Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Seeing the Future Dimly

Wednesday, August 8th, 2012

By David L. Brown

One of the news websites, Fox News (here), today featured excerpts from a number of predictions made 25 years ago by “science thinkers,” predicting conditions in our time of 2012. I recognize the names of most of these “science thinkers” and they are actually “science fiction writers,” but that’s okay because they’re in the business of imagining the future as much as anyone. I’ve always had a passing interest in futurism, the attempt to predict how things will be in future times. In general, these tend to be wildly inaccurate due to the many uncertainties and the phenomenon of straight line thinking. Too often futurists tend to look at what’s been happening recently and simply project a straight line into the future.

Even a cursory look at history will knock enough holes in this procedure to make Swiss cheeses look like solid objects. Imagine the application of straight line thinking to the U.S. economy in the summer of 1929, the likelihood of war in Europe in 1913, the future well-being of the little Roman village of Pompeii in 78 AD (Mount Vesuvius erupted the following year), and so many more examples of unexpected and unpredictable events that dramatically change the future.

One thing that struck me abut these predictions was that they were for the most part pessimistic, in contrast with the usual fol-de-rol about a Jetsons future with flying cars and an abundance of everything. Here are some excerpts with my comments:

Isaac Asimov: “Assuming we haven’t destroyed ourselves in a nuclear war, there will be 8-10 billion of us on this planet and widespread hunger.”

Isaac’s view was fairly accurate, even though he was a little on the low side on population (it’s actually just something over 7 billion). He was dead on about the looming hunger, hastened by this year’s worldwide drought.

Jack Williamson: “If we had a time-phone, now in 1987, we would beg you to forgive us. We have burdened you with impossible debts, wasted and polluted the planet that should have been your rich heritage, left you instead a dreadful legacy of ignorance, want, and war.”

Of all the predictions, I nominate this one as the most accurate. I have expressed similar thoughts myself, many times. Anyone who looks around the world today with open eyes can recognize Williamson’s vision of our time.
Sheldon Glashow: “The American economy will have experienced a gentle yet relentless decline. Our children will not live such comfortable lives as we do. The spread between the rich and the poor will have grown, and crime will have become so prevalent as to threaten the social fabric. The rich and the poor will form 2 armed camps.”
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Posted in Conflict and War, Energy Technology, Essays and Opinion, Extinction, Famine, Fossil Fuels, Medicine, Politics, Population Issues, Resource Depletion, Space Exploration, Technology | Comments Off

Mars Curiosity Rover Lands Safely

Monday, August 6th, 2012

By David L. Brown

If you didn’t watch the live feed from the Jet Propulsion Lab last night as the new Mars Rover, Curiosity, made its entry and landing, you missed one of the great moments in space exploration history. The landing took place about 11:30 p.m. here in Mountain time, so it was pretty late for those in the East and Central time zones. But it was definitely a dramatic two hours I spent watching the action in the control room as the team followed the approach and landing.

Because it takes fourteen minutes for radio waves (and light) to travel from Mars in its present location, the rover’s landing had already taken place, either for good or bad, when the team saw it happening. But there was telemetry from the craft throughout the approach, which slowed the vehicle carrying the rover from about 13,000 miles per hour to a gentle set down at 2 m.p.h. seven minutes later. The entire process was pre-programmed—the complex system did it all by itself—using radar and other input to steer to the final landing place with incredible accuracy.

The process was amazing. First, the vehicle used atmospheric slowing such as the Space Shuttle does, using a heat shield. Since the Martian atmosphere is 100 times thinner than earth’s, that was sufficient only to slow the capsule to about 1000 m.p.h. Next a huge supersonic parachute was deployed, slowing it further to about 200 m.p.h. Again, due to Mars’s thin atmosphere, the parachute could only do so much, so a final third phase was deployed. In this case, a rocket powered module that flew the capsule sideways to clear the parachute, then as it approached the ground, lowered Curiosity on a cable “sky crane” to a gentle touchdown before flying away to crash at  safe distance. It was an engineering achievement of almost unbelievable complexity and with zero margin for error. If any single thing had gone wrong, and there were many crucial details during the descent and landing the scientists called “Seven Minutes of Terror,” the $2.5 billion project would have been a loss.

To really put the achievement into perspective, Curiosity is believed to have touched down just 262 meters from the planned landing spot, after traveling for about  350 million miles from earth. (For the metrically challenged, that’s less than three football fields away from the target.) As someone said, it’s like hitting a golf ball halfway around the world for a hole-in-one.

The scene in the control center at the JPL when Curiosity reported its safe landing was emotional to say the least. Hugs and high fives went on for about a half hour among the ecstatic scientists and engineers. As icing on the cake, within minutes Curiosity’s first pictures arrived from the surface of Mars. It was a night to remember, and a huge achievement for the U.S. space program. No other nation could even come close to achieving what NASA and JPL achieved yesterday with the landing of this huge and sophisticated rover on the Red Planet.

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Curious About Mars? Tomorrow’s the Big Day

Saturday, August 4th, 2012

By David L. Brown

Tomorrow the newest Mars rover, Curiosity, is set to land on the Red Planet. If all goes well, it will set down through an incredible series of engineering steps. In the final stage, the massive rover will be lowered from its berth on the delivery vehicle on cables while the vehicle supports them with rockets. Here’s an image from the Jet Propulsion Lab:

The landing process has several stages, beginning with a heat shield deceleration similar to that used by the Space Shuttle. After that there’s a deployment of a huge supersonic parachute, and finally the rocket-assisted delivery pictured above. with the “skycrane” delivery of the rover to the surface. To see an incredible animated video of the full entry and landing process, see here. If this looks like a Rube Goldberg approach to engineering, well, yeah. But it was required because you see Curiosity is a far larger payload than any previous Mars rovers. How much bigger? Below is a picture showing a model of the Curiosity rover (the big one at right) and the two previous landers. Compared with them, it’s huge. And, it will be able to operate much more aggressively because it’s powered by a nuclear battery instead of weak solar panels. It’s bigger, faster, and has more scientific packages.

But the question now is, will it succeed in making a safe landing? The entry and landing is being called “Seven Minutes of Terror” by the scientists and engineers who developed it. We’ll know tomorrow. Let’s hope it’s good news. If so, it will be perhaps the most incredible engineering feat in history.

If it’s successful, this feat will put America right back at the top in space achievement. If it fails, well, not so much.

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Technology—Promise or Curse?

Wednesday, August 1st, 2012

By David L. Brown

Historian Niall Ferguson in an article published in The Daily Beast raises a question that’s long interested me. He asks, in effect, which vision of the future we should embrace: The idea that technology will make the world a better place, or the vision of a world in catastrophic economic decline?

Here”s a brief excerpt from the beginning of his essay, titled “Don’t Believe the Techno-Utopian Hype” (you can read the whole thing here):

Are you a technoptimist or a depressimist? This is the question I have been pondering after a weekend hanging with some of the superstars of Silicon Valley.

I had never previously appreciated the immense gap that now exists between technological optimism, on the one hand, and economic pessimism, on the other. Silicon Valley sees a bright and beautiful future ahead. Wall Street and Washington see only storm clouds. The geeks think we’re on the verge of The Singularity. The wonks retort that we’re in the middle of a Depression.

Let’s start with the technoptimists. Last Saturday I listened with fascination as a panel of tech titans debated the question: “Will science and technology produce more dramatic changes in solving the world’s major problems over the next 25 years than have been produced over the last 25 years?”

They all thought so. We heard a description of what Google’s Project Glass, the Internet-enabled spectacles, can already do. (For example, the spectacles can be used to check if another speaker is lying.) Next up: a search engine inside the brain itself. We heard that within the next 25 years, it will be possible to take 1,000-mile journeys by being fired through tubes. We also heard that biotechnology will deliver genetic “photocopies” of human organs that need replacing. And we were promised genetically engineered bugs, capable of excreting clean fuel. The only note of pessimism came from an eminent neuroscientist, who conceded that a major breakthrough in the prevention of brain degeneration was unlikely in the next quarter century.

Ferguson,  a professor at Harvard and also associated with Oxford University in England and The Hoover Institution at Stanford, takes the same point of view that has always struck me as the right path. In effect, he asks: What is the value of technology that merely puts people out of work and provides wonderful whiz-bang stuff that has no real benefits for anyone. He points out that fifty years ago we were promised flying cars, and instead we have Twitter.

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One-way Trip to Mars Is Not ‘Suicide’

Wednesday, July 25th, 2012

By David L. Brown

In the news today are headlines about a “suicide” mission to Mars being planned by a private company. Here is a link to an article at Fox News about the plans announced by the Dutch company Mars One.

Now I know a bit about the meaning of words, and suicide this is not. Suicide is when one kills one’s self outright or embarks on a course that will inevitably result in their death (think Kamikaze pilots and terrorist bombers). That is not at all what Mars One has in mind. In fact, their plan is to create a habitat on Mars and then send volunteers to actually live there and continue to build the base for further expansion. Yes, it is envisioned as a one-way trip, at least for the time being, but no suicide is intended. In fact, the idea is that the volunteers will live out their natural lives on Mars, or even possibly return to Earth later when advanced technology makes it possible. They may even reproduce and create new generations of Martians.

In short, the word ‘suicide’ should never have been applied to this plan (and I’m not saying the idea itself might be without danger). The correct terms are migration or colonization, the processes through which people permanently move to a different location, in this case on another planet

It’s not suicide when you decide to move to another city (although come to think of  it, it could amount to the same thing if one were to relocate to certain inner-city neighborhoods in Detroit, Philadelphia or East St. Louis), so why should one-way trips to the proposed Martian colony be described with that word?

We didn’t call it suicide when John Glenn soared into space, or when Buzz Aldrin touched down on the moon. Of course, we hoped they would survive and they did. We will hope the Mars colonists will, too, if any should ever arrive there. I’m not optimistic about the prospects for human habitation in space, but let’s not put the wrong labels on new ideas. It would be a wonderful achievement to see a permanent presence on the Red Planet.

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My New Book

Sunday, October 31st, 2010

By David L. Brown

depcovercropI am pleased to announce the publication of my new book DEAD END PATH: How Industrial Agriculture Has Stolen Our Future. This work, in the form of an extended essay, is the result of a lifetime of experience and study. It is written in an easy-to-read style and thoroughly documented with more than 250 footnotes and a bibliography of nearly 150 volumes included in its nearly 300 pages.

DEAD END PATH is unusual in that it is part essay, part memoir, part speculative journalism and part research-based analysis. It examines the serious challenges that face the human race, including the unhappy facts that as human population continues to grow the resources on which our technological civilization depends are being depleted through runaway “progress” and “development,” code words for the destruction of the environment in the interests of profit for the few.

Many of the ideas in this book have been discussed in this weblog, including population issues, resource peaks, and economic considerations. The main argument of DEAD END PATH is that while most of the structural problems of our civilization can be traced to over-population, that core fact itself rests on the short-sighted use of industrial methods to produce more food in the short term than the Earth can sustain. As resources peak and begin to decline, a food crisis looms ahead of us at the terminus of the path we have taken.

To give you the general flavor of this work, here is the official description from the publisher’s website:

DEAD END PATH is an important book because it describes in simple, jargon-free words the critical dangers facing humanity, including many facts that the media seldom report. It’s an extended essay on how industrial agriculture has led us down an unsustainable path that threatens our very civilization. The danger is real and looming before us in the here-and-now. Our petroleum-based technology is reaching its limits and the coming collapse will likely trigger a domino-like food crisis that will change the world forever.

Readers will learn how machine technology has transformed food production and pitted the human race against Nature herself. Topics include over-population, resource depletion, climate change, economic realities and the long-term outlook for human survival. Part journalism, part history, part memoir, part essay — this book aims to entertain and inform curious readers in non-technical language. The subjects of this book are possibly the most important issues of the 21st Century, a stark reality that is little reported by the media and largely ignored by world leaders. Every thinking person should be aware of this looming threat to civilization, the real-life story that unfolds in the pages of DEAD END PATH.

To help bring the message of DEAD END PATH to a wider audience, I have begun to create a new website at www.agdeadend.com. It is only partially constructed, but you may find it interesting to visit it now to read the text of the Author’s Note from the book in which I explain my personal life’s journey and how it resulted in the writing of this book. Please bookmark and return to it as it takes form. It will contain news and commentary relating to the subject of the book.

Posted in Agriculture Issues, Book Reviews, Desertification and Soil Loss, Economics, Essays and Opinion, Famine, Fossil Fuels, Politics, Resource Depletion, Technology | Comments Off

Oh How Far We Have Come!

Saturday, April 3rd, 2010

By David L. Brown

In 1965 Gordon E. Moore, a co-founder of Intel Corp., wrote a paper in which he predicted that computing power would continue to increase exponentially, that is, doubling again and again. Moore noted that since the invention of transistors, about seven years before, the number of components (switches) that could be put on a single integrated circuit chip had doubled approximately every year. He claimed that that trend would continue “for at least ten years.”

Well, what has become known as “Moore’s Law” turned out to be an understatement. Since his paper appeared, computing power has continued to double, not every year but every 18 to 24 months, regular as clockwork. And while contrarians have often claimed the end is in sight, technology has continued to roll forward. Present estimates are that Moore’s Law will continue  to hold true until at least 2015, and the promise of new methods coming over the horizon may extend the exponential expansion even further. And, oh yes, should quantum computing become a developed technology, it could go even faster and further to almost unimaginable levels of storage and computing power. In a few years, you may be able to hold the entire contents of the Library of Congress in one hand while scratching your head with the other.

Words are great things, and it is my personal belief that despite the old saying they are more powerful than pictures. Sometimes, though…well, here’s an example.

storage-1980-2010crop1What you see here are two forms of computer storage, one from 30 years ago and one from today. On the left is an eight-unit IBM 3380 Disk System from 1980. Each of the eight units can hold 2.5 GB of data, so the total capacity of the array is 20 GB. The estimated cost of this system ranged to more than $1 million. It weighs about 4400 pounds. This was an advanced example of the cutting-edge technology that had put a man on the Moon.

On the right, by way of comparison, we see three 32 GB micro SD flash memory cards from today. Each card has more than half again more capacity than the complete IBM array from 30 years ago, and together the three cards could store nearly five times as much as the eight units of the old hard disk unit. The weight of a single flash memory chip is about half a gram, or 1/70th of an ounce. You can buy a 32 GB flash card for less than a hundred bucks, and Apple’s latest iPod and iPhone products, not to mention the new iPad, can be ordered with that much memory. Prices are sure to come down fast as new, even larger capacity products hit the market.

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‘Glitter-sized’ solar cells you could wear

Saturday, December 26th, 2009

By David L. Brown

Microscopic solar cells with the potential to bring solar power to places where no solar cell has gone before are being developed at the Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM. The tiny cells are one-tenth the thickness of traditional solar cells and can potentially pv_microbe attached to flexible backings that could be mounted onto any odd-shaped object such as buildings, clothing, or even camping tents, thus bringing solar power to anyplace where the Sun shines.

The tiny cells, described as “glitter-sized,” are made from crystalline silicon and are expected to eventually be cheaper to make and more efficient than present photovoltaic collectors, according to a news release. They can be made in present manufacturing facilities, using far less silicon than traditional solar cells and with less waste. The cells, pictured above, measure from 0.25 to 1 mm in size (1/100 to 1/25 inch).

According to Sandia field engineer Vipin Gupta larger installations on the roofs of houses and warehouses “could have intelligent controls, inverters and even storage built in at the chip level.”

Thinner than the thickness of a human hair, the chips perform as well as conventional cells that are ten times thicker. They use 100 times less silicon to generate the same amount of electricity, the researchers say. Because the cells are so small they are less sensitive to overhead obstructions that can cause conventional panels to turn off entirely when part of the surface is blocked from the Sun.

According to lead investigator Greg Nielson, the “glitter-sized” cells could allow campers, hunters and military personnel in the field to recharge cell phones, cameras and other electronic gear just by walking around in the Sun while wearing special clothing. Other potential uses are in satellites and remote sensing installations.

Solar concentrators, arrays of microscopic lenses to focus the sunlight, can be placed over the tiny cells to increase the efficiency by increasing the number of photons striking the cells. The concentrators should be cheaper to make and more efficient, again because of the small size of the cells.

Because of the large number of cells in an array, high-voltage output can be generated directly, reducing costs and taking advantage of lower losses due to electrical resistance in wiring at higher voltages.

Sandia Laboratories is operated by Lockheed-Martin Company for the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration.

Below are pictured three of the Sandia research team members holding micro solar arrays; from left: Murat Okandan, Greg Nielson, Jose Luis Cruz-Campa.

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‘Stacked’ Chips Could Replace Hard Drives

Thursday, December 24th, 2009

By David L. Brown

As applications and databases grow ever larger and more complex, computers demand more and more memory. Hard drives are reaching the limits of how much data they can hold — but a solution may be coming soon. It’s all to do with the idea of ‘stacking’ memory chips to increase density, much as a can of Pringles can hold as much as a large bag of edible chips.

According to a report from Arizona State University, Tempe, a team led by Dr. Michael Kozicki has developed just such a way to “stack” memory layers on a single chip to make high-density memory modules.

“This could lead to hard drive data storage on a chip,” Kozicki said, “which enables portable systems that are smaller, more rugged and able to go longer between battery charges.”

Imagine the capacity of a full-sized hard drive on a tiny chip that could reside in a cell phone or other portable device. Not only may that be possible, but Kozicki says the stacked memory chips are simple and can be made using present technology and materials.

Kozicki is a professor of electrical engineering and director of ASU’s Center for Applied Nanoionics, devoted to studying nano-scale electronics. Graduate student Sarath C. Puthen Thermadam also worked on the project.

Memory cells could not previously be stacked because the individual cells could not be isolated.

“Before, if you joined several memory cells together you wouldn’t be able to access one without accessing all of the others because they were all wired together,” Kozicki explained. “What we did was put in an access, or islolation device, that electrically splits all of them into individual cells.”

Each memory cell has a built-in diode to isolate the layer, which will “allow us to put in as many layers as we can squeeze in there,” Kozicki said.

Each layer adds significantly more memory to the chip. For example, a chip with eight layers of memory would have nearly eight times as much capacity in the same area as a conventional single-layered chip.

“Stackable memory is thought to be the only way of reaching the densities necessary for the type of solid state memory that can compete with hard drives on cost as well as information capacity,” he said. “It turns out to be a ridiculously simple idea, but it works. It works better than the complicated ideas work.”

Moore’s Law, which stipulates that computer power will double approximately every 18 months, seems to be in effect for some time to come.

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