A new energy storage device — flatulent micro-organisms that generate methane on command.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
There’s Something Missing
So the president made (or is making) a speech before the NAS today in which he proposes to increase spending for “science,” and R&D (I wonder if he understands that these are different things?).
Well, no surprise there. Increasing spending is his first resort to every conceivable problem (except when it comes to defending the nation). But do you not see what I don’t see?
Obama said he plans to double the budget of key science agencies over a decade, including the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy Office of Science and the National Institutes of Standards and Technology.
He also announced the launch of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. It is a new Department of Energy organization modeled after the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, that led in development of the Internet, stealth aircraft and other technological breakthroughs.
Look, Ma, no space agency! No mention of NASA at all. This, combined with the continuing absence of an administrator or White House direction, makes me wonder just where space falls in the priorities of this administration.
But actually, what I find much more disturbing is this:
“I believe it is not in our character, American character, to follow — but to lead. And it is time for us to lead once again. I am here today to set this goal: we will devote more than 3 percent of our gross domestic product to research and development,” Obama said in a speech at the annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences.
Let’s leave aside the arbitrariness of setting a percentage goal at all (why 3%? Why not 2.5% or 5%?). Let us also ignore the fact that at the rate things are going, there’s not going to be much of a GDP to have a percentage of, and that the $420B number makes some optimistic estimates.
Why set the goal as a percentage of GDP? Why not as a percentage of the federal budget, something over which a president and a government has at least theoretical control? The implication is that he doesn’t just preside over the government and its spending priorities, but that he commands the entire national economy, and can, should and does dictate how others are to spend their own money, which apparently is no longer their own money. It implies a conceit of omniscience on the part of him and his advisors about how much we should be spending on R&D as a function of domestic product, and how we should be spending it, when he has no useful control over what non-governmental entities are spending.
Or does he? Just what does he have in mind?
Oh, and note the latest gratuitous slap at the previous administration, without which, apparently, no Obama speech is complete:
In recent years, he said, “scientific integrity has been undermined and scientific research politicized in an effort to advance predetermined ideological agendas.”
He then drew chuckles, commenting: “I want to be sure that facts are driving scientific decisions, not the other way around,” Obama said.
Yes, there will be no predetermined ideological agendas in an Obama administration.
Right.
Oh, one other thing. I don’t have the time to run the numbers right now, and it obviously depends on how you categorize things, but I’d wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t already spend more than 3% of the GDP on R&D. It’s just not being spent the way The One wants it to be spent.
[Update a few minutes later]
This brings to mind some thoughts that I had last summer on the ability to command and control R&D, with bad Apollo analogies.
[Late afternoon update]
One of Clark Lindsey’s readers makes a good point about the non-mention of NASA:
Perhaps, as the reader suggests, if NASA had not dropped most of its R&D in favor of funding a handful of giant development projects like Ares I, it would get more backing for such activity.
Of course, Ares 1 is R&D, technically speaking. But almost all other, more diverse and certainly more useful R&D has been sacrificed to fund it. But somehow, I actually doubt that this is the reason for the apparent oversight. It think it’s just an oversight.
[Update a few minutes later]
OK, NASA didn’t go entirely unmentioned. He did repeat the flawed Apollo analogy again (it’s one of his favorites), and then said this:
My budget includes $150 billion over ten years to invest in sources of renewable energy as well as energy efficiency; it supports efforts at NASA, recommended as a priority by the National Research Council, to develop new space-based capabilities to help us better understand our changing climate.
That little whirring windy sound you hear is my upright forefinger twirling around and around.
Whoopee.
Not Guilty?
There is evidence that the asteroid that created the Chicxulub crater didn’t wipe out the dinosaurs:
New clues at other sites in Mexico showed that the extinction must have occurred 300,000 years after the Chicxulub impact and that even larger asteroids may not be the purveyors of doom they’re thought to be, according to a paper published in the Journal of the Geological Society by researchers from Princeton, New Jersey, and Lausanne, Switzerland.
“We found that not a single species went extinct as a result of the Chicxulub impact,” said Gerta Keller, a professor of geosciences at Princeton University, in a release distributed by the Geological Society of London. “These are astonishing results.”
Maybe. But even if true, it’s not an excuse to ignore the problem. Being hit by one of these things will mean a bad day, and maybe a bad decade, depending on its size and strike location. Tonguska was only a hundred years ago, and if it were to hit a populated area (e.g., the eastern Seaboard) today, it would be more devastating than a nuclear blast (minus the radiation), potentially killing hundreds of thousands of people. Even if it didn’t wipe out species, you can bet that anything that can create a crater over a hundred miles across wiped out a lot of life. We should still be investing a lot more than we are to become spacefaring, and prevent a repeat.
And what’s frustrating is that we wouldn’t even necessarily have to spend more money. We’d just have to spend NASA’s budget smarter. But that wouldn’t keep the jobs in the right districts.
[Update a few minutes later]
I wonder if this topic will come up at the Planetary Defense Conference. Looks interesting — wish I could attend. A. C. Charania is blogging it.
[Update a few minutes later]
Or maybe we shouldn’t waste all this money on planetary defense, and just get the president to apologize and make peace with the solar system.
Perspective
Shannon Love says that, when it comes to epidemics, most people today have no idea how good we have it.
Singularity 101
Solar System Day
Regular readers know that I hate the earth and the environment.
Well, not really, but I’d imagine that some of the more deluded among them believe that. And I am opposed to many so-called environmentalists. But it’s not an anti-environment position so much as an anti-anti-humanity and anti-anti-free market position.
So I do have trouble getting into Earth Day. I find the notion far too blinkered and unimaginative.
Yes, earth is special and, as we learned over forty years ago (shortly before the first Earth Day), looks like a very precious and fragile jewel against the black background of an unimaginably vast, sterile and hostile universe.
But it’s just one planet of uncountably many, and we don’t just live on a planet, we live in a solar system, a galaxy, a universe. In fact, while there’s an implicit recognition of this in the worship of the sun by the renewable energy types, they’re insufficiently open minded about the use of the rest of the system as a source of resources whose harvesting would be much gentler on the planet than mining them here, if it could be done cost effectively.
I’d like to see Earth Day used as a platform to focus a lot more attention on the environmental benefits that space technology has brought us over the past half century, from data gathering on deforestation and pollution, communications that allow less business travel and more telecommuting, to space-based navigation that saves fuel and lives. I’d also like to see consideration of the even greater future potential for saving the planet via space.
I actually do share the goal of the anti-humans of wanting to reduce the environmental burden of humanity on the planet, and I don’t even necessarily object to the goal of reducing the terrestrial population, as long as we can dramatically increase the extraterrestrial human population, because I’m one of those people who think that human minds are the ultimate resource, and that you can’t have too many of them. But the way to achieve that goal is to open up space, not to simply reduce the human population on earth, by whatever means necessary (and many of these folks think that end will justify any means).
Back in the seventies, many of the L-5ers were hippies who recognized the peaceful potential of space colonization to gently depopulate the earth and make it into a giant natural park, with the vast bulk of humanity living and producing off planet the wealth, via industrial-intensive processes, that would make such a thing affordable. I wasn’t a hippy, but I thought then, and still think, that a wonderful ultimate goal.
But the means to achieve it are not more constraints and taxes on current energy use, or population. It is to deploy technologies that can actually achieve the goal — nuclear, molecular manufacturing, fusion (if we can do it), and low-cost space access, which might eventually make space solar power and extraction of other extraterrestrial resources for use on earth economically feasible.
Golda Meir once said that there would be peace in the Middle East when the Arabs started to love their children more than they hated the Jews. Similarly, the planet will be saved when many of the watermelons who claim to care for it start to love it more than they hate humans, freedom, individualism and technology.
[Thursday morning update]
Last week the Environmental Protection Agency did bravely move forward by finding that things like smokestacks and breathing — or anything related to greenhouse gases — endanger the public health and welfare. And since the EPA can now regulate CO2, it can have a say in nearly everything we do with little regard for silly distractions like economic tradeoffs…
…What’s worse than the EPA grabbing power over CO2? Well, leading Luddite and Congressman Henry Waxman is worse. His proposal sets carbon reduction goals of 20 percent by 2020, 42 percent by 2030 and 83 percent by 2050, and, with cap-and-trade, effectively nationalizes energy production.
This incremental destruction of prosperity is probably going to have to be modified as soon as citizens get a taste of reality. But how could any reasonable or responsible legislator suggest an 83 percent cut in emissions without any practical or wide-scale alternative to replace it, or any plan to pay for it all?
Well, that assumes that Henry Waxman is reasonable or responsible, when the available evidence indicates otherwise.
[Bumped]
The Achilles Heel Of Aging
Most people aren’t aware of the recent scientific breakthroughs in life extension technology, but here’s a good update:
In 2004 my lab teamed up with Dr. Rafael de Cabo at the National Institutes of Health to see if resveratrol could improve the health and extend the lifespan of mice. When middle-aged mice were fed a low-fat diet, resveratrol delayed diseases of aging but did not extend lifespan. When fed a high-fat diet, mice on resveratrol got chubby but stayed healthy — they were less susceptible to diseases we associate with obesity, like type II diabetes. And with a sufficient- win a Nobel Prize. ly high resveratrol dose, they burned enough fat to stay lean. What’s more, the resveratrol mice on the high-fat diet ran twice as far on a treadmill as their unmedicated counterparts, and their remaining lifespan after treatment began increasing by an average of 25 percent compared with the high-fat controls. Notably, in both the obese and the lean mice on resveratrol, there was the clear physiological signature of calorie restriction.
The trouble is, while resveratrol is found in many foods, it is present only in very low concentrations. Someone wanting to get a resveratrol dose equivalent to what we used in our mice studies would need to consume hundreds of bottles of red wine each day. Resveratrol has served its purpose, proving the possibility of inducing the physiology of dieting and exercise with a small molecule. Now pharmaceutical companies are working on synthetic molecules that are thousands of times as potent as resveratrol: The race to develop a drug that targets sirtuins is on, though the longterm effect of activating sirtuins in humans requires further research. If the mice studies are anything to go by, the side effects of these drugs could include protection from multiple illnesses, including heart disease, osteoporosis, cataracts, and Alzheimer’s.
Bring it on. I’m all in favor of this, which is one of the reasons that I’m not a conservative.
I Got Ripped Off
Over forty years ago, we stopped at the Four Corners National Monument on a family vacation, where I got to have one limb in each of the four states simultaneously. Well, it turns out that the plaque is off by two and a half miles. So all those tourists were in Colorado the whole time.
I’m not sure whether to blame George Bush, or Barack Obama.
Space Nuclear Waste Disposal
When I wrote that piece about Three-Mile Island the other week, I forgot to mention my own recollections of the event. It was interesting timing, because it happened in the middle of a senior space systems engineering project that I was involved with at the University of Michigan. It was an annual course taught in the Aerospace Engineering department, required for Aerospace majors, which I took as an elective (though it wasn’t my major, I took many courses there, including several graduate ones, tailoring my own astronautical engineering degree, but without the emphasis on aeronautics). The course was taught by Harm Buning (who died only three years ago — I really ought to write about him some time). The project was to figure out how to dispose of nuclear waste in space. This was a couple years before the Shuttle had its first flight, and we still believed the hype about its cost and safety, so it was the assumed launch vehicle, but the question was what to do with the stuff once it was in LEO.
Having been pretty heavily involved with the L-5 Society (I had actually spent a semester the previous year volunteering at the HQ in Tucson, and had met people involved with the MIT mass driver work, including Henry Kolm and Eric Drexler — the people in that now-classic picture are, from right to left, a twenty-four year-old bearded Eric wearing a Maxwell’s equations teeshirt (one of which I also had at the time), Henry, Gerry O’Neill, someone unknown to me, and Kevin Fine — geek and space enthusiast city — I could write a sad book titled “We Were Space Enthusiasts, And Young…), I suggested that we use a linear synchronous motor to propel it out of the solar system. The class adopted the idea, and we came up with a crude systems design (about what you could expect from college seniors for such a complex project). It was in the middle of the project that TMI occurred, making it seem even more relevant.
The university seems to have put many of these older (typed by department secretaries– no word processors back then) reports on line, including this one. I’m sure I have a dead-tree copy somewhere, but it’s nice to see it on the web. It’s been a long time, and I was distracted at the time because my father had his second heart attack in April of that year, and died a few weeks later. Due to time missed, I had to finish up my sections early in the summer to avoid an Incomplete for the course, so I don’t remember how much of it and which parts I wrote, but it was quite a bit of it (at least the orbital mechanics and the dynamics of the payloads in the accelerator, and how much wall play they would have to have). Dave Steigmann wrote a lot of the structures section, I think. The report says that it’s authored by Kevin Blankinship, but he was probably just final editor, because he was officially the team project manager. One of the things that this course taught was not just engineering, but how to work as an engineering team (including managing with the politics and personal interactions). These were…interesting. I won’t say any more than that, to protect the guilty, whoever they all may be. 😉
Anyway, is it feasible? Probably not, but it was a good project for the purpose of learning how to consider all aspects of a space system, and project teamwork.
[Update a while later]
The project name was pretty good acronymery. I don’t recall whether it was mine, someone else’s, or the result of a brainstorming session. But it was Project NEWDUMP (Nuclear Energy Waste Disposal Using Mass-Driver Propulsion).
For anyone who is willing to read the thing, it is probably entertainingly rife with howlers, from the perspective of three decades later. This one on page four jumped off the page at me:
The Space Shuttle has substantially reduced the cost of space transportation since the Apollo project, with possible improvements for further economy.
Note the tense, and not also that this was written about two years before first flight.
More SPS
Technology Review has a story about the Solaren/PG&E deal, which answers questions some have had in comments about beam intensity and aiming.