Space: Bigelow Aerospace to Tackle Inflatable Space Habitats

Leonard David has an article in Space about the embryonic space tourism industry and Robert Bigelow's plans for Nautilus, an orbital hotel:

But now the North Las Vegas, Nevada-based Bigelow is putting his money down on inflatable Earth orbiting modules. He’s intent on attracting not only high-flying sightseers, but those hungering to crank out made-in-space products and evaluate microgravity processes. Bigelow’s plan is to establish a habitable commercial space station for research, manufacturing, entertainment and other uses.

Bigelow Aerospace is developing the Genesis Pathfinder -- one-third scale hardware meant to shakeout the bugs in a much larger space habitat tagged the Nautilus. The first Genesis test is now slated for launch in November 2005 onboard the maiden voyage of the Falcon V -- an offshoot of the yet-to-fly private booster being designed by Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) in El Segundo, California. That agreement has been confirmed by SpaceX chief rocketeer, Elon Musk. Plans are also afoot to loft a second Genesis Pathfinder module in April 2006. For this in-orbit evaluation, Bigelow Aerospace has executed a non-technical framework agreement that, pending a U.S. State Department go-ahead, would use a Dnepr booster under contract with ISC Kosmotras, a Russian and Ukrainian rocket-for-hire company.

Milan Cirkovic on Fermi Paradox and the Massive Universe

I sent the Paul Hughes article on the massive universe (see my previous blog entry) to cosmologist Milan Cirkovic who had this to say:

Thanks for forwarding this to me! Well, in my view the seriousness of FP is large in all cosmological models and only weakly dependent on the spatial size of the universe. The reason is, of course, that the Milky Way is, imho, sufficiently large for the paradox to be very serious, even if no other galaxy existed in the universe. Of course, the larger the universe is, the problem does become somewhat more serious, but this is just a pedantic reasoning: in my view the difference between 95% and 99% is really not very important... Thus, from my personal viewpoint ironically (since I was trained as cosmologist, and did my PhD in cosmology), the link of astrobiology and cosmology is very weak one, indeed.

(Of course, if you believe the sort of "rare Earth" arguments of Ward and Brownlee, than it becomes somewhat more important, but I personally don't buy that. Opportunities for life and increase in diversity and disparity are so big even in the history of the Solar System, that it is by far premature, not to mention epistemologically unsound, to speculate that we're unique in any reasonable sense.)

Addendum:

Here are some more of Milan Cirkovic's writings:
On the Importance of SETI for Transhumanism
Contact in Context
The Temporal Aspect of the Drake Equation and SETI

The Universe is Freakin' Massive, Dude

Paul Hughes over at Future Hi has given some thought to the recent news about the size of the universe. It turns out that the universe's radius is 78 billion light years, or 156 billion light years across, minimum.

Okay, that's big. Colossal. Actually, there isn't a word in the English language that describes this enormity, except for maybe infinity -1. And maybe that's not enough either.

Paul Hughes explains how big this is by analogy:

According to the standard inflationary model of cosmology, the visible portion of our universe; the one mapped by our telescopes is an infinitesimally small speck in a much larger universe of at least a 10X35 light-year across! I admit this number is really, really big, and almost impossible to imagine. So lets shrink everything down, WAY down, just so we can get a better grasp of it. Let's imagine that the entire universe that we have seen in all the world telescopes, all the galaxies, all trillion of them, extending out 13 billion light years in every direction is shrunk down to the size of a golf ball. Now you are holding the entire visible universe in the palm of your hand. So how big is the actualy 10X35 lightyear universe in comparison? If we do a volume calculation, the actual universe contains 10X60 of those golf balls! Wow, I guess we didn't shrink things down far enough, but this will have to do. So how big a volume would 10X60 golf balls fill up? Try a sphere 850 light years across! So imagine a mass of golf balls that big, and each one of those golf balls contains all the stars and galaxies that we can see through our telescopes.

That's a lot of golfballs. Not satisifed? How about this:

This is still almost beyond imagining, so lets take a slightly different approach. Imagine you are travelling so fast that you can go from on end of the galaxy to the other in just one second. That's a speed of 100,000 ly/sec. At this speed the entire galaxy would be in reach before you can say the word "go", and wam, you're there. At this speed, you could travel to the nearest galaxy Andromeda in 22 seconds. And you could cross from end of the visible universe to the other in 72 hours. Continuing on at this speed, it would take 115 days to travel a trillion light years, 315 years to travel a quadrillion, and 315,000 years to travel a quintillion or 10X18 light years. And yet you have barely moved at all in comparison to the universe which is 10X35 light years across. So, lets speed up our warp vehicals again, so that we can travel a quintllion light years every second. At such a speed we could cross the known universe 100 million times in one second. Ok, so now that we are travelling at a speed that might as well be infinite, how long would it take to cross from one side of the univese to the other?

3.7 billion years

What does this mean? Well, a number of things.

It means that the Rare Earth Hypothesis might be shot right out of the water. There are so many galaxies in the universe that even if you have a one in a trillion chance of having a space-faring civ, you're still going to have more civs than there are atoms in our solar system spread across the entire universe.

It also means the Fermi Paradox is that much more spookier :-|

Institute for Accelerating Change Advisory Board

I've been asked to join the Institute for Accelerating Change's Advisory Board -- an invitation to which I accepted. Specifically, I'll be advising on the Civic, Humanist, and Transhumanist Advisory Board which includes "political, legal, social, educational, philosophical, spiritual, and aesthetic thinkers and leaders who are thoughtfully considering accelerating change." Current members include:

Walter Truett Anderson, Author, Evolution Isn't What it Used to Be, All Connected Now, The Next Enlightenment
Ziana Astralos, Webmaster, Extrotech.net
Greg Bear, Author, Blood Music, Darwin's Radio
Howard Bloom, Author, The Lucifer Principle, Global Brain
Joseph Coates, Professional Futurist, JosephCoates.com
David Forrest, President, Global Vision Consulting Ltd., Author of InnovationWatch.com
Patrick Gunkel, Theoretical Neuroscientist, Developer of Ideonomy
James Hughes, Secretary, WTA, Host of Changesurfer Radio
Alan Kazlev, Webmaster, Kheper.auz.com
Doug Mulhall, Author, Our Molecular Future
John L. Petersen, Founder and President, The Arlington Institute
Wolf Read, Author, "About the Technological Singularity," Contributing Writer, Analog Science Fiction and Fact
Peter Russell, Author, The Global Brain, Waking up in Time (homesite)
Sam Williams, Author, Arguing AI

The IAC's Civic, Humanist, and Transhumanist Advisory Board will eventually be divided into: Global (world governance, environment), National (political, legal, economic), Cultural (social, relationships, aesthetics, entertainment), Individual (health, self development, spirituality), and Student (high school, undergraduate, graduate, and independent learner) Advisory boards, allowing an even broader representation of multidisciplinary humanist issues. John Smart and the IAC hope to add as many as 100 members to each board panel.

Exo, Astro, Other?

John Smart wrote to me today in response to my Exosociobiology post:

In the future I'd suggest renaming Exosociobiology to Astrosociobiology, as the "Exo" term is being outcompeted by Astro, and it will help the growth of the field for us to hew to the new standard.

Exo- also has a boogeyman, other, alien connotation that is really unnecessary (a false start on naming the field, IMHO) if the world is constrained to some degree by a bunch of universal developmental archetypes, as we are now beginning to suspect.

Interestingly, the Library of Conference has this to say on the matter:

Extraterrestrial Anthropology: Here are entered works on the prospective use of the science of anthropology in dealing with intelligent beings in outer space, or establishing earth colonies on extraterrestrial bodies.

Works on life indigenous to outer space are entered under "Life on other planets."

Works on the study of processes occurring in outer space that are relevant to biology, especially the origin and evolution of life, are entered under "Exobiology."

Works on the biology of humans or other earth life while in outer space are entered under "Space biology."

I think I still prefer astrosociobiology or exosociobiology over extraterrestrial anthropology, which is a bit limited as a descriptor.

Baby born from sperm frozen 21 years ago

In what scientists are saying is a new record, a baby boy was born after being conceived with sperm frozen 21 years earlier:

The case will give hope to young men about to undergo treatment for cancer which may leave them infertile.

The boy's father had his sperm frozen when he was 17 before starting successful treatment for testicular cancer in the early 1980s.

"I'm 99 percent sure that it is the oldest frozen sperm sample used (for a live birth)," said Greg Horne, a senior embryologist at St Mary's Hospital in Manchester, England, which treated the baby's parents.

The man's sperm was stored in liquid nitrogen nearly two decades ago and was not thawed until he married and decided to start a family.

Exosociobiology

One of the items on my never ending list of things to do before the Singularity is my desire to expand on the idea of exosociobiology (yes, another idea that came to me in the shower. Praise be the facilitative powers of the almighty shower!). Exosociobiology is the convergence of exobiology and sociobiology.

Exobiology is the speculative field within biology that considers the possible varieties and characteristics of extra terrestrial life. Exobiologists, also known as astrobiologists or xenobiologists, speculate about the possible ways that organic life could come into being in the Universe and the potential for artificial life. The excellent journal Astrobiology regularly puts out fascinating articles that chronicle the latest developments in this field.

Sociobiology attempts to explain animal behavior, group behavior and social structure in terms of evolutionary advantage or strategy and using techniques from ethology, evolution and population genetics. Sociobiologists are especially interested in comparative analyses, especially in studying human social institutions and culture. Prominent sociobiologists include E. O. Wilson, Jared Diamond, and Richard Dawkins.

What got me interested in combining these two disciplines is the concept of convergent evolution, the evolutionary process in which organisms not closely related independently acquire some characteristic or characteristics in common, usually a reflection of similar responses to similar environmental conditions. Examples include physical traits that have evolved independently (e.g. the eye), ecological niches (e.g. pack predators), and even technological innovations (e.g. language, writing, the domestication of plants and animals, and basic tools and weapons).

In order for us to embark in the speculative field of exosociobiology we need to start with some basic assumptions which may or may not be true. These assumptions are that

1. extra terrestrial civilizations exist
2. extra terrestrial civilizations must in some part resemble our own, both in terms of
a) the physical and cognitive characteristics of the extra terrestrials themselves, and
b) the characteristics of alien society

In other words, we need to assume that intelligent life arises from similar environmental factors and selectional/developmental processes.

It's hard to tell if these are valid assumptions. For example, the Rare Earth hypothesis and the Fermi Paradox suggests that we might be alone in the galaxy. Or, aliens and their civilizations may scarcely resemble our own. There's also a lot of environmental determinism inherent in my assumptions -- but this may in fact be the case! Still, all of these points can be countered by the Copernican Principle and the self-sampling assumption. We shouldn't assume that we're unique. In fact, if anything we should probably assume that we are very typical.

That being the case, we can start to make some predictions about those characteristics that are common to all alien societies. For example, based on our own experience, we can conclude very broadly that all civilizations go through similar developmental stages, including agrarianism, industrialization, democratization, globalization, and an information age.

What about technological innovations? I have a strong suspicion that innovations and scientific advancements happen in roughly the same sequence that we've witnessed. For example, every advanced civilization will have its own Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein in basically that same order. Science is a cumulative discipline, so it's hard to imagine it arising out of order. As for technological innovations, I wonder if all extra terrestrials develop functionally equivalent technologies, what futurist John Smart refers to as universal archetypes. For example, are swords, telescopes, trains, nuclear weapons, and automobiles universal archetypes? Probably.

And what about the future of intelligent life? Unfortunately, engaging in that discussion would be a highly speculative endeavor, primarily because we haven't gone through the next developmental stage ourselves. Here's a scary thought: We currently have no data to support the idea that human civilization will continue on into the foreseeable future. Actually, if you consider the Fermi Paradox, we may actually have a data point suggesting a limitation to how far advanced civilizations can develop.

But as far as exosociobiology is concerned, with each advancing step that our species takes, we can assume that our extra terrestrial counterparts -- both past and present -- have gone through similar stages. For some reason I find a lot of comfort in that thought.

Addendum May 24, 2004:
I received an email from John Smart today who made an interesting suggestion:

Excellent stuff. In the future I'd suggest renaming Exosociobiology to Astrosociobiology, as the "Exo" term is being outcompeted by Astro, and it will help the growth of the field for us to hew to the new standard.

Exo- also has a boogeyman, other, alien connotation that is really unnecessary (a false start on naming the field, IMHO) if the world is constrained to some degree by a bunch of universal developmental archetypes, as we are now beginning to suspect.

On the Weakness of Gravity

Living in our so-called biophilic universe I like to think about its particular physical parameters. The anthropic principle suggests that we should think of our universe as one of an ensemble of universes -- ours having the special characteristic of producing intelligent observers. Thus, it's worthwhile to think about the factors that had to come into play in order for our specific universe to be able to produce life.

One major player in the makeup of our universe is the force of gravity. Gravity, of course, is responsible for particles coming together, giving form to such structures as galaxies, suns, and planets. It's also responsible for one of the most powerful objects in the universe: black holes.

That being said, the force of gravity itself is exceptionally weak. In fact, compared to other physical forces, it's a total wimp. Take electromagnetism, for example. The gravitational attraction of protons is approximately a factor 10X36 weaker than electromagnetic repulsion. That's a crazy difference! This weakness can be demonstrated with the simple experiment of using a magnet to pick up a small metal object. One small magnet has greater attractive force than the entire planet below it.

The exact characteristics of gravity, however, may not be arbitrary. Even a minor deviation from its current value would have resulted in a vastly different universe than we see now, one that may not have been able to foster life. As an interesting analogy, cosmologist Alan Guth notes how one second after the Big Bang the mass density of the universe must have been at the critical density to an accuracy of fifteen decimal places in order to counterbalance the expansion rate and produce the flat universe we observe today.

So remember just how weak gravity really is the next time you fall flat on your face and maybe you won't feel so bad. Or maybe not.

RFID Chips for VIPs

[via BoingBoing] David Pescovitz reports on how club kids who want VIP status at the popular Baja Beach Club in Barcelona can now get implanted with a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag. For 125 euro, customers can have the rice sized VeriChip injected into his or her upper arm. You can even use the chip to run a tab.

Telomeres and the Ethics of Human Cloning

Bioethicist Fritz Allhoff chimes in on the ethics of human cloning in The American Journal of Bioethics to discuss the potential problem of shortened telomeres and accelerated aging. Abstract:

In search of a potential problem with cloning, I investigate the phenomenon of telomere shortening which is caused by cell replication; clones created from somatic cells will have shortened telomeres and therefore reach a state of senescence more rapidly. While genetic intervention might fix this problem at some point in the future, I ask whether, absent technological advances, this biological phenomenon undermines the moral permissibility of cloning.

Interestingly, Betterhumans reported earlier this week that cloning resets the cellular clock.

Aliens are Green, Not

Margaret Turnbull makes The Case Against Litte Green Men. Excerpt:

[V]irtually all the solar-powered life on our planet is plant life. Animals don’t seem to be interested in direct food production from sunlight. Are they missing a bet? Is there any reason why an alien with a green epidermis couldn’t produce its food by just hanging around in the sun?

There is. And the reason can be traced to energy efficiency. At the Earth’s surface, sunlight provides about 100 watts of power per square meter. If you were conscious during high school biology class, you’ll recall that when this light strikes a leaf, it encourages the combination of water and carbon dioxide into sugars. These sugars then allow the plant to produce pollen (for reproduction), blossoms and nectar (for pollinators), leaves (for intercepting more light), and roots (for sucking up more water).

What most people don’t know is that out of the original 100 watts striking a square meter of leaf, only about 35% is actually absorbed. (If the absorption were fully efficient, plants would be black.) Worse, the photosynthetic reactions that subsequently occur with the remaining 35 watts are so inefficient that only about one-fourth of that energy results in usable sugars. Hence for every 100 watts of perfectly good sunlight, only about 8 watts ends up as plant food.

How Can We Be Persons if There is No Self?

I received an interesting question in response to my "Better Living Through Transhumanism" article that was recently re-published in The Humanist:

Your article "Better Living through Transhumanism" page 8 right column includes "..and its denial..or the self" Paragrapg 2 of the same column ends with "..subscribe to person-hood ethics." I do not follow how an individual can deny the self yet have person-hood ethics. Please explain.

A fair question. Broadly speaking, the issue of self is a problem for the cognitive sciences and the philosophy of mind, while personhood ethics is a social consideration for moral and legal theory.

To say that there is no self is to suggest that there is no definable, immutable or linearly persistent aspect to cognition that would give rise to the phenomenon of a fixed self that exists over time. Most people who believe in a fixed self have really just substituted vitalism in favour of a supposed functional cognitive equivalent. The idea of a self is also a rather potent illusion (see Paul Bloom's recent Edge.org article, "Natural Born Dualists."

To further prove the point, if you had no capacity for memory, you would still experience the world but without any capacity for self-identity; the self is in many respects the accumulations of past experiences that can be recalled into a coherent narrative. Also, brain damage, drugs, and hormonal influences constantly alter brain-state and literally change who we are. Similarly, I am not the same person I was 10 years ago; I may share that person's body and experiences, but the way I look at the world now is profoundly different than it was back then.

That being said, because we function in this world as discreet conscious agents who persist and act over time, we need to be considered persons (or in other words, agents deserving of moral consideration). Moreover, because we have the capacity for a spectrum of emotions and sufferings of varying sorts, and because we deserve the right to work towards goals and pursue happiness, we should expect legal protections.

So, the fact that the self does not exist in any tangible form doesn't really change our status as persons so long as we exhibit the characteristics of a person, which primarily includes a minimum threshold of intelligence, sentience and the capactity for formulate plans and intentions over time.

The Sun Herald on Transhumanism

Southern Mississippi's Sun Herald has published an article on transhumanism, "Transhumanism Takes Technology to the Level of Faith", that mentions WTA executive director James Hughes and cyborg Steve Mann, both of whom will be speaking at TransVision later this summer. Other transhumanist thinkers mentioned in the article include Marvin Minsky and Ray Kurzweil. Excerpt:

Transhumanists come in a wide variety, said James J. Hughes, executive director of the World Transhumanist Association based in Willington, Conn.

Some are interested in life extension. Some want to be immortal. Some think nanotechnology - the emerging science of molecular machines - will someday repair our bodies from the inside out. Others are convinced they'll someday extend their memories with computer implants or upload their consciousness into a smarter-than-human artificial intelligence.

What all share is the desire "to ethically use technology to become more than human," said Hughes, whose organization has 3,000 members in 24 chapters across 98 countries.

Killer Optical Illusion

This is, without a doubt, the best optical illusion I have ever seen. I have no idea how this works, but apparently this book will help: Visual Intelligence, How We Create What We See, by Donald D. Hoffman. Here's an excerpt.

The Big Lab Experiment

Slate's Jim Holt consults with Stanford University Physicist Andrei Linde about whether our Universe could have been designed:

Among the many curious implications of Linde's theory, one stands out for our present purposes: It doesn't take all that much to create a universe. Resources on a cosmic scale are not required. It might even be possible for someone in a not terribly advanced civilization to cook up a new universe in a laboratory. Which leads to an arresting thought: Could that be how our universe came into being?

"When I invented chaotic inflation theory, I found that the only thing you needed to get a universe like ours started is a hundred-thousandth of a gram of matter," Linde told me in his Russian-accented English when I reached him by phone at Stanford. "That's enough to create a small chunk of vacuum that blows up into the billions and billions of galaxies we see around us. It looks like cheating, but that's how the inflation theory works—all the matter in the universe gets created from the negative energy of the gravitational field. So, what's to stop us from creating a universe in a lab? We would be like gods!"

Surviving a Trip to Mars

[via Gravity Lens] Marianne Frey considers the challenges of spaceflight to human physiology and psychology in Astrobiology Magazine and concludes, "A much greater level of commitment and of funding for biomedical research and countermeasure research and development must be made than has ever existed before."

Frey argues that there are four distinct sources of risk:

First, the reduced gravity environment. From almost zero to about 1/3 earth's gravity, which will cause fluid shifts in the body, loss of normal stress on the bones and muscles, and changes in stimuli to the nervous system.

Second, the environment inside the vehicle or habitat poses threats from floating particles, which might be inspired. Toxic wastes, poor illumination, loud noise and poor thermal control.

Third, the environment outside the vehicle or habitat poses threats, including radiation and meteorites or other debris.

And fourth, the psychological and psychosocial stresses will be extreme.

Ooooh, new look.

Yes, I can't leave well enough alone so I changed the look of my blog. I think it looks pretty cool now.

BH Editorial Advisory Board Page

We've created a page for the first 14 members of the Betterhumans Editorial Advisory Board. We're hoping to have bios and images posted soon.

Updated Transhumanist Art & Culture Site

TransVision's latest organization sponsor is Transhumanist Art & Culture. Natasha Vita-More recently updated the site to include the call for submissions.

Robert Bradbury on Berserker Probes & Out of Body Processing

I've been corresponding with Robert Bradbury, who had this to say in response to my March 22nd post on berserker probes:

I'm *not* sure that you have to vote for harmful intentional actions when harmful unintentional actions may fit the bill. For example, we have a neutron star (RX J185635-3754) zipping through space about 200 light years from Earth. The explosion that produced it was only about a million years ago. The production of neutron stars from supernovas or gamma-ray bursts from mega-supernovas produce enough radiation to fry most information preservation systems (e.g. DNA, computer memories, etc.) on nearby planets. So the development of advanced civilizations involves a *lot* of luck.

There is also the fact that Berserker's don't provide much unless you activate them on the basis of revenge. Otherwise it makes a lot more sense to send out harvester probes to bring material and energy resources back to an originating system (over the longer run the construction of end-point Matrioshka Brains or other ultimate computing resources are matter & energy constrained). It seems probable that such harvesting would be detectable and it makes much more sense to get the resources from the cheapest source possible rather than getting into a "debate" with another civilization. So if/when such harvesting is taking place we (in a more advanced form we will probably be able to observe it -- subject to light speed time delay constraints) and we will probably be able to plot developmental paths that would waste the minimal amount of resources (fighting over them rather than harvesting whatever can be obtained at the lowest cost). The Berserker idea *might* be valid at a later developmental stage of the Universe -- but I suspect we really don't know enough about physics yet to begin to make that case.

Robert, who may speak at TransVision, is also currently thinking about the potential for out of body processing power:

Think of something something like a pacemaker that connects to a external computer that is linked to a bunch of sensors that monitor skin moisture/resistance (driven by how much you are sweating), external temperature (that may be causing you to sweat), blood pressure, eyeglass cameras and listening devices that determine whether you are watching a scary movie, etc. The computer performs an integrative analysis of all of this data and sends out signals that allow the pacemaker to optimize blood flow.

Mental inputs & outputs will not be far behind. There is *way* too much money to be made by using a Wifi interface between the human brain and Google to improve memory and ultimately intelligence for it to be far behind. And the fact that the Google founders are going to be *really* rich soon makes it an obvious thing to work on.