Saturday Morning Science 009

Is Grey Goo the New Yellow Peril or Just Another Red Dawn?– Future, how I fear thee, let me count the ways. Long before one succumbs to future shock there is future anxiety. To the best of our knowledge we are the only species on the planet that builds fallout shelters, frets about asteroid collisions and establishes religions that posit an end to the world. If you are waiting for some ethologist to post “Apocalyptic Cultism Among Ring Tailed Lemurs”  you are going to wait a long time and either run out of time or lemurs. The situation is worse in the case of  dust mites. Those guys just don’t get it. Face it, we’re the only one’s who really care. The sun could bloat to the size of a red giant and the lillies of the field will neither toil, spin or notice the change except to shrivel just prior to total combustion. We are the animal that worries about things that Nature doesn’t think about.

My friend Patrick loves to worry about the future; runaway nanotech, artificial black holes, resurrected dinosaurs, you name it, he rails, an unhonoured prophet before these future demons. I’ll admit it. I do try to goad him. Send him a YouTube link on self repairing robots and he’s off on a high energy screed about our immanent doom. Last week I sent him; First image of protein residue in 50 million year old reptile skin. Okay it’s just a reptile, it’s 116 million years shy of the Jurassic and it’s just an image of the proteins not a DNA sample but  you can see where I was going. I expected to have Patrick conjuring the clatter of Velociraptor hunting packs cruising down urban alleys or the swish and flap of pterodactyl wings just before they snatch a hapless toddler from the playground; but no.  Instead, I get:

“…the obvious, critical application is of course the Louis Vuitton “Paleocene Clutch”: retail $83,400, available in borealosuchus blue, palaeotrionyx pink and titanoboa teal. beyond that, I can’t see much value…”.

Someone was learned to stop worrying and love the inevitable. For those of you who haven’t reached this blessed state and feel the need to band with other like minded souls this week’s instalment  will focus on a group of people working towards a survivable future. Now, I’ll spare you the usual stuff, to properly do justice to a group like say, Greenpeace, would take serious amounts of time and a level of journalistic honesty that this column can’t sustain. This is Saturday Morning Science and certain groups are just too respectable and not sufficiently daft or cool.  Likewise we won’t look at any 2012 prophecy cults; there is no future for people who can’t figure out how a circular calendar works. So what does that leave us? Nothing short of everything, of course.

Mankind Overboard! It doesn’t happen very often but when it does you remember it. You’re surfing the net, and I mean surfing, not clicking through StumbleOn or hitting on Wikipedia links. I’m talking genuinely lost in the web and not caring how many 404 pages you land on. Then it happens, you come across a site that is so out there that you think,”This has to be a put on. This is somebody’s meta-critical-web-based-art project. Are these guys serious?” For me it was  almost a decade ago when I came across Evident Technologies: a company that makes quantum dots. Their current website is just typical high tech marketing, posed shots of pretty girls in lab coats, a earnest looking male model determinedly staring at the colour co-ordinated contents of a lab flask, and a hopelessly full of it company motto; The Future is Evident. Worth a look for a few random giggles but not what I encountered all of those years ago. This week I came pretty close to getting that buzz again when I checked out the website of:

The Lifeboat Foundation. First you get the fundraising page. This is a zero foreplay operation. A naked plea for money right off the top and an immediate listing of who are the top donors and what projects are getting how much. And the projects? There is the story. Their terminology is interesting. All of the following are termed as “existential risks”. Back in my day an existential risk was; living one’s life according to rules that were inauthentic to one’s being, subordinating oneself to authority and aiding in the oppression of others, nausea, ennui, angst and crashing your sports car in the South of France. As you will see, our transhuman future appears to register nothing short of the apocalypse as an existential risk:

AI Shield- Where are Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics for our Singularity bound Artificial General Intelligences? These folks want to make it so that when HAL 9000 finally gets passed the stage where the phrase, “the door is ajar” no longer problem, the command “open the pod bay door” is also not a problem. Achtung! Baby Stage Computer Overlord (I’m talking to you, Google and you too Quiz Master Watson)…Daddy is Home.

Asteroid Shield- Do I have to explain this one? Even Jerry Bruckheimer knows about this one.

BioShield- This is where Michael Creighton page turners and the next episode of Fringe come to a halt. There is a serious point here in that the possibilities of unintended consequences resulting from biological research are just too great and the methods for identifying and containing artificially induced biohazards are very poorly implemented at present. Maybe these guys are on to something.

Nano Sheild-  Now did you know that:

an ecophage that internally employed mechanosynthetic tooltips possessing Ge-C bonds might be disabled by exposure to 21 THz infrared radiation, the approximate resonant stretching frequency of the Ge-C dimer bond. Similarly, exposure to GHz microwaves might pump unplanned energy into purely mechanical components of nanorobots such as the logic rods in mechanical nanocomputers operating at GHz frequencies, thus permanently damaging them, if these moving components incorporate any unbalanced electrical charge or conductive pathways in their molecular structure.

I just had to share that. There is a grand pulpy poetry to tech talk that could almost rival Milton for its range and audacity. Think of it as your own personal shotgun/cricket bat with which to stave off the shuffling zombie hordes (the dreaded SZH’s ). But seriously, think of it. We are moving into areas in the physical world where the unscrupulous and the profit driven could make big, quick cash by building nanotechnology based weaponry. The Lifeboat Foundation isn’t just a bunch of tin foil hatted conspiracy loons. Check them out, BS meter in hand and mind opened.  Their list goes on; anti-matter research, black holes, solar disturbances, even the old standby: the aliens. The Lifeboat Foundation takes itself very seriously even if their videos are totally naff. At a certain level even the sceptic in me is moved by their Wal-Mart approach to our various collective, probable doomsdays.  Trust me, short of tooling around the south of France in a sports car poking through the Foundation’s links could be the most fun you have this winter afternoon.

Thanks to Morgan Meis at 3 Quarks Daily for posting an article about the Foundation that appeared in The Walrus.