macleod@drivax.UUCP (05/29/87)
It has been some time now since the death of Buckminster Fuller. When
the popular media mentions him, it's usually related to his best-
known invention, the geodesic dome. He's remembered as an inventor,
innovator, and free spirit, and the media seem to portray him as an
interesting and successful eccentric.
I didn't know much more than that about Fuller until I picked up his
last major book, "Critical Path", and read it. Then I learned that
something much more profound was going on; there was a philosophy and
worldview behind his work that was unpublicised (at least, I never
saw it).
Fuller claimed that he had refuted a basic principle behind group/govern-
ment actions.
As Fuller tells it, the story begins with the British East India Company.
As the mercantile arm of the British Empire, they were interested in
extending their power and justifying doing so. They commissioned the
famous study by Thomas Malthus which drew the conclusion that populations
would inevitably grow faster than their supply of necessities, which meant
that there would either be a universal shortfall, or that some would have
enough while others lacked.
This was an improvement over older philosophies that posited a zero-sum
nature to existence, where there were only total winners and total losers,
appropriate to groups that had no understanding of creative production at
all, only seizure of others' products.
Even so, the Malthusian proposition was accepted as scientific and seemed
to justify all sorts of governmental schemes - from the aims of the
British East India Company to dominate the sources of raw materials, to
various Social Darwinists who wanted to conquer others outright, to theories
of class interests that were incorporated into Marxism.
Fuller observed, however, that there was a force pushing in the >other<
direction, weak enough in Malthus's time for him to overlook, but which
has grown and grown in importance. Fuller calls this process
"Ephemeralization", and it simply means that as scientific knowlege grows,
more benefit is derived from a unit quantity of a resource.
The most relevant example that comes to my mind is sand. For a long time
sand had a value of next to nothing. In fact, it was probably considered
a liability when mixed into sacks of grain, or other places where it wasn't
wanted.
Then men discovered how to make windows, and the usefullness of sand
increased.
Then men discovered how to make silicon-based semiconductors, and sand
became ever so much more useful.
There is no >direct< correlation between the development of inexpensive
computing and increased productivity in farms or industries; rather,
the increase in utility, is, in general, absorbed into the infrastructure
behind the production. This is one of the reasons ephemeralization has
been difficult to see.
Anyway, Fuller claims that during the late '40's or early '50's we reached
a crucial point: the scientific revolution was now capable of raising the
living standards of everyone on Earth >faster< than they were reproducing.
So what happened? Well, Fuller puts the blame on military industrialization,
operating on the obsolete principle that there are not enough resources to
go around. He says that >now<, for the first time in history, if we
cooperate, we can create abundance for the whole planet. And this was the
thrust of his inventions. There were more than new designs; they were
"ephemeralized" designs that were meant to bring advantage to all men.
For example, if you have a thousand liters of water, and it takes 20 liters
of water per shower, 50 people can shower with that water. Fuller's shower
creates a kind of dense fog that works like a shower, but uses only half a
liter of water per shower.
Fuller goes on to say that we have a relatively short time to stop fighting
and settle down; the crisis will come before the year 2000. He personally
recommends a kind of utopian communism where there is no private ownership
of anything, and which makes me ill to contemplate, but I don't think that
this is necessary to his central thesis.
What strikes me as curious is that this concept surely must be of earth-
shaking importance, if true; if not, we need not pay attention to him.
But surely the issue must be faced. And nowhere have I seen any discussion
or analysis of ephemeralization.
Part II: Nanotechnology
I recently posted a short description of what is called Nanotechnology in
the sci.space group. Bear with me if you have read it there.
The term "Nanotechnology" refers to a basket of advances in engineering
science that promise to bring control of the physical world down into the
realm of the cell, the molecule, and the atom. The best known book on
the subject is K. Eric Drexler's "Engines of Creation", which provides
an overview of the techniques, philosophy, and pitfalls of this technology.
Nanotechnology is classic ephemeralization. The beginnings of nanotechnology
are here now, in the form of gene splicing with reduction enzymes, and of
mapping the human genetic structure. The ephemeralization is demonstrated
by, for example, the availability of large quantities of cloned human insulin
and somatotropin, where previously the only sources were tedious, dangerous,
and expensive extractions from cadavers (in the case of somatotropin).
The next frontier of nanotechnology occurs when scientists learn how to make
living state machines at a cellular level. According to Drexler, vast
quantities of computing power and data can be enclosed in cell-sized
biocomputers. When this level of technology is reduced to common practice,
cell-sized "doctors" will roam the blood stream, supervising engineering
projects like chelation of arteriosclerotic deposits, repair of cross-linkage,
and other kinds of free radical damage. What is your life expectancy if any
damaged cell can be rebuilt?
This level of engineering in fact implies control of molecular structures;
still, Drexler maintains that this is yet another level to move to, and that
even finer control is possible from this state. Here we encounter materials
that are "intellegent"; a drafting stool that changes into an easy chair, or an
automobile that organizes itself as it extrudes from the wall of your garage.
Here speculation takes over, and even hard-core science-fiction buffs have
a hard time conceiving of the material advances possible.
It is to Drexler's credit that he confronts the "dark side of The Force", the
sorts of catastrophies that can occur with nanotechnology. The classic
disaster is the Grey Goo Catastrophe, in which some person creates a cell-
sized automaton which 1) eats anything, and 2) makes copies of itself
every (day) (hour) (minute) (millisecond). In some time, long or short,
everything is copies of this nanomachine eating each other. There are other
possible pitfalls, like the catastrophe in Greg Bear's novel "Blood Music",
and Drexler attempts to answer these.
Drexler makes much of the principle that these developments are as rigorously
extrapolated as he can achieve - they require no breakthroughs in technology,
merely the continual nibbling away at capabilities, so admirably demonstrat-
ed by recent advances in superconductor technology (in Drexler's book,
by the way, heat of reaction is seen as a major problem in cellular
state machinery; perhaps room-temperature superconductors will solve some of
these problems). >IF< this is the case - and I invite comment and argument
here - the future is going to be mighty interesting, and perhaps more
alien than any of us realize (nanotechnology also includes, of course,
the reduction to practice of predictive genetic engineering, so expect
human - ??? hybrids).
And because the machines themselves - like the "doctor" white blood cells
with the computing power of a hundred Cray-2s and the data available to
repair virtually any part of the body - reproduce (if desired), their
cost of production is microscopic, literally pennies to distribute all
over the world.
Part III: Frontiers
With the tools of production spread around the world to the sites of the
raw material, and the continued march of ephemeralization, we seem to be
moving into a potential paradise. What's wrong with this picture? The
same things that have always been wrong - the inability of men to live
rationally, to control their own passions, to keep their promises.
Fuller beat his head against this one, too, for many years, and concluded
"Don't try to reform man...reform the environment." If men operated
completely on deterministic, mechanistic principles, this might work.
H.G. Wells called for those who cared about the future to create a
stronger civilization (>not a stronger government<) to bind around society
like iron bands. Where are these iron bands? We have moved in the
opposite direction; the bands of purpose, of vision, of hopes for the
future, are little more than flaccid rubber bands. When times are good,
we sate our vices; when times are bad, we retreat in fear that progress
has ended, and that our slide back into pre-industrial oblivion will
begin soon. For the first time in American history, the trend of increasing
education and wealth each generation has reversed.
I'm convinced that at least >part< of the problem is the perception of lack
of frontiers, and of America as maturing into a rigid, conservative, European-
style State. Here, I mean conservative in the sense of backing away from all
change, and risk, of reliance on tradition and structure rather than substance,
equally applicable to Welfare State or Warfare State. I fear that this
maturation is inescapable.
For tens of thousands of years individuals have assessed the current scene and
decided, "To hell with all this. I'd rather start over on my own over
>there<." For a lot of history that meant picking up and going West. When
Europe was finally full, they expanded into America and beat their way west
over the next 500 years. Today, people are still coming to California to
escape the more rigid social and political structures of the East Coast.
And everybody knows what kind of a reputation California has.
There's an obvious problem, though. The next frontier is up, not West.
There is a small, but growing group ready to leave, and when and if the
means are there, the trickle will swell to a flood. The pent-up pressure
is there. In my opinion, the social diversity of groups can only tolerate
a certain percentage of disagreement on goals and values, and the values
of the frontiersmen are centered on freedom of action, acceptance of risk
for possibility of gain, and a willingness to be self-responsible. The
values of the conservative remainder are security, resistance to change
which might threaten them, and an adbication of responsibility for protection.
We are now in a situation where these forces are seesawing back and forth,
trying to drag us all in one direction or the other.
The current problem is that the small percentage who want to move into
space must try to convince a huge, distrusting mass to commit the money
and effort to make it happen. The record is not promising.
However, if nanotechnology pays off, we will have new approaches to space
flight; we will be able to genetically engineer devices like Larry Niven's
solid-fuel "stage trees". We will have nanotechnology laboratories in space,
surely the safest possible place for such an explosive technology. These
techniques will give us access to the solar system, and we will be able to
build multigeneration interstellar vessels if we want to. We will be able
to terraform Venus in years instead of centuries, and to convert asteroids
into habitats.
I have high hopes, then, for the future, if we can get through this most
perilous period. I hope that a hundred years from now we can look back
at this time and say that it was the most frustrating in human experience -
when the promises of technology were envisioned, but not yet born, and men
could feel their wings, but not yet fly.
Mike MacLeod