We can file some of our ponderings about this development under the "what might have been" heading. The actual find: a new planet about 8 billion (appropriate Saganesque emphasis applied) years older than the rest of the planets discovered so far outside of the solar system. It's not only old and huge — about twice the size of Jupiter — it's apparently seen some action.

...it is believed the planet formed about a sunlike star near the edge of the globular cluster. Over time, the star and its planet were gravitationally captured by the pulsar, which was then a neutron star with another star as a companion. As the sunlike star was sucked into the mix, the companion star was ejected from the group. This left the sunlike star and neutron star bound to each other while the planet orbited both.

Eventually, the sunlike star burned up its fuel, bloomed into a red giant and then collapsed into a white dwarf. The neutron star, with its greater density, sucked in material from the collapsing star. This caused the neutron star to start spinning at 100 times a second and emitting radio signals, turning into a pulsar. It was the clocklike pulsing of these radio signals, picked up by radio telescopes, that led to other observations and the discovery of the complex.

The article explains how this planet's very existence calls into question assumptions astronomers have made about when and how planets formed. The current thinking is that planets showed up only after the galaxy had cycled through a generation or two of stars. These later stars (like our sun) contained more heavy materials, such as carbon, that would make it possible for planets to form. So how did this planet manage to materialize so early? I think they'll be scratching their heads over that one for a while.

And while we're asking questions, let's turn to a few that have been raised by the all the other (more than 100) supersized planets that have been discovered outside the solar system. Are they all alone out there? Could they have smaller, earthlike moons or planetary companions? Is it possible that life has formed on any of these hundreds of smaller bodies?

These questions take on a certain poignancy when applied to our new old planet. Here's why:

But when the sunlike star was pulled into orbit of the neutron star, any planets near the sun would have been destroyed. Only the gaseous planet, orbiting some two billion miles out, would have survived.

If there was intelligent life on such a planet, he said, it was destroyed as the parent sun was pulled toward the neutron star.

"They would have seen it coming..."

But could they have done anything about it?

Let's say it was happening to us, at our current level of development. The only scenario that might work would be a desperate, swing-for-the-fences, When Worlds Collide kind of approach. Say we knew we had about ten years: we might be able to slap together a small fleet of manned "space arks" that could get a few thousand of us to the moons of the gas giant. I'm not sure if we'd be safe there, though. And of course, this assumes that the moons are there and that they would have sufficient resources to sustain us.

If we knew we had fifty or a hundred years, we might have a shot at building something that would carry us out of harm's way altogether and into interstellar space. Centuries later, our descendants could conceivably wash up on some hospitable shore. I'm not saying that's easy. How would we go looking for such a "shore?" There are none that we know of. We would just have to aim ourselves at a star that has big planets, and which therefore might have little, earthlike planets, and hope for the best.

I'm going on the assumption that we would want to land on a planet. That isn't necessarily the case. Putting oursleves on a permanent, renewable space station might make more sense in either the 10-year or 100-year scenario.

But what if we had been in that situation in the year 1800? If we were 100 years out from the big smash-up, I wonder whether our astronomy would have been sufficient even to tell us this fact? Presumably, one could just look at the night sky and know something was up. Under those circumstances, it doesn't seem possible that we could have done anything at all.

So here's to the hypotehtical inhabitants of a hypothetical planet that was once a neighbor of our newly discovered (very old) planet. I hope they were farther along than us technologically. I hope they found some way out of their predicament. And if not, I hope they went out with grace and dignity and (wouldn't it be nice) the biggest party their planet ever saw. They may have passed into oblivion, leaving behind no signpost or message in a bottle to declare that once they existed. So I'm glad I thought about them, and I hope anyone who reads this takes a moment to think about them.

There may be no way to remember them, but through us they are not entirely forgotten.

Originally published July 11, 2003.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 8:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It couldn't have gone to a more deserving guy.

Congrats, Howard!

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 9:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

This is the first in a series of "reprints" of interviews from the Speaking of the Future series. This interview originally ran August 27, 2003. Zubrin's arguments for heavy-lift capability make for an interesting counterpoint to the current excitement about commercial sub-orbital spaceflight. And our subsequent interview with Rand Simberg (which we'll be running in a couple of weeks) makes an interesting counterpoint to Zubrin's arguments.

 

Speaking of the Future with Robert Zubrin

Two items in the news set the stage for today�s piece

• The Gehman Report on the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster has been released, and it is as critical of NASA as many predicted it would be. While the report calls for an overhaul of the culture that drives the space agency, there are those who suggest that fixing NASA won�t be enough. Some critics are calling for the end of the space shuttle program or for the abolishment of NASA altogether.

• Today, Mars and Earth are at their closest point in nearly 60,000 years. What a treat it�s been, on recent evenings, to stand in my back yard and gaze at this amazing golden light shining in the southern sky. There�s another world, right there, almost close enough to touch. It�s a world many of us have thought about, read about, dreamed about all our lives.

The crux of these two news stories is that it may be time to put away childish things where Mars is concerned. I�ve always believed that I would live to see the day that human beings set foot on Mars. And I�ve always assumed that, when that day comes, it will be NASA that makes it happen. Both that belief and that assumption are now seriously in doubt.

After all, if we were ever going to go to Mars, wouldn�t we be doing it right now? Wouldn�t this have been the perfect time, with Mars so close?

And how could NASA — an agency apparently still mired in the same cultural bog that gave us the Challenger disaster — possibly get us there?

Enter Robert Zubrin.

While many of us have been reading and dreaming about Mars, Zubrin has been making concrete plans. He�s a former Staff Engineer with Lockheed Martin, and the founder and President of both Pioneer Astronautics and the Mars Society. Zubrin is the author of several books on the future of space exploration and settlement, most notably The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must.

For years, Zubrin has been making the case that a series of missions to Mars could be deployed quickly and safely, and at a much lower cost than other experts have suggested. These missions would serve as the first steps in the human settlement of the red planet and of the rest of the solar system.

Some will argue that such ideas are pipe dreams, that any attempt by NASA to take on a major exploration initiative would inevitably dead-end just as Apollo did, to the detriment of other, more realistic space inititiatives. That may be true. On the other hand, if abolishing the space shuttle and even NASA itself are going to be on the table, then some other alternatives need to be there as well. And maybe — just maybe — it�s time to think big again, as we did when the space program was born.

In the wake of the Gehman report, with Mars shining bright in the southern sky, it�s time Robert Zubrin had a fair hearing.

You've been in the news this week saying, "Next year is a crisis that may well determine whether humans to Mars occurs in our lifetime. This is a unique opportunity, but if we let it slip by, we're going to blow it." Can you please explain what that means? How are we going to blow it?

We have a conjuncture of events that are facing us right now. First of all, NASA is about to be thrown into chaos over the shuttle report, which is going to be deservedly very harsh. It's going to be impossible to suggest that we should keep launching the shuttle orbiters for the next 25 years or so. Also, there's going to be a severe rethinking of NASA's overall priorities. Human space flight is risky. Is it worth taking those risks just to fly ant farms into Earth orbit? Or, if we're going to take those kinds of risks, should we be attempting goals that are worthy of those risks?

You mentioned keeping the shuttle orbiter going for the next 25 years. What's the plan of record for that?

Well, that's the party line prior to the Columbia, actually. And it's ridiculous. You can't maintain these things, they're Carter-Administration-era constructs. They take a hell of a beating every time we fly. Actually, it's somewhat incredible that they have had the good luck they have had up to this point. NASA has already begun to move on this and they've started a program called the orbital space plane.

You see, the shuttle is irrational as a launch vehicle regardless of whether an accident occurs. It's a huge launch vehicle; it has 7 1/2 million tons of thrust — the same amount of thrust the Saturn V, a moon rocket, had at take-off. A Saturn V could lift 140 tons of payload to Earth orbit. The shuttle delivers 20 tons of payload to Earth orbit. It actually delivers 120 tons, but most of that is the inert mass of the shuttle itself. So flying cargo to Earth orbit is like trying to truck cargo in a Winnebago. You've got a powerful engine, but most of it is hauling your house around. So we�re using the shuttle to transport crew to the space station, basically to perform a taxicab function . It can do it, but it's like using an aircraft carrier to pull water skiers. The vehicle is way oversized for the task.

That's why NASA has come up with a plan to create a thing they called the Orbital Space Plane, which would be, by comparison, a relatively modest capsule or a mini-shuttle.

Is that the ramjet/scramjet?

No. It's either a capsule or a miniature shuttle put on top of an expendable launch vehicle, an Atlas or a Delta, which sends it to orbit. It can have a crew of six people in it. It will have about one-tenth the take-off thrust and one-tenth the cost of the shuttle. That's rational. Fine. Okay.

However, the question then becomes: what do we do with the shuttle launch infrastructure? The shuttle launch infrastructure is more than the orbiter, it's also the external tanks, the solids, the space shuttle main engine, the pads, and all the people and technology that support that. Now if you simply discard that, you're discarding a gigantic asset.

Really, what you want to do with the shuttle launch infrastructure is lose the orbiter and replace it with an upper stage, a rocket stage. And then, all of a sudden, without the burden of this huge mass, this giant Winnebago, it becomes a proper launch vehicle. It provides Saturn V class launch capabilities, which means it could serve as the primary instrument to send humans to the Moon or to Mars. With this approach, we can achieve direct throw, straight from the launch vehicle, just like we had with Apollo. No monkeying around with trying to build gigantic science fiction interplanetary space ships. Just throw the payload to the planet using the booster. Bang! You're there.

NASA can do that, or not do it. They have a choice. They can simply rationalize the shuttle's taxicab function to orbit, to move people back and forth to the space station on a little capsule on top of an Atlas, and lose the shuttle pads, and capabilities. Or they can turn the shuttle into a heavy-lift vehicle. The only way they can rationalize turning the shuttle into a heavy lift vehicle is if they decide we�re going to go to the Moon or Mars, or both. With people.

Because otherwise we don't need that big lift capability.

Right. NASA has had an academic position for the past 30 years that some day, we'll go back to the Moon. Someday we'll go to Mars. Of course, someday we're going to do it. But now, they've got a choice: they either have to do it now or throw away a $10 billion asset. So it's like a guy who's been hanging around a girl for five years, and she finally turns and says, "Jack, are you going to propose or not?"

Let me give you a choice: shuttle launch infrastructure or Saturn V for going to Mars — which one would you pick?

I'd take the Saturn V.

We really lost something, there, didn't we?

Yes, we did.

Now, in risking throwing away the shuttle launch infrastructure, is NASA poised to repeat the mistake they made with the Saturn V after Apollo?

Yes, that's exactly what they did with the Saturn V after Apollo. And it was the most catastrophic mistake that has ever been made in the history of the space program. We destroyed tens of billions of dollars worth of space capability. We set ourselves back a generation. It was like Columbus coming back from the New World and Ferdinand and Isabella saying, "Oh, so what? Burn of the fleet." That's what happened after Apollo, and that's the juncture they're at right and now. So they can choose. Which way are they going to go?

Some of the contractors have a vested interest in how this position works out. There's jobs at stake. There's money at stake, here. Some of the contractors don't see the possibility of getting a moon/Mars program launched. And so what they're trying to do instead is to make the Orbital Space Plane as expensive as possible. It's basically you're the cabdriver, there's one fare at the airport, and you want to show him all the sites in town. They're coming up with designs for this capsule — I cannot believe this, but it's true — with proposed program cost-to-development of $17 billion. That's almost twice what it cost to develop the shuttle, the whole shuttle, its propulsion systems and its external tanks as well as the orbiter. It's three times what we were going to pay to build the Superconducting Supercollider. It's crazy. And yet all it gives you is a capsule, to go back-and-forth to the station. This program should be a $1 billion program, not a $17 billion program. Maybe $1.5 billion. But they're trying to run it up on the meter.

Now if they do that, there will be no money to convert the shuttle, there will be no money to do anything in space, except to build this stupid taxicab. And then people have to start asking the question, "If we're just going back and forth to the space station, why are we going to space all?" Because the only real justification for the space station is to prepare the way for human interplanetary flight. You can't justify that if, at the same time, you're destroying your main asset that would support this requirement.

On the other hand, for many of the contractors, the destruction of the shuttle infrastructure means they're out of business.

They are in crisis, too, and this gives the people who want to launch a planetary initiative a certain constituency right now. All this is happening at a time when five spacecraft are on their way Mars:

There's the Mars Express, the interplanetary probe from the European Union; there�s the Beagle 2, the first British interplanetary probe; there are two NASA Mars landers equipped with capable rovers, robotic rovers, which will move kilometers across the Martian surface; and finally there�s the Japanese Nozomi orbiter, which has been limping along towards Mars for several years now, but looks like it's finally going to get there in the spring. And then there's two American orbiters in orbit around Mars right now as well. So next spring, there will be seven spacecraft operating on Mars, representing Europe, the United States, Britain, and Japan. There's going to be worldwide excitement about Mars. If the robotic space program is ever going to have the effect of kickstarting a human exploration program, it has to happen next spring. There'll never be another show this big. It's going to be a hard act to follow. I mean, there will be other probes, which can do this and do that, but in terms of public impact, this spring is the climax of the robotic program.

So you've got NASA itself in a crisis, you've got the robots doing everything they can to move things forward, and it's all happening in the high political season in United States. The New Hampshire primary is going on virtually simultaneously with the Rover landings. The timing of these missions and the political climate make this an excellent opportunity to generate interest in a humans-to-Mars program among the American public.

Let me ask about something else that I think is going to attract a lot of attention towards the end of this year. I'd like to know what your views on it are. That is the X Prize. Will it generate interest not only in getting people into orbit, but in doing it in something other than a make-it-as-expensive-as-we-can kind of approach?

A little. But the X Prize, if someone does win it, is a sub-orbital junket on a rocket. It's not the same as planetary exploration. It's not exploration at all.

And it doesn't help to get us there?

Well, you know, it's giving some publicity to small launch vehicle companies that need some publicity and so, by running it as a race, you can generate public attention and perhaps some investment, but the scale of these operations are very small compared to what is needed to open the solar system for humanity. And that's what we're really doing now. So hats off to the X Prize. And hats off to anyone who wins it . But it's a peripheral element of the situation from where I stand.

The X Prize approach of doing it more-or-less on the cheap reminded me a lot of The Case for Mars.

That's true. But you know, you don't have to do things on the cheap if you're the United States. You just have to do them. The incredible waste that we've had in our space program is not a function of particular operations being expensive. It's a function of the fact that the space program as whole has no plan. They're literally spending as much money per year right now as we spent on average during the Apollo period, and accomplishing nothing. Nothing.

The average NASA budget, taken from 1961 when Kennedy made his speech, to 1973 when we had the close-down of the Apollo and Skylab missions was $17 billion per year in today's money, inflation-adjusted. NASA's budget this year is $16 billion. We're within six or seven percent of Apollo-level funding, and we're not accomplishing anything. We spent $150 billion on NASA in the 1990's, and we're not one step closer to the Moon or Mars today than we were in 1990. That is because they have no plan. So they launch a series of simultaneous programs. They start them; they stop them. None of them ever produces anything, with the exception of the robotic probes. The robotic probes are good. A few elements have advanced since 1990. We've got a bit more scientific knowledge about Mars from the Mars Global surveyor probe. Of the $150 billion, that was $150 million. Just one-tenth of 1 percent of the money was usefully spent.

I'll just give you one example. In the 1960's we had Apollo. We knew where we going. We're going to the Moon, thanks to Kennedy, and we had a deadline.

Within this decade.

Within this decade. Sitting there in 1961 they say, if we're going to do this by 1969, we�re going to have to figure out how we�re going to do it in a year and then put out contracts, and then build the elements and have them test-flying around 67, and then go on to the Moon from there. And that's exactly what they did. Take the Saturn V: from1961 to 1962, they figure out how they're going to do the Moon mission. In 1962, they said okay, these are the elements we need: the command module, the lunar lander, the service module. We need a vehicle that can throw all that to a trans-lunar trajectory, the Saturn V, it's got to have this capability. They put out a request for proposals to select contractors. The deadline is to fly by 1969. They have the first test flight in 1966. And they send people to the Moon in 1969.

Now contrast that to NASA's more recent approach. In 1996, NASA administrator Dan Goldin says he'd like to work on "new launch vehicle technology." No requirements, no deadlines, no nothing. So they spend a billion dollars and five years on the program they call X-33, which they cancel in 2001 without having flown anything, and without having achieved anything. And if you look at it, since the 1980's, NASA has had a series of launch vehicle programs: it was the Shuttle C, we had the Advanced Launch System, we had the New Launch System, we had the SpaceLifter Program, we had the X-33, we had the Space Launch Initiative — I know I'm leaving a couple of them out. But they just start them up and shut them down; start them up and shut them down. They just spend money without making any progress.

Administrator O'Keefe has been going around saying NASA should not have a goal. It should not be destination-driven. That's what he says.

What would NASA be driven by, then?

He says instead we're developing the technologies to allow us to go anywhere, anytime. So, organically, the technologies are being developed until they're mature. And then we will have them to go everywhere, instead of just a particular place, like Mars.

This could not be further from the truth. They're not developing the technologies that will allow them to go anywhere at all, let alone "anywhere, anytime." Without a goal, they don't develop a coherent set of hardware that can do anything. We didn't get to the Moon by a bunch of guys running into each other in the cafeteria at the Johnson Space Center in the spring of 1968 And saying, , "You know, if we put your booster together with my lunar landing module and his command module, we could call these pieces together and gee, we could go to the Moon. Isn't it lucky all the pieces fit?"

It went to the other way. You define the goal; you figure how do the goal; you figure out what hardware elements we need to do the goal; you build those hardware elements; and you go do it. The way they're attempting to develop space technology right now is like this: imagine a couple is trying to build a house. The way they're doing it is, they're accumulating things that might be useful to build the house. So they go to a garage sale, where somebody's got a banister and they think, hey, that's a good-looking banister. Hey, there's some aluminum siding, next year maybe we'll get a spiral staircase, how about a Doric column or two. They accumulate all this junk in their backyard and they hope that eventually they�ll have all the right pieces to build a house.

So that's the problem, here. NASA's spending $16 billion a year, and taking no material steps forward toward human space exploration, because they have no commitment in place to do human space exploration. They have no plan. Then have no goal. They're not destination-driven. They need to be a destination-driven. That's what's needed to create a productive space program.

You put together what reads to me like a really coherent plan to get us to Mars a number of years ago in your book, The Case for Mars. To what extent is the plan that you outlined there what you would propose now in this (potentially) post-shuttle era? Would you recommend the same approach?

Pretty much. If you look at the Mars Direct Plan, we used the shuttle as our heavy-lift launch vehicle. It moves the orbiter replaced with an upper stage. It was the right approach in 1990, and it's the right approach today.

Do you have any hope that there's going to be a change of heart at NASA around adopting a kind of mission-oriented, destination-driven approach to these things?

I'm going to try to make it happen.

The Mars Society is going to try to make it happen. We're going to mobilize our chapters to go and visit with Congressmen all across the country. The goal is to visit with at least 300 Congressmen in their offices over the next six months and tell them that America needs a space program that�s going somewhere. That's what we need if we're going to have a viable space program. We need to have a viable space program if we're going to continue to be a nation of pioneers.

Here's the question that maybe either doesn't get asked, or doesn't get answered properly. Why think about going to Mars? It's been 30 years since we've been to the Moon, we've done a fair job of exploring the planets with the unmanned satellites, we have Hubble doing a pretty good job for us. Have things just kind of evolved to where the human exploration of the planets of outer space is over?

Try exploring the Earth with orbiters. Yes, you can do some imaging from orbit, you can learn something about the Earth from orbit, but try to exploring the Earth from orbit. Try exploring Paris from orbit. The orbiters are worthwhile. No doubt about it. In pointing out the limits of robotic exploration, I am not opposing robotic exploration. I am simply making clear that it's a limited tool. It's like aerial reconnaissance. You can't win wars with aerial reconnaissance. It comes in handy. It's good to do. You should do it. But it's not the decisive element. The decisive element in exploration is the human being on the ground. If we�re ever going to find out if there's ever been life on Mars, if we're going to find fossils on Mars, we're going to have to drill into its crust to extract water from the subsurface, and examine it for life ... you have to send human explorers there.

These rovers that we're sending to Mars this year, in their life they will travel a kilometer. You know, the Mars Society has a simulated Mars exploration environment on Devon Island. We constrain people to operate as if they were on Mars. The can�t go outside without wearing space suits, for example. Our explorers on Devon have found stromatolites, which are fossils left by colonies of bacteria. I guarantee you that you could have parachuted a hundred robots to Devon Island and you never would've found those stromatolites. You could parachute a thousand of these rovers into the Rocky Mountains, and you'd never find a dinosaur fossil.

What about taking the argument one step further? So what if we drill into the crust and find those things? Why is it worth spending this kind of money to have people standing there so they can discover ancient bacteria on Mars?

Well, we get an answer to the question of life in the universe, whether it's a general phenomenon or not. We find out if it's life like on the Earth or not. Getting an answer to that question is worth the money. But beyond that, there's something worth much more: if we go to Mars, we're going to open up a new world for humanity. We're going to open up a world that has a surface area equal to all the continents of the Earth put together and that has on it all the resources needed to support not only life, but civilization. If we go to Mars in our time, then 200 years from now there will be a new branch — or perhaps many new branches — of human civilization on Mars, with their own dialects, literatures, cities and universities, used bookstores. They will have made contributions to social thought, to technology and invention, and they'll have epic stories to inspire those who go out further. When they look back at our time, what will they think that we're doing today that is equal in importance to what we did to make their existence possible?

We look back today to 1492: who was queen of Spain?

Isabella.

All right, who was queen of Spain in 1540?

Beats me.

And I bet you couldn't find one person and a thousand who could tell you that one. Or 1640. Or 1740. Or 1840. Isabella is only a significant person because she sponsored Columbus.

So this is a message you need to get to President Bush, right?

Yes.

What about this. I've heard it argued that Greens, people who support the environment, really should be in favor of space exploration. The argument goes like this: take the Apollo missions for example. For a short time, we brought life to what had always been a lifeless body. If we continue with the human settlement of space, we can bring life to many places where it's never been before. But at the same time, you hear about this movement to keep the Moon and now Mars pristine and make a preserve out of them.

Well, that point of view is anti-life. It is the nature of life to take barren environments and transform them to those that are friendly to the development and propagation of life. That's the whole history of life on Earth. That's why life on Earth has been a success. And we regard this process as marvelous. When Hawaii came out of the Pacific Ocean, this huge piece of bare basalt, would anyone have wanted it to stay that way? No, we want the birds to fly over and drop seeds so the islands become lush, then the animals arrive, then the Polynesians show up, and then Europeans come and build hotels. This is what life does. This is what life should do. Who would want the Earth today, with all its natural wonders, to become a place like Mars? No one sane. So, clearly, it is a good thing to take Mars in the state that it is in and transform it into becoming something as wonderful as the Earth.

So, if you get your way — if the Mars Society is successful, and a program is adopted — let me give you a list of things, and then you tell me when you think they will happen. Starting with a manned mission to Mars.

If we get our way, we can be on Mars in 10 years. We�re closer today, from a technological point of view, to having humans on Mars than we were to having people on the Moon in 1961 when that goal was adopted.

How about a permanent settlement on Mars?

Twenty years.

How about permanent settlement elsewhere in the solar system? And where you think that would be?

Well, you could establish a settlement on the Moon, but it wouldn't be anywhere near as self-sufficient as one on Mars.

Because of the lack of resources there?

Yes. And then similarly in the near asteroids, and eventually the main-belt asteroids. Mars is not the final destination, but it is the direction. It's where we establish our first new branch of humanity in space as a space-faring species. And if we do it, that in itself will develop our capabilities. The first people that go to Mars are going to go in chemically propelled spacecraft. They're going to make the passage in cramped and uncomfortable quarters. The grandchildren of the first Martian immigrants will find it difficult to credit the story that their grandparents tell about how long it took. Because they'll be traveling in fusion-powered spacecraft which can do it in three weeks in great comfort.

Once there is a branch of human civilization on Mars, we have the incentive to develop more of the technologies that will allow us to make the transit routine. Columbus fared the Atlantic in ships that even a generation later no one would have attempted to the Atlantic in. Because until there was transatlantic transportation, there was no need to develop transatlantic-capable ships. But after Columbus came a trans-oceanic civilization and your three-masted sailing ships, your clipper ships, your steamers, your ocean liners, your Boeing 747�s all followed in turn. But the same technology that makes the transfer to Mars routine, will also make it possible for more daring people to take much greater steps. If you can get to Mars in three weeks, you can get to the Moons of Saturn in a few months. Perhaps even attempt interstellar voyages within a few decades.

A few decades from now?

No, a few decades of transit.

Actually, that was the next item on my list. Using the same time line, when we would we venture to the stars?

If we go on this trajectory, if we take the high road, and establish a new branch of human society on Mars, such that 50 years from now there are growing settlements on Mars and we're seeing the beginnings of settlement of the broader solar system — with mining colonies in the outer asteroids and so forth — I think a few decades later, we will see the first exploratory missions beyond the solar system.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 2:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ten years ago most genetic scientists thought that the human genome consisted of 100,000 or more genes.

When the working draft of the genome was published in 2001, scientists were very surprised to learn that the estimate of functioning genes fell between 30,000 and 35,000.

After further analysis, scientists in the U.S., Asia, and Europe announced this week that the estimate of functioning human genes is only 20,000 to 25,000.

The refined sequence reported in the science journal Nature is the most complete so far. It covers 99 percent of the gene-containing parts of the human genome, identifies 99.7 percent of known genes and is 99.9 percent accurate, according to the scientists.

Because it is so complete it will allow scientists to search for the causes of disease and inheritable factors that predispose people to illnesses such as diabetes or cancers.

Scientists also expect it to advance drug development by customizing treatments to genetic profiles.

The refined sequence identifies the birth of 1,183 genes in the last 60-100 million years and the death of about 30 genes in a similar period.

This is good news. If finding the cause of a genetic disease were like finding a needle in a haystack, the size of the haystack is only 25% of the size we thought it was a decade ago.

And if you were holding out hope for hidden utility in junk DNA, that doesn't seem to be the case. Junk DNA seems to be junk - at least in mice.

Mice born without large portions of their 'junk DNA' seem to survive normally. The result contradicts the beliefs of many scientists who have sought to uncover the function of these parts of the genome...

[Barbara Knowles from the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine] cautions that the study doesn't prove that non-coding DNA has no function. "Those mice were alive, that's what we know about them," she says. "We don't know if they have abnormalities that we don't test for..."

"Survival in the laboratory for a generation or two is not the same as successful competition in the wild for millions of years," he [David Haussler of the University of California, Santa Cruz] argues. "Darwinian selection is a tougher test."

The remaining mystery: Why, if junk DNA really is useless, does nature carefully conserve much of this information over millennia?

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 4:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Dispatches from a rapidly changing, rapidly improving world

#20 10/21/04

A question we're often asked — how can the world possibly be "getting better" when the bad news consistently outweighs the good? This is a common misunderstanding. The reality is that good news so far outweighs bad that the former isn't considered noteworthy. A high school student robs a convenience store. Meanwhile, at the school a few blocks away, 400 of his peers are recognized for their academic achievements in an Honors Night ceremony. Which of those two stories would be considered noteworthy? Which would be picked up by the local media? Even if some enlightened media outlet treated the stories equally (which would be a stretch), they aren't equal. The good news is 400 times greater than the bad.

That might not be a bad ratio to work with. Better All The Time isn't about donning rose-colored glasses and pretending that serious problems don't exist. It's about remembering, if only for a moment, that the problems aren't the whole picture, and that — every day, for every problem that we are forced to contemplate — hundreds of positive developments go unheralded. Usually even unnoticed.

So here, for your edification and enjoyment, are ten news stories that show how the future might be better. Each one reflects a development so positive that even the mainstream media couldn't pass it up.

Today's Good Stuff:

Quote of the Day Let the Robot Do It Democracy in Space Death to Take a Dive? Gadget-Busting Gadgets A Tasty Slice of Pi Turning Cancer Off Portable Library of Congress More Chances to Win Big! Mars the Fast Way Alien Fish Neutralized

Quote of the Day

We can no longer pretend that we know so little about how to cure aging that the timing of this advance will be determined overwhelmingly by future serendipitous discoveries: we are in the home straight already.

-- Aubrey de Grey

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Item 1
U.N. Sees Coming Surge in Domestic Robots

GENEVA — The use of robots around the home to mow lawns, vacuum floors, pull guard duty and perform other chores is set to surge sevenfold by 2007, says a new U.N. survey, which credits dropping prices for the robot boom.

By the end of 2007, some 4.1 million domestic robots will likely be in use, the study says. Vacuum cleaners will still make up the majority, but sales of window-washing and pool-cleaning robots are also set to take off, it predicts.

The good news:

Very soon we'll have robots to perform all or most of our household tasks, freeing us to do more work or spend more time on leisure activities. We are really going to come to appreciate these efficient, tireless helpers.

With that in mind:

This announcement would appear to be very much in order:

Five robots from science and science fiction, representing the highest accomplishments in robotic achievement and creativity were inducted into Carnegie Mellon University's Robot Hall of Fame: ASIMO, ASTRO BOY, C-3PO, Shakey, and Robby, the Robot.

Representatives of each robot accepted the honors on behalf of the inductees before an appreciative audience of scientists, researchers, admirers, and friends. The Robot Hall of Fame is an educational outreach activity of the Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science, in partnership with the Robotics Institute and the Entertainment Technology Center.

Moreover...

If robot household servants become commonplace, can flying cars be far behind?

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Item 2
Astronaut to e-Vote from Space

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AP) -- The space station's newest astronaut will cast his ballot in the presidential election from 225 miles (360 kilometers) up, with NASA's help.

Leroy Chiao said Monday that the space agency has worked hard with local and federal authorities to make it possible for him to vote from the orbiting complex, his home until spring.

The good news:

One more normal everyday activity gets added to the list of confirmed activites which have taken place in space.

The downside:

This is very bad news indeed for Darth Vader, the Emperor Ming, and any other galactic overlord hoping to hedge off the advance of democracy into the final frontier.

Anyway: Remember the great Space Race of the 20th century, the one that pitted the USA against the Soviet Union? It wasn't just a race to the moon, it was a contest of the viability of capitalism vs. communism, of freedom vs. oppression. Although that race is long over, the triumph of SpaceShipOne earlier this month was heralded as a reminder of our victory. Astronaut Chiao's vote is another excellent reminder of the same.

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Item 3
The Conquest of Death

The Immortality Institute has published its first book, �The Scientific Conquest of Death: Essays on Infinite Lifespans.�

About the Book:

The book is a collection of essays divided into two parts: Science and Perspectives. The Science half of the book is written by scientists well-known to life extension enthusiasts: Aubrey de Grey, Michael West, Robert Freitas, Ray Kurzweil, and Marvin Minsky to name a few. These authors work in different fields but share a vision of a future where degenerative aging is a choice - and a rather unpopular choice. For most of these scientists, it�s not so much a question of "if," but "when." As we quoted above:

We can no longer pretend that we know so little about how to cure aging that the timing of this advance will be determined overwhelmingly by future serendipitous discoveries: we are in the home straight already.

-Aubrey de Grey

The Issues:

While the authors of the Science section outline potential paths to the goal, the Perspective authors ask whether the goal is worthy. Will we be plagued by overpopulation or lethargy if death is removed from the picture?

The objections [to eternal youth] can be divided into two different categories: practical and philosophical. Practical worries might include: the population problem, the problem of scarce resources and environmental pollution, eternal youth that is only available to the wealthy, the accumulation of too much wealth and power by an elite group of immortals�

A philosophical objection to life extension is the worry that the longer we lived, the less we would value our time. After all, a basic economic principle is that the value of a resource tends to increase the more scarce it is. Would we somehow value each moment less if we lived longer? Another worry that people may have is that a desire for life extension is somehow selfish. Perhaps budding immortals would become really self-centered and narcissistic?

-Marc Geddes

To its credit the Immortality Institute allowed debate on these issues. Several of the Perspective essayists are quite critical of the goal of life extension. But if the authors of the Science portion the book are correct that radical life extension is coming, any philosophical arguments against life extension will ring hollow when it arrives. The Perspectives section is of greater value when it debates how to adapt our society to life extension, rather than whether we should pursue it. The publication of this book is certainly a landmark for the Immortality Institute. The Institute should be proud of this accomplishment. More importantly, this book is a milestone in the quest for life extension. The depth of the bench here, the willingness of respected scientists to contribute to such a book, is an important development. These contributors and others that follow can now investigate the possibility of radical life extension without the fear of being thought unserious. This alone could make all the difference.

Availability:

�The Scientific Conquest of Death: Essays on Infinite Lifespans,� will be available within the next couple of weeks at Amazon.com. Click here for the Table of Contents, introductions for both the Science and Perspective portions of the book, biographical sketches of the authors, and additional resources.

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Item 4
Gadget-Busting Gadgets

The BBC reports:

The infuriating ring of someone else's mobile blights many a night out at the cinema or theatre. France has decided to jam phone signals to allow audiences to enjoy shows in silence - could the UK follow suit?

The good news:

Technology giveth and — in this case — taketh away, annoyance.

More Good News:

Jamming cell phones is just the beginning. What about those annoying TVs blaring away in public places even though no one is watching them?

Altman's key-chain fob was a TV-B-Gone, a new universal remote that turns off almost any television. The device, which looks like an automobile remote, has just one button. When activated, it spends over a minute flashing out 209 different codes to turn off televisions, the most popular brands first.

For Altman, founder of Silicon Valley data-storage maker 3ware, the TV-B-Gone is all about freeing people from the attention-sapping hold of omnipresent television programming. The device is also providing hours of entertainment for its inventor.

And so...

The interminible wait in the airport boarding lounge may not get any shorter, but it just might get quieter.

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Item 5
Amazing Numbers

Mathematician Steven Pincus has made some interesting discoveries when looking at the randomness of the first 280,000 digits of Pi, the square root of 2, and several other irrational numbers. It turns out that some of these numbers have higher levels of entropy (randomness) than others. When Pincus started looking for the same characteristic of entropy in real-world strings of numbers, such as you might get from tracking, say, the stock market, he discovered that the stock market hits its highest level of entropy right before a crash.

The good news:

We're always looking for ways to better understand the workings of the financial markets. Pincus observes that entropy

appears to be a potentially useful marker of system stability, with rapid increases possibly foreshadowing significant changes in a financial variable.

He goes on to conclude:

Independent of whether one chooses technical analysis, fundamental analysis, or model building, a technology to directly quantify subtle changes in serial structure has considerable real-world utility, allowing an edge to be gained... And this applies whether the market is driven by earnings or by perceptions, for both sort- and long-term investments.

The downside:

Expect to hear a lot more about entropy and financial markets in the near future. Along with legitimate analysis, a good deal of mathematical snake oil will no doubt be pushed.

Anyway...

Number are interesting, aren't they?

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Item 6
Gene Switch Can 'Turn off Cancer'

Scientists have shown they can turn off a cancer-causing gene in mice, offering hope of new treatments for cancer patients.

The Stanford University team used a common antibiotic to turn off a gene called Myc, which is known to trigger cancer.

Mice remained cancer free for as long as they took the drug. The drug also turned cancer cells back to normal.

The Good News:

That part about turning cancer cells back to normal is especially exciting. And it is worth noting that this research, which had its focus on liver cancer, may have some positive implications for the treatment of breast, bowel, and prostate cancer, all of which originate in the epithelial cells.

Some of the "normal" cells turned back to a cancerous state after the antibiotic treatment was stopped. This may help to account for the return of cancer which often occurs to those who have received chemotherapy.

Dr Elaine Vickers, science information officer for Cancer Research UK, said: "The Myc gene is known to be overactive in many types of cancer.

"Estimates suggest that the gene may contribute to as many as one in seven cancer deaths.

So we may could be looking at potential treatments that will help one in seven cancer patients. Very encouraging, indeed.

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Item 7
The Ultimate Portable Library

Universal access to all human knowledge could be had for around $260m, a conference about the web's future has been told. The idea of access for all was put forward by visionary Brewster Kahle, who suggested starting by digitally scanning all 26 million books in the US Library of Congress.

The good news:

This is a tremendous idea; and the cost of doing it is only going to go down. The initial scanning work is the only part of the plan that's likely to present much of an expense factor. According to Moore's Law, that $60,000 price tag for storage should be somewhere around $2,000 eight years from now. If the estimate for the robot scanner is accurate, and it follows a less robust drop in price — say halving once every four years — we would be looking at a price tag of around $65 million in the same period of time. Sounds pretty doable.

Prediction:

By 2018, the storage for a copy of the entire Library of Congress online will cost less than $1000; even the cost of creating the archive would be $15 million or less. We could put the entire Library of Congress in every school in America.

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Item 8
New X Prize Sets Sights on Science, Technology and Social Solutions

The X Prize Foundation and the World Technology Network announced today the formation of a joint venture to launch a series of technology incentive prizes to help spur innovation and breakthroughs in a range of scientific arenas. The creation of new X Prize awards follows the success of the twin SpaceShipOne flights that snagged the $10 million Ansari X Prize purse. However, these are focused on other arenas, such as medicine, environment, energy, nanotechnology, and informatics.

The Good News:

Of course, there have always been rich financial rewards associated with helping to bring about the next stage of technological development. But there does seem to be something especially effective about putting a prize in place and encouraging teams to try to be the first to achieve some milestone. As we saw in the example set by the X Prize, there are no losers. Even the teams who don't win the prize stand to reap substantial rewards.

Talk about a win-win.

Get in on the Act:

Bloggers are collecting suggestions on the kinds of accomplishments these prizes may be used to recognize. Got a good idea? Suggest it!

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Item 9
New Propulsion Concept Could Make 90-day Mars Round Trip Possible

A new means of propelling spacecraft being developed at the University of Washington could dramatically cut the time needed for astronauts to travel to and from Mars and could make humans a permanent fixture in space.

In fact, with magnetized-beam plasma propulsion, or mag-beam, quick trips to distant parts of the solar system could become routine, said Robert Winglee, a UW Earth and space sciences professor who is leading the project.

Currently, using conventional technology and adjusting for the orbits of both the Earth and Mars around the sun, it would take astronauts about 2.5 years to travel to Mars, conduct their scientific mission and return.

"We're trying to get to Mars and back in 90 days," Winglee said. "Our philosophy is that, if it's going to take two-and-a-half years, the chances of a successful mission are pretty low."

The good news:

The team that came up with this innovative idea received a paltry $75,000 in funding from NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts. The idea is to push a spaceship equipped with a sail with a mag-beam shot from a space station. This would, in theory, be able to propel the ship to incredible velocities � 26,000 miles per hour. At that speed a trip to Mars would take about 80 days. However, designer Robert Winglee thinks he can do better even than that, with the 90-day round-trip as his goal.

Where might this lead?

Magnetic beam stations could eventually provide a system of highways between the solar system, allowing high-speed travel between the planets and eventual settlements in the asteroid belt.

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Item 10
No More Alien Snakeheads Found in Chicago Harbor

CHICAGO - An anxious search yesterday of a Chicago harbor turned up no more northern snakeheads, a voracious alien fish that can devastate freshwater ecosystems by gobbling up food and native fish.

"This is a good sign that we didn't catch any," said Philip Willink, a fish biologist with Chicago's Field Museum who checked six traps and nets in Burnham Harbor.

The good news:

Chicago fisheries are safe from a disruptive, potentially dangerous predator.

The real reason we ran this story:

Come on, who are we kidding? Alien snakeheads. Awesome!

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Better All The Time is compiled by Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon.

For more good news, try the Good News Broadcast. And there's always Good News Saturdays on Winds of Change. Plus, don't miss the latest round-up of positive developments in Afghanistan by Arthur Chrenkoff. Moreover, if you're tired of just reading the good news, and feel like you're ready to help make some, here's your big chance.

Live to see it!

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 2:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

In the Future...

...lion dentistry will be given the attention it richly deserves.

Futurist: M104 member Robert Hinkley.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 4:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sybil looked in the bag. Then she looked back at Todd.

“Holy shit,” she said. “Are you crazy? Where the hell did you get this kind of money?”

Todd took the bag back and rolled up the top.

“As I said, as acting executive of the Mackey Home, this money is mine to dispense as I see fit. And I see fit to offer it to you.”

She snorted.

“Acting executive? Give me a break. You’re only a kid!”

“Be that as it may,” said Todd. “Circumstances have left something of a void in the management of the home. We formed a committee to take care of things in this interim period. And the committee has empowered me to act.”

“You,” said Sybil. “A boy. What are you -- nine, ten years old?”

“Actually, I’m 13. They’ve had my age wrong all along, and I was never able to tell anyone. But let’s not quibble about nonessential matters.”

“Hey,” said Judy, in spite of herself, “we’re the same age. I didn’t know that.”

Todd nodded.

“It’s true. But we need stick to the business at hand.”

“Right,” she said. “Miss Lufts, please believe what Todd says. I know it sounds crazy, but we really are running the home. For a while longer anyway. And we need your help.”

“There aren’t many adults we could turn to,” said Todd. “Not who could understand. There’s only one who we’re sure we can trust, but she can’t help us. Not right now.”

“Who?” asked Sybil.

Todd cleared his throat.

“Grace’s mother. Jolene. She always did what she could to take care of us. But she’s away at the state home right now. And as much as she wants to help us, she can’t.”

Grace got wide-eyed at this mention of her mother. It was the second time that day. Since coming to the home, I had rarely heard anyone mention Jolene. I knew that Grace had a picture of her hanging on her wall. And it seemed like…somebody would bring her up once in a great while. Or Grace would ask about her. Or something. It seems that there was some vague notion that Grace would one day go to the state home and visit her mother. It was all a little fuzzy. I figured Todd wouldn’t mention Jolene without a good reason, and I knew he wouldn’t say anything as stupid as what Miss Baker had said earlier that day about Grace seeing her mother soon.

But I could also see how disturbing this all was for Grace. I took her hand in mine.

Sybil looked at Grace. I thought she was maybe going to cry when she first saw the little girl and realized who she was. She looked so upset. And now she kind of looked that way again. But as I was to learn over the years, Sybil didn’t like to give herself over to messy, soft emotions.

“It’s funny you mention Jolene. I think she was the smartest girl I ever met. And now I listen to the two of you talk…don’t they have any kids in that home who actually belong there?”

Judy couldn’t help herself. She giggled.

“We all belong there,” said Todd. “All except Grace. But that’s a long story we’ll have to tell you about some other time. We don’t have much time. We need your help now. We’re perfectly willing to pay you for helping us out. But this isn’t really about the money.”

Sybil looked at him skeptically.

“I think you’ll help us for Jolene’s sake. I think you’ll do for us what she would, but can’t.”

“Yeah?” said Sybil. “what makes you think so?”

Todd reached into his pocket and pulled out a worn gray envelope.

“Oh, Jesus,” said Sybil.

She made a move like she was going to grab the letter out of Todd’s hand, and then thought better of it. Todd opened the letter. There were two pages. He scanned the second page.

“Here we are,” he said. “…and even though saying I’m sorry isn’t enough, I want you to know that I am truly sorry. I never wanted anything but the best for Jolene and I still want that now. What happened to her…”

He skipped a bit, mindful of Grace’s presence.

“…and I will do anything I can to help her at any time. Please accept my apology and my offer to help. I hope to hear back from you very soon.”

Todd put the letter down and looked Sybil directly in the eye.

“Sincerely, Sybil Lufts,” he said.

No one said anything for a while.

“So,” said Todd, “did you mean it or not?”

Sybil sighed. She reached in her purse and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. I noticed that her hand was shaking as she lit one.

“Where did you get that?” she asked.

“It was well hidden,” said Todd. “I don’t think anyone has seen it for a while.”

Sybil took a long draw off her cigarette. Grace was fascinated. I don’t think she’d ever seen anyone smoke before. Sybil shook her head as she exhaled.

“So tell me what you want.”

Todd outlined the plan for her. She would go home and gather whatever belongings she wanted to take with her. In two hours, she would meet me at a street corner a few blocks from the home. (It was best, Todd reasoned, to avoid having Sybil seen anywhere near the home.) I would have the money with me along with my personal belongings. Plus I would have a sealed envelope containing additional instructions. She would take me with her out of town. Preferably out of state. Todd suggested that Florida might be a good idea, but emphasized that neither he nor any of the rest of them wanted to know where she was going.

“If we don’t know, we can’t tell,” he said.

The instructions that I carried with me were not to be opened for five years. These were directions for how and when Sybil and I would meet back up with them. If the timing was not right on either end, the instructions also included contingency plans. The $8000 (minus the $30 Todd had ended up lavishing on the waitress at the all-night diner) was a down payment. Sybil would be compensated to the tune of $25,000 per year for each year she took care of me. The amount would be increased 3% per year should we have to resort to one of the contingency plans.

None of us knew how outrageous these sums of money were, but Sybil obviously did. She looked skeptical when Todd mentioned the $25,000. When he told her about the 3%, she laughed out loud.

“You kids kill me,” she said. “Where do you think you’re going to get your hands on that kind of money?”

Todd started to answer, but Judy cut in.

“Well, not to brag or anything,” she said. “But we got $8,000 just today and we didn’t even have to try very hard. If we had a week or so to plan, we would probably have paid you the full amount in advance.”

Sybil looked like she was about to make a sarcastic remark, but she stopped herself. She looked at the bag full of cash again, seeming to consider what it implied about Todd and Judy (and the rest of us) and what we might be capable of.

She glanced at her watch.

“If I don’t go in right now, I’m going to be late for work,” she said.

“Of course, you’ll have to quit your job,” said Todd.

“Of course,” she said bitterly. “I’ll have to drop everything and just run out of town like a criminal, which I probably will be if I accept your money.”

“I don’t mean to be insensitive,” said Todd. “But to be perfectly frank, it doesn’t look like you’ll be leaving that much behind.”

He glanced towards the backdoor of the strip club as he said it. He continued before she could respond.

“You don’t think anybody’s going to notice that I’m gone?”

“Let me be very frank,’ said Todd. “With everything else that’s taking place, I doubt that your disappearance will get much attention. If any.”

“And you don’t care if it means that I just have to drop everything? Leave everything I have behind?”

“We can sympathize with that,” said Judy. “We’re all going to lose our home, too. But none of us get any say in where we’re going next. Unlike you.”

Sybil took another drag off her cigarette and then threw it down, still lit, in the gravel.

“Why?” she said. She looked at me. “Why do you want me to take this kid? Wouldn’t it make more sense for me to take Grace?”

I remembered the debate earlier this morning that Judy, Todd, and Lucinda had had about whether Grace should go with us. Todd and Judy knew that Grace’s presence would carry a lot of weight with both of the people we were planning on talking to, but Lucinda feared the discussions she would be subjected to. Like this one.

“No,” said Todd. “We’re going to keep Grace with us for as long as we can. That isn’t a negotiable point. She’s going to be placed with a family soon. I’ve read the papers at the home. They’ve been working on it for a long time.”

“What?” said Grace. “What family? I don’t want to. I want to stay with Lucinda.”

“Never mind that for now,” said Judy. “We’ll talk about it later.”

“No,” said Grace. “I won’t go. And I don’t want Corey to go either.”

She began to cry. I put my arm around her shoulder, but she broke free. She stood off to one side, wailing.

Judy glared at Sybil

“Now look what you’ve done,” she said.

It looked to me as though the blame really belonged to Todd, but I wasn’t going to say anything. Especially since I couldn’t talk.

“Grace,” said Todd, his voice quiet and reassuring, “you can’t do this. Not now. Do you remember what we talked about this morning?”

She continued to wail.

“Corey is in danger. We’re the only ones who can keep him safe. Just us and this lady. Everything is going to change for a while. But someday soon, we’ll get things back the way they’re supposed to be. You’re going to have to go live with a new family, and it’s going to be fine. They would never…I mean we…”

Todd struggled to figure out who it was he was talking about. The same question occurred to me: who exactly was trying to find Grace a family? One of our missing persons, it seemed.

“We would never send you anyplace that wasn’t great. But we have to talk about that later. If Corey goes away with Miss Lufts, then we’ll see him again some day. We have a plan. It’ll be okay. But if he doesn’t, other people are going to take him away and then we don’t know when we’ll ever get to see him again.”

I could see now what Todd was doing. He wasn’t explaining my situation to Grace, he was explaining it to Sybil. He had manufactured the entire scene, including Grace’s crying, just to be able to get the message across the way he wanted to. It struck me that he was being a little hard on Grace, using her fears like that, but after the bank and the diner, I wasn’t about to question Todd’s rhetorical strategies. He apparently knew what he was doing.

Grace grew quiet. She looked up at Todd, tears streaming down her face.

“Really?” she said.

“Really.”

“But who wants to take Corey away?”

“Government people,” said Judy. “People who don’t understand.”

“Are they mad at him?” said Grace. “Because of the mountain? But we have to tell them that it wasn’t just Corey. It was all of us!”

She stopped talking, realizing the indiscretion about a half second after it occurred to the rest of us. I wasn’t sure whether this was part of Todd’s plan or not. But I guess it must have been.

All eyes turned to Sybil. She was looking from one of us to the other, her mouth wide open.

“Hold it,” she said. “Bullshit. Do you meant to tell me that this kid…that that thing that happened…”

“The Phenomenon,” said Todd.

Sybil’s eyes grew wide. She laughed strangely.

“Right, the phenomenon…”

She turned instinctively towards the mountain, but it was blocked by the Cheri Lounge. She studied the crumbling brick building for a moment, anyway. She turned back to Todd.

“You kids did that?” she said.

“We didn’t mean to,” said Grace. “It was an accident!”

Sybil looked at me for a long while.

“You did it,” she said.

I nodded.

There was no good reason for her to believe that this was actually the case. But then, she didn’t have to believe. Somehow she seemed to just know it. She let out a long sigh which ended in a kind of shudder. She turned to Judy.

“And now you want me to run away with him. If I take you up on this deal, what else is he going to do?”

“We don’t know. Nothing bad.”

This was more or less a lie. Earlier that day, Judy had said that she didn’t think it was a good idea to ask me to try to bring about any more changes. What she didn’t know at the time was that I couldn’t. For all any of them knew right then, I might fall asleep that night and dream up something much worse than the ants. Or even than the Remover version of myself. I had no way of telling them what Angela had told me -- that I had lost the my lucid-dreaming ability, the means by which I had previously communicated with them and shaped the world into forms I liked better.

Sybil turned to me again.

“Listen, kid. Corey. I don’t need any of this shit, okay?”

I nodded.

“I don’t go in for all this spooky stuff. If I go along with this deal, you have to make me a promise that you won’t pull any more stunts like that. Do you understand?”

I nodded again.

“I mean it, kid. No spooky stuff, Do you promise?”

I nodded for the third time.

“You can’t talk, can you?”

I shook my head.

“Well…” she said. She seemed to be chewing on the implications. Not just my inability to speak or my role in causing the Phenomenon. All of it.

“Okay, then,” she said after a moment. She turned back to Todd.

“All right, ” she said. “Let me just be sure I’ve got this straight. You want to pay me $8,000 to leave town with some mute, miracle-working kid that the government’s after. Right?”

“Nobody is looking for Corey,” said Todd. “Not yet, anyway.”

“And they may never,” said Judy, “if we get him out of here immediately.”

“And as I already explained,” Todd added, “the eight thousand is a just a down payment.”

“Right,” said Sybil. “A down payment…” She took one last look at her wristwatch and at the door to her place of employment. “Twenty-five thousand a year. I know.”

“You’re going to help us, aren’t you?” said Grace.

Sybil gave Grace a very faint smile.

“Your friends here never doubted it. It’s like…Todd says -- it’s what your mom would do if she were here.”

She was right. After he read the letter, Todd was sure that Sybil would help. What he didn’t tell her was that he wasn’t 100% sure that she was the right person to go to. In addition to the instructions he was to give to Sybil, there was another set that he gave to me. What to do if Sybil “proved unreliable” as he put it. It wasn’t much of a fallback plan. He gave me Dr. MacHale’s telephone number, which I was to present to the authorities when I turned myself in. Only as a last resort.

Sybil walked over and picked Grace up, giving her a long hug. My little friend didn’t ordinarily much care for this sort of thing -- and she had never seen many strangers -- but she didn’t protest. After a moment, Sybil set her down and started towards her car.

“It was nice meeting you kids,” she said, over her shoulder. She stopped by the car, turned, and looked straight at me.

“I’ll see you in a couple of hours,” she said.

Then she drove away.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 2:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Randall Parker has the details on a proposed method of getting a spacecraft to Mars (and back) in 90 days using magnetic beam plasma propulsion. (Also see Stephen's post on the subject, below.) In the proposed design, the beam would be able to push a spaceship along by means of a sail at a consistent rate of about 26,000 miles per hour. At that rate, it would take a little less than 80 days to get to Mars. Not too shabby when you consider that, 125 years ago, 80 days was considered a remarkable speed just for doing a single lap around the Earth. However, designer Robert Winglee thinks he can do better even than that, with the 90-day round-trip as his goal.

Of course, the real advantage here isn't the speed. We have rockets that push payloads to that kind of speed all the time. The advantage is that the magnetic beam would be able to push the spacecraft in a straight line from point A to point B. When we send a probe to Mars, it doesn't travel in a straight line. It would take way to much rocket fuel to do that. So we put the probe into an orbit around the sun that eventually intersects with Mars' own orbit of the sun, as shown below. From a rocket fuel standpoint, this is an extremely efficient and economic way to go. But from a time standpoint, it is costly. The inner circle, the orbit of Earth, takes one year to complete. (In fact, each one of those orbits is what a year is. But of course, we all knew that.) The outer circle, the orbit of Mars, takes almost two years to complete. As you can see, the trajectory followed by a probe launched from Earth is somewhere between the two in duration. Call it 18 months.

Granted, this is a vast oversimplification. Estimates on how long a manned flight to Mars would take using the conventional approach range from a few months to a couple of years. But you get the idea. And contrast that approach to Mars with the approach that the proposed technology will allow:

Quite a bit shorter of a trip, isn't it?

Of course, Mars isn't the only place to go in the solar system. Closer to home, a magnetic beam projector in low Earth orbit could push a spaceship to the moon in about ten hours. Interestingly, at that rate, if you took the space elevator up from Earth, the trip from Earth to orbit would take quite a bit longer than the trip from Earth orbit to the moon. Over longer distances, the advantages of the magnetic beam approach seem to dissipate. According to my (admittedly highly suspect) calculations, the magnetic beam that gets us to Mars in 80 days could get us to Neptune in about 12 years.

That is one big solar system we live in, folks.

Unless I'm mistaken, it also takes us about 12 years to get to Neptune using the old orbital intersection approach. We will have to crank up the output of the magnetic beam projector — which, as noted above, is exactly what Winglee intends to do — before we see any real advantage over those kinds of distances.

In addition to making travel within the solar system much less expensive and more practical, magnetic beam propulsion technology can serve as a precursor to solar sail technology. Frank Tipler has proposed the idea of focusing the energy of the sun into a laser beam which we could then use to launch a very small (you could hold it in your hand) interstellar probe. According to Tipler, such a probe could be accelerated to about .9c (90% of the speed of light) within about a month and a half. That means that we could have it to Alpha Centauri in less than five years, with information coming back in less than 10. Contrast that with 12 years to get to Neptune on a magnetic beam. Now we're talking speed.

(Not that AC that would necessarily be our first target; I think Kathy would agree that Epsilon Eridani would make an excellent choice.)

But wait. How much interstellar exploration could we really get done using such a tiny probe? Well, that's where nanotechnology comes in.

See how all this stuff fits together?

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The concept of solar sails has been around awhile. But the idea of providing our own "wind" is newer. This morning Wired reported that a University of Washington team is working on magnetized-beam plasma propulsion. This group just received $75,000 in funding from NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts.

[What's the matter guys? Feel the private sector breathing down your neck? � ed.]

The idea is to push a spaceship equipped with a sail with a mag-beam shot from a space station. This would, in theory, be able to propel the ship to incredible velocities � 26,000 miles per hour. At that speed a trip to Mars and back again would take about three months.

Once shot off into space, onboard propulsion units would provide a spacecraft some power for minor flight corrections, but not enough to decelerate, which would be handled by a plasma station orbiting the destination.

Not having to carry the mass of the fuel required for acceleration and deceleration within the craft is a big advantage here. Going to Mars by traditional rocketry would be very slow, 2.6 years for a round trip, and prohibitively costly.

Obviously there are a lot of questions to answer. Presumably the plasma stations will have to deal with Newtonian physics, and this gun would have quite a kick. In order to keep from having to compensate, it might be best if it was located on a large and, relatively, unmovable object such as the Moon.

Also, does a mag-beam have the range to accelerate and decelerate a craft at a sufficient distance? Nobody knows yet.

And a commentor at FuturePundit thought of another problem:

How accurate does the incoming craft's trajectory have to be to balance perfectly on the decelerating beam? Think about it. You're essentially pushing against a huge amount of inertia with a magnet - which is damn slippery. Unlesss I'm misunderstanding something it seems like the decelerator would have to be absolutely perfectly over the craft's center of gravity to not push it off course. It would be like decelerating a bullet without deflecting the bullet.

My guess is that engineers will address these issues in time. And I'm glad that NASA is thinking beyond the Shuttle.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 8:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The death of one of America's space pioneers got lost in the news of SpaceShipOne's triumph.:

HOUSTON (Reuters) - The last of the seven Project Mercury astronauts who pioneered U.S. space exploration in the 1960s remembered one of their own as a fearless pilot with the "right stuff" in an emotional memorial ceremony on Friday for Gordon Cooper.

"Gordo has scrambled, he's out there ahead of us with Gus and Al and Deke, and I'm sure we'll all rendezvous out there someday," [former astronaut and US Senator John Glenn] said, referring to late Mercury astronauts Gus Grissom, Alan Shephard and Deke Slayton.

Cooper was part of two important missions. As part of Project Mercury, his Faith 7 (launch shown above) capsule completed 22 orbits of the Earth. In 1965, he flew on Gemini 5, which orbited the Earth for eight days, setting a new record for space flight duration.

Thanks, Gordo. We'll miss you.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 9:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When I heard this summer that the Immortality Institute was publishing its first book, The Scientific Conquest of Death: Essays on Infinite Lifespans, I asked for an advanced copy to review for the Speculist.

I was surprised and honored when Bruce Klein and Reason from FightAging emailed me a working draft. This was a valuable blog-lesson for me: ask and you shall (sometimes) receive.

I'm happy to report that the book is a complete success.

This book is a collection of essays divided into two parts: Science and Perspectives. The Science half of the book is written by scientists well-known to life extension enthusiasts: Aubrey de Grey, Michael West, Robert Freitas, Ray Kurzweil, and Marvin Minsky to name a few.

These authors work in different fields but share a vision of a future where degenerative aging is a choice - and a rather unpopular choice. For most of these scientists, it's not so much a question of "if," but "when:"

We can no longer pretend that we know so little about how to cure aging that the timing of this advance will be determined overwhelmingly by future serendipitous discoveries: we are in the home straight already.

-Aubrey de Grey

While I found the Perspectives half of the book a little slower going, ultimately it may prove to be more important than the first half.

While the authors of the Science section outline potential paths to the goal, the Perspective authors ask whether the goal is worthy. Will we be plagued by overpopulation or lethargy if death is removed from the picture?

The objections [to eternal youth] can be divided into two different categories: practical and philosophical. Practical worries might include: the population problem, the problem of scarce resources and environmental pollution, eternal youth that is only available to the wealthy, the accumulation of too much wealth and power by an elite group of immortals�

A philosophical objection to life extension is the worry that the longer we lived, the less we would value our time. After all, a basic economic principle is that the value of a resource tends to increase the more scarce it is. Would we somehow value each moment less if we lived longer? Another worry that people may have is that a desire for life extension is somehow selfish. Perhaps budding immortals would become really self-centered and narcissistic?

-Marc Geddes

To its credit the Immortality Institute allowed debate on these issues. Several of the Perspective essayists are quite critical of the goal of life extension.

But if the authors of the Science portion the book are correct that radical life extension is coming, any philosophical arguments against life extension will ring hollow when it arrives. The Perspectives section is of greater value when it debates how to adapt our society to life extension, rather than whether we should pursue it.

The publication of this book is certainly a landmark for the Immortality Institute. The Institute should be proud of this accomplishment. More importantly, this book is a milestone in the quest for life extension. The depth of the bench here, the willingness of respected scientists to contribute to such a book, is an important development.

These contributors and others that follow can now investigate the possibility of radical life extension without the fear of being thought unserious. This alone could make all the difference.

The Scientific Conquest of Death: Essays on Infinite Lifespans, will be available within the next couple of weeks at Amazon.com.

Click here for the Table of Contents, introductions for both the Science and Perspective portions of the book, biographical sketches of the authors, and additional resources.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 10:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (1)

Okay, granted, nobody watches the Late Late Show ever since Craig Kilborn left and the thing has been "guest-hosted" by an incredible string of has-beens, wannabes, and trained chimps. But tonight, actor Ben Browder will be appearing, no doubt talking about FarScape: The Peacekeeper Wars which debuts on Sci-Fi this coming Sunday.

So if you're up, check it out. And be sure to tune in on Sunday for the return of the best show on TV.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 2:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Wired Magazine ran a recent piece on K. Eric Drexler, whose relationship to the field of nanotechnology is difficult to characterize — Dean? Founder? — as The Incredible Shrinking Man. There is no question that Drexler's work has been misrepresented and misunderstood, that the term "nanotechnology" has been co-opted by others who then have the audacity to paint Drexler as some kind of outsider or Pariah in the field, or that there is a strong movement within both the business community and the ever-seeking-funding research community to eliminate what Glenn Reynolds has described as the spooky side nanotechnology. Drexler's opponent in the Great Assembler Debate, Dr. Richard Smalley, the Nobel laureate responsible for the discovery of buckyballs, even went so far as to accuse Drexler of frightening the children with his predictions of nano-weapons and grey goo. Spooky, indeed.

It was therefore all the more exciting to see the news that Dr. Peter Diamandis, the Chairman of the X PRIZE Foundation, is going to head up the Foresight Institute's Feynman Grand Prize Steering Committee. The Foresight Institute is an organization founded by Drexler to help prepare the world for the coming age of molecular manufacturing. The institute annually awards Feynman Prizes to major contributors in the field; the grand prize is a $250,000 cash award which will go to the first individual or team to construct a rudimentary nano-scale computer and robotic arm. Diamandis' presence on the committee for the Feynman Grand Prize indicates that the goals of the Foresight Institute are no more "fringe" than were those of the X Prize committee. While the Nano Business Alliance continues to insist that term "nanotechnology" applied only to stain resistant pants and other vital breakthroughs, some researcher or team of researchers is one day soon going to provide Drexler the ulitmate vindication, and open up a new world even more strange and wonderful than the one promised by the triumph of SpaceShipOne.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I like those public service messages that Cingular runs in movie theatres featuring Mr. Inconsiderate Cellphone Man. The guy is so obnxoious that there's almost something likeable about him. However, there is nothing admirable about his mobile telephony habits. Well it looks as though nos amis in France have done something to end Mr Inconsiderate's reign of terror, and the UK is thinking about doing the same:

The infuriating ring of someone else's mobile blights many a night out at the cinema or theatre. France has decided to jam phone signals to allow audiences to enjoy shows in silence - could the UK follow suit?

I doubt that we'll see anything like this in the US. The Bill of Rights makes it darn difficult to curb obnxoxious behavior. I'm not saying that jamming phone signals in movie theatres is a free-speech issue. Beats me if it is. I'm saying it would almost certainly be opposed on those grounds.

Plus, in my limited recent movie-going experience in suburban Denver, I haven't observed much of a cell-phone problem in the US. Now if they had had this technology a few years ago in Malaysia...

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 8:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the Future...

...biologists will learn how to stop worrying and embrace change.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This is huge:

The X Prize Foundation and the World Technology Network announced today the formation of a joint venture to launch a series of technology incentive prizes to help spur innovation and breakthroughs in a range of scientific arenas. The creation of new X Prize awards follows the success of the twin SpaceShipOne flights that snagged the $10 million Ansari X Prize purse. However, these are focused on other arenas, such as medicine, environment, energy, nanotechnology, and informatics.

FuturePundit has more details, including a handy breakdown of some of the proposed prizes:

1. Transportation: Demonstration of a 4-seat vehicle able to achieve 200 miles per gallon in a cross country race

2. Nanotechnology: Construction of a pre-determined molecule by an assembler

3. Aging deceleration: Extension of mammal life, or demonstrated evidence of aging reversal

4. Education: Demonstration of a self-sufficient education facility able to operate independently and educate villagers anywhere on the planet

Randall Parker comments:

The X Prize success demonstrates that prize money can be a very effective tool for accelerating the advance of science and technology. I favor aging research prizes aimed at the development of effective rejuvenation treatments most of all. But another class of prizes that deserves support are prizes for achievements in developing new energy technologies. What would be useful milestones in the development of better energy technologies? Keep in mind that ideal milestones should be achievable by fairly small teams of engineers and scientists.

Of course, there have always been rich financial rewards associated with helping to bring about the next stage of technological development. But there does seem to be something especially effective about putting a prize in place and encouraging teams to try to be the first to achieve some milestone. As we saw in the example set by the X Prize, there are no losers. Even the teams who don't win the prize stand to reap substantial rewards.

Randall is taking suggestions for additional competitions. I have a few thoughts:

1. A prize for the first team to create a computer that passes the Turing Test.
2. Related to one of Randall's ideas, a prize for demonstrating a practical means of extracting hydrogen from the atmosphere and/or the development of a hydrogen fuel cell.
3. A prize for achieving some specific accomplishment in robotics. Say, building a robot that can iron a shirt.
4. Related to an item reported earlier this week, a prize for demonstrating a low-cost automated means of scanning millions of books.

What else?

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sybil first met Corey in the alley behind the Cheri Lounge, where she had been working for a couple of years. It was the same day the Phenomenon occurred; the entire state was in an uproar. There was speculation that the overnight appearance of a city on the mountain signaled the apocalypse, or an alien invasion, or a massive Soviet incursion along completely unexpected lines. There were rumors that Idaho Springs, the old mining town at the base of Mount Evans, was being sealed off and would likely be evacuated. She had heard on the news that Golden and Boulder (and possibly even Denver itself) might be evacuated.

No mention of Greenwood.

In such a state of uncertainty, many businesses failed to open that day. Some people were evacuating themselves ahead of any official government decision. Others were trying to make their way into the mountains to see what was happening. But Sybil doubted any of this would affect the operation of the Cheri Lounge. And if it did, it might actually be good for business. The Lounge’s clientele weren’t a particularly philosophical bunch. If the world ended, most of them would just go ahead and die without giving the matter too much thought. So the notion that the world might be ending probably wouldn’t alter their plans that much — except to the extent that a few of them might get the idea that they ought to go ahead and see a naked woman now rather than wait until later.

She would usually get to the joint about an hour before she had to go on, just enough time to do her hair and makeup and get into her first costume, and possibly catch up on a little gossip from the other girls. She had a repertoire of three different routines. She always opened with the one she called the Old Fashioned. She would start out wearing a blue checkered dress with a big blue bow in her hair. In this initial get-up, she thought she looked something like little Bo Peep. The dress would fall away after a while to reveal a white slip. After the slip came gold panties and matching tassels, which she could get to spinning pretty well. In the end, she would be down to just a G-string with the bow still in her hair. The bow was always the last to go. It was a traditional striptease. So traditional, in fact, that the other girls said it was corny and an embarrassment. The slip, the tassels — that sort of thing had gone out of style in the sixties. The age of the lap-dance was dawning.

But the Cheri’s clientele didn’t have any aesthetic qualms with Sybil’s act; quite the contrary, in fact. So she kept at it.

She parked her car in the tiny lot behind the bar and was on her way in when somebody called her name. She turned to see who it was without slowing down. In her line of work, being recognized out in public could be dangerous in a lot of different ways. And she hated the poorly-lighted parking lot, which the performers had to share with the patrons. She drew her handbag in a little closer and felt for the comforting outline of a metal cylinder within: her spray can of mace. She hadn’t had to use it to date, but was ready any time she needed to.

Sybil stopped when she saw who it was that had called her name. A kid. One of four.

What the hell?

“Sybil?” the little black girl said again. “Sybil Lufts?”

The children walked over to her from where they were standing.

“Who wants to know?” she asked.

“I’m Judy,” said the girl. “And this is Grace. Grace is Jolene’s daughter.”

Sybil’s eyes widened.

She had heard that Jolene had been sent to the state home. She often thought that she should go see her there, but she hadn’t gotten around to doing it so far. Something told her that she probably never would. She was afraid to go, afraid of what she would see. Afraid of the part she had played in causing it.

Though she had thought about Jolene many times over the years, Sybil never once gave a thought to her kid. She knew somehow that Jolene had had a girl, and she seemed also to be aware that the child was being raised in the home. And now here she was. Grace, the girl had said. Sybil looked at the little girl. Blonde hair, blue eyes. She was beautiful, but she looked just like him.

Donny.

The father.

Son of a bitch.

She remembered the last time she saw him. They were in Albuquerque, the three of them living in a tiny apartment. Sybil had started her career a few weeks before — it was all Donny’s idea — and she was dancing four nights a week in a place so sleazy that it made the Cheri Lounge look like Radio City Music Hall. She came home early from work one night, it had been slow, and tried to kill Donny. And she was pretty sure that she would have killed him, too, if he hadn’t left when he did.

Sybil was seventeen at the time. It hadn’t taken long to shatter her delusions about being in love and running away to see the world.

So many sweet promises.

She met Donny at the ceramic factory, where she worked part time because her mother needed the money, and also to fulfill one of the requirements at the vocational school. He was a good-looking guy: tall, blond hair, well-muscled with just a little paunch . He had played football in high school, but apparently not well enough to get him out of Greenwood. His uncle owned the factory and gave him his on-again, off-again job there as security guard.

Sybil worked the night shift, four to midnight. There was no graveyard shift. Donny, or whoever else might be serving as night watchman, would hold down the fort from midnight to eight, when the day shift came on. Donny stopped by the factory early one evening, probably to ask his uncle for a salary advance or a loan, and saw Sybil applying glaze to some birdbaths. They immediately caught each other’s eye and began to talk. Within a few days, Donny had readjusted his work schedule so that it aligned with Sybil’s, and he came in early every night. Before long, she was also staying late most nights.

It was in those early mornings together, the place vast and dark and entirely abandoned except for the two of them, that they began to develop their plans. Sometimes they talked about them before the sex, but more often after — lying together on a blanket that Donny had spread out on the shop floor, work tables and machinery all around them.

The plans went something like this: they would take Donny’s car and what money Sybil could put together and get the hell out of Greenwood. They would just drive: maybe head into the mountains, maybe back east. They would find a place where they could make a fresh start. They would get a place; they would work; they would be together.

Looking back, Sybil realized that it was an astoundingly vague plan. And ridiculous as well. Why did they need to get out of Greenwood? Could she honestly have believed at the time that it was the town that was somehow holding Donny back? Had she been that naïve? Once out from under Greenwood’s shadow, the plan was, he would immediately receive the respect and recognition that he deserved. A high-paying job (doing what?) would inevitably follow. Not that the plan needed to be in any wise realistic. It was only later that Sybil realized that Donny never had any intention of acting on it. He already had everything he needed: a job in which he was paid to do nothing and a naïve teenage girl who would put out and who believed his bullshit. The plan was just there as a kind of window-dressing for their relationship, adding a much-needed element of romance — if no respectability — to their regular meetings.

Not that Sybil felt any shame or remorse over those nights on the shop floor. She was a kid, he was a manipulating creep and, besides, what was a girl with raging hormones supposed to do? Anyway, she saved all her shame and remorse for what came later. She needed all she had for that.

Although the plan was never meant to be acted upon, one night circumstances changed. In the wee hours of a rainy Thursday morning, Donny’s uncle Ned paid an unexpected visit to the factory. The rain covered over the sound of his car approaching and his entering the factory. Donny and Sybil had no idea he was there until he was there, right there, shining a flashlight on their intimacy.

They were both fired on the spot. Moreover, Uncle Ned made it clear to Sybil that the vocational school would receive a full report of the incident. If she had been in state of mind that allowed her to pay attention to things, rather than to file them away only to realize their significance much later, she might have picked up on Ned’s words to his errant nephew:

“Damn it, Donny, you’ve been warned about this. Plenty of times. That’s it. You’re fired.”

Plenty of times.

Later, she would understand that there was no excuse for what happened next. A naïve girl, even a stupid girl — even a stupid girl with hormones who’s just lost her job and who is about to be kicked out of school — ought to be able to pick up on the significance of the words plenty of times. But she had refused to see it at the time. She was actually thrilled at the way things turned out. As she saw it, it left them no choice. They would have to put their plan into action.

They talked about it over a breakfast at the all-night diner. Donny seemed hesitant at first, but the more they talked about it, the more the idea grew on him. They formulated a plan: he would take her home, she would gather a few belongings, and they would meet back at the Diner at six the following evening.

He dropped her off at her house and drove away. She was quietly working the key in the deadbolt — it would squeak sometimes if you didn’t work it just right, not that her mother was likely to hear anything — when she realized that she wasn’t alone on the dark porch. She hadn’t noticed at first, because the porch light was burned out and she wasn’t looking for anybody anyway, but there was somebody lying on the decrepit metal glider.

Sybil was startled, but not frightened. She knew who it was. Even in this light, Jolene’s horrible pink coat was unmistakable. What in the world was she doing there? As quietly as she could, Sybil nudged her friend awake. It turned out that she wasn’t asleep, anyway. She was awake and sobbing.

Sybil and Jolene had been friends from the day Jolene first came to the vocational school. Their friendship had begun with a contrarian impulse on Sybil’s part. Sybil wasn’t exactly a popular girl at the school, but she wasn’t unpopular, either. She had a few friends, all of whom fell in line with the notion that a retarded girl from the retarded home was a good target for ridicule and teasing. This idea offended Sybil. They wanted to make Jolene an outcast, but that was absurd. Weren’t they all just outcasts from the real high school? So she befriended Jolene: sitting with her in every class they had together and always making a point of talking to her when she met her in the hall.

It didn’t take long for Sybil’s act of defiance to grow into true friendship. There was something so innocent about Jolene. She didn’t know anything about anything: music, TV shows, meeting guys. She never cussed, had never had a cigarette, certainly had never had a drink, had never made out. She was a blank slate. She had a little bit of a religious side to her — was always talking about the Bible and stuff — but Sybil was tolerant enough to overlook that.

Before long, the girls began to open up to each other; pretty soon they could tell each other anything. Sybil learned all about the home and the other kids there and the people who ran it. Jolene got an earful on Sybil’s fat, drunken mother and long-absent father. And she was the only person who knew about her and Donny.

Sybil slowly managed Jolene’s entry into her wider circle of friends. After the initial novelty of having a “retarded” kid around — which label didn’t last long, even behind her back, once they got to know her — Jolene had become part of the gang. In a moment of trouble, Jolene might have turned to any of four or five different girls for help. But Sybil was her first friend, her best friend, so it was no real surprise that — whatever the hell it was that was going on — Jolene had shown up on her front porch.

Sybil helped her friend up and asked her what was wrong. The girl began to cry in earnest, making far too much noise (not that anything was likely to arouse Sybil’s mom) and sputtering something about being in trouble at the home and not being able to go back there. Sybil got her into the house and up the stairs to her room where they could talk more easily. She fetched Jolene a Coke from the kitchen, which the poor kid still looked at as some kind of special treat, and told her to give her the whole story, from the beginning.

It took a long while to get it out of her, and even then it made no sense.

Such a fuss over a stupid flag? Who could give a shit?

But as she eased her friend into bed and reflected on everything that had transpired that night, Sybil had an inspiration. Her friend needed help, and she was in a position to provide it. It may have been stupid to think that the town of Greenwood was somehow holding Donny back, but Jolene was a different matter. In the time that they had known each other, Sybil had become convinced that a terrible mistake was made that day Jolene got dropped off at that home for retarded kids. She didn’t belong there. She was smarter than Sybil; she was smarter than any of the other kids in the vocational school. And now Jolene was convinced that they were about to send her off to the state home. But even if she was wrong and this whole thing was a big misunderstanding — which Sybil thought must be the case; surely they wouldn’t kick her out for dropping a flag; what were they, Nazis? — sooner or later, she was going to end up in the state home. That much was certain. That’s where all the kids from the Mackey home ended up.

Sybil had checked this fact herself.

So it wasn’t that hard a decision to make. Jolene would come with them. She needed a fresh start more than either Sybil or Donny did. And besides, it would be fun to have a friend along. She was still excited at the prospect of running off with Donny, but maybe a little scared now that she had a minute to think about it.

She called Donny the next morning and asked him if it would be okay if she brought her friend with them. There was something strange about Donny’s voice. At first he seemed not to remember that they had even planned to leave. Then he remembered, but he didn’t want Sybil to bring her friend. Then he seemed to reconsider, and he had all kinds of questions about Jolene, asking for details on what she looked like more than once. This ought to have struck Sybil as being odd, but she just didn’t think about it.

He told her that they wouldn’t be able to leave until the following day because he needed to get some work done on his car. Could she lend him some money? He would drop by that afternoon — while Sybil’s mother was at work — to get it. He did come by that day and asked for the money. And he insisted on meeting Jolene. Sybil went upstairs and got her, although she was shy about meeting new people. As soon as Donny saw her, the matter was settled.

Jolene would come with them.

After Donny left, Sybil sat down with Jolene and told her what they had in mind to do. Jolene began to cry. She asked whether she would be able to come back and see her friends again. Sybil told her that she didn’t think she would, not for a long while. But that she also wouldn’t be able to do that if they sent her off to the state home. Then she painted a picture for her of how it would be, the three of them off in a new place, free to do whatever they wanted. The more Jolene heard, the more she seemed to like the idea. By the time Sybil finished, Jolene was smiling and seemed eager to leave. She didn’t mentioned the home again. She seemed resigned to the fact that she was leaving it behind forever.

A while later, the police came to the door and asked Sybil if she had heard anything from her friend Jolene, who had disappeared the night before. She told them she hadn’t. And then she started asking them questions — How long had Jolene been gone? Who was the last person to see her? Had they talked to Janie Lewis? She was Jolene’s friend, too. Did they want to come in and use the phone to call her? (Jolene was safely upstairs in Sybil’s room, so she didn’t mind laying it on a little thick.) The cops bought Sybil’s act, and that was pretty much the end of it. Apparently, no one never put Sybil’s own subsequent disappearance together with Jolene’s. The police did ask her why she wasn’t in school. Sybil replied that she was dropping out to take care of her mother; this didn’t make a lot of sense seeing as her mother was apparently well enough to be at work. And she didn’t know whether they already knew about her expulsion from the vocational school, but she certainly wasn’t going to bring it up. Anyway, they didn’t seem to care one way or the other. As they left, she asked if they would please let her know when they found Jolene. She would be worried sick in the mean time, she said.

In all, it was three days before Donny got his car fixed. Sybil had no trouble hiding Jolene in her room during that time. At nearly 400 pounds, her mother hadn’t climbed the stairs in years. Sybil went to school only once during those three days, long enough to learn that she was, in fact, expelled. She cleaned out her locker and left.

That night, the three of them took a perfunctory cruise down Main Street on their way out of town. Sybil felt triumphant. She didn’t even bother to tell her mother she was leaving. Her plan was in play: they were on their way to freedom. But she also felt conspicuous, the engine of Donny’s battered red Charger roaring as they went. Drawing needless attention to them. She looked right and left to see whether anyone saw them, hoping that no one would see her and Jolene leaving town together. With Donny.

And unfortunately, no one did.

Sybil’s feeling of elation lasted for all of eight hours. They were at a rest stop outside of Santa Fe, Jolene asleep in the back seat, when Donny began to outline his plan for how they could best make some quick money. They would drive to Las Vegas, where Donny was sure he could get a couple of fake IDs for Sybil and Jolene. Or — he explained — depending on where they ended up working, they probably wouldn’t even need IDs. The girls could get jobs as cocktail waitresses or even dancers. They were both built for it, he said. In fact, they would even be able to make a lot more money if they would maybe consider…but he didn’t finish the thought. As for Donny, he would be a dealer. But he might have to take a class or something first, he wasn’t sure.

Her disappointment at this plan was bitter, all the more so because she had no alternative to present. This wasn’t the fresh start she had in mind. It wasn’t what she and Donny had talked about. But it was a plan, and Donny seemed to know what would work, how they would be able to survive. She told herself that this would be a temporary measure, a stop along the way to the true fresh start. But she didn’t say this aloud, and she wasn’t sure why. What she did say out loud was that while she would be happy to work as a waitress or a dancer, she didn’t think either of those jobs would be suitable for Jolene. Maybe Jolene could be a waitress in a restaurant, but not someplace where she would have to fight off drunks. It would be better to find her something like Sybil’s old job at the ceramic factory.

Donny just winked at her and said sure, no problem.

They never made it Las Vegas. The car broke down just outside of Albuquerque — in spite of whatever work had been done on it before they left — and so that was where they ended up. It was some time later that Sybil would take a look at a map and realize that they weren’t even heading towards Las Vegas. Either Donny had started them on some back way there or he had never even bothered to check a map.

They fixed the car, found a little place to live, and Sybil went to work. Donny found her the job. It wasn’t something that she had ever thought of doing, but she found that she didn’t mind it. The place was a dive and the customers were creeps. But the bouncers made sure they kept their paws off. It turned out that Sybil was pretty good at being a dancer (she had quickly learned that the girls never referred to themselves as “strippers”), much better than she had been at glazing pottery. And they needed the money. Donny never managed to find a job for himself, although he explained that he needed to find one for Jolene first. After he landed her a job as a motel maid, his job-hunting activity slowed down quite a bit. But he was always on the verge. He was always expecting to hear from somebody tomorrow.

It wasn’t the life Sybil had gone looking for, but it was a life.

Then one evening she came home early from work — it had been slow — and found them together. Donny and Jolene. But not really together. The apartment was just one room plus a filthy little bathroom; Donny and Sybil had shared the sofa bed; Jolene slept on a pile of blankets on the floor. But as Sybil walked through the door, there was Jolene: lying face down on the bed. Still wearing her cheap blue maid uniform, her skirt hiked up, her underwear gone. And there was Donny, splayed across her, unconscious. His jeans around his ankles. An empty bottle of cheap-shit whiskey lay beside him on the bed.

Sybil screamed, at both of them at first. It would take a minute before she put together what had actually happened. Donny’s eyes came half open as she approached the bed, all the way open as she picked up the empty bottle and held it like a club poised to strike. Then she swung it at him — directly at his face. He dodged the blow. He got up and began to say something to her. It didn’t matter what. Sybil managed to connect with the second blow, the bottle making a satisfying cracking noise as it slammed up against his head. Donny fell to the floor and started whimpering. She told him to shut up or she’d hit him again.

After a moment, he got up again. Sybil started towards him, but he held up his hand. Let me just get dressed, he said. Then I’ll go. He put on his pants and began fumbling under the bed for his shoes. Something about seeing him near the bed set Sybil off again. She told him to forget the shoes and go. Angry now, he turned to face her, reaching for the bottle. But he didn’t expect what would happen next. She lunged at him with all her strength. She knocked him off balance, sending him crashing into the wall. Before he could move, she swung the bottle around and hit him square in the stomach.

Donny doubled over. He stayed that way for a long time, panting and moaning. When he looked up again, Sybil was still standing there, the bottle poised to deliver another blow. He held out his hand, but this time didn’t speak. He made his way to the door and left. He took nothing with him; he wasn’t even wearing shoes. She was immediately sorry she let him leave. She wanted to hit again — to break the bottle over his head. To watch him bleed.

Sybil couldn’t rouse Jolene. Not that day; not the next. The third day, she finally got her out of bed and into a shower. Jolene wouldn’t talk, and her eyes wouldn’t meet Sybil’s. It would be a few days before she started talking again. And even then she would speak only haltingly. She did not return to work.

She would never again be the same girl Sybil had a few months earlier at the vocational school.

Sybil was never able to get the story of what exactly had happened that night — Jolene would get too upset every time she brought the subject up — but she decided she had seen enough to piece it all together anyway. Donny probably started drinking early and got himself drunk enough to forget about any possible consequences; so he decided just to help himself to a little something he had no doubt been planning on sampling all along. Whether it had started out as rape or started out as Jolene going along with some of his drunken attentions, it was clear — from the condition Sybil had found the two of them in, from the state of Jolene’s clothes, from the bruises on her face — how it had ended up.

They stayed there in Albuquerque for a long time, until the seventh month of Jolene’s pregnancy. Sybil continued with her new line of work, but found a more suitable place to ply her trade. They moved into a nicer apartment with two bedrooms. Sometimes Jolene would do a little of the cooking and cleaning. Sometimes she would talk more; sometimes less. As she got farther along, the days where it seemed that the bright, outgoing Jolene might reemerge grew rarer and rarer. Finally the day came when she didn’t speak and wouldn’t respond in any way.

Then one night, Sybil came from home from work and Jolene was gone.

A panicked three days followed. Sybil spent the time driving around the neighborhood looking for her, checking all the hospitals, pleading with the police. It was hard to get the idea across to them that there was any real cause for concern. At the end of third day, a strange idea occurred to her.

She called Greenwood, the home.

The old lady answered. Myra. The same sawed-off old bitch who had scared Jolene away. She said she was too busy to talk. Sybil said she just had one question for her.

And sure enough, Jolene had returned there.

Sybil was confused. She felt betrayed. At the same time, she felt guilty that it had never occurred to her to bring Jolene back to that place, when it was obviously where she wanted to be.

It would be a couple years before Sybil returned to Greenwood herself. By then, Jolene was long gone. Sybil’s mother took her in for a short while, and then threw her out for the last time. She moved into her own place, and started working again. Donny had also returned to Greenwood, which she learned one night when he made the mistake of stumbling into the Cheri. It was the only time in her career that Sybil ever invoked the privilege of having a patron summarily bounced. When she asked the bouncer to make sure that Donny’s exit be as quick and painful as possible, he just smiled and nodded.

A few weeks after she started at the Cheri Lounge, Sybil sat down and wrote a long letter to Myra, explaining everything that had happened. She hoped that this Myra might get in touch with her, that she might learn from her how Jolene was doing. There was never any response to the letter. And until the moment she met these four kids while on her way to work, Sybil had no idea that anyone at the home, or anywhere else, knew about her connection with Jolene.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 12:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

They're looking into it:

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Harvard University scientists have asked the university's ethical review board for permission to produce cloned human embryos for disease research, potentially becoming the first researchers in the nation to wade into a divisive area of study that has become a presidential campaign issue.

"We want to find new ways to study and hopefully cure diseases," said Harvard biologist Douglas Melton, a senior researcher who, along with a colleague, has applied for permission to do the work.

Prepare for the inevitable hype and hysteria. There are serious ethical issues that need to be worked out in order to create a workable framework to allow for therapeutic cloning. Unfortunately, those issues are consistently missed in favor of Hollywood imagery.

We need regulations that prevent reproductive cloning — that is the development of a viable living cloned person. Reproductive cloning is a different fight for a different day. (Or century.) There should be strict guidelines as to how far in its development cycle an embryo should be allowed to progress before cells are harvested from it. And there should be guidelines as to who can access the stem cell lines once created and why. Stephen shared some serious thoughts on these issues a while back.

Unfortunately, it's unlikely that we'll get much discussion on these issues in the mainstream media. Vivid imagery of body-part banks and invading clone hordes make much better newspaper copy.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 9:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the Future...

...Al Gore will almost certainly snag himself a nomination.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 8:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the Future... ...office workers will continue to defend their right to construct, keep, and bear arms. via GeekPress

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 8:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's a breakthrough worth noting:

Scientists have shown they can turn off a cancer-causing gene in mice, offering hope of new treatments for cancer patients.

The Stanford University team used a common antibiotic to turn off a gene called Myc, which is known to trigger cancer.

Mice remained cancer free for as long as they took the drug. The drug also turned cancer cells back to normal.

That part about turning cancer cells back to normal is especially exciting. And it is worth noting that this research, which had its focus on liver cancer, may have some positive implications for the treatment of breast, bowel, and prostate cancer, all of which originate in the epithelial cells.

Interestingly, some of the "normal" cells turned back to a cancerous state after the antibiotic treatment was stopped. This may help to account for the return of cancer which often occurs to those who have received chemotherapy.

The article continues:

Dr Elaine Vickers, science information officer for Cancer Research UK, said: "The Myc gene is known to be overactive in many types of cancer.

"Estimates suggest that the gene may contribute to as many as one in seven cancer deaths.

So we may could be looking at potential treatments that will help one in seven cancer patients. Very encouraging, indeed.

via GeekPress

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 9:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Sometimes when Supe was stopping crimes
I'll bet that he was tempted to just quit and turn his back
On man, join Tarzan in the forest
But he stayed in the city, and kept on changing clothes
In dirty old phonebooths till his work was through
And nothing to do but go on home

Superman never made any money
For saving the world from Solomon Grundy
And sometimes I despair the world will never see
Another man like him

-- Crash Test Dummies

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 9:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Don't miss the current Rocky Mountain Blogger Round-up or this week's Carnival of the Capitalists. Good stuff!

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 9:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Farscape, the award-winning creation of the Jim Henson company (Brian Henson is executive producer) ran for four seasons on Sci-Fi before being cancelled in 2003. Now it's back, both in the form of an 8-hour-a-day, 11 day marathon in which Sci-Fi is showing every episode and (more importantly) the debut of a new mini-series, Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars, on October 17th.

What makes Farscape so great? Several things. It has a look and feel that's all its own. It isn't a Star Trek or Star Wars rip-off, nor would it want to be. The cast is wonderful, both human and animatronic. The stories range from comedy to fast-paced action to intense drama. The story arc is complex; I can't remember another TV show with so many bad good guys and so many good bad guys. But good or bad, the characters are all engaging; their relationships grow over time. They truly change and grow, and not always for the better.

If you've never watched, do yourself a favor and catch an episode or three over the next few days. If you want some background, try the FarWhat? or Save Farscape fan sites. There's also lots of good information on the official Sci-Fi Farscape site.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 5:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

You learn something new every day. It seems that some strings of random numbers are more random than others. That's kind of interesting, but not really a surprise when you think about it. Whenever we look at the characterisitcs of a string of random digits occuring in Pi or e or some other irrational number, we are looking at only a tiny fraction of the digits. Actually, it may not even be accurate to describe it as a fraction.

The linked article describes how mathematician Steven Pincus made some interesting discoveries when looking at the randomness of the first 280,000 digits of Pi, the square root of 2, and several other irrational numbers. However, even 280,000 isn' t really a fraction of an infinite number, now is it? How many digits would it take before you had a representative sample of an infinite string? I'm not a mathematician, but I'm guessing it would take an infinite string.

But before you wrap your head too tightly around that, consider what Pincus observed when he started comparing these strings of digits: some have higher levels of entropy (randomness), some lower. Then he started looking for the same characteristic of entropy in real-world strings of numbers, such as you might get from tracking, say, the stock market. He discovered that the stock market hits its highest level of entropy right before a crash.

Pincus observes that entropy

appears to be a potentially useful marker of system stability, with rapid increases possibly foreshadowing significant changes in a financial variable.

He goes on to conclude:

Independent of whether one chooses technical analysis, fundamental analysis, or model building, a technology to directly quantify subtle changes in serial structure has considerable real-world utility, allowing an edge to be gained... And this applies whether the market is driven by earnings or by perceptions, for both sort- and long-term investments.

Expect to hear a lot more about entropy and financial markets in the near future. The movie Pi, which I thought was well-made and entertaining, but suffered from a silly premise, may just turn out to be prescient.

via GeekPress

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 12:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (1)

Via Kurzweil AI, check out this modest proposal made at the Web 2.0 conference in San Franciso:

Universal access to all human knowledge could be had for around $260m, a conference about the web's future has been told.

The idea of access for all was put forward by visionary Brewster Kahle, who suggested starting by digitally scanning all 26 million books in the US Library of Congress.

In his speech, Mr Kahle pointed out that most books are out of print most of the time and only a tiny proportion are available on bookshop shelves.

He estimated that the scanned images would take up about a terabyte of space and cost about $60,000 (£33,000) to store. Instead of needing a huge building to hold them, the entire library could fit on a single shelf.

This is a tremendous idea; and the cost of doing it is only going to go down. The initial scanning work is the only part of the plan that's likely to present much of an expense factor. According to Moore's Law, that $60,000 price tag for storage should be somewhere around $2,000 eight years from now. If the estimate for the robot scanner is accurate, and it follows a less robust drop in price — say halving once every four years — we would be looking at a price tag of around $65 million in the same period of time. Pretty doable, I'd say.

Unfortunately, the legal concept of public domain is rapidly diminishing, while copyright terms are lengthened and controls are made more expansive. As John Bloom observed a while back in The New Republic:

In the name of Mickey Mouse and other American icons, we have gradually lengthened that 14-year limit on copyrights. At one time it was as much as 99 years, then scaled back to 75 years, then — in one of the most anti-American acts of the last century — suspended entirely in 1998. The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of that year says simply that there will be no copyright expirations for 20 years, meaning that everything published between 1923 and 1943 will not be released into the public domain. Presumably they'll take up the matter again in 2018 and decide whether any of these books, movies, or songs are ever set free. There are 400,000 of them.

So Kahle's observation that few of these books are still on the shelf will be beside the point. A scanned-in Library of Congress could conceivably serve as a back-up to the print archive, providing an excellent disaster recover resourse, but it would probably not be possible to distribute the whole archive. Only those parts created before 1923.

Of course, there's hope that, when the copyright issue is reviewed again by Congress (presumably in 2018) the public will be more aware of what's going on and will not stand for any more expansions of copyright controls. Failing that, maybe we could get an exception to copyright law into place. Perhaps we could make this backup of the Library of Congress exempt from all copyright restrictions as long as it's used by schools and public libraries.

By 2018, the storage for a copy of the entire Library of Congress online should cost less than $1000; even the cost of creating the archive would be $15 million or less. We could put the entire Library of Congress in every school in America.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 8:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Dispatches from a rapidly changing, rapidly improving world

#19 10/07/04

Welcome to a new and improved Better All The Time. We've got the same same upbeat philosophy, a snappy new look, and more good news than ever. So what are we waiting for? Let's get started.

Today's Good Stuff:

Quote of the Day The Eagle Flies SpaceshipOne Takes the Prize Man's Best Friend, Indeed! Fastest Computer Popcorn Gets Poppier More Good News from Mars Smart Cells Just Like Home Little Robots in Your... Intestines Caffeinated Beer?

Quote of the Day

The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I was a part — perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there . . . It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. Far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined!

-- Richard Feynman

Item 1
Bald Eagles Rebound

An icon of conservationists, the bald eagle was on the brink of extinction in America's lower 48 states four decades ago, when its numbers stood at just 417 nesting pairs. Anti-poaching measures, a reduction in the use of lethal pesticides and the transfer of eagles from Canada have seen its numbers rise in the lower 48 to several thousand. Washington now says that some of the bird's safeguards can be loosened.

The good news:

Bald eagles were first categorized endangered in 1978. In 1995, their status was downgraded (upgraded?) to threatened. Today, officials are recommending removing them from the endangered species list altogether.

The downside:

Other winged predators are not so lucky and conservationists say that the bald eagle's success should not lead to a false sense of complacency regarding its feathered kin.

BirdLife International has classified about a quarter of the planet's roughly 305 known raptor species as threatened.

There's plenty of work left to be done to protect the world's birds of prey.

Anyway...

Eagles are strong, proud, beautiful creatures. We've preserved a symbol of our nation, and guaranteed that future generations will get to enjoy the sight of a bald eagle in flight.

Item 2
SpaceShipOne captures X Prize

SpaceShipOne achieved its most spectacular flight yet, climbing to an altitude of 377,591 feet (71 1/2 miles) to win the $10 million Ansari X Prize on Monday.

X Prize officials said it set an altitude record exceeding the military X-15's top altitude of 354,200 feet (67 miles) set on August 22, 1963.

The good news:

On the 47th anniversary of Sputnik, Burt Rutan, Mike Melvill and company have demonstrated that the manned exploration of space is no longer a government monopoly. Space now belongs to anybody possessing the guts and perseverance (not to mention money) to get there. We covered the first of the two historic flights here, and the second one here.

The downside:

Let's get back to the subject of money for a moment. In an exciting related development, entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson announced plans to establish Virgin Galactic, which will provide commercial flights into space to as many as 3,000 people in the coming decade. The price tag for such a flight?

About $200,000.

Ouch.

But wait, think about it...

Before Branson's announcement, nobody ever even thought about getting into space for less than a million dollars. And even for those willing to pay, there were darned few opportunities. Branson is cutting the cost of going into space by at least 80%, while providing several orders of magnitude more opportunities to get there. And that's without any competition.

Prediction: Within 20 years, the price of a sub-orbital flight such as Branson is promising to offer via Virgin Galactic will be comparable to (or less than) a first-class around the world fare on any of the major airlines.

Item 3
Cancer Sniffing Dogs

A study from UK researches has shown that dogs could be used to help diagnose urinary tract cancer. As if dogs had anything more to prove in terms of loyalty and kindness towards their human friends, we get this news:

The authors trained six dogs of different breeds for 7 months to discriminate between urine from patients with bladder cancer and urine from those without cancer…

After training, each dog was offered seven urine samples--one bladder cancer sample and six comparison samples from individuals of the same sex…

The good news:

Commenting on the paper, statistician Tim Cole from the Institute of Child Health in London notes that the study was carefully designed. "On balance the results are unambiguous," he writes in an accompanying commentary. "Dogs can be trained to recognize and flag an unusual smell in the urine of bladder cancer patients."

Speculation...

Now that it has been proven that urinary cancer can be detected with dogs, can a medical version of the "dog-on-a-chip" be far behind?

Item 4
IBM Sets a Record for Speed

What a comeback! Last May we reported that the United States was poised to regain the title of "World's Fastest Supercomputer."

It's happened. On Tuesday IBM announced that it's Blue Gene/L system beat the Earth Simulator's maximum sustained speed of 35.86 teraflops with a sustained speed of 36.01 teraflops.

The good news:

That speed differential is less than one-half of one percent. And how IBM did it is even more impressive:

BlueGene/ L is one-hundredth the physical size of the Earth Simulator and consumes one twenty-eighth the power per computation, IBM said...

"It's again an exciting time to be involved in high-performance computing," said Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee who ranks the 500 fastest computers. "For some computational scientists, it's like a Hubble telescope."

Of course:

The world's other computer speed competitors aren't going to take this lying down. Plans to beat BlueGene/L are no doubt already underway.

And so...

The race goes on.

Item 5
Popcorn Gets Poppier

Well, it just doesn't get any better than this:

Next time you go to the movies, look out. If the popcorn vendors have read this article, your cup of popcorn might contain fewer pieces than it used to. That's because the pieces could each be up to twice the volume they were previously.

The good news:

Popcorn kernels twice the size of what we're used to. Paul Quinn of Kutztown University in Pennsylvania and Joseph Both of the Stanford School of Medicine in California have figured out that cooking popcorn under lower pressure can make it pop up twice as big. Whatever those fine institutions are paying these two scholarly gentlemen, they ought to double it.

The downside:

Okay, technically, we are getting less popcorn for the money.

On the other hand...

Doesn't that leave more room for butter?

Item 6
More Good News From Mars

Both Martian rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, are still going strong having survived the Martian winter and a 12 day communications black-out.

With both vehicles showing "few signs of aging" NASA has approved six more months of funding. Way to go, you hard-working astro-droids!

Item 7
Researchers Manipulate Cell Recognition Mechanism

Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have developed a technique to change the type of molecule that activates a cell's nuclear receptors, where the activated receptor in turn initiates gene expression. With this technique, cells could be programmed to signal the presence of specific molecules in their environment. These modified cells could be used in sensor arrays, gene therapy for cancer or as research tools.

The good news:

These smart cells may pay a big roll in treating cancer and other degenerative diseases, and may prove useful in the fight against aging overall.

Speaking of which...

Don't miss this profile of Ray Kurzweil, one of the patron saints of accelerating change.

Item 8
In search of the Earth mark II

It's only a matter of time before we discover an earth-like planet somewhere out in space. So far, fewer than 150 planets have been located outside the solar system, but that's about to change:

COROT, a French satellite scheduled to be launched in 2006, is designed to discover planets photometrically. Kepler, a similar American mission, is scheduled for launch in October 2007. And another American satellite, the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM), which will use astrometry, is planned for 2009. The SIM will measure the positions of between 10,000 and 30,000 stars, and to do so a hundred times more precisely than they are now known.

Moreover:

If neither of these missions come up with Class M paydirt, there are two others on the drawing boards that probably will:

America's Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) and Europe's Darwin are friendly rivals. The TPF and Darwin will both look at relatively nearby stars—within 50-75 light years of Earth. But there are so many stars within that sphere that it is reasonable to expect plenty of planets to turn up. The reason for that expectation is that enough exoplanets have been discovered already for statistically meaningful inferences to be made about what other planets are out there, and where they are. Two facts stand out. Of sun-like stars that have been closely investigated for any length of time, 15% have planets. And within the range of detectable planets, lower-mass bodies are exponentially more common than higher-mass ones. Put these facts together and it seems likely that small, rocky planets might be very common indeed.

Whether alternative Earths, complete with oceans and life, are common is a different question—but it is one that spectroscopy should be able to answer. When the data from the TPF and Darwin start rolling in, they may provide a definitive answer to that old, nagging question: “is there anybody out there?” How long that answer would take to become commonplace, though, is anybody's guess.

Question:

Let's say we discover an earth-like planet within 75 light-years of Earth. Once we know it's there, we point everything we have at it. We quickly determine that it is not sending out any radio signals (thus chances are that there is no resident civilization) but we do confirm that the atmosphere is rich in oxygen. So there is almost certainly life on that planet. Would we start trying to figure out how to get there?

Discuss.

Item 9
Robotic Capsule to Crawl Through Intestines

Researchers have developed a prototype robotic capsule designed to crawl though a patient's stomach, enabling doctors to view and even treat an internal ailment remotely.

Current endoscopies require a patient to swallow a capsule equipped with a camera that transmits images back outside the body. The prototype capsule has legs, made of a shape memory alloy, that can move the capsule across intestinal tissues without damaging the tissue.

Unlike current capsules, the robotic capsule could be guided to particular spots in the intestinal system.

The good news:

The robot camera will be able to produce more precise and accurate information on a patient's condition, greatly increasing the effectiveness of treatments applied. Moreover, depending on its size and shape, the robot camera is likely to be a lot more comfortable and less intrusive than current methods of performing this procedure.

Implications for Futurists:

A while back there was a flap (or was it a kerfuffle?) about how nanotechnology was bringing on the age of little robots in your pants. It looks as though these researchers have taken that idea to its logical extreme.

Item 10
Sweet! Caffeinated, ginseng beer

Brewer Anheuser-Busch says it will introduce a caffeinated, sweet-flavored beer for twentysomething club goers to compete with the flavored rums and vodkas gaining ground on the dance floor.

The new beer B(E) -- read as "B to the E power" -- will roll out in several phases starting in November.

The good news:

Well, it's...er...okay. You've got us. What exactly is the good news here?

Better All The Time is compiled by Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon.

For more good news, try the Good News Broadcast. And don't miss the latest round-up of positive developments in the Islamic world by Arthur Chrenkoff.

Say, are you tired of just reading about the future? Maybe ready to actually do something about? Why not consider attending The Foresight Conference on Nanotechnology?

Live to see it!

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 1:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (1)

In the Future... ...laboratory technicians will need to keep their CD collections especially organized. ...or use iPods as a safety precaution.

via Science news articles, Discover Magazine subscriptions, Science magazines online

Posted by at 8:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It was a shabby little diner. And it was the wrong part of town for four kids to be in at this time of night. Or any time, really. But it seemed that I was the only one aware of these kinds of details, the others having lived their whole lives in the home.

I, of all people, was the only one with any experience living in the outside world.

We sat in a booth near the back door. The seats were shiny fake red leather; the table top was speckled Formica. There was a juke box in the corner flashing orange and red and green lights. Next to it was a pinball machine, with flashing red and yellow lights of its own. The two sets of flashing lights were slightly out of sync with each other. If I had been so inclined, I could have watched them both for hours, and drawn out some intricate analysis of the relationships between the different colors. Actually, we had been there long enough for me to make a good start: almost three hours.

In that time, Todd and Grace had ordered and eaten twice. After the pancakes that morning and the greasy French fries I had with my initial order at the diner, I couldn’t stand the thought of another bite. And based on her horrified expression when the other two announced that they had decided to order more food, I could tell that Judy felt the same.

The waitress, a bedraggled dirty blonde of indeterminate age, had lost whatever patience she might have once had with us. I don’t think groups of kids were a common demographic for that diner. And I wasn’t sure whether Judy was causing some other kind of problem for her, more along racial lines. Todd waved her over to the table after a prolonged battle for her attention. She flipped her little notepad open with a snap and glared at us.

“Something else?” she said curtly.

“Yes, ma’am,” said Todd. “We’d like another cheeseburger please, with French fries…”

“They come with fries,” she said with deadpan impatience.

“Yes, of course. And we’d also like some ice cream, please.”

She looked at him.

“What kind?” she said after a moment. “I don’t have all day.”

Todd turned to Grace, who was studying the menu. Which of course she could not read.

“What will it be, Grace?” Judy prompted.

“I wonder…” she said.

“Yeah?” the waitress pressed.

“I wonder if you have any…pink ice cream.”

The waitress was not amused.

“Look,” she hissed, “I don’t have time for this. You kids already owe for what you ate and you’ve been here a long time. This isn’t the damn bus station, you know.”

We all looked uncomfortably around the table.

“Well,” said Todd, “why don’t we just settle for what we owe you already? Before we order anything else.” He reached into the brown paper bag positioned snugly on the seat between himself and Judy and produced a crisp twenty dollar bill.

“I think this will cover everything,” he said. “and keep the change for yourself.”

The waitress was taken aback. But that didn’t slow her down in accepting the money.

“You see, ma’am,” Todd continued, “we’re in an unusual situation. We’re meeting my mother later. She works near here and she’ll be getting off in about…”

“An hour,” said Judy.

“Right,” said Todd. “An hour. We appreciate your patience in letting us wait here until then. And we thank you for the good service.” He glanced just ever so briefly at the twenty as he said this. The message was clear: be nice to us and you’ll get more of the same.

The waitress nodded and then turned to Grace with a smile that couldn’t have been sweeter or more sincere had it actually been sweet and sincere.

“How ‘bout strawberry ice cream, honey? That’s pink.”

Grace nodded enthusiastically.

“Oh yes, please,” she said. “Pink ice cream.”

“One cheeseburger, one strawberry ice cream.” She began collecting our plastic glasses. “I’ll just refill those sodas for you. And you kids let me know if you need anything else.”

And with that, she departed.

“Grace, why do you always want everything to be pink?” asked Todd.

“Because pink is yummy.”

She turned to me.

“ ’Member, Corey, when you made the pink cake?”

I nodded. I did remember. It was the first time I had thought about that incident that day. I hoped that eventually there would be time to be appropriately mystified by the many strange things that I had done. Both before and after coming to the home. This was not the day for that. But when that day came, and when I had a the chance to reflect upon what I had wrought, I knew that the cake episode would stand out, somehow. There was something different about it.

“How can it be yummy?” Todd persisted. “Pink isn’t a flavor; it’s a color.”

Grace shrugged.

“Pink things are yummy,” she said. “They taste yummy. They taste pink.”

“I can see that,” said Judy. She turned to Todd. “But what’s the idea with the 42% tip?” she asked. “I thought we were supposed to be inconspicuous?”

“You round 41.449 up to 42?” he scoffed. “Where did you learn math?”

“At the John Mackey Home, same as you,” said Judy. “With a little help from Corey. But don’t change the subject. What’s the idea flashing the money?”

Todd smiled.

“I think I’m learning to communicate,” he said.

Judy looked puzzled.

“Take this morning. We visited Miss Baker with a very simple objective in mind, and yet I lost her with my explanation.”

Judy nodded.

“That’s for sure.”

“Yes. I was disappointed in how that worked out. So I watched what you did in explaining the situation to her, and while you were talking…something occurred to me. I don’t know how else to say it. I kind of…embraced the whole idea of communicating with somebody. I got it. I’d never had it before. But I saw you do it and it looked so straightforward, like you didn’t even have to think about what you were saying.”

Judy considered this.

“Well, I didn’t, really.”

“Exactly. I think that’s how it is for most people. Talking is kind of like…walking. You don’t think about it, you just do it. But I have to approach it from another place. I think this is something that Corey and I have in common. I don’t think we were designed for language.”

Todd looked at me. I considered what he said. Maybe this was why I couldn’t talk. Or write. Maybe my brain couldn’t handle language. But that made no sense. I could understand what they were saying, after all. And I could read. But it was somehow a one-way street.

Somehow, Angela was the key to all this. I needed to get to the city on the mountain. But that wasn’t going to happen. Not now.

Todd turned back to Judy.

“Then as I watched you persuading Miss Baker, and I saw how easy it was — and I actually saw what it was that you were doing — I got it. I could see that getting a message across is like solving any other problem. Right? And talking somebody into something…that’s just another kind of problem to solve. A harder one, maybe. A specialized instance. But in the end, it’s all just like calculating the percentage of the tip.”

Judy looked doubtful.

“I guess,” she said.

“Anyway, I’m starting to think I have the knack for it. You just have to listen to what other people are telling you. Not necessarily their words, but everything else they say. This morning, Miss Baker didn’t want to know that there was no other choice, that giving us the check was the one and only way to go. But that’s what I was telling her. She wanted to know that she could help us. And get at Jepson. And be assured that she was doing the right thing. That’s all she wanted. And you gave it to her.

“This situation just now, that was different. The waitress wants to come out ahead. She doesn’t want to feel like she’s being taken advantage of. She needs to know that she’s getting the better end of the bargain. So I gave that to her. And now if her boss yells at her for our being here all this time, she doesn’t care. She understands the situation better than he does and she gets the money. It’s exactly what she needed.”

The waitress reappeared with Grace’s ice cream.

“Here you go, honey,” she said, setting the dish before her.

“Thank you, ma’am.” She dug into it.

With the waitress safely gone, Judy continued.

“I think you might be on to something,” she said. “This could really help us.”

Todd nodded.

“I think it already has,” he said. “Some people need to know who is in charge, believing themselves to be. When they find out they aren’t, you can get almost anything you want from them.”

Todd was referring to what had happened that afternoon after we left Miss Baker’s. And I was quite certain he was right. We would never have come to where we were without his newly amplified powers of persuasion.

As soon as I heard it, I knew the big plan that these two and Lucinda had come up with that morning was flawed. I just had no way of telling them. As they saw it, the only real obstacle they had to overcome was getting the check from Miss Baker. But I knew the real difficulty lay in the next step.

Cashing it.

After we left Miss Baker’s, we headed straight for the bank. Having been confined all our lives, walking around was a new experience for us. (As I mentioned, I had spent a good deal of time on the bus years before. But my mother never walked anywhere.) We used a map of town torn from the phonebook to guide us. Fortunately, Greenwood was still a pretty small town at the time: Miss Baker lived only fifteen blocks from the home; the bank was nine blocks from her house; then it was seven more blocks from there to the diner. Judy had been concerned over whether Grace would be able to handle all the walking, but there was no choice about taking her. Her presence had been crucial in dealing with Miss Baker, and we expected that it would be even more important in the meeting we had planned next.

Anyway, about the bank. It’s important to note that this all took place a number of years ago. I guess it’s easy to imagine that things were somehow simpler when we were kids. But in some ways they really were. The town was smaller. Twenty dollars was all it took to pay for dinner for four and bribe a waitress. And a nine-year-old kid could walk into a bank and a cash a check for $8,000.

Actually, it wasn’t quite that simple.

Todd had assumed rightly that our best bet for cashing the check would be to take it to Greenwood Security Bank. This was the bank where the home had its account, the bank from which the check would be drawn. Miss Baker had left the home more than a year before, but her name was still on the home’s bank statements. Even the most recent ones. (These statements had been a little troubling to look at. There was a blank space under the name Myra Baker where another name seemed to belong.) Todd concluded that the presence of Myra’s name on the statements meant that she was still listed at the bank as a signatory for the account. So the check would be valid, and the signature could be verified against a signature card on file.

Again, he was right on both counts.

Now I don’t know where Todd got the idea of having the check made out to cash, or for that matter where he got any of his information about how banks work. It must have been from TV; there were certainly no reference books on the subject in the home’s library. But he knew that if the check was made out to cash, the person cashing it would not need to show any identification. Which was good, because we had none.

Alternative plans had been discussed that morning in which we got Miss Baker to make the check out to the Mission Lady or to Sheila. But it seemed unlikely that we could get either of them to go along with the idea. And even if we got one of them to cash the check, we doubted either of them would then give us the money and let us do with it what we had planned. Plus, for her trouble, our accomplice would probably end up in jail.

That was not acceptable.

So Todd’s idea was simpler and better, and that was the idea we went with. When we got to the bank, I stood with him in line while the girls waited in the lobby. When Todd reached the front of the line, he handed the check to the teller and said

“I’d like cash for this check, please. Tens and twenties.”

The teller was a young guy in a crisp blue suit. He looked at the check. Then he looked at us. Then he looked at the check again. Then he looked back up.

“I’m sorry, boys,” he said. “Is this a joke or something?”

Todd got very stiff.

“It is not. Please cash the check.”

The teller shook his head.

“This doesn’t make any sense. Where did you get this check?”

Todd glared at the man. His tone of voice became very lofty.

“Sir, I’ve been watching you work for the last twenty minutes or so. Four people were in this line ahead of me with checks they either cashed or deposited into their accounts. Not once did you ask any of them where they got their check.”

The teller frowned. This didn’t seem to be going well. I wondered why, after the trouble Todd had talking to Miss Baker, it hadn’t occurred to us that Judy should cash the check.

“Don’t get smart with me,” the teller said. “Let’s just see what Mr. Carter has to say about all this.”

The teller walked away, check in hand, and returned a few minutes later with a fat bespectacled man in black pin stripes. He looked us both over for a moment before speaking.

“What’s your name, son?” he asked.

“Todd. Todd Alpert.”

“And what about you?” he asked me.

“He’s my friend, Corey.”

“Boys, I don’t know what this is all about, but we’re going to have to hold onto this check and have a word with your parents. Please follow me to my office.”

Todd looked coldly at the man.

“We will not,” he said, loud enough for the people behind us in line, and standing in the two adjacent lines, to hear. “By what right are you confiscating this check? And placing us under arrest? Are you even remotely aware of the legal implications of what you’re saying?”

Mr. Carter blinked. The he cleared his throat.

“Now nobody said anything about confiscating or arresting,” he said uncertainly. “And I don’t think there’s any need for you to take that tone of voice…”

“Mr. Carter, let’s keep this simple, shall we? You’re holding a valid check written on an account in this bank. I will endorse it any way you like. But if you can confirm that the check is properly made out and signed — which I assure you it is — and that there are sufficient funds in the account to cover the check — which I assure you there are — then I don’t understand what the hold-up could possibly be.”

At this point, Mr. Carter began to turn quite red.

“Now you look here. You don’t take that tone of voice with me. You think you can just waltz in here with a check for eight thousand dollars and cash it. I have an obligation to make sure this is a legitimate transaction.”

“Then check the signature and see if it’s valid. Or call Miss Baker if you like and confirm that she wrote the check and sent me here to cash it. We came here straight from her house.”

Mr. Carter looked perplexed.

“But why would she have given you this check?” he asked.

“That is none of your concern, sir. I’m sure you’ve heard about what’s happening at the home she runs. Doesn’t she have enough trouble without being harassed by the bank?”

Mr. Carter suddenly calmed down.

“All right, now,” he said in a placating tone. “Nobody is harassing anyone. I just want to understand why she would…”

“That is quite simply none of your concern,” Todd said again. “Call her if you like, but I hope you don’t expect that she owes you an explanation. She does not.”

Mr. Carter walked away, shaking his head and mumbling something under his breath. We knew that we were in a dangerous position. Miss Baker had left the home some time before. Her name was still on the statements, but wasn’t it strange for her to be writing this check? Even if she was legally entitled to do so? Plus, even though she had written the check, would she stand by the decision to do so when called by the bank? It was a risk.

Mr. Carter returned less than two minutes later. He huddled with the teller for a moment and then walked away again.

“Please sign the back,” the teller said, passing the check back to Todd.

Todd did so, and then handed the teller a brown paper shopping grocery bag.

“Tens and twenties, please,” he said.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 7:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the Future...

...you might hear some pour soul who's had one too many lament:

Man, I wish I hadn't drunk all that beer. I'm so wired, I can't pass out.

via GeekPress

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 8:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I had a lively debate with my 15-year-old daughter this morning while driving her to the orthodontist. Initially, we were on the subject of the presidential race. She expressed a certain disdain for both candidates, complaining that Bush is "such a Republican" and Kerry "such a Democrat." As a registered Independent, I can sympathize with that reaction (even if I wasn't sure exactly what she meant.)

When I asked her to clarify what it was about President Bush that made him "such a Republican," she complained about his tax cuts for the rich and reliance on "trickle down" economics to help out those in need. In response, I opined that tax cuts are a good idea for everyone, rich and poor alike, because they free up money for spending and investing — which in turn creates jobs. I explained that the image that her Democrat friends have of rich people filling their basements with gold coins and swimming around in them like Uncle Scrooge McDuck is pretty inaccurate. Their money goes into purchases, which support manufacuring and service jobs, or investments, which support business growth in general, or straight into the bank, which lends it to would be home- or business owners.

In the end, she conceded that maybe it's no better or worse to tax the rich than it is to tax anyone else. (Which I considered to be a major concession from a young liberal. She was adamant that the rich shouldn't be punished for being successful, and she seemed distinctly uncomfortable with any explicit redistributionist ideas.) However, in the end, she argued that I had to "admit that Bush's trickle-down policies weren't working."

Of course, I could admit no such thing. Unfortunately, we arrived at the orthodontist's office at exactly this point in the debate, so I am forced to offer up my concluding arguments here. So, Hannah, if you're reading this — no tax could ever create economic opportunity (that is, jobs) as quickly and efficiently as the market can on its own.

I have argued that economic growth appears to go hand in hand with technological growth. In America, a poor family of today is at least as well off as a middle class family of 30 years ago. No one is seriously arguing that this change has anything to do with taxing the rich or with government programs. Robin Hood himself, given legions of Merry Men to steal from the rich and give to the poor 24/7 for the past 30 years, would not have been able to achieve such a result.

We're better off today than we were 30 years ago because there is more wealth to go around. Where did it come from? Certainly not from the government. It came from increases in production and in productivity. As a group, we produce more now than we did then. So now we have more, too.

Those who picture the economy as a pie to be shared, who think that a bigger piece for some necessarily represents a smaller piece for others, have got it exactly wrong. Arnold Kling explains as follows:

The often-used phrase "distribution of income" suggests the metaphor of a pie. I believe that a more accurate metaphor would be an escalator. The pie metaphor treats income as static, thereby ignoring one of the most important facts about the standard of living, which is its rise over time.

If you want to address the real challenges of poverty in this country, use the metaphor of an escalator. Target government intervention at people who are unable to get onto the escalator, due to impediments that may be medical, behavioral, or social. But don't try to "fix" the escalator by carving it up like a pie.

Maybe it's his fixation with the pie vs. the escalator image that makes Kerry "such a Democrat." I'm not sure; we never got that far in our discussion. One thing is certain: neither candidate really "gets" the escalator idea. (Although I would venture to say that President Bush comes a lot closer to it.)

We are likely a generation or two away from politicians who will seriously grapple with the kinds of fundamental changes that are taking place today, and that are coming ever faster. Most of the domestic issues that are on the table this year are firmly grounded in the increasingly irrelevant 20th century. Much, though not all, of the debate surrounding the War on Terrorism is really a clash of ideas and strategies that originated in World War II or in Viet Nam vs. the Bush Doctrine, which started taking shape after September 11, 2001.

It seems strange, doesn't it, that the progressive, futuristic arguments should come from the middle-aged Dad, while the tired and archaic views are spouted by the teenager. I think this has to do in part with the company she keeps (public school teachers and the like.) But there may be more to it than that. I am, after all, "such a Speculist."

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (3)

Glenn Reynolds has an excellent observation on the significance of the X Prize being won on this particular date:

The launch -- coming, as Boyle notes, on the anniversary of the Soviet Union's 1957 launch of Sputnik -- represented in many ways the final triumph of capitalism over communism.

It's not widely remembered today, but when Sputnik was launched Americans took it as a serious blow to their self-esteem. Those backward Russians, beating us into space? Did this mean that communism was (literally) ascendant, and capitalism in decline? Many feared (or hoped) so.

Of course, we won the space race a long time ago. It was July 20, 1969 to be precise — the day a manned US spacecraft landed on the moon. But even that glorious accomplishment was the triumph of one government over another. Today, free enterprise has won. Free markets have one. The individual has triumphed over government.

Space now belongs to all of us. Not our governments. Us.

Glenn concludes:

I heard someone on one of the cable channels (it might even have been MSNBC!) predicting that more people will travel into space in the next decade than in all of human history to date. That's probably right -- and if it is, it will be because the forces of capitalism have done what they always do, making things cheaper, better, and more widely available.

Is it possible that the long-awaited Space Age really is about to begin?

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 2:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

...that's the way it appears. It hasn't been certified yet.

UPDATE: CNN is reporting that the X prize was won.

UPDATE: This flight to 368,000 feet appears to have broken the X-15's unofficial altitude record of 354,200.

The X-15 served as inspiration for SpaceShipOne.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 9:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

What a comeback! Last May we reported that the United States was poised to regain the title of "World's Fastest Supercomputer."

It's happened. On Tuesday IBM announced that it's Blue Gene/L system beat the Earth Simulator's maximum sustained speed of 35.86 teraflops with a sustained speed of 36.01 teraflops.

That's a speed differential of less than one-half of one percent. But how IBM did this is more impressive:

BlueGene/ L is one-hundredth the physical size of the Earth Simulator and consumes one twenty-eighth the power per computation, IBM said...

"It's again an exciting time to be involved in high-performance computing," said Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee who ranks the 500 fastest computers. "For some computational scientists, it's like a Hubble telescope."

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)