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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
and if your logic prevails we'll all be little piles of goo.
Building shelter and moving out of caves doesn't have a lot of very clear and distinct possibilities of terrible outcomes. Sure, my shelter might fall on me, but that's a risk I'm willing to take.
With this new technology on the other hand, we're looking at some VERY real VERY possible VERY bad outcomes. It's not just that this MAY lead to something which COULD be warped to 'bad' uses, it's that it COULD VERY easily be used to f' up lots of shit.
I'm not anti research here, I'm just saying this is something to be very very careful with.
"The only ones that should clearly be avoided are clear-cut cases like nerve agents, genetic creation of deadly diseases, and all that."
The sticky issue there is that you cannot scientifically classify anything as 'clear-cut'. It's never that black and white.
Personally, I think the opposite should happen. The more that's known about artificially created deadly diseases, for example, the more that's known about how to identify and cure them.
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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Ahhh, but if you could intentionally cause a star to become a supernova.
/improbable / difficult it is. Just use your imagination
Yeah, yeah. I understand the physics and how impossible
More bad sci-fi: And the aliens decide to remove the human menace. As they pass through out solar system, they drop a nova bomb. It takes a few years for the bomb's orbit to decay into the star; but, once it impacts, it creates a beautiful cloud of ionized gas backlit by the exploding Sun. The new nebula adds an artistic touch to the aliens night sky, justification enough to have made the trip...
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.
It's wrong that Einstein worked on the bomb. His only involvment (as pointed out already) was writing a letter, that got dismissed, to Roosevelt. Einstein at the time was not liked, because of his roots. He was virtually exiled to the United States, because England didn't want him.
Also, that the reason why the Germans didn't have a nuclear bomb is because the allied forces destroyed (after a first failed mission) the heavy water factory in Switzerland (I think it was in Switzerland, not 100% sure) that was fundamental to the bomb design. Hindenberg was also much further along than the Allies, by years. The reason why Hindenberg was so slow in his development is because he was a practical physicist, and not theoretical, and thereby couldn't construct the most efficient shape for a sustained reaction.
Hindenbergs devices failed to reach critical mass, but they were very close, and had the Allied forces not resorted to sabotage, would have achieved it long before the Allies did.
The reason why Einstein wrote that letter is because he knew, logically, the Germans were developing the technology.
I think that the moral of the story is develop the technology first, as soon as you can, then create policy after realizing nobody should have that power. You can never know who is developing what, so it's better to develop everything.
The Arms Race is constantly ongoing, so is the Space Race, and all that jazz.
As I mentioned earlier in the thread, this boils down to, "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should." In regards to science, you always should, so you can protect yourself if someone else does.
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The "grey goo" thing is, frankly, a nonissue. Despite the fact that a few renegade nanobots could deconstruct a bunch of matter, these nanobots would NOT be able to make more nanobots. Why? Because....surprise....you need an energy source and it would be damned hard to find an energy source for self-replicating nanotech to use. I mean, think about it. For a self-replicating nanobot to become an issue they need a self-sustainable energy source, they need a way of giving the new nanobots a self-sustainable energy source, they need to be resistant to weather, cosmic and solar radiation, electromagnetic fields, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. This is the same reason why there is nonbacterial organic life on the planet. Because individual species of bacteria have limited environments they can live in, limited speed of infection and decomposition, weaknesses to organic and inorganic compounds, a set growth rate, and can die. Even the worst case scenario of nanobots would most likely result in the entire puddle of grey dust dying off as soon as it ran out of internal energy. A whimper, not a bang. This whole grey goo scare is pure bull.
If not all sentients are human, couldn't it be possible that not all humans are sentient either?
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...
Biotech = bioweapons
Nanotech = nanoweapons
Nerve Agents = tranquilizers, stasis chambers
Creation of deadly disease = preemptively improving the immune system
What you consider good can be used for bad, and opposite. If I truly understand how the immune system works and want to extend and improve it to benefit mankind, I also have the knowledge of how to kill, by avoiding all its detection mechanisms, attack mechanisms, defense mechanisms, exploiting its flaws and weaknesses. All I'd have to know to go from vaccine to plague is how to make a replication method (e.g. by air/touch), which is trivial by comparison.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
-- 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?
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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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.
--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.
"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
I'm not sure you can "over-sensationalize" the prospect of the whole Earth being turned into a 100 meter sphere of inert goo.
I agree biotechnology and nanotechnology are certainly going to proceede and we should fund them. It is just certain high energy physics experiments should probably be thought about very carefully.
And that is the area in which Rees is most knowledgable: astro and particle physics (they interelate alot - note he is an astrophysicst and this kind of inquiry would not effect his field directly). I doubt he is as much of an expert on nanotech, but he included it somewhere in the end of his book as another place for inquiry.
Yes, the odds of disaster are really slim. Rees is asking, how far from zero should the odds be before we stop research? One in a million? One in a billion? What if there are (say) a million different permutations of the experiment, any of which could trigger the event?
It is pretty obvious to me that we should be thinking about these things and asking things like, don't these particles collide all the time in nature? (Say, in the Sun or near Black Holes, etc) and if the answer is yes, then is there a signal we could look for?
I'm sure people already are doing some back of the envelope calculations, but trying to get funding for this kind of work, as the above post so clearly indicates, is going to be a tough sell to parts of the public. Even the \. crowd who in general would be rather supportive of scientific funding.
a war on terrorism? How can we end a war on a method?
Yes, Agent Orange was an herbicide. But did you know that it wasn't the only one used? Many herbicides were used in the Vietnam conflict, their names coming from colored stripes on their containers. In addition to Orange, there were Agents Blue, Pink, Purple, and White. Once upon a time I had a chart of the effects of these chemicals, because they all had different actions. Agent Orange was a fairly standard defoliant: it made plants lose their leaves and die. The only other one I can remember is White, which made plants go into "growth overdrive" and explode themselves, bringing about disease, rot, and death.
We had a lot of "innovative" weaponry in that era, like the Agents and a personal favorite of mine, antipersonnel mines loaded with slow-burning phosphorus/magnesium pellets instead of steel shrapnel. There were reports of the wounds of victims, who could take days to die, glowing sickly in the night.
Lovely stuff.
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agnet blue is a broadleaf herbicide otherwise known as 2-4-T agnet blue is also an organic acid.
agent white is a narrowleaf herbicide I'm not sure of the comercial name but it kills grasses such as bambo and is an organic alcohol.
Toxicity of both agents are extremely low, but the manufacturer does recomment standard indusrtial hygene mesures when handling ether herbicide. So of course because both were being used in the same area somebody had the bright Idea to react them into a single compound by using a routine esterification reaction, basic sophmore organic chemistry stuff (usual 2nd week in lab). Well some how traces of dioxins were found in the new agent orange and agent orange got blamed for the vague hard to pin down recuring health problems that seem to always happen to soldiers that spend time at war.
The herbicide usage is not chemical warefare as herbicides are not directed at people. Technicaly we did use a chemical warefare agent in Vietnam and it was agent CS, or tear gas(it smells a bit peppery) and CS replaced CN which smelled like appleblossoms, the same stuff that the police and anti-war protestors used to play volleyball with back home.
I'm still trying to figure out how we know nerve agent GB (Tabin) smells like mown hay and nerve agent GA (Sarin) smells garlicey. Nobody knows what VX smells like.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
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.