Science & Technology

Shields Up!

1 Comment / Science & Technology / /

Steven Den Beste has a fascinating post about the critical characteristics of space warships. He approaches the question from a realistic angle, mostly relying on current technology, only extrapolating reasonable advances. He rules out the sci-fi stuff (“hyperspace,” “subspace,” “leap cannon,” etc…) right from the start, and a few things struck me while reading it.

This post will deal with one of the things that he has (reasonably) decided not to include in his discussion: energy shields. I’m doing this mostly as a thought exercise. I’ve found that writing about a subject helps me learn about it, and this is something I’d like to know more about. That said, I don’t know how conclusive this post will be. As it stands now, the post will raise more questions than it answers. Another post will deal with a subject I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, which is how unglamorous technological advance can be, and how space battles might be a good example. It sounds like a battle using the weapons and defenses described would be punctuated by long periods of waiting followed by a short burst of activity in which one side was completely disabled. There is a reason why science fiction films flaunt the rules of physics. But that is another topic for another post.

Once he discards the useless physics-defying science fiction inventions, Den Beste goes on to list a number of possible weapons, occasionally mentioning defense systems. Given that I’ll be focusing on defense systems, it’s worth noting the types of attacks that will need to be repelled. Here is a basic list of weapons for use in a space battle:

  • Lasers
  • Masers (Similar to lasers, but operating at microwave frequencies)
  • Particle Beams
  • Missiles (with a variety of warheads)
  • “Dumb” Projectiles

Strangely enough, I recently came across the concept of cold plasma, which may be able to shed some light on how to defend against the weapons Den Beste laid out. Cold plasma in the quantities and density required to repell attacks is not yet technologically feasible, and articles like this aren’t always reliable (sometimes exaggerating the effects of new technology).

Plasma is basically a collection of molecules, atoms, electrons and positively charged ions, and it makes up 99% of the known universe. Hot plasma is present in the sun – at high temperatures hydrogen nuclei can fuse into heavier nuclei despite a mutual electric repulsion. When these particles collide in the sun, they aquire enough energy to fuse, and release a tremendous amount of energy. Unfortunately, hot plasmas are not of much use for defensive purposes, as the temperatures are too high, and would be destructive.

Colder plasmas, however, would do the trick. A plasma’s charged particles interact constantly, creating localized attractions or repulsions. An external energy attack, from weapons such as lasers, high powered microwave bursts, or particle beams, would theoretically be caught up in the plasma’s complex electromagnetic fields and dissapated or deflected. If the plasma could be made sufficiently dense, it could even deflect missiles and other projectiles. The process of absorbing and dissapating energy could also go a long way into defeating radar… but as Den Beste noted, IR detectors would be the primary sensor used in space, so this sort of “cloaking” ability would be of limited use.

Interestingly, such a cold plasma shield could also be applied to projectiles such as missiles, shielding them from the defensive measures Den Beste thinks would be used against them.

Unfortunately, cold plasma requires a lot of energy to produce. And since I can’t seem to find an adequate explanation of what cold plasma really is or, rather, how it is produced, the use of cold plasma brings up a number of questions. My primary concern has to do with the energy needed to produce cold plasma, and how the excess heat would be dissapated. Den Beste notes:

Warships will be hot and will have to shed a lot of heat in order to avoid destroying themselves.

There are lot of ways of getting rid of waste heat, and convection is by far the easiest and most convenient. It’s what cars use, and what nuclear power plants use, and what our bodies use. A fan moves air past the radiator of a car, and since the radiator is warmer than the air, it is cooled and the air is warmed. The cooling tower of a nuclear reactor sheds heat into cold water, boiling it and turning it into water vapor which is dispersed into the atmosphere. Our bodies shed heat in expelled breath, and through our skins into the air, sometimes aided by sweat.

Unfortunately, in space there’s no atmosphere to convect heat into, and you have to rely on radiation.

Now, you’ve created a cold plasma force field around your spacecraft that could theoretically deflect electromagnetic attacks from weapons like lasers, masers, and particle beams, but what about the heat produced on your own ship? How would heat interact with the cold plasma? Would the plasma absorb the heat? If it did, wouldn’t you saturate the plasma shield (after all, you’d be producing an awful lot of heat even without the massive amount of energy needed to set up the plasma field, and when you add that, couldn’t you overload it)? If you surrounded your ship, how would the heat escape? Exposing the radiator would defeat the purpose of having a shield in the first place, as the radiator would be one of the primary targets.

Well, perhaps I’ve figured out why Den Beste ruled out energy shields in the first place. Sorry if this seemed like a waste of time, but I found it at least somewhat interesting, even if it wasn’t conclusive. And I’ve also found a new respect for the type of theoretical discussions Den Beste is so good at… Stay tuned for a more general (and hopefully more interesting) discussion on the unglamorous march of technology.

Update: Buckethead has an excellent series of 4 posts on War in Space (one, two, three, four). I am clearly outclassed. One of these days I’ll crank out that post about the unglamorous side of technology advancement, but for now, I’ll leave the technical aspects in the capable hands of Den Beste and Buckethead…

In-Q-Tel

Science & Technology / /

USA Today has a fascinating look inside an interesting CIA initiative:

…In-Q-Tel is the venture-capital arm of the CIA.

That’s right: The CIA is investing in tech start-ups. At a time when the CIA has come under fire for intelligence lapses, In-Q-Tel offers a promising path to technology that might help the agency spot trouble sooner and make fewer errors.

In-Q-Tel, set up in 1999, invests about $35 million a year in young companies creating technology that might improve the ability of the United States to spy on its nemeses. It has kept a low profile and is not much known outside of the intelligence community and Silicon Valley.

The program has apparently been very successful, and will most likely be renewed. The DoD has expressed interest in duplicating the model for their own purposes.

Despite it’s name being inspired by James Bond’s Q, In-Q-Tel doesn’t seem to be investing in high-tech weaponry or spy gadgets. Their focus seems to run more towards finding, sorting and communicating data. Products range from an application that can translate documents from Arabic into English, to an advanced Google-like search engine, to weblogging software(!). Public/private partnerships aren’t very common in the US, but there are some exceptions, and in this case, it looks like it was a good idea.

…Tenet explained that the CIA and government labs had always been on the leading edge of tech. But the Internet boom poured so much money into tech start-ups, the start-ups leapt ahead of the CIA. And scientists and technologists who had innovative ideas went off to be entrepreneurs and get rich ? they didn’t want government salaries at the CIA.

At the same time, tech companies were booming and didn’t want the hassle of dealing with the government’s procurement process. Most never thought of contacting the CIA. Tech companies didn’t know what the CIA might need, and the CIA had no idea what the tech companies were inventing ? a dangerous disconnect with lives on the line.

Of course, the public/private and somewhat low profile nature of the program makes for some strange rumors:

In-Q-Tel has become known for being thorough yet furtive. These days, when a young company is making a presentation at an event, an unknown man or woman might come in, listen intently, then disappear. Such is In-Q-Tel’s mystique that entrepreneurs often believe those are In-Q-Tel scouts even when they’re not.

As I said before, the program has been successful (though success is measured in more than just money here – they’re actually finding useful applications, and that’s what the real goal is) but the CIA is characteristically cautious:

“It has far exceeded anything I could’ve hoped for when we had that first meeting,” Augustine says. But he adds a note of caution, apropos for the CIA, which had been stuck for too long in old ways of finding new technology. “No idea is good forever,” Augustine says. “We’ll have to see how it holds up with time.”

Update: Charles Hudson is a blogger who works for In-Q-Tel. Interesting.

My New Toy

3 Comments / Science & Technology / /

Pictured to the right is my new toy, a Pioneer DVR 106 DVD±RW Burner. I wanted to get a DVD drive for the computer so that I could do screen grabs for film reviews and scene analysis (for instance, it would help a great deal to have screenshots on my scene analysis of Rear Window), but when I looked into it, I found out that DVR drives were shockingly inexpensive. In fact, it cost approximately $100 less than my CD Burner (which I bought several years ago, when they hadn’t yet become commonplace). For the record, a simple DVD ROM drive is also shockingly inexpensive, but the added functionality in a DVR drive seemed worth the price.

Deterministic Chaos and the Simulated Universe

2 Comments / Best Entries, Science & Technology / /

After several months of absence, Chris Wenham has returned with a new essay entitled 2 + 2. In it, he explores a common idea:

Many have speculated that you could simulate a working universe inside a computer. Maybe it wouldn’t be exactly the same as ours, and maybe it wouldn’t even be as complex, either, but it would have matter and energy and time would elapse so things could happen to them. In fact, tiny little universes are simulated on computers all the time, for both scientific work and for playing games in. Each one obeys simplified laws of physics the programmers have spelled out for them, with some less simplified than others.

As always, the essay is well done and thought provoking, exploring the idea from several mathematical angles. But it makes the assumption that the universe is both deterministic and infinitely quantifiable. I am certainly no expert on chaos theory, but it seems to me that it bears an importance on this subject.

A system is said to be deterministic if its future states are strictly dependant on current conditions. Historically, it was thought that all processes occurring in the universe were deterministic, and that if we knew enough about the rules governing the behavior of the universe and had accurate measurements about its current state we could predict what would happen in the future. Naturally, this theory has proven very useful in modeling real world events such as flying objects or the wax and wane of the tides, but there have always been systems which were more difficult to predict. Weather, for instance, is notoriously tricky to predict. It was always thought that these difficulties stemmed from an incomplete knowledge of how the system works or inaccurate measurement techniques.

In his essay, Wenham discusses how a meteorologist named Edward Lorenz stumbled upon the essence of what is referred to as chaos (or nonlinear dynamics, as it is often called):

Lorenz’s simulation worked by processing some numbers to get a result, and then processing the result to get the next result, thus predicting the weather two moments of time into the future. Let’s call them result1, which was fed back into the simulation to get result2. result3 could then be figured out by plugging result2 into the simulation and running it again. The computer was storing resultn to six decimal places internally, but only printing them out to three. When it was time to calculate result3 the following day, he re-entered result2, but only to three decimal places, and it was this that led to the discovery of something profound.

Given just an eentsy teensty tiny little change in the input conditions, the result was wild and unpredictable.

This phenomenon is called “sensitive dependence on initial conditions.” For the systems in which we could successfully make good predictions (such as the path of a flying object), only a reasonable approximation of the initial state is necessary to make a reasonably accurate prediction. Sensitive dependence of a reasonable approximation of the initial state, however, yields unreasonable predictions. In a system exhibiting sensitive dependence, reasonable approximations of the initial state do not provide reasonable approximations of the future state.

So here comes the important part: For a chaotic system such as weather, in order to make useful long term predictions, you need measurements of initial conditions with infinite accuracy. What this means is that even a deterministic system, which in theory can be modeled by mathematical equations, can generate behavior which seems random and unpredictable. This manifests itself in nature all the time. Weather is the typical example, but there is also evidence that the human brain is also governed by deterministic chaos. Indeed, our brain’s ability to generate seemingly unpredictable behavior is an important component of both survival and creativity.

So my question is, if it is not possible to quantify the initial conditions of a chaotic system with infinite accuracy, is that system really deterministic? In a sense, yes, even though it is impossible to calculate it:

Michaelangelo claimed the statue was already in the block of stone, and he just had to chip away the unnecessary parts. And in a literal sense, an infinite number of universes of all types and states should exist in thin air, indifferent to whether or not we discover the rules that exactly reveal their outcome. Our own universe could even be the numerical result of a mathematical equation that nobody has bothered to sit down and solve yet.

But we’d be here, waiting for them to discover us, and everything we’ll ever do.

The answer might be there, whether we can calculate it or not, but even if it is, can we really do anything useful with it? In the movie Pi, a mathematician stumbles upon an enigmatic 216 digit number which is supposedly the representation of the infinite, the true name of God, and thus holds the key to deterministic chaos. But it’s just a number, and no one really knows what to do with it, not even the mathematician who discovered it (though he could make accurate predictions on for the stock market, though he could not understand why and it came at a price). In the end, it drove him mad. I don’t pretend to have any answers here, but I think the makers of Pi got it right.

JASON Lives!

Science & Technology / /

Established in 1960, JASON is an independent scientific advisory group that provides consulting services to the U.S. government on matters of defense science and technology. Most of it’s work is the product of an annual summer study and they have done work for the DOD (including DARPA), FBI, CIA and DOE. FAS recently collected and published several recent unclassified JASON studies on their website. They cover a wide area of subjects, ranging from quantum computing to nanotechnology to nuclear weapon maintenance. There is way too much material there to summarize, so here are just a few that cought my eye:

  • Counterproliferation January 1998 (3.3 MB .pdf): The first sentence: “Intelligence efforts should focus on humint collections as early as possible in the proliferation timeline and should continue such efforts throughout the proliferation effort.” Note that this was written in January of 1998 and also note that this criticism is still being raised today.
  • Small Scale Propulsion: Fly on the Wall, Cockroach in the Corner, Rat in the Basement, Bird in the Sky September 1997 (1.2 MB .pdf): “This study concerns small vehicles on the battlefield, and in particular their propulsion. These vehicles may fly or travel on the ground by walking, rolling or hopping. Their purpose is to carry, generally covertly, a useful payload to a place inaccessible to man, or too dangerous for men, or in which a man or manned vehicle could not be covert.” Unfortunately, things don’t look to be going to well, as the technology required to create something like an “artificial vehicle as small and inconspicious as a fly or a cockroach” is still a long ways off. That was over 6 years ago, however, so things may have improved…
  • Data Mining and the Human Genome January 2000 (1.6 MB .pdf): Work on the Human Genome is shifting from the collection of data to the analysis of data. This study seeks to apply powerful data mining techniques developed in other fields to the Human Genome and the biological sciences.
  • Opportunities at the Intersection of Nanoscience, Biology and Computation November 2002 (5.0 MB .pdf): This seems to be a popular subject, and DARPA has several programs that seek to exploit this intersection of subjects. Applications include Brain Machine Interfaces and Biomolecular Motors (which, come to think of it, might help with the propulsion of those artificial vehicles as small and inconspicious as flies).

Interesting stuff.

NASA, Commercialization, and Agility

Science & Technology / /

The Laughing Wolf comments on the “new” space initiative, paying particular attention to commercial interest in space… and the lack of any mention of commercialization in the new plan. He reads something into this which goes along with my thoughts on the institutional agility that will be necessary to make it to the moon and beyond.

You know, the President is not nearly as stupid as his critics try to portray him to be. In fact, he has been pretty shrewd and smart on many major issues. He may not be the best spoken person around, but he is not stupid. Do you think that he may have had some method to his madness here? For what if private industry does create and provide launch services? What if they do send probes on to the moon? Do you think that maybe NASA might, by dint of budget and language, be encouraged to make use of it? It is an intriguing possibility, since the actual language and such is not yet fully available, or perhaps even fully worked out.

Even if not, the timeline and scope provide ample opportunity for private space enterprise to prove its claims. The President has made his announcement and hit the button of his obligation here. He has honored the ideal that was NASA, and provided a cover to try to re-organize and re-focus the agency. In so doing, he has also effectively issued a challenge to the private sector: do it better and do it faster.

For if industry can, then there is the possibility of NASA having to use those services. If not, then the government can proceed on down the same tired path.

In my post on this subject, I didn’t write about what the next big advance in space travel would be or who would create it, only that it would happen and that NASA would need to be agile enough to react to and exploit it. I noticed that the proposal didn’t make any mention of commercial efforts, but I didn’t pick up on the idea that the absense of such points was something of a challenge to the private sector.

Also, for more on the space effort, Jay Manifold has been blogging up a storm over at A Voyage To Arcturus. There is too much good stuff there to summarize, but if you’re interested in this subject, check it out. Alright, one interesting thing I saw there was this conceptual illustration of a modular Crewed Exploration Vehicle. Of course as both Jay and the Laughing Wolf note, the CEV is meant to accompish many and varied goals, which means that while it may be versitile, it won’t do any of its many tasks very well… but it is interesting nonetheless.

To the Moon!

Best Entries, Culture, Science & Technology / /

President Bush has laid out his vision for space exploration. Reaction has mostly been lukewarm. Naturally, there are opponents and proponents, but in my mind it is a good start. That we’ve changed focus to include long term manned missions on the Moon and a mission to Mars is a bold enough move for now. What is difficult is that this is a program that will span several decades… and several administrations. There will be competition and distractions. To send someone to Mars on the schedule Bush has set requires a consistent will among the American electorate as well. However, given the technology currently available, it might prove to be a wise move.

A few months ago, in writing about the death of the Galileo probe, I examined the future of manned space flight and drew a historical analogy with the pyramids. I wrote:

Is manned space flight in danger of becoming extinct? Is it worth the insane amount of effort and resources we continually pour into the space program? These are not questions I’m really qualified to answer, but its interesting to ponder. On a personal level, its tempting to righteously proclaim that it is worth it; that doing things that are “difficult verging on insane” have inherent value, well beyond the simple science involved.

Such projects are not without their historical equivalents. There are all sorts of theories explaining why the ancient Egyptian pyramids were built, but none are as persuasive as the idea that they were built to unify Egypt’s people and cultures. At the time, almost everything was being done on a local scale. With the possible exception of various irrigation efforts that linked together several small towns, there existed no project that would encompass the whole of Egypt. Yes, an insane amount of resources were expended, but the product was truly awe-inspiring, and still is today.

Those who built the pyramids were not slaves, as is commonly thought. They were mostly farmers from the tribes along the River Nile. They depended on the yearly cycle of flooding of the Nile to enrich their fields, and during the months that that their fields were flooded, they were employed to build pyramids and temples. Why would a common farmer give his time and labor to pyramid construction? There were religious reasons, of course, and patriotic reasons as well… but there was something more. Building the pyramids created a certain sense of pride and community that had not existed before. Markings on pyramid casing stones describe those who built the pyramids. Tally marks and names of “gangs” (groups of workers) indicate a sense of pride in their workmanship and respect between workers. The camaraderie that resulted from working together on such a monumental project united tribes that once fought each other. Furthermore, the building of such an immense structure implied an intense concentration of people in a single area. This drove a need for large-scale food-storage among other social constructs. The Egyptian society that emerged from the Pyramid Age was much different from the one that preceded it (some claim that this was the emergence of the state as we now know it.)

“What mattered was not the pyramid – it was the construction of the pyramid.” If the pyramid was a machine for social progress, so too can the Space program be a catalyst for our own society.

Much like the pyramids, space travel is a testament to what the human race is capable of. Sure it allows us to do research we couldn’t normally do, and we can launch satellites and space-based telescopes from the shuttle (much like pyramid workers were motivated by religion and a sense of duty to their Pharaoh), but the space program also serves to do much more. Look at the Columbia crew – men, women, white, black, Indian, Israeli – working together in a courageous endeavor, doing research for the benefit of mankind, traveling somewhere where few humans have been. It brings people together in a way few endeavors can, and it inspires the young and old alike. Human beings have always dared to “boldly go where no man has gone before.” Where would we be without the courageous exploration of the past five hundred years? We should continue to celebrate this most noble of human spirits, should we not?

We should, and I’m glad we’re orienting ourselves in this direction. Bush’s plan appeals to me because of it’s pragmatism. It doesn’t seek to simply fly to Mars, it seeks to leverage the Moon first. We’ve already been to the Moon, but it still holds much value as a destination in itself as well as a testing ground and possibly even a base from which to launch or at least support our Mars mission. Some, however, see the financial side of things a little too pragmatic:

In its financial aspects, the Bush plan also is pragmatic — indeed, too much so. The president’s proposal would increase NASA’s budget very modestly in the near term, pushing more expensive tasks into the future. This approach may avoid an immediate political backlash. But it also limits the prospects for near-term technological progress. Moreover, it gives little assurance that the moon-Mars program will survive the longer haul, amid changing administrations, economic fluctuations, and competition from voracious entitlement programs.

There’s that problem of keeping everyone interested and happy in the long run again, but I’m not so sure we should be too worried… yet. Wretchard draws an important distinction, we’ve laid out a plan to voyage to Mars – not a plan to develop the technology to do so. Efforts will be proceeding on the basis of current technology, but as Wretchard also notes in a different post, current technology may be unsuitable for the task:

Current launch costs are on the order of $8,000/lb, a number that will have to be reduced by a factor of ten for the habitation of the moon, the establishment of La Grange transfer stations or flights to Mars to be feasible. This will require technology, and perhaps even basic physics that does not even exist. Simply building bigger versions of the Saturn V will not work. That would be “like trying to upgrade Columbus?s Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria with wings to speed up the Atlantic crossing time. A jet airliner is not a better sailing ship. It is a different thing entirely.” The dream of settling Mars must await an unforseen development.

Naturally, the unforseen development is notoriously tricky, and while we must pursue alternate forms of propulsion, it would be unwise to hold off on the voyage until this development occurs. We must strike a delicate balance between the concentration on the goal and the means to achieve that goal. As Wretchard notes, this is largely dependant on timing. What is also important here is that we are able to recognize this development when it happens and that we leave our program agile enough to react effectively to this development.

Recognizing this development will prove interesting. At what point does a technology become mature enough to use for something this important? This may be relatively straightforward, but it is possible that we could jump the gun and proceed too early (or, conversely, wait too long). Once recognized, we need to be agile, by which I mean that we must develop the capacity to seamlessly adapt the current program to exploit this new development. This will prove challenging, and will no doubt require a massive increase in funding, as it will also require a certain amount of institutional agility – moving people and resources to where we need them, when we need them. Once we recognize our opportunity, we must pounce without hesitation.

It is a bold and challenging, yet judiciously pragmatic, vision that Bush has laid out, but this is only the first step. The truly important challenges are still a few years off. What is important is that we recognize and exploit any technological advances on our way to Mars, and we can only do so if we are agile enough to effectively react. Exploration of the frontiers is a part of my country’s identity, and it is nice to see us proceeding along these lines again. Like the Egyptians so long ago, this mammoth project may indeed inspire a unity amongst our people. In these troubled times, that would be a welcome development. Though Europe, Japan, and China have also shown interest in such an endeavor, I, along with James Lileks, like the idea of an American being the first man on Mars:

When I think of an American astronaut on Mars, I can’t imagine a face for the event. I can tell you who staffed the Apollo program, because they were drawn from a specific stratum of American life. But things have changed. Who knows who we’d send to Mars? Black pilot? White astrophysicist? A navigator whose parents came over from India in 1972? Asian female doctor? If we all saw a bulky person bounce out of the landing craft and plant the flag, we’d see that wide blank mirrored visor. Sex or creed or skin hue – we’d have no idea.

This is the quintessence of America: whatever face you’d see when the visor was raised, it wouldn’t be a surprise.

Indeed.

Update 1.21.04: More here.

A Compendium of DARPA Programs

Science & Technology / /

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been widely criticized for several of its more controversial programs, including the now defunct Terrorism Information Awareness program (rightly so) and a Futures Market used to predict terror (perhaps wrongly so), but (as Steven Aftergood has noted) it has not received the credit to which it is arguably entitled for conducting those programs in an unclassified form, in which they can be freely debated, criticized and attacked.

DARPA has recently published a complete descriptive summary of all of its (unclassified) programs, and some of it reads like a science fiction author’s wishlist. It’s a fascinating collection of programs and it makes for absorbing reading.

I’ve read a good portion of the report and while I find it impossible to provide a summary (it is, after all, a summary in itself), though I was particularly enthralled by how DARPA is attempting to exploit the intersection of biology, information technology, and physical sciences. For instance:

The Brain Machine Interface Program will create new technologies for augmenting human performance through the ability to noninvasively access codes in the brain in real time and integrate them into peripheral device or system operations.

Essentially this means that they are attempting to create an interface in which a brain accepts and controls a mechanical device as a natural part of it’s body. The applications for this are near limitless and, though designed for military applications (of the type you’re likely to see in science fiction novels), this technology would be extremely valuable for giving paralysis or amputation patients the ability to control a motorized wheelchair or a prosthetic limb as an extension of their body.

As you might expect, many of the projects work along similar lines and could theoretically provide supporting characteristics to one another. For instance, it seems to me that a brain machine interface would be particularly useful if paired with the Exoskeletons for Human Performance Augmentation program, again creating something right out of science fiction. It also raises some rather interesting questions about our place in evolution, and whether making the transition to a cyborg-like species is inevitiable. I remember Arthur C. Clarke forwarding the idea that as technology progressed far beyond our capabilities, human beings would find a way to transfer their consciousness to a mechanical (or, given the amount of biological engineering going on, let’s just say constructed) being, as these machines would be more efficient than the human body. Of course, that is quite far off, but it is interesting to ponder (and Clarke even went further, postulating that we would only spend a short time in our “robot” form and even transcend our physical form…)

Again, I found the biological technologies (as well as many of the nanotechnologies) that are being explored to be the most interesting buch. One such program is attempting to actively collect information from insect populations to map areas for biohazards, another is set to develop biomolecular motors (nanomachines that convert chemical energy into mechanical work at a very high rate of efficiency). There are a lot of programs that utilize BioMagnetics and nanotechnology to attain a better monitoring capability for the human body.

Some of these projects or ideas have been around for a while and many of them are still in preliminary phases, but it is still interesting to see the breadth of ideas DARPA is exploring…

Note: Some of the information in the report is out of date, notably with respect to the “Total Information Awareness” project which was later renamed “Terrorism Information Awareness” and is now defunct.

My God! It’s full of stars!

Best Entries, Culture, Science & Technology / /

What Galileo Saw by Michael Benson : A great New Yorker article on the remarkable success of the Galileo probe. James Grimmelmann provides some fantastic commentary:

Launched fifteen years ago with technology that was a decade out of date at the time, Galileo discovered the first extraterrestrial ocean, holds the record for most flybys of planets and moons, pointed out a dual star system, and told us about nine more moons of Jupiter.

Galileo’s story is the story of improvisational engineering at its best. When its main 134 KBps antenna failed to open, NASA engineers decided to have it send back images using its puny 10bps antenna. 10 bits per second! 10!

To fit images over that narrow a channel, they needed to teach Galileo some of the tricks we’ve learned about data compression in the last few decades. And to teach an old satellite new tricks, they needed to upgrade its entire software package. Considering that upgrading your OS rarely goes right here on Earth, pulling off a half-billion-mile remote install is pretty impressive.

And the brilliance doesn’t end there:

As if that wasn’t enough hacker brilliance, design changes in the wake of the Challenger explosion completely ruled out the original idea of just sending Galileo out to Mars and slingshotting towards Jupiter. Instead, two Ed Harris characters at NASA figured out a triple bank shot — a Venus flyby, followed by two Earth flybys two years apart — to get it out to Jupiter. NASA has come in for an awful lot of criticism lately, but there are still some things they do amazingly well.

Score another one for NASA (while you’re at it, give Grimmelmann a few points for the Ed Harris reference). Who says NASA can’t do anything right anymore? Grimmelmann observes:

The Galileo story points out, I think, that the problem is not that NASA is messed-up, but that manned space flight is messed-up.

…

Manned spaceflight is, in the Ursula K. LeGuin sense, perverse. It’s an act of pure conspicuous waste, like eating fifty hotdogs or memorizing ten thousand digits of pi. We do it precisely because it is difficult verging on insane.

Is manned space flight in danger of becoming extinct? Is it worth the insane amount of effort and resources we continually pour into the space program? These are not questions I’m really qualified to answer, but its interesting to ponder. On a personal level, its tempting to righteously proclaim that it is worth it; that doing things that are “difficult verging on insane” have inherent value, well beyond the simple science involved.

Such projects are not without their historical equivalents. There are all sorts of theories explaining why the ancient Egyptian pyramids were built, but none are as persuasive as the idea that they were built to unify Egypt’s people and cultures. At the time, almost everything was being done on a local scale. With the possible exception of various irrigation efforts that linked together several small towns, there existed no project that would encompass the whole of Egypt. Yes, an insane amount of resources were expended, but the product was truly awe-inspiring, and still is today.

Those who built the pyramids were not slaves, as is commonly thought. They were mostly farmers from the tribes along the River Nile. They depended on the yearly cycle of flooding of the Nile to enrich their fields, and during the months that that their fields were flooded, they were employed to build pyramids and temples. Why would a common farmer give his time and labor to pyramid construction? There were religious reasons, of course, and patriotic reasons as well… but there was something more. Building the pyramids created a certain sense of pride and community that had not existed before. Markings on pyramid casing stones describe those who built the pyramids. Tally marks and names of “gangs” (groups of workers) indicate a sense of pride in their workmanship and respect between workers. The camaraderie that resulted from working together on such a monumental project united tribes that once fought each other. Furthermore, the building of such an immense structure implied an intense concentration of people in a single area. This drove a need for large-scale food-storage among other social constructs. The Egyptian society that emerged from the Pyramid Age was much different from the one that preceded it (some claim that this was the emergance of the state as we now know it.)

“What mattered was not the pyramid – it was the construction of the pyramid.” If the pyramid was a machine for social progress, so too can the Space program be a catalyst for our own society.

Much like the pyramids, space travel is a testament to what the human race is capable of. Sure it allows us to do research we couldn’t normally do, and we can launch satellites and space-based telescopes from the shuttle (much like pyramid workers were motivated by religion and a sense of duty to their Pharaoh), but the space program also serves to do much more. Look at the Columbia crew – men, women, white, black, Indian, Israeli – working together in a courageous endeavor, doing research for the benefit of mankind, traveling somewhere where few humans have been. It brings people together in a way few endeavors can, and it inspires the young and old alike. Human beings have always dared to “boldly go where no man has gone before.” Where would we be without the courageous exploration of the past five hundred years? We should continue to celebrate this most noble of human spirits, should we not?

In the mean time, Galileo is nearing its end. On September 21st, around 3 p.m. EST, Galileo will be vaporized as it plummets toward Jupiter’s atmosphere, sending back whatever data it still can. This planned destruction is exactly what has been planned for Galileo; the answer to an intriguing ethical dilemma.

In 1996, Galileo conducted the first of eight close flybys of Europa, producing breathtaking pictures of its surface, which suggested that the moon has an immense ocean hidden beneath its frozen crust. These images have led to vociferous scientific debate about the prospects for life there; as a result, NASA officials decided that it was necessary to avoid the possibility of seeding Europa with alien life-forms.

I had never really given thought to the idea that one of our space probes could “infect” another planet with our “alien” life-forms, though it does make perfect sense. Reaction to the decision among those who worked on Galileo is mixed, most recognizing the rationale, but not wanting to let go anyway (understandable, I guess)…

For more on the pyramids, check out this paper by Marcell Graeff. The information he referenced that I used in this article came primarily from Kurt Mendelssohn’s book The Riddle of the Pyramids.

Update 9.25.03 – Steven Den Beste has posted an excellent piece on the Galileo mission and more…

Security & Technology

Best Entries, Neal Stephenson, Science & Technology, Security & Intelligence / /

The other day, I was looking around for some new information on Quicksilver (Neal Stephenson’s new novel, a follow up to Cryptonomicon) and I came across Stephenson’s web page. I like everything about that page, from the low-tech simplicity of its design, to the pleading tone of the subject matter (the “continuous partial attention” bit always gets me). At one point, he gives a summary of a talk he gave in Toronto a few years ago:

Basically I think that security measures of a purely technological nature, such as guns and crypto, are of real value, but that the great bulk of our security, at least in modern industrialized nations, derives from intangible factors having to do with the social fabric, which are poorly understood by just about everyone. If that is true, then those who wish to use the Internet as a tool for enhancing security, freedom, and other good things might wish to turn their efforts away from purely technical fixes and try to develop some understanding of just what the social fabric is, how it works, and how the Internet could enhance it. However this may conflict with the (absolutely reasonable and understandable) desire for privacy.

And that quote got me to thinking about technolology and security, and how technology never really replaces human beings, it just makes certain tasks easier, quicker, and more efficient. There was a lot of talk about this sort of thing around the early 90s, when certain security experts were promoting the use of strong cryptography and digital agents that would choose what products we would buy and spend our money for us.

As it turns out, most of those security experts seem to be changing their mind. There are several reasons for this, chief among them fallibility and, quite frankly, a lack of demand. It is impossible to build an infallible system (at least, it’s impossible to recognize that you have built such a system), but even if you had accomplished such a feat, what good would it be? A perfectly secure system is also a perfectly useless system. Besides that, you have human ignorance to contend with. How many of you actually encrypt your email? It sounds odd, but most people don’t even notice the little yellow lock that comes up in their browser when they are using a secure site.

Applying this to our military, there are some who advocate technology (specifically airpower) as a replacement for the grunt. The recent war in Iraq stands in stark contrast to these arguments, despite the fact that the civilian planners overruled the military’s request for additional ground forces. In fact, Rumsfeld and his civilian advisors had wanted to send significantly fewer ground forces, because they believed that airpower could do virtually everything by itself. The only reason there were as many as there were was because General Franks fought long and hard for increased ground forces (being a good soldier, you never heard him complain, but I suspect there will come a time when you hear about this sort of thing in his memoirs).

None of which is to say that airpower or technology are not necessary, nor do I think that ground forces alone can win a modern war. The major lesson of this war is that we need to have balanced forces in order to respond with flexibility and depth to the varied and changing threats our country faces. Technology plays a large part in this, as it makes our forces more effective and more likely to succeed. But, to paraphrase a common argument, we need to keep in mind that weapons don’t fight wars, soldiers do. While technology we used provided us with a great deal of security, its also true that the social fabric of our armed forces were undeniably important in the victory.

One thing Stephenson points to is an excerpt from a Sherlock Holmes novel in which Holmes argues:

…the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful country-side…The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish…But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the

wiser.

Once again, the war in Iraq provides us with a great example. Embedding reporters in our units was a controversial move, and there are several reasons the decision could have been made. One reason may very well have been that having reporters around while we fought the war may have made our troops behave better than they would have otherwise. So when we watch the reports on TV, all we see are the professional, honorable soldiers who bravely fought an enemy which was fighting dirty (because embedding reporters revealed that as well).

Communications technology made embedding reporters possible, but it was the complex social interactions that really made it work (well, to our benefit at least). We don’t derive security straight from technology, we use it to bolster our already existing social constructs, and the further our technology progresses, the easier and more efficient security becomes.

Update 6.6.03 – Tacitus discusses some similar issues…