Science, Technology & Health: March 2003 Archives
I would absolutely love to work on a space elevator; maybe when I finish up school I'll have the chance. Meanwhile, I have been emailing some of the groups involved and trying to scope out the scene, and I think that the project concept is entirely realistic, even if it sounds like science fiction.
The basic idea is simple: put a large satellite or space station in geosynchronous orbit, and then drop a cable down to the surface of the earth. Since the satellite would be stationary relative to the planet below, the cable would hang motionless in the atmosphere and could be used by an elevator system to lift cargo and people up into orbit at a tiny fraction of the cost that current rocket technologies require. The science needed to make this concept a reality already exists, and LiftPort Inc. (and the related company, HighLift Systems) intends to follow through and build the thing within 15 years.
Rather than rehash what has already been written, please take a look at the links below:
How Space Elevators Will Work.
LiftPrt Inc., a company created to build a space elevator within 15 years.
Space.com article, "The Space Elevator Comes Closer to Reality".
Wired article, "To the Moon in a Space Elevator?"
Another pointer from Instapundit gives us an article debunking the threat of the new "super-pneumonia". That's fine... to tell the truth, I wasn't scared at all anyway. When the news reports an emergency, a crisis, or a disaster I just divide whatever danger they relate by 100 and take a nap.
I am reminded by the article of a real, and ongoing, health crisis: malaria. Sure, as an American it's not much of a threat to me, but malaria afflicts up to 500 million people per year, and kills more than 3 million people per year. It's not as glamorous as ebola (kills dozens per year, maybe), or the new super-pneumonia (which has killed around 200), but malaria is a real and present danger to millions of people in undeveloped parts of the world. Malaria is spread by mosquitoes... isn't there something we can do to eliminate it?
Good question. In 1955, the Eighth World Health Assembly adopted a Global Malaria Eradication Campaign, and by 1967 malaria had been eradicated from every developed country where the disease was endemic, and from large tropical areas of Asia and Latin America. The program was also used successfully in three countries in tropical Africa. How did it work?
"To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT... In little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths, due to malaria, that otherwise would have been inevitable."
[National Academy of Sciences, Committee on Research in the Life Sciences of the Committee on Science and Public Policy. 1970. ...]
There are a lot of "reasons" that DDT use has been largely abandoned, but the vast majority of them are based on flawed science and the politics of the environmentalist movement. DDT was linked to everything from cancer, to shell-thickness among bald eagle eggs, but none of these claims are really substantiated or even supported by actual science. DDT can be dangerous when it is used improperly, as can all chemicals, but it can also be an incredibly powerful tool when used safely.
The history of DDT is just one example of how the environmental movement leads directly to human death on a massive scale. Of course, that may be part of the point.
Population control advocates blamed DDT for increasing third world population. In the 1960s, World Health Organization authorities believed there was no alternative to the overpopulation problem but to assure than up to 40 percent of the children in poor nations would die of malaria. As an official of the Agency for International Development stated, "Rather dead than alive and riotously reproducing."
[Desowitz, RS. 1992. Malaria Capers, W.W. Norton & Company]
Continuing my previous postings about the free-rider problem, I see an article on TCS by James Miller that explains it very clearly.
No one likes cleaning bathrooms, but most people like their bathrooms to be clean. When several people share a bathroom, a free rider game may manifest in which some attempt to free ride off the efforts of others.
He then goes on to describe how this type of game plays into the situation with Iraq and other foreign policy issues. It's an interesting article, and easy to understand. He concludes by writing:
After victory in Iraq, many will suggest we have a choice between acting morally or vengefully towards reluctant allies like France and Germany. I believe, however, that the vengeful path is also the moral one. If we don't reward our allies and punish our detractors, free rider problems will doom U.S. troops to act alone in future conflicts.
Spotted via Instapundit.
Also known as the Warthog, the A-10 is a close air support plane that is used to take out enemy main battle tanks. It's main weapon is the GAU-8/A Avenger, a seven-barrel gatling gun that can fire 4,200 rounds per minute (that's 70 per second). Each round is 30mm in diameter, weighs more than a pound and a half, and travels 1067 meters/second (that's more than 2200mph). The gun itself is larger and heavier than a Cadillac.
Click on the picture to learn more about the plane, via the Federation of American Scientists.
Click on the picture to learn more about the GAU-8/A Avenger via Stravonski's A-10 Page.
(Continued):(Update part 2)
Dr. Boyd responded and told me:
The metapopulation is made up of 128 populations. Payoff biased imitation tends to reduce the frequency of punishers in each population. Random variation due to sampling variation in who gets imitated causes frequencies to jiggle around randomly, but if these were the only two processes populations would all eventually evolve to all defect. However, competition between populations causes some populations to become extinct, and this is more likely to happen in populations in which have fewer punishers because such groups tend to have fewer cooperators. Sometimes these processes balance out so that the metapopulation frequency of punishers reaches an approximate steady state---only approximate because stochastic variation in which groups go extinct and who reproduces causes variation in punisher frequency around the long term means reported in the paper.
Very interesting. I emailed him back and told him a little about my MS thesis and my PhD dissertation, and he offered to send me the VB code that he used for this paper. How exciting.
Also via GeekPress, an article in the Economist that discusses evolving cooperators and 'punishers' as a solution to the free-rider problem. On the most basic level, the free-rider problem arises in situations where groups of organisms are cooperating for the common good, and a few members of that group cheat the system by taking advantage of the cooperation without giving anything back to the group. The problem is also known as the Tragedy of the Commons, meaning that any resource that is held in common by a group will tend to be abused by individuals rather than used in a coorperative manner, because there is just too much short-term advantage to cheating the system.
Anyway, back to the Economist article. I'm working on my PhD in artificial intelligence, and so I have quite a bit of experience with evolutionary systems such as the one described in the article. I haven't yet read the entire paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, but based on the description in the article, I can't see how their model could achieve cooperative punishment as an emergent phenomena. The author of the paper, Robert Boyd, is a professor at UCLA, so I think I'll email him about it (after I read the paper, of course).
(Update)
The paper can be found here.
It's pretty interesting. The formulas the author gives are satisfying, but in his discussion section he states that the punishers never do reach a stable equilibrium frequency, which is what I would expect given that they will always be at a disadvantage to the meta-free-riding cooperators. I emailed the Robert Boyd to ask for clarification, in case I am mistaken.
This is what happens when a society allows crazy people to freely wander the streets. Yes, it's unfortunate that some people are comlpetely insane, but we shouldn't let our pity move us to foolishness. I'm not a psychologist or a medical doctor, so I don't know exactly where to draw the line, but I believe that a fair and just system of civil committment could be developed that would benefit both society as a whole, and the crazy people who were locked up. How crazy is too crazy? I know it when I see it. Society should be willing to bear this cost, as it does with the prison system, but money should not be wasted on largely inneffectual "treatments"; innmates should be housed in as comfortable a state as is reasonably possible, and should be prevented from hurting themselves or others.
Our prison system is awful in many ways, but it is better than any other in the world. Nevertheless, it is still in dire need of improvement, and I'm not talking about greater access to gym equipment or cable TV -- I'm talking about eliminating the daily routine of rape and assault that goes on in many of our nation's jails with a wink and a nod from society. A more robust civil committment system would be in danger of this same corruption, in addition to the danger of abuse by authorities given charge over it. It would need to be closely supervised by the public, and its power divided between competing branches of government. It would also not be cheap, but it would be cheaper than the costs of allowing dangerously erratic and insane people to roam freely, beneath our notice until they commit some horrible crime.
I don't mean to beat a dead horse, but I have trouble evaluating the rigor, applicability, and validity of a theory whose key terms are only defined in terms of each other. As described up to this point, civilization advances interconnectedness (which increases as a result of innovations like language, writing, moveable type, digital information processing, etc, and which determines the rate at which such innovations can spread), which is directly related to functional density. There are no definitions here, and so the given relations between concepts cannot be verified or evaluated in any substantive or analytical way. I do not question whether Michael has rigorous definitions for these concepts, as he has clearly given the theory much thought. But without being provided with a more precise, concrete, and independent formulation of each of the key terms, interested and careful readers will be unable to reproduce the logic inherent in the theory and thereby achieve non-trivial agreement.
For example: the idea of interconnectedness is frustratingly ambiguous. Does interconnectedness refer to frequency of communication, or accuracy of communication, or some particular quality of communication such as coherence or relevance? And how would these aspects of communication relate to each other, within the definition of interconnectedness? In the vague sense of it that I currently grasp, it seems like interconnectedness would also increase conflict and confusion, as individuals are exposed to a wider range of opposed and irreconcilable communications. Couldn’t this increase in conflict and confusion lead to societal stagnation, at least enough to balance out the positive effects of innovation dispersal? Isn’t it possible? Maybe not, but without a more rigorous formulation of the concept of interconnectedness, the reader may be left with such unanswered doubts.
I have to go study for final exams, but I want to give this horse one more swift kick. I am still dissatisfied with the idea of advancement as described. You’ve given four dimensions of advancement: “increased freedom for individuals, increased health and standard of living, increased happiness and fulfillment, and increased security from internal and external threats.” But you have not given any account of the fact that it is often the case that an increase in some of these benefits comes only with a decrease in others. For example, it is a major concern that increased security from the threat of terrorism in the United States will only come with a decrease in personal freedom. Innovations that provide for greater security may cost us in terms of freedom. Or again, maybe such trade-offs are not necessary in your theory- but the reason why your theory excludes this possibility would have to be explained before it can be accepted. Furthermore, each of the four given dimensions of advancement is of so complex a nature that it is impossible to gauge how they might be affected by interconnectedness or functional density, as they are currently described.
But believe me, I wouldn’t be so nit-picky if I didn’t see great potential in what you have described thus far. I look forward to hearing more, if you have the time and desire to provide it.
(... continued): Like the light bulb, most world-changing innovations required a low marginal cost to implement, allowing every person in a society to quickly and cheaply reap the benefit of one man's genius. The rate at which an innovation can be spread throughout a civilization is directly dependent on that civilization's interconnectedness, and its functional density. Consider the written word, the cotton gin, mass production, agriculture, the wheel, sidereal navigation… each of these innovations had a low marginal cost of implementation and provided a huge benefit to any people-group that could take advantage of it.
The benefits of a high functional density are twofold: first, the benefits of innovation spread more quickly through a civilization; and second, there is less duplication of effort among geniuses because they are more aware of each other and are better able to collaborate together. The net result of all this is that functional density fuels innovation, and innovation reinvests to yield ever-increasing functional density (through the spoken word, writing, the printing press, the internet, &c).
I promised earlier to post a little more detail about my theory on the advance of civilization and its relation to what I termed functional density. Nicholas pointed out that I should define my vocabulary in more detail, and so I'll attempt to do that as well.
I believe I explained functional density in sufficient depth in my earlier post, and covered how it relates to interconnectedness and actual population density. To take a step farther back, what do I mean by the advance of civilization? Nicholas is correct that this is an essential definition. To me, and to all who live in and value a liberal democratic society, the definition should be fairly clear: increased freedom for individuals, increased health and standard of living, increased happiness and fulfillment, and increased security from internal and external threats. A Nazi or a communist might disagree with some or all of these principles and with good cause -- totalitarian governments are in fact harmed by greater interconnectedness among their subjects and between their subjects and the outside world. But if one desires a populist society that is based on freedom for all, then I believe that my theory will hold true.
Now, to the theory itself. I have described functional density and what I hold as the principles of civilization that are to be advanced. How does greater functional density lead to this advance? Let me first define another term that I will use in a specific way: genius. Dictionary.com defines a genius as a person of extraordinary intellect and talent and in general I am inclined to agree; in this particular context, I want to focus on a certain kind of genius: a person who creates or conceives of an innovation that leads to the advance of civilization. One example would be Edison and the light bulb. The invention of the light bulb was instrumental in the industrial revolution, and made it possible for factory workers to labor night and day through every season, immune to the vagaries of the sun and the weather.
One of my little pet theories is that civilization (however you define it) advances at a rate proportional to the interconnectedness of humanity. I generally take "civilization" to include things like health, technology, art, engineering achievements, and that sort of thing. "Interconnectedness" is a little more abstract; in my mind, it increases due to technological inventions like spoken language, written language, the telephone, satellite communications, and the internet. These innovations serve to increase what I call the functional population density -- that is, the more functionally dense a society is, the more interconnected it is, and the faster its civilization will advance. SDB has a neat essay on the four most important inventions in history, and I generally agree with his analysis, since it fits so neatly into my own theory. (I'll explain my theory in more detail in a later post.)
Of course, if functional density is good, why, actual density must be even better! Check out this Wired article and read about the future of civilization!
By expanding our cities underground, we will be able to reach population densities unheard of throughout history. Functional density increase due to increased population density creates some difficulties that technological advancement does not (such as crime, waste disposal, heat (you've got to have huge air conditioners for cities a mile below ground), dealing with natural disasters), but I believe that they can all be overcome. Inevitably, there is some equilibrium point where the benefits to civilization and the costs of maintaining a given population density balance out, but we certainly haven't reached that point yet with our current population density-increasing technology of choice: skyscrapers. Major cities continue to drain people from rural areas, and even the largest and most dense cities are still growing (see here).
Now, as to Los Angeles... I don't know how safe it would be to dig here, considering that we can't even build a subway without plowing into tar and natural gas. Oh, and earthquakes. Better than Balrogs, I suppose.
