LongTomH

LongTomH's Journal

November 28, 2012

I have some problems with the idea of 'uploading' my 'consciousness' into a computer.....

Start with Douglas Hofstadter's deconstruction of the Star Trek Transporter: His analysis of the transporter is, that it essentially destroys the person who steps into one end and builds a duplicate at the other end. That person thinks he is the original, he has all the original's memories.

But, to carry the thought experiment a step further: Imagine a transporter that doesn't destroy the original; but still transmits the information to build a duplicate. Now you have two people, each of whom believes he is the original.

Hofstadter's premise is that, in the first example, the person being 'transported' dies. Assume you're the person in the transporter beam: the lights go out, your experience ends. Another person starts living who thinks he's you; but, that's literally cold comfort, since you, the experienced you, no longer exists.

I used this analogy to argue against the idea of uploading at a function for the Foresight Institute, which was originally formed for discussion Eric Drexler's ideas on nanotechnology. I argued with a group of 'singulatarians' who very much into the idea. I used Hofstadter's analogy of the transporter to explain that, as far as I can see: If I upload my memories into a computer, that just creates a virtual model of me. If the process destroys the original, then the lights go out for me, fade to black, I'm dead. If the process doesn't destroy the original, then the original 'me' is still 'me,' no matter what the 'other guy' thinks.

To quote Robert A. Heinlein: "I know who I am; but, who are all you zombies?"

As for the idea of a singularity, count me among the skeptics. There are a number of other people skeptical of the idea, including my favorite science fiction writer: Kim Stanley Robinson. In an interview with Wired magazine, Robinson took on the idea of the singularity, among other possibilities for the future:

Robinson: I think it’s a misunderstanding of the brain and of computers, in effect. We are underestimating how complex the brain is and how little we understand it, and we’re overestimating how much computers might have a will or intention. I think the intention will always stay with us, and the machines will be search engines and adding machines — enormously powerful and fast binary, digital things — but they’re not going to do the singularity as I understand it, this notion that machines will take off on their own and leave us behind.

I think it’s some of this what I call MIT-style public relations “futurology,” which is just lame science fiction, where people are asserting that it’s really going to come true. And as a science fiction writer, I find that a little bit offensive, because nobody knows what’s really going to come true, and people who declare it is are instantly putting themselves in the fraud category. They’re claiming more than they can.

Now, to come back to the singularity, I think what’s useful in it is the idea of it as a metaphor; it’s a science fiction metaphor, and even if it will never come true in a literal sense, it might be a good way of talking about the way things feel already. So that I’ve been saying, “Yeah, the singularity, if it ever is going to happen, it actually happened back in 2008, with the financial crash.” Because what happened there, nobody quite understands, and it was a really super-complex system that involves computers, algorithms, laws, habits and traditions, and all of them combined on a global financial system that no one person understood or controlled. So that’s almost like the singularity. Our financial system has actually blown up in our face, and none of us understand it, and yet it does control the world.

If you read much Kim Stanley Robinson, you'll soon see that social justice, as well as ecological themes are major themes in his work. This continues in his latest work 2312, set in a future where human beings are spread across the solar system. The economic system for the autonomous space colonies is called The Mondragon Accord:

Wired: You call this system “the Mondragon Accord.” Is that based on something real?

Robinson: Yes, in the Basque part of Spain there’s a town called Mondragon that runs as a system of nested co-ops — including the bank, which is simply a credit union owned by everybody. So it’s a town of only 50 to 100,000 and they’re all Basques — more or less — and they don’t intend to leave the city, so there are reasons why capitalist economists want to say that it can’t possibly work for all the rest of us, but I’m not so sure. And what I wanted to do is scale it up, and show a Mondragon-style system working amongst all the space colonies in one giant collective of cooperatives.

Read the rest of the interview here: http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/06/geeks-guide-kim-stanley-robinson/all/

November 17, 2012

50 Years of NASA's budget vs. 1 year of Pentagon spending

From The Sagan Series Facebook page

November 15, 2012

Can Elon Musk and SpaceX change the rocket equation and make spaceflight routine?

From the Smithsonian Institute's Air & Space mag online: Is SpaceX changing the rocket equation?

The saga of entrepreneur Elon Musk's attempt to bring down the cost of putting stuff into space actually started with his long-term ambition: Making human beings a multi-planet species. Musk wanted to put a small greenhouse with some seeds and plant-food gel on the surface of Mars. He found contractors who would build a lander for a reasonable cost; but, the cost of launching it to the red planet was prohibitive, whether he was talking to US rocket companies or the Russians.

So, in 2002: "....... enlisting a handful of veteran space engineers, Musk formed Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, with two staggeringly ambitious goals: To make spaceflight routine and affordable, and to make humans a multi-planet species." The key to all this is holding down the cost of launches:

But what really sets SpaceX apart, and has made it a magnet for controversy, are its prices: As advertised on the company’s Web site, a Falcon 9 launch costs an average of $57 million, which works out to less than $2,500 per pound to orbit. That’s significantly less than what other U.S. launch companies typically charge, and even the manufacturer of China’s low-cost Long March rocket (which the U.S. has banned importing) says it cannot beat SpaceX’s pricing. By 2014, the company’s next rocket, the Falcon Heavy, aims to lower the cost to $1,000 per pound. And Musk insists that’s just the beginning. “Our performance will increase and our prices will decline over time,” he writes on SpaceX’s Web site, “as is the case with every other technology.”

Bringing down the cost required a departure from the usual big aerospace way of doing things:

......prices are expected to rise significantly in the next few years, according to defense department officials. Why? Musk says a lot of the answer is in the government’s traditional “cost-plus” contracting system, which ensures that manufacturers make a profit even if they exceed their advertised prices. “If you were sitting at an executive meeting at Boeing and Lockheed and you came up with some brilliant idea to reduce the cost of Atlas or Delta, you’d be fired,” he says. “Because you’ve got to go report to your shareholders why you made less money. So their incentive is to maximize the cost of a vehicle, right up to the threshold of cancellation.”

SpaceX's design philosophy emphasized both innovation and simplicity in design, like the decision to use the same low-cost Merlin engines in all stages of their vehicles. Another secret is an organizational style at odds with traditional aerospace:

But as for SpaceX’s organizational style, it’s Silicon Valley, not NASA, that had the most influence. In Hawthorne, where everyone including Musk works in cubicles instead of offices to encourage communication, the buzzwords of the business culture—lean manufacturing, vertical integration, flat management—are real and fundamental. Says former SpaceX business development director Max Vozoff, “This really is the greatest innovation of SpaceX: It’s bringing the standard practices of every other industry to space.” Having almost all of SpaceX’s engineers under one roof means the process of designing, testing, and improving is greatly streamlined. One NASA manager who visited SpaceX quips that when there is a new problem to solve, “it looks like a flash mob” in the hallway.

I got a look inside the traditional NASA/big aerospace way of doing things on a field trip to the Marshall Space Flight Center at Huntsville, AL during an International Space Development Conference back in the 90s. One of our guides talked about problems with getting International Space Station contractors together for a meeting. You see, to build support for the ISS, congressional supporters had to provide contracts, and therefore jobs, in the home districts of as many supporters as possible. Which meant that NASA had to rent a large auditorium or even a stadium, for a meeting of contractors.

Add in the fact that decisions on design were often made to provide contracts to companies with powerful supporters in Congress, rather than for engineering reasons. Why do you think solid rockets were chosen for the space shuttle boosters despite their safety hazards? Some NASA engineers resigned when they learned that solids were to be used on a crew-carrying vehicle. Read Richard Feynman's comments in the appendix of the Rogers Commission on the Challenger Disaster, especially the paragraphs on solid rockets. Supporters of the solid-fuel rocket company Morton-Thiokol (now ATK Launch System Group) were able to influence NASA to use solids in return for their support for the space shuttle, which was in danger of cancellation several times during the 1970s.

Morton-Thiokol/ATK's supporters were able to successfully resist attempts to replace the SRB's with liquid-fuel boosters after the Challenger tragedy. That same group of powerful congressmen are the major reason that every launcher concept proposed by NASA has used or even been based on a variant of the shuttle's SRB's. That includes the cancelled Ares rocket based on a 'single-stick' version of the shuttle SRB's. A number of aerospace commentators have said that, if the Ares was carrying a crewed Orion space capsule, the crew would have little chance of survival, even with an Apollo-style launch escape system.

All the above, and more, are why a number of space program supporters, including progressives like myself, were happy when President Obama decided to rely on private launch companies like SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corporation for International Space Station resupply. I would also like to see SpaceX and Orbital Sciences be allowed to bid on contracts for launchers and capsules for future deep-space missions to the lunar L2 point, asteroids and eventually Mars.

NASA does many things very well, as demonstrated by the Curiosity rover mission to Mars, the Kepler planet-finding space telescope and other missions; but, in developing vehicles it's been handicapped by having to work with big aerospace as well as being micro-managed by Congress.

For more information, go to SpaceX's webpage and its Facebook page.

BTW this post is partly in response to a (hopefully) friendly debate with DU colleague Bananas on why I don't support the proposed Space Launch System, and why I'm a supporter of SpaceX's Falcon 9 Heavy. SpaceX has proposed follow-on heavy-lift launchers in the Saturn V class.

Also BTW, we may not necessarily need Saturn-class heavy lift to do manned deep space exploration; but, that's another post.

Profile Information

Member since: Wed Oct 13, 2004, 05:42 PM
Number of posts: 8,636