Slashdot Mirror
Top Physicist Advocates Scientific Self-Censorship
spamania writes "The San Francisco Chronicle is running this article about a new book by Britain's astronomer royal, Sir Martin Rees, that advocates restricting scientific research in certain fields in the interest of public safety. In "Our Final Hour", Rees lends a sober, respectable voice to the oft-irrational ranting about nanotech, biotech, and other fields."
If research is truly dangerous then classify it. But not to research it only leaves you behind when other nations research it.
Shh.
technology has potential to annihilate
...as well as the potential to protect us from annihilation.
What about intellectual curiosity?
What to do with censoring information? Not telling somebody something is not the same as preventing them from hearing it.
I can see it now: "If nanotechnology is outlawed, only outlaws will have nanotechnology!"
Facetious, but nevertheless relevant.
Look what the stupid animals of this planet do when they get they're hands on technology. All this knowledge, and all they can do is wonder how it can be applied to maiming, killing, controlling, etc.
Makes you want to go into something else.
just because you can, doesn't mean you should?
I thought we already covered all of this a long, long time ago.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Not all scientists will self-censor, nor are all scientists working toward the greater good. Sometimes it's not their choice (see: Germany, 1940, and Iraq, 1988) to censor themselves.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Does that apply to Windows exploits as well?
Seems to me if you restrict research, not everybody will comply. This will lead to someone other than ourselves having a headstart on the research. The research will be done by SOMEONE so it might as well be us.
IMO, the main problem with suggesting this sort of restriction is, who restricts? The same research might be considered dangerous to some people and necessary by others. The same apply to "moral", of course. In the end, it's all in the hands of humans. To decide which areas should be restricted, or to use science for evil, or to do evil while doing science etc.
The usual over-sensationalistic /. headline is, as usual, over-sensationalistic. This is not censorship, but self-control and self-direction. It's not about not publishing things which exist and have been researched (that would be censorship), but about deliberately avoiding avenues of research which are too dangerous given our current rather low level of social evolution.
However, it's very hard to decide which avenues of research should be avoided. Biotechnology, Nanotechnology and all that promise great benefits, potentially helping us progress socially much faster (eliminating hunger and disease wouldn't do us much harm socially, would it?). The only ones that should clearly be avoided are clear-cut cases like nerve agents, genetic creation of deadly diseases, and all that. Otherwise, it makes little sense to restrain research in other directions...
Daniel
Carpe Diem
This makes an interesting counterpoint to an article from last week about an editorial by Sheldon Pacotti, one of the designers of Deus Ex. Rees seems to think self-censorship is the best defense, while Pacotti thinks it's best to spread the knowledge far and wide, so that everybody has the information necessary to devise defenses against technological threats.
TheFrood
If you say "I'll probably get modded down for this..." then I will mod you down.
I have never understood "banning" certain types of research. What do we hope to accomplish?
Information longs to be free, and technology inherently desires improvement. If we don't allow certain scientific research, then this research will simply move to other countries, and the United States and its citizens will lose the opportunity to shape the methodoligies and goals of this research.
Perhaps a self-censorship system moderated by an international panel would work nicely, but it is utter foolishness (IMO) to let public opinion blindly dictate the direction of science. Enhancing the lives of the common citizen should always be the primary goal of science (IMO), but that doesn't mean that the public always/ever knows what is best.
I guess this is a step in the right direction. Have the most skilled in those fields moderate themselves. Sure, but I cringe whenever I see the words "censor" and "science" together in a sentence.
...we would still be living in caves. Seriously, because some things may lead to something which could be warped to 'bad' uses, we should halt the progress of science?
Knowledge on it's own can not be defined as 'good' or 'bad' - it just is. It is what we use the knowledge for that can be judged on a moral level. And what some people consider to be a 'good' use, other people may see as 'bad' or even 'evil' use of the knowledge.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
People like Einstein dedicated their entire lives to find truth. Find, "The answer". So what's the matter? Can't handle the truth?
There shouldn't be any kind of censorship in this quest for knowledge, and this need to understand. I know I'm sounding like I've mixed philosophy with science, but lets not forget that science is an offshoot of philosophy.
So, just becasue some knowledge may potentially be dangerous, doesn't mean its knowledge we shouldn't pursue. That's like saying "you shouldn't learn how to use a gun, just because you might use a gun to kill someone!"
- Tempestdata
This sounds like the beginnings of the CoDominium.
Yes, some research leads to Bad Things(tm), but in the greater picture, research is a Good Thing(tm).
Information and research should be freely available to anyone. That is how greater discoveries are made (Warp Drive anyone?).
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
Maybe it wouldn't matter much if countries got just got together to protect one another and create technologies for better living rather than technology for blowing stuff up.
Looks like it's time to invest in Old Glory Robot Insurance
http://www.robotcombat.com/video_oldglory_hi.html
"No decision to go ahead with an experiment... should be made unless the general public is satisfied..." An interesting question is not simply the scientific realities of dooms-day science but the implied obligation of all people to the worldwide community. It seems as the years pass we get closer to having a serious discussion, as citizens of our individual nations, as to whether our responsibilities lie with our own flag or a "global" identity.
addressing the grievances that might cause a certain group to use technology to do harm? Or am I supposed to believe that we are the only rational ones and the rest of the world is full of savages that need to be tamed? Our viewpoint of other countries sounds alot like present day colonialism if you ask me.
Here's some food for thought. If we don't address these grievances, then how can Rees so arrogantly believe that his book is going to make a bit of difference? Does he think that they are incapable of research? Does he think that they are going to say," Gee, Rees wrote a book, maybe we shouldn't use this technology or do our own research." It might slow terrorism down, but it's a stupid price to pay. It will only delay the inevitable UNLESS we address the problems rather than dropping bombs. The only thing that his proposal might do is further along the police state mentality that seems to be moving along quite well here in the US. He certainly won't stop terrorism.
Why not just outlaw reading? Make it punishable with a death penalty.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
As a case study of such "extreme risks," Rees cites a controversial project that began in 2000 at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. Physicists there have used a particle accelerator to try to create a "quark- gluon plasma," a soup of extremely hot, dense subatomic particles that mimic conditions of the "Big Bang" that spawned our cosmos 13.7 billion years ago. Critics speculated that this high concentration of energy might have one of three undesirable results: -- It could form a black hole -- an object with such immense gravitational pull that nothing could escape, not even light -- which would "suck in everything around it."
So, can we now find it plausible that some black holes could be the catastrophic by-product/warning sign of other somewhat-intelligent civilizations from "out there"?
If you don't research these technologies the enemy will, and when they attack you with it, you won't have any idea how to defend yourself.
If you understand the technology, you know its weaknesses so you can build a defense.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Only outlaws will have science. By restricting access to certain types of research, we limit knowledge in those fields, making it more likely that we will not be able to discover antidotes to technological mishaps. Will it reduce the chance of those mishaps? I doubt it. If the process of scientific discovery was exact and well known, perhaps, but simply limiting information won't stop progress. Who knows where crucial breakthroughs in, say, nanotechnology will come from? If we limit access to scientific knowledge off all fields that might lead to the development of "grey goo" we will stagnate, and won't garauntee that "grey goo" won't get made. All we will garauntee is that we won't know how to fight it if it does get made.
Maybe if we did away with the massive iniequalities that fuel destructive behavior we won't need to limit access to knowledge, because no one will have any reason to destroy. There may still be accidents, but limiting access to information because of possible accidents is like the proverbial ostrich sticking its head in the sand to escape detection. Just because the ostrich doesn't see the lion sneaking up on him doesn't mean he isn't about to become lunch.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I am really getting frustrated by the amount of traction the whole "grey goo" meme is getting.
Sure, it's possible that when nanotechnology gets going, that somehow a nanomachine that can convert just about any material to energy and raw materials to copy itself could be accidentally created. It could then convert the entire Earth and everything on it to copies of itself. It's POSSIBLE.
But then again, it's also possible that some species of bacteria could mutate and start doing the same things. And it's probably not any less likely than a nanomachine doing it.
A machine that could convert just about anything on the planet into useful materials, and duplicate itself endlessly, would probably be difficult to make INTENTIONALLY, let alone accidentally. It would also be extremely easy to insert safeguards to prevent anything like that from happening. Either require the presence of a particular molecule for the machines to duplicate themselves. Add replication limits to the nanomachines. Never include self-replication in the same nanomachine as one that can break down most/all things into raw materials.
Unless nanoengineers are incredibly sloppy, maliciously so, then it's not going to happen by accident.
INTENTIONAL creation of such machines is an issue of higher importance. And the type of people who would make such nanomachines are not the type who are going to listen to people saying "we can't research/develop this technology, it might be dangerous". Would a law against using aircraft for suicidal terrorism have stopped Al Queda from taking down the WTC? Nope.
The best chance at preventing/defending against such actions is to develop the technology and focus some research on using it to prevent such uses. Not saying "stop all research!"
Now, I would be enormously in favor of a global treaty banning research into nanotechnological weapons. The thought of militaries working with such technologies does scare me.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
So, what he's saying is, "We could find lots of horrible and dangerous things if we keep researching in this direction, so we shouldn't do it."
What that actually means is, "Since we actually have the kind of restriant not to use this stuff, let's let someone with less restraint come up with it first."
When Einstein gave the US his aid in building an atomic weapon he did it on the principle that someone would discover it, and that it was MUCH better that it be us, than the Nazis. It's much better that we know, and can prepare, than it is for us to be caught flat footed by something so awful we didn't even let ourselves think about it.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
my problem with the point of view being taken by this prominent scientist is that he views all scientific propositions as risky, and there should be some generally agreed upon allowable risk threshold that any experiment should be considered against before it is carried out. The unfortunate thing about this point of view is that it doesn't take into account the potential benefits that could come out of it. Nano-bots destroying cencerous cells would truely make the fact that we live longer and longer much more worthwhile, if those extra years are cancer free, in my opinion. It is probably more worthwhile than creating blckholes on earth, even though the risks might be somewhere in the same range of dangerousness.
my second point, the nihilist one, is in regards to the 'gray goo' that nanotech could turn the planet into. could I stipulate that some sort of evolution could continue, but instead of carbon based cellular processes being the basis, the nanobots would be instead. just a thought.
-- Space itself, an invisible froth of subatomic forces and short-lived particles, might undergo a "phase transition" like water molecules that freeze into ice. Such an event could "rip the fabric of space itself. The boundary of the new-style vacuum would spread like an expanding bubble," devouring Earth and, eventually, the entire universe beyond it.
Goddamn, but that would be so cool.
I mean, blowing up the universe. The whole friggen cheeselog.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
All the Modern Things have always existed, They've just been waiting.
-Björk
I find it interesting that this man is an astronomer. I guess he figures that his particular branch of science will never be considered "dangerous" and need to be "limited", unlike those other blighters in physics.
www.eFax.com are spammers
It's not like a supernova makes a very practical weapon...
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Mr. Rees obviously ate too much pizza before falling asleep during the Star Trek Marathon. With a little pulling out of context, imagine CDR Data saying these things:
"...micro- robots that could reproduce out of control..."
"It could form a black hole -- an object with such immense gravitational pull that nothing could escape, not even light -- which would suck in everything around it."
"The quark particles might form a very compressed object called a strangelet, far smaller than a single atom, that could infect surrounding matter and transform the entire planet Earth into an inert hyperdense sphere about 100 meters across."
"...subatomic forces and short-lived particles, might undergo a phase transition like water molecules that freeze into ice. Such an event could rip the fabric of space itself."
But this line could not have come from our plucky android, as this kind of pessimism would be the death nell of any TV series, political movement, or other public activity: "It's just that the more I have followed science and its potential, the more I have been aware of both the exciting hopes and the unintended downsides." From which he concludes with his own mid-life crisis version of the stupid Precautionary Principle, that if we couldn't guarantee safety, then we should'a stood in bed!
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
I'm going to go out on a limb and say this is a good idea. I don't think most of us would question whether emerging fields such as biotechnology could open up a pretty nasty pandoras box for people with bad intentions. No one wants the small group of unbalanced bad guys to be making super-smallpox in clandestine labs located in some state that would be unable or unwilling to counter them.
There will be some control over technology like this, and we all should want there to be. Technology will make it more and more possible for bad people to do ever more terrible things with ever fewer resources. We all remember Steven Hawking and others taking about the challenge facing us due to technology and our own possible self-destruction. Will we survive another 1000 years? We have to make sure the answer is yes.
You had better believe the government is concerned with it, especially with everything that has happened. recently. There WILL be some kind of controls, the only question is what form they will take. Technology can be an incredibly powerful thing. We always, always need to respect that, and it should start, as it most sensibly should, with those who pursue the science that can bring us further forward, or use our own insights to destroy us.
It is the nature of the human spirit to explore the unknown, and it shocks me that someone supposedly recognized as a scientist wold want to supress that spirit in any way. I can only conclude that he's forgotten why he became a scientist in the first place, but until he remembers, he probably needs a sabattical.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
1. Depleted uranium munitions fired in Iraq don't require cleaning up because they disapate instantaneously on impact and pose no long term threat to people or the environment.
Jeez, I guess the UN science teams who detected DU munitions fired by US aircraft over the former Yugoslavia seven years earlier were just imagining things.
Nice to know that, after bombing a society to hell and back in the name of "liberation", the US military doesn't even feel obliged to clean up its own mess.
2. Saddam Hussein was the biggest user of chemical weapons since World War II.
Isn't it funny how the US military conveniently forgets Vietnam whenever it wants to? Agent Orange any one?
Only last week my girlfriend read an article about how third generation birth defects are all too common in Vietnam, almost 30 years after that war ended; about how, on aborted missions, US bombers would ditch their weapons packages over reservoirs before returning to base; and how the US government denies any link between use of chemical weapons then and the ongoing damage to that county.
And let's not forget that it was the US that sold Saddam most of his chemical stockpile, even knowing his reputation for brutality.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Einstein never worked on the bomb! His involvement was strictly limited to writing a letter, asking Roosevelt to develop the bomb.
I can't beleive anyone in the scientific community would ever consider the issue of self censorship. Knowlege is supposed to be used for the betterment of human kind, even dangerous military technology has been used for the benefit of all (think nuclear power). Would any of us really be so naive as to beleive that if someone in the biotech industry had developed a great genetic code for new amazing eyes that would let us see in the ifra-red spectrum and with amazing accuracy and clairty, that the code for such a thing would not eventually end up on a P2P system being traded around for anyone to find? We can no longer put the genie back into the bottle on these types of things, and in alot of respects it's better to have ALL knowledge out at once than to restrict and keep hidden that which our "betters" would like to keep from we the unwashed masses. E.g would you be so affraid of the public camera's if we could all tap in and see what was on them, rather than some hidden secretive agent? Right now as we turn a corner in humanity we should not be trying to retard our development with these restrictions, but rather to embrace the knowledge so that we can all push forwards. Yes, bad things will happen, but big deal, we can all make homemade bombs and naplam (think jolly rogers handbook, or the anarchists cookbook). But people using these things to cause widespread panic and death are INCREADIBLY rare.
Words to consider before this head-long rush into self-censorship:
In Germany I first came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then I came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then I came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then I came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then I came for me - and by that time I was the only one left in the room.
See, if you'd read the link, you wouldn't have to ask that question.
After all, there's nothing stopping a scientist being a terrorist. Censorship only services to hide things from the general public.
:)
If this kind of thinking had been around before, we'd still be living in the stone age! No radio, microchips, nothing! No slashdot even!
hmm...
The idea that humans would ever be capable of doing experiments capable of destroying the universe is laughable. Supermassive black holes have been 'experimenting' with energy ranges and densities that we can never hope to achieve. Furthermore, in an infinite universe like ours, some alien civilization somewhere already would have destroyed it were it possible. Small black holes made by scientists will solve the problem of their own existence by evaporating. The dangers of nanotechnology have also been overstated. Having said that, the greatest threats to humanity are nuclear weapons and biological agents like viruses.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
Once a science becomes feasible, it's going to be explored.
Yes, but the real question is: will it be financially feasible for anyone but a first world country or research institution to do it?
I'm sure Al Qaida would love to develop nanobots that proceed to liquefy any person who has Anglo-Saxon genes, but scanning-tunneling electron microscopes and other equipment cost money, dude.
When things get scary is when somebody produces some body of knowledge that allows a weapon to be reproduced for malicious intent cheaply and easily.
Like when the U.S. government discovered back in the 60's that if their secrets on making biological weapons were leaked (which they inevitably would be), they could be produced by anyone in cheap and relatively undetectable manner. For this reason we decided to stick with nuclear weapons, which you can't build just by knowing how to build them- you need weapons-grade uranium or plutonium, which requires either a massive purification facility or a nuclear reactor.
Or when Popular Mechanics drew flak for publishing an article (with unlucky timing- in the August 2001 issue)outlining how to build an electromagnetic pulse weapon for $400.
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
Now, I would be enormously in favor of a global treaty banning research into nanotechnological weapons. The thought of militaries working with such technologies does scare me.
That'll work about as well as the ABM and ASAT treaties, and the non-nuclear proliferation treaties. The USA is all for banning and preventing technology, after they have it. Here's to WOMD for all, MAD makes the world go round.
Now are you concerned? Hadn't realized what you were facing before, when you thought it was grey goo. I hope I've made my point.
If research is truly dangerous then classify it. But not to research it only leaves you behind when other nations research it.
Hey, if you read the article then you would have understood Sir Martin Rees's reasons for recommending self-censorship. Here's a sample paragraph:
"Some experiments could conceivably threaten the entire Earth," he writes. "How close to zero should the claimed risk be before such experiments are sanctioned?"
He isn't talking about research that has potentially dangerous applications if it falls into the "wrong" hands, he's talking about potentially dangerous experiments. The kind of experiments where something going wrong could, say, create a minature black hole and thus destroy the planet.
When you're talking about an experiment going that wrong then you don't really give a damn who's performing it, "them" or "us".
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
All the hype about those terrorists have gone too deep into your heads people. Way too deep...
I mean, "before the bad guys research it"?
Did the world suddenly turn into a giant comic book while I was asleep?
The man is talking about restricting things that could potentially detroy the entire planet. When they detonated the first atomic bomb they considered that there was a chance the atmosphere could catch on fire, it's choices like those that will become more frequent the faster progress moves.
He's not condoning hushing things up counter to the 'information wants to be free' school of thinking, he's considering the fact that some lessons could potentially be the last thing we ever learn.
I particularly enjoyed this one:
-- The quark particles might form a very compressed object called a strangelet, "far smaller than a single atom," that could "infect" surrounding matter and "transform the entire planet Earth into an inert hyperdense sphere about 100 meters across."
Just when I thought that my cow-workers couldn't get any denser...
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Also, note his comment about the allocation of money. If risky (trendy) fields have their research budgets reduced (i.e. biotech, nanotech, particle physics), there is more for everybody else (i.e. him).
Not that he doesn't have valid concerns, just some warnings that should go with his advice.
Quack!Quack!.....QUACK!!
I love physics, and my fellow physics people, but why do so many physicists start saying really dumb things when they get old? No, Dr. Rees, we're not going to get together and decide to halt exploration because of the potential negative consequences.
There are a lot of highly moderated posts making the point that if we don't research this, then somebody else will.
Well, if you RTFA, you will see that it is not so much concerned about technologies that can be used as powerful weapons, etc. Rather it cites experiments that in themselves are so dangerous that they could destroy the planet, by for example creating black wholes or nano-machines that replicate out of hand.
If these were feasible (personally I doubt it) then the conclusions drawn make a lot of sense. It is does not make us much good if we are the inventors of the nano-robot that ate the world. If such risks exists (again, I don't think they do) we must work to stop the experiments, on a global scale.
Tor
So who is supposed to have the right to decide what and how should something be investigated... as long as the goverment (and his mental-patient-cowboy-leader) is the one who's deciding I want information to be as free as possible.
Actually, until somone can prove that the man on charge is a more wise person than the society itself i would still think the very same...
and what's this "technology has the power to destroy" !?!?!?... ask Hiroshima's people about it.
dammit.
mod me up scottie!
If we didn't have birds, we might not have airplanes, and then 9/11 might not have happened. Give me a fucking break. I could go on, but I won't.
I thought true scientific achievements come out only due to lack of censorship even if we are talking about self censorship. There is no good science or bad science, it is only science. Extreme cases of censorship of science we saw in the midlle ages with the inquisition when some clerics decided what is good science and what is bad science. We all know what that lead to. I know we are talking here about self censorship, but isn't that another form of inqusition? Or more acuratelly said a form of self iquisition. Look for example at the Openheimer case. Indeed it was tragic that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed killing tens of thousends of inocent people, but more were killed than in the both cases toghether with thw Tokyo classical raid. Also we lived throughout the cold war with the fear of nuclear holochaust, which thank god never happend, but nuclear power did happened. Therefore self censorship will only bring a new form of dark ages.
http://ebgp.net/ccc/
He's talking about experiments that have a chance they might DESTROY THE EARTH. Not something as mundane as stupid little nuclear weapons or as unimportant as a new method of encryption. Like, the sort of stuff that they'd build a lab in an asteroid in orbit around Mars to research - a *LONG WAY* from civilisation.
It's not censorship - indeed, basic knowledge of how most of the stuff he mentions should work is straightforward and logical. It is RESTRAINT - just because it might be possible to make nanomachines that self-replicate does not mean that we should lest they get out and turn our entire planet (and occupants) into little tiny robots.
Let me rephrase that: NOBODY should be able to blow up the earth if they wanted to given our current technological and sociological status.
If and when we have contact with an interstellar species, perhaps we'll have a need for planet-destroying technology if we need to protect ourselves in terms of mutually assured destruction - but still, don't you think that would be a little extreme and irresponsible to have such an ability?
I'm sure Al Qaida would love to develop nanobots that proceed to liquefy any person who has Anglo-Saxon genes, but scanning-tunneling electron microscopes and other equipment cost money, dude.
a) Bin Laden was never short of a few (hundred) million, and I doubt the US has got hold of all his assets even now.
b) They would want to "liquefy" by religion, which isn't genetic - the Taleban had the death penalty for converting to christianity (how do you convert your genes ?).
UhOh.. E=MC^2
Someone might make a weapon out of that, better hush that one!
So, if I'm reading this correctly, this guy is worried about things we imagine are possible? Of course, we don't really know very much about these areas, so the imagined fears stem primarily from our ignorance, and not any real knowledge.
In other words, anything you don't know about has a much larger set of imagined possibilities. If you know absolutely nothing about something, then you can imagine the worst possibility, since you aren't limited in your imagination by your knowledge.
This reminds me a little of the kid who's afraid to look under his bed because he imagines there's a monster under it. The kid doesn't posess enough maturity, or experience, or whatever to temper his imagination.
AccountKiller
but, sure as hell, Rees has no problem making them if they will sell a few books... I like some of the possibilities. I hope Hollywood implements some of them.
Laws are for people with no friends.
Biotechnology, Biogenetics, Nanotechnology, ...TECHNOLOGY ...
..." public attempting to prevent and maybe destroy science and technology. These satanic leaders and demonic followers of evil doers approve of murdering abortion advocates and doctors, keeping biogenetics for the wealthy and elite of the world, providing marginal education programs for the public, ..., and making uninformed heinous decisions that limit the advances of science and technology.
.... So far, the track record for good coming from educated individuals, science, and technology far exceeds the performance of religion, politics, and illiterates.
Only religion (not GOD!), politics (not TRUTH!), and illiterate individuals (no FREEWILL!) can make technology the issue of gods and themselves to control for the good of others.
News and Hollywood sensationalize the matinee SciFi technology horror movie aspects providing religion, politics, and some foolish individuals divine knowledge on the topic that justifies stupid laws and criminal penalties. Others may suffer, but they know they are righteous sinners.
Religion, politics, and individuals have done far more evil throughout history then technology. The old proverb: "It ain't guns that kill folks, its dang people that murder folks." Well folks reality (as I interpret it) from history is that religion, politics, and individuals are the real evil in the world.
The Luddites of this millennium cloak themselves in the CULTure of religion, politics, and the "ain't my responsibility, fault, problem,
The same science and technology that has provided antibiotics, vaccines, computers, internet, robotics, jet aircraft, rockets,
OldHawk777 (@50+)
Reality is a self-induced hallucination.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
-- It could form a black hole -- an object with such immense gravitational pull that nothing could escape, not even light -- which would "suck in everything around it."
-- The quark particles might form a very compressed object called a strangelet, "far smaller than a single atom," that could "infect" surrounding matter and "transform the entire planet Earth into an inert hyperdense sphere about 100 meters across."
-- Space itself, an invisible froth of subatomic forces and short-lived particles, might undergo a "phase transition" like water molecules that freeze into ice. Such an event could "rip the fabric of space itself. The boundary of the new-style vacuum would spread like an expanding bubble," devouring Earth and, eventually, the entire universe beyond it.
I remember that experiment. I am thinking that if the universe is that unstable, it would have been destroyed long ago. And the idea that that experiment could create a black hole is preposterous...Let's not forget what a black hole is - A huge amount of matter (generally from a very large collapsed star) compressed into a very small amount of space. In actuality it has no more or less than the original star (although as time goes on anything the black hole "sucks" in gets added to its total mass). I'm going to guess that it takes more than a few heavy atoms from a piddly experiment to form one.
As for the nanotech fears...Cowering in ignorance won't solve any problems. The last thing we need is the Good Guys thinking nanotech is bad and blacklisting it, while the Bad Guys are developing all kinds of nifty nanotech weapons.
It kind of is the same thing along the lines of the government and corporations locking up the white hats who are warning them about security flaws while the black hats are cracking the shit out of anything they want with impunity. It seems in their eyes white hats are nothing more than black hats who have confessed.
-R
Expect /. readers to make their opinions known when a scientist says maybe we should stop experimentation in a specific avenue of research until we can say for certain it won't destroy the world (or universe!). This is NOT like nuclear weapons - the scientists involved may not have had a complete picture of all the sideaffects, but they could say with certainty that the effect was localized (the sun and earth do it naturally), and they could control the scale of the experiment (there is a limit to the amount of fuel for the reaction).
These things can't be said with certainty for Particle Physics, Biotechnology, Nanotechnology (especially self-replicating). There are interactions going on that we don't understand, and experimenting outside of tightly controlled environments really could destroy out world. It doesn't matter if the good guys screw up or the bad guys do it on purpose - the world is over. The whole mini black hole sounds fantastic, and unlikely, but people put their money down all the time for lotteries with similar odds - and, eventually, someone wins. Truly frightening to me is the bio-tech issue. GM organisms have so many unknowns - mad cow disease is essentialy caused by an unusual molecule. What if an animal was engineered that made those easily, and could breed true with a natural species? If that sounds too far-fetched, how about a crop that grows especially well in very poor soil, spurring on the deforestation of our world's rainforests (where only God knows how many miraculous compounds are waiting to be found)? A hardy crop plant certainly sounds like a good idea...
Of course, we can't hide from these things forever, but maybe we should scale back, or stop entirely, the experimentation until we can say with certainty what the risks are. Maybe we shouldn't release GM crops into the wild if they can interact with native plants in that area. Maybe we shouldn't try to make self-replicating nanobots until we have a better understanding of the capabilities of nanobots in the first place.
Maybe we shouldn't worry too much about self-restriction (it's NOT self-censorship!) if it's in the name of safety. After all, you don't want me experimenting with aviation over your house, do you? Hey, I think they even have LAWS about that...
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
The terrorists are now using the internet.
We need to keep harmful info out of their hands.
Sorry. Thats the only way to go since there are so many tribal on the planet that only want to harm.
> Sometimes it's not their choice
Why isn't their choice?
Because where in the 'Bad' side?
May be they thinked that they where the right side.
Its too simplistic to think that all Iraq scientists has no choice.
There are a lot of people very confused in either side.
> 'our side'
'Our side' is the Good side for the two sides.
> Nor are all scientists working toward the greater good.
Microsoft knows that.
Well, First you develop a highly contageous, but harmless virus that affects only pigs*. Next you develop a highly contageous, but relatively harmless virus that affects only humans. However, his second virus becomes extremely virulent in the presence of the first virus.
The result: All of us ham-eatin' heathens curl up and die, leaving only those who have "kept themselves pure" to rule the world.
*Feel free to substitute any religeously unclean food.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
I think there are two main levels which have to be considered. Roughly, there's the could-destroy-all-life-on-earth level, and the could-destroy-the-universe level.
The destroying life level is the one where the 'what will this be used for' concern is valid. "I think the odds are no better than 50-50 that our present civilization on Earth will survive to the end of the present century," Rees says. Maybe so. We've had the ability to fuck all life on Earth for a few decades, and we've been to the brink of using it. Hopefully we're wiser for it. In that way, our 'present civilization' should be constantly evolving. We can all agree that at least something is wrong with civilization (although we may not agree what). Over time, civilization will change, maybe gradually, maybe suddenly. If we don't have the humanity to handle our technology, everything may change very suddenly. But in the worst case, we'll probably wipe out life on Earth as we know it, and in a half million years the cockroaches and anything else that survived will start a new civilization. The Roman empire rose up, changed a bit, but didn't survive. In certain respects we're only recently evolving to the same levels that they did. That's kinda how civilization works.
Ripping a hole in spacetime that can destroy the universe is different. You don't want to go into your basement and mix a bunch of chemicals together and call it 'fuel research' without at least taking some chemistry classes. I think this is the more important aspect of the article, not 'we shouldn't do research into things could could be used for terrorism.' This type of problem is also less constrained by the 'someone else will do it' arguments: outlaws probably don't have the resources to build a gigantic supercollider (or whatever you happen to need in order to create a black hole). Like the fuel research, we should definately study nanotech, advanced physics, etc., just be damn sure we know what we're doing and aren't going to cause a big bang (or get sucked into an alternate dimension with vampire leeches and shit).
The same issue comes up with weapons. The non-nuclear proliferation treaty is much the same issue, and while it has slowed research, North Korea clearly shows you can't put the djini back in the bottle.
We've progressed from poking people with a sharp stick, the swords, to guns, to bombs, to missiles, etc. Eventually, someone will develop the "planet killer" weapon. It won't matter where this weapon is, it'll destroy the planet in some fashion.
This weapon might be based on nano-technology. It might be 50,100,200 years away, but it'll be developed.
Regardless, we'll reach a cross-over point and, in my opinion, humanity will either have to deal with their global contentions and become much more globally unified or go "whoomph" as some pissed off researcher/leader destroys the world.
There is a certain amount of sense to the idea of restricting scientific research. Larry Niven's early-Tales of Known Space charactor "Gil Hamilton" worked for a UN agency called the A.R.M. that, amongst other things, suppressed scientific research - keeping the results for themselves in case "secret weapons" were needed in the future.
It's in interesting philosophical question that has been around for a very long time. On one hand, the Catholic Church suppressed Galileo. Nobel invented dynamite, and as a result a lot of people died.
On the other hand, information about nuclear physics and the technology to build nuclear reactors (good) and nuclear weapons (bad) has been suppressed, with limited success, by those countries already in the Nuclear Club. As a result, so far, the terrorists have not yet (we hope) obtained nuclear weapons. September 11th could have been much, much worse if Al Quaeda had the "Islamic Bomb".
In fact, the ARM reminds me of the efforts of the US Government in suppressing cryptographic technology - classifying it as weaponry. And I can't say that the US is wrong. US efforts in breaking the Japanese codes were as responsible for the US victory at Midway as the Navy pilots themselves.
Yes, information wants to be free. So do children, but only irresponsible parents allow their children to run about unattended.
However, I feel that attempts to self-censor or otherwise suppress scientific research are doomed to failure. Information still wants to be free, and anyone who has ever watched "Connections" knows that science doesn't take logical paths - any innovation, however innocent, can result in something very very dangerous.
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It has also been suggested that Hindenberg was himself 'sabotaging' his own efforts. Many of his problems can be traced back to a reasonably simple math error (If simple can be used to describe the mathematics in nuclear physics) and some have though that Hindenberg was trying to walk the fine line of appearing to develop a Nuclear Weapon while keeping it from ever coming to fruition.
My user number is the sum of 4 squares.
chl
Terrorist this, terrorist that. They're the flavor of the month. One of the reasons that BushCo is going after Iraq is because to do a lot of this stuff, you need the resources of a state or a very large corporation. Corporations also can't effectively control territory beyond prying eyes as well as a gov't can, so I'd argue that only a country or a country backing up a multinational would be capable of doing the kind of research necessary to do these "bad things". Some things to keep in mind about what the theoretical terrorists can do: - Some of the documents that they found in Afghanistan relating to Al Qaeda's research into nuclear weapons included stuff from the Journal of Irreproducable Results. The pages included a blurb about "Next Issue: Clone your neighbor's wife!" - Some of the main intellectual lights involved have been trying to figure out how djinns are involved in particle physics because they interpret the Koran a little too literally. - A leading Pakistani nuclear scientist sympathetic to Al-Qaeda met with them and said basically forget about a nuclear weapon because Pakistan was only able to get them after decades of effort, help from other countries and countless billions of dollars. He suggested they try a dirty bomb instead. - The two largest terrorist events in the U.S. were created with cellphones and box cutters in NYC and fertilizer in Oklahoma. Not real high tech. I think the same will follow for other technologies. Nuclear weapons are a fairly well known technology but they still require a lot of infrastructure. Guys living in a cave are probably not going to be innovating in nanotech to the point where they figure out how to make gray goo. These advances are not cooked up by a lone genius working in isolation. If nanotech ever works it will be after years or decades of research by thousands of people. So basically if you trust the other national governments in the world not to want to kill themselves, there isn't much risk. Mutual assured destruction is a proven technology.
The same arguments that are used for restricting research is the same research that has now given use the ability to sequence the genome for SARs in a matter of weeks and hopefully will lead to a vaccine soon after.
Without the research done ahead of time there would be nothing to stop a disease like SARS from turning into something like the flu epidemic of 1918 that killed millions. Of course that could still happen, but we now have a way to fight it and not just accept what nature throws at us.
a) Bin Laden was never short of a few (hundred) million, and I doubt the US has got hold of all his assets even now.
Try billions of dollars, thousands of professors accross hundreds of universities across dozens of countries and accross decades. Does Bin Laden have that?
--who's responsible, who do you REALLY trust? Someone pays these "respectable" scientists beer and rent. VERY few people turn down serious money and/or an "order" from their regime, it just slap don't happen too often, here, there, or over to boogorillaland someplace, it's the same. Name ONE government that is trustworthy. Name ONE military that is trustworthy. Name ONE police force that is trustworthy.
---the poop has hit the propeller already, the point is moot. All over the planet now freaking moron scientists are working on race specific biowarfare germs or viruses, working on more advanced robotic impersonal "sanitary" warfare, and more efficient means to generally destroy things and kill people. When it was still limited to one soldier facing another on the classical "field of battle", it was somewhat under control,but now? No way. Our "humaness" and societal evolution is centuries behind our technology, if not millenia. It's a matter of WHEN humans destroy themselves, not IF they will do it.
And chances are fantastic it will happen within a decade or two. Maybe sooner, maybe within a year or two now. The odds against it not happening at some point are negligible. Bioweapons in particular are particular bad, because a "war" could start, and you wouldn't know it was a war. Unlike even a chemical attack or nuclear, any (pick one it doesn't matter) regime could decide they wanted to win, and their BSOD-quality arrogant scientists and engineers would be assuring the "leaders" there that their new whizzbang superturbokill_all 2005 bioengineered cootie would take three months to show up, only kill certain racial characteristics, etc, etc,that don't worry, they got the vaccine and cure for "their" side, and usual lie, exagerration, etc, and it would be all over before the targeted nation/population/group was all so infected they would croak before they knew what was happening. Something like that, say a SARS on steroids with a BIG lag time. And if the target population picked up on it, so what-who do they blame? Who do they attack? And no way do I want to hear that scientists and engineers don't step on their dicks all the time and make seriousmistakes, they are just as fallible and have the same sort of arrogance in their intellectual superiority as anyone else, they aren't to be trusted on all matters.
This concept is called "stealth wars" and is part of the "slow plagues" warfare scenario, it's researchable.
Should the research into those weapons go on? No. It should cease yesterday, along with nuclear and chemical and directed energy and weather manipulation and so on and so forth. Enough's enough until the "civil" part of "civilization" catches up, then we can proceed again. And every nation on the planet should open itself up to inspections to verify it's NOT going on, IMO.
That's not a biologically sound scenario. Only immunocompromised individuals could be effected, and that's assuming the combination would somehow work, which it wouldn't as described in your post.
Isn't this the type of attitude that doome imperial backwardness? You can't just "stop" scientific progress and in order for science to progess information needs to be shared.
I find the idea that a james Bond "S.P.E.C.T.R.E" type organization will pose a threat to humanity like this article implies.
"It could form a black hole -- an object with such immense gravitational pull that nothing could escape, not even light -- which would suck in everything around it."
I realize this isn't from you, it's from the article, but the rest of slashdot needs to realize this.
Suppose for a moment that you could replace the sun with a black hole of identical mass. Guess what would happen? Nope, we wouldn't get sucked in. It'd get dark, we'd probably be bathed in some pretty nasty radiation, but we'd still have exactly the same orbit.
Now suppose for a moment that we can warp the laws of physics enough to create an extremely small black hole, on the order of a few grams maybe (more like nano or picograms or smaller if it's in a particle accelerator). It would be a nasty little thing that wouldn't exist very long because there's no way to pump enough energy or matter into it fast enough to sustain it.
Basically, it only has "such immense gravitational pull" within its event horizon, and you need at least a couple solar masses to make a black hole. Last time I checked we didn't have that kind of mass just laying around. As for the strangelet, perhaps I don't have the understanding necessary to see how it could "infect" surrounding matter and compress the whole planet into something smaller than a football stadium. I mean it's not like it's SARS or anything. It's like he's saying "let's take the craziest, kookiest possibilities quantum physics has come up with, and assume they all happen in the worst possible way, etc."
Sixty years ago they were afraid that testing an atomic bomb might rip the entire planet apart, but went ahead with it anyway. They were some pretty smart people. Let's follow their lead.
While some of you may consider this view to be off-the-wall and not in accordance with "science" others in the field see it as a reasonable approach to take. No one has ever said we *won't* examine the unknown in any of the articles or lectures that I've ever been to that propose we limit certain areas of our research.
This reasoning isn't wholy unfounded either. Imagine if you will, the inventor of Kevlar strapping a bulletproof vest to his chest without adequate knowledge of its strength, telling his assistant to fire at point-blank range....and dying. My guess is instead they used a straw dummy and analyzed the problems that arose when the bullet penetrated it the first few times. We need that proverbial dummy in a lot of the aspects of biotechnology we're currently working on.
Imagine a virus that is capable of adapting in such a way as to avoid the human immune system in order to make germline changes so your children are not prone to an inheritable disease that you and your spouse would have passed on. Now imagine that it accidentally recombines with a flu viral genome you also had working your way through your body at the time of injection and propogates as an unknown disease agent. Not so implausible, given the latest news of the day.
Researchers in the 1970's instituted a moratorium on work with recombinant DNA until other methods and work had been done to better understand the implications of what we were working with at the time. This is no different. Just because you *can* do something, doesn't mean you necessarily should. There was an interesting talk by Dr. George Annas (a BioLaw professor at Boston University) at a recent conference entitled "The Future of Human Nature". Wired will be putting out an article on it. I'll try and get it submitted here on
In Dr. Annas' talk, he describes the need for a similar moratorium for germline meddling and what he describes as "species altering methods". Now, he was looking at 50-200 years in the future, but the idea that we might want to figure out how best to modulate our ability to develop new and interesting things with our realization that we're not always sure the outcome is still valid.
The closer we come to altering our own species, the worse the "oops" factor becomes. It's not crazy, it's an attempt at foresight...since hindsight could be far more costly with the types of things we are dealing with.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
There has been a Hindenburg in German history, but he was a pre-Nazi era politician. Paul (??) von Hindenburg was Reichspraesident and his stepping down gave way for Adolf Hitler.
You are refering to the German physicist Werner Heisenberg who was leading the German nuclear program. Calling Heisenberg not a theoratical physicist is a major error given his contributions to the Quantum Mechanics and the Matreix calculation.
The allies never bombed Switzerland and Germany didn't have a heavy water factory there. Switzerland was neutral.
What really sucks about this thread is the lack of any good opinion from anyone with credentials or insight into the topic and the overabundance of egos babbling the effects of their overgrown sense importance to the world. Slashdot would be a greater place if it attracted the comments of the learned and intelligent for the learning to sift through, instead of piles of crap to be sifted away from the few good, interesting comments that are usually not even there for us to find. Sorry if this comment got a little too overgeneralizing, but as I was thinking about it I started to think of how Slashdot, itself, reflects this and not just this thread.
Jesus christ, didn't even the 1% of /. readers that normally read the article do so this time!?
:-)
The article is talking about research that has the potential to create a black hole right here on earth. We wouldn't have time to say "oops" before the entire earth and solar system was sucked in. How the hell can you protect against gravity? And how the hell can research into how to make your own black hole protect you from others' black holes? Other points that are common in this thread are about terrorists and rogue nations acquiring the ability to do this. Currently, it takes large particle accelerators and lots of funding and scientists to accomplish a situation which *may* cause a singularity to form. WE AREN'T TALKING ABOUT WEAPONS HERE PEOPLE!
The only similar technological development that has occured in human history was the development of the atomic bomb. Before the Trinity test (the first nuclear bomb detonation) there were several prominent scientists who thought that the nuclear reaction might not stop, and could turn the entire earth into one enourmous fission explosion. The Truman administration just crossed there fingers and hoped that wouldn't happen and detonated the bomb anyways. Lucky for mankind the never-ending-explosion theory was wrong.
All that said, there is a little part of me that says "who cares? it's not like anyone will care a split-second after the experiment goes wrong."
Perhaps that is the origin of gamma ray bursts: civilizations turning their planets into 100 meter diameter spheres with really powerful particle accelerators.
Sure it's massively unlikely, but it would explain why we SETI hasn't heard anything yet.
Imagine if the first signal we decode is: "don't build a particle accelerator larger than 5 kilometers in diameter or you will destroy your whole world."
a war on terrorism? How can we end a war on a method?
Lets Make Some Ice 9!
-You're wasting your time. Alfador only likes me.
That without science, every disease that strikes will kill on average 50% of the population.
...
That the sustainable number of humans alive without science is measured in millions.
That without science, the number of people to hear his arguments would be about 20.
Other historians have also suggested that his name may have been "Heisenberg".
There seems to be some, umm, what's the word,... uncertainty over the gentleman's name.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
So far there seem to have been a lot of replies complaining that it's silly to abandon research of dangerous topics, because if it's ignored then someone much worse will discover it first. I agree with this almost completely, but I think there are also times when it makes sense once a threshold has been reached where making things worse gains no strategic advantage.
The one I was thinking of was thermonuclear war. Before he died in 1996, Carl Sagan argued in The Demon Haunted World (and probably other places) that the development of the Hydrogen Bomb by the US was strategically pointless, because it didn't accomplish or deter anything that couldn't already be accomplished or deterred by existing nuclear weapons. On the other hand instead of simply destroying an enemy, a thermonuclear war would induce a nuclear winter and wipe out most of the world. Furthermore, there wasn't any intelligence that the USSR was developing it, nor that they would have if the USA hadn't started.
Apart from that I'm not familiar with the whole situation, so I won't go into it further. But I don't think the argument that it's necessary to research ultra-dangerous topics before an enemy does holds up all the time -- especially when the only advance from existing technology is that it leads to a lose-lose scenario instead of a win-lose scenario.
I have also read the myriad of other articles examine the likelyhood of a stranglet forming. Since collision events many orders of magnitude greater in energy occur all the time in the upper atmosphere, were the strangelet runaway scenario likely we would already be a hyperdense sphere 100 meters in diameter.
Also, the odds that we will be able to create better nanobots than nature has is equally remote - as any nanobot that could "grey goo" the world would have to work against quite an entropy gradient, and were that possible some microbe would have stumbled across it by now.
"Stumbled across it" - that's a very good phrase to keep in mind when reading this sort of thing. Do you really think that just because N scientists don't follow a line of research that all scientists won't?
I would far rather have responsible scientists examining the world, finding the "bad things", and allowing mankind to deal with them, than to allow one scientist working for the only people who will fund him (this would be the "naughty people") to come across the idea first.
As I stated before - all too often the people who most preach "self control" are really more interested in "other control" - after all, were they interested in self control they would control themselves.
I think that in this case, either he a) believes that this won't effect him personnaly, or b) he doesn't care. And that sickens me, because the truely great astronomers, physicists, geneticists, and other scientists believed that while there are evil men, man can be trusted.
And look at it like this: if we cannot trust man, then we are screwed because that's what we are.
www.eFax.com are spammers
You are refering to the German physicist Werner Heisenberg who was leading the German nuclear program. Calling Heisenberg not a theoratical physicist is a major error given his contributions to the Quantum Mechanics and the Matreix calculation.
I actually got the name wrong, and what he did backwards. I'm rather sick, and my mind is off in never-never land.
I meant Heisenberg, and he was a theoretical physicist, not a practical one. Therefor his designs lacked physical solidarity.
The Germany heavy water factory was also located in Norway.
I shouldn't post when I'm not feeling well.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Physicists on a distant planet were trying ... to create a "quark- gluon plasma," a soup of extremely hot, dense subatomic particles that mimic conditions of the "Big Bang" that spawned our cosmos 13.7 billion years ago.
...
Critics speculated that this high concentration of energy might have one of three undesirable results
Make that four.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
If you don't research something, you can never research protections/safeguards for it.
This is why weapons development is important. If the sick fucks who invent weaponry aren't allowed to continue what they're doing and come up with amazing and inventive new ways to kill humans, there can be no investigation into mitigating the effects, and the first hostile race that comes along could wipe us out.
I don't like to believe in the existence of a hostile alien race, but ignoring the possibility is a little stupid.
Basically all science should be restricted to research on health and disease, the ecology, and psychological/social well being. Outlaw the rest, it's mostly pathological ... like much of computer science ;-)
Abandon anything that would feed the capitalist/imperialist system which assumes that nature is an infinite resource or infinite dump and uses things like wars to acquire more resources when needed. Consumerism helps fuel all this and some say is the root of most conflicts and suffering in (other) parts of the world.
I guess getting sucked into a black hole would be about the coolest way I could think of.
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
Obviously, any kind of censorship for a given piece of new information is just adding a delay to its publication. Protecting all humans from possible threats is a nice goal but is impossible. Protecting humanity or more generally life on Earth from annihilation should be a continuous endeavor. Here are some principles to make humanity/life more robust to catastrophe: add/encourage redundancy in the system add/encourage heterogeneity in the system add/encourage distributed decision making colonize all places that can be reached, i.e. all continents, the oceans, the underground, other habitable planets and satellites, other stellar systems.
Nothing stops people who search for power. Knowledge has be remain free so there will always be those who mop up the pools of blood created by fools.
not to draw flame on myself, but....
for once, there's virtually no rational comment to the article (at least out of the top-modded ones).
The point of Rees's statement is not that we must beware of developing a horribly powerful weapon. The point is that in the course of regular experimentation a horrible tragedy can occur. It is not that US must develop the BHM (black hole missile (tm)) before Syria, cause then they'll destroy the world, cause after all, they're bad guys that have black hate in their veins. The danger is that the black hole can happen *accidentally*. Thus, the argument "better us than them" is pointless. It is in no way mitigated by the fact that us refraining from destroying the world doesn't prevent others from doing it.
How real are the dangers of accidentally destroying the universe? If a top british physicist says they're real, i believe him. Virile nanobots? probably not, but its just an example, really.
Can self-sensure achieve desired goal? to some extent, you bet. No "underground organization" is going to build a particle accelerator for high energy physics. This stuff doesn't appear out of thin air, it takes BIG BUCKS. True, some doomsday methods are within easier reach (bio weapons in particular) But at least some of the more dangerous experiments can be avoided.
I repeat, "let's make a black hole before they do!" does not make sense/is not applicable.
Rationality shouldn't be abandoned, even in science. The hope may be faint (i think his 50-50 prognosis is optimistic) but its no reason not to try or to disparage the messenger.
> Agent Orange was a defoliant and not a chemical
> weapon
wasn't nerve gas originally developed as an insecticide?
"space-time continuum". Time is a human perception.
Even if we don't destroy ourselves from advanced research, its not like we're likely to last that long. Look at the way nations treat each other. Chances are, we'll try and abuse or exploit every single alien species we come across the same way we do each other, and eventually we'll piss off the wrong little green men who'll exterminate us for the good of the universe (and if I wasn't human, i'd probably congratulate them for it too).
This would lead to a further polarisation of human society.
You just need to go into a supermarket with a good book on chemistry to find enough stuff to at least be able to injure many people.
Keeping information from potential terrorists which used wisely could greatly improve these peoples live does not help to fight the cause.
Unless we can convince them that they are doing/thinking wrongly there always will be a potential danger for everyone in the western world and everywhere else.
So the question should not be "how can we make sure terrorists do not have the ability to harm" but " how can we make sure people do not become terrorists (even ill equiped ones) ".
Calculations showed otherwise, and things proceeded as expected. (Note: this may be apocrypal, as I can find no google reference to it and can't remember where I came across it -- but it makes the point as well as anything)
Just imagine if the theories or calculations had been inadequate to predict the results. Then look across the expanse of scientific history, and see how much of scientific knowledge has sprung from unexpected or unforeseen results.
All the author is saying is that the price of poker has gone up, and as we continue to push back the frontiers of ignorance, it's pretty much inevitable that we're going to step in something really ugly sooner or later. And with the capabilities humanity is poking at with sticks, the consequences of a major oops/surprise in a number of fields (high-energy physics, genetic tinkering/biowar, nanotech) are generally at least planet-wide in scope.
For the concerns involving alterations in the fabric of space-time or nature of reality, even off-world laboratories may offer insufficient protection.
Risk assessment is a very poorly understood discipline, easily corrupted by those who want to attain the goal and can't conceive of making a mistake. Look at how easily the NASA bureaucrats rationalize away the risks of the shuttle -- check out Feynman's appendix to the Challenger failure analysis report for some insight, and marvel at how his back-of-the-envelope calculation of 1:100 catastrophic failure rate still holds true today, and NASA management is still oblivious to the point he was trying to make.
Isn't it ironic that you were just censored by a /. moderator? Perhaps Sir Rees has moderation duty today?
Oh, wait...
We didn't publish that?
Oh, shit...
The one who figured out how to make fire, its all her fault. We should invent a time machine, go back in time, and whack the SOB. Or would that be too dangerous?
What should happen when man is able to manipulate reality like pixels on a screen ?
Since the answer is not easy, we should start thinking about it from now.
Wrong
Q: So, what have you achieved this month, loyal peon?
A: Marvellous, wonderful things. But for the good of humanity, I destroyed all my research.
Wonder how long I could get away with that?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
"For the good of all", we must tell hard working, innovative, talented people to stop producing. "For public safety", we must restrict the creativity of others. "For a better future", we must force others to live by a collectivist mantra, with a morality that says that we must live for others. I reject this. Regardless of the risks, the bigger risk is that individuals cannot pursue their desired research.
Read "Atlas Shrugged" !
That reminds me of an old story I was once told:
A family of four is driving to the ocean to sunbathe and swim, while passing an airbase they swerve to miss a stray cat and hit a gasoline tanker that blows up. The cloud of smoke obscures the vision of a pilot landing an airplane which causes him to crash into an ICBM silo. The missile launches causing world war three and the end of the world.
Should the family not be able to run the experiment of taking a drive to the ocean because of the infintessimally small risk of it causing the end of the world? Of course not.
Eat at Joe's.
Another point: If only criminals can research bioweapons then only criminals will know anything about them. When one makes a superplague, nobody will no how to cure it if the line of research is forbidden.
Eat at Joe's.
What the fuck does this have to do with the topic you shithead? You deserve to get clubbed in the head far more than he ever did.
MOD this irrelevant fuckwad down!
It was a Norwegian heavy water factory. There's a movie about the sabotage raid.
So how exactly do you recognize a "respectable, civilized scientist". Does he/she wear a tie? Is he/she a British citizen? Or maybe a WASP?
Anyway, it's obvious that Adolatra didn't get the message of the greek legend (rephrased for the layman by Martin Rees). The fact that we can do some things does not mean that we have to. Even if we are respectable and civilized. We are talking here about energies far beyond our control. Even A-bombs are, by comparison, mere toys.
this is really stupid!
while it is true that ther are some self propigating systems that could theoreticlly destry everything, all of these things (from black holes to nanites) only do so under specific conditions. For instance, it is almost certain that particle accelerators HAVE created black holes, but these are so small that they evaporate before they grow. Only in a suoer dense environment, like the core of the sun, cloud it actually grow.
Worrying about nanorobots is just stupid! As thermodynamics states, as you make things smaller, you must put more energy into the system to overcome entropy. In theory nanorobots could turn the world into gray goo, but the availible energy is SO low that they will not be able to replicate outside of the environmet we create for them.
All other disasters are all the same....it is stupid to entertain the idea of accidental world distruction!!!
I have heard that Round-UP has the same chemicals in it as agent orange. Is this fact or fiction?
respectfully, I don't think you get it. Not talking about private low -tech gun ownership, and I probably own a lot more than you do unless you are a major collector, and no, I'm not a predator either, that is a side issue that has NO relevance to this discussion and is called a "red herring" in debate 101 so don't bother trying that with me on this forum, save it for the kiddies. And I'm not a technological luddite. My point is, there's no way to USE weapons of mass destruction in a defensive manner, especially biologicals, so you can't claim "your side" can because in your opinion they are "the nice guys". I'll concede on one point, and barely, nukes can possibly be argued and classed as an extension of giant guns, wheras biologicals are NOT, weather manipulation for aggressive warfare and economic purposes are NOT, they shouldn't be developed, and going out of your way to build a biological weapon or directed energy related weather weapons, and other such like warfare related technologies does NOT mean you are working on a cure for something else,or being nicey nice to the peepuls, nope, that means for example you are building a new life form designed to kill stealthily and on a mass scale with no way for the other party to defend themselves and it goes completely through the civilian and offical populations of the targeted country exactly the same as if you carpet bombed all their cities. that's called mass genocide. It's not a selective weapon, nor can it be used in "surgical strikes" with "limited collateral damage". Those sorts of weapons are ONLY useful as genocidal weapons, there's no selectivity to them until the race based weapons are released, which they will be, in my opinion. They are 100% aggressive and genocidal in nature in design even if your favorite pet nation/group who's developing them claims to be "the good guys".
You just won't admit my basic over-all premise, which is society has seriously lagged behind technology when it comes to being peaceful and civilised. Ever been in the middle of a major riot in a "non predatory" nation like the US? I have, it's amazing, that veneer of civilisation is one micron deep. One minute, normality, the next minute, the people you might have been standing in line with at the store or working next to at the plant etc are burning cars and smashing windows and looting. Been there, seen that myself, the rodney king riots that happened in atlanta, was downtown twice during that little "proof of civilization and niceness". I could give a dozen more personal anecdotals of how people, whether provate citizens or official governmental citizens can be quite bad, not nice, complete criminals in nature, despite all sorts of indignant protest to the contrary. Of course those are anecdotals, no way to "prove" that to anyone, but I'll use them anyway for this discussion. How about waco or kent state? That was a "non predatory good guy" nation doing some seriously bad stuff. How about good guys US supporting dictators for generations down in central and south america? My point is there are NO good guys when you are talking about orgs developing these sorts of weapons, just varying and changing levels of bad or slightly less bad guys. Just because your particular society/nation/group claims to be civilised is not proof either, it is trivial to come up with example after example of a lack of civilization for any society you can name, easy enough with the US as well as any other nation. You simply can't claim, just for example, the US is non predatory, on other nations or their own people, nor any other nation, because there are verifiable examples that exist that can disprove that, so following the scientifc principle that theorem is *not proven*. One exception to a rule makes that rule invalid.
It's not all "these are the good guys and those are the bad guys". Just because you personally aren't a predator doesn't mean your government and it's tame scientists aren't, or could be at some time, that those "other guys the obvious bad guys"
Here's my reasoning for why most/any restiction on scientific or technological development would be a Bad Idea.
First, it seems we have two choices, to restrict or not to restrict technology.
If we restrict technological development, there are three possible outcomes. First, we could chagne as a society and repeal the restrictions. Second, we could be knocked back to the stone age, and then redevelop. Or third, a metior of gamma ray burst or such could wipe out our species.
After the best of these scenarios, we will be right where we are now, and will have just postponed the danger of dealing with new technologies. In the second best, we will also have to deal with the dangers of nuclear war which we seem to have avoided succesfully.
Is there hope? Yes, I think so. Bio and Nano technology would make it easier to colonize other planets, and computer science might one day yield real, Friendly, superintelligent AIs to help us sort ourselves out. Nuero-science might give us a real lie detector. I'm actually quite optomistic about our chances, but even if I was pessimistic the argument would be the same.
As to developing things in secrecy, I would advise against it. Secrecy tend to breed curruption, and people behave much better if they think that other people might be watching. In our(relativly) open (almost) global technological development, I don't think that secret labs stand much chance, but they would be much more dangerous in a restricted scenario.
This sig wasn't worth reading, was it.
The herbicides were indeed chemical weapons, because their horrible effects on humans were well known. There were demands in Congress during the Vietnam war to cease what was rightly called at the time "chemical warfare", but they went unheeded.
The victims go right on suffering today. Not a penny of compensation has ever been paid.
The same thing will happen with Depleted Uranium shells and cluster bombs. Are these meant to kill innocent civilians, and deform unborn children? No, but since the effect is known, the moral culpability still applies. The use of indiscriminate weapons is a war crime.
Referring to Hindenburg as a pre-Nazi era politician is sort of like calling Eisenhower a post-WWII American politician: being rather economical with the facts.
Hindenburg was not just a German general, he returned from retirement (after a 45 year career) in 1914 to command the Eastern front, or Ober Ost. After the failure of the offensives around Verdun, he replaced the sacked Chief of the General Staff for the remainder of the war.