Careless futurism and amateur science fiction
Like many internet savvy Americans I've long been a fan of science fiction. For the last few years I've been writing short stories and scenario snippets based on my readings of nanotechnology, futurists and assorted others which I'm calling "The Glassman Anthologies" I hope to have the collection on the web before summer is out.
Today my futurism thinking is centered on terraforming Mars. There's been a lot of work about thickening the atmosphere of Mars with chloroflourcarbons, melting the polar ice caps, installing domes and releasing CO2 from frozen reserves. But these plans overlook one of the biggest issues causing the martian atmosphere to be degenerate from the point of view of earth life. This is the lack of a powerful magnetosphere. Much of Mars' atmosphere is lost to scouring by the solar winds.
To prevent this it would be necessary to install both synchronous orbiting magnetic field generators and to locate nuclear powered magnetic field generators on the surface near any residual magnetic domains preferably near the poles.
This would allow gases to accumulate more readily in the atmosphere as well as reduce harmful particle flux from the sun.
My other terraforming ideas involve an enormous freznel lens made of thin film placed in a parallel orbit to mars that would focus sunlight near the equator of the planet. This could actually be a narrow ring with a diameter greater than the planet thus not blocking light to any other part of the planet. A similar parallel orbit scheme could be used to place a gigantic shade cloth between the sun and Venus thus dropping the temp of Venus. But there's the whole solar wind pressure problem to deal with there. Still working on that...
Here are 2 articles at azonano.com that seem to be diametrically opposed on the subject of the safety of buckyballs and other nanoparticles in the ecosystems.
This one says little or no toxic effects.This one assumes toxicity.Notice the difference in phrasing. The first article points directly to researchers who clearly state a case. The second article says
there are reports that these aggregates can be toxic
without any actual supporting documentation or citation. This is common behavior for alarmists and spin doctors.
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Been enjoying the pugnacious and perspicacious writings of Melanie Swan over at Broader Perspectives. Is she humanoform or is she a digital descendant? How far has her avatar evolved? Only time and reflection will tell.
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MIT's Technology Review has a fascinating article about Krishna Palem's development of probabilistic electronics. This looks especially interesting for artificial intelligence software.
I wrote my first ELIZA program and cellular automata when I was in high school and later moved on to fuzzy sets and neural nets so I can tell you for sure that a probabilistic design scheme like the one described in this article holds out great promise in all these AI arenas.
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The sky is falling again. I always have to laugh at articles like this. It's pretty much just a list of unsupported accusations. Lots of mights and maybes made to sound like "absolutely and for sure" but then never a single specific to detail any true threat. Where is the list of exact agents and products?
Look for the individual agenda of one group or another trying to position itself to increase its political power and social persuasion when facts aren't readily available.
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Fred Friendly has made some really thought provoking programs over the years which I have almost always enjoyed. And this one looks pretty good too, called "Power of Small" it presents many of the current discussion points surrounding nanotechnology. I will keep an open mind until the full series begins in April but I must say I am concerned by hearing many of the misleading and alarmist statements that are facetiously batted around the web in shallow science and tech news articles. Check it out for yourself ( a short preview is available at the link)
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One of the most egregious examples of nano-paranoia I've ever read, the LA Times article "An unprecedented ability to harm" by George Kimbrell is composed of unsupported statements and sourceless references. All the usual lies, distortions and misunderstandings. He even stole my line "The new asbestos" from a year ago. According to Mr. Kimbrell, all that is unknown will most certainly kill us all with even the slightest brush. And of course industry can never be trusted to act responsibly and only the government can save us from the evil nanotech overlords.
A tour-de-farce of propaganda and fear mongering, when will the old media outlets quit poisoning the data stream with their agenda driven spin-doctoring?
Aatish Salvi does a passable job of countering these claims in his answering article "Fake fears shouldn't stop progress" but I sense in this an attempt by the LA Times to engineer plausible deniability. Aatish could do a better job of pointing out that many of the issues George raises are either out-right lies or are based on poorly designed experiments.
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A pretty good blog there. Heavy on the science which my brain finds delicious.
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