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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.
technology has potential to annihilate
...as well as the potential to protect us from annihilation.
I can see it now: "If nanotechnology is outlawed, only outlaws will have nanotechnology!"
Facetious, but nevertheless relevant.
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
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 has long been the useless prattle of luddites..
And who decides what should or should not be done..
I believe it has always been in the interest of man to protect against the effects of technology but not against the pursuit of technology.
I.E We can outlaw chemical weapons, and biological weapons because we know they are freakin' dangerous... but don't outlaw stem cell research or technology that we do not fully comprehend the effect of because we are scared of the "possible" consequences..
Anyways.. it is not about right or wrong that we control technology.. it is usually a matter of power.
"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.
Mostly the article talks about how certain scientific research could lead to catastrophic accidents that would be detrimental to our existance. So it's censorship in the idea that it wants to "remove or suppress what is considered morally, politically, or otherwise objectionable" in the sense that is it objectionable to the environment, world, universe, etc.
It's not saying that we shouldn't know about the research, but that it shouldn't happen at all.
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.
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.
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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'
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.
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
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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Isn't it funny how the US military conveniently forgets Vietnam whenever it wants to? Agent Orange any one?
If memory serves, Agent Orange was a defoliant and not a chemical weapon. It's kind of like complaining about the Orkin man using chemical weapons: technically true but not really what is meant by a chemical weapon. Sure there were probably people in the jungles that were defoliated but its not anything like dropping a nice efficient nerve agent.
I'm really curious about how long it's going to take people to accuse the US military of chemical warfare because so many people are dying of lead poisoning.
-jaded- walking the earth as a living corpse is in somewhat questionable taste
-- 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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chl
It has also been suggested that Hindenberg was himself 'sabotaging' his own efforts.
Other historians have also suggested that his name may have been "Heisenberg".
--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
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?
the US that sold Saddam most of his chemical stockpile
The claim by the grandparent post was that the US that sold Saddam most of his chemical stockpile. Your references don't support that claim.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
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.
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.
Posted with Mozilla
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.
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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.
Actualy I was agent white a lot on my lawn to kill weeds, a lot of people do. White phosphorus was used a a smoke agent, it was normaly loaded in artilery shells and WP sharpnel would re-ignite spontaniously on contact with air makeing surgical removal of WP sharpnel a bit tricky, the surgon had to operate on the victem while the wound is maintained under water so the WP wouldn't burn. A bit of copper sulphate in the water slowly reacted with the WP to make it glow and a lot easier to find. WP is one weapon that strike pure terror in the hearts of infantryman, nasty stuff. WP was replaced in the US arsenal by red phosphorus, which isn't as nasty and terririfing but the smoke has much bettter infra-red obscurant properties.
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actualy the term depleted in this case means that the fissile U235 and Pu239 has been extracted, leaving only the non-fissile U233. In lay terms you can't use it for nuclear fuel, that's all. Any toxicity inherent in uranium is still present. We use it in anti-tank cannons because the stuff is much better at punching through thin armor than the much lighter lead w/ tungston core AP rounds do.
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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.
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.