Roundup of interesting internet articles, September 2017 edition

Sorry about my long absence, but I promise more blog entries are coming. In the meantime…

  1. High-tech solutions to global poverty still aren’t substitutes for basic infrastructure, good government, property rights, and cultures of trust. Here’s one recent article about it and two older ones:
    https://qz.com/1090693/zipline-drones-in-africa-like-rwanda-and-tanzania-have-an-opportunity-cost/
    https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2016-08-30/debunking-microenergy
    https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2016/08/bot-we-trust
  2. GE is working on robots the sizes of small animals and insects that can crawl around inside jet turbines for inspections, and maybe for repairs as well in the future. Are we headed for a future where things never break down?
    https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21729737-robotic-mechanics-can-go-anywhere-tiny-robots-will-inspect-and-fix-jet-engines
  3. ‘Professor Simon Blackmore, head of engineering, argues that an even bigger benefit could be in providing fleets of small, light robots, perhaps aided by drones, to replace vast and heavy tractors that plough the land mainly to undo the damage done by soil compaction caused by . . . vast and heavy tractors. Robot tractors could be smaller mainly because they don’t have to justify the wages of a driver, and they could work all night, and in co-ordinated platoons.’
    http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/robot-farm-machinery/
  4. If machines take all of our jobs and do them better and faster than we can, then it could portend a world where billions of unemployed humans spend their days in hyperrealistic virtual reality games engineered by machines.
    https://youtu.be/jOOB9Q1Nj8Y
    https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2017/03/economist-explains-24
  5. Many of the action scenes in the superhero movie Logan were done using incredibly lifelike CGI simulacra of the actors. Will actors someday make money by licensing the use of their digital likenesses in movies instead of physically starring in them?
    https://youtu.be/TxWu5Brx_As
  6. I definitely agree with this. I think Elon Musk’s statements about AI and other things are part of a deliberate strategy to keep the public’s attention focused on him. As a businessman dependent upon the faith of his investors to keep his enterprises afloat, he needs to constantly stay in the spotlight and to project an image of being smarter than everyone else to keep the dollars flowing.
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-19/google-s-ai-boss-blasts-musk-s-scare-tactics-on-machine-takeover
  7. Per my previous blog entry, being able to quickly replace 100,000 cars destroyed by a hurricane is a respectable feat, but it would be better to find a way to keep the 100,000 cars from being destroyed at all.
    http://www.npr.org/2017/09/25/553475557/rental-firms-disaster-readiness-may-help-usher-the-age-of-self-driving-cars
  8. Computers make weird mistakes in some object recognition tasks, but so do humans.
    http://www.kurzweilai.net/human-vs-deep-neural-network-performance-in-object-recognition
  9. ‘Distributed ledgers are useful technology, just like banks. As they become a larger part of finance, the temptation to abuse them will be just as great. History instructs that no governance is perfect, and humans are reliably awful.’
    https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2017/09/not-so-novel
  10. Our cells are full of organic nanomachines which support our most basic life functions, and since Richard Feynman’s 1959 lecture on the subject, it has been recognized that this was proof of concept that fully synthetic nanomachines were also feasible. Yet only recently have scientists managed to build crude but functional nanomachines in labs.
    http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/09/25/building-our-own-molecular-machines
  11. Don’t get your hopes up about Amazon flying drone package delivery: there are legal liability issues with packages accidentally dropping on people’s heads, and major noise issues. Flying cars would be handicapped by the same problems. Fortunately, there’s still a lot of room for improving the efficiency of ground transit with technology.
    https://qz.com/1085214/google-moonshot-lab-cofounder-sebastian-thrun-talks-flying-cars-automated-teaching-and-an-ai-arms-race-with-china/
  12. A useful quote to remember when contemplating flying cars: ‘Flying machines are inherently more complicated to operate than ground vehicles, and the consequences of error or malfunction are much greater—because of gravity.’
    https://warisboring.com/u-s-marines-portable-helicopters-were-too-crazy-to-survive/
  13. And in typical form, McKinsey beats this issue to death: ‘Drones require good weather and are now limited to loads of 7.5 kilograms or less and a route of 15 to 20 kilometers. Infrastructure that will support commercial delivery is lacking, and concerns about theft, hacking, crashes, and privacy worry consumers. Finally, drones need a minimum of about two square meters to land, more than many urban households can offer.’
    https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/sustainability-and-resource-productivity/our-insights/urban-commercial-transport-and-the-future-of-mobility
  14. Would aliens 10,000 more advanced than humans have electric motors that are any better than ours? Would they have better mousetraps as well?
    https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21728888-better-motors-go-better-batteries-electric-motors-improve-more-things
  15. Seeing as how so many people vote on the basis of falsehoods, prejudice, or party affiliation and commonly vote against their own self-interests without realizing it, might democracy benefit if machines tried to reason with voters one-on-one before elections?
    http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-40860937
  16. Disreputable peer-reviewed scientific journals are an even bigger problem than thought. Some of the junk papers are written by NIH-funded scientists and by scientists working at prestigious universities like Harvard.
    http://www.nature.com/news/stop-this-waste-of-people-animals-and-money-1.22554
  17. Anytime you’re down on the U.S. Big Pharma industry, consider the massive fraud that exists within China’s equivalent. (Russia is just as bad.)
    http://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/clinical-fakes-09272016141438.html
  18. Your month of birth determines a surprising amount about your academic performance, all the way to college.
    https://www.utoronto.ca/news/oldest-kids-class-do-better-even-university-u-t-study
  19. Birth month also affects your odds of becoming an athlete, thanks to the same cutoff date effect.
    http://www.bbc.com/sport/olympics/18891749
  20. An important counterpoint to the growing anti-Vaxx movement is this: Teen vaccination rates for HPV are now over 50% and rising. The vaccine actually prevents several types of cancer.
    https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/health/hpv-vaccine-teenagers.html
  21. Chinese scientists have edited the genomes of human embryos to fix single-point DNA mutations (yes, this appeared in a peer-reviewed journal).
    http://www.bbc.com/news/health-41386849
  22. One more experiment finished showing that humans could bear the psychological stresses of a years-long Mars mission. Now about that space radiation problem…
    https://www.space.com/38180-hi-seas-8-month-mars-simulation-ends.html
  23. Two years ago, Russia and Turkey were at each other’s throats over the latter’s shootdown of the former’s attack plane, and there was talk of all NATO being dragged into war over it. Recently, Turkey turned it back on the the alliance to buy an advanced antiaircraft system from Russia.
    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/12/world/europe/turkey-russia-missile-deal.html
  24. The U.S. Army’s first upgraded Stryker rolled off the assembly line.
    http://www.janes.com/article/74356/first-us-army-upgraded-stryker-dvh-rolls-through-production

Roundup of interesting internet articles, August 2017 edition

  1. In a parallel universe, it’s still the 1990s and there was a Moore’s Law for the number of random pipes and hoses strewn across the landscape.
    http://www.boredpanda.com/scifi-girl-robot-traveling-artbook-simon-stalenhag/
  2. China has rolled out (pun intended) a copy of the U.S. Stryker armored vehicle
    http://www.janes.com/article/73292/norinco-rolls-out-vp10-8×8-vehicle-variants
  3. Here’s a needlessly long-winded piece about the long, long history of Christian theologians, cult leaders and even Popes wrongly predicting Biblical Doomsday.
    https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/aug/25/yearning-for-the-end-of-the-world
  4. A survey of 150 people shows about 1/3 of them could hand-draw common corporate logos (for companies like Burger King and Starbucks) from memory, with disturbing accuracy. (I estimate it takes 100 – 200 repetitions of the same commercial before I become cognizant of whatever is being advertised).
    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4813514/Only-16-people-correctly-recall-famous-logos.html 
  5. Britain is repainting its Challenger tanks with a camouflage scheme similar to what it had for its West Berlin-based tank unit in 1982. What’s old is new, and visual concealment methods don’t seem to have improved in 35 years.
    https://warisboring.com/new-urban-camo-wont-save-british-tanks/
  6. Medical micromachines were successfully used on lab rats to deliver antibiotic loads. I don’t understand why medical nanomachines get all the attention and hype when micromachines are more technically plausible and could do many of the same things.
    http://bigthink.com/design-for-good/for-the-first-time-tiny-robots-treat-infection-in-a-living-organism
  7. An analysis of the accuracy of Gartner Hype Cycles from 2000 to 2016 is an informative catalog of failures.
    https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/8-lessons-from-20-years-hype-cycles-michael-mullany
  8. Here’s an outstanding rebuttal to Kevin Kelly’s recent “Myth of a Superhuman AI” article. I’ve never heard of the author before, his blog only has three entries, but he’s written a very thorough and convincing treatise, all the more impressive since he didn’t write it in his native language (he’s Finnish).
    https://hypermagicalultraomnipotence.wordpress.com/2017/07/26/there-are-no-free-lunches-but-organic-lunches-are-super-expensive-why-the-tradeoffs-constraining-human-cognition-do-not-limit-artificial-superintelligences/
  9. Geneticists have uncovered the chemical steps through which magic mushrooms produce their hallucinogenic agent, psilocybin. Large scale industrial production of it could be possible, because the world badly needs more drugs.
    http://cen.acs.org/articles/95/web/2017/08/Magic-mushroomenzyme-mystery-solved.html
  10. A reality check for lab grown meat.
    http://gizmodo.com/behind-the-hype-of-lab-grown-meat-1797383294
  11. A video that clearly and simply describes the operation of Mazda’s new, high-efficiency gas engine, which operates like a diesel part of the time.
    https://youtu.be/9KhzMGbQXmY
  12. Scientists and inventors are dispensable, but great artists, writers and musicians are not. (A somewhat humbling thing to remember when debating the usefulness of a STEM vs. humanities education.)
    http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/tim-harford-review/#.WX-QCkibyHc.facebook

Review: “Killzone” (the PS2 game)

[Below is a review of the video game “Killzone,” which I wrote while in college, over ten years ago. While I admit it’s a little silly to hold a video game to such scrutiny, my conclusions are still valid, and this piece is significant because it was my first attempt to put part of my own future vision in writing, even if it is a critique of someone else’s vision.

This repost will be the first in a recurring series of film and video game “Reviews” that I’ll be doing to assess the feasibility of whatever futuristic elements they depict. 

I’ve edited this Killzone review a little for clarity and brevity. ]

A couple days ago I finally finished the game “Killzone” for PS2, and I have some thoughts about it. First, a bit of background: “Killzone” takes place at some unspecified point in the distant future when mankind has mastered interstellar space travel and colonized two new planets, Vekta and Helghan. Vekta looks identical to Earth, while Helghan is barren and polluted.

Over the generations, the humans of Helghan–known as the Helghast–were genetically mutated by their harsh environment to the point of being barely-human freaks. The Helghast are also warlike and have a tradition of military leadership. At the start of the game, the cool Intro video shows the Helghast army invade Vekta by surprise. While the motivations for this aren’t clearly stated, after reading the “Killzone” booklet I believe it was probably done to obtain resources that Helghan lacks.

This is where you, the player, come in. You play a soldier named “Templar,” serving in Vekta’s ground forces (called the “ISA”). As the game progresses, three other character join your team: Luger is the woman, Rico is the heavy weapons guy and Hakha is the Helghast/human “hybrid.” Among them, Templar is the natural leader and all-around balanced fighter while the other three have specific combat specialties. By the midpoint of the game, you have the option of playing as any character you wish at each level. I thought this was a pretty cool touch because each character has unique abilities and weapons that make the levels a different experience depending on whom you choose. Anyway, you blow away a bunch of Helghast and save the planet–from the first invasion wave.

Along with the the selectable player option, I also liked how “Killzone” was neither too short (“Max Payne 2”) nor too long (“Halo 2”). However, there were some areas needing serious improvement. The gameplay could be awkward: You can’t jump period, making it impossible for your big, soldier self to clear small obstacles like a Jersey Wall; grenades are almost impossible to aim and take about 10 seconds to throw and detonate; climbing ladders is an ordeal; and aiming the sniper rifle gives new definition to the word “tedious.” While the A.I. is an O.K. challenge, the enemies aren’t varied enough and there are only like three different types of Helghast soldiers. Your fellow A.I. squad mates are of inconsistent help during gameplay. The game’s story was also pretty boring. Overall, “Killzone” is playable but falls short of what it could have been.

I also noticed some crude demographic stereotypes in the game. On your team, for instance, the leader is Templar: the handsome younger white guy. Luger, being a woman, is weaker in terms of health and physical strength and has to rely on her sniper pistol and sneaking skills as she runs around in her skin tight black jumpsuit killing bad guys. Rico, being the only “colored” person on the team (he looks Latino), is big, tough, dumb, vulgar, and slow, and fittingly starts each mission with a big machinegun/rocket launcher while his teammates have smaller, more precise weapons. Hakha’s bald head and pale skin cast him as the stereotypical older white man, and he predictably uses received pronunciation, quotes passages from literature to the rest of the team, and knows the most about computer and electronics systems.

“Killzone” also presents an extremely incongruous vision of the future. Let’s begin: We are told at the beginning of the game that humans have inhabited Helghan and Vekta for several generations, which I’ll very conservatively assume means “50 years.” Thus, 50 years before the start of “Killzone,” mankind had already 1) mastered faster than light space travel and 2) built spacecraft cheaply enough to allow mass numbers of people to be transported to Vekta and Helghan. The requisite scientific breakthroughs for these two technological advancements will almost certainly not arrive before the middle of the 21st century, and in fact may prove totally elusive. Considering the facts and estimates in this paragraph, we are left to conclude that “Killzone,” at the very earliest, takes place 100 years in the future–2106 A.D.

Problematically, the world of “Killzone” ignores all of the other scientific breakthroughs and new technologies that will also be made by 2106. For instance, all of the weapons used in the game are simply 20th-century firearms, but with cool-looking exteriors that make them look advanced when in fact they’re not. By 100 years from now, small arms will certainly be much more advanced. I wouldn’t be surprised if directed energy weapons or EMP-powered railguns had totally superseded firearms. I also expect small arms to come with built-in sensors, computers and actuators that allow the guns to sense which target their shooter wanted to hit, and to automatically aim themselves at it. All you would have to do is aim at someone’s body, pull the trigger, and the gun would make sure the bullet went directly through the person’s brain or heart. Not just that, but through the part of the organ that caused the most damage and the most immediate incapacitation. The gun’s computer would also automatically shuffle between different types of ammunition to inflict maximum damage on the target and could also automatically adjust the velocity of the projectile. As a result, the small arms of 2106 will require almost no training to be used effectively. And if they incorporated nanotechnology, future guns might be able to make their own bullets and conduct self-repairs and maintenance, meaning the weapons would be self-cleaning and would last almost forever.

But the more fundamental problem with “Killzone” is that humans will be obsolete on the battlefield by 2106. Think about it. Even the most hardcore, well-armed, futuristic supersoldier still needs hours a day to eat, sleep and take care of other personal needs. He or she still feels pain, questions orders, makes mistakes, and is subject to irrational and unpredictable emotions. A machine, on the other hand, would suffer from none of these faults. Machines are also expendable whereas humans are not, meaning that it would be easier politically to wage a war if a nation’s casualties were solely machines. A human still needs at least 16 years of growth and development to be physically and mentally able to handle the demands of combat, followed by months or even years of specialized military training. A combat machine could be built in an afternoon and then programmed with its military training in a few minutes. Clearly the future of warfare belongs to machines. By 2106, fighting machines will make war a cruelly unfair environment for human beings, where only the most desperate or foolhardy members of our species will dare set foot. Without direct human participation, the battlefield will become totally devoid of all the camaraderie, honor and bravery that stand today as the few positive attributes of war, and warfare will complete its evolution towards becoming a totally cold and anonymous endeavor.

A Predator drone aircraft in flight. The Predator is a remotely controlled aircraft that first entered service with the U.S. Air Force in 1995 as a reconnaissance (spy) plane. In 2001, it was armed with Hellfire anti-tank missiles and was successfully used against Taliban forces in Afghanistan. It remains in use. A Predator drone costs only $3.5-4.5 million to manufacture. Compare that to an F-16 C/D, which costs almost $20 million.

It probably looks petty for me to spend so much effort lambasting “Killzone” because it’s just a video game. That is certainly true, but the fact remains that games like “Killzone” embody and reinforce the ill-informed visions of the future held by most people, and I believe that critiquing the game is the most immediate way I can help people examine their own ideas. I think few people realize how unrealistically our future is portrayed in popular culture. Things like “Star Trek,” “Star Wars” and “Halo 1 & 2” have created the preposterous misconception that the universe is filled with humanoid, alien intelligent life forms that are all +/- 50 years our same level of technology. Considering 1) the age of the Universe (13.5 billion years old), 2) the fact that the planets are oldest at its center of the Universe and youngest at its fringes thanks to the Big Bang, 3) the fact that 3.5 billion years separated the appearance of the first primitive bacteria to the evolution of intelligent life on Earth, and 4) that chance that cosmic events have seriously altered the pace of Earthly evolution, we can conclude that the Universe is certainly populated with intelligent species of vastly different levels of technology.

To have human space explorers discover an intelligent alien species close to our level of technology is akin to having you randomly pick a name out of a three-inch thick phone directory and finding out that that person shares your same year, date, hour, minute, and second of birth. It is overwhelmingly likely that you will instead randomly pick someone who is different from you, and similarly, it is overwhelmingly likely that alien civilizations we encounter will be vastly older or younger than we are and thus either vastly stronger or weaker than we. So this recurring sci-fi trope where humans are fighting future space wars with aliens is ludicrous: any war with an alien species is certain to be very lopsided in favor of one side, and hence very short. This is actually where “Killzone” gets a bit of credit, since the plot has humans from different planets fighting one another. Sadly, I can see that as realistic even in 2106.

I also take issue with “Killzone” and most other sci-fi portraying the racial makeup of our descendants as being essentially the same as it is in contemporary America: The majority are white people, with smaller, roughly equally sized minorities of blacks, Asians and Hispanics. NO. Eighty percent of the current world population is nonwhite, and in the future, once Third World areas have closed the economic and technology gap with the West, we will see the world’s true racial character more vividly in everyday life. Multiracial people will also be much more common.

Another demographic shift very rarely portrayed in future sci-fi is the graying of the population. Average human lifespans have been increasing steadily for more than 100 years, and there is no reason to expect this trend to abate. By 2106, expect average people to be living to 120, if not indefinitely. Moreover, they will be stay active much longer thanks to better medical technologies. The means to slow, halt and reverse the effects of age will probably be achieved. “Killzone,” like all other Sci-Fi depictions of the future, fails to recognize the societal implications of these new technologies. Older people will look and feel DECADES younger than they are chronologically.

No carrier upgrade for you!

Yet another Russian military BIG PLAN that was announced with trumpets has died quietly.
The “Admiral Kuznetsov”

Russia’s single, outdated, and ailing aircraft carrier the Admiral Kuznetsov will spend the next 2-3 years just getting repaired, presumably from wear and tear incurred during its recent deployment off Syria and also probably to fix a backlog of known problems that existed long before the ship even left port. Russia’s plans to use the downtime to also upgrade the carrier have been canceled due to lack of money.

The Admiral Kuznetsov had a less-than-distinguished performance in 2016 operating in the eastern Mediterranean against ISIS: Two of the carrier’s fighter planes crashed while trying to land on it. After the first accident, most of the ship’s aircraft transferred to Syrian government ground bases and operated from there.

For comparison, China now has two aircraft carriers, one of which is about equal to the one the Russians have, and the other of which is better. The Chinese will start building a third in a few years.

The U.S. has 11 supercarriers, which individually are several times better than any of the carriers China or Russia has. The U.S. also has eight smaller carriers called “Amphibious Assault Ships.”

Russia is possibly the world’s worst offender when it comes to making overly ambitious predictions about future improvements to its military, technology, economy, or infrastructure (and, unsurprisingly, about negative things that will happen to its competitors like the United States). I think this owes partly to a unique cultural habit of lying (the “vranyo“), which is accepted and readily seen through by Russians, but misunderstood by foreigners.

Links

  1. http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/russias-only-aircraft-carrier-has-big-problem-21535
  2. https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2016/12/05/Second-Russian-fighter-jet-crashes-attempting-aircraft-carrier-landing/4261480940373/
  3. http://www.janes.com/article/65775/russian-carrier-jets-flying-from-syria-not-kuznetsov
  4. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/magazine/from-russia-with-lies.html

Battlestar Galactica nitpick: 2D radar screens to depict 3D space

I’ve been a huge science fiction fan since childhood, but one franchise that has oddly not attracted my interest until now is Battlestar Galactica. Specifically, I’m talking about the series that aired from 2003-09.

When that series was ongoing, I tried watching a few episodes but just couldn’t get into it. For some reason, the quasi-documentary nature of how the show was filmed put me off. I also didn’t watch the show from the first episode onward, so each time I sat down and gave it a try, I had no clue who the characters were or what the plot arc was about.

Last night I had nothing to do and discovered Battlestar Galactica was available to me through Hulu. I watched the very first episode, and this time around was gripped.

For those of you who don’t know, Battlestar Galactica is about a space war between humans and their robots, called “Cylons” (SAI-lahns). The technology depicted in the show is much more advanced than our own (i.e. – there are giant spaceships, faster than light travel, and bipedal robots), and the events take place in a different part of our galaxy. The humans are descended from people who came from Earth, but for some reason, Earth’s location has been lost to history. Forty years before the events depicted in the series, the Cylons–who were servant robots–violently revolted against their human masters and flew away in space ships to found their own worlds. During the first episode of the series, the Cylons return for unexplained reasons and stage a massive sneak attack (meaning this is the Second Human-Cylon war) that destroys the human planets and the human space fleet. Of the handful of surviving human space ships, the most powerful is an aircraft carrier called the Battlestar Galactica, commanded by an older man named “Adama.” Disorganized, demoralized and grievously wounded, the remaining humans have to find a way to survive against overwhelming odds.

For reasons I’ll describe in much greater detail in future blog posts, I think the vision of a future where humans explore the galaxy in faster-than-light space ships and still do tasks like flying fighter planes and fixing plumbing leaks with wrenches will never come to pass. So at the most basic level, I think Battlestar Galactica is an inaccurate depiction of what our future might look like.  But one thing that really stuck out to me as silly was the use of old-fashioned radar screens on the bridge of the Battlestar Galactica. Here’s a screenshot of the bridge:

And a tight shot of one of the “radar screens” (and yes, before anyone complains, I’m sure they’re actually making use of more advanced sensor technology than solely radar):

There’s a basic problem here: 2-dimensional screen displays are terrible at depicting 3-dimensional space. 2D displays are fine when you’re dealing with 2D environments, such as in naval warfare, where your surface ship is in the middle of a basically flat, featureless plain and uses its radar to locate other surface ships also on the plain. But in space, the ships are free to move in any direction and to approach each other from any vector, making useless any conceptualization of space as being planar, or of there being an “up” or “down.” Trying to “square the circle” by thinking like that will just get you into trouble, particularly if you’re in a fast-paced space battle with a smart enemy that has figured out what your spatial-thinking biases and limitations are (“Battlestar Galactica returns fire fast when we attack it from the front, back, left, and right, but it returns fire slowly and misses a lot when we attack from the top or bottom.”). The time spent looking at a flattened visual depiction of the space around you and then mentally calculating what the elevations and depressions of other ships are and then trying to synthesize it all into some global picture of where everything is and how it’s all moving around will cost you dearly in an actual space battle.

The best approach will instead be to show space ship commanders accurate, 3D representations of their surroundings. I’ve seen this depicted well in other sci-fi. For example, in Return of the Jedi, the Rebel command ship’s bridge had a hologram of the Death Star, which the commanders presumably used for real-time monitoring of that vessel and their own fighters that were attacking it. Using a more zoomed-out view, the Rebel commander could have used holograms to track the progress of the broader space battle and to see the locations of all ships, in 3D space.

Return of the Jedi bridge hologram

Babylon 5 and Ender’s Game also depicted another approach: Making the bridge’s interior one, giant, 360 degree wraparound screen that displayed live video footage from outside the ship.

Minbari ship bridge
Ender’s Game command center view

And Star Trek Deep Space Nine depicted the same visioning capabilities for ship commanders, but delivered via augmented reality glasses instead of wall screens (a smart use of a limited TV show budget).

DS9 eyepiece

All of these visioning technologies are hands-down better than using 2D radar screens to try and see what’s happening outside your space ship. And considering the overall level of technology present in the Battlestar Galactica (Faster than light engine? Enough said.), I don’t see why the ship couldn’t have also had one or all of these other devices on its bridge. Maybe someone on the show’s creative team just didn’t think things through enough, maybe they did but didn’t have the budget for anything but small computer screens, or maybe they were deliberately trying to make the ship look old-fashioned (but again, the result is nonsensical).

This silliness gets taken a step farther when Adama announces that he’s taking the Battlestar Galactica to a remote outpost to regroup against the Cylons, and to chart a course there, he unrolls a paper star map on the big table in the middle of the bridge and starts drawing on it with rulers and crayons. Sigh. I realize Adama’s “thing” is that he’s a grizzled old guy who doesn’t like technology, but this is taking it too far. Typing the desired coordinates into the ship’s computer would instantly spit out a more efficient and accurate course than he ever plot using old-time mariner’s tools.

I think that whenever we actually do have space ships of similar size and sophistication to the Battlestar Galactica, their bridges won’t look anything like they do on the TV show. Just for the sake of redundancy, I think there might be small, 2D sensor screens and even paper star maps shoved off to the side somewhere, but they’ll only be used in emergency situations where all the better technology has broken. The notion of a space battle being managed by an old human man who likes to look at screens and draw lines on paper will be laughable. In reality, the ship’s systems–including its weapons systems–would probably be entirely automated, and the best captains and fighter pilots would all be machines. The old guys would die fast.

Chinese navy launches its most advanced destroyer yet

Type 055 Chinese guided missile destroyer

Another piece of China’s military force projection strategy falls into place. The Type 055 guided missile destroyers will escort China’s aircraft carriers and defend them against enemy ships, planes and subs. Naval technology is a weak point of mine, but from what I gather, the Type 055 shows that China has pulled ahead of Russia in terms of shipbuilding capability (also note that China recently launched its second aircraft carrier, whereas Russia only has one–in the repair shop). This is also the first time China has built a guided missile destroyer that wasn’t significantly smaller than standard U.S. destroyers.

On paper, the Type 055 is roughly equivalent (in terms of ship dimensions and types of weapons) to the American Arleigh-Burke missile destroyers and Ticonderoga missile cruisers, which comprise the backbone of the U.S. Navy surface combatant force. However, it’s a safe assumption that there are many “devils in the details,” and the Type 055 has considerably inferior technology. The U.S. also has many more destroyers and cruisers than China (most of which are outdated Type 051 and “just OK” 052 class ships).

So while it’s certainly not time for the Pentagon to panic, China’s launching of the Type 055 should still be seen as an important milestone that shows China is steadily closing the naval gap with America. A single Type 055 isn’t anything to worry about, but six of them (which is how many China wants to eventually build) would be.

Links:

  1. http://www.janes.com/article/71903/china-launches-largest-surface-combatant-to-date
  2. https://southfront.org/china-launches-first-type-055-destroyer-first-step-shifting-naval-balance-power-pacific/