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Dyson On Grey Goo, Bioterrorism, and Censorship
Phronesis writes "In "The Future Needs Us," Freeman Dyson reviews Michael Crichton's Prey. After disposing of the bad science (The Reynolds number of nanobots 'the size of red blood cells' would limit their top speed to 2 mm/sec, which would make it hard for them to swarm or chase people; Solar power would provide no more than 20 nanowatts, which would not be sufficient for the activities the book describes; etc.) he turns to the more general theme of fearmongering about nanotechnology and biotechnology, comparing Prey to Nevil Shute's On the Beach ('Prey is not as good as On the Beach, but it is bringing us an equally important message')." Read on for a few more notes from the story, which makes an interesting followup to reader cybrpnk2's positive review of Prey .
"Dyson notes Joy's oddly prescient comment in April 2000 that
I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals.but objects to Joy's recommendation that we should 'relinquish pursuit of that knowledge...so dangerous that we judge it better that [it] never be available.' After a discussion of the actual history of biological warfare and bioterrorism, Dyson quotes Milton's Areopagitica in defense of intellectual and scientific freedom, concluding that 'Perhaps, after all, as we struggle to deal with the enduring problems of reconciling individual freedom with public safety, the wisdom of a great poet who died more than three hundred years ago may still be helpful.'"
I've read a few of his books over the years, and would put him up there with Richard Dawkings. Great read, even for the non-scientific.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
The problem with this is that knowledge (or even simply ideas) once taken out cannot be jammed back into the can. Nor should it. Security through obscurity is never really secure... if you know what I mean...
00101010
Yeah, "Prey" might scare the beejeebees out of people, but maybe get a few interested in real nanotechnology. For that, they can take a look at Small Times, which has covered the environmental issue extensively both in this article and in its upcoming dead-tree-edition cover story.
Dyson & Bill Joy both relate to the Unabomber Manifesto,
which has some stunning sections on technology:
Industrial-Technological Society Cannot Be Reformed
Restriction Of Freedom Is unavoidable In Industrial Society
The 'Bad' Parts Of Technology Cannot Be Seperated From The 'Good' Parts
Technology Is A More Powerful Social Force Than The Aspiration Freedom
The complete manifesto is here
BEFORE YOU REPLY, please read a bit.
He has some ideas that are VERY similar
to ideas that get posted here on slashdot.
One excerpt here...
While technological progress AS A WHOLE continually narrows our sphere of freedom, each new technical advance CONSIDERED BY ITSELF appears to be desirable. Electricity, indoor plumbing, rapid long-distance communications . . . how could one argue against any of these things, or against any other of the innumerable technical advances that have made modern society? It would have been absurd to resist the introduction of the telephone, for example. It offered many advantages and no disadvantages. Yet as we explained in paragraphs 59-76, all these technical advances taken together have created world in which the average man's fate is no longer in his own hands or in the hands of his neighbors and friends, but in those of politicians, corporation executives and remote, anonymous technicians and bureaucrats whom he as an individual has no power to influence.
Return a Time/Space anomoly to normal.
Seal an atmoshpere about to get ripped away from a planet.
Stun some nasty aliens.
Adjust the harmonics of a warp drive.
But, how can this be? It's not possible they say.
Get over it and just have fun.
Micheal Crichton in this book, describes HOW these nanites are moving. Yes, they have fibres to move and by themselves could only go 2 mm/sec (not enough to chase people) but he goes on to say how through these emergant behaviours that they were working as groups. They were developing propulsion that was designed around multiple units working at once. Increasing the totally speed of the swarm. There was a lot of very detailed explanation on exactly how these units moved, how when wind came up they had to fall to the surface to escape the velocities.
With the exemption of the ending which I wont spoil here it was a very plausible book.
You have to understand that with solar power in nanite groups, you're not just generating electricity, but also heat which causes convection etc and nanites could control this force among others naturally present in the environment.
Its exactly this kind of emergent behaviour that crichton was talking about and this guy has seemed to miss the point.
$.02
I can state with no doubt that you did not read the article.
Go ahead and flame my ass. I earned it.
P.S. Where should I post questions like this?
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
One of the most intereting conversations I've ever had was with a fellow who was pursuing a career in particle accelerator work.
According to him there used to be similar "Grey Goo" arguments surrounding some earlier particle accelerator work. There was some worry that an experiment, by chance, might create a form of matter that was more stable at lower energies, causing a chain reaction that would convert normal matter into this more "stable" matter, plus energy.
I really don't know enough about the field to flesh this out better. However, rather than being frightening, the conversation really captured how exciting fields on the edge can be.
I always had trouble with the grey goo concept, on which Crichton bases this book, on the grounds that I have a hard time figuring out what the damned things do for food.
The dominant energy source around us is organic matter. You can't get much energy out of eating inorganic matter (rock) because, aside from carbon (coal, graphite, diamond), it's mostly well-oxidized and sitting in a free-energy minimum. That's why we don't burn rocks other than coal in the fireplace. This means that the nanobots would be competing with natural life forms for organic matter and I doubt they would do well in the competition.
The machinery by which living things extract energy from organic matter is quite sophisticated and I don't see any prospect for engineered nanotechnology out-competing basic bacteria on this front.
Similarly, if most of the energetically favorable raw material around is organic, if the nanobots are to reproduce, they will likely be built of organic compounds, so they are again competing with bacteria that have a 4 billion year head start in optimizing themselves for the environment. If they are built of inorganic compounds or make much use of elements that are not generally found in living matter, then they will need to use much of their metabolic output to fighting entropy as they purify (reduce sand to silicon, for instance) and synthesize the necessary building blocks.
Until the question of where a nanobot gets its food and how it reproduces are plausibly explained (we don't need reduction to practice, but some plausible background is necessary), I will not take scenarios involving huge swarms of malevolent grey goo seriously, even in fiction.
This is the difference between science fiction and fantasy--SF is reasonably plausible, F has no such limits. Crichton's work is clearly what I and many others have been calling science fantasy.
A-ha-ha-ha-ha.
Now then, Dmitri. You know how we've always talked about the possibility... of something going wrong with the dust. The dust, Dmitri. The nano dust! Well, now, what happened, is... ah, one of our scientists, he had a sort of... well, he went a little funny in the head. You know, just a little... funny. And, ah, he went and did a silly thing. Well, I'll tell you what he did. He ordered his dust... to attack your country. Ah, well let me finish Dmitri - let me finish Dmitri... Well listen, how do you think I feel about it?! Can you imagine how I feel about it, Dmitri? Why do you think I'm calling you? Just to say hello?
Of course I like to speak to you! Of course I like to say hello! Not now, but anytime, Dmitri. I'm just calling up to tell you something terrible has happened. It's a friendly call, of course it's a friendly call. Listen, if it wasn't friendly... you probably wouldn't have even gotten it.
They will not reach their targets for at least another hour. I am... I am positive, Dmitri. Listen, I've been all over this with your ambassador, it is not a trick.
Well, I'll tell you. We'd like to give your HVAC staff a complete run-down on the targets, the flight characteristics, and the defensive systems of the dust. Yes! I mean, i-i-i-if we're unable to denature the dust, then... I'd say that, ah... well, we're just gonna have to help you destroy it, Dmitri. All right, well listen now. Who should we call? Who should we call, Dmitri? The, wha-whe, the People... you, sorry, you faded away there. The People's Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning Headquarters. Where is that, Dmitri? In Omsk, right? Yes? Oh, you'll call them first, will you? Uh-huh. Listen, do you happen to have the phone number on you, Dmitri? Whe-ah, what? I see, just ask for Omsk Information.
Ah-ah-eh-um-hmmmmm.
I'm sorry, too, Dmitri. I'm very sorry. Alright, you're sorrier than I am! But I am as sorry as well. I am as sorry as you are, Dmitri. Don't say that you're more sorry than I am, because I'm capable of being just as sorry as you are. So we're both sorry, alright?
Alright.
Yes, the main page has been slow for me as well; it's probably not your admin.
You should post questions such as yours in the user-created discussions section.
Nice that I wandered onto the article and read a bit before realizing this was really full of spoilers on a relatively new book. Thanks for hanging it out there without a warning.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
You got me there. I admit that I did not read the review fully until after I had posted, although I did read it immediately afterwards. The review itself was, in my opinion, pretty nicely written and well researched. It was Phronesis' leading story that made me see red, in that it emphasised the technical shortcomings listed in the review, completely skimming over it's real substance.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
No, I think you have completely manages to miss the point of Dyson's article. It is not an article geared to impress the masses on his command of science, rather, it is one meant to point out the serious, very serious, flaws that people like Bill Joy and Crichton have with their outlook on nanotechnology. When you read into their arguments and "forecasts" about nano, it becomes clear that Joy and Crichton really don't have an inkling on what they are talking about. The result of their writings, based more on emotion than hard logic, is the disillusionment of the masses against a science that is not properly understood. I find it of great annoyance that a popular author, such as Crichton, is willing to put himself in the position of being one to predict how the future of nano will unfold. The reality is that by applying fundamental rules of physics and chemistry, one can quickly dismiss the dream-land nanotechnology scenarious proposed by people such as Drexler, Joy, and Crichton, as the stuff that fairytales are made of. Kudos to Freeman Dyson!
Vernor Vinge had a really interesting take on nanomenaces in "A Fire Upon the Deep" - he talked about whole worlds awash in the sludge of nanodevices that had gone out of control and eaten everything.
Also had a lot to say about what he called "locators" - which now is called Smart Dust by the military which is investing lots of money into it - microscopic sensors that form ad-hoc networks and can provide video, audio, etc. He predicted that this was one of the most dangerous possible technologies for a civilization to develop because it allowed total government surveillance, which, because it is so easily abused, is radically destablizing and would send any civilization back into the stone age within a couple centuries.
This is plagiarized from an Amazon.com member review to get karma points - scroll down to the 6th review on that page - I think the comment should be moderated redundant
The narrative in Prey is boring and childish. Crichton shows no more command of English expression than your average freshman composition class. Events in the book which deserve some fear and some dread are treated without any emotion at all. Doesn't a descent into the subterranean world of a pulsing, mechanical evil demand some exposition? Crichton doesn't think so, and dismisses this climactic scene in at most twenty large-type, double-spaced pages.
There is so much good literature in the world that I regret having spent even the few hours I did reading Prey. Certainly don't buy it, and if you got it as a gift, try selling it to you local used shop and picking up something worthwhile.
I saw a copy at the local bookstore, read the first few pages, and then sat down for four hours and read it from cover to cover. As a novel, it is an excellent read and the creeping horror as the father of the family (told in first person) realises something is 'not quite right' is very well delivered. Mr Crichton writes a compelling story that's hard to put down.
/. ers think I'm one of the anal types, but especially (this is not really a spoiler) the whole scene inside the cave made me frown and go "What the heck?!?" It also looks as if he was given a deadline and he had to bash out the remaining holes in the story in a very rushed epilogue.
However, it does suck on a few points:
1) It's written like a movie script. There's one part where the characters rush into a supply shed past a large case of dynamite, then scenes later where the sprinkler system is mentioned again, and again. Gosh, those props are not going to be used later in the book, are they?
2) The last third is just plain silly. I don't care if other
3) Crichton has done the whole "Scientists not understanding the powers they meddle with" thing before. Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, Timeline... on the other hand, this has made him a very rich man. More power to him. And I'll probably give the movie a look when (not if) it comes out.
Go read it for the human elements, and don't look at the nanotechnology too closely.
Dr Fish
In his preview of the book Freeman J. Dyson points out the bad science, e.g. limitation of nanobots' speed due to the viscous forces.
There are however, numerous other limitations if "the camera is smaller than a red blood cell". Normal human erythrocyte is 6 - 8 um in diameter, about ten wavelengths of the visible light. Even if this is a diameter of the camera lens only, the camera would have a very poor resolution due to the diffraction limit. Such camera would also suffer from the poor light sensitivity and bad S/N ratio.
Even with the current incredible rate of nano-technology development some things will not be possible ever. Do not expect microscopic spying bugs anytime soon.
I am not trashing the novel, merely trying to point out some facts about nano-technology since it provokes some people to be paranoid.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
Forget all the tech arguments(it's *fiction*, folks) this guy has some serious issues - he seems incapable of writing realistic female characters. Jurassic Park - the little girl was constantly whining and crying - at least Spielberg gave her some intelligence("Hey - this is Unix! I know this! :) ). Andromeda Strain- I only recall some nurses. Now, in Prey, the hero's wife goes to the dark side and conjures up some Clones(see: Attack of).
Mebbe Mr. Critchton should go for a little sensitivity training?
Dyson rocks, though.
DT
For you readers, this is a great 2-3 day quick read. Ignoring the science holes, it is a very enjoyable page turner.
SPOILERS BELOW!!!! PLEASE LOOK AWAY!
I was very frustrated by the fact that a virus that had been nibbling on the vat of e-coli would cause the swarms to scream and melt. I was expecting glitches and slow deterioriation and heart pounding suspense while the reader is unsure if the virus is even working. Instead, we get instant gratification. And then an explosion and super heated destruction just to make sure everything is good and wiped out.
So that sucked.
Then, why did the children just allow themselves to be given the virus and not fight back. If there were already three swarms working, why were they not already setting up a nest?
And the glow in the back yard seemed like Crichton was setting up for a sequal or something and then decided not to.
Over all, one of the best page turning and late night reading books I have enjoyed lately. Even if the science was rough, over all a very well written book.
It's claiming to be SCIENCE fiction, in which case the science must be correct. Or able to be reasonably extrapolated from what we currently know.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
The point is that in Science Fiction, if you are straying from current scientific "truths" (regardless of the fact that truth is a function of time), that you have to provide an explanation why. Else it's not science fiction.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
Papyrus was just trying to be helpful - that didn't warrant a -1 Offtopic.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
Crichton seems to be a reasonable writer. I say this in the sense that his style is readable and engaging. The topics are rarely boring. The characters seem to be plausible.
The problem is that he gets details in science often wildly wrong. Almost all the geneticists I spoke to flinch at _Jurassic Park_. The supercomputer people I work with smirk about his treatment of our field. The situation is not unlike how the military people and defense contractor engineers read Clancy: it's a good read, but don't expect anything like reality from it. (re my own experiences having worked @ one of the laser test ranges in NM and comparing it to _Cardinal of the Kremlin_ or the reactions from engineers to people that cite Clancy on sci.military.naval or rec.aviation.military).
The good question is...is this a service he's doing for us, the scientists and engineers? Or is it a massive disservice? The weighing that needs to be done is whether or not the service of bringing up the fact that people need to pay attention to new technologies and their implications vs the really bad extrapolations and wrong impressions the guy gives people about what we are able to do or even how the stuff works at all...
People will react with "This is only fiction..." but then most people don't often read about the real science and get caught up, do they? They find it dull and, thus, get their impressions from these works...
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
I've never really understood the title of Joy's essay, "Why the future doesn't need us", and likewise for Dyson's rejoinder. Joy mostly wrote about how we could wipe ourselves out through technology. Of course this has been a concern for decades. But nobody before expressed it as whether or not the future "needed" us. It was rather a question of whether we would be around!
Why did Joy adopt this curious phraseology? What does it mean for the future to need us? How can the future have needs at all? It's like saying that Left needs us, or Up doesn't need us. I've never understood it.
Like any other sane person, it is the yoctobots that I fear. Devices so small they can masquerade as a hydrogen atom to escape notice. They would float around on superstring loops, adjusting quantum spins on our very molecules!
What happens, when a swarm of these things invades your brain, and suddenly changes some unobserved quantum value to another unobserved quantum value? Your entire SOUL could change, and there is nothing you could do about it!!! Even if neurological science progesses to a fantastic level, upon examination, no one could conclude that your mind had been tampered with...
This is why I propose a worldwide ban, without exception, on yoctotechnology experimentation. We can't act soon enough!
Freeman Dyson postulated the idea of a Dyson Sphere, which is basically a planet that was built as a shell surrounding a sun, using all the energy it radiates.
Also mentioned in the TNG episode Relics.
"TK-421, why aren't you at your post?"
but Acts of the Apostles
by John F. X. Sundman
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Did you buy the book after the first few pages, or did you have your four hour sit-in at the bookstore?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Tacheon beams are apparently the 24th century equivelent of duct tape.
Technoli
Ok, what about that comment is "oddly prescient"? Does the submitter not understand what "prescient" means; does he not understand the comment; or (the most generous interpretation I can find) is he merely noting that Joy foresaw--not anything that has passed in reality--but further science-fiction doom-saying?
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
Blood Music, by Greg Bear: One of the original grey goo stories. The short story version is somewhat different from the novel, both fascinating. Queen of Angels and Slant deal with nano/bio modifications to people.
Deception Well by Linda Nagata (also The Bohr Maker, and Vast, the prequel and sequel -- though DW reads fine on its own). Nano-infected planet holds keys to all kinds of mysterious stuff, including how this not-quite human person is able to live among the humans.
Limit of Vision by Linda Nagata. OK, I reallyreally like her stuff. This one is closer to present-time, and doesn't quite hit the grey goo phase... but avoids it narrowly. Not her best, but still very entertaining.
Truly, NanoSF is a bit passe. Blood Music dates from '86 (according to Amazon). Current cutting-edge SF tends more towards bioengineering, plagues, eco-crashes (Dust), or truly wonky time travel (Chronoliths).
Design for Use, not Construction!
We have the means to stop this onslaught, a lovely piece of legislation called the DMCA and an army of lawyers to back it up.
Any badass nanite that tries to replicate itself will be doing so without paying the appropriate copyright fees to the original creator and will summarily get slapped with a nice lawsuit and some jailtime to cool it's heels (erm... cillia? flagella?).
Just in case that does not work, we have Senator Disney who will make sure that these abominations have DRM technology built into them from the get-go, so self-replicating nanites will come pre-spayed and neutered for our protection.
We need not even go that far. The very fact that such a beast is being created is a violation itself, since it's its own circumvention device.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
Yes, I bought the book.
Dr Fish
So huge, in fact, that I thought the TNG episode was actually pretty lame for the way it handled the sphere. I mean, given that the thing's usable surface area was 100,000 times the surface of all the planets in the Federation combined (assuming 3190 Federation worlds to round the numbers out), you could easilly devote a season or a serries to the concept (once you worked out that nasty little solar flare issue, of course). Are you listening, Rick Berman?
It also says a lot that Niven was absolutely stoked when Dyson contacted him and told him he thought Ringworld was plausible.
(Apologies for posting anonymously - I moderated a an earlier comment in this discussion)
a material doesnt "have" a reynolds number.
:-)
Not on its own, no, but the point is that for nanobots moving in air at a given speed, you can work out a Reynolds number. If it is too high, they couldn't possibly move in an organized fashion because turbulence would take over. In this manner you can get an upper bound on their possible speed.
You may be a mechanical engineer, but Freeman Dyson is one of the giants of 20th century physics. I trust his argument.
Oh, and I am a physicist, if we're going for the whole argument from authority thing.
I'm not entirely certain whether I agree or disagree...
There are a number of different styles of science fiction. We've got the kind you describe, where amazing technology exists solely because the author wants it to be there. The author wants something to happen, so he waves his hands and says 'it's all because of science.' There's no deeper meaning, and there's no attempt at any sort of realistic theory behind things. These stories are nothing but suspending disbelief and enjoying the ride.
Then there are the books that, while quite possibly written for entertainment as well, also go about playing the 'what-if' game... These are the sort of stories that, even if it isn't the main premise, wind up bringing up issues and trying to answer the question "If we had technology to do X, then what sort of things might happen to us..." These aren't trying to explain how the technology itself works, but rather how the having that technology affects people.
Finally, there are the science fiction books that actually try to propose valid explanations for what is going on...
There can be mixes amongst the categories(frequently something explains a theory and tries to analyze how it might affect people), but it's pretty easy to find examples of all these different types of books in SF... And it doesn't mean any one type is inferior to the others.
That said, while I haven't read this particular book, one of Crichton's recent books, Timeline, annoyed me with one particular trait. If it had been written as an 'enjoy the ride' style story, it would have been fine(though a little predictable, but that's a separate issue). The problem arose in that he spent large portions of the book quoting and referencing scientific papers and books on science trying desperately to justify and explain something, while he really didn't have any sort of grasp on the subject matter. Trying to pass yourself off as explaining the technology in SF, when you don't have a clue as to how the subjects your discussing work is something I find rather grating. If he'd just waved his hands and said 'and the scientists discovered time travel,' then I would have found the book significantly better...
Then again, this is just my opinion.
What makes Science Fiction such a compelling genre for the discussion of ideas (particularly important social themes) is the fact that the environment of the story is unencumbered by the limitations of human understanding.
It provides a rich framework, with enough truth, and enough speculation, so as to remain interesting to the reader, and yet allow the author to explore complex issues which may or may not be just around the corner, and these issues are the point of the story. The science itself is window dressing.
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
The "dude, it's fiction" thing only goes so far. Imagine some really stupid mistake that anyone would catch -- say, a novel set on the Atlantic coast of Kansas. Don't you think that would interfere with your suspension of disbelief, just a little? For people with any significant degree of scientific knowledge, dumb science mistakes are just as jarring.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Who passed that law. Why wasn't I informed.
Freeman Dyson is a very smart guy with a lot of good, difficult and original work under his belt as well as the ability to write for the general public. Dawkins is just a tactless popularizer of other people's theories.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
In 'Prey' the nanobots themselves run amok, but in 'The 8th Day' by John Case, the Gray Goo is itself the weapon when in the control of someone intent on Earth's annhilation.
It too was a great read, very hard to put down, but wasn't as much about the technology as 'Prey' was. Just two of Michael Crichton's earlier works, 'Andromeda Strain' (published in 1969, about the gov't accidentally releasing pathogens they were going to use in biological weapons) and 'Jurassic Park' (published in 1990, about taking the genetic material of petrified dinosaur blood to recreate them in modern day), seemed like the furthest stretches of reality. Yet as we now know, Mr. Crichton wasn't too far off the mark, that some of his imaginings DO become real to some extent. Let's hope that Mr. Crichton and Mr. Case's imaginings for nanotech are more benign in reality!
I don't know if anyone else had come up with a similar law before I thought of it a number of years ago (thanks mostly to the brilliant work of none other than Ivan Stang), so I'll put a flag in it right now and call it Wee's Law of Tinfoil Hats.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
The very fact that such a beast is being created is a violation itself, since it's its own circumvention device.
Not only did the slashdot poster use both "its" and "it's" correctly, but (s)he did so adjacently!
I do believe that this is a slashdot first, folks. Any other poster would have confused possessive pronouns with contractions. The only possible explanation is that rworne is not a real slashdot poster, but rather a sentient nanite himself!
You have no idea who Freeman Dyson is do you?
Suffice it to say that if anyone knows the limitations of science and technology I'll take Freeman Dyson's word for it over yours or Bill Joy's, although I'd still listen to Bill Joy because he's at least interesting and thought provoking.
You on the other hand think that the "laws of physics" are made to always be broken and that scientists really have no clue.
Just to let you know, neither of the two situations you site were "unpredicted" by scientists or the science of the time.
Sure information wants to be free, but how much are you willing to pay for the packaging?
This fear-mongering of science has to stop. They keep talking about the potential for this and that.
Politcal THEORY has killed millions of people in the last century. Hitler, Stalin, Mao and many, many others directly caused the deaths of millions of people, based on their politcal theories.
Why not shut down the political science depts at universities? Political theory has been PROVEN to be far more dangerous than science.
I'm going to protest outside the poli sci dept. Who's with me?
"Some science fiction writers have wrongly given me the credit for inventing the idea of an artificial biosphere. In fact, I took the idea from Olaf Stapledon, one of their own colleagues:
"This passage I found in a tattered copy of Stapledon's Star Maker which I picked up in Paddington Station in London in 1945."
If you're one of those that reads comments before following the link, be aware that Dyson's review basically enscapsulates the entire book, and gives away the end. If you want to read the book without spoilers, it might be best to read the review later.
It doesn't matter to me - I gave up on Crichton after "Timeline" ( :: shudder :: ) but I wouldn't want to spoil the potential enjoyment of others.
That's what science fiction is. Move beyond that and it's fantasy, regardless of whether or not there are dragon's and wizards.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
I realy don't know how else to put this.
But FUCK YES!
Accusing Dyson of not having a imagination is like saying water can't be wet.
Freeman Dyson is one of the smartest people alive. Don't allways agree with him, (in this case I do). :>
Only other person with that range of insight is Roger Penrose. I don't always agree with Roger either.
Hmm come to think of it Penrose pisses me off somtimes but he allways makes me think.
"think of it as evolution in action"
Well, yeah, I agree. I was thinking more along the lines of nano than dinosaurs.
The difference between statements made in history limiting man's abilities and those made by Dyson in the book review are that Dyson's are based on absolute physical law. Previous assertions such as man never being able to fly faster than the speed of sound had nothing to do with physical laws so much as underestimating mankind's engineering ability.
Even when curmudgeons were declaring that a craft heavier than air would never get off the ground you only had to look in the sky every time a bird, or an insect or a piece of paper flew by to know that it had to be possible. We knew back before the days of the Chuck Yeager and the Bell X-1 that objects could break the sound barrier. Bullets did it all the time and it was just a matter of engineering to get past the hurdle.
OTOH, the increasing effect of viscosity on smaller objects in a fluid media is a known physical law. More energy might mean faster movement but that leads us to the problems of the amount of the maximum amount of energy contained in sunlight. Like Dyson stated, the energy is just not there - there's no engineering problem to solve. It would be like trying to get 5 gallons of gasoline out of a 1 gallon container.
That is what annoys me about arguments such as yours. They don't take into account what we know about the physical universe versus what people in the past thought they knew about man's engineering limitations.
Freeman Dyson is a well-known physicist. You can no doubt find many reviews of Prey that focus exclusively on its merits as a work of literature. Personally, however, if I were to read a book review by Freeman Dyson, well-known physicist, I would hope that he would inject some of his professional expertise into the review. He's a physicist- if I wanted a discussion of its prose, I would find a review from a professional in that area. I don't think the purpose of a book review is just to mention the key elements of the plot and how much the reviewer liked it or disliked it- a third grader can do that.
This book wasn't written in a vacuum (well, probably not). It's supposed to be creative fiction, yes, but it's also a classic Michael Crichton cautionary tale of "TECHNOLOGY GONE HORRIBLY WRONG!!" Remember when Jurassic Park came out, and news organizations had scientist-type persons assessing the likelihood that humans could genetically engineer dinosaurs? This is the same sort of thing. Professor Dyson is the scientist-type person, and the question posed is whether nanotech von Neumann machines could destroy the human race. He provides reasons why the scenario presented in the novel is not completely realistic, but I think that Dyson's review of the science and his review of the fiction are independent of each other. I haven't read Prey yet, but I have read nearly everything else by Crichton, and I've enjoyed most of them. I think a key factor in my enjoyment of many of them has been their sheer plausibility, and the way Crichton combines emerging technologies and scientific discoveries in unusual ways to produce a highly original story, like the combination of chaos theory and genetics in Jurassic Park. His works are generally rather heavy in the science component of science fiction- they're all set in the present or near future, take place on Earth, etc. I hardly think an examination of the science involved is unfair.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
all these technical advances taken together have created world in which the average man's fate is no longer in his own hands or in the hands of his neighbors and friends
But the technical advances to blame are agriculture and irrigation, not telephones and indoor plumbing. Does the word "serf" ring any bells? The average man's fate hasn't been in his own hands since hunter-gatherer times.
I don't know that much about fighter planes or warships, but I think I know a little about computers, and Tom Clancy gets the computer stuff wrong a fair proportion of the time. Hence, it's reasonable to assume that he gets the rest of the engineering in his books wrong.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Hey, your law works for software licenses too! :-)
Not sure that too many people really believed that scientists could soon have dinosaurs rampaging through their back yard.
I think you've hit on an important point here: there's no reason to believe that anyone will take "Prey" any more seriously than they did Jurassic Park. In that sense, I think Dyson's entire piece is misguided. If he wants to argue with Bill Joy, he should do so directly, rather than dragging a piece of unrealistic irrelevant pulp fiction into it.
Dyson's comparison to "On the Beach" doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The consequences of a major nuclear war would not be very different, in the most important respects, from that described in On the Beach - i.e. unthinkable numbers of people would die, and life on Earth would barely be worth living. The situation with nanotech is nowhere near so clear.
Dyson claims he's trying to combat myths that might enter the public consciousness as a result of "Prey", but it's not clear that the public is going to be any more worried about the realistic consequences of nanotech, than it is about scientists cloning killer dinosaurs.
Heh, Crichton has never been one to let facts get in the way of his story. Look at "Eaters of the Dead." To give his yarn an air of authenticity, he added footnotes and a bibliography. Many of those footnotes and bibliographical references are themselves pure fiction.
What is this tacheon beam you all speak of?
My tachyon beam and I feel left out now.
You zap the moderators with a wand of humor! The moderators resist!
Am I the only one who, having read the title, was expecting something about the latest innovation in vacuum cleaners?
Quoting 2 passages from the article:
Relinquish pursuit of that knowledge and development of those technologies so dangerous that we judge it better that they never be available.
As we now know, the Soviet Union violated the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972 on an extensive scale... until its collapse in 1991.
If the "we" in the first passage were "we, the world" then we could decide which technologies are too dangerous to pursue. Unfortunately the real world is made up of a collection of we's and they's, acting independently and at their own levels of wisdom. Any we that decides not to pursue a technology has no guarantee that they will do likewise. The fate of the world will rest, as usual, on the wisdom of whoever ends up dominating it.
Wow! what a fantastic story line. If you don't want it, can I have it?
-c
"If you are an idealist it doesn't matter what you do or what goes on around you, because it isn't real anyway."-R.P.W.
Heh. Go for it. Just take a careful look at the topo maps first, okay? ;)
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
without contradicting the laws of physics. Think of the nanobots as held so close together that they behave like the cells of a large insect. The physics of the whole swarm is like that of a single insect flying through the air.
Only the surface of the outermost layer of nanobots will be exposed to the sorrounding air and its viscous drag.
Dyson's argument assumes that the bots are far enough apart so that each bot has its entire surface exposed to the sorrounding medium.
Umm...I think he has a life. A quite distinguished one at that.
Four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit down and keep still. -C. Coolidge
Well, using ALL CAPS to track crackpots is an old, old idea, it's even part of the canonical crackpot index!
Terry
Actually the thing that bothers me about Crichton is that so many of his books follow the same predictable science-out-of-control-creates-a-monster formula, starting with Andromeda Strain and continuing with just about everyting else thereafter. The only difference is that this is a nanobot and not a bacteria from outerspace or dinosaur dna or genetically engineered chimps or....
I was not agreeing just because it was Dyson, but because I though Dysons comments where more insightful and credible. Now I allmost always think "Crichton" ideas suck. He allways takes the same themes, and bends them to some easy for the masses Luddite agenda. Personaly I think the "get a fucking life" comment is cheap, easy, and to be honest kinda sophmoric. Not what I would call insightful.
"think of it as evolution in action"
The viscous drag of air or water becomes stronger as the creature becomes smaller.
I believe this is backwards. On a long thin object such as a micro-organism, the drag is proportional to (length)*(velocity), assuming that the object is small enough so that we are in a low-Reynolds number regime. This holds even in water, and very possibly air too, both of which are typically associated with high-Reynolds fluid flow.
In any case, I suspect that a swarm behaves differently than an individual element. Does anyone know about the dynamics of swarms (birds, fish, microorganisms)?
I think you're right. A a matter of fact, I think I can prove it.
Yep. I[ve proven that you are correct. Trouble is that Slashdot won't let me post my proof here, so I put it on my site.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Now, the other objections are probably more reasonable, but this one has problems, and doesn't really seem like a valid criticism to me.
Uh, you're confused.
Reynolds' number is proportional to the pressure stresses (forces per unit area) acting on a body divided by the viscous stresses.
Reynolds' number increases with object size and speed. Meaning, a 747's wing (long chord: call it 40 feet) operating at cruise has a Reynolds number of 10,000,000 or so, because the viscous forces are almost totally irrelevant compared to the pressure forces. Bumblebees have a wing chord of a couple millimeters, and operate at slow speeds, so the ratio of pressure forces to viscous forces is a lot smaller. That's why aerodynamic models that work really good for large flying objects totally fail to explain what's going on with bumblebees: Many aerodynamic calculations discard viscous forces as negligible because they're orders of magnitude smaller than pressure forces.
You can predict the transition from laminar to turbulent flow based on a Reynolds' number, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you couldn't have controlled flight. Bumblebees get blown around by air currents, but they still get to where they're going. If your system reacts fast (and if it's small, it can) I can imagine controlled flight even in turbulent low-Reynolds' number flows. How fast? Well, Dyson says not very, and he's awful smart, but I'd want to see more of his reasoning in order to agree with his number of millimeters/second.
On the other hand, Crichton explains that the things fly by "climbing" air molecules. He just made that shit up.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Dyson sets up Joy's argument as a strawman, and then knocks it down in a manner that *still* isn't entirely convincing. It's a shame, as I would love to hear a well-considered reply to a generous reading of Joy.
The key thesis of Joy's thinking on technology is that *there are some technologies that aren't worth pursuing.* This suggestion is anethema to that class of technolophiles that insists that all technology is neutral, and it is only the individual uses of technology that can be called good or bad. Those who hold this position tend to believe that the pursuit of more powerful technology is basically a moral imperative, because it gives us more options, and more control of our lives. In my experience, this is the position natrually held by most scientists and engineers.
One problem with the belief that technology is value neutral is that the believers should be able to articulate a convincing argument for why we *shouldn't* have abandoned biological weapons research, or why, to use another example from Dyson's article, the international biological community shouldn't have voluntarily forbidden certain gene-splicing experiments. After all, these are merely researches into technology--and all such research gives us more options, and more control over our lives.
But this is a hard case to make. Most of us are glad that the US hasn't agressively pursued bioweapons for the last 30 years. Dyson conveniently avoids having to argue this case by saying: look how fantastic it is that these people censored themselves, and look at how bad Bill Joy is for wanting someone else to cesnor them. But, (at least as far as I understand him) Joy isn't advocating the interference of the UN in the affairs of scientists--he's calling on scientists to think about the likely effects of their research before they engage in it.
The upshot of the Dyson piece is that there are technologies that shouldn't be pursued. Joy agrees. Dyson creates a debate by putting fascist words into Joy's mouth--which makes him easier to argue against.
What's good for the syndicate is good for the country. --Milo Minderbinder
That's the whole point, isn't it?
... it could never work, but let us assume that it does, what would its operating parameters be? How would you use it? What would its failings and flaws be?
The best Sci-Fi takes an absurd premise and says, 'well -- assume that Kansas has an Atlantic Seafront. How did it get that way and what are the ramifications?' You would probably come up with a quite interesting story to explain why the Eastern half of the USA is missing and what results from this.
Check out the David Brin novel The Practice Effect. In it he takes the laws of Thermodynamics and says 'what if...', in this case what if things got better with use? (ie., reversed entropy.) The mechanics of how it works are sketchy at the best of times (and amount to a hand-wave), but that is irrelevant because the story serves as a gedankenexperiment (sp?). The more outlandish the premises the better the explanation has to be, and (hopefully) the better the story.
Hey, even the Lensman series by E.E. Doc. Smith make good stories, even if they are boy's own tales of superhumanly competent demi-gods. And the Inertialess Drive
"This is a Hollywood movie: when it comes to the Laws of Physics, they're lucky if they get Gravity!" --- my wife
While Mr. Dyson is quite right in this observation, it seem almost absurd that he didn't see it fit to mention that post-Nixon USA also resumed research and large-scale production of biological weapons. For example, all evidence indicates that the "weapons-grade" anthrax sent through US mail was a strain developed by US weapons labs. What that anthrax scare revealed is just how many US military labs are working on the further weaponization of anthrax and other, more deadly biological agents.
Yes, the drag decreases with size, but the drag per unit cross-sectional area increases as size decrease. Let's work an estimation.
At such small size, the drag force on a particle is approximated by what is known as Stokes' drag, which you can look up in any undergrad book on fluid mechanics. Stokes drag for a small sphere is
F = 6 * pi * dynamic viscosity * radius * velocity = 6 * PI * DV * R * V
For other shape, the difference is not great, definitely within an order of m agnitude. So, yes, as the radius R gets smaller, the drag force decrease. howe ver, the pressure increases:
P = drag force / area = F / A
For a sphere, the cross sectional area is:
A = PI * R^2
So, combining the equation:
P = F / A = 6 * DV * V / R
Now, the radius (size) is the denominator (bottom)! So, as R gets smaller, p ressure P increases! A particle ten times as small needs to preduce ten times as much pressure to stay at the same velocity! This is considering size in terms of linear scale. Real objects are 3D, so if it is 10 times smaller in 1 length scale, then it is 1000 times smaller in volume. Assuming constant density, when you shrink a nanobot by 10 times linearly, you have to produce 1000*10 times more pressure per unit mass of nanobot to fly at the same velocity!!!!
I worked out a rough estimate of a red blood cell size particle at standard atmospheric conditions:
R = 0.5 * 10^(-5) m
V = 5 m/s (almost a sprint)
DV = 2 * 10^(-5) Newton * s/m^2
You get a pressure of 120 Newton/m^2 !!! What does this mean? This mean that a single layer of nanobots, lining the bottom of a 12kg piece of wood that is 1m by 1m, and levitating it! Now, go to K-Mart and buy a fan that can produce that much force
Cheers,
e.
Crichton shows no more command of English expression than your average freshman composition class.
I think your average Slashdotter would be more appropriate.
Timeline was *way* offbeat. If you are able to enter only parallel Universes, then the actions in those Universes should not affect this Universe.
However, things left in a parallel Universe (glasses) find their way to this Universe, and so on.
If you're saying something like a Multiverse, atleast make sure that you're consistent with what you claim. He himself sounded confused as to where the hell things are supposed to be.
And oh yes, that negative portrayal. The most brilliant physicist gets the boot, lands up in an era where he is subjected to the bubonic plague (or whatever crap it is) and dies. And all the good arts majors and non-techies lived happily ever after.
Duh.
... look at Heinlein. The man was incapable of writing a female character who wasn't either a total slut, or a super-capable total slut. Yet he seemed rather prudish in real life - I dimly remember reading part of his (posthumously) published letters where he's bemoaning the sexual deviance of "young people" who engage in "soixante-neuf and all sort of other perversions". This from the man who wrote "Friday" and "Stranger in a Strange Land"...
Freedom: "I won't!"
Actually the largest fearmongers are commercial advertisers. Advertisements almost never target rationality, facts, or logic. Instead they nearly always appeal to base emotions, especially fear. so while you forbrain is hearing the message, "healthy|safer|attractive", your hindbrain is hearing "fear|fear|fear".
One person becoming mildly anxious, neurotic, or agressive because of overstimulation of the biological response to fear is no big deal. It takes on more significance in proportion to the size of the population affected.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
"The message is that biotechnology in the twenty-first century is as dangerous as nuclear technology in the twentieth. The dangers do not lie in any particular gadgets such as nanorobots or autonomous agents. The dangers arise from knowledge, from our inexorably growing understanding of the basic processes of life. The message is that biological knowledge irresponsibly applied means death. And we may hope that the world will listen. "
Dyson takes the message seriously enough to think that it should, in fact, be heeded not dismissed.
"in the end the technical details do not matter."
So all the nerdly debate about flying nanobots is irrelevant.
"I assume that the growth of biological knowledge during the century now beginning will bring grave dangers to human society and to the ecology of our planet. "
In other words, he does not dispute the basic Joy/Crichton thesis, nor does he pretend that the technical errors in the book matter. If you are following Dyson's argument, then, that is the starting point - *yes* biotechnology is dangerous, and *no* technical quibbles with the book do not matter.
Dyson attempts to counter Crichton's position through analogy to the printing press. Ideas can inspire wars, and the government of Milton's time feared the danger of unfettered ideas among the masses. Milton argued eloquently for press freedom, and, in hindsight, few would dispute that he was right.
The analogy, however, is very weak. The counter to bad ideas is better ideas. Indeed, this is one of the classic arguments for freedom of speech and the press: to prevent the suppression of good ideas along with the bad. There is an assumption that in the long run the ideas that better suit human needs will triumph.
In a Darwinian contest for survival there is no reason to believe that the nanobots that better suit human needs will triumph. Rather it is those that better suit their own needs. A symbiotic relationship with humans is, of course, a valid survival strategy, but hardly the only one and probably not the easiest to achieve.
Conclusion: Joy's point stands; Dyson's does not.
. . . sentient nanite himself!
You know, back when I made nanites, I told them to--
Aw, forget it. This joke is played out.
Not that I'm an expert, but it's intuitive that it's much harder to push atoms around than it is to drill, mill or etch things. This is also why, as you say, you're not really talking about solid mechanics anymore, but more chemistry or biology.
I stopped reading Crichton because he stopped writing novels and started writing padded screenplays. There's rarely anything written about the internal aspects of the characters, it's all in the dialog. The setting and action sequences are spelled out in great details. And it's clear what parts are padding that's meant to be removed when cutting the story down to movie length. I wouldn't be surprised if he wrote the screenplay first then wrote the novellization.
Okay, you could argue that this was always the case, but it's gotten worse and worse with each book.
Set the "time" aspect of your tachyon generator to "eon". Military generators have it; you probably are only familiar with the household generators (maximum time aspect of "tacham", only useful to make butter for your toast as soft as if it has been on the table all morning) or commercial generators (maximum setting of "tachmillenium", used for updating all poorly-maintained equipment).
Firstly, there would be no gravity inside the sphere unless it was spinning, and then only on a ring.
If it were spinning, it would flatten out from centrifugal force.
Eat at Joe's.
You'd think a medical doctor would now more about the physics od cell sized things than that...
Eat at Joe's.
It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken.
Eat at Joe's.
Thank you, thinking in terms of pressure helped.
Too true...but remember it's SCIENCE fiction...which stems from a tradition where although it might be fiction, the science is accurate, or at the very least a believable extrapolation of known facts. Anything else is just pulp-science fiction.
/not/ a porn site!).
If you look at the old masters (Asimov is a prime example) you'll notice that these people actually knew something about what they were writing. If not from their own PhD's, then because of their research. Now, it's just hacks who get their idea's from spurious internet pages like the crap sciencebox.dk instead of xxx.lanl.gov (no, that is
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Biological cells generally can't change their function unless they are of a special class of stem cells, but highly differentiated cells cannot. They can generally still divide to make more differentiated cells of the same type.
Maybe I will hunt for the math stuff for the scale factors, but none of this is really an argument that the SF scenarios cannot happen, just that the author got the "how" part wrong. Personally, I like SF where the plausibility factor is really high and nothing stands out as improbable for logical reasons.
Think of it in terms of the worries over creating the first atomic fission reactor. Probably, most of the scientists involved had a pretty good idea that fission couldn't be sustained in the more stable matter outside the core of the experiment, but were they able to do a mathematical analysis that proved it was "safe"? At the time, it took whole rooms full of human computers to do even the most basic calculations about the expirements. I'm sure they did some calculations related to stability and extent of any possible chain reaction, but they didn't know enough or have enough computing power to answer all the critical questions with certainty.
My gut feeling from what I know about systems tells me not to worry too much about the grey goo scenarios and other run-away nano-tech predictions. In reality, the questions raised by nano-tech are not that different than the ones we can already see on the horizon. Fundamentally, we need to advance our social and ethical frameworks much more quickly to handle the rapid changes in science and technology. Bottom line is that we all share this world, and if some or a lot of people are left out the odds for something bad happening increases. It is much more likely that technology will go badly wrong because a group of disenfranchised malcontents will intentionally start something than that a herd of wild nanites will escape the lab and unintentionally trash the world. I guess I'm basically saying that the really important and difficult questions are social, not technical. Tech just makes it more critical that we solve the problems, and hopefully gives us some good tools if we use them for good.