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Domain: extropy.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to extropy.org.
Comments · 28
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Why ground based solar makes more sense
From: "[ExI] Thoughts on Space based solar power"
http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2008-November/046620.html
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I spent a long time around 2003 and 2004 on the SSI email list (now on yahoo
groups if you want to look at the archives) explaining why space-based solar
power will not in any likely time frame be of any value on Earth.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/ssi_list/
And I want to make it clear I was a SSI Senior Associate (five year pledge
of money) back in the 1980s, and even took a (intro Physics) course from
Gerry O'Neill. So this in not just a casual disagreement. I am very sad that
the Space Studies Institute even now pushes an outdated agenda (well, now
they are moving to scaring people with asteroids, to the extent they are
still operating). I feel if Gerry O'Neill was around now he might agree with
this analysis of the current prospects for space-based power in the next few
decades, since he always was an adaptable and innovative guy, even if,
unfortunately, ultimately an unsuccessful businessperson with GeoStar and
LAWN with which he hoped to fund space habitation. I think by coupling the
two -- a desire to build space habitations coupled with economic arguments
for space solar power (or even other space activities) -- that one may miss
out on sooner realizing the dream of space habitation done for its own sake
(as a hobby).The core points of the argument I advanced there:
* About a third to one half the cost of residential electric service is
maintaining transmission lines. So, at best, space solar even if *free* at
the ground station will be at best one-third the cost of utility power is
now at the home meter. As the costs of home power generation fall from
advanced manufacturing, the cost of home solar power (or wind, or
cogeneration) will drop below that cost at some point for self-contained
homes producing all or most of their own power, making space solar power
obsolete for home use. Since space solar power will initially be expensive,
it is non-viable right now. And since the cost of solar panels (like
Nanosolar's) is dropping way faster than the cost of space operations, and
since solar space satellites have a twenty to thirty year time horizon for
significant production, they are a non-starter and too risky investment
comparatively. Things might have been different in the 1970s, but it is
thirty years later. Also, one can make an argument for limited solar power
for large commercial facilities producing aluminum or liquid fuels or doing
laser launching, but that is only likely to be worth doing once we already
have a space presence since then only the incremental costs will need to be
paid, rather than expect solar power to pay to develop a space
infrastructure as O'Neill and others proposed (and people still propose).
I'm sure one can look hard at situations where transmission costs are
minimized, but this cost of transmission argument is a very deep one and
I've never seen it rigorously discussed. We know how to do solar on the
ground, there are ways to store the energy at night (molten salts, ever
improving batteries, pumping water up hill, compressed air, production of
synthetic liquid fuels, production of hydrogen, a superconducting world wide
grid backbone, etc.), and there are complementary technologies like wind
power and cogeneration by burning biomass that together with solar produce
fairly reliable power (as well as a lot of local hands-on jobs in the short
term). And there are organizations promoting R&D to make this all even better:
http://www.google.com/corporate/green/energy/* A rebuttal to this is
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Bad publicity for the church of Scientology
It is ironic how much bad publicity the church of Scientology has generated for itself by these repeated attempts to punish and silence Keith Henson. Like many Slashdot readers, I had barely heard of the church of Scientology. This discussion about the arrest of Keith Henson is my first real source of information about Scientologists. They may have won several battles in the court room against Keith Henson, but in doing so, lost several major battles for public opinion. Is publicity like this what they want people to know about their organization?
Back in the 1970s, I was once a member of the L-5 society but never attended any of their meetings. I just enjoyed reading about the ideas presented in their monthly newsletter. Keith Henson was a co-founder of that organization. I vaguely remember the name Keith Henson, but had never met him. L-5 Society members could probably be considered to be a bunch of overly optimistic technology enthusiasts who wanted to promote the idea of building self-sufficient cities in space using existing technology. It was an intriguing vision of the future which never happened and probably won't happen within my lifetime. They were an idealistic bunch of engineers, scientists and, what we would now call geeks, who in their own way wanted to try to build a better world. So imagine my surprise at reading on Slashdot that Keith Henson was a Scientology critic who had just been arrested a few miles away from where I live here in the quiet little town of Prescott, Arizona.
So far, I still don't know very much about the church of Scientology, but here is the general sense of what I have have learned today so far on Slashdot and the various links. The church of Scientology is allegedly a rich and vengeful religious cult. They apparently have lawyers who are ready to sue their critics. The church was founded by a science fiction author. People can be sued for excerpting their scriptures (are they copyrighted?). I don't know it that is a totally accurate picture or not, but that is the general impression that I get by following the news stories about Keith's arrest. If other readers are reacting the same way, then it looks like the church of Scientology may have won in court, but in doing so has generated lots of bad publicity. At least in that sense they have lost. They may have only turned Keith Henson into a martyr and symbol for the Scientology critics?
I saw a link to the "Henson Legal Support Fund" and my contribution check is now in the mail to help pay for his defense.
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Henson Legal Support FundDonations to assist Keith's defense can be made here.
Please mod this up to make it more visible (or better yet, can it be edited into the main article, Hemos? Thanks)
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Hazy Case & Donation Fund
Personally, I've only become aware of this case via this article. If all he did was post that on a forum to cause all this trouble with Scientology, I sure feel sorry for him. But if a California court found him guilty of any wrong, then I think he should serve his time. I don't think "interfering with a church" should constitute a long sentence though. I feel I am missing a large part of the story here or that this article was written omitting tactics Mr. Henson used agains Scientology. I can't judge until all the facts are in but I am aware that people with a lot of money can make strange charges stick.
If you want to support Keith Henson, there is a donation fund set up for his defense fees.
I personally hate Scientology but they are a religion and must be respected as one. If they can convince chumps to give them money, there's nothing I can do to stop that. -
Annan's global warming claim on Foresight Exchange
A poster to the extropy-chat mailing list pointed out that James Annan also created a global warming claim on the Foresight Exchange that people can bid on:
http://www.ideosphere.com/fx-bin/Claim?claim=GW203 0
If I'm reading the current bid correctly, global average temperatures are predicted to rise 0.72 degrees celsius by 2032.
There's also a Nature news item covering this. -
Future IncomprehensiveIt's interesting how the media works. Here we have the head of futurology unit of British Telecom. He isn't some random guy and he clearly did some studies about the future. He makes a speech (was it at Futurex), where he, no doubt speaks at length about the future, about likely developments, about his work, about BT plans, etc. But the media takes two soundbites and rehashes them endlessly, without analisys or as much as a second thought. As a result, we get a bunch (hundreds of, to be more precise) of identical articles titled "Download your brain by 2050" and the text centering around "The other prediction was talking yoghurt by 2020".
This is pathetic. The average reader/viewer/listner has no chance to form a coherent picture of the future, or even our current ideas of it. But sadly, this is typical for news coverage of all topics. And it's actually one of the problems - that we treat such items as "news", where you get a notable person speak, then a few hundreds of nearly identical articles appear, then silence. In the best case the meme of "Playstation 5 will be as powerful as a human brain" will spread and settle in the brains of the public.
Instead of starting a decades-long discussion of all the implications of the future changes, instead of purposefully changing our societies to adapt to the scientific and technological advances, instead of basing our research budgets on the goal of achieving the most desirable of all possible futures, we just live as if nothing important is happening. This is beyond sad.
I don't know how you can change that, may be it's impossible in the world of corrupt democracies and commercialised mass-media, but if you personally want to understand where we are heading, check out the links in the end of this post.
Ian Pearsen is late. I remember the idiotic 21st century forecast that BT produced five years ago. Only now he starts to get things that better thinkers realised a decade ago. For some people the idea of mind uploading is not new and they already managed to present a much more comprehensive picture of the future.
Here are some of the resources outlining it:
- World Transhumanism Association
- Singularity Institute
- KurzweilAI.net
- Extropy Institute
- Transtopia
- Better Humans
- Anders Transhuman Page - a comprehensive directory of transhumanist resources
- Transhumanism at del.icio.us
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this is what extropianism forgot aboutAll those people talking about the "Singularity" (supposedely the moment when the growth of human knowledge becomes near enough to asymptotic that radical social changes take place) totally forget about things like this.
i.e. Goethe was aware of the details of all major scientific fields in his day, a renaissance man as they were known, same for DaVinci, who actually pushed the boundries of knowledge in most fields. Today, to do groundbreaking work in physics requires a: mandatory 12 years (at least in the U.S.), a bare minimum of 8 more at an institute of higher learning and that is followed up with an apprenticeship program where you work for more experienced scientists for 5 years (or more). This gives us a standard educational model that lasts 25 years from entry to specialty.
As human knowledge increases, and the flood of it into our heads is turned from a trickle to a torrent, we'll be increasingly unable to find it (which is why Google was invented, i suppose, but the problem is larger than just finding things). But as the article points out: focus is a valuable thing. Realizing this can make one spend time and energy on acquiring it. As an aside, multitasking is useful too, but when you actually need to get something done...
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Re:They sound like scientology to me.I don't think that CRN is a scientology organization, but it is pretty easy to trace some of the members on the web. The executive director of CRN Mike Treder is also a member of the socalled Extropy institute who advocate for genetic changes of the human genome. I quote from their very entertaining faq :
What is a transhuman? A transhuman is a human in transition. We are transhuman to the extent that we seek to become posthuman and take action to prepare for a posthuman future. This involves learning about and making use of new technologies that can increase our capacities and life expectancy, questioning common assumptions, and transforming ourselves ready for the future, rising above outmoded human beliefs and behaviors. [SNIP]
What is transhumanism? Transhumanism was given its first definition and characterization by Dr. Max More (in Extropy The Journal of Transhumanist Thought #6, 1990) "Transhumanism is a class of philosophies that seek to guide us towards a posthuman condition. Transhumanism shares many elements of humanism, including a respect for reason and science, a commitment to progress, and a valuing of human (or transhuman) existence in this life [..]. Transhumanism differs from humanism in recognizing and anticipating the radical alterations in the nature and possibilities of our lives resulting from various sciences and technologies[...]"
What is the Singularity? As defined by Vernor Vinge, 1986: The postulated point or short period in our future when our self-guided evolutionary development accelerates enormously (powered by nanotech, neuroscience, AI, and perhaps uploading) so that nothing beyond that time can reliably be conceived. Vinge also wrote: "The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century. I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence." Transhumanists vary considerably in their view of the exact nature and definition of a Singularity, and not all transhumanists accept it as a useful notion. For good information on the Singularity from two advocates of the idea, we suggest you visit Raymond Kurzweil's KurzweilAI.net site and The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the work of its fellow, Eliezer Yudkowsky.
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Re:They sound like scientology to me.I don't think that CRN is a scientology organization, but it is pretty easy to trace some of the members on the web. The executive director of CRN Mike Treder is also a member of the socalled Extropy institute who advocate for genetic changes of the human genome. I quote from their very entertaining faq :
What is a transhuman? A transhuman is a human in transition. We are transhuman to the extent that we seek to become posthuman and take action to prepare for a posthuman future. This involves learning about and making use of new technologies that can increase our capacities and life expectancy, questioning common assumptions, and transforming ourselves ready for the future, rising above outmoded human beliefs and behaviors. [SNIP]
What is transhumanism? Transhumanism was given its first definition and characterization by Dr. Max More (in Extropy The Journal of Transhumanist Thought #6, 1990) "Transhumanism is a class of philosophies that seek to guide us towards a posthuman condition. Transhumanism shares many elements of humanism, including a respect for reason and science, a commitment to progress, and a valuing of human (or transhuman) existence in this life [..]. Transhumanism differs from humanism in recognizing and anticipating the radical alterations in the nature and possibilities of our lives resulting from various sciences and technologies[...]"
What is the Singularity? As defined by Vernor Vinge, 1986: The postulated point or short period in our future when our self-guided evolutionary development accelerates enormously (powered by nanotech, neuroscience, AI, and perhaps uploading) so that nothing beyond that time can reliably be conceived. Vinge also wrote: "The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century. I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence." Transhumanists vary considerably in their view of the exact nature and definition of a Singularity, and not all transhumanists accept it as a useful notion. For good information on the Singularity from two advocates of the idea, we suggest you visit Raymond Kurzweil's KurzweilAI.net site and The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the work of its fellow, Eliezer Yudkowsky.
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An upset to the apple cartThe whole dark matter/dark energy perspective could be flawed. It depends upon the perspective that the Universe (as viewed) is most probably dead. It does not ask the question of what the Universe would look like if it were alive. But as work by Charles Lineweaver (a noted physicist at the Univ. of NSW) and his students have shown that may be a very questionable assumption. Their work suggests *most* of the Earths (60%+) in this Universe should be *much* older than ours.
So the question must be raised *what* would the Universe look like if
I've tried to explore and address some of these questions in my papers about Matrioshka Brains as has Dr. Sandberg in his exploration of the various types of Jupiter Brains.
These are not new concepts -- they have been discussed on the Extropians list for perhaps a decade. There are a few good astronmers and astrophysicists who discuss these ideas but to a large extent mainstream science seems stuck in the paradigm that the universe simply must be dead.
Until we deal with whether or not that is a fundamental misconception we may be plagued by concepts like Dark Matter and Dark Energy that could be resting on very questionable evidence.
Robert
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Re:Another Similar Site... and another
The Foresight Exchange has a market that has been running since at least 1994. It uses fake currency, has email and telnet interfaces, and a mailing list for development of the code that runs the market.
The group of people behind this market tends towards transhumanism, extropianism, etc. You can find a summary of "how the market worked so far" at http://www.extropy.org/ideas/journal/previous/1999
Also intereesting: Jay Scott wrote a bot for automating purchases and sales in this market. -
Re:Forgotten (Zardoz and Buckaroo Banzaii)
I am a big fan of Zardoz, though it is a product of its time and has loads of detractors. It is an extropian cautionary tale about what happens if you get more life but don't really evolve yourselves. As for Buckaroo Banzaii. I can't get enough of it and wish the sequel and TV series had gone somewhere. The writer of the best-candiate spec. script for the sequel in recent years has this to say about Buckaroo Banzaii (at 1:10, and a few other geeky films).
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They Post This, But Never Comment on Serious Stuff
It's frustrating that
For example, the Singularity Institute has a vast array of comp-sci-related interesting stuff about General Artifical Intelligence and its role in the Singularity. The institute and volunteers are working on Flare, a programming language for GAI development.
Then we have the Foresight Institute who have a bunch of scholarly, serious things to say about nanotechnology and its implications.
Just for starters, of course. Then we have a million other resources out there, such as:
KurzweilAI.net
Extropy Instituteat which one can learn about the Singularity and associated topics in context.
But no, we get trash like the spaceship guy. Bah, bah, bah. Reason
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Extropians are an interesting bunch
I spent some time lurking around the Extropian main mailing list. There are some brilliant people with some good ideas there, as well as some real whack jobs.
Max Moore is really one smart guy. I'd recommend reading his Extropian Principles statement. -
Re:Hmm...Spoiler time:
The bar in question is "The Guildford Arms" in Edinburgh, yours trully features in that sequence under his own name
The reason for this mess is that the SF writing field in Scotland is very small, and the number of Scottish SF writers who have an interest in weird politics and extropianism is even smaller. -
Re:At least we'll have time to prepareThere is no reason humanity shouldn't last a few hundred years longer to get here
That appears to be a website devoted to some kind of quasi-religious belief in the transformation of humans to some kind of machine form. Whatever the result, I suspect that it would not be us, and it would certainly not be human. Interesting idea, though.
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Re:At least we'll have time to prepare
> Given our presence at the top of every food
> chain on the planet, we're in a rather
> vulnerable position because we could easily wipe
> out our food sources.
I submit we are the most stable organism to live on this planet, at least of anything larger than a bug. There is no reason humanity shouldn't last a few hundred years longer to get here, which is all that's needed. Even the worst and most irrational irresponsible threats of global warming (deserts and massive flooding) won't reduce humanity to some tiny, caveman-like group of survivors or less. -
Re:Isn't this exactly what Linus was talking about
If you're interested in directed evolution and improving humans, you may be interested in the Extropy Institute. They have healthy attitudes toward this sort of thing. I'm looking forward to the future....
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Re:So What?
Complete agreement. Make sure to check out the Extropians. They're similarly forward-thinking. (Their site seems to be down for the moment, but it's very much worth checking out)
I enjoy Star Trek, but one of the things that really irks me is Roddenberry's persistent "natural" approach to the future of mankind. Anyone who has taken control of their genetic destiny is the villain. You need look no futher than Kahn to see it, but even in the latest 'Enterprise' series, genetic manipulation is what's done by the evil Sullians (or whatever they're called). Even TNG's brief brush with genetically engineered super-children ended up being a lesson in the "evils" of tampering with mother nature. -
Re:How long till the scares start?
There is a group actively examining and discussing the pros and cons of many new technologies like genetic modification and nanotechnology: The Extropy Institute.
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Re:What the guy is talking about.
Extropy is my favorite joke ideology. People who coin the name of their ideology because it "sounds good, kinda like the opposite of entropy, but not really" instead of its literal meaning are rather hard to take seriously.
ex- : out of; away from.
-tropy : indicates condition of turning.
So, "Away-turning", not as the self-named extropians claim, "the extent of a system's intelligence, information, order, vitality, and capacity for improvement".
Steven E. Ehrbar -
What the guy is talking about.
Extropians: Randists, only
more so.
Singularity: Explained here.
Read all of that and digest. It's fun. -
Nature is always creating dangerous things
If you think nature is "static", you should look at how many people it kills every year due to various new creations. Nature itself is filled with self-replicating, mutating, DNA sharing organisms. And in case you haven't noticed it, most of them view you as LUNCH. Yes, you do have defenses, but those defenses fail every year for millions of people.
For more info, see my post regarding "Ye Are Gods", from the Sept. 24, 2000 Extropy Institute archives. -
Evolution of humans into transhumans or posthumans
Thoughtful discussions (rather than the usual doom and gloom predictions) regarding the consequences of genetic engineering and technological progress in computers, AI, etc. may be found in the Extropy Institute's Mailing List. There are many years of discussions in the Archives.
Some additional sources of useful information include the The Transhumanist FAQ and the Journal of Transhumanism . The World Transhumanist Association is an umbrella organization for many regional transhumanist groups.
The people involved in these organizations actively discuss and investigate the many issues and concerns related to our future evolution as a species. -
Evolution of humans into transhumans or posthumans
Thoughtful discussions (rather than the usual doom and gloom predictions) regarding the consequences of genetic engineering and technological progress in computers, AI, etc. may be found in the Extropy Institute's Mailing List. There are many years of discussions in the Archives.
Some additional sources of useful information include the The Transhumanist FAQ and the Journal of Transhumanism . The World Transhumanist Association is an umbrella organization for many regional transhumanist groups.
The people involved in these organizations actively discuss and investigate the many issues and concerns related to our future evolution as a species. -
Nanomedicine and nanotechnology can be safeI was a reviewer for Nanomedicine and I speak with Robert Freitas frequently. He is very serious about designing nanobot medical devices so they are non-replicating, have numerous failsafes, and do not create the possible problems most people envision. One reason writing all three volumes will take 6 years is the depth of analysis that has to be done to meet this standard. While it is doubtful that a single individual can think of everything, Nanomedicine clearly will lay the foundation for safe and very useful nanobots such as Respirocytes.
The problems mentioned by Bill Joy in his interview point out how poorly informed he is. Anyone who has been in the computer industry as long as he has, should know enough to "read the manual(s)" before offering uninformed opinions. The problems regarding nanotechnology run amok have been discussed for many years in the sci.nanotech newsgroups as well as at conferences for the Foresight Institute's Senior Associates. The basic solutions involve making "safe" (e.g. reviewed, open source) designs available while at the same time developing defenses against nanotech run amok. The Extropy Institute's Mailing List Archives, for example, contains recent discussions about encouraging the availability of "almost anything" manufacturing boxes (similar to Star Trek "replicators"), while discouraging the availability of "everything" boxes.
Diamondoid or saphire based molecularly assembled nanobots used in medical applications will greatly exceed the capabilities in of "biobots" built on existing genetic machines (DNA, enzymes, bacteria, cells, etc.) because they are stronger, can pack the "code" more densely, and can have more complex programs than the rather "ad hoc" designs that nature has provided us with. Most of the first volume of Nanomedicine is devoted to determining exactly what the physical limits will be on power, communication, mobility, etc. Most of the applications will be discussed in Volumes II and III.
Joy may be right that the technology poses a threat to the "human species", but that begs the question of "Why would you want to run on obsolete hardware?". Anyone who understands even a little astronomy knows that galactic hazards doom biological human forms to death at some point. Only those humans who choose to upload have any hope of living the trillion or so years that seems quite feasible. So while the hopes for biochemical humans are rather dismal even with Nanomedicine, the long term prospects for humanity, based on what nanotechnology allows are quite good indeed.
As far as nanotechnology background material goes, the best (nontechnical) source is Engines of Creation. Other references can be found in Eric Drexler's CV.
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Nanomedicine and nanotechnology can be safeI was a reviewer for Nanomedicine and I speak with Robert Freitas frequently. He is very serious about designing nanobot medical devices so they are non-replicating, have numerous failsafes, and do not create the possible problems most people envision. One reason writing all three volumes will take 6 years is the depth of analysis that has to be done to meet this standard. While it is doubtful that a single individual can think of everything, Nanomedicine clearly will lay the foundation for safe and very useful nanobots such as Respirocytes.
The problems mentioned by Bill Joy in his interview point out how poorly informed he is. Anyone who has been in the computer industry as long as he has, should know enough to "read the manual(s)" before offering uninformed opinions. The problems regarding nanotechnology run amok have been discussed for many years in the sci.nanotech newsgroups as well as at conferences for the Foresight Institute's Senior Associates. The basic solutions involve making "safe" (e.g. reviewed, open source) designs available while at the same time developing defenses against nanotech run amok. The Extropy Institute's Mailing List Archives, for example, contains recent discussions about encouraging the availability of "almost anything" manufacturing boxes (similar to Star Trek "replicators"), while discouraging the availability of "everything" boxes.
Diamondoid or saphire based molecularly assembled nanobots used in medical applications will greatly exceed the capabilities in of "biobots" built on existing genetic machines (DNA, enzymes, bacteria, cells, etc.) because they are stronger, can pack the "code" more densely, and can have more complex programs than the rather "ad hoc" designs that nature has provided us with. Most of the first volume of Nanomedicine is devoted to determining exactly what the physical limits will be on power, communication, mobility, etc. Most of the applications will be discussed in Volumes II and III.
Joy may be right that the technology poses a threat to the "human species", but that begs the question of "Why would you want to run on obsolete hardware?". Anyone who understands even a little astronomy knows that galactic hazards doom biological human forms to death at some point. Only those humans who choose to upload have any hope of living the trillion or so years that seems quite feasible. So while the hopes for biochemical humans are rather dismal even with Nanomedicine, the long term prospects for humanity, based on what nanotechnology allows are quite good indeed.
As far as nanotechnology background material goes, the best (nontechnical) source is Engines of Creation. Other references can be found in Eric Drexler's CV.
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Web Resources on the Singularity
Homo sapiens sapiens won't last forever. The only question is whether we wipe out all intelligence in the Solar System due to superweapons, an outcome which we can legitimately label as "bad", or whether "life as we know it" is ended by the rise of greater-than-human intelligence first. Frankly, I think I'll take what's behind door number two.
Bill Joy scores points for pointing out the probability of apocalypse, but vastly more important is accepting the certainty of some apocalypse and deciding which one we want. I don't think there's much of a contest between the coinflip chance that AIs are nice to humans and the near-certainty of being murdered by Iraqi nanoweaponry.
Anyway, the Extropians list has been rehashing this issue for years - right down to the argument about how to build an AI - and, unsurprisingly, some Web resources seem to have sprung up along the way. So if you'd rather not reinvent the wheel...
Ope n Directory Singularity category
Singularity Sub-Page in Anders Transhuman Page
Comments on Vinge's Singularity (13 authors write essays; Vinge responds)
Staring into the Singularity
The Plan to Singularity (403K)For those of you wondering about how to build the AI:
Coding a Transhuman AI (353K)
For those of you wondering about what the AIs will do:
Logic from Frequently Asked Questions about the Meaning of Life