TECHNOLOGY: FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE?

A survey done by the Pew Research Center and Smithsonian magazine this past February asked Americans if they were optimistic about the future when it comes to technology. There was a pretty strong gender divide, with 61% of men feeling that technological changes will lead to a future in which most people’s lives are better. Only 51% of women agreed with that. When income was factored in, nearly 80% of men making more than $75,000 per year were optimistic, though women’s views didn’t change much with the higher income. The researchers speculate that men may be more likely to benefit from the availability of jobs in the tech sector. Or is there more to it than that?

Maybe guys are picturing hover cars, ubiquitous video screens showing sports events 24/7, and ever more powerful remote controls, while women don’t find these things a turn-on and would be unimpressed with a world of cybernetic personal assistants that double as love-bots. Another survey question found that 59% of women viewed wearable computers as a negative development. Guys were evenly split. Yet both men and women generally felt that the internet has been a good thing for themselves personally, and for society. Perhaps approval hinges on the question of how pervasive and invasive the technology is. An internet that we can call upon whenever we want is great, but being hooked up to it every moment of the day? Not so much. When it comes to information technology, constantly available can also mean constantly demanding. Seventy percent of both men and women said they would not be interested in computer brain implants, even if it improved their memory function. But then, I have to think that people of thirty years ago probably wouldn’t have welcomed the idea of being slaves to their phones either, alerted every time one of their friends enjoys a cat video or posts a new selfie. It’s like a frog in slowly-heated water: with gradual exposure we don’t see the danger until we’re hooked (or cooked!) I expect most future tech developments will make their mark on society almost subversively, marketed as the next must-have consumer purchase.

Most people would probably expect SF fans to be the most optimistic about technology, yet a very great deal of SF paints a dark picture of the future. We’re fascinated with tech, but it’s often a morbid fascination. Would you really want to live in a cyberpunk world? Or do you just get a big kick out of exploring the creepy possibilities?

The truth, of course, is that technology giveth and technology taketh away. Some things become better, some worse. I personally feel that if we can prevent our society from being totally consumed by consumerism (very much I doubt at the moment) we’ll be in a far better position to keep a reign on technology and reap its benefits without selling the farm. We’ll also need to resist the herd mentality, reassert our individuality and our privacy, and constantly be on the lookout for the tech equivalent of magic beans that lead us blithely to a place where giants are eagerly waiting to gobble us up. When a new development opens a new door, let’s constantly be asking if we actually want to go there.

Then our high tech future can truly be a place to be optimistic about.

ASTEROID MINING--POTENTIAL BONANZA OR PIPE DREAM?

At the recent Ad Astra SF convention in Toronto, Canada, I watched a panel discussion about asteroid mining, the problems and potential. I’ve posted about the subject before because it’s one of the major tropes of near-Earth space exploration predictions and stories. So is it really such a sure thing? The panel (including some PhDs, SF writers and a robotics expert) agreed that it will come down to profitability: revenue vs. cost. After all, you don’t go to the trouble of landing on speeding chunks of barren rock for the beautiful scenery.

There have been estimates that, although many asteroids will be mainly nickel-iron rocks, some will be very rich in platinum group metals, and a reasonable-sized one of those could contain far more than all of the known reserves of such ore on Earth. At first glance, that sounds promising. Of course, platinum and its relatives are costly because they’re rare—a sudden increase in the supply would be sure to cause prices to drop, cutting profits that might already be marginal. Especially when a Keck Institute of Space Studies report estimated that the cost of returning a 500 ton asteroid to low Earth orbit for processing would be in the area of $2.6 billion US. I’ve seen other projections that it would require more like $100 billion to create the infrastructure to make a mining operation, especially since a lot of new technology will have to be developed. Could such a venture possibly pay for itself, let alone make attractive profits? Companies like Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries have already declared that they’re in the game, and the people involved are no dummies.

The costliest part of any space venture will be hoisting things up out of Earth’s gravity well into space, and returning things safely to the ground. So space mining may not become cheaper than mining for the same elements here on Earth until all of this planet’s resources are exhausted. If the intention is to return the mined material back here.

But what if the market for the ore you’re mining is out there? Shipping to and from orbital space stations, asteroid facilities, and even moon colonies would be much less costly because of the lower gravity involved. There are also a lot of other materials worth mining for, if your market is a space colony or interplanetary fleet. Water and oxygen for spacecraft fuel and human consumption would be valuable commodities, too, plus many more ordinary metals and non-metals. That certainly increases the potential for space mining, except it still suggests such an industry will have to wait until we make a big push out into space for other reasons, and thereby create the beyond-Earth markets.

One other thing that could possibly tip the balance in favour of space mining is if our current interest in corporate responsibility continues to increase. In the past, mining companies rarely had to factor environmental cleanup into the cost of their operations, but there seems to be a growing taste for making companies protect and rehabilitate the environment from the ravages of their ore removal and processing. If we ever start charging companies a realistic cost for their pollution and for remedial treatment of land and water, that just might raise costs to the point that bringing back ores from near-Earth asteroids becomes a better alternative.

Bottom line? I don’t think SF writers should scratch those grizzled space miner characters out of their stories just yet.

TO REVIVE OR NOT TO REVIVE

No, this isn’t going to be about medical resuscitation in the ER. This week I came across a non profit project called “Revive and Restore”, carried out by The Long Now Foundation. Its stated mission is to “enhance biodiversity through the genetic rescue of endangered and extinct species.” Yup, they promote the idea of reviving extinct species of birds and animals using genetic technology. No, not dinosaurs—no matter what the movies say, there’s never been any viable dino DNA found. But there are good samples of woolly mammoth and passenger pigeon, and lots of others, and living relatives of these species that could conceivably be used as surrogate parents for the cloned offspring. Why do it? According to the Foundation, it’s to increase our planet’s biodiversity and genetic diversity, and to learn more about the processes required for “de-extinction” in order to help preserve endangered species.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault on the Norwegian island of Spitzbergen was created to preserve genetic diversity of plant life. These days, the focus of commercial agriculture on specialized and bio-engineered crops significantly increases the risk of newly-mutated blights and diseases that could wipe out entire crops on an international scale (perhaps even on purpose, from bioterrorism). The seed vault should provide at least some safety net to enable a recovery from such a disaster. A similar collection of DNA from animal and fish species would be a very good idea. The American Museum of Natural History and the U.S. National Park Service already work together to add samples of endangered species from American parks to the Museum’s existing DNA bank. We should be storing samples of each known species’ DNA, adding new ones as they’re discovered and identified.

As an SF author (and therefore an amateur futurist), here’s why I think so.

The World Wildlife Fund suggests that humans may be causing species extinction thousands of times more quickly than the natural extinction rate. And that’s just from things like overhunting, overfishing, and destruction of habitat. Now along comes climate change, with a frightening potential to force human migration because of changing climate patterns. The combination of these factors will be devastating to plant and animal species. And because every organism on our planet is linked to others in complex degrees of dependency, every loss of biodiversity is a threat to the planetary ecosystem. We can’t know how much damage is done when a given species becomes extinct, but we can no longer afford to be complacent about it, or the human race could soon find ourselves alone on a dying rock.

Along with the danger from our own race, Earth continues to be vulnerable to the same things that caused mass extinctions in the past: massive volcanic eruptions, cataclysmic asteroid or comet impacts, deadly gamma ray bursts from dying stars, or exposure to fatal levels of cosmic radiation during flips of the Earth’s magnetic field. We might be able to find ways to survive such things in the short term, but long term survival would depend on restoring at least some of our home planet’s ecosystem.

Then there’s the reason closest to my geeky heart. Although the idea of colonizing other planets and star systems has formidable obstacles stacked against it, I’d still like to believe it will happen.

And we’ll want to bring our friends along.

WHY I DON'T BELIEVE IN UFO'S (BUT WOULD LIKE TO)

I’m a radio show host, and for an April Fools gag this year we pretended that a strange object had been spotted in the sky above a nearby town. We played it as skeptics who were gradually convinced, and we fooled some people. But that pretty much describes my real state of mind. I’d kind of like to be convinced that spacecraft from another place or time have come to this Earth, but for now I’m not. Here’s why.

If we propose that authentic Unidentified Flying Objects are spacecraft from some other solar system, the obvious barrier to that is Einstein’s assurance that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Millions of science fiction fans, including countless physicists and engineers, would really love for that to be proven wrong, but so far there’s absolutely no indication that it will be. However, even if we assume that advanced species may have solved the light speed barrier or found some other means of taking shortcuts through the galaxy (like stable wormholes), it’s still a big step to conclude that they have come to Earth. Yes, there have been many thousands of sightings of (so far) unexplained phenomena, but think about that. Is it really possible that our planet could have been visited that many times without the aliens just coming right out and saying, “Here we are” for the whole world to see? Without them making legitimate contact with us as a planetary species? If they have the technology to travel the stars and they’ve been coming here for the better part of a century, maybe much longer, they won’t be stopped by language barriers, they’ll know about our systems of government (the good and the bad), and they’ll know the best ways to reach individual humans in large numbers.

But they haven’t.

Yes, I know about the Prime Directive of non-interference. And look how many times Captain Kirk has thrown that one out the window. Are you going to tell me that not a single alien spaceship captain would have given in to that temptation over decades of time and thousands of visits? Oh, but it’s not just one species that’s come here, you say—there may be forty different kinds. Even less likely, then, that all of these various species would have the complete commitment and single-mindedness to have kept their presence a secret all this time. Why would they? We’re big boys and girls now—we can understand the concepts of alien biology and advanced technology.

The idea that governments have known about these visitors but kept the information from us is even sillier. Governments are leakier than soup strainers. Secrets that political administrations have the most powerful interest in preserving—their own misdeeds—rarely last as long as the governments themselves. Top secret technology is constantly being stolen, the most secure of databases hacked. Yet there are hidden desert bases housing crashed alien spacecraft, and mysterious government agencies to deal with them? I don’t think so.

In many ways it would be nice to be proven wrong. An alien species might have solutions to our very worst problems, like cancer, climate change, and nuclear proliferation. They might have answers to the deep scientific and philosophical questions that have puzzled us for millennia. And best of all, if they can cross galactic distances, then there’s no reason we can’t too.

For now, though, I’ll keep my skeptic’s hat on. But don’t worry, my door will be open if ET ever comes by and needs to borrow a phone