- Simberg, Rand.
Safe Is Not an Option.
Jackson, WY: Interglobal Media, 2013.
ISBN 978-0-9891355-1-1.
-
On August 24th, 2011 the third stage of the Soyuz-U rocket
carrying the
Progress M-12M
cargo craft to the
International
Space Station (ISS) failed during its burn, causing the craft and
booster to fall to Earth in Russia. While the crew of six on board
the ISS had no urgent need of the supplies on board the Progress,
the booster which had failed launching it was essentially identical
to that which launched crews to the station in Soyuz spacecraft.
Until the cause of the failure was determined and corrected, the
launch of the next crew of three, planned for a few weeks later,
would have to be delayed. With the Space Shuttle having been retired
after its last mission in July 2011, the Soyuz was the only way for
crews to reach or return from the ISS. Difficult decisions had to be
made, since Soyuz spacecraft in orbit are wasting assets.
The Soyuz has a guaranteed life on orbit of seven months. Regular crew
rotations ensure the returning crew does not exceed this
“use before” date. But with the launch of new Soyuz
missions delayed, it was possible that three crew members would have
to return in October before their replacements could arrive in a
new Soyuz, and that the remaining three would be forced to leave
as well before their craft expired in January. An extended delay
while the Soyuz booster problem was resolved would force ISS managers to choose
between leaving a skeleton crew of three on board without a known
to be safe lifeboat or abandoning the ISS, running the risk that
the station, which requires extensive ongoing maintenance by the crew
and had a total investment through 2010 estimated at US$ 150 billion
might be lost. This was seriously considered.
Just how crazy are these people? The
Amundsen-Scott
Station at the South Pole has an over-winter crew of around 45
people and there is no lifeboat attached which will enable them, in
case of disaster, to be evacuated. In case of fire (considered the
greatest risk), the likelihood of mounting rescue missions for the
entire crew in mid-winter is remote. And yet the station continues
to operate, people volunteer to over-winter there, and nobody thinks
too much about the risk they take. What is going on here?
It appears that due to a combination of Cold War elevation of astronauts
to symbolic figures and the national trauma of disasters such as
Apollo I, Challenger, and Columbia,
we have come to view these civil servants as
“national treasures”
(Jerry Pournelle's
words from 1992) and not volunteers who do a risky job on a par with
test pilots, naval aviators, firemen, and loggers. This, in turn,
leads to statements, oft repeated, that “safety is our
highest priority”. Well, if that is the case, why fly?
Certainly we would lose fewer astronauts if we confined their
activities to “public outreach” as opposed to the
more dangerous activities in which less exalted personnel engage
such as night aircraft carrier landings in pitching deck conditions
done simply to maintain proficiency.
The author argues that we are unwilling to risk the lives of
astronauts because of a perception that what they are doing,
post-Apollo, is not considered important, and it is hard to
dispute that assertion. Going around and around in low Earth
orbit and constructing a space station whose crew spend most
of their time simply keeping it working are hardly
inspiring endeavours. We have lost four decades in which the
human presence could have expanded into the solar system,
provided cheap and abundant solar power from space to the Earth,
and made our species multi-planetary. Because these priorities
were not deemed important, the government space program's mission
was creating jobs in the districts of those politicians who
funded it, and it achieved that.
After reviewing the cost in human life of the development of
various means of transportation and exploring our planet, the author
argues that we need to be realistic about the risks assumed by
those who undertake the task of moving our species off-planet
and acknowledge that some of them will not come back, as has
been the case in every expansion of the biosphere since the first
creature ventured for a brief mission from its home in the sea
onto the hostile land. This is not to say that we should design
our vehicles and missions to kill their passengers: as we move
increasingly from coercively funded government programs to
commercial ventures the maxim (too obvious to figure in the
Ferengi
Rules of Acquisition)
“Killing customers is bad for business” comes increasingly
into force.
Our focus on “safety first” can lead to perverse choices.
Suppose we have a launch system which we estimate that in one
in a thousand launches will fail in a way that kills its crew.
We equip it with a launch escape system which we estimate that
in 90% of the failures will save the crew. So, have we reduced
the probability of a loss of crew accident to one in ten thousand?
Well, not so fast. What about the possibility that the crew escape
mechanism will malfunction and kill the crew on a mission
which would have been successful had it not been present? What if
solid rockets in the crew escape system accidentally
fire in the vehicle assembly building killing dozens of workers
and destroying costly and difficult to replace infrastructure?
Doing a total risk assessment of such matters is difficult and
one gets the sense that little of this is, or will, be done
while “safety is our highest priority” remains the
mantra.
There is a survey of current NASA projects, including the grotesque
“Space
Launch System”, a
jobs
program targeted to the
constiuencies of the politicians that mandated it, which has no
identified payloads and will be so expensive that it can fly so
infrequently the standing army required to maintain it will
have little to do between its flights every few years and lose the
skills required to operate it safely. Commercial space ventures
are surveyed, with a candid analysis of their risks and why
the heavy hand of government should allow those willing to accept
them to assume them, while protecting the general public from
damages from accidents.
The book is superbly produced, with only one typographic error I noted
(one “augers” into the ground, nor “augurs”)
and one awkward wording about the risks of a commercial space
vehicle which will be corrected in subsequent editions. There is a
list of acronyms and a comprehensive index.
Disclosure: I contributed to the Kickstarter project which funded the
publication of this book, and I received a signed copy of it as a
reward. I have no financial interest in sales of this book.
- Cawdron, Peter.
Feedback.
Los Gatos, CA: Smashwords, 2014.
ISBN 978-1-4954-9195-5.
-
The author has established himself as the contemporary
grandmaster of first contact science fiction. His
earlier
Anomaly (December 2011),
Xenophobia (August 2013),
and Little Green Men (September 2013)
all envisioned very different scenarios for a first
encounter between humans and intelligent extraterrestrial
life, and the present novel is as different from those which
preceded it as they are from each other, and equally
rewarding to the reader.
South Korean Coast Guard helicopter pilot John Lee is flying
a covert mission to insert a U.S. Navy SEAL team off the
coast of North Korea to perform a rescue mission when his
helicopter is shot down by a North Korean fighter. He barely
escapes with his life when the chopper ditches in the ocean, makes
it to land, and realises he is alone in North Korea without
any way to get home. He is eventually captured and taken to
a military camp where he is tortured to reveal information
about a rumoured UFO crash off the coast of Korea, about which
he knows nothing. He meets an enigmatic English-speaking
boy who some call the star-child.
Twenty years later, in New York City, physics student Jason Noh
encounters an enigmatic young Korean woman who claims to have just
arrived in the U.S. and is waiting for her father. Jason, given to
doodling arcane equations as his mind runs free, befriends her and
soon finds himself involved in a surrealistic sequence of events which
causes him to question everything he has come to believe about the
world and his place in it.
This an enthralling story which will have you scratching your
head at every twist and turn wondering where it's going and
how all of this is eventually going to make sense. It does,
with a thoroughly satisfying resolution. Regrettably, if I
say anything more about where the story goes, I'll risk spoiling
it by giving away one or more of the plot elements which the
reader discovers as the narrative progresses. I was delighted
to see an idea about the
nature of flying
saucers
I first wrote about in 1997 appear here, but please don't follow
that link until you've read the book as it too would spoil
a revelation which doesn't emerge until well into the story.
A Kindle edition is available. I
read a pre-publication manuscript edition which the author
kindly shared with me.
- Kurzweil, Ray.
How to Create a Mind.
New York: Penguin Books, 2012.
ISBN 978-0-14-312404-7.
-
We have heard so much about the exponential growth of computing power
available at constant cost that we sometimes overlook the fact that
this is just one of a number of exponentially compounding technologies
which are changing our world at an ever-accelerating pace. Many of
these technologies are interrelated: for example, the availability of
very fast computers and large storage has contributed to increasingly
making biology and medicine information sciences in the era of
genomics and
proteomics—the
cost of sequencing a human genome,
since the completion of the Human Genome Project, has fallen faster
than the increase of computer power.
Among these seemingly inexorably rising curves have been
the spatial and temporal resolution of the tools we use
to image and understand the structure of the brain.
So rapid has been the progress that most of the detailed
understanding of the brain dates from the last decade, and
new discoveries are arriving at such a rate that the author
had to make substantial revisions to the manuscript of this
book upon several occasions after it was already submitted
for publication.
The focus here is primarily upon the
neocortex,
a part of the brain which exists only in mammals and
is identified with “higher level thinking”:
learning from experience, logic, planning, and, in humans,
language and abstract reasoning. The older brain, which
mammals share with other species, is discussed in chapter 5,
but in mammals it is difficult to separate entirely from the
neocortex, because the latter has “infiltrated”
the old brain, wiring itself into its sensory and action
components, allowing the neocortex to process information
and override responses which are automatic in creatures such
as reptiles.
Not long ago, it was thought that the brain was a soup of
neurons connected in an intricately tangled manner, whose
function could not be understood without comprehending the
quadrillion connections in the neocortex alone, each with
its own weight to promote or inhibit the firing of a neuron.
Now, however, it appears, based upon
improved technology for observing the structure and operation
of the brain, that the fundamental unit in the brain is
not the neuron, but a module of around 100 neurons which
acts as a pattern recogniser. The internal structure of
these modules seems to be wired up from directions from
the genome, but the weights of the interconnections within
the module are adjusted as the module is trained based upon
the inputs presented to it. The individual pattern recognition
modules are wired both to pass information on matches to
higher level modules, and predictions back down to lower level
recognisers. For example, if you've seen the letters
“appl” and the next and final letter of the word
is a smudge, you'll have no trouble figuring out what the word
is. (I'm not suggesting the brain works literally like this,
just using this as an example to illustrate hierarchical
pattern recognition.)
Another important discovery is that the architecture of these
pattern recogniser modules is pretty much the same regardless
of where they appear in the neocortex, or what function
they perform. In a normal brain, there are distinct portions of
the neocortex associated with functions such as speech, vision,
complex motion sequencing, etc., and yet the physical structure
of these regions is nearly identical: only the weights
of the connections within the modules and the dyamically-adapted
wiring among them differs. This explains how patients recovering
from brain damage can re-purpose one part of the neocortex
to take over (within limits) for the portion lost.
Further, the neocortex is not the rat's nest of random connections
we recently thought it to be, but is instead hierarchically
structured with a topologically three dimensional “bus”
of pre-wired interconnections which can be used to make long-distance
links between regions.
Now, where this begins to get very interesting is when we
contemplate building machines with the capabilities of the
human brain. While emulating something at the level of neurons
might seem impossibly daunting, if you instead assume the building
block of the neocortex is on the order of 300 million more or less
identical pattern recognisers wired together at a high level in
a regular hierarchical manner, this is something we might be able
to think about doing, especially since the brain works almost
entirely in parallel, and one thing we've gotten
really good at in the last half century is making
lots and lots of tiny identical things. The implication
of this is that as we continue to delve deeper into the structure
of the brain and computing power continues to grow exponentially,
there will come a point in the foreseeable future where emulating
an entire human neocortex becomes feasible. This will permit
building a machine with human-level intelligence without translating
the mechanisms of the brain into those comparable to conventional
computer programming. The author predicts “this will first
take place in 2029 and become routine in the 2030s.”
Assuming the present exponential growth curves continue (and I
see no technological reason to believe they will not), the
2020s are going to be a very interesting decade. Just as
few people imagined five years ago that self-driving cars
were possible, while today most major auto manufacturers
have projects underway to bring them to market in the near future,
in the 2020s we will see the emergence of computational power
which is sufficient to “brute force” many problems
which were previously considered intractable. Just as search
engines and free encyclopedias have augmented our biological
minds, allowing us to answer questions which, a decade ago, would have
taken days in the library if we even bothered at all, the 300
million pattern recognisers in our
biological brains are on the threshold of having access to
billions more in the cloud, trained by interactions with
billions of humans and, perhaps eventually, many more artificial
intelligences. I am not talking here about implanting direct
data links into the brain or uploading human brains to
other computational substrates although both of these may
happen in time. Instead, imagine just being able to ask a
question in natural language and get an answer to it based upon
a deep understanding of all of human knowledge. If you think this
is crazy, reflect upon how exponential growth works or imagine
travelling back in time and giving a demo of Google or Wolfram
Alpha to yourself in 1990.
Ray Kurzweil,
after pioneering inventions in music synthesis, optical
character recognition, text to speech conversion, and
speech recognition, is now a director of engineering at Google.
In the Kindle edition, the index cites
page numbers in the print edition to which the reader can
turn since the electronic edition includes real page numbers.
Index items are not, however, directly linked to the text
cited.
- Bracken, Matthew.
Castigo Cay.
Orange Park, FL: Steelcutter Publishing, 2011.
ISBN 978-0-9728310-4-8.
-
Dan Kilmer wasn't cut out to be a college man. Disappointing
his father, after high school he enlisted in the Marine Corps,
becoming a sniper who, in multiple tours in the sandbox, had
sent numerous murderous miscreants to their reward. Upon
leaving the service, he found that the skills he had acquired
had little value in the civilian world. After a disastrous
semester trying to adjust to college life, he went to work
for his rich uncle, who had retired and was refurbishing a
sixty foot steel hulled schooner with a dream of cruising the
world and escaping the deteriorating economy and increasing
tyranny of the United States. Fate intervened, and after
his uncle's death Dan found himself owner and skipper of
the now seaworthy craft.
Some time later, Kilmer is cruising the Caribbean with his
Venezuelan girlfriend Cori Vargas and crew members Tran Hung
and Victor Aleman. The schooner Rebel Yell is
hauled out for scraping off barnacles while waiting for a
treasure hunting gig which Kilmer fears may not come off,
leaving him desperately short of funds. Cori desperately
wants to get to Miami, where she believes she can turn her looks
and charm into a broadcast career. Impatient, she jumps
ship and departs on the mega-yacht Topaz, owned
by shadowy green energy crony capitalist Richard Prechter.
After her departure, another yatero
informs Dan that Prechter has a dark reputation and that there
are rumours of other women who boarded his yacht disappearing
under suspicious circumstances. Kilmer made a solemn promise
to Cori's father that he would protect her, and he takes his
promises very seriously, so he undertakes to track Prechter to
a decadent and totalitarian Florida, and then pursue him to
Castigo Cay in the Bahamas where a horrible fate awaits Cori.
Kilmer, captured in a desperate rescue attempt, has little
other than his wits to confront Prechter and his armed
crew as time runs out for Cori and another woman abducted by
Prechter.
While set in a future in which the United States has continued
to spiral down into a third world stratified authoritarian
state, this is not a “big picture” tale like
the author's Enemies trilogy
(1, 2, 3). Instead,
it is a story related in close-up, told in the first person,
by an honourable and resourceful protagonist with few
material resources pitted against the kind of depraved sociopath
who flourishes as states devolve into looting and enslavement
of their people.
This is a thriller that works, and the description of the
culture shock that awaits one who left the U.S. when it
was still semi-free and returns, even covertly, today
will resonate with those who got out while they could.
Extended
excerpts
of this and the author's other novels are available online at the
author's Web site.