hkhenson@cup.portal.com (06/16/89)
[I have adopted entirely new posting software in an attempt to
beat the truncation bug. To test it, I'm resending Megascale,
which has not to my knowledge ever made it out complete before.
Cross your fingers! --JoSH]
MegaScale Engineering and Nanotechnology -- Healthy, Wealthy, Wise and
plenty to keep us from getting bored.
By H. Keith Henson
I have an advantage over most of you--about 5 years of thinking
about the consequences of nanotechnology. It is only with Eric
Drexler's presentation at the last annual meeting that the
consequences of molecular scale construction have been coming to the
attention of the National Space Society. I don't know how *you* have
reacted to these revelations, but it was not a uniformly pleasant
experience for me. I no longer believe any significant number of us
will get into space by "conventional" means. As I am one of the
founders of the L5 Society, you can see that exposure to these ideas
has caused a wrenching readjustment of my world view.
In spite of that, I still put effort into the space cause. In the
last year I have been trying to get the National Space Society to 1)
take a stand against the Moon Treaty, 2) attempt to get the Moon
Treaty formally rejected by the US, and 3) get the '67 Outer Space
Treaty revised or rejected. It seems clear that a government agency
is the wrong kind of organization to reduce the cost of going into
space and liability provisions of the '67 Treaty are being used by
government lawyers to stifle private companies offering launch
services. I wanted to live out there, and keep working on these
political problems because I still want to.
But conventional development leading to a breakout into space has
kept receding into an ever more remote future, probably well beyond my
unaugmented lifetime, while the nanotechnology breakthrough seems to
be looming over the horizon. After finally adjusting to the
nanotechnology view, (it took years) the future I now see for space
development--and my role in it--is much more attractive than the old
L5/space colony paradigm.
What is the "nanotechnology breakthrough," what relation does it
have to living in space, and what do either have to do with "MegaScale
Engineering"?
The Ultimate Tool
The key to nanotechnology is the replicating assembler, a
microscopic, complex device with the capacity to build anything,
including copies of itself, that can be built out of atoms. Its size
and speed of operation can be estimated, after all, natural
replicaters are all around us. They seem to be about the same order
of magnitude in size, complexity and doubling time as the artificial
ones will be. Microorganisms in ideal conditions (often the case in
industrial vats) can double in about 20 minutes.
When we figure out how to make, feed, and control replicating
assemblers the base of our "industrial capital" (roughly equal to
wealth) will depend on something that replicates in 20 minutes.
Planning, design, transportation, etc. will slow down the pace, but
even a factor of 10,000 slower would leave us with more than a
doubling per year.
All of us survivors of "limits to growth" know about exponential
increase. Human populations do it with minimum doubling times of
about 15 years, the industrial base in the developed world does it in
about 20 years. The ratio between population and industrial growth
rates equals the increasing (or decreasing) wealth per capita.
Because of differential birth rates, rich societies really are getting
richer and, in some cases, the poor are getting poorer.
With replicating assemblers, wealth per capita will rapidly
increase if we can harness even a small portion of the nanotechnology
potential (provided, of course, human populations are still limited to
slower doubling times). A capital base doubling on a time scale of a
year or less would make us almost arbitrarily wealthy, at least until
we run into resource limits. Nanotechnology offers an opportunity for
widespread personal wealth on a scale (in terms of materials and
energy) that can only be compared to today's world gross product. I
leave it as an exercise for the reader to calculate the number of
doublings their personal worth would need to reach one GWP.
The changes we should expect from wealth on this scale make the sum
of all the technological and social changes since we started chipping
flint look tame.
How would even vast wealth get us into space? Being rich won't
automatically get us into space, but the few of us who want to go
there will no longer have to get a government or a large corporation
to pay our way. We won't have to sell our dreams to anyone, but we
will have to keep them, and that may not be an easy task!
The process of reaching energy or material limits on Earth could
provide a few MacroScale Engineering SF story backgrounds. For
example, the real carbon dioxide crisis will be when there is too
little from people taking carbon (the strongest engineering material)
out of the air to build houses, roads, tunnels through the mantle,
industrial works, and spacecraft in large numbers. Some civic minded
types (the Autaban Society? Serria Club?) might burn coal fields to
bring the level back up so plant productivity wouldn't be seriously
hurt. A small engineering project would be to leave a few percent of
the coal underground, reworked into diamond arches to hold up the roof
and keep from disturbing the surface. Illuminate this space with
light pipes from the surface, and you have several hundred square
miles of 200 foot ceilings a thousand feet underground with activity
at the edges still churning out CO2 as their main product, energy as a
minor byproduct, and heat as the unavoidable waste product. Toxic
trace elements? Wall them up in the arches to keep them from
"unimproved" life, they certainly wouldn't bother people who were
using cell repair machines to stay healthy.
Remember the Hunter in Hal Clemet's *Needle*? Cell repair
machines, an obvious product of replicating assemblers, could stitch
together cuts like the Hunter. Even better, they could heal damage
right down to the molecular level. They could clean out clogged blood
vessels, inspecting DNA for errors, reverse the effects of aging, and
rebuild damage from stray cosmic rays. The avant-garde will not be
satisfied with maintaining a youthful physique, and will make
modifications, like growing new teeth out of diamond, or answer the
little ad that says: "Reverse Your Retinas--Get Rid of Unsightly Blind
Spots!" As soon as they become available, I want the integrated
memory package so I can recognize the 10,000 people who expect me to
know them and the enhanced math/science/engineering "thinking aid"
that would let me design a starship in an afternoon (and build it in a
few months.) The availability of such things will split the race into
those who don't want to change, and those who know how pitifully
limited their abilities are and want improvements.
Cell repair machines have another use. They won't (by definition)
revive the dead, but even arch conservatives Peterson and Drexler
admit that cell repair machines could cure "severe, long-term,
whole-body frostbite." This is an obtuse way to say that the concepts
of nanotechnology and cell repair machines changes cryonic suspension
from a longshot to something that only requires "the faith of
Goddard." Goddard *knew* from calculation that the Moon was in reach.
There were only two things about Apollo that might have surprised him.
It occurred much sooner than he thought it would, and he would have
been dismayed that we didn't stay. Anybody who looks at the
nanotechnology/cell repair machine concepts will come to same
conclusion Goddard did, it can be done, and likely will--within a
generation or two. So what if it cost more, and takes longer to
develop the technology. It doesn't take much income to keep you in
liquid nitrogen. Adjusting your world view to include suspension (if
needed) and revival may take longer than your allotted span, but
that's *your* problem. Cryonic suspension offers anyone a chance to
go into the future who can afford the small amount of life insurance
needed to pay for it. Cell repair machines will get us back and let
us live long enough to reshape the galaxy.
Well, what do we do when faced with vast wealth and lives as long
as we want? Just about anything we want to. Neither material or
energy limits will pinch for a long time for the small number of
people willing to go off planet. Getting around the solar system
seems easy enough, and with arbitrarily long lives, the stars are
within reach.
****End part 1
The Last Few Pages
Besides the ability to rework the solar system and lives as long a
we want, what else can we do with nanotechnology?
The information gluttons among us can contemplate a monstrous but
short-lived feast. A few years after the nanotechnology breakthrough
we will have the ability to drill the entire Earth to the mantle on a
1 mm grid at trivial cost and without disturbing anything. We are
going to suck all the available information out of the Earth. When we
do, we will be able to revive at least some of the dinosaurs by
sorting through amber for their DNA. A few years ago it was reported
in *Discover* that readable DNA from 70-100 million-year-old insects
has been found embedded in this natural plastic. Surely a few of
these bugs were blood sucking or biting like deer flies and we will
find DNA from at least a few of the dinosaurs. We may find enough in
an exhaustive search to revive the Neanderthals and possibly some of
our other ancestors. Neandrerthals seem to have made their living by
wrestling cave bears, were immensely strong, and may have been smarter
than we are. The first guy to raise enough for a football team will
clean up.
We can clone or computer simulate the famous people from history in
cases where we can locate enough fragments of undecayed tissue to
decipher their genome. Leonardo de Vinci, for example, is known to
have painted with the tips of his fingers, leaving bits and pieces in
hardened oil paint. There is enough left of Einstein's brain, and it
was preserved soon enough after death that really advanced
nanotechnology might allow us to recover his memories and personality.
With even the faintest hope of doing so, it seems a shame for
researchers to keep whittling on it. Preserving the pieces left in
liquid nitrogen with the cryonics patients now in storage might be a
good idea. In any case, the cold would stop further degradation.
The feast won't last very long. Extracting information from the
rest of the solar system will take only a few years and promises to be
much less interesting. (I don't expect artifacts to be found on
Mars.)
After we have discovered all the local information, knowing where
*all* the fossils and artifacts are buried, and knowing exactly what
they look like right down to the placement of atoms, what can we do to
fill the post-nanotechnology equivalent of *Scientific American*?
The Far Edge Party
Some new information can be obtained with large telescopes. And,
given really large space-based telescopes, we will be limited only by
the amount of material we want to move and tie up in mirrors. I
expect we will resolve continent-sized features on planets out to 1000
light years or better within a few years following the breakthrough,
and locate the oxygen atmospheres (if any) out to a much further
distance.
But there are real limits to what we can find out with remote
sensing, so someone will have to take a closer look. What is the
optimum way to sweep out the Galaxy and obtain most of the available
information? Going out and sending back information works, but takes
too long for my taste. Besides I want to *see* the wonders of our
galaxy, all of them. There are 100-200 billion stars in our galaxy
alone and even with nanotechnology to help it will take a year or two
per star system, not counting travel time between stars. Visiting
every interesting object in serial is literally impossible, since the
interesting places won't last long enough. I don't want to take such
a long time looking over this one small flock of stars that most of
them burn out.
The only way clearly available is to explore the Galaxy in
parallel. This is a topic that hard to discuss, even with readers of
science fiction. Most of my friends in the cryonics organizations are
very uneasy about xeroxing people.
To explore the Galaxy in parallel, we need to make only a few
starships, say 100 and recruit crews for perhaps 10, but we make
copies of the crews to fill all 100. At 1,000 people per ship, and
100 ships (100,000 adventurers) this would probably be necessary
anyway. I doubt there are as many as 10,000 people in the entire
world who would board a starship. Misfits who want to *do* something
as opposed to watching or reading about space exploration are a very
rare compared to the number of *Star Treck* fans. They may not be
common even amoung NSS memebers. An assembler doesn't care what it is
making, and unless there really is some special "vitalizing" force, we
won't have to make hard choices about which way to go--we take all
roads (or at least a fair sample of them).
People have talked about making a copy of themselves and having the
copy do the unpleasant chores. That's silly. A good copy would be
indistinguishable from the original right down to desires. You could
neither make a copy to go visit the stars nor one to stay on Earth
that would be happy unless you didn't care which you did (unlikely) or
someone messed with their personalities (unethical). In fact, I think
it would be unethical to distinguish between copies (a case where the
Golden Rule applies in its strongest form). The only case I can see
where copies are justified is a situation where a person really has no
preference between two mutually exclusive choices. The copying
process might best be fixed so as to split the original material in
half, so neither of the individuals coming out of the process would
have a better claim to being "original". The ethical questions about
copying people, reprogramming them, mapping yourself into faster
hardware, and the rights of constructed personalities is a topic I
would like to see getting more serious discussion.
Another problem is how to improve ourselves without getting
completely lost. Today the mental modules at the root of our
personalities change slowly if at all. When our deepest desires can
be quickly modified with trivial effort, how much of us will survive?
The results of modifying ourselves could be as tragic as being
modified by others.* This and nanotechnology based "super dope" that
make everyone happy but without ambition (or even the desire to eat)
are among the subtle dangers we face. It is time for those of us who
are concerned about our futures to start thinking about these
problems.
--------
footnote
Marvin Minsky has a good deal to say about these problems in
Society of Mind.
--------
Heavy guage philosophical problems of identity aside, and assuming
we avoid the dangers, I expect starships to exit the solar system
within a decade of the nanotechnology breakthrough. They might be
pushed by laser, or powered in one of several other ways. At the
target stars, they build new launch facilities and an appropriate
number of copies of the ship and crew for the targets ahead. How many
stars do they get to visit? If 100 ships go out, each ship and its
descendants will need to visit a billion stars (neglecting losses and
overlaps). Fortunately exponential growth comes to the rescue. A
ship needs to copy itself only about 30 times since 2 exp 30 is about
10 exp 9. If thirty is too few stars for your taste, double less
often, if too many, make more copies per generation.
Do we go out and come back to exchange information? Not with 50
billion starships. Even if there is room to park them, where in our
solar system could we hold a meeting for 50 trillion intrepid
explorers? We will need an economy sized ringworld, and getting a
permit to build one around Sol might take longer than the round trip.
Besides it takes twice as long as needed. There is no point in
wasting time even if we have it. So we will sweep across the Galaxy
and converge for a giant party, scientific meeting, and for those who
want it, a memory merge so they can have seen all the wonders of the
Galaxy. Oh yes, the con committee will have to get a little ahead of
the pack to construct party hotel(s) for 50 trillion.
******End of part 2
The first two of these columns discussed nanotechnology and a few
of the consequences, ending with a discussion of a monumental party on
the far side of the Galaxy.
BEMs
One of the discussion about the Far Edge Party came up with the
suggestion of a prize for bringing the most interesting alien.
Someone else pointed out that with nanotechnology and tens of
thousands of years the judges will have a hard time detecting cheating
with constructed aliens, or life forms raised to sentient status.
More seriously, what will be our effect on aliens? What rules of
conduct should we abide by? Perhaps equally to the point, will we
find any?
Debate rages (that may be too strong a term) between the Saganites
and the Tiplerites. Carl Sagan and Co. hold the opinion that
technological life is fairly common, with radio capable civilizations
every few hundred light years. This school proposes vast listening
posts to eavesdrop. Frank Tipler points to the lack of any evidence
that our galaxy, or the universe at large, is inhabited by
technophiles. I have come to lean very strongly toward Tipler because
I think that before very many years go by *our* existence in this
particular part of the universe will become very obvious. Laser
cannons pushing light sails would be seen as obviously unnatural
beacons far across the universe. It may be that life is fairly
common, but the time it takes for technology to arise is much longer
than the time available on most planets. This may be the real answer
to the Fermi question.
But I am willing to withhold judgment 'til we sweep out our
Galaxy. That should give us a representative sample.
How long will it take to cross the Galaxy looking for life and
getting a look at everything? Light takes about 100,000 years. At an
average of 0.5c, it should take 200,000 years. There are a number of
interesting problems which people so inclined might consider. How do
we get back together at a place we can't even see from here? If we
send out several con committees (so a "run in" with something solid
doesn't leave us without a party hotel) how do we get them all
together at the same place? How many centuries should we party? How
much bean dip will we need? How big could the party get and avoid a
Schwartzchild collapse? The dead dog party will no doubt drag on for
several millennia. If the party is a success, it will be imitated.
Should we give one party per galaxy? Or one on the far side of the
Virgo cluster?
Back at the Ranch
The stay-at-homes, or those who colonize and stay around a single
star, won't have as much fun, but they will have plenty of interesting
things to do. Conservation for example. Have you ever thought of how
much energy the Sun wastes? But I am getting ahead of myself.
"a long enough lever...
James E. Lovelock is an English chemist and prolific inventor.
Along with Lynn Margulas, he developed the biosphere regulation Gaia
concept. Some years ago he calculated that the ability of this planet
to compensate for the rising output of the sun will fail within the
next 50-100 million years. Without intervention, the Earth will
become a post-biotic planet, which David Brin speculates may be a
common fate. Lovelock proposed planetary sunshades be deployed when
they are needed. We could do it with today's technology if we really
needed to. However, it is not the most aesthetic approach, cluttering
up our neighborhood with sun shades. I was familiar with Eric
Drexler's work on solar sails, and proposed hanging a large collection
of them ahead of the Earth in its orbit. The sails would be
gravitationally coupled to the Earth, and accelerate the planet into a
larger orbit. The numbers work out that we had better get started
right away. It would take about 100 million years to pull the Earth
back far enough from the fire.
There is another way to move the Earth. We could use much of the
mass of the asteroid belt to transfer momentum from Jupiter to the
Earth. It takes about the same time to change the Earth's orbit. It
might take almost that long to convince me that we could play
interplanetary billiard balls that long and not accidentally put a cue
ball in the pocket!
The best scheme to cope with stellar aging is not to move the
Earth, but to cool off the sun. David Criswell has called this
process "star lifting" and worked out (at least in theory) how an
advanced (and wealthy) culture would go about cooling their sun by
removing mass and storing the mass to heat it up later. (You want to
take good care of your star, otherwise it gets all dark and icky.)
An Even Longer Lever
A much wilder scheme came out of this thinking. The *very*
patient can move stars. The truly desperate might move a galaxy. An
advanced civilization (even without nanotechnology) could hang a
hemisphere of actively controlled light sails over a star. (They have
to be actively controlled since the light and gravity forces which the
sails balance obey the same square law.) The sails couple
gravitationally to the star, and turn the star (and sails) into a
fusion/photon drive. The ultimate delta V is about the same fraction
of the speed of light as the fraction of mass turned into energy (for
obvious reasons). Still, it is comparable to the velocity of stars
against the cosmic background, or the orbital velocity about the
center of our galaxy, and much larger than our 80 km/sec closure rate
with the Andromeda galaxy.
If enough of the mass of a galaxy is in stars, we may be able to
prevent or at least greatly modify galactic collisions by moving
stars. (The gas, dust, black holes, and dark matter should tag along
if we move the stars slowly enough.) This could be used as background
for SF of a scale that hasn't been seen since the days of Doc Smith,
or Clifford Simak's *Cosmic Engineers*.
A nice fresh G-type star can actually cross the average distance
between galaxies before it burns out. This is for people who want to
travel *and* stay home. Reminds me a little of Larry Niven's
Puppeteers.
Naturally small stars, or ones reduced by "star lifting" have
inconvenient spectral characteristics, at least for those of us
evolved in the light of a G-type star. Two solar sail hemispheres
could be used to reflect light back on the star and change its
spectral type. The surface layers would heat up to look like a G
type, and the light would escape in a narrow band to light planets or
space habitats ranging up to a ringworld. The interior temperature and
burn rate of the star should not be affected, but it might inhibit the
star's normal convection patterns. If someone in stellar physics
wants to work the numbers, I would like to see a copy.
Economy Ringworlds
Do we really need Larry Niven's "scrith" to build ringworlds or can
we get by with known, or at least projected, materials? If you leave
most of the structure non-spinning (or spinning retrograde very
slowly) and support a much lighter spinning part on superconducting
magnetic bearings, O'Neill-type cylinders can be built large enough to
house a continent. I have my doubts about cooling such a thing,
because radiator mass per unit of radiation goes up as the square root
of the absolute size of a radiator. And it is not a particularly
efficient use of mass. But, as Eric Drexler pointed out, there is an
even *less* elegant way to build one-g ringworlds. You spin a
ringworld supported by bearings, pile all the non-spinning mass on the
outside, and let the star's gravity acting on the mass keep the
ringworld from flying apart! Such an economy sized ringworld around a
warmed up M type star might be about the right size to hold the Far
Edge Party.
The ideas about nanotechnology have been evolving for less then 10
years, and have only recently spread out beyond Eric Drexler and his
close associates. We have only started to think about what we will be
able to do with nanotechnology tools, great wealth, and long lives.
Will we reshape planetary systems and stars, or change the courses of
galaxies? The outline of this future is only starting to take shape.
Will these memes spark a social movement like the space colony meme?
Hard to say, but they offer many of the attractive features of
O'Neill's space colonies, especially new lands, personal involvement,
and grand adventure. They have the added advantage that advanced age
will be no barrier. A few of us are starting to take the "Far Edge
Committee" seriously. In any case, these ideas should provide more
interesting speculation than L5 ever did.
Such are this year's thoughts on the future of living in space.
The stay-at-homes will rework stars and planetary systems. The more
adventurous will board the starships, stopping every now and then for
a memory merge and party.
[If you get this note, you have the whole file. --JoSH ]
MegaScale Engineering Page 7 Henson 10/25/87
Postscript--Conceptual Breakthroughs
While Eric Drexler discussed it in Engines of Creation, you get the
impression that he expected the start of molecular "design ahead" to be many
years in the future. It may be sooner.
Roger Gregory (of Xanadu Hypertext) has predicted that molecular design
software will be in the hands of an army of unfunded hackers within the next few
years. Simulation programs are available now for molecules of several
thousand atoms. They are expensive, and burn a lot of computer time, but given
the ever rising capacity of personal computers, who cares? These tools can be
used to design (= build in computer space) and run a whole family of molecular
manipulators. Eventually "molecular hackers" seeking prestiege and perhaps
prize money will design one that can make a copy of itself in computer space. We
then have a target to link with what we can do in the known world of chemistry/
biotechnology. Once we have all the steps down (this object with this input and
this outside help can generate the next one in the chain to this more capable
device, etc.), it should become a relatively short-term project of months, or at
the most a few years, to physically implement nanotechnology.
Thanks to all who review this article in draft.
Bibliograpy
Lovelock, James "Gaia and the End of Gaia."
CoEvolution Quaterly, No. 31, Fall 1981
Drexler, K. Eric. Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of
Nanothecnology. . Anchor Press/Doubleday: Garden City, New
York, 1986.
Criswell, David R. "Solar System Industrialization: Implications
for Interstellar Migrations" in Space Migration PUBLISHER DATE
Burrows and Tipler, Frank. Cosmological Anthropic Principle,
PUBLISHER DATE
Minsky, Marvin. Society of Mind. Simon and Shuster: New
York, 1986.
About the author
H. Keith Henson was one of the founders and first president of the L5 Society.
Memes, computers, nanotechnology, cryonics, and planning for the Far Edge Party
are amoung his current interests. The Far Edge Committee may be a precursor to
the infamous "Last Proton Club," unless "barions are forever."
The Far Edge Committee (so far) is only a mailing address (1685 Branham Lane,
#252, San Jose, CA 95118) and a column in the Space Faring Gazette, a
National Space Society newsletter for western chapters.
MegaScale Engineering Page 1 12/2/87 Henson
kamk@uunet.uu.net (Wrath O' Kahm) (07/18/89)
In article <Jun.15.22.51.53.1989.13793@athos.rutgers.edu> hkhenson@cup.portal.com writes:
+
+ "a long enough lever...
+
+ Some years ago [James E. Lovelock] calculated that the ability of this planet
+ to compensate for the rising output of the sun will fail within the
+ next 50-100 million years. Without intervention, the Earth will
+ become a post-biotic planet, which David Brin speculates may be a
+ common fate ...
[thus leading to a discussion of various + ways to move the Earth,
move or regulate the Sun, or get a new Sun -kk]
Why not just replicate the Earth somewhere more convenient? ;-)
--
Kameran Kashani kamk@sco.com
The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. uunet!sco!kamk
[Anywhere the materials are available and conditions are sanguine,
earth will in a sense already have been replicated long ago, by
the time the original is in serious jeopardy.
... I trust everyone realizes that this conversation is completely
tongue in cheek, since 50 million years is a time scale on which
it seems fairly silly to speculate about "who" or "what" will be
around doing the thinking at the end of it...
--JoSH]