Future Shock

If you have a free hour or ten, check out some of the learned, mind expanding answers to this year’s edge.org question, which is “What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?”

I am going to try and cover some of the more interesting responses over the next few days. I’ll start with John Gottman’s anticipation of earthlike colonies: 

 

The technological changes were small at first. In 2007 a telescope was developed that could search for planets in the Milky Way within 100 light years of Earth. The next version of the telescope in 2008 did not have to block out the light of the new star to see the planets. It could directly see the reflected light of the planets closest to every star. That made it possible to do spectroscopic analysis of reflected light and search for blue planets like Earth. Within a decade, 100 Earth-like planets had been identified within 100 light years. In the next two centuries that number increased to 50,000 blue planets.

Within the next two centuries the seemingly impossible technical problems of space travel began to be solved. Problems of foil sails were solved. Designs emerged for ships that could get up to 85% of the speed of light within 2 years, using acceleration from starts and from harnessing the creative energy of empty space itself. The Moon, Europa and Mars were colonized. Terra-forming technologies developed. Many designs emerged for the spinning complete 2-mile Earth-habitat ship that produced a 1-g environment. Thousands of people wanted to make the trips.

Darwin and Crime

The Economist has a piece about how the study of evolution can be useful to policymakers. I’m unqualified to opine on that however the article did contain some fascinating bits of research:

That murderers are usually young men is well known, but Dr Daly and Dr Wilson dug a bit deeper. They discovered that although the murder rate varies from place to place, the pattern does not. Plot the rate against the age of the perpetrator and the peak is the same (see chart). Moreover, the pattern of the victims is similar. They, too, are mostly young men. In the original study, 86% of the victims of male killers aged between 15 and 19 were also male. This is the clue as to what is going on. Most violence (and thus most murder, which is simply violence’s most extreme expression) is a consequence of competition between young, unemployed, unmarried men. In the view of Darwinists, these men are either competing for women directly (“You looking at my girl, Jimmy?”) or competing for status (“You dissing me, man?”).

Research also shows why capital punishment may be ineffective as a deterrent against murder. If murder is indeed motivated by reproductive competition, you could conclude that capital punishment is ineffective because it presents the same risk of reproductive failure which motivated the crime in the first place.

Then there’s this, on rape:

Transferable Skills

The NYT has a piece on laid off bankers chasing literary/creative dreams:

With Wall Street hemorrhaging jobs, bonuses disappearing and the financial sector going through a seismic shift, some bankers and lawyers are switching lanes to more creative career paths. They are putting down their Wall Street Journals and picking up Variety as they try their hands at comedy, filmmaking and writing. “The economy couldn’t survive on speculation and what really amounted to advanced financial alchemy,” he said. “We are now realizing it is our human creativity that is our real capital. 

“The economic downturn is going to free up top talent to do other things that are going to change the metabolism of cities like New York in a very good way.”

Not so fast:

Still, Jonathan Bowles, director of the Center for an Urban Future, says that while there is no question that creative fields are not faring as badly as Wall Street right now, they are hardly immune to the economic downturn. The advertising, publishing and newspaper industries are all cutting jobs, he noted.

 

 

Green, Not-So-Green

TreeHugger reports on a new shoebox made from 100% recycled material:

Pretty cool, but, the real question is: How will this affect the  manufacture of gradeschool dioramas?

Also, just in case that story tempted you into indulging in any optimism about the green revolution, there’s this report in the NYT about an artificial beach currently under development in Dubai which will feature air conditioned sand. Yep. Air conditioned sand. That has to be the energy equivalent of burning hundred dollar bills in a fireplace, right?

Ancient Oceans

New research on the state of the earth 2.5 billion years ago:

Just 2% to 3% of the Earth’s surface would have been dry land, compared with 28% today. Back then life consisted of nothing more complex than algae and bacteria. The Australian scientists who produced the new computer simulation believe that billions of years ago the Earth’s deep mantle was 200C hotter than it is today. A hotter mantle would have thickened and buoyed up the Earth’s crust beneath the oceans, creating shallower basins and leading to the flooding of what is now land. The continental crust would also have spread, making it lower and flatter and more vulnerable to floods. New Scientist magazine reported: “As the mantle cooled, land would have gradually appeared as the oceans became deeper and regions of high relief on the continental crust formed.” The transition may help explain why oxygen levels in the atmosphere rose at this time in the Earth’s history, say the researchers led by Dr Nicolas Flament from the University of Sydney.

Depressing News: Commercial Spaceflight

Leonard David at SPACE on how the economic downturn is expected to affect prospects for commercial spaceflight:

But one big issue looms for NewSpace next year, said Jeff Foust, an aerospace analyst, journalist and publisher, as well as editor and publisher of the respected website, The Space Review. And that topic of trepidation is the state of the economy.

“This is going to affect companies in the industry in two ways.  One, it’s going to make it that much more difficult for companies to raise the money needed to develop their vehicles,” Foust told SPACE.com. ”It won’t directly affect companies that are already self-funded or otherwise fully-funded – like Virgin Galactic, SpaceX, Armadillo Aerospace, Bigelow Aerospace, etc. – but those  companies trying to raise tens of millions of dollars or more  to carry out their business plans will find that steep path to funding  has become even steeper.

Foust also noted another impact tied to the rocky economy – a potential reduction in customer demand, particularly in space tourism. A whiplash from the continuation of a deep recession in 2009, he said, may well be people reconsidering tossing out $95,000 to $200,000 or more for suborbital jaunts, or putting the trip off a few years – to a time when, presumably, the economy recovers.

The silver lining:

“During 2009, entrepreneurial space companies will continue working on their propulsion systems, airframes, and all the other components necessary for successful access to space,” Greason explained. “So we will see engine tests, other subsystem tests, and progress on vehicle construction and system integration.”

But given all that activity, Greason added: “We’re unlikely to see any new systems enter service in 2009. People should not find this disappointing. This is the hard work that is necessary to make affordable spaceflight a reality, and it will lead to first flights in 2010.”

Spotlighting that next year will likely become the “tipping” point in the emerging personal space flight industry is Stuart Witt, general manager of Mojave Air and Space Port in California. Witt’s end of the year message is straightforward: The industry has an opportunity to expand to many locations across the nation if operators are successful at Mojave.

Here’s a bonus link for the space obsessed.

Sigh.

Ezra Klein acheives a remarkable (and sad) coherence on this week’s misadventures in the Gaza strip:

The point is simple: You can argue, as Israel is arguing, that their air strikes are a response to Hamas’s missiles. But to the Palestinians, Hamas’s missiles were a response to the blockade (under international law, a blockade is indeed an act of war). Israel, of course, would argue that the blockade was a response to Hamas’s past attacks. And Hamas would argue that past attacks were a response to Israel’s unceasing oppression of the Palestinian people. And Israel would argue that…

The provocations and cassus belli travel as far back as anyone might care to trace. And whether you believe Israel, the Palestinians, or the international partitioners originally at fault, starting the clock on December 10th, when the ceasefire expired and Hamas’s missiles crashed into the fields around Sderot, is merely an Israeli press strategy. This is the latest tactic in an ongoing struggle over land and freedom and security and money and politics and religion and elections and oppression. It did not begin with the rockets, and it will not end with this attack.

Depressing News: Boredom Aids Learning

Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias has a post on some new cognitive  learning research which contains (for me) some counterintuitive results:

In Experiment 1, students received an illustrated booklet, PowerPoint presentation, or narrated animation that explained 6 steps in how a cold virus infects the human body. The material included 6 high-interest details mainly about the role of viruses in sex or death (high group) or 6 low-interest details consisting of facts and health tips about viruses (low group). The low group outperformed the high group across all 3 media on a subsequent test of problem-solving transfer (d = .80) but not retention (d = .05). In Experiment 2, students who studied a PowerPoint lesson explaining the steps in how digestion works performed better on a problem-solving transfer test if the lesson contained 7 low-interest details rather than 7 high-interest details (d = .86), but the groups did not differ on retention (d = .26). In both experiments, as the interestingness of details was increased, student understanding decreased (as measured by transfer). Results are consistent with a cognitive theory of multimedia learning, in which highly interesting details sap processing capacity away from deeper cognitive processing of the core material during learning.

If this is borne out by other research it certainly has some far reaching consequences for how we think about classroom teaching in general. We’ve been raised in a paradigm which values the “interesting” teacher who “brings the material alive” with unexpected or fascinating details. Perhaps at some point in the future we’ll see a renaissance of dry, Ben Stein styled lecturers.

(Let’s hope not)

Walkable Urbanism

Matthew Yglesias has a smart post on “walkable urbanism” as distinguished from “living in a city”. The thrust is basically that the benefits of urban living (a walking lifestyle, conveniently located retail and restaurants, etc.) don’t necessarily have to occur within today’s major cities. With tweaks in building patterns citylife can be brought to suburbs and small towns. One example:

I think trying to build housing in shopping malls is a potentially promising idea.

My sense is that housing would change the malls in important, beneficial ways also. There would probably be an increase in restaurants and other small shops which appealed to the everyday needs of residents. Those tenants would likewise help the malls to survive downturns (like one we’re currently in) when spending on purely consumer goods plummets radically. I could see mall housing being particularly attractive to community college students who could work and live in the same structure while also experiencing a taste of the citylife their away-at-school friends are enjoying.

Roots of Evil

We’re all familiar with the unpleasant consequences of dehumanization (torture and genocide come to mind). Dehumanization is actually surprising given the natural built in mechanisms human beings have for empathy. Harvey Whitehouse at Cognition and Culture highlights some of the new conclusions about what kinds of thinking produce it:

Some researchers have begun to investigate non-empathetic ways of reasoning about other agents. For instance, speciation (the tendency to classify our fellow humans as if they were natural kinds with essentialized heritable qualities) may be necessary for various types of reflective ideas about human types, such as racial categorizing or attribution of charisma or religious specialization (witches, shamans etc. who are thought to be inherently different from other people). Or to take another example, teleological reasoning(the tendency to view our fellow humans as instruments with specialized functions, just like tools and weapons) seems to be entailed in certain types of strategic decision-making (e.g. the idea that foot soldiers can serve as cannon fodder in a strategic advance or that civilians can serve as a human shield).

The Self as Cartoon

Jonathan Franzen quoting Scott McCloud:

Scott McCloud, in his cartoon treatise Understanding Comics, argues that the image you have of yourself when you’re conversing is very different from your image of the person you’re conversing with. Your interlocutor may produce universal smiles and universal frowns, and they may help you to identify with him emotionally, but he also has a particular nose and particular skin and particular hair that continually remind you that he’s an Other. The image you have of your own face, by contrast, is highly cartoonish. When you feel yourself smile, you imagine a cartoon of smiling, not the complete skin-and-and-hair package. It’s precisely the simplicity and universality of cartoon faces, the absence of Otherly particulars, that invite us to love them as we love ourselves. The most widely loved (and profitable) faces in the modern world tend to be exceptionally basic and abstract cartoons: Mickey Mouse, the Simpsons, Tintin, and – simplest of all, barely more than a circle, two dots, and a horizontal line – Charlie Brown.

Man as Titanic Passenger

Kip at Overcoming Bias has a post entitled The Meta-Human Condition in which he lists the supposedly bleak facts of human existence (our fate is to a large degree determined, we will die, there is no afterlife, the universe is mostly empty, humans may not survive this century, etc).  He draws an interesting paralell between humanity and the Titanic: 

I’ll end with an analogy for the Meta-Human Condition and the Human Condition: the Titanic.  If we are all in the same boat, it is sinking.  The story of the Titanic squeezes the entirety of a human life into a single night. That, perhaps, is part of the story’s appeal.  Everyone can relate to the poor souls trapped that boat.  Those people were alone in the ocean, destined to die, just as we appear alone in our universe, destined to die.

Suppose you’re on the Titanic.  Now consider the hard question.  Suppose you know that, in this alternative world, everyone dies.  There are no life rafts.  When you tell people about the iceberg, they don’t believe you.  “Hit an iceberg?  You have quite an imagination, young man.  Please.  Have a cigar and sip some cognac.  This ship has a fine captain.  He is in perfect control and will keep us safe.”

Do you persist in trying to convince them of the horror of the situation?  Or do you take the cigar and cognac, dance with a beautiful woman, and sing a grand old song, at least for another hour or two?

Future Food

Homaru Cantu on the next revolution in food:

We’ve been trying to incorporate food from the green world, and started growing microalgae. You can get 10,000 to 30,000 gallons of algae per acre. It can be grown in salt or fresh water, in a whole variety of temperatures. It increases the food supply rather than depleting it, and it’s a net energy gain. For $300 we built a photobioreactor that produced 15 gallons of food per month. The idea was to take algae, process it into sushi and fuel, and deliver it it in a truck running on algae biofuel. And we’re just a bunch of chefs. If we can figure this out, I don’t know why others can’t. Algae is the perfect food plant. It doubles cell mass every twelve hours, depending on the strain. The Japanese have a long lifespan in part because they eat different forms of algae.

 

Spouse as Big Brother

This article in WIRED tackles the way YouTube and other technologies fundamentally alter the way we think and create. It makes some interesting points:

What’s happening to video is like what happened to word processing. Back in the ’70s and early ’80s, publishing was a rarefied, expert job. Then Apple’s WYSIWYG interface made it drop-dead easy, enabling an explosion of weird new forms of micropublishing and zines. Laptop audio editing did the same thing, giving birth to the mashup and cut-and-paste subgenres of music. Then there’s photo manipulation, once a rarefied propaganda technique. Photoshop made it a folk art. Marshall McLuhan pointed out that whenever we get our hands on a new medium we tend to use it like older ones. Early TV broadcasts consisted of guys sitting around reading radio scripts because nobody had realized yet that TV could tell stories differently. It’s the same with much of today’s webcam video; most people still try to emulate TV and film. A bigger leap will occur when we get better tools for archiving and searching video. Then we’ll start using it the way we use paper or word processing: to take notes or mull over a problem, like Tom Cruise flipping through scenes at the beginning of Minority Report. 

All that is true and fascinating, but then there’s this:

Hawks Against the Draft

In a post about teaching quality Matt Yglesias from CAP discusses military personnel quality: 

In the aftermath of the Vietnam War there was a very low level of interest in joining the United States military and consequently in order to maintain the required overall force size it was necessary to make recruiting standards quite low and to be pretty lax about who you would keep on. The rebuilding of the quality of the personnel employed by the military over the course of the 1980s and 1990s is one of the great prides of the officers who were involved. And when the Iraq War was leading to a personnel crunch and moves toward diluting recruiting standards there was, rightly, a great deal of hand-wringing over it. Concern about personnel quality is also one of, if not the, main reason why the military brass is generally very hostile to the idea of conscription and this is also why we’ve encouraged our NATO allies to abolish conscript and build smaller, higher-quality, more professionalized forces.

The Sidewalk as Laboratory

Jonah Lehrer on cities and innovation:

While certain institutions can foster innovation, the scientists are quick to point out that the innovative abilities of cities are ultimately rooted in the one thing that every city has in common: lots of human interaction. “Cities concentrate our social interactions,” Bettencourt says, “and that’s what leads to this explosion in knowledge creation and innovation.”Perhaps significantly, the metropolises of the future of fast growing desert communities like Phoenix and Las Vegas don’t generate this kind of human friction. They work by minimizing our dealings with other people. These rapidly growing cities are really collections of suburbs, in which density gives way to single-family homes and air-conditioned garages. The sidewalks are empty; the commuters commute alone. But unless these new cities find ways to make their citizens interact to create public spaces that people want to share they might not generate the conditions that allow them to continue their rapid growth. The equations imply that a city without concentrated human contact is destined to stall and wither, since it won’t be able to innovate at the necessary rate. Urban growth without urban density is unsustainable.

The Coming Plague of Bad Drivers

The Economist on the coming age of the elderly:

Thanks to a combination of growing longevity and falling birth rates, the average age of populations, first in the world’s rich countries and, after a time lag, in emerging nations too, has been rising inexorably. By 2050 the world will have about 2 billion people aged over 60, three times as many as today. In parts of the rich world, mainly Japan and western Europe, that age group already makes up nearly a quarter of the population. By 2050 their share will rise to 30-40%, and even in the—much younger—developing world it will go up to 25-30%.

Why is this scary?

Technology and Archaeology

Heather Pringle at Archaeology has this bit on the Shroud of Turin:

Many believe the Shroud of Turin is the winding cloth that covered the body of Jesus of Nazareth after his crucifixion.  It bears a faint and terribly sad image of a man.  In 1988, the Catholic Church gave the University of Arizona and two other institutions the task of dating the Shroud of Turin, hoping to shed light on its mysterious origins.  On the morning of April 21, 1988,  a group of scientists and clerics convened in the sacristy of Turin Cathedral to trim tiny samples from the famous shroud. Each of the labs then received four identical stainless steel containers,  one holding a shroud sample and three containing samples from other ancient textiles to allow blind studies. 

Shooting Up

Amanda Schaffer at Slate looks into a new Japanese fad:

Located in a tony complex—upstairs from L’Occitane and Armani, down the hall from Morgan Stanley—the clinic offers 10-minute intravenous drips to urbanites in need of a pick-me-up. (The place is called Tenteki 10, after the Japanese word forintravenous.) When I drop in, three women are on their way out, exuding relaxation, as if they’ve been to a spa. A technician tidies up the treatment room, where patients sit on elevated stools. IV bags release liquid into their veins as a flat-screen TV displays images of red leaves and water rushing over rocks. Many of the treatments include recognizable fare—vitamin C, biotin, and various amino acids—however questionable it may be to infuse unspecified doses of these “treatments” into healthy adults. But the kicker is the key ingredient in one of the cocktails: human placental extract.

The article goes on to detail some of the supposed benefits of human placenta, among them  increased energy, improved skin and a youthful appearance. As is usually the case with these sorts of fads, the science doesn’t stick:

To date, at least, that evidence supporting placenta as a health treatment is scant. The effects on skin are also fairly speculative. In theory, topical gels or creams containing placental extract might help chronic wounds to heal. That is plausible since placenta contains compounds that facilitate collagen formation and skin cell proliferation, says Michael Nelson of Washington University School of Medicine, who edits the scholarly journal Placenta. But this paper, at least, finds that the wound-healing effect is merely comparable to that associated with a common antiseptic. Nor did I turn up any clinical trials that demonstrate anti-aging effects on skin, at least in the peer-reviewed, medical literature. Perhaps the fountain-of-youth claims spring from a belief that substances connected with childbirth or infants must hold some power to turn the clock back.Meanwhile, claims that the extract aids both insomnia and fatigue are cause for some head-scratching.

Art and Ecology

Saw this  in the BBC:

Nineteenth Century artwork is a useful tool for studying coastal erosion, according to a retired coastal engineer. Robin McInnes assessed the accuracy of geological and topological features in more than 400 paintings of the Isle of Wight and Hampshire coastline. Dr McInnes said such old masters gave engineers the chance to see coastal features before they were changed by industrial development.