from subjective truth and superstition.

We’ve created terrible imbalances in our own bodies, minds, spirits and the natural world. We’ve pitted science against faith, estranging the spirit of consciousness from its body/mind. We’ve ostracized science from faith, letting our spirits flounder in directions the evidence clearly doesn’t lead.

What Jesus did was so unexpected that many people refused to recognize it as what God had been telling them all along. The culmination of the creative work in the next Singularity will be no less.

I don’t pretend to understand what it will look like. Humanity has made the mistake of trying to pin it down too many times before. If we could do that, it wouldn’t be a Singularity.

But based on the evidence of the resurrection, I’m pretty sure biological life is critical to the post-Singularity reality. Not disembodied bliss in a spiritual haven or silicon hive. Somehow, technology, or quantum physics, or some new level of understanding will be made available by God’s design, and we will live in a cosmos that functions in an equilibrium beyond our imagining. We will commune with God, and with each other. God’s realm and the natural world will co-exist the way he intended all along.

I do believe God wants us to choose it, however.

That’s why we find ourselves at this juncture in the first place.

And I don’t think that’s such a bad place to be.

Michael Sargent (a.k.a. "El Jefe")

Why am I a Speculist?

I was born exactly one calendar month before the Apollo 11 landing on the moon. I remember watching the latter missions of Apollo, the Apollo - Soyuz Test Project, Skylab, and the testing and first flight of the Space Shuttle with the untempered fascination and awe that can only be generated by a gradeschooler. This is not to say that I wasn't completely aware of other, less upbeat, events. But, on the whole, at least from my perspective, a positive, active and responsible approach to the problems of the world and the challenges of the Universe seemed to be the most rewarding.

During my adolescence I debating the morality and worth of strategic nuclear weapons in the days of "The Day After". I watched Three Mile Island, Love Canal, and Chernobyl bring to a close the quarter-century dream of "Atoms for Peace" and the trust most Americans held in their corporate neighbors. I joined the military in the closing years of the Cold War with a fair degree of certainty that the greatest demonstration of technological prowess in history was going to take place on the plains of Germany in a suicidal flash. But all the while I heard the voices of those that were saying, given enough intelligence, creativity, and effort, things didn't have to turn out the way that seemed likely.

My influences have ranged from Roddenberry and Lucas, Azimov, Bradbury and Clarke, Spider Robinson, John Denver, Judy Collins, Peter, Paul and Mary, to Carl Sagan, Buckminister Fuller, and James Burke. If any clear connecting line can be drawn among these it is, possibly, a common theme that strong, righteous, thougtful, caring people can overcome the problems set before them by a fair, but challenging, Universe and be the better for the experience.

In the last few years I have experienced events, personally and as a member of society, that have been difficult to reconcile with my customary attiudes about the ability of skill, and might, and intellect, to make the world a fundamentally better place. I've watched skilled, creative, and evil people find the weapon in the tool and use it to end thousands, and destroy tens of thousands, of lives. I've watched my brother-in-law recieve the best of modern medical care at the end of his life and wondered whether, on balance, it was making his life better or more comfortable. I have watched his sister, my wife, undergo an almost inconceivably complex series of medical procedures, which have unquestionably enriched us both but have caused grief, physical and emotional pain, and suffering beyond my experience as well and had to ask myself, at several points along the way, whether the promised outcome was really worth the cost.

In the end, it is that existential question, asked repetedly and widely, in circumstances from a click while browsing the internet (the kind that first brought me into the Speculist), to those few, excruciating, life-and-death decisions that we must all, eventually, face that determines whether or not we are optimists. When we choose to try to make the world just a bit better than it is now for as much of the world as we can, that is optimism. That is the spirit that we celebrate in these entries. If, on the other hand, we throw up our hands, give up the struggle, and dispair of finding that little bit better, we cease being, in some way, fully human.

Like Stephen, I find the attitude neatly summarized in a John F. Kennedy quotation:

We choose to ... do [these] things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win...

Phil Bowermaster

Why am I a Speculist?

A lot of different reasons. One answer that comes to mind is one of the few memorable lines (at least one of the few that wasn’t memorable because it makes you laugh at loud at the sheer awkwardness / preposterousness of it) from the movie Troy. Trojan priestess Briseis asks her captor, Achilles (Brad Pitt), why he chose to be a warrior.

“I chose nothing,” Achilles responds. “I was born, and this is what I am.”

That pretty much sums it up for me.

Another, more complicated, answer -- one that I’ve never delved into before on this site -- would be: for Ricky. Last week marked my brother Ricky’s 50th birthday. There was a small family get-together in honor of the day, which I was unfortunately not able to attend. It wasn’t a party or a celebration, and it was the first time in many years that we have marked the day as a family.

My brother Ricky died on the operating table at age 11. He had suffered his entire life from a heart condition which is now routinely corrected. I remember a few weeks before that final operation -- the one that it was hoped would fix everything -- lying in bed one night in the room that I shared with my two older brothers, when Ricky announced to my brother Danny and myself that he was going to die.

I can’t remember whether Danny said anything to contradict Ricky’s prediction. I know that I did not. I was too startled by the idea to say anything. I didn’t really have a clear idea of what it meant, but I sensed that Ricky was saying something that he shouldn’t -- meaning that it was something that would upset our parents if they heard him say it. I recall him doing that quite a bit when it was just the three of us. He had the oldest brother’s duty to be the leader of the pack; I think a certain amount of independence and defiance must be built into that role. Nor was he necessarily shy about asserting his independence directly in front of our parents; he would do that sometimes, too. I also remember that he was often kind of gloomy in his outlook. Of course, who could blame a kid who had spent virtually his entire life being sick for having a gloomy outlook?

But in addition to being something that Mom and Dad wouldn’t want to hear, I thought what Ricky said was wrong. Factually wrong. I thought he was making a bad prediction.

I couldn’t imagine that he was really going to die. I couldn’t imagine that anyone I knew was really going to die. It was something that happened on TV, or to other people out in the world. Not to my big brother. No way.

But Ricky did die, just as he predicted. His short, difficult, and painful life came to an end on that operating table.

I’m a Speculist in part because I didn’t say anything to my brother that night. I don’t think that my saying something would or could have changed anything. Even if I could have articulated words of encouragement, his little brother would hardly have been a credible source. And I know that my parents and older siblings gave him lots of encouragement along the way. My brother died from a heart condition, not from a lack of people hoping and praying that he would live -- and telling him that yes, of course he would.

When a child is suffering, we offer those hopes and prayers and words of encouragement because that is the right thing to do. The fact that I was a child myself is something of an excuse, but maybe not enough. In some sense, I failed Ricky by not responding to what he said.

So now I write about the future on this blog.

I’m a little better today than I was all those years ago at articulating hopeful scenarios. And though some who have read my stuff might have a hard time believing it, I no longer believe that a positive outcome is guaranteed. Far from it. I’ve experienced my share of setbacks and disappointments along the way, and I know that these can occur in the life of an individual or to all of humanity. Ricky was the first person I cared about to whom I had to say goodbye; there have been quite a few since.

This isn’t a penance. I don’t write for the Speculist and L2si out of guilt or remorse. My brother’s final lesson to me was that the time to stand up against death and despair, the time to invoke a better tomorrow by asserting that it should, must, will come to be…is right now. As I stated at the outset, this is something I do because it’s who I am and I can’t imagine doing anything else; and also because it brings me joy and satisfaction; but also because I owe it to my brother.

My sister Ellen wrote an e-mail last week in which she considered some of the things that our lives have included that our brother’s did not -- high school, college, marriage, children, careers. There is so much that my brother did not live to see. I’m a Speculist because I hope for a better world. My tagline isn’t just a motto. It’s something that I missed one opportunity to say, and I don’t want to miss any others. It’s my sincere wish for my family, my friends, for everyone who’s reading this.

Live to see it.