Archive for the 'Technology' Category

Jan 30 2024

Neuralink Implants Chip in Human

Published by under Skepticism,Technology

Elon Musk has announced that his company, Neuralink, has implanted their first wireless computer chip into a human. The chip, which they plan on calling Telepathy (not sure how I feel about that) connects with 64 thin hair-like electrodes, is battery powered and can be recharged remotely. This is exciting news, but of course needs to be put into context. First, let’s get the Musk thing out of the way.

Because this is Elon Musk the achievement gets more attention than it probably deserves, but also more criticism. It gets wrapped up in the Musk debate – is he a genuine innovator, or just an exploiter and showman? I think the truth is a little bit of both. Yes, the technologies he is famous for advancing (EVs, reusable rockets, digging tunnels, and now brain-machine interface) all existed before him (at least potentially) and were advancing without him. But he did more than just gobble up existing companies or people and slap his brand on it (as his harshest critics claim). Especially with Tesla and SpaceX, he invested his own fortune and provided a specific vision which pushed these companies through to successful products, and very likely advanced their respective industries considerably.

What about Neuralink and BMI (brain-machine interface) technology? I think Musk’s impact in this industry is much less than with EVs and reusable rockets. But he is increasing the profile of the industry, providing funding for research and development, and perhaps increasing the competition. In the end I think Neuralink will have a more modest, but perhaps not negligible, impact on bringing BMI applications to the world. I think it will end up being a net positive, and anything that accelerates this technology is a good thing.

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Jan 29 2024

Controlling the Narrative with AI

Published by under Technology

There is an ongoing battle in our society to control the narrative, to influence the flow of information, and thereby move the needle on what people think and how they behave. This is nothing new, but the mechanisms for controlling the narrative are evolving as our communication technology evolves. The latest addition to this technology is the large language model AIs.

“The media”, of course, has been a large focus of this competition. On the right there is constant complaints of the “liberal bias” in the media, and on the left there are complaints of the rise of right-wing media which they feel is biased and radicalizing. The culture wars focus mainly on schools, because those schools teach not only facts and knowledge but convey the values of our society. The left views DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiates as promoting social justice while the right views it as brainwashing the next generation with liberal propaganda. This is an oversimplification, but it is the basic dynamic. Even industry has been targeted by the culture wars – which narratives are specific companies supporting? Is Disney pro-gay? Which companies fly BLM or LGBTQ flags?

But increasingly “the narrative” (the overall cultural conversation) is not being controlled by the media, educational system, or marketing campaigns. It’s being controlled by social media. This is why, when the power of social media started to become apparent, many people panicked. Suddenly it seemed we had seeded control of the narrative to a few tech companies, who had apparently decided that destroying democracy was a price they were prepared to pay for maximizing their clicks. We now live in a world where YouTube algorithms can destroy lives and relationships.

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Jan 26 2024

How Humans Can Adapt to Space

Published by under Technology

My recent article on settling Mars has generated a lot of discussion, some of it around the basic concept of how difficult it is for humans to live anywhere but a thin envelope of air hugging the surface of the Earth. This is undoubtedly true, as I have discussed before – we evolved to be finely adapted to Earth. We are only comfortable in a fairly narrow range of temperature. We need a fairly high percentage of oxygen (Earth’s is 21%) at sufficient pressure, and our atmosphere can’t have too much of other gases that might cause us problems. We are protected from most radiation that bathes the universe. Our skin and eyes have adapted to the light of our sun, both in frequency and intensity. And we are adapted to Earth’s surface gravity, with any significantly more or less causing problems for our biology.

Space itself is an extremely unforgiving environment requiring a total human habitat, with the main current technological challenges being artificial gravity and radiation protection. But even on other worlds it is extremely unlikely that all of the variables will be within the range of human survival, let alone comfort and thriving. Mars, for example, has too thin an atmosphere with no oxygen, no magnetic field to protect from radiation, it’s too cold and its surface gravity is too little. It’s better than the cold vacuum of space, but not by much. You still need essentially a total habitat, and we will probably have to go underground for radiation protection. Gravity is 38% that of Earths, which is probably not ideal for human biology. In space, with microgravity, at least you can theoretically use rotation to simulate gravity.

In addition to adapting off-Earth environments to humans, is it feasible to adapt humans to other environments? Let me start with some far-future options then finish with what is likely to be the nearest-future options.

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Jan 25 2024

DNA Directed Assembly of Nanomaterials

Published by under Technology

Arguably the type of advance that has the greatest impact on technology is material science. Technology can advance by doing more with the materials we have, but new materials can change the game entirely. It is no coincidence that we mark different technological ages by the dominant material used, such as the bronze age and iron age. But how do we invent new materials?

Historically new materials were mostly discovered, not invented. Or we discovered techniques that allowed us to use new materials. Metallurgy, for example, was largely about creating a fire hot enough to smelt different metals. Sometimes we literally discovered new elements, like aluminum or tungsten, with desirable properties. We also figured out how to make alloys, combining different elements to create a new material with unique or improved properties. Adding tin to copper made a much stronger and more durable metal, bronze. While the hunt for new usable elements is basically over, there are so many possible combinations that researching new alloys is still a viable way to find new materials. In fact a recent class of materials known as “superalloys” have incredible properties, such as extreme heat resistance.

If there are no new elements (other than really big and therefore unstable artificial elements), and we already have a mature science of making alloys, what’s next? There are also chemically based materials, such as polymers, resins, and composites, that can have excellent properties, including the ability to be manufactured easily. Plastics clearly had a dramatic effect on our technology, and some of the strongest and lightest materials we have are carbon composites. But again it feels like we have already picked the low-hanging fruit here. We still need new better materials.

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Jan 23 2024

Microbes Aboard the ISS

Published by under Technology

As I have written many times, including in yesterday’s post, people occupying space is hard. The environment of space, or really anywhere not on Earth, is harsh and unforgiving. One of the issues, for example, rarely addressed in science fiction or even discussions of space travel, is radiation. We don’t really have a solution to deal with radiation exposure outside the protective atmosphere and magnetic field of Earth.

There are other challenges, however, that do not involve space itself but just the fact that people living off Earth will have to be in an enclosed environment. Whether this is a space station or habitat on the Moon or Mars, people will be living in a relatively small finite physical space. These spaces will be enclosed environments – no opening a window to let some fresh air in. Our best experience so far with this type of environment is the International Space Station (ISS). By all accounts, the ISS smells terrible. It is a combination of antiseptic, body odor, sweat, and basically 22 years of funk.

Perhaps even worse, the ISS is colonized with numerous pathogenic bacteria and different types of fungus. The bacteria is mainly human-associated bacteria, the kinds of critters that live on and in humans. According to NASA:

The researchers found that microbes on the ISS were mostly human-associated. The most prominent bacteria were Staphylococcus (26% of total isolates), Pantoea (23%) and Bacillus (11%). They included organisms that are considered opportunistic pathogens on Earth, such as Staphylococcus aureus (10% of total isolates identified), which is commonly found on the skin and in the nasal passage, and Enterobacter, which is associated with the human gastrointestinal tract.

This is similar to what one might find in a gym or crowded office space, but worse. This is something I often considered – when establishing a new environment off Earth, what will the microbiota look like? On the one hand, establishing a new base is an opportunity to avoid many infectious organisms. Having strict quarantine procedures can create a settlement without flu viruses, COVID, HIV or many of the germs that plague humans. I can imagine strict medical examinations and isolation prior to gaining access to such a community. But can such efforts to make an infection-free settlement succeed?

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Jan 22 2024

Is Mars the New Frontier?

Published by under Technology

In the excellent sci fi show, The Expanse, which takes place a couple hundred years in the future, Mars has been settled and is an independent self-sustaining society. In fact, Mars is presented as the most scientifically and technologically advanced society of humans in the solar system. This is presented as being due to the fact that Martians have had to struggle to survive and build their world, and that lead to a culture of innovation and dynamism.

This is a  version of the Turner thesis, which has been invoked as one justification for the extreme expense and difficulty of settling locations off Earth. I was recently pointed to this article discussing the Turner thesis in the context of space settlement, which I found interesting. The Turner thesis is that the frontier mindset of the old West created a culture of individualism, dynamism, and democracy that is a critical part of the success of America in general. This theory was popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but fell out of academic favor in the second half of the 20th century. Recent papers trying to revive some version of it are less than compelling, showing that frontier exposure correlates only very softly with certain political and social features, and that those features are a mixed bag rather than an unalloyed good.

The article is generally critical of the notion that some version of the Turner thesis should be used to justify settling Mars – that humanity would benefit from a new frontier. But I basically agree with the article, that the Turner thesis is rather weak and complex, and that analogies between the American Western frontier and Mars (or other space locations) is highly problematic. In every material sense, it’s a poor analogy. On the frontier there was already air, food, soil, water, and other people living there. None of those things (as far as we know) exists on Mars.

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Jan 18 2024

Converting CO2 to Carbon Nanofibers

Published by under Technology

One of the dreams of a green economy where the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is stable, and not slowly increasing, is the ability to draw CO2 from the atmosphere and convert it to a solid form. Often referred to as carbon capture, some form of this is going to be necessary eventually, and most climate projections include the notion of carbon capture coming online by 2050. Right now we don’t have a way to economically and on a massive industrial scale pull significant CO2 from the air. There is some carbon capture in the US, for example, but it accounts for only 0.4% of CO2 emissions. It is used near locations of high CO2 production, like coal-fired plants.

But there is a lot of research being done, mostly in the proof of concept stage. Scientists at the DOE and Brookhaven National Laboratory have published a process which seems to have promise. They can convert CO2 in the atmosphere to carbon nanofibers, which is a solid form of carbon with potential industrial uses. One potential use of these nanofibers would be as filler for concrete. This would bind up the carbon for at least 50 years, while making the concrete stronger.

In order to get from CO2 to carbon nanofibers they break the process up into two steps. They figured out a way, using an iron-cobalt catalyst, to make carbon monoxide (CO) into carbon nanofibers. This is a thermocatalyst process operating at 400 degrees C. That’s hot, but practical for industrial processes. It’s also much lower than the 1000 degrees C required for a method that would go directly from CO2 to carbon nanofibers.

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Jan 16 2024

Betavoltaic Batteries

Published by under Technology

In 1964 Isaac Asimov, asked to imagine the world 50 years in the future, wrote:

“The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course, for they will be powered by long- lived batteries running on radioisotopes. The isotopes will not be expensive for they will be by- products of the fission-power plants which, by 2014, will be supplying well over half the power needs of humanity.”

Today nuclear fission provides about 10% of the world’s electricity. Asimov can be forgiven for being off by such a large amount. He, as a science fiction futurist, was thinking more about the technology itself. Technology is easier to predict than things like public acceptance, irrational fear of anything nuclear, or even economics (which even economists have a hard time predicting).

But he was completely off about the notion that nuclear batteries would be running most everyday appliances and electronics. This now seems like a quaint retro-futuristic vision, something out of the Fallout franchise. Here the obstacle to widespread adoption of nuclear batteries has been primarily technological (issues of economics and public acceptance have not even come into play yet). Might Asimov’s vision still come true, just decades later than he thought? It’s theoretically possible, but there is still a major limitation that for now appears to be a deal-killer – the power output is still extremely low.

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Jan 04 2024

Oxygen As A Technosignature

Published by under Astronomy,Technology

This is one of the biggest thought experiments in science today – as we look for life elsewhere in the universe, what should we be looking for, exactly? Other stellar systems are too far away to examine directly, and even our most powerful telescopes can only resolve points of light. So how do we tell if there is life on a distant exoplanet? Also, how could we detect a distant technological civilization?

Here is where the thought experiment comes in. We know what life on Earth is like, and we know what human technology is like, so obviously we can search for other examples of what we already know. But the question is – how might life different from life on Earth be detected? What are the possible signatures of a planet covered in living things that perhaps look nothing like life on Earth. Similarly, what alien technologies might theoretically exist, and how could we detect them?

A recent paper explores this question from one particular angle – are there conditions on a planet that are necessary for the development of technology? They hypothesize that there is an “oxygen bottleneck”, a minimum concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere of a planet, that is necessary for the development of advanced technology. Specifically they argue that open air combustion, which requires a partial pressure (PO2) of oxygen of ≥ 18% (it’s about 21% on Earth), is necessary for fire and metallurgy, and that these are necessary stepping stones on the path to advanced technology.

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Dec 18 2023

The Conversation Gets it Wrong on GMOs

Published by under Technology

Even high quality media outlets will get it wrong from time to time. I notice this tends to happen when there is a mature and sophisticated propaganda campaign that has had enough time and reach to essentially gaslight a major portion of the public, and further where a particular expertise is required to understand why the propaganda is false. This is true, for example, for acupuncture, where even medical experts don’t have sufficient topic expertise to know why the claims being made are largely pseudoscience.

Where there is arguably the biggest gap between the scientific evidence and public opinion is genetically modified organisms (GMOs). There has been a well-funded and unfortunately successful campaign to unfairly and unscientifically demonize GMO technology, largely funded by the organic lobby but also environmental groups. Scientific pushback has ameliorated this somewhat. Further, the more time that goes by without the predicted “GMO apocalypse” the less urgent the fearmongering seems. Plus, genetic engineering works and is safe and is producing results, and people may be just getting more comfortable with it over time.

But it seems to me that there are still some people who are stuck in the anti-GMO narrative, and they are making increasingly poor and unconvincing arguments to sustain their negative attitude. An example is a recent article in The Conversation – Genetically modified crops aren’t a solution to climate change, despite what the biotech industry says. The article is by Barbara Van Dyck, who is a long time anti-GMO activist, even participating in disruptions of field trials. Let’s dive into her recent article.

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