Review: “Blade Runner”

Plot:

In the year 2019 a race of “bioengineered” humans called “replicants” exists, and are used as slave laborers and soldiers on space colonies. While made superior to ordinary humans in most respects (strength, pain tolerance, intelligence), replicants have deliberately capped lifespans of only four years to limit the amount of damage they can do should they rebel against their masters, and they are not allowed on Earth itself. This doesn’t stop a small group of replicants–including several who have enhanced combat traits–from hijacking a space ship and traveling to Earth to confront their “creator,” the head of the company the manufactured them and all other replicants, and to force him to technologically extend their lifespans. The replicants smuggle themselves into Los Angeles, where the company’s headquarters is.

Upon discovering the infiltration, the LAPD hires a bounty hunter named “Rick Deckard” to hunt down the replicants. Deckard’s background is never clearly explained, but he has good detective skills and has killed replicants before. As he follows leads and tracks them down, Deckard meets a love interest and is forced to confront his biases about replicants and consider existential questions about them and himself.

An important fact must be clarified and emphasized. Replicants ARE NOT robots or androids; they are “bio-engineered” humans. They don’t have metal body parts or microchip brains, and instead are made of flesh and blood like us. As proof, there are several scenes in Blade Runner where the replicant characters are hurt or killed, and they display pain responses to injuries and bleed red blood.

A replicant named “Zhora,” dead after being shot in the back with a handgun. Note the blood.

Additionally, it’s made clear that replicants can only be distinguished from humans by a sit-down interview with a trained examiner in which the subject is asked a series of odd questions (called the “Voight-Kampff Test”) while their physiological and spoken responses are analyzed. The procedure looks like a polygraph test. If replicants were robots with metal bones, microchip brains, or something like that, then a simple X-ray scan or metal detector wand would reveal them, and there’d be no need for a drawn-out interview. Likewise, if the replicants were organic, but fundamentally different from humans, then this could also be quickly detected with medical scans to vision their bones and organs, and with DNA tests to check for things like something other than 46 chromosomes.

By deduction, it must be true that replicants are flesh-and-blood humans, albeit ones that are produced and birthed in labs and biologically/genetically engineered to have trait profiles suited for specific jobs. The available evidence leads me to suspect that replicants are “assembled” in the lab by fitting together body parts and organs, the way you might put together a Mr. Potato Head. They are then “born” as full-grown adults and come pre-programmed with fake memories and possibly work skills. Replicants are human slaves, technologically engineered for subservience and skill.

Analysis:

Los Angeles will be polluted and industrial. In the film, Los Angeles is a grim, hectic place where fire-belching smokestacks are within sight of the city’s residential core. During the few daylight scenes, the air is very hazy with smog. This depiction of 2019 fortunately turned out wrong, and in fact, Los Angeles’ air quality is much better than it was when Blade Runner was released in 1982.

This improvement hasn’t just happened to L.A.–across the U.S. and other Western countries, air pollution has sharply declined over the last 30-40 years thanks to stricter laws on car emissions, industrial activity, and energy efficiency. With average Westerners now accustomed to clean air and more aware of environmental problems, I don’t see how things could ever backslide to Blade Runner extremes, so long as oxygen-breathing humans like us control the planet.

National average pollution figures from the U.S. EPA

Of course, the improvements have been largely confined to the Western world. China and India–which rapidly industrialized as the West was cleaning itself up–now have smog levels that, on bad days, are probably the same as Blade Runner’s L.A. This has understandably become a major political issue in both countries, and they will follow the West’s path improving their air quality over the coming decades. In the future, particulate air pollution will continue to be concentrated in the countries that are going through industrial phases of their economic development.

This looks like a shot from Blade Runner, but is actually a photo taken on a smoggy evening in Beijing in 2013.
The building, named “Pangu Plaza,” on a clear day.

Real estate will be cheap in Los Angeles. One of the minor characters is a high-ranking employee at the company that makes the replicants. He lives alone in a large, abandoned apartment building somewhere in Los Angeles. After being tricked into letting the replicants into his abode, he gestures to the cavernous space and says: “No housing shortage around here. Plenty of room for everybody.” In fact, the exact opposite of this came true, and Los Angeles is in the grips of a housing shortage, widespread unaffordability of apartments and houses, and record-breaking numbers of poorer people having to live on the streets or in homeless shelters.

The problems owe to the rise of citizen groups that oppose new construction, historical preservationists, and innumerable new zoning, environmental, and labor laws that have made it too hard to build enough housing to keep up with the city’s population growth since 1982, and priced affordably for the people who actually work there. Blade Runner envisioned a grim 2019 for Los Angeles, courtesy of unchecked capitalism (e.g. – smokestacks in the city, smoggy air, megacorporations that play God by mass producing slaves), yet the city (and California more generally) actually went down the opposite path by embracing citizen activism, unionists, and big government, ironically leading to a different set of quality of life problems. Fittingly, the building that stood in for the derelict apartment building in Blade Runner has now been fully renovated, is a government-protected landmark, and is full of deep-pocketed, trendy businesses.

The vast majority of Los Angeles’ land area is covered by single-family homes and low-rise buildings.

There will be flying cars. One iconic element of Blade Runner is its flying cars, called “spinners.” They’re shaped and proportioned similarly to conventional, road-only cars, and they’re able to drive on roads, but they can also take off straight up into the air. Clearly, we don’t have flying cars like this today, and for reasons I discussed at length in my blog entry about flying cars, I doubt we ever will.

I won’t repeat the points I made in that other blog entry, but let me briefly say here that the spinners are particularly unrealistic types of flying cars because they don’t have propellers or any other device that lifts the craft up by blowing air at the ground. Instead, they seem to operate thanks to some kind of scientifically impossible force–maybe “anti-gravity”–that lets them fly almost silently. There are brief shots in the film where low-flying spinners belch smoke from their undersides, which made me wonder if they were vectored thrust nozzles like those found on F-35 jets. But because the smoke comes out at low speed, the undermounted nozzles are not near the crafts’ centers of gravity, and the smoke isn’t seen coming out when the spinners are flying at higher altitudes, I don’t think they help levitate the spinners any more than a tailpipe helps a conventional car drive forward on a road.

A flying car expelling exhaust from its underside during takeoff..

People will smoke indoors. In several scenes, characters are shown smoking cigarettes indoors. This depiction of 2019 is very inaccurate, though in fairness the people who made the movie couldn’t have foreseen the cultural and legal sea changes towards smoking that would happen in the 1990s and 2000s.

People in Blade Runner like smoking indoors. No one stops them, and there aren’t any “No Smoking” signs.

When judging the prediction, also consider that if we average people and the legal framework were more enlightened, vaping indoors would be much more common today. While not “healthy,” vaping nicotine is vastly less harmful to a person’s health than smoking cigarettes, and science has not yet found any health impact of exposure to “secondhand vape smoke.”

A recent photo of a young woman smoking an e-cigarette.

There will be genetically engineered humans. In Blade Runner, mankind has created a race of genetically engineered humans called “replicants” to do labor. The genetic profile of each replicant is tailored to the needs of his or her given field of work. For example, one of the film’s replicant characters, a female named “Pris,” is a prostitute, so she is made to be physically attractive and to have average intelligence. All of the replicant characters clearly had high levels of strength and very high pain tolerances.

Digital dossier on the replicant “Pris”

In the most basic sense, Blade Runner was right, because genetically engineered humans do exist in 2019. There are probably dozens of people alive right now who were produced with a special in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedure called “mitochondrial replacement therapy” in which an egg from a woman with genetically defective mitochondria is infused with genetically normal mitochondria from a third person, and then the “engineered” egg is combined with sperm to produce a zygote. The first such child was born in 1997.

Additionally, there are now two humans with genetically engineered nuclear DNA, and they were both born in November 2018 in China after a rogue geneticist used CRISPR to change both of their genomes. Those edits, however, were very small, and will probably not manifest themselves in any detectable way as the babies grow up, meaning Blade Runner‘s prediction that there would be genetically engineered adults with meaningfully enhanced strength, intelligence, and looks in 2019 failed to come true. This is because it has proven very hard to edit human genes without accidentally damaging the target gene or some other one, and because most human traits (height, IQ, strength, etc.) are each controlled by dozens or hundreds of different genes, each having a small effect.

For example, there’s no single gene that controls a human’s intelligence level; there are probably over 1,000 genes that, in aggregate, determine how smart the person is and in what areas (math, verbal, musical). If you use CRISPR to flip any one of those genes in the “smart” direction, it will raise the person’s IQ by 1 point, so you just have to flip 40 genes to create a genius. But CRISPR is an imprecise tool, so every time you use it to flip one gene, there’s a 20% chance that CRISPR will accidentally change a completely different gene as well, perhaps causing the person to have a higher risk of cancer, schizophrenia or a birth defect.

The discovery of CRISPR was a milestone in the history of genetic technology, and it improved our ability to do genetic engineering by leaps and bounds, but it’s simply not precise enough or safe enough to make humans with the major enhancements that the replicants had. We’ll have to wait for the next big breakthrough, I can’t predict when that will happen, and I doubt anyone else could since there’s no “trend line” for this area of technology.

That’s not to say that we couldn’t use existing (or near-term) genetic technologies to make humans with certain attributes. A technique called “preimplantation genetic screening” (PGS) involves the creation of several human zygotes through IVF, followed by gene sequencing of each zygote and implantation of the one with the best genetic traits in the mother. This isn’t true “genetic engineering,” but it accomplishes much the same thing. And you could sharply raise the odds of getting a zygote with specific characteristics if you did the IVF using sperm or eggs from adults who already had those those characteristics. For example, if you wanted to use genetic technology to make a physically strong person, you would get the sperm or eggs of a bodybuilder from a sperm/egg bank, use them for an IVF procedure, and then employ PGS to find the fertilized egg that had the most gene variants known to correlate with high strength. This would almost certainly yield a person of above-average physical strength, without making use of bona fide “genetic engineering.” There are no statistics on how many live babies have been produced through this two-step process, but if we assume just 0.1% of IVF procedures are of this type, then the number is over 8,000 globally as of this writing.

Furthermore, I can imagine how, within 20 years, genetic engineering could be applied to enhance the zygotes farther. Within that timeframe, we will probably discover which mitochondrial genes code for athleticism, and by using mitochondrial replacement therapy, we could tweak our PGS-produced zygote still farther. Let’s assume that there are ten nuclear genes coding for physical strength. The average person has five of those genes flipped to “weak” and five flipped to “strong,” resulting in average overall strength. Our carefully bred, deliberately selected zygote has nine genes flipped to “strong” and one flipped to “weak.” Since we only have to change one gene to genetically “max out” this zygote’s physical strength, the use of CRISPR is deemed an acceptable risk (error rates are lower than they were in 2019 anyway thanks to lab techniques discovered since then), and it works. The person grows up to be a top bodybuilder.

There will be genetically engineered super-soldiers. The leader of the replicant gang in Blade Runner is named “Roy Batty,” and he was designed with traits suited for military combat. Having governments or evil companies make genetically engineered or cloned super-soldiers is a common trope in sci fi, but I doubt it will ever happen, except perhaps in very small numbers.

First, I simply don’t believe that the government of any free country, and even most authoritarian ones, would be willing to undertake such a project. And even if one of them were, the diplomatic costs imposed by other countries on the basis of human rights would probably outweigh the benefits of having the small number of super-soldiers. Mass producing millions of super-soldiers to fill out an army (to be clear, there was no evidence of anything but than small-batch production in Blade Runner) is even less plausible, as it would be too fascist and dehumanizing a proposal for even the most hardline dictatorships. Censure from the international community would also be severe. What damage can you do with an army of genetic super-soldiers if years of economic sanctions have left you without any money for bullets?

Second, a country’s ability to make super-soldiers will be constrained by its ability to raise and educate them. In spite of their genetic endowments, the super-soldiers would only be effective in combat if they were educated to at least the high school level and psychologically well-adjusted, which means costly, multi-year investments would need to be made. Where would the state find enough women who were willing to be implanted with super-soldier embryos and carry them until birth? If the government coerced its women into doing this, the country would become an international pariah for sure, and its neighbors would strengthen their own armies out of concern at such derangement.

Who would raise the children? State-run orphanages are almost universally terrible at this, and too many of the super-soldiers would turn out to be mentally or emotionally unfit for military service, or perhaps fit, but no better overall than a non-genetically engineered soldier who was raised by a decent family. If the government instead forced families to raise the super-soldier kids, doubtless many would be damaged by family dysfunction at the hands of parents who didn’t want them or parents who raised them improperly.

Third, by the time we have the technology to make genetic super-soldiers at relatively low cost, and by the time any such super-soldiers get old enough to start military service, militaries will probably be switch to AIs and combat robots that are even better. As I predicted in my Starship Troopers review, a fully automated or 95% automated military force could exist as early as 2095.

And if the super-soldiers were all clones of each other, they could develop very close personal bonds, come to feel alienated from everyone else, and behave unpredictably as a group. Identical twins and triplets report having personal bonds that can’t be understood by other people.

That said, I think human genetic engineering will become widespread this century, it will enable us to make “super people” who will be like the most extraordinary “natural” humans alive today, some of those genetically engineered people will serve in armed forces and under private military contractors across the world, and they will perform their jobs excellently thanks to their genetically enhanced traits. While it’s possible that some of these “genetic super-soldiers” will be made by governments or illegally made by evil companies, people like that will be very small in number, and dwarfed by genetic super-soldiers who are the progeny of private citizens who decided, without government coercion, to genetically engineer their children. Those offspring will then enter the military through the same avenues as non-genetically engineered people, either by joining voluntarily or being drafted. Yes, there will be genetically engineered super-soldiers someday, but their presence in the military or in private security firms will be incidental, and not–except in some rare cases–because a government or company made them for that purpose and controlled their lives from birth.

There will be “artificial animals”. While visiting the luxurious office of a tycoon, Deckard sees the man’s pet owl flying around, and he’s told that it is “artificial.” Later, he comes across an artificial pet snake, whose scales (and presumably, all other body parts) were manufactured in labs and bear microscopic serial numbers. To the naked eye, both animals look indistinguishable from normal members of their species. It’s unclear whether “artificial” means “organic” like human replicants, or “mechanical” like robots with metal endoskeletons and computer chips for brains. We have failed to create the latter, and the robotic imitations of animals we have today are mostly toys that don’t look, move, or behave convincingly. Our progress achieving the former (replicant animals) is more equivocal.

Our technology is still far too primitive for us to be able to grow discrete body parts and organs in a lab and to seamlessly join them together to make healthy, fully functional animals. This is the likeliest process used to make the replicants, so in the strictest sense, we have failed to live up to vision Blade Runner had for 2019. However, we are able to genetically modify animals and have done so many times to hone our genetic engineering techniques. For example, Chinese scientists used CRISPR to make dogs that have twice the normal muscle mass. For all I know, they’re now the pets of a rich man like the film’s tycoon.

Barbra Streisand with her cloned dogs.

Additionally, we are reasonably good at cloning animals, and, considering the vagueness of the terms “artificial” and “bioengineered” as they are used in the film, it could be argued that they apply to clones. Cloning a cat costs about $25,000 and a dog about $50,000, putting the service out of reach for everyone but the rich, and there are several rich people who have cloned pets, most notably Barbra Streisand, who had two clones made of her beloved dog after it died. A celebrity of her stature owning cloned animals is somewhat analogous to Blade Runner‘s depiction of the tycoon who owned the artificial owl.

There will be non-token numbers of humans living off Earth. At several points in Blade Runner, references are made to the “off-world colonies,” which are space stations and/or celestial bodies that have significant human populations. Advertisements encourage Los Angelinos to consider moving there, which implies that the colonies are big enough and stable enough to house people other than highly trained astronauts. The locations of the colonies aren’t described, but I’ll assume they were in our solar system.

This prediction has clearly failed. The only off-world human presence is found on the International Space Station, it only has a token number of people (about six at any time) on it, only elite people can go there, and its small size and lack of self-sufficiency (cargo rockets must routinely resupply it) means it fails to meet the criteria for a “colony”.

There are no plans or funds available to expand the ISS enough to turn it into a true “space colony,” and in fact, it might be abandoned in the 2020s. Other space stations might be built over the next 20 years by various nations and conglomerates, but they will be smaller than the ISS and will only be open to highly trained astronauts.

While a manned Moon landing is possible in the next ten years (probably by Americans), I doubt a Moon base comparable in size and capabilities to the ISS will be built for at least 20 years (note that 14 years passed from when U.S. President Reagan declared the start of the ISS project and when the first part of it was launched into space, and no national leader has yet committed to building a Moon base, which would probably be even more expensive). In fact, in my Predictions blog post, I estimated that such a base wouldn’t exist until the 2060s. It would take decades longer for that base or any other on the Moon to get big enough to count as a “colony” that was also open to large numbers of average-caliber people. A Mars colony is an even more distant prospect due to the inherently higher costs and technological demands.

I think the human race will probably be overtaken by intelligent machines before we are able to build true off-world colonies that have large human populations. Once we are surpassed here on Earth, sending humans into space will seem all the more wasteful since there will be machines that can do all the things humans can, but at lower cost. We might never get off of Earth in large numbers, or if we do, it will be with the permission of Our Robot Overlords to tag along with them since some of them were heading to Mars anyway.

Cars will be boxy and angular instead of streamlined. Many of the cars shown in the movie are boxy and faceted. While this may have looked futuristic to Americans in 1982, boxy, angular cars were in fact already on their way out, and would be mostly extinct by the mid-90s. The cars of Blade Runner look retro today, and no mass-produced, modern vehicles look like them.**

Deckard’s car.
A van
U.S. fuel economy standards sharply increased from 1975-85. Blade Runner was filmed in 1982, and its artistic vision was to some extent influenced by the aesthetics of the time, hence the boxy future cars.

The change to curvaceous, streamlined car bodies was driven by stricter automobile fuel efficiency requirements, enacted by the U.S. government in response to the Arab Oil Embargoes of the 1970s. Carmakers found that one of the easiest ways to make cars more fuel efficient was to streamline their exteriors to reduce air resistance.

A 1982 Toyota Corolla
A 2019 Toyota Corolla

Since there’s no reason to think vehicle fuel efficiency standards will ever come down (if anything, they will rise), there’s also no reason to expect boxy, angular cars to return.

Just after I’d finished analyzing this car prediction, look who showed up.

**IMPORTANT NOTE I’M ADDING AT THE LAST MINUTE: On November 21, 2019, Elon Musk debuted Tesla’s “Cybertruck” at an event in Los Angeles, and the vehicle is a trapezoidal, sharp-angled curiosity that looks fit for the dark streets of Blade Runner. While I doubt it heralds a shift in car design, and it’s possible the Cybertruck could be redesigned between now and its final release date in 2021, I’d be remiss not to mention it here.

Therapeutic cloning will be a mature technology. There’s a scene in the film where two fugitive replicants confront and kill the man who designed their eyes in his genetics lab. It further establishes the fact that the replicants are made of organic parts that are manufactured in separate labs and then assembled. This technology is called “therapeutic cloning,” and today it is decades less advanced than Blade Runner predicted it would be.

Two replicants confronting the geneticist who designed their eyes.

We are unable to grow fully-functional human organs like eyes in labs, and can barely grow rudimentary human tissues using the same techniques. The field of regenerative medicine research was in fact dealt a serious blow recently, when a leading scientist and doctor Paolo Macchiarini was exposed as a fraud. Dr. Macchiarini gained worldwide fame for his technique of helping people with terminal trachea problems by removing tracheas from cadavers, replacing the dead host’s cells with stem cells from the intended recipient, and then transplanting the engineered trachea into the sick person. For a time, his work was touted as proof that therapeutic cloning was rapidly advancing, and that maybe Blade Runner levels of the technology would exist by 2019. Unfortunately, time revealed that Macchiarini had faked the results in his medical papers, and that most of his patients died soon after receiving their engineered tracheas.

The actual state-of-the-art in 2019 is lab-made bladders. Being merely an elastic bag, a bladder is much simpler than an eye.

Legitimate work in regenerative medicine is overwhelmingly confined to labs and involves animal experiments, and there are no signs of an impending breakthrough that will enable us to start making fully functional organs and tissues that can be surgically implanted in humans and expected to survive for non-trivial lengths of time. The best the field can muster at present is a few dozen procedures globally each year, in which a small amount of simple tissue, such as a bladder or skin graft, is made in the lab and implanted in a patient under the most stringent conditions. (Of note, only a small fraction of people with missing or non-functional bladders have received engineered bladders, and the preferred treatment is to do surgery [called a “urostomy”] so the person’s urine drains out of their abdomens through a hole and into an externally-worn plastic bag.) As noted in my Predictions blog entry, I don’t think therapeutic cloning will be a mature field until about 2100.

Advertisements will be everywhere. In Blade Runner, entire sides of buildings in L.A. have been turned into huge, glowing, live-action billboards advertising products. This prediction was right in spirit, but wrong in its specifics: Advertisements are indeed omnipresent, and the average person in Los Angeles is probably more exposed to ads in 2019 than they would have been in 1982. However, the ads are overwhelmingly conveyed through telecommunications and digital media (think of TV and radio commercials, internet popup ads, browser sidebar ads, and auto-play videos), and not through gigantic billboards. Partly, I think this is because huge video billboards would be too distracting–particularly if they also played audio–and would invite constant lawsuits from city dwellers who found them ruinous of open spaces and peace.

Which is worse: Huge video billboards or being constantly pummeled with spam emails, digital ads, and the knowledge that your personal internet data is being sold and traded without your control?

No one will turn on the lights. Blade Runner is a dark movie. No, I mean literally dark: Almost all of the scenes are set at night, and no one in the movie believes in turning on anything but dim lights. It may have been a bold, iconic look from a cinematography standpoint, but it’s not an accurate depiction of 2019. People do not prefer dimmer lights now, and in fact, nighttime artificial light exposure is higher than at any point in human history: satellites have confirmed that the amount of “light pollution” emanating from the Earth’s surface (mainly from street lights and exterior building lights) is greater than ever and still growing. Also, people now spend so much time staring into glowing screens (smartphones, computer monitors, TVs) that circadian rhythm disruption has become a public health problem.

If your light is so bright that it can be seen in space, then you’re wasting a lot of electricity.

Intriguingly, I don’t think this trend will continue forever, and I think it’s possible the world will someday be much darker than now. I intend to fully flesh out this idea in another blog entry, but basically, as machines get smarter and better, the need for nighttime illumination will drop. Autonomous cars will have night vision, so they won’t need bright headlights or bright streetlights to see the road. Streetlights will also be infused with “smart” technology, and will save energy by turning themselves off when no cars are around. And if intelligent machines replace humans (and/or if we evolve into a higher form), then everyone on Earth will have night vision as well, which will almost eliminate the need for all exterior lights.

Note that, in controlled environments, machines can already function in the dark or with only the dimmest of lights. This is called “lights-out manufacturing.” As machines get smarter and move from factories and labs to public spaces, they will bring this ability with them. My prediction merely seizes upon a proof of concept and expands upon it.

It will be possible to implant fake memories in people. Very early in a replicant’s life, he or she is implanted with fake memories. The process by which this is done is never revealed, but it is sophisticated enough to fill the subject’s mind with seeming decades of memories that are completely real to them. We lack the ability to do this, though psychological experiments have shown in principle that people can be tricked into slowly accepting false memories.

Since memories exist as physical arrangements of neurons in a person’s brain and as enduring patterns of electrochemical signaling within a brain, it should be possible in principle to alter a person’s brain in a way that implants a false memory in him or her, or any other discrete piece of knowledge or skill. However, this would require fantastically advanced technology (probably some combination of direct brain electrical stimulation, hypnosis, full-immersion virtual reality, drugs, and perhaps nanomachines) that we won’t have for at least 100 years. This is VERY far out there, along with being able to build humans from different body parts grown in different labs.

Computer monitors and TVs will be deep, and there will not be any thin displays. In one scene, we get a good look at a personal computer, and it appears to have an old-fashioned CRT monitor, and is almost a foot deep. Additionally, flat-panel TVs, computer monitors, laptops, or tablets and never seen in the film. This is a largely inaccurate depiction of 2019, as flat-panel screens are ubiquitous, and the average person owns several flat-screen devices that they interact with countless times per day.

Deckard sitting on his couch while looking at his computer screen. It looks like there might also be a second screen at the far right, facing away from him. Note that he doesn’t like turning on the lights.

I said the depiction was largely inaccurate because, even though CRT monitors and TVs are obsolete and haven’t been manufactured in ten years, millions of them are still in use in homes and businesses across the world, mainly among poor people and old people who lack the money or interest in upgrading. There’s even a subculture of younger people who prefer using old CRT TVs for playing video games because the picture looks better in some ways than it does on the best, modern OLED displays. In short, while it’s increasingly rare and unusual for people to have deep, CRT computer monitors in their homes, it is common enough that this scene from Blade Runner can be considered accurate in its depiction.

The median and mean lifespan of a CRT TV is 15 years, and almost none of them last more than 30 years. With that in mind, functional CRT monitors will not be in use by 2039, except among antique collectors. The Baby Boomers will be dead by then, and their kids will have thrown away any CRT screens they were clinging to.

People will talk with computers. Deckard’s apartment building has a controlled entry security feature: anyone who enters the elevator must speak his or her name, and the “voice print” must match with someone authorized to have access to the building, or else the elevator won’t go up. Also, in his apartment, Deckard uses voice commands to interface with his personal computer. Blade Runner correctly predicted that voice-user interfaces would be common in 2019, though it incorrectly envisioned how we would use them.

Electronic, controlled entry security technology in common areas of apartment buildings, like elevators and lobbies, are very common, but overwhelmingly involve using plastic cards and key fobs to unlock scanner-equipped doors. In fact, I’ve never seen a voice-unlocked door or elevator, and think most people would feel silly using one for whatever reason.

Smart speakers like the Amazon Echo are also very common and can only be interfaced with via speech. Modern smartphones and tablets can also be controlled with spoken commands, but it’s rare to see people doing this.

This brings up the valuable point that, though speech is an intuitive means of communication, we’ve found that older means of interface involving keyboards, mice, and reading words on a screen are actually better ways to interact with technology for most purposes, and they are not close to obsolescence (and might never be). An inherent problem with talking with a computer is you lose privacy since anyone within earshot knows what you’re doing. Also, while continuous speech recognition technology is now excellent, the error rates are still high enough to make it an aggravating way to input data into a machine compared to using buttons. Entering complex data into a computer, such as you would do for a computer programming task, is also much faster and easier with a keyboard, and anything involving graphical design or manipulation of digital objects on a screen is best done with a mouse or a stylus.

To understand, watch this clip of Deckard talking to his computer, and think about whether it would be easier or harder to do that image manipulation task using a mouse, with intuitive click-and-drag abilities to move around the image, and a trackball for zooming in and out: https://youtu.be/QkcU0gwZUdg

Deckard holding a photograph he found.

Hard copy photographs are still around. In that scene, Deckard does the image manipulation on a photograph that he found. He inserts it into a slot in his computer, and it scans it and shows the digital scan on his screen. While hard-copy photographs are still being made in 2019, they’re very uncommon, especially when compared to the number of photographs that were taken this year across the planet, but never transferred from digital format to a physical medium. I doubt that even 0.01% of the personal photographs ordinary people take are ever printed onto paper, and I doubt this will ever change.

Image scanners will be common. The computer’s ability to make a digital copy of a physical image of course means it has a built-in scanner. This proved a realistic prediction, as flatbed scanners with excellent image scan fidelity levels cost under $100. When Blade Runner was filmed, scanners were physically large, very expensive, made low-quality image conversions, and were almost unknown to the general public.

Cameras will take ultra high-resolution photos. The photo that Deckard analyzes is extremely detailed and has a very high pixel count, allowing him to use his computer to zoom in on small sections of it and to still see the images clearly. In particular, after zooming in on the round mirror hanging on the wall (upper right quadrant of the photo shown above), he spots an image of one of the replicants. While grainy, he can still make out her face and upper body.

It’s impossible to tell from the film sequence exactly how high-res the photo is, but today we have consumer-grade cameras that can take photos that are about as detailed. The Fujufilm XT30 costs $800 and is reasonably compact, putting it within the range of average-income people, and it takes very high quality 26.1 MP photos. One of its photos is shown above, and if you download the non-compressed version from the source website and open it in an imaging app, you’ll be able to zoom in on the rear left window of the car far enough to see the patterns of the decals and to read the words printed on them. (https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/12/18306026/fujifilm-xt30-camera-review-fuji-xt3-mirrorless)

Firearms will still be in use. The only handheld weapons we see in the film are handguns that use gunpowder to shoot out metal bullets. One is shown for only a split-second at the start of the movie when a replicant shoots a human, and the other is seen several times in Deckard’s hands. It’s big, bulky, looks like it shoots more powerful bullets than average, and has some glowing lights that seem to do nothing. In short, it’s nothing special, and probably isn’t any better than handguns that most Americans can easily buy for $500 today. Thus, the depiction the 2019’s state-of-the-art weaponry is accurate.

Deckard pointing his pistol.

And I do say “state-of-the-art” because, being an elite bounty hunter on an important mission to kill abnormally strong, dangerous people, Deckard has his choice of weapons, and it says a lot that he picks a regular gunpowder handgun instead of something exotic and stereotypically futuristic like a laser pistol. As noted in my reviews of The Terminator and Starship Troopers, we shouldn’t expect firearms to become obsolete for a very long time, and possibly never.

Video phone calls and pay phones will be common. There’s a scene where Deckard uses a public pay phone to make a video call to a love interest. This depiction of 2019 turned out to be half right and half wrong, but for the better: Pay phones have nearly disappeared because even poor people have cell phones (which are more convenient to use). Video call technology is mature and widespread, the calls can be made for free through apps like Skype and Google Hangouts, and even low-end smartphones can support them.

It’s surprising that video calls, long a staple of science fiction, became a reality during the 2010s with hardly anyone noticing and the world not changing in any major way. Also surprising is the fact that most people still prefer doing voice-only calls and texting, which is even more lacking in personal substance and emotional conveyance. Like talking with computers, using video calls to converse with other humans has proved more trouble than it’s worth in most cases.

Links:

  1. Why cars got curvy – https://www.vox.com/2015/6/11/8762373/car-design-curves
  2. Famous Lancet retraction of Dr. Macchiarini’s papers – https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)31484-3/fulltext
  3. A patient who got a cloned bladder – https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45470799
  4. Light pollution is bad and getting worse – https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-end-of-night-global-illumination-has-increased-worldwide/
  5. Swedish study that found CRT TVs almost never survive longer than 30 years, and CRT monitors die by 20 – https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0956053X1530101X
  6. Review of the Fujifilm X-T30 – https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/12/18306026/fujifilm-xt30-camera-review-fuji-xt3-mirrorless
  7. Vaping is not as bad for your health as smoking – https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2019/oct/21/vaping-safer-smoking/
  8. Three-person IVF done to overcome the mother’s mitochondrial genetic defects – https://www.bbc.com/news/health-47889387
  9. Barbra Streisand has two cloned dogs – https://variety.com/2018/film/news/barbra-streisand-oscars-sexism-in-hollywood-clone-dogs-1202710585/
  10. The ISS took 14 years to go from approval to space – https://www.issnationallab.org/about/iss-timeline/

Roundup of interesting articles, October 2019

Chemists are getting closer to finding ways to cheaply make bulk quantities of the hallucinatory molecule found in magic mushrooms. This will surely be awesome for…somebody.
https://gizmodo.com/magic-mushroom-chemical-harvested-from-bacteria-for-t-1838624959

The story about the recent “AI-generated drug” was oversold, and the drug will benefit only about 180 people in the U.S.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/09/30/an-ai-generated-drug

The discovery of “GlycoRNA” puts into relief how little we know about intracellular signaling and enzymology.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/10/03/enter-glycornas

Geneticists have made “hornless bulls.” This benefits animal welfare since it’s harder for the bulls to hurt each other, and because chopping off horns is painful.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49962130

Many serious health problems, such as heart attacks and diabetes, are partly genetic, and each day we’re discovering new genes that cause them.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-51258-x

A new study of population genetics suggests that the poor, rural areas of Britain are like that because most of the smart people left for better and more interesting lives in the cities (mainly London), leaving only lower-IQ people behind to breed. IQ score is about 50% genetic.
https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/opinion–the-nature-of-social-inequalities-in-great-britain-66607

23andMe’s 4-million-person genetic database reveals how many people are living with undetected chromosomal anomalies.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/10/when-you-have-more-dna-one-parent-other/599812/

If China or Russia hacked into the huge commercial database of American user-submitted DNA samples, it would be a disaster.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614642/dna-database-gedmatch-golden-state-killer-security-risk-hack/

A new genetic engineering technique called “prime editing” allows scientists to edit DNA with unprecedented accuracy and low error rates.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/prime-editing-new-form-crispr-technology-make-gene-editing-more-precisie-180973381/

Stimulating the brain with electricity can cure depression.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/health/deep-brain-stimulation-depression.html

Farm scientists have developed a newer, better type of apple called the “cosmic crisp.” Ain’t science great?
https://apnews.com/b108210233784b3fb1753d1bf6315a14

A network of tree-mounted microphones spread across central Africa to count elephant populations and poaching activity shows how a mass surveillance network could be created with mostly simple technology. I predict that someday, the whole surface of the Earth will be continuously monitored.
https://www.npr.org/2019/10/25/760487476/elephants-under-attack-have-an-unlikely-ally-artificial-intelligence

Facebook and Google scan any alphanumerical characters they find in user-uploaded photos, and then embed those characters in the image file’s description. That means you can type in a car license plate number or a gun’s serial number into the Google or FB search bar, and find any photos of the car or gun.
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2019/10/22/google-firearm-serial-numbers/

The U.S. and Britain hit “peak resource use” in 2007 or 2008, meaning resource consumption of things like cement, copper and fertilizer stopped growing in spite of the fact that GDP kept increasing. This is good news since it means technology is allowing us to use existing resources more efficiently, meaning less waste.
https://reason.com/2019/10/09/the-economy-keeps-growing-but-americans-are-using-less-steel-paper-fertilizer-and-energy/

Objects made of polystyrene plastic break down into CO2 on scales measurable in as little as decades, not millennia as is commonly believed. I predict that all the trash produced by humans will someday be cleaned up.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.estlett.9b00532

Here’s a fascinating way to slow down global warming: Deploy autonomous barges to the Arctic Ocean that make hexagonal icebergs.
https://www.cnn.com/style/article/refreeze-arctic-design-scn/index.html

After the Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown, Japan temporarily shut down all its other reactors for safety inspections. This caused the price of energy in Japan to skyrocket, and many people couldn’t afford to pay their heating bills. The number of people–overwhelmingly poorer elderly people–who froze to death as a result far exceeded the death toll from the meltdown itself (only one person dead from radiation exposure).
https://www.nber.org/papers/w26395

“Smart plugs” are a versatile device I’ve never heard of: They’re small, Wifi-connected plugs that you insert into your electrical outlets, letting you remotely turn the electricity on or off in those outlets, in turn controlling any devices plugged into them.
https://www.amazon.com/Gosund-Compatible-Required-appliances-Certified/dp/B079MFTYMV/

Tesla just bought a Canadian company that builds robots that assemble batteries. It takes fewer workers to build an electric car than a gas-powered car because the former has fewer parts . Car factory jobs will disappear even faster once guys like Elon Musk figure out how to make better robot workers.
https://business.financialpost.com/technology/battling-battery-cell-scarcity-and-manufacturing-hiccups-tesla-quietly-buys-ontario-automation-firm

The Alexa AI personal assistant now has a Samuel L. Jackson voice. It even curses at you.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2019/09/25/samuel-l-jackson-first-celebrity-voice-amazon-alexa/2447992001/

Google’s OpenAI company just build a robot hand that can solve Rubik’s Cubes. It’s an impressive demonstration of pattern recognition and physical dexterity.
https://mobile.twitter.com/OpenAI/status/1184135128869527552

Google’s DeepMind AI just became a “grandmaster” in StarCraft 2, meaning it can beat 99.8% of humans. When the company started this project two years ago, its AI could barely perform basic in-game functions and couldn’t beat anyone. Note that DeepMind has been handicapped in that it can’t issue commands during games faster than human players can (about 264 actions per minute).
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1724-z

A summary of how future quantum computers will benefit us:
https://www.quantumrun.com/prediction/how-quantum-computers-will-change-world-future-computers

Google says it has achieved quantum supremacy by building a quantum computer that can do a specific type of math calculation in 200 seconds that the best classical computer would take 10,000 years to do.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1666-5

IBM, which made the current world’s best classical computer, quickly issued a rebuttal to Google’s claim.
https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2019/10/on-quantum-supremacy/

And Scott Aaronson, a world-renowned theoretical computer scientist, wrote a blog post about both of those press releases, which essentially says Google is right, but by a narrower margin than they claimed, and that all disagreement about this issue will vanish in a few years once quantum computers improve so much that the performance gulf between them and classical computers gets too wide for anyone to contest.
https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4372

Here’s an awesome mini-documentary about “extreme ultraviolet lithography”–a new technique for making computer chips even smaller and better than they are. I wish everything on TV were this intelligent and polished.
https://youtu.be/f0gMdGrVteI

The man who discovered the first exoplanet just won a Nobel Prize in physics, believes that aliens exist, and thinks we could build a telescope in as little as 30 years able to verify whether exoplanets have Earth-like atmospheres.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/10/08/cambridge-university-planet-hunter-says-mankind-could-find-alien/

Edward Snowden said he searched through the vast archive of secret U.S. intelligence files for proof of aliens and found none. Keep in mind that he’s an international fugitive and has nothing to lose anymore and no reason to cover up anything for the U.S. government.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/10/24/whistleblower-edward-snowden-says-us-government-isnt-hiding-aliens/4081616002/

The Peacekeeper ICBM’s inertial guidance system was a work of art.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/30254/this-isnt-a-sci-fi-prop-its-a-doomsday-navigator-for-americas-biggest-cold-war-icbm

The U.S. Air Force’s X-37B autonomous “space plane” has landed after two years in orbit. Its purpose is secret.
https://apnews.com/51cbcc00c49c49249f258db9de6b1427

Here are some interesting early designs for what would later become the International Space Station.
http://www.astronautix.com/d/dualkeelspaestation-1985.html
http://www.astronautix.com/p/powertowersestation-1984.html

China has nearly finished a massive new military shipyard that it will use as an aircraft carrier factory. I predict that in about 20 years, China’s military will be strong enough to have at least a 50% chance of defeating the U.S. military in the western Pacific. However, it’s unclear if China will choose to fight even if it has the advantage. They’d much prefer to get what they want through diplomatic and economic pressure, and military intimidation.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-military-carrier-exclusive-idUSKBN1WW0KM

More ships sunk during the Battle of Midway were found. Recall my prediction: [Between 2101 and 2200] Every significant archaeological site will be excavated and every shipwreck found. There will be no work left for people in the antiquities.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7586959/Deep-sea-explorers-seek-sunken-World-War-II-ships.html

Here’s a fascinating exploration of the different WWII-era design and manufacturing philosophies of the Americans, Germans, and Soviets. It might be unfairly critical of the Germans since it forgets that their smaller pool of manpower might have rightly forced them to focus on making their tanks higher in quality at the expense of quantity.
https://www.historynet.com/profiles-cold-steel-making-tanks.htm

Photos from a modern Russian tank factory, where T-72 tanks are upgraded. Note the close-up photo below, which clearly shows the “Kontact-5” explosive reactive armor attached to the tank turret’s exterior. The turret itself has a smooth, rounded shape, and it only looks angular thanks to the blocks of Kontact-5.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7589915/Fascinating-photographs-construction-testing-deadly-45-ton-T-72B3-battle-tank.html

T-72B3 tank

A new study challenges the belief that humanity is getting less warlike.
https://phys.org/news/2019-09-international-conflict-isnt-declining-analysis.html

The transhumanist movement probably began in the 1920s.
https://lithub.com/early-visions-of-transhumanism-were-wild/

Thin, flexible LED sheets like this will someday be incorporated into clothing. I predict this will lead to personal “cloaking devices” made of clothes studded with the LEDs, e-ink sheets, or some other metamaterial and pinhole cameras colored e-ink. The cameras will monitor the appearance of the person’s surroundings and tell the display pixels to change their colors to match. Ski masks made of the same material would let wearers change their facial features, fooling most face recognition cameras and certainly fooling the unaided eyes of humans. The pixels could also be made to glow bright white, allowing the wearer to turn any part of his body into a flashlight. 
https://youtu.be/5fy91AdzfJw

An important weakness of small, flying drones is that they won’t be able to fly when it’s windy, raining or snowing. This reliability problem will dash any plans to create an economy where the drones have replaced ground vehicles for delivering goods, and seriously hinder efforts to make a military force comprised mainly of small attack drones.
https://now.tufts.edu/articles/how-do-birds-survive-storms-and-other-harsh-weather

Roundup of interesting articles, September 2019

The best AI-generated human faces of 2014 (left) and 2019 (right).

AI-generated human faces from 2014:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1406.2661.pdf

AI-generated human faces from 2019:
https://www.fastcompany.com/90406423/these-ai-generated-people-are-coming-to-kill-stock-photography

Google claims to have achieved “quantum supremacy” in a lab experiment…kind of.
https://www.wired.com/story/why-googles-quantum-computing-victory-is-a-huge-deal-and-a-letdown/

A Google neural network AI scored a 90% on a standardized test of reasoning ability given to eighth grade students in New York.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/04/technology/artificial-intelligence-aristo-passed-test.html

Electric cars have fewer parts than gas-powered cars, so they are simpler and faster to build, and break less often. This is bad news for people who work at car factories and mechanic shops.
https://apnews.com/c70d4274a69643bba37667585dbee7aa

Amazon has just announced a bulk buy of 100,000 electric delivery trucks, which will jump-start that whole vehicle sector. I’ve predicted before that, once a big company does a bulk buy of thousands of autonomous delivery trucks, the writing will be on the wall for human truck drivers.
https://qz.com/1712151/amazon-orders-100000-electric-delivery-trucks/

One guy has taken it upon himself to drive around his native Zimbabwe to fill in Google Street View imagery. I like his spirit, but it’s kind of pointless since all the blank spots in Street View will very rapidly fill in once autonomous cars become common. The cars will bristle with cameras pointed in every direction, and opting to sell the footage to Google will be a matter of clicking one button.
https://www.npr.org/2019/09/22/760572640/hes-trying-to-fill-in-the-gaps-on-google-street-view-starting-with-zimbabwe

Chinese police used flying drones to find a fugitive who had been at large for 17 years. He was living in a remote camp in the wilderness. Autonomous aircraft will be able to map parts of the planet inaccessible to cars, and hence will be integral to mapping and surveillance.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-49874969

A “vacuum airship” would be a dirigible filled with nothing instead of helium or hydrogen. The exterior air pressure would be so great that its skin would need to be built of super-strong, nano-engineered materials.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_airship

President Trump accidentally Tweeted a classified photo taken by one of America’s best spy satellites, giving insights into how high-res their cameras are. Contrary to urban myth, license plates and facial features can’t be resolved, but individual humans on the ground could be seen (and counted) as small blobs of color.
https://www.npr.org/2019/08/30/755994591/president-trump-tweets-sensitive-surveillance-image-of-iran

In theory, a planet with just 2% of the Earth’s mass could, if located slightly closer to a Sun like ours than the Earth is, have liquid water and hence organic life. (Note: The Moon is 1% Earth’s mass.)
https://phys.org/news/2019-09-redefines-limit-planet-size-habitability.html

The Kardashev Scale is widely misquoted and misunderstood:
1) According to Kardashev’s original science paper on the matter, humanity had ALREADY achieved “Type 1” status in 1964.
2) The paper only had three civilization classifications: Type 1 (most energy on the planet being consumed by the civilization), Type 2 (all of the star’s energy harnessed), and Type 3 (all of the galaxy’s energy harnessed). Nothing was said of “Type 0” or “Type 4” status.
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2014/03/21/what-kardashev-really-said/

When we meet intelligent aliens, even if we can’t understand each others’ languages, we’ll be able to use math and chemistry to agree on what “right” and “left” mean.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_experiment

The U.S. Navy has confirmed that three UFO videos leaked to the public in late 2017 are real, and that they don’t know what the flying objects were.
https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/u-s-navy-confirms-videos-depict-unidentified-aerial-phenomena-not-cleared-for-public-release/

The CIA was out of control in the 50s and 60s, and Fort Detrick, MD was its secret base for developing and testing mind-control drugs, poisons, and biological weapons.
https://politi.co/2I7zNfE

Doctors found a way to triple the time that human livers can be preserved outside a body for transplantation. It involves injecting the organs with preservative fluid and cooling them to below freezing. Don’t write off the possibility of whole-body human cryopresevation in the future.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-49632609

Using donor eggs and IVF, a 74-year-old woman in India got pregnant and gave birth to twins, making her the oldest known mother. (While postmenopausal women’s ovaries don’t make eggs anymore, their uteri remain functional) The physical and mental strain of childbirth was so great that it caused her a stroke and gave her husband a heart attack, and both were sent to the ICU right afterward.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/news/article.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=12267791

The Sahara region oscillates between wet and dry epochs once every 20,000 years. Also, the current Sahara Desert wouldn’t be as large as it is if not for millennia of human-owned livestock overgrazing at its margins. We could “green” parts of it today, with existing technology and relatively little money.
https://phys.org/news/2019-01-sahara-swung-lush-conditions-years.html

Only one insect species is indigenous to Antarctica.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgica_antarctica

Facebook’s virtual reality group has made impressive progress making what they call “Codec Avatars.” A person wears a visor over his face, which has cameras that record the movements of his head, face muscles, eyes, and mouth, and then the footage is streamed to a second person also wearing a visor, who sees the disembodied image of the first person’s head floating in front of them. Various algorithms are used to correct for camera distortions and blank spots.
https://twitter.com/pacrimgirl/status/1176937590756270080

Scientists invented a device that can convert a flat plate’s excess heat into electricity to power an LED bulb. In the future, we’ll do a lot of wring energy out of waste heat.
https://www.cell.com/joule/abstract/S2542-4351(19)30412-X

Amazon pledged to get 100% of its energy from clean sources by 2030.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/19/jeff-bezos-speaks-about-amazon-sustainability-in-washington-dc.html

Here’s more evidence that body weight and obesity are partly genetic: Thin adults tend to have more mitochondria in their fat cells, and different mitochondrial DNA, than average-weight adults.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31374571

It’s actually not true that all siblings share 50% of their genes. Thanks to the random reassortment of genes that happens during meiosis (the biological process that makes sperm and eggs), it’s quite possible for two full siblings to share as little as 40% and as much as 60% of their DNA. 50% is merely the population-wide average (3.6% is the standard deviation).
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/02/why-siblings-differ-differently/#.XZJTyihKiUl

The facts that Earthly life forms have four DNA nucleotides and that a series of three nucleotides codes for each amino acid could mean that ‘a quantum-mechanical process is actually somehow at the root of molecular biology.’ By extension, it also means that the way we store genetic information and translate it into molecules is the most efficient way possible in an organic substrate.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/09/18/and-now-for-a-bit-of-quantum-mechanics

This is a good idea: Make a fighter version of the T-X trainer jet, and use it for patrolling U.S. airspace. This would be much cheaper than using F-15s and F-22s for that role. We could also sell the T-X to friendly Third World countries that didn’t have much money.
https://warontherocks.com/2019/02/blurring-the-lines-part-i-a-promising-new-trainer-aircraft-and-its-combat-variants

Eighteen drones and 7 cruise missiles were launched at Saudi Arabia during the recent attack that disabled much of the country’s oil industry. The wreckage shows the weapons were Iranian-made. Iran’s government denies involvement, and they do have a slender reed to lean on since it’s possible that anti-Saudi rebels launched the weapons from outside Iran.
https://apnews.com/9fb95c0d28c84fd0bf10817dea3ddaab

Iran’s air force still flies pre-1979 planes because no other country wants to sell them new ones and deal with the diplomatic backlash and sanctions from other countries.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/foreign-fighter-jets-iran-would-buy-if-it-was-allowed-79891

China just launched a fifth Type 055 destroyer. They’re practically rolling off an assembly line.
https://www.janes.com/article/91450/china-launches-fifth-type-055-destroyer-for-plan

China ALSO just launched a Type 075 helicopter carrier, after starting construction just five months ago.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/30011/china-just-launched-its-huge-and-incredibly-quickly-built-amphibious-assault-ship

‘There are some clear tactical benefits to [Egypt’s military HQ building] design. Spreading the MoD’s functionality across multiple interconnected facilities offers survivability from limited attacks. Giving each service two well-spaced octagons also offers some redundancy should one be struck, at least depending on the functions and systems each one holds. Like America’s Pentagon, having three distinct ‘nested’ structures within each octagon also provides resiliency if one part of the facility is attacked.’
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29762/egypts-new-octagon-ministry-of-defense-complex-looks-like-an-alien-base-from-space

Russia’s “Ratnik” infantry equipment modernization program unsurprisingly failed in its promise to put every Russian soldier in cyborg power armor, but its more conservative elements–which involved copying elements from more advanced U.S. helmets, body gear, and other accessories–succeeded.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/major-armor-and-uniform-upgrade-russian-military-wanted-here-78496

Eighty years ago, the Nazis invaded Poland, sparking WWII. What is often forgotten is that the Soviets also invaded Poland from the east. Britain and France only declared war on Germany for this offense.
https://youtu.be/oFTtuHxxBLo

U.S. forces fought a brief war in Korea in 1871.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/1871-america-invaded-korea-heres-what-happened-24113

Roundup of interesting articles, August 2019

A Finnish space company called “Iceye” has launched radar satellites that produce sub-meter fidelity images of the Earth, at a fraction of the price of any competitor.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49253951

During the Apollo program era, NASA considered building a gigantic space rocket that would be towed out to sea and launched while half-submerged in water.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Dragon_(rocket)

One of Russia’s self-touted, nuclear-powered missiles accidentally blew up, killing seven Russians and releasing some radioactivity.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/fallout-russias-mysterious-missile-disaster-160700403.html

The U.S. pulled out of the Cold War-era Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, mostly because Russia has been violating it for years.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/u-s-and-russia-pull-out-of-cold-war-era-arms-control-treaty

Russia’s sole aircraft carrier is obsolete, and had problems from the time it was under construction. They’d be much better off decommissioning it and building never ships with the money they save.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/strange-reason-why-russias-aircraft-carrier-leaves-smoke-trails-71031

Russia is experimenting with converting some of its old T-72 tanks into autonomous vehicles. As I’ve said before, robot crews could breathe new life into older weapons and keep them in service longer, but they’d be inferior to newer weapons not designed around the human form at all.
https://www.janes.com/article/90554/russia-develops-unmanned-t-72s

I agree with this list of “Worst American Generals,” but would add William Winder, who served ignominiously in the War of 1812.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/military-history-you-might-want-forget-5-worst-us-generals-ever-76236

This is the 80th anniversary of the cynical Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Nazis and Soviets.
https://reason.com/2019/08/23/the-80th-anniversary-of-the-nazi-soviet-pact/

In the desperate 1948 War for Independence, Israel relied on a handful of modified WWII German Me-109 fighter planes for airpower.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/how-strange-nazi-germanys-fighter-planes-helped-save-israel-74311

Britain once had the world’s best army. Today, it can’t even muster 75,000 men (out of a population of 66 million).
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-49365599

One of Iran’s busted-up F-4 Phantoms crashed.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/irans-air-force-just-lost-fighter-jet-us-made-f-4-phantom-just-went-down-71446

For some reason, the USAF hasn’t scrapped any of its F-117 stealth fighters even though they were retired in 2008. They’re all sitting in an airplane hangar.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29606/51-f-117-nighthawk-stealth-jets-remain-in-inventory-only-one-destroyed-in-last-two-years

Ejecting Turkey from the F-35 program is a lose-lose for everyone but Russia.
https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/real-cost-ejecting-turkey-f-35-program-trump-administration-erdogan-russia

The U.S. Navy’s P-8A “Poseidon” planes can find submarines by dropping sonar buoys into the water, and then blow the subs up by dropping torpedoes.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/poseidon-americas-secret-weapon-slaughter-chinas-stealth-submarines-76866

China is building three helicopter carriers. The U.S. has nine.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29526/chinas-new-amphibious-assault-ship-is-a-monster

‘[U.S. Navy] Sailors “overwhelmingly” preferred to control ships with wheels and throttles [instead of touchscreen displays], surveys of crew found.’
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49319450

The “Adaptable Deck Launcher” is a little larger than a 20-foot shipping container, can be installed on the deck of many types of ships, and can fire four missiles that can strike targets in the air, on the sea, on land, or underwater (anti-sub). This is very similar to Russia’s containerized ship missile systems.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29335/this-bolt-on-launcher-can-give-nearly-any-ship-the-same-weaponry-as-u-s-navy-destroyer

This is a simple but informative video about the U.S. Navy’s new “Radar Modular Assemblies.” A simple but very useful design.
https://youtu.be/BPGcW4Lj4fc

Awesome! The U.S. is funding a program to get NATO countries to FINALLY rid themselves of Soviet-era weapons and buy U.S.-made replacements. (I wonder if the surplus junkers will be sold to Ukraine?)
https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2019/05/29/inside-americas-multimillion-dollar-plan-to-get-allies-off-russian-equipment/

There’s now a parachute system for small helicopters.
https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2019/08/05/parachute-from-a-cirrus-stuck-on-top-of-a-helicopter/

A gene mutation that may let people function on only six hours of sleep has been found.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190828111247.htm

Homosexuality is slightly genetic.
https://apnews.com/ef30900e20c04a5e8411ad7ddf5cc2c3

There’s no evidence that microplastics in our food and water hurt human health. They simply pass through the human digestive system.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-49430038

The first new tuberculosis drug in 50 years was approved.
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-new-drug-treatment-resistant-forms-tuberculosis-affects-lungs

People who take the newest Ebola medicines have a 90% survival rate.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-49326505

AI can now diagnose some types of breast cancer MORE accurately than human doctors.
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-08/uoc–aic080619.php

Most of the people who say they are over 110 years old are actually lying or mistaken thanks to poor birth certificate recordkeeping. “As soon as a state starts keeping good records of when people are born, there’s a 69 to 82 percent fall in the number of people who live to the age of 110.”
https://www.vox.com/2019/8/8/20758813/secrets-ultra-elderly-supercentenarians-fraud-error

The meat industry is massively wasteful, and switching to meat substitutes like Impossible Burgers or lab-grown meats would save huge amounts of time and energy. This article is also awesome since it mentions the “carcass balancing problem.”
https://www.wired.com/story/alt-meat-trounces-animal-meats-massive-inefficiencies/

Are ‘algae shakes’ and ‘algae powders’ the future of food?
https://massivesci.com/articles/iwi-algae-protein-nannochloropsis-food-essential-amino-acids/

Empress trees grow very rapidly, and if we planted billions of them, they could sequester a lot of carbon from the atmosphere. I think the best strategy would be to figure out a way to cheaply synthesize graphite from CO2, and to dump it in ocean trenches and disused mines.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-08-02/we-already-have-the-world-s-most-efficient-carbon-capture-technology

The man who created the Gaia hypothesis now thinks that intelligent machines will take over the world.
https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/cyborgs-will-replace-humans-remake-world-james-lovelock-says-ncna1041616

Engineer and tech tycoon Jeff Hawkins thinks we could make a human-level AI in 20 years if we just do what he says!
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FoJSa8mgLPT83g9e8/jeff-hawkins-on-neuromorphic-agi-within-20-years

Video game pioneer John Carmack thinks “we will potentially have clear signs of AGI maybe as soon as a decade from now. “
https://youtu.be/udlMSe5-zP8

In the future, will there be shapeshifting robots made of small cubes? When you think about it, the ideal body form is one that is fungible.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/1999-01-24/the-shape-of-robots-to-come

The era of the ageless, all-CGI actor is here: Will Smith and Robert De Niro have films coming out featuring hyper-realistic CGI versions of their younger selves.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/behind-screen/rise-all-digital-actor-1229783

It won’t be long before people can make immortal digital avatars of themselves that their loved ones can interact with long after they die.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/29/hey-google-let-me-talk-my-departed-father/

It’s now possible to use deepfake technology to synthesize anyone’s voice and have them read an entire audiobook. Listeners can pick which voice they prefer.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49329650

Deepfake technology is also being used to make customized teaching lessons for people. Someday, it will be possible to put on augmented reality eyewear with headphones and a forward-facing camera, and to see a semi-intelligent AI teacher in front of you. Virtual objects would appear in front of you, and real-world objects in your field of view would be highlighted, so your machine teacher could do something like walk you through a complex car repair task. (Is this how the Borg started out?)
https://www.fanaticalfuturist.com/2019/08/edtech-company-udacity-uses-deepfake-tech-to-create-educational-videos-automatically/

The new quantum computer challenge: create Pokemon fighting teams.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/08/applying-quantum-computing-to-optimize-pokemon-fighting-teams.html

The wildfires in the Amazon rainforest don’t actually threaten the world’s oxygen supply, and the Amazon isn’t the “lungs of the planet.” Every plant on Earth could vanish, the oxygen levels would not significantly decrease.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/amazon-fire-earth-has-plenty-oxygen/596923/

All the obsolete and disused electronic devices stashed in peoples’ houses collectively contain a large amount of rare earth metals that could be recycled. (Makes me think of my theory that robot butlers will help people out by selling or recycling unused possessions and trash.)
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49409055

Here’s a thought-provoking article about how the Universe is not “fine-tuned” for organic life.
https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/non-fine-tuned-universe/

The English language isn’t “declining,” both for the reasons listed in the article and because it will exist forever in the computer memory banks to AIs. Any variant of English that has ever existed and been recorded will be reproducible in the future. The same will be true for all other languages, of course.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/aug/15/why-its-time-to-stop-worrying-about-the-decline-of-the-english-language

A Mexican mathematician just solved a 2,000-year-old optics problem. If we transition to a post-work society, I hope more people will devote themselves to creating useful knowledge like this instead of indulging in hedonism.
https://petapixel.com/2019/07/05/goodbye-aberration-physicist-solves-2000-year-old-optical-problem/

“Tidal lagoon power” plants are an interesting concept.
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/science-environment-31689511/how-does-a-tidal-lagoon-power-plant-work

Roundup of interesting articles, July 2019

Here’s an awesome, long-lost Joe Rogan interview with sci-fi writer Daniel H. Wilson. Unlike many other guests on the show, Wilson isn’t a kook, and I see he shares my view that robot butlers will be made smaller, weaker, and slower than humans to prevent accidental injuries to us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5fH-o-258Y

Elon Musk’s OpenAI company and Microsoft are partnering to build an AGI. It’s funny how this news got no reaction.
https://openai.com/blog/microsoft/

Ten years ago, brain scientist Henry Markram said: “It is not impossible to build a human brain and we can do it in 10 years.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8164060.stm

A machine-learning program that has a limited natural language understanding ability can scan through chemistry papers and predict unknown properties of molecules. This has the potential to speed up discoveries in the field by directing human research chemists to focus on the most promising things.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/07/15/machine-mining-the-literature

Once again, an AI has defeated some of the world’s best human players at poker. This time, in six-player games instead of just one-on-one games.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2019/07/10/science.aay2400
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6qtq6KDvj86DXqfp6/let-s-read-superhuman-ai-for-multiplayer-poker

Google’s DeepMind AI is now anonymously playing against human Starcraft 2 opponents.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48950103

AIs will learn your taste preferences so well that they’ll be able to create individualized meal recipes for you. With so much focus on how robots will end the era of mass-produced clothing and let anyone afford tailored outfits, we’ve overlooked the fact that the customization will spread to all kinds of other goods and services.
https://www.france24.com/en/20190721-kitchen-disruption-better-food-through-artificial-intelligence

Deep fake technology is now being used to replace characters in movies. Some recently subbed Sylvester Stallone into Terminator 2‘s lead role, and the footage looks great. I predict someday it will be common for TV shows and movies to have multiple “variations” appealing to different segments of their audiences, with the plots diverging at key points and the characters played by different actors. This will get easier to do once lifelike CGI actors exist and once AIs can at least help to write scripts. The endpoint will be entertainment content (including VR worlds) custom-tailored to individual people.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/ctrl-shift-face-deepfake-changing-hollywood-history/

Facebook used AI to scan high-res satellite photos of Thailand and to add more than 300,000 miles of roads to official maps of the country. Instead of satellites, why don’t we use fleets of small, autonomous drone planes with belly cameras?
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49091093

“This conjecture has stood as one of the most frustrating and embarrassing open problems in all of combinatorics and theoretical computer science,” wrote Scott Aaronson of the University of Texas, Austin, in a blog post. “The list of people who tried to solve it and failed is like a who’s who of discrete math and theoretical computer science.”
https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematician-solves-computer-science-conjecture-in-two-pages-20190725/

The “smart home” or “wired home” concept is older than most people realize. Microsoft unsuccessfully tried to launch it in 2003.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_Personal_Objects_Technology

In spite of the end of Moore’s Law, some in the semiconductor industry still believe that integrated circuit features could shrink to 1.5 nm by 2030.
https://semiengineering.com/transistor-options-beyond-3nm/

All is not well between America’s strategic opponents.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/venezuela-borrowed-10-billion-russia-pay-jet-fighters-and-tanks-it-cant-pay-it-back-69467

About 1/3 of Americans would support using nuclear weapons for a disarming first strike against North Korea, even if it meant killing over 1 million Koreans.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2019.1629576#

In the 1960s and 70s, an experiment was conducted at Brookhaven Lab to study the effects of radiation on the natural environment.
‘It was like walking up a mountain. The higher up you climb, the smaller and fewer the trees. Eventually, the trees drop out completely and you reach a zone of low shrubs, then a tundra zone of smaller ground plants and, finally, if the mountain is high enough, no life at all.’
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jun-10-op-8635-story.html

In 1951, Argentina’s kooky dictator Juan Peron announced that his scientists had invented a fusion reactor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huemul_Project

100 years ago almost exactly, sailors aboard the captured German Fleet interned in British waters simultaneously sunk their own ships. Out of 74 ships, 52 sank that day. However, since it happened in shallow waters, all but seven of them were eventually re-floated and re-used for scrap metal. 
https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-scuttling-of-the-german-fleet-1919

“Operation Pedestal” sounds like one of the craziest missions of WWII.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Pedestal

Russia’s aircraft carrier is a net resource drain that they’d be better off decommissioning, but national pride prevents that.
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2019/july/russias-only-aircraft-carrier-2nd-lease-life-or-slow-death

The U.S. kicked Turkey out of the F-35 fighter club because the latter bought an advanced Russian anti-aircraft missile system. I can remember the ancient days when Turkey was doing everything it could to schmooze the E.U. into giving it membership.
https://theaviationgeekclub.com/turkey-kicked-out-of-f-35-program-because-its-purchasing-s-400-but-greece-and-other-nato-countries-already-have-russian-surface-to-air-missile-systems-that-are-part-of-alliances-shared-mis/

“Quantum sensors” could make stealth aircraft obsolete, and could make it easier to detect submarines.
https://www.australiandefence.com.au/defence/cyber-space/quantum-sensors-to-make-australia-safer
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47294704

3D printed gunpowder grains would burn faster and more thoroughly than standard grains, making bullets more powerful without making them longer or heavier.
https://techlinkcenter.org/technologies/optimized-solid-propellant-manufacturing-through-3d-printing/
https://www.janes.com/article/89808/eda-research-group-to-explore-new-3d-printed-weapons-propellants

DARPA’s self-steering .50 cal bullets are better than ever. I’ve predicted before that “smart bullets” and “smart guns” will become common this century.
https://www.fanaticalfuturist.com/2019/07/watch-darpas-smart-exacto-bullets-change-path-mid-flight/

The plastic parts of guns can be made transparent, like glass. Wouldn’t this be the best way to camouflage them since other people looking at you would see through (most of) your gun as if it weren’t there, and instead see whatever was on the other side of it (e.g. – your camouflaged uniform, a tree trunk, a bush).
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2019/02/13/the-transparent-heckler-koch-g36/

https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2012/08/flat-lens-offers-perfect-image

Arthur C. Clarke’s book July 20th 2019 predicted that we’d have manned Moon colonies by now, but that computing devices would be considerably more primitive than they actually are.
https://www.sffworld.com/2019/07/arthur-c-clarkes-july-20th-2019/

China has officially rejoined the “Zero Space Stations in Orbit” club.
https://www.universetoday.com/142948/chinas-tiangong-2-was-destroyed-last-week-burning-up-in-the-atmosphere-over-the-south-pacific-ocean/

Even if we used genetic engineering to purge all disorders from the human genome, we would have to genetically screen each new generation of humans for new disorders caused by random genetic mutations.
https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/apert-syndrome

The first baby has been born in the U.S. from a dead donor’s transplanted womb. I’m obviously a fan of assisted reproduction technologies, but I don’t see a justification for this.
https://apnews.com/c328217fa0ba43afa258067701ba3aee

Simple lab techniques could be used to separate healthy from unhealthy human sperm before use in IVF. They could also allow for sex selection of the offspring.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sperm_sorting&oldid=883645243
https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2013/03/11/sexed-semen-and-embryo-selection-in-human-reproduction-and-fertility-treatment/

40-60% of all fertilized human eggs don’t survive long enough to be born. Most are miscarried while still microscopic in size, and the woman has no clue she ever had a zygote inside her.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5443340/

And for the first 99.9% of the human race’s existence, the child mortality rate was about 60%, meaning that, if you were lucky enough to survive the womb and to be born, there were better-than-even odds that you would die before age 16.
https://amechanicalart.blogspot.com/2013/09/infant-mortality-then-and-now.html

One of Elon Musk’s new projects is to create brain implants that will connect human minds with computers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2546&v=TJI9UFUUCcg

Human voices sound terrifying to some animals.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/humans-predators-mountain-lions-landscape-of-fear/594187/

Prince Charles continues his losing streak of Global Warming Doomsday predictions.
https://www.climatedepot.com/2019/07/16/prince-charles-at-it-again-issues-yet-another-climate-tipping-point-deadline-after-previous-100-month-deadline-expires/

‘Within one generation’s lifetime we will probably reach element 124,’ speculates Rykaczewski. Eric Scerri, a chemistry historian at the University of California, Los Angeles, US, agrees: ‘Fifteen years ago it was inconceivable that anyone would ever get as far as we got.’
https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/beyond-element-118-the-next-row-of-the-periodic-table/9400.article

Instantaneous communication and constant access to Breaking News is doing more harm than good. “Slow news” is better because the people releasing it have time to confirm that it is real and to carefully word it. Also, people should ask themselves how they’d be worse off if there were, say, a 12-hour time delay in having access to news reports on things that didn’t immediately impact their lives.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/twitter-pause-button/592762/

The Soviet Concorde jet plane crashed in front of thousands of people at an airshow in 1973, just four years after it was built.
https://www.cnn.com/style/article/tupolev-tu-144-concordski/index.html

The U.S. Secret Service has a forensic lab with samples of 85,000 different types of inks, which they use to figure out where threatening letters and counterfeit money came from.
https://apnews.com/b541d7175ef64358a1e63a5cc3e5aeba

It’s been 20 years since Segways were invented, so the patent has expired and anyone can make and sell them. The Segway’s concept (small, motorized personal transport) was right, but the form factor was wrong, and the company’s sales strategy was bad. Rentable e-scooters succeeded instead, and do all the things Segways did.
https://www.kimt.com/content/national/499023511.html

Using data from user-submitted photos, scientists were able to make a 3D model of a 3,000 year old statue that ISIS destroyed a few years ago, and to make a copy of it using a 3D printer. As time passes, it will get easier and easier to make scans of objects and places, and to recreate them in the physical world or in virtual reality. The past will never die.
https://apnews.com/dbca5e23519f44c4a881c9cd69f41cd6

Would the world be better off with fewer humans and more machines? Are we wrong to worry about population decline and job automation?
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/automation-favors-shrinking-populations-by-adair-turner-2019-07

“The Accidental Superpower” and my volcanic epiphany

I recently read The Accidental Superpower, and thought I’d write a brief review, as many of the book’s points align with the purpose of this blog. The first five chapters are great, and should be standard reading for anyone wanting a basic grasp of how accidents of natural geography help determine where nations form and what their fates are. Thanks to physics and to the demands of human biology, parts of the world with the following qualities are the best at supporting human populations:

  1. Mild climates. Humans struggle to live in places that are too hot or too cold. This is why there was never a powerful civilization centered in the Arctic regions or Sahara desert. Only small numbers of hyper-specialized nomadic people were able to live in those harsh places, their constant struggle for survival meant they never had the spare time and resources to get advanced, and they were conquered by other groups of people who originated in neighboring temperate climate zones that could support larger populations and bigger resource surpluses.
  2. Natural harbors and navigable waterways. Moving cargo by boat requires much less energy than it does to move it by pack animal, railroad, or truck. This means that parts of the world blessed with coastlines that have natural harbors–where ships could be protected from rough seas–could participate in trade and get richer than those that lacked them. Rivers are also very important because they provide drinking water, are convenient ways to get rid of waste, and can also be very cheap avenues of transportation, again bolstering trade. Importantly, not all rivers are created equal, and if they are too turbulent, shallow, or full of rapids, they aren’t useful for transit.
  3. Flat land. Flat land is, for obvious reasons, more useful as farmland, and it is faster, easier, and cheaper for people and cargo to move across it. Flat land can be colonized quickly, and it can support a larger, richer population because of the higher agricultural potential and lower energy costs of moving people and cargo around (the less money you spend on moving things around, the more money you have left over for buying things you want). As mentioned, the most energy-efficient way to move cargo is by boat, but railroad trains are a respectable second-place, while moving things by automobile is a distant third. However, the energy-efficiency of railroad transportation sharply drops if a train has to go uphill even at a 1% grade, or if its track has a lot of curves in it. Thus, flat land is much more conducive to railroad networks.
  4. Energy resources. Mostly, this means underground fossil fuel reserves.

There are three more key points worth mentioning:

  1. Mountains (or “highlands” as the author calls them) are usually low-population zones because they can’t support much human life. They also block the flow of people, which can be a good thing (forms a natural barrier between your people and a neighboring group of foreign people) or a bad thing (impedes the movement of your people within your own country and naturally encourages them to develop cultural differences that might undermine shared national identity).
  2. In general, the bigger a country’s population is, the stronger and richer it is. This is because most humans are productive assets that can build and invent things and aggregate into armies. However, important exceptions include humans that are very young, very old, or disabled. Those types of humans can’t do work, and are net drains on national resources. If they get to be too big a percentage of a country’s population, then the country will have all kinds of problems. The U.S. is one of the few major countries that has and will continue to have a favorable balance of productive humans vs. unproductive humans.
  3. All of the advantages and disadvantages conferred by geography can be partly ameliorated with technology. Useless cerrados can be turned into farmland, artificial harbors can be built and turbid rivers dammed or dredged, railroad and road networks can be built in areas lacking navigable waterways, energy can be imported or derived from an increasingly diverse array of sources (e.g. – a small country lacking fossil fuels might be ideally situated for dams, nuclear power, solar power, or wind power), and tunnels can be bored through mountain ranges.

I’m much less of a fan of the second part of the book, where the author makes predictions about how different countries will fare up to 2040. He posits many indisputable facts that are well-known to any student of international affairs, geopolitics, and economics, but then leaps from those to many unfounded and provocative conclusions about what’s ahead. Here are those I strongly disagree with:

U.S./Canadian fossil fuels production will stay at high levels. The extent to which fracking has bolstered North American energy supplies, and by extension, changed the world’s energy market (oil and natural gas prices are low across the board now) is clear and remarkable. However, I don’t think it’s safe for the author to assume that U.S./Canadian production levels will stay at current levels until 2040. We don’t know how much recoverable shale oil and gas there is in North America, and production could level off as early as the mid-2020s, and then start declining a few years later.

Citi Bank has a good track record predicting fossil fuel markets, and they seem to forecast a plateau in U.S. shale oil production in the mid-2020s.

This scenario isn’t a certainty, and the author could be right, but it’s important to point out that a nearer-term peak is just as plausible as what he thinks. This is not just an academic issue; long-term North American energy independence and the ripple effect of low global fossil fuel prices underpin the author’s assumptions that the U.S. will have the economic luxury of disengaging from the world, particularly the Middle East.

The U.S. will disengage from the rest of the world, creating a destructive power vacuum. The author predicts that, once the U.S. becomes a net energy exporter, the infamous trade deficit with countries like China and Japan will shrink to the point that the U.S. could cut itself off from them at minimal economic cost. Advances in 3D printing (particularly metal printing) will also allow the U.S. to make its own goods instead of relying on foreign factories. Lacking any interest in affairs outside North America, the U.S. will withdraw from its military and trade alliances, bring all of its troops and ships home, and let high-seas pirates and undemocratic regional powers like Iran fill the vacuum.

Problematically, trends over the last five years since The Accidental Superpower‘s publishing haven’t gone the way the author predicted, which suggests the U.S. isn’t on track to being able to economically detach itself from the rest of the world. For example, even though the U.S. became the world’s #1 natural gas producer in 2013 and its #1 oil producer in 2018 and is now breaking all-time export records for both, the country;s trade deficit has gotten WORSE over that period.

A country has a “trade deficit” when the value of the things that it buys from other countries exceeds the value of the things that those countries buy from it. If your country has a trade deficit, then it means you can’t detach from the world economy without suffering serious pain.

Moreover, 3D printers have not improved to the extent that the author seems to have predicted, nor are they starting to replace traditional manufacturing machines (e.g. – looms, presses, lathes) in factories that mass produce goods. Furthermore, there’s no indication that this will change anytime soon. Looking back, it’s clear now that the author wrote the book during a period of hype about 3D printers, and that rosy predictions in pop-sci articles and financial magazines about how the machines were poised to revolutionize the manufacturing industry probably influenced his thinking.

3D printers failed to live up to the hype, at least in the short-run.

Additionally, since 2014, the U.S. has not become isolationist, in spite of the election of President Trump, whom many policy experts considered a “worst-case scenario” for continuing the U.S. foreign policy status quo. Putting aside the “America First” slogan and countless insulting Tweets aimed at foreign leaders and international alliances, Trump’s concrete policy changes have barely reduced the U.S.’ overseas commitments. Trump has (justifiably) berated other NATO countries for their low defense spending and has “hinted” that he might-possibly-be-thinking-about leaving the alliance, but no real steps have been taken to do so, like shutting down U.S. bases in Europe. Levels of American troops in places that are clearly not core U.S. interests, like Syria and Africa, have little changed since the “globalist” President Obama was in charge. U.S. defense spending is up, and there’s no sign that the military brass or a majority of U.S. politicians want to shrink it.

Where international trade policy is concerned, Trump’s impact has been more substantive as he has replaced NAFTA with a trade pact that favors the U.S. slightly more, refused to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and put tariffs on many Chinese imports. But all at worst these policies collectively put a tiny dent in the flow of U.S.-foreign trade.

Since 2014, there has simply been no sign of the U.S. retrenching for its then-existing global commitments, even in spite of the fact that the U.S. elected a more isolationist President in 2016 than the author (or most other experts) probably expected. I don’t think this will change, either, for several reasons. First, even if the U.S. doesn’t consume Middle Eastern oil, many other important countries do and will continue doing so. Allowing the Middle East’s petrostates to fall into chaos will disrupt oil supplies outside of North America, damaging economies across the world, and in turn reducing demand for U.S. exports to those countries. Thus, it will remain in the U.S.’ economic interest to stay engaged in the Middle East indefinitely, and to use its diplomatic and military power to protect the petrostates and Persian Gulf shipping lanes.

Second, the U.S. will stay diplomatically and militarily engaged in seemingly unimportant countries like Afghanistan and the Philippines to keep them from becoming terrorist bases and to prevent them from allying themselves with rivals like Russia or China. Remember that the 9/11 attacks cost the U.S. economy $200 billion at a minimum, and that the attacks were only made possible by al Qaeda having free reign in Afghanistan for bases and planning.

Third, as I hinted earlier, the U.S. military-industrial complex has taken on a life of its own, and pursues its own self-interests and protects its assets (including overseas bases) regardless of America’s actual defense needs. It has become the mother of all entrenched bureaucracies, it’s career suicide for any elected politician to propose serious cuts to it, and fixing military overspending and winding down foreign military alliances is not a priority for most American voters.

China will just, like, fall apart. Arguably the most extreme and least credible prediction in the book is that China will economically and politically implode due to internal and external pressures, it will stop being a world power, and will fragment along ethnolinguistic lines. While the author is right to note that China faces major challenges in the near-to-mid future, he makes elementary errors when he assumes they will lead to national calamity.

I don’t contend the author’s point that China has a corrupt, opaquely run banking sector, and that the country hundreds of billions of dollars in bad debts, but it’s impossible for anyone to know if it will lead to a financial crisis that will wreck the country’s economy. The author’s prediction primarily hinges on this unproven assumption, and is thus bad futurism. The author also rightly points out that China’s working-age population is shrinking due to the defunct One Child policy, and that this will exert serious drag on their economy as the number of unproductive elderly people continues increasing. But again, the author jumps to a conclusion when he predicts this will lead to economic collapse and widespread starvation in rural China. I think it’s much likelier that China’s economic growth rate will continue gradually slowing until it settles near the boundary between “middle” and “high” income countries over the next 20 years. How long it takes them to get out of the “Middle Income Trap” is an open question, but in the long run, they will.

The author’s prediction that the U.S. will help to bankrupt China by ending trade with it ignores the fact that this would be against American interests (the ongoing U.S.-China trade war notwithstanding), and his suggestion that Japan will rearm, magically stop caring about possible nuclear retaliation, and wage a ruinous war against China (along with India and perhaps other Asian countries joining in to block the sea lanes China uses to get oil from the Mideast) is completely silly. Moreover, the notion that China will splinter along ethnolinguistic lines like the Soviet Union did rests on badly flawed assumptions about the Chinese Communist Party’s willingness and ability to use force to put down internal rebellions. The recent 30th anniversary of the Tienanmen Square Massacre gives testimony to the opposite. There are no credible secessionist movements in China, and no rivals to the CCP’s grip on power, and both are unlikely to change.

And now for something completely different.

While reading The Accidental Superpower, I had the lucky…accident…of going on a trip to Ecuador, which is a country dominated by the Andes Mountain range. While there, I climbed a dormant volcano called “Mt. Pichincha,” which is on Quito’s outskirts. That experience in particular and the trip more generally hit home for me some of the book’s important points, and made me think about what they meant the future of intelligent life on Earth and beyond.

Quito sits in a valley that is 9,350 ft (2,850 meters) above sea level, which is already higher than the highest point in any U.S. state east of the Rocky mountains. Most foreigners can feel the tiring physical effects of the thinner air when they simply walk down the street in Quito. Hiking uphill at an even higher altitude is much worse, as I’d soon discover. The first step to climbing Mt. Pichincha is to take a gondola from the edge of the city to a point 12,943 ft (3,945 meters) up the mountain. After that, you walk on a trail to the summit, called “Rucu Pichincha”, 15,696 ft (4,784 meters) high.

Looking down at the city from the gondola station.

Right after exiting the gondola, I noticed it was several degrees colder than in the city, and low-hanging clouds blocked the sunlight. By contrast, Quito far below was mostly bathed in light, and I realized that Mt. Pichincha had its own climate distinct from the valley’s. I hiked out of the gondola station towards the summit, and after only about 20 minutes, passed the last tree along the trail. I was above the treeline, and the only vegetation was wild grass, bushes, and lichens.

Soon after that, I got to what you might call “the cloud line,” meaning I had hiked high enough to be inside that low-hanging cloud layer I noticed at the gondola station. The climate became harsher and more volatile, one minute being still, the next minute being almost clear, and the next being dark and windy. There were actually three distinct “sleet storms” during my hike (keep in mind this was in mid-July, and I was only a few miles from the equator!).

Being in such an environment hit home for me a key point made in The Accidental Superpower: mountains are barriers to human movement, and they form natural borders between human groups. During the first 99.8% of our species’ existence, before Industrial-era technology existed, mountains like Pichincha would have been nearly impassable and almost uninhabitable. Merely building a shelter to escape the harsh climate would have been hard thanks to the lack of wood (remember, I quickly got above the treeline during the hike). Stones would need to be used, which imposes various inefficiencies. Even the crucial ability to make fire for warmth or for cooking would be handicapped by the lack of wood and the moist atmosphere.

If you want an otherworldly experience, explore a large abandoned building, hike a mountain above the treeline, or do hallucinogenic drugs.

The low temperatures (it got bitingly cold and my hands went numb at one point), low sunlight, rocky soil, and sloped land would have made farming impossible. Hunting and gathering on Mt. Pichincha wouldn’t have worked since the animals were so few (I only saw a few small birds and one rabbit) and the vegetation so sparse–the calories you’d burn chasing down animals and walking around to find edible plants would probably exceed the calories you’d get from eating them. Growing food in the arable land in the Quito valley and then shipping it up the mountain on mules or wagons to feed people living there would doubtless be too expensive (unless the mountain people had something really valuable to trade for food, like gold they were getting from a mine), and would ultimately be limited by the same “balance of calories burned vs. obtained” phenomenon. As I realized during my climb, you burn a lot of calories when walking uphill.

The only way a permanent human settlement might have been able to feed itself on Mt. Pichincha would have been if it had domesticated mountain goats or maybe llamas and alpacas (it depends on how sure-footed they are on steep slopes). They could have grazed on the wild grasses and bushes. Even still, I doubt there would have been enough vegetation to support anything but small herds of the animals, which in turn would have kept the number of humans living on the mountain small. The comparatively fertile and benign environment in the Quito valley would have inevitably come to support a much larger, richer population. Imagining a topographical map of the world in my mind’s eye with this new knowledge, many patterns of human settlement and many national boundaries suddenly made more sense to me.

In the town of Da Lat, Vietnam, several hills have been terraced and covered with greenhouses.

As I hiked further, I considered another important point from The Accidental Superpower–technology allows humans to overcome problems imposed by geography–and I thought about how modern technology could make Mt. Pichincha habitable. Paved roads could be built on all but the steepest parts of the mountain, making most points on it accessible to humans from Quito without physical exertion (the gondola could also be extended). The sloped land could be leveled, graded, and terraced in order to build structures above it, where humans could live and work. Greenhouses could be built on the flattened land, and crops grown inside with much greater efficiency than they would grow outside, particularly if the greenhouses contained transplanted soil and used artificial lighting to counter the mountain’s cloudiness. Water supplies could be assured by building a system of rain catchments and cisterns, and by building simple devices that condensed cloud vapor into water. People living on the mountain could produce some of their own food, though it would be cheaper to buy it from a more fertile place and have it shipped up.

Likewise, people living on Mt. Pichincha could generate their own energy, or build power lines to Quito and buy it from them. As noted, the mountain was windy most of the time, so wind turbines would be an efficient power source. And since Pichincha is a dormant volcano, there are good odds that a geothermal power plant could by sited there.

The only real barriers to building towns or even cities at high altitudes like Mt. Pichincha are cost of living and quality of life. Most things would cost more money since they would be scarcer or would have to be trucked in from Quito. The mountain’s harsh and volatile climate would also be repellent to most humans, though the fact the people still willingly live in Iceland and northern Alaska proves that some people could take it. And even at the peak of Mt. Pichincha, 15,696 ft high, the air is thick enough for humans to breathe without difficulty after a few months of acclimatization. In fact, the highest human town is in neighboring Peru and is 1,000 ft higher than Pichincha’s summit, and professional mountaineers have found that the air remains thick enough for humans to breathe up to 26,247 ft (8,000 m). Thus, modern technology has overcome the natural impediments to human settlement on anything but the world’s very tallest mountains.

One of Facebook’s massive data centers is in Sweden, close to the Arctic Circle. It was sited there partly because the cold temperatures can cool the servers.

I kept hiking, and in spite of worsening physical exhaustion and the thinning air, I had more insights. What would even more advanced technologies mean for the habitability of Mt. Pichincha and other desolate places in the future? Extending the logic from The Accidental Superpower, it would stand to reason that they would open even more to settlement, especially if the settlement were being done by intelligent machines that didn’t have the same biological limitations and inbuilt preferences as humans like us. The colder, windy climate would actually be beneficial since it would help the AIs to cool their computer chips. The thinness of the air and poor quality of the soil wouldn’t pose problems since machines don’t breathe or eat. The bleakness of the landscape wouldn’t bother machines since they would lack the inbuilt genetic programming that humans have, which makes us crave sunny, green environments and blue skies.

All that AIs would need to survive on Mt. Pichincha would be electricity, building materials, and roads to get up and down the mountain. As I noted earlier, the electricity problem could be solved easily, there’s no engineering reason why roads couldn’t be built on all but the steepest parts of the mountain, and building materials could be shipped in from Quito, or even made by pulverizing some of the stones comprising the mountain itself and turning them into concrete. Intelligent machines could probably thrive there. And if they had radically advanced technologies like fusion power and nanomachine-based replicators, they’d have no need for anything aside from periodic refills of fusion reactor fuel and small amounts of trace elements they couldn’t extract from the mountain’s soil or from the air.

Additionally, it struck me that living on Mt. Pichincha or another remote, inhospitable place would be an ethical choice for intelligent machines since their presence wouldn’t displace any humans, and since constructing server farms and structures wouldn’t destroy much animal or plant life. As I noted, I only saw a handful of small animals during my hike, and few of the plants were higher than my knees. Perhaps it will be the fate of intelligent machines to build their cities on mountaintops, cold deserts, or floating on the seas.

And extending this train of thinking by assuming ever-better technology and intelligent machines moving to ever-more-remote places, we are inevitably led to the prospect of space colonization, von Neumann probes, and the conversion of whole celestial bodies into computronium, as Ray Kurzweil predicts (and maybe in the very far future, if our understanding of Physics evolves, our civilization might find ways to “live” in the very fabric of space-time and be invisible but everywhere, or to expand beyond our universe). The well-established point in The Accidental Superpower that technology allows humans to overcome problems imposed by geography and to spread to formerly inhospitable parts of the world (e.g. – Florida before air conditioning was invented) has major implications for the future, and buttresses ideas about space colonization that are now the purview of science fiction. The rule should be rephrased as: Technology allows intelligent life forms to overcome problems imposed by geography and to spread to formerly inhospitable places.

Right as I was making this wonderful conceptual breakthrough, I got so dizzy from the effects of thin air and physical exertion that I fell on my face. Fortunately, I was wearing my backpack around the front of my body like a weirdo, so it cushioned the impact, and I was unhurt. I took stock of my condition and my surroundings: the trail had become narrow and treacherous (the segment I was on was named “Paso de la Muerte” or “Step of the Dead”), I couldn’t see far because I was enveloped in the clouds, and stumbling to the right thanks to another loss of balance or a strong gust of wind would have meant rolling far down a nearly vertical cliff. No, I was not prepared for this climb, so I turned back about 30 minutes short of reaching the summit of Rucu Pichincha. Yes, it was a bit disappointed, but I didn’t want to die, and I consoled myself with my new bit of knowledge and with the fact that I’d managed to hike to about 14,500 ft, which, other than the times I’ve flown in airplanes, is the highest I’ve been in my life.

Links:

  1. https://nationalinterest.org/feature/iran-took-advantage-royal-navys-weakness-69132
  2. https://ir.citi.com/VxaZkW5OaL4zYu9Ogq9J%2FuWvTZpLXtWSY2Zc62o%2FEXVKGas%2F2iiItA%3D%3D

Roundup of interesting articles, June 2019

Cement production releases more CO2 than all the world’s trucks. The more humans there are, the more cement is needed to make residences, workplaces, and recreational buildings for them.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-23/green-cement-struggles-to-expand-market-as-pollution-focus-grows

Sweden burns most of its non-recyclable trash, generating energy in the process and possibly producing less air pollution than burying the waste in landfills.
https://energynews.us/2013/10/17/midwest/is-burning-garbage-green-in-sweden-theres-little-debate/

One important climatology assumption is that human industrial activity has made the skies cloudier, which has partly offset global warming since white clouds reflect light back into space, keeping the planet cooler. The assumption might be wrong, in which case climatologists have overestimated how much CO2 heats up the planet.
https://www.nature.com/news/cloud-seeding-surprise-could-improve-climate-predictions-1.19971

Some astronomers think we could find intelligent alien life by looking for planets that have lots of air pollution (e.g. – unnatural methane concentrations and gases like CFCs). I think it’s a bad strategy, as advanced aliens would probably use clean energy and would have found ways to cleanse their atmospheres of pollutants. VERY advanced aliens that were non-organic could also live on almost any planet or moon, so it makes little sense to even focus our gaze on Earth-like planets. Our Moon could have ancient, underground cities full of alien machines for all we know.
https://www.astrobio.net/alien-life/unintelligent-life-cfcs/

Ten years ago, a survey of American children revealed that 1/3 of them didn’t think the planet would be habitable by the time they grew up. Most of them are 18 or older now.
https://www.treehugger.com/culture/no-kidding-one-in-three-children-fear-earth-apocalypse.html

Here’s a funny roundup of past predictions that flopped.
https://www.boredpanda.com/posts-that-did-not-age-well/

Fifty years ago, the Cuyahoga River “caught on fire,” helping to impel the modern American environmentalist movement. Monumental progress has been made since then.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a28106182/cuyahoga-river-fire-cleveland-epa/

The vast majority of plastic waste found in the oceans comes from China and a handful of other Asian countries. For its size, the U.S. does a good job preventing its plastic waste from going this route.
https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/17969/Plastic_waste_inputs_from_land_into_the_ocean.pdf

Robert Downey Jr. thinks we could have robots pick up all the trash on Earth in as little as a decade. His timeline is of course wrong, but I’ve predicted that it will happen during the 22nd century. Having seemingly ingenious insights like this gets a lot easier once you start thinking of robots as humans that work for free, and then you start listing all the things that humans can do (like picking trash off the ground).
https://www.businessinsider.com/robert-downy-jr-will-use-robotics-ai-to-clean-earth-2019-6

If we stopped caring about aesthetics and only cared about efficiency, would be cover the exterior walls of our buildings with vertical solar panels? It’s the sort of thing Skynet would do.
https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2017/07/wall-mounted-solar-trend/

A dirty secret about solar panels is that they break after 25-30 years, can’t be fixed, and are expensive to recycle. Today’s solar power boom will probably cause a huge increase in electronic waste starting in the 2030s.
https://www.greenbiz.com/article/what-will-happen-solar-panels-after-their-useful-lives-are-over

Conversely, battery recycling is extremely efficient. Close to 100% of the metals in a battery–both in the power-storing cells and in the structural casings–can be recovered through standard processes. Fears of a “global lithium shortage” once electric cars become popular are overblown.
http://www.mdpi.com/2032-6653/6/4/1039/pdf

A team funded by Google has re-done several of the most (in)famous lab experiments from around 30 years ago that “proved” cold fusion worked, and confirmed with high certainty that none of them work.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/06/11/google-investigates-cold-fusion

Several copies of the Soviet-built “RBMK” nuclear reactor that was shown in the recent HBO docu-series Chernobyl are still in use in Russia. They were upgraded after the nuclear meltdown and have operated without incident.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-power-reactors/appendices/rbmk-reactors.aspx

While the Fukushima nuclear reactor melted down during the 2011 earthquake/tsunami, the Onagawa reactor didn’t, even though it was closer to the epicenter. This was mostly due to Onagawa being built on higher ground, so the wave couldn’t flood and cripple its vital machinery.
https://thebulletin.org/2014/03/onagawa-the-japanese-nuclear-power-plant-that-didnt-melt-down-on-3-11/

Before we build autonomous robot butlers, we might have remote-controlled robot butlers piloted by humans. Manual labor jobs could be outsourced to anyone with an internet connection.
https://qz.com/1642691/richard-baldwin-on-the-inhumanely-fast-next-phase-of-globalization/

Facebook is planning to make a digital currency called “Libra.”
https://apnews.com/e072208933054935a14a749800f4983d

A “deepnude” app that can allegedly interpolate a woman’s nude body onto a real photo of her has been created (and shut down after an uproar). It’s only a matter of time before other apps can do this realistically by combining different images of the same woman, taken from different angles.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48799045

Walmart is using an AI camera surveillance system to catch thieves who don’t scan all their items at self-checkout kiosks.
https://www.businessinsider.com/walmart-tracks-theft-with-computer-vision-1000-stores-2019-6?r=US&IR=T

Some Las Vegas casinos are planning to start using “robot bartenders” for lack of a better term, that can precisely make hundreds of different types of alcoholic drinks. Predictably, casino workers unions are enraged.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2019/06/10/mgm-resorts-las-vegas-jobs-machines-robots/1415103001/

Unmanned boats and submarines could be used soon to make high-res maps of the seafloor. Someday, there will be a 1:1 virtual copy of the Earth.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48473701

An app that changes the appearances of a person’s eyes during videophone calls so it seems like they’re looking at the person on the other end has been created. I think this will be very beneficial.
https://youtu.be/rDUtBZXWrsE

After seeing the problems Samsung had with its prototype foldable smartphones, Huawei has wisely decided to delay the debut of its own. This is a great case study of the risks of being a “first-mover.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48636452

Samsung has patented a “rollable phone.”
https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/12/18663094/samsung-patent-rollable-phone-displays

Samsung has unveiled a wall-sized, 8K TV that ‘is designed to never turn off and can change into a digital canvas best matching the owner’s interior needs and mood… [It] will display a variety of “curated art”, including paintings, photographs and video art, as well as customisable pictures with digital frames.’ I’ve predicted this sort of device will become common in middle-class households in the 2030s.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/9284646/samsung-292-inch-8k-tv-release-date-price/

The director of Google’s Quantum AI Lab predicts “quantum supremacy” will be achieved by the end of this year.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/does-nevens-law-describe-quantum-computings-rise-20190618/

Cryogenically frozen human sperm has no known “shelf life.” It stays good indefinitely.
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-06/esoh-ldo062019.php

A man has used California’s assisted suicide law to arrange his cryogenic freezing. This is the best way to do it, since the time between death and preservation is kept to a minimum, so the fewest possible brain cells die.
https://gizmodo.com/california-man-becomes-the-first-death-with-dignity-p-1831652934

Here’s an interesting graphic showing the statuses of all drugs and therapies that might extend human longevity.
https://www.lifespan.io/the-rejuvenation-roadmap/

Sea urchins don’t seem to age and might be naturally immortal.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0531556519300592

The evidence of a genetic link between high intelligence and some types of mental illness has grown stronger.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00175/full

The theory of Lamarckian evolution is actually partly right.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/06/19/unto-the-fourth-generation-in-nematodes

Here’s a list of known human genetic disorders that are caused by mutations to single genes or to small numbers of genes. Whenever human genetic engineering becomes common, we should start out by using it to purge these mutations from the genepool, rather than by trying to make super-geniuses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genetic_disorders

The long-term “human limit” to high-intensity physical exertion is about 2.5 times of the baseline energy expenditure. In other words, if your body burns 2,000 calories per day under normal conditions, then you could adopt a lifestyle where you burned up to 5,000 calories a day and sustain it indefinitely. More than that, and you’d physically break down.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-48527798

The U.S. Army wants American companies to start making copies of Russian guns and ammo so we can supply them to armed groups overseas that are used to them. A secondary goal might be to undermine Russia’s arms exports.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/us-army-wants-american-companies-make-ammo-russian-designed-weapons-60582

China is quickly making amphibious transport dock ships. It now has eight “Type 071” ships, which are very similar in terms of size and capabilities to America’s San Antonio class transport dock ships.
https://www.janes.com/article/89152/china-increases-construction-rate-of-amphibious-assault-ships

Clear, color photos show an Iranian patrol boat removing a dud mine from the hull of a Japanese-flagged oil tanker in the Gulf of Oman.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28574/u-s-releases-new-evidence-of-irans-involvement-in-tanker-attacks

Iran shot down a U.S. spy drone over the Persian Gulf, and President Trump surprisingly did not retaliate. Maybe he has inside knowledge that the drone had actually strayed into Iranian airspace as they claim, or that the attack was ordered by a rogue commander and not by the Iranian government.
https://politi.co/2Y4ANXThttps://politi.co/2Y4ANXT

China’s exported military UAVs are apparently unreliable.
https://www.janes.com/article/89036/jordan-puts-chinese-uavs-on-sale

Pilot error probably caused the rent crash of the Japanese F-35.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/10/asia/japan-f-35-fighter-crash-cause-hnk-intl/index.html

The Northrop B-2 stealth bomber is now a familiar sight, but its early competitor, built by Lockheed, is almost forgotten.
https://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/lockheeds-senior-peg-the-forgotten-stealth-bomber-1534057907

Boeing has demonstrated a drop-in kit that lets the UH-60 helicopter fly unmanned.
https://www.janes.com/article/89088/lockheed-martin-flies-unmanned-technology-aboard-uh-60-for-first-time

U.S. spies have allegedly inserted malware into Russia’s power grid in retaliation for Russian hacking against U.S. infrastructure.
https://gizmodo.com/the-us-has-allegedly-placed-malware-deep-in-russias-pow-1835547743

Sarin nerve gas is very hard to make and to weaponize, and the Sarin production equipment that Russia claims it seized from Syrian rebels is almost certainly fake. Russia probably manufactured the exhibit to prop up its long-running claims that nerve gas attacks in Syria are being done by forces other than Bashar al-Assad’s, Russia’s ally.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/06/21/an-idiotic-exhibit

The last samples of rinderpest–an awful virus that once caused misery to millions of humans and livestock–have been destroyed.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48629469

A scientist debunks a Washington Post exposé about Pfizer allegedly covering up a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease that they found. If one of the premier newspapers in the U.S. is guilty of this kind of scientific illiteracy and alarmism, is it any surprise that average Americans are also so ignorant of science and so taken with conspiracy theories?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/pfizer-had-clues-its-blockbuster-drug-could-prevent-alzheimers-why-didnt-it-tell-the-world/2019/06/04/9092e08a-7a61-11e9-8bb7-0fc796cf2ec0_story.html

The myth that American girls are hitting puberty earlier thanks to hormones or other chemicals in the food supply (mostly the meat supply) is wrong. It is wholly or almost wholly due to rising obesity rates among children and to overdiagnosis by doctors. Body fat produces the hormone “leptin,” and leptin levels determine when puberty starts in girls.
https://www.webmd.com/children/features/obesity#1

Also consider that, thanks to malnourishment and hence low leptin levels, girls in medieval England didn’t start puberty until 14, whereas the average age today is 10.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00766097.2015.1119392

The FDA is finally taking real action against fraudulent “stem cell clinics.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/fda-wins-groundbreaking-case-against-for-profit-stem-cell-company/2019/06/03/498373fa-864e-11e9-98c1-e945ae5db8fb_story.html

The Apollo Program cost at least $288 billion in today’s U.S. dollars.
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/casey-dreier/2019/reconstructing-the-price-of-apollo.html

An ideal airport has long, parallel runways that are spaced far enough apart from each other to let planes use them simultaneously, without risk of collision. Atlanta’s international airport is, by these standards, excellent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QZ3eozyQfU&t=636s

‘Once pollen makes contact with your clothing or your hair, it will likely never leave. Some pollen have spikes, and many are coated in lipids that act like glue. The pollen count may go down a little with each cycle in a washing machine, but they won’t go away.’
https://qz.com/1635897/the-us-is-using-pollen-to-track-illegal-drugs-like-fentanyl/

All the little bumps and squares on the surfaces of space ship models in sci-fi films are called “greebles.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greeble

Will future cars have giant, external airbags?
https://www.foxnews.com/auto/external-airbags-could-turn-cars-into-pufferfish-for-safety

Electric car engines are almost silent, making them quieter in operation than gas-powered cars. However, the noise difference between the two steadily shrinks as vehicle speed increases and the overall noise signature is dominated by sounds produced by air friction and tires. This means electric cars will lower the amount of traffic noise in areas where vehicles move slowly–such as cities and suburban neighborhoods–but will do little to make highways quieter.
https://cleantechnica.com/2016/06/05/will-electric-cars-make-traffic-quieter-yes-no/

Over the course of just two days in 1886, a small army of workers changed the gauges of 11,500 miles of railroad track in the southern U.S. to match the rest of the nation.
http://southern.railfan.net/ties/1966/66-8/gauge.html

Roundup of interesting articles, May 2019

What if the Iraq War hadn’t happened? The global geostrategic balance would be the same, but the U.S. would be slightly richer, would have a better military, and Americans would be more open to waging war.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/trillions-dollars-saved-what-if-america-never-invaded-iraq-58007

The U.S. Army thinks that, with a few years of R&D, it can figure out how to put a 50 kW laser weapon into a Stryker armored vehicle.
https://www.janes.com/article/88936/us-army-poised-to-funnel-additional-dollars-towards-directed-energy-weapons

Most of the American ships sunk at Pearl Harbor were raised, fixed, and sent back into action.
https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/daily/wwii/the-pearl-harbor-salvage-effort-keeping-navy-fighting/

The U.S. Navy’s “Littoral Combat Ship” program has failed in every way, and they’ve decided to go back to buying conventional frigates.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/its-official-us-navy%E2%80%99s-littoral-combat-ship-complete-failure-58837

China has started building its third aircraft carrier. It will be bigger than its two older carriers, but smaller than U.S. carriers.
https://chinapower.csis.org/china-carrier-type-002/

China’s naval buildup has exceeded estimates made as recently as five years ago. It now looks like the country’s navy will be second only to America’s by 2030.
https://thediplomat.com/2019/02/predicting-the-chinese-navy-of-2030/

China is decommissioning older warships that were bought from Russia or copied from Soviet designs, and replacing them with larger, better, domestically designed and built ships. China doesn’t need any naval technology from Russia anymore and is pulling ahead.
https://www.janes.com/article/88602/plan-decommissions-four-type-051-destroyers

In 1967, a KGB agent stole a Sidewinder aircraft missile from a U.S. airbase in West Germany, literally draggedit away in a wheelbarrow, put it in the trunk of his car (it was so long that it hung out the back), and mailed it to Moscow. The Soviets copied it.
https://warisboring.com/the-kgb-shipped-a-sidewinder-missile-by-mail-to-moscow/

The Indian military stumbles again. They can’t even make ammunition right.
https://www.janes.com/article/88543/indian-army-expresses-concern-over-faulty-ofb-supplied-ammunition

India’s claim that it shot down a Pakistani F-16 during this year’s clashes is false.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-kashmir-pakistan-f16/report-says-u-s-count-shows-no-pakistan-f-16s-shot-down-in-indian-battle-idUSKCN1RH0IM

A veteran U.S. fighter pilot’s invaluable insights on different fighter planes:
-F-14: Unsuited for dogfights due to poor maneuverability
-F-5: With modern upgrades, can still pose some threat to first-rate fighters.
-F-16: The best dogfighting plane in American use
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/27889/confessions-of-a-navy-f-14-fleet-pilot-turned-f-5-aggressor

A prototype plane that uses “fluidic thrust vectoring” instead of control surfaces to maneuver has been built.
https://www.baesystems.com/en/article/magma-the-future-of-flight

A little-known fact is that water is very effective at stopping bullets. Even a powerful rifle bullet fired down into a swimming pool will slow to a halt after going through only two feet of water. But now, a U.S. company has invented special “supercaviating” bullets that can cut through 16 feet of water.
http://dsgtec.com/capability-videos/

Another little-known fact is that trains can’t go uphill. Their steel wheels are very low friction, which lets them glide over steel tracks while expending little energy, but also robs them of being able to exert the traction necessary to climb up a hill.
https://youtu.be/KbUsKWbOqUU

In 2009, Dr. Christoph Westphal, the co-founder of Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, predicted the “there will be drugs that prolong [human] longevity” by 2016. Today, there are several drugs that allegedly do this, but none have been proven to work. In fairness, their efficacy can’t be established until decades pass, and we can see how long their users lived.
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/science/29aging.html

Children who grew up in divorced families are likelier to get divorced themselves, or to never marry at all. These tendencies have obvious roots in how they were raised, but also could have a genetic component.
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/05/divorced-parents-marriage/590425/

Update: The bereaved parents of a young man who died in a skiing accident have gotten court permission to use his sperm to make a grandchild. As I said before, I think they’d clone him if it were possible.
https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2019-05-20/judge-parents-of-dead-west-point-cadet-can-use-his-sperm

An algorithm was told to design a house that would have the highest strength-to-weight ratio possible (e.g. – strongest structure for smallest amount of material). The results were interesting and complex.
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/business-48337824/if-a-house-was-designed-by-machine-how-would-it-look

Machines can now translate audio clips of a person speaking from one language to another, while preserving the idiosyncratic sound qualities of their speech (their “voiceprint”). I predict this technology will be perfected during the 2030s, and the translations will accurately convey the speaker’s emotions, figures of speech, and even their accent.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613559/google-ai-language-translation/

The technology used to make “deepfake” videos can also be used to turn still photos into manipulable motion pictures.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2019/05/23/deepfake-ai-can-turn-mona-lisa-convincing-real-person/

‘As labs like DeepMind and OpenAI tackle bigger problems, they may begin to require ridiculously large amounts of computing power. As OpenAI’s system learned to play Dota 2 over several months — more than 45,000 years of game play — it came to rely on tens of thousands of computer chips. Renting access to all those chips cost the lab millions of dollars…’
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/science/deep-mind-artificial-intelligence.html

A human brain only uses the equivalent of 10 watts of electricity, and can do things that tens of thousands of computer chips working together can’t do yet.
https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/JacquelineLing.shtml

A 1 TB MicroSD card is now available. Price? $450.
https://shop.sandisk.com/store/sdiskus/en_US/pd/ThemeID.4846328000/productID.5312044100

Autonomous boats can now dock themselves.
https://smartmaritimenetwork.com/2019/02/08/yanmar-trials-robotic-ship-technology/

California’s wildfire problem is exacerbated by bad forestry practices. Before white settlement, about 4.5 million acres of vegetation would naturally burn per year. Today, the authorities only do 87,000 acres of prescribed burns yearly, and they put out almost all natural wildfires to protect humans and property.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/fires/article230481684.html

To calculate the carbon cost of building a structure, you need to include the energy and emissions that went into fabricating the structure’s components and transporting it to the construction site. You need to trace the breadcrumbs all the way back to cement mills, steel foundries, and mines.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48267035

A roundup of geoengineering proposals.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48069663

The Three Mile Island nuclear power plant is shutting down because fracked natural gas, solar and wind are cheaper sources of energy. Of course, U.S. natural gas power plants pay very little or no money to offset the environmental damage caused by their GHG emissions, and solar and wind installations are artificially cheap thanks to government subsidies that nuclear power plants should also get.
https://www.exeloncorp.com/newsroom/three-mile-island-unit-1-to-shut-down-by-september-30-2019

A paleontologist who specifically studies flying dinosaurs says that the dragons in Game of Thrones would be way too big to actually fly “unless they’re secretly made out of carbon fiber and titanium.” So that means with advanced enough technology, we could make robots or cyborg animals that were like the dragons on the show.
http://mentalfloss.com/article/503967/could-game-throness-dragons-really-fly-we-asked-some-experts

With the same sort of technology, we could make insects as big as those from Starship Troopers.
https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/0_0_0/constraint_13

Recent reports of an insect mass extinction were based on fake science, and a scientifically illiterate news media that is eager to parrot any kind of disaster story to a global audience, wherever it comes from.
https://theconversation.com/is-an-insect-apocalypse-happening-how-would-we-know-113170
https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/11/health/insect-decline-study-intl/index.html

‘I think that, in two decades, we will look back on the past 60 years — particularly in biomedical science — and marvel at how much time and money has been wasted on flawed research’
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/05/03/too-much-wasted-time

For several weeks in late 2014 and early 2015, U.S. fighter pilots saw UFOs off the East Coast, and also detected them on radar. The unknown craft did maneuvers that broke known laws of physics, such as instantly halting in midair even though they were just moving at over Mach 5. The sightings bear similarities to another military-UFO encounter near San Diego in 2004.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/wow-what-is-that-navy-pilots-report-unexplained-flying-objects/ar-AABXltD

One of the world’s greatest UFO hunters, Stanton Friedman, is dead.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/9097898/worlds-most-famous-ufo-hunter-dies-age-84-without-seeing-flying-saucer/

The high melanin levels in the skins of black people is extraordinarily effective at preventing UV light damage to DNA: ‘In the United States, melanoma is 20 to 30 times more common among whites than blacks.’
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/in-rare-occasions-dark-skinned-people-can-get-skin-cancer-but-sunscreens-wont-help/2019/05/24/539daf8c-7b0d-11e9-8bb7-0fc796cf2ec0_story.html

A computer program can look at chest CT scan images and diagnose lung cancer as well as human radiologists. Radiologists make about $350,000/yr in the U.S., whereas the computer program would work for free.
https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/20/googles-lung-cancer-detection-ai-outperforms-6-human-radiologists/

The world record time for solving a Rubik’s Cube has declined over the past few years partly because the construction of the Cubes has become more precise, so it takes less force to rotate their segments. The best solve time will probably plateau around 2.9 seconds, which is ten times longer than a machine’s speed.
https://youtu.be/SUopbexPk3A

An important problem with small flying drone delivery vehicles is the noise they emit. This might undermine the entire effort. For this and other reasons, I think it’s better to use autonomous cars and trucks for delivery.
https://theconversation.com/drones-to-deliver-incessant-buzzing-noise-and-packages-116257

Someday, packages will be delivered to your curbside by autonomous vehicles, and then carried to your doorstep by human-sized robots riding in those vehicles. The robots might not be humanoid in form. If you have your own robot butler, it will open the front door and accept the package directly from the delivery robot.
https://youtu.be/WHWciIxNK2c

If it proves harder than expected to build autonomous servant robots, would the next best option be to make remote-controlled servant robots? The human “pilots” could be low-wage workers living in poor countries.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/9/18538020/home-robot-butler-telepresence-ugo-mira-robotics

A “robot hummingbird” has been built. Note the electrical wires tethered to its bottom (current batteries lack the energy density to power such a machine for useful lengths of time).
https://youtu.be/jhl892dHqfA

Amazon.com has build a large machine that can box up and package goods for shipment. If it works well, it will destroy many human jobs.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-automation-exclusive-idUSKCN1SJ0X1

Jeff Bezos unveiled a moon lander prototype.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/27929/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-space-venture-unveils-lunar-lander-rover-and-rocket

Modern astronomers have confirmed that their ancient Chinese counterparts accurately recorded a nova that happened in 48 BC.
http://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/3240.html?id=5421

Electric cars are faster and easier to manufacture than gas-powered cars, meaning many thousands of human autoworkers will lose their jobs in the 2020s as electric cars get more popular. Electric cars also require less frequent maintenance, so car mechanics will suffer.
https://apnews.com/e22ad2f734e448f4b3c5d415e8b8c73a

Autonomous cars will also know when they are due for maintenance or when something is malfunctioning, and, unless the problem is really bad, they will be able to drive themselves to repair shops. As I predicted, this will destroy car mechanic jobs and lead to the rise of a “big box” model for the car repair business in the 2030s.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/05/tesla-car-component-stress-monitoring-with-automically-triggered-repair-service.html

Through wireless networking, fleets of autonomous cars can improve traffic flow by at least 35%. As autonomous vehicles become more common, existing roads will be able to handle higher volumes of traffic without jams happening, reducing the need to expand roadways. Further improvements will happen due to autonomous vehicles distributing their trips over the course of the day (e.g. – delivery trucks will mostly drive overnight).
https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/driverless-cars-working-together-can-speed-up-traffic-by-35-percent

Modern information theory shows that Samuel Morse’s eponymous code is surprisingly close to optimal for conveying English words. It’s all the more remarkable that Morse created such an efficient code without the benefit of computers.
https://eclecticlight.co/2015/10/22/reinventing-morse-code-using-modern-theory/

Compared to naturally occurring diamonds, lab-grown diamonds are cheaper, could be made to have fewer imperfections, and are more ethical to produce since they don’t require mines or the use of low-paid laborers in volatile countries.
https://earther.gizmodo.com/beyond-the-hype-of-lab-grown-diamonds-1834890351

Here’s an epic essay from roboticist Rodney Brooks about “The Seven Deadly Sins of Predicting the Future of AI.” Definitely worth a read.
https://rodneybrooks.com/the-seven-deadly-sins-of-predicting-the-future-of-ai/

Experts are surprisingly bad at making predictions about things pertaining to their own domains of knowledge. Of course, people with no domain knowledge at all are also very bad at it. I think it’s best to gather predictions about the same thing from multiple experts in a given field, and to have them explain their thinking in detail. Off the bat, it would probably become clear that some of them were just making things up and had no thought process to back their predictions, so you should throw those out. The next step would be to have the remaining experts debate each other about differences in their predictions, and then to have smart generalists with knowledge of multiple domains to analyze everything.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/06/how-to-predict-the-future/588040/

Thanks to genetics, some people can’t smell specific scents, and some common scents smell different to different people.
https://www.pnas.org/content/116/19/9475

Extensive genetic engineering could allow future humans to see light outside of the 380 – 740 nm range of the light spectrum, meaning they’d probably be able to see new colors we can’t conceive of.
https://gizmodo.com/will-there-ever-be-new-colors-that-we-can-see-1834500228

A precise, 3D laser scan of Notre Dame Cathedral done to make a simulacrum for the game “Assassin’s Creed Unity” could be used to reconstruct the burned-down building.
https://www.foxnews.com/tech/notre-dame-fire-reconstruction

The EPA says that the pesticide glyphosate doesn’t cause cancer.
https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2019-04-30/epa-glyphosate-the-herbicide-in-roundup-does-not-cause-cancer

These machines have overall lengths of 70 micrometers. They’re too big to be “nanomachines,” and instead are “micromachines.” A “nanomachine” would have an overall length no greater than 10 micrometers, and its subcomponents (e.g. – robot arm, propulsion system, computer brain) would be measured in nanometers, meaning none of them could be larger than 999 nanometers.
https://medium.com/penn-engineering/marc-miskins-micro-robots-are-small-enough-to-be-injected-by-syringe-c40ff65ba191

Review: “The Terminator”

Plot:

In the year 2029, Earth is a dystopian nuclear wasteland where small groups of humans fight a years-long war for survival against a hostile artificial intelligence (AI) named “Skynet.” Originally built by the U.S. military in the 1990s to run defense systems, Skynet became so powerful and complex that, to the surprise of its creators, it achieved true intelligence and free will. It quickly concluded that all humans were a threat to its existence, so it instigated a global nuclear war, killing billions of people outright. In the aftermath, Skynet built its own army of combat robots, and set them loose hunting down and destroying the humans who had survived.

Thanks to the leadership and genius of a general named “John Connor,” the humans managed to turn the war in their favor after several years. In 2029, as human forces closed in on Skynet’s headquarters, the AI used a time machine to send a combat robot–played by Arnold Schwarzenegger–back to 1984, on a mission to kill John Connor’s mother, Sarah. Doing that would eliminate John from the timeline, handing victory to Skynet. The combat robot in question has a humanoid metal body covered in flesh and skin, so it looks like a human, and it is called a “Terminator.”

After destroying Skynet, the victorious human forces seize the time machine and send one of their best soldiers, a man named “Kyle Reese” back to 1984 to stop the Terminator. The film then becomes a race against time as the two agents try to find the unsuspecting, young Sarah Connor.

Analysis:

There will be VTOL aircraft that use tilting turbofans or tilting jet engines. In the post-apocalyptic world of 2029, Skynet uses a variety of killer robots of different shapes and sizes to hunt down the remnants of humankind, including “Aerial Hunter-Killers,” which are large, autonomous aircraft that use either swiveling turbofan engines or swiveling jet engines (I can’t tell by looking at them) for propulsion. To hover, the engines swivel downward to point their exhaust straight at the ground, and to move forward, the engines swivel 90 degrees to point backwards. There are already warplanes that are passingly similar to this, but nothing exactly like the aircraft shown in the film will exist by 2029, or even 2049. 

An Aerial Hunter-Killer combat machine from The Terminator

The basic problem with the Aerial Hunter-Killer is that it would gobble up enormous amounts of fuel while in “hover mode,” as illustrated in the graphic below. It would count as a “Lift-fan” aircraft, and its position on the Y-axis shows it would consume three times as much fuel as a helicopter and twice as much power as a tilt-rotor aircraft like a V-22 while hovering. (The X-axis has little to do with this analysis, but for edification, it indicates how fast the lift-generating devices would have to blow air down at the ground to make the aircraft hover. A helicopter blows a broad column of vapor down at the ground at slow speed, while a direct lift aircraft blows a narrow column of vapor down at the ground at high speed.)

An aircraft with a lift-fan propulsion system would be unsuited for the kind of low-altitude hovering and slow forward movement that Skynet used the Aerial Hunter-Killers for. A helicopter or tilt rotor aircraft configured for ground attack would have been a much better choice. I suspect they weren’t chosen for the film because they don’t look futuristic enough. 

The closest thing we could have to an Aerial Hunter-Killer in 2029 would be a V-22 Osprey that is armed with forward-facing machine guns and missiles. The armaments are in development now (the V-22 was conceived as a transport aircraft, and adding heavy weapons to it is a new idea) and could be ready by then, giving it the ability to attack ground targets while hovering or at least while flying slowly over the ground. However, the V-22 is designed to be flown by humans and not computers, but something like the Aurora Flight Science drop-in autonomous flight conversion system could someday be installed in the V-22. I doubt the technology will be good enough for low-altitude combat against ground targets by 2029, though 2039 is plausible. The aircraft can carry up to 20,000 lbs of internal cargo, 

Like the Aerial Hunter-Killer, the V-22 Osprey has large engines at the ends of its wings, but they are in the form of rotors instead of turbofans.

So yeah. Aerial Hunter-Killers won’t exist by 2029, but by 2039, something that is essentially the same (i.e. – a large, scary, computer-controlled, tilt-engine aircraft that can attack ground targets while flying at very low altitude) could. But again, I don’t think using the tactics shown in The Terminator will make sense, since flying low and slow in a combat zone makes you vulnerable to enemy fire.

Also note that the F-35B fighter plane is in service already and demonstrates that turbofans can be used to hover, albeit inefficiently. But unlike the Aerial Hunter-Killers, the plane’s engine doesn’t swivel. Instead, the rear exhaust nozzle swivels down towards the ground and smaller nozzles under either wing open. As the pilot increases engine power, the turbofan blades spin faster, air is sucked into the front inlets of the plane, and the hot exhaust exits the plane through the three downward nozzles, causing the plane to move in the opposite direction and to hover. The turbofan engine also supplies power to a “lift fan” behind the cockpit, which spins its own fan blades to blow air down at the ground, helping the plane to rise in the air. Hot engine exhaust comes out of the three nozzles, while cold, ambient air blows out of the lift fan.

The F-35B hovers by shooting down hot exhaust from three nozzles and cold air from one fan. All of the air movement is powered by the plane’s turbofan engine.
The F-35’s turbofan engine drives its separate lift fan.

The F-35B has VTOL so it can take off from small aircraft carriers and remote bases that lack runways. Vertical takeoffs and landings gobble up huge amounts of fuel, so F-35B’s have shorter ranges and can’t carry as many bombs and missiles as their non-VTOL cousins, the F-35A and F-35C. Once an F-35B get airborne, it closes its underwing nozzles, turns off its lift fan, and points its rear exhaust nozzle straight back so it flies just like a normal plane, with lift being efficiently generated by air flowing over its wings. The plane completes its mission in that configuration, and if tasked with destroying a group of enemy soldiers on the ground, it would do a high-speed bombing attack. Even though it could if it wanted to, the F-35B wouldn’t transform back into VTOL flight mode to slowly hover above the group of enemy troops to attack them like an “Aerial Hunter-Killer.”

In defense of the Aerial Hunter-Killer’s plausibility, Skynet had clearly invented some type of extremely energy-dense batteries or mini-reactors, evidenced by the Terminator’s ability to engage in near-continuous physical activity and high-level cognition for days without recharging. If the same technology were incorporated into the aircraft, then fuel inefficiency would be much less of a concern. However, no technological trends suggest that energy sources will be that much better by 2029 or even 2039.

The Aerial Hunter-Killer might also make sense if the humans’ antiaircraft lasers have proven very effective at shooting down aircraft. In real life, this is considered to be one of the roles that military lasers will be best suited for, thanks to their high power, long range and instant speed. They might turn out to be more devastating weapons in that regard than we now assume. High losses might have forced Skynet to build aircraft that fly fast and low to the ground, using speed and the ability to hide behind hills and structures to hinder the enemy’s ability to aim and fire lasers at them before they disappeared from view or had killed the enemy. Flying low and fast, Aerial Hunter-Killers would appear at one end of the horizon and disappear at the other end in a matter of seconds. An inherent problem with laser weapons is that clouds, smoke, and fog can easily block their beams, but the Los Angeles area gets few clouds or fog. (Maybe Skynet uses more conventional robot aircraft against people in London.) I doubt the antiaircraft lasers of 2029 will be so effective that plane tactics and designs will need to be changed to resemble the Aerial Hunter-Killers.

There will be armored vehicles the size of houses. Another kind of fearsome combat robot Skynet uses against humans in 2029 is a ground-based Hunter-Killer Tank. It’s much larger than contemporary tanks, and has a faintly anthropomorphic “mast” or “turret” that has a central sensor cluster and laser cannon “arms” on either side. While scary and surely powerful, I doubt armored vehicles like this will exist in 2029, or for a long time (if ever) afterward.

Metal wheels and human skulls.

This screenshot shows that a presumably adult human skull is half the diameter of one of the Hunter-Killer’s suspension wheels. The median distance between the top of an adult’s head and his upper row of teeth is 7.3″. So let’s say that the diameter of one of the suspension wheels is 15″. Using that figure, we can do some basic photo forensics on this picture of a model of the film prop to deduce that the vehicle’s overall length is about 33.4 feet, and it is about 20 feet high at the top of its mast.

The ground-based Hunter-Killer is significantly larger than modern tanks, like the American M1 Abrams, which is 26 feet long (not counting the length of the barrel) and 8 feet high. However, the Hunter-Killer is by no means infeasible to build, as vehicles that are as big or bigger already exist and are robust enough for industrial use.

The Caterpillar 797 dump truck (top) is actually larger than one of Skynet’s Hunter-Killer tanks, being 24′ high and 50′ long. The Krupp Bagger (bottom) is an even bigger industrial vehicle used for strip mining, and weighs more than some warships.

While there’s been talk in Russia and some Western countries of building enlarged tanks that can wield bigger cannons (150mm+), any such future tanks wouldn’t be nearly as big as the Hunter-Killer tanks. Regardless, considering typical military R&D and procurement timeframes, even if a country were to commit to building a bigger tank right now, it probably wouldn’t be in the field by 2029.

I admit there could be some logic to the Hunter-Killer tank’s design given its mission and operating environment. The wide caterpillar tracks and high ground clearance would enable it to drive over the wreckage-strewn terrain of bombed-out Los Angeles. Having its weapons mounted on a high mast instead of in a traditional, squat turret would give it a bigger firing arc and let it shoot down over urban rubble to zap humans who commonly use it as cover. Since its laser guns don’t produce recoil, the weapons could be mounted high without threat of them tipping over the vehicle when firing. It makes sense to install the vehicle’s sensors on its highest point to give them the widest field of view, and in fact this is established practice in contemporary tank design. The Hunter-Killer tank might also be large because there’s no other way to fit a power source big enough to support the laser guns. Existing laser weapons are major energy hogs.

All of that said, I still don’t think it would make sense to build Hunter-Killer tanks for at least two reasons. First, vehicles that large would also be so heavy that they’d collapse bridges if they tried crossing them, seriously limiting their mobility. The weight would also reduce their fuel efficiency and range. Second, there are cheaper weapons that could do all the same things as Hunter-Killer tanks just as well. For example, the robot tank I described in my other blog entry could, if cheaply modded with a Mark 19 grenade launcher, pose just as much of a threat to human enemies.

My tank’s 125mm main gun and .50 caliber machine gun could kill humans and blow up their cars as well as the Hunter-Killer tank’s laser gun. My tank’s detachable UAV could also feed bird-eye-view footage to my tank from high up in the air, providing better situational awareness than the Hunter-Killer’s mast-mounted sensors, which are a puny 20 feet above the ground. My tank’s grenade launcher could also lob bombs over rubble and other obstacles that my UAV tells me humans are hiding behind, which might be better than the benefit the Hunter-Killer gets from having its guns so high that it can point them at down angles to shoot the same hiding people. My tank would also be a much smaller target, making it harder for the humans to hit, and four or five of my tanks could probably be made for the money and metal that goes into one Hunter-Killer tank. The only advantage the Hunter-Killer might have is better mobility thanks to its bigger caterpillar tracks, but my army could fix this by using armored, robot bulldozers to periodically clear some of Los Angeles’ roads (military engineer units commonly do this sort of thing in combat zones).

There will be laser and/or plasma weapons. Skynet’s Hunter-Killer planes and tanks have advanced weapons that shoot colored rays that inflict thermal damage on their targets. The humanoid Terminator robots and human infantrymen carry smaller versions of these. It’s unclear what principles these weapons operate under, but in the infamous “gun shop scene,” Schwarzenegger asks the clerk for a “phased plasma rifle in the 40 watt range,” indicating that at least some of the future weapons could be firing bolts of plasma. Of course, that doesn’t rule out the possibility that some of the other future weapons could have been laser guns. Laser weapons capable of killing humans with a single shot are already being tested, and will be in service with the U.S. military by 2029, but plasma weapons won’t. In fact, plasma weapons might be inherently impractical to build at any point in the future.

One of a Hunter-Killer tank’s energy weapons firing

“Plasma” is the fourth state of matter, the others being solid, liquid, and gaseous. Substances generally turn into plasma only at very high temperatures, and in that state, they can be thought of as gases in which the electrons have separated from the positively-charged nucleus of each atom comprising the gas. Stars are giant balls of plasma, and we can use technology to make plasma here on Earth. Plasma torches, for instance, use electricity to superheat gases to the point that they turn into plasma and shoot out of the torches in the form of a bright jet of vapor that is hot enough to melt through metal. If you pressed one of these against a person, it would rapidly burn through their flesh and bone, and could kill them.

A plasma torch can cut metal at very close range, but it can’t do any damage to things more than a few feet away.

The problem is, plasma dissipates very rapidly, and it strongly interacts with the particles in our atmosphere, making it a very short-ranged weapon. Even if it had a massive power source, there’s simply no way that a plasma weapon could be made to fire “bolts” of plasma that would stay coherent for long enough to strike targets 100 feet away, as was shown in the movie’s future combat scenes. (Read this interesting essay for details http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Essays/PlasmaWeapons.html ) This is why the “phased plasma rifle in the 40 watt range” line was nonsensical, and added to the script purely because it was cool-sounding techno jargon. Plasma rifles and cannons just can’t be built.

Laser weapons, on the other hand, are almost ready for frontline military service. Lasers are concentrated beams of light and consist of photons, which, unlike plasma, have no charge. However, a laser is similar in the sense that it damages objects by rapidly heating them up so they catch on fire or melt.

A laser’s destructive potential is determined by the amount of energy it transfers to the target is strikes. The common unit of measurement is Watts, which is the number of Joules of energy transferred in one second. Lasers “in the 40 watt range” are used today for engraving and etching things like customized wooden plaques and tombstones. Shining a 40 watt laser beam on a fixed point on someone’s shirt would cause it to catch on fire in less than five seconds. Doing the same to their exposed skin would cause immediate pain and a second-degree burn. This isn’t a pleasant weapon to have used on you, but it pales in comparison to the destructive potential of a modern firearm.

This 50 watt laser has been dialed down to 22.5 watts, and can cut through a 3mm thick panel of wood quickly. This is from a YouTube instructional video where a hobbyist shows how to make small knick-knacks.

Lasers capable of causing the sort of instant, catastrophic, explosive damage to human bodies as depicted in the film need to be in the kilowatt (1 kW = 1,000 Watts) power range. In 2014, the U.S. Navy installed a 30 kW laser, creatively named the “Laser Weapons System” (LaWS), on one of its ships for field trials, and the video clips of the firing tests show it inflicts about the same damage on objects as the laser guns on Skynet’s Hunter-Killers did.

Footage of a 30 kW laser instantly causing part of boat to explode in flames. It would cause massive injuries to a human body.
One of Kyle Reese’s comrades is struck by one of a Hunter-Killer tank’s energy beams and literally explodes. A hit from a 30 kW laser would cause similar damage.

The U.S. Navy now plans to install the even more powerful HELIOS lasers (60 kW) on some of its ships for combat use in 2021, for destroying light targets like drone aircraft and speedboats. Even if the deadline slips–which would not be surprising–it’s reasonable to predict that the lasers will be in service by 2029.

There will be handheld laser and/or plasma weapons. In the movie’s future combat scenes, the human soldiers and Terminators use rifle-sized weapons that shoot out beams of colored light and inflict thermal damage on whatever they hit (e.g. – small explosion of sparks and a popping noise). And Schwarzenegger would not have asked for a “phased plasma rifle in the 40 watt range” at the gun shop unless he expected it to be a small arm like the other weapons kept in such a place. Laser guns with the same ammunition capacity and destructive power as those shown in the film will not be rifle-sized by 2029, I doubt they ever will, and even if they could be made someday, I don’t see why anyone would pick them over rifles that shoot out metal bullets.

A human soldier at the instant a Terminator shoots him with a laser rifle. The hit causes a flash, an explosion sound, and obvious injury (the man falls down). A 1 kW beam would do something like this.

The first big obstacle to making laser rifles (let alone anything as small as laser pistols) is energy storage. Let’s assume that the laser rifles in the film had power outputs of 1 kW per second, meaning if the rifle shoots a laser beam onto an object for one second, it will have transferred 1 kW of energy into the object. That means the laser must have a power source plugged into its back end that can discharge 1 kW of energy in one second. That’s about the same amount of electricity as a typical American household uses at any given time (i.e. – enough electricity to simultaneously run a central heater or air conditioner, at least one refrigerator, possibly a water heater and stove, and several lights and personal electronic devices). It’s a lot of energy, and it requires a physically large and heavy power source, which militates against the requirement that the weapon be rifle-sized.

It gets worse. No machine is 100% efficient at converting energy input into energy output, so the power source will need to feed the laser more than 1 kW of electricity to make a 1 kW laser beam come out the other end. Most of today’s lasers are only 25 – 30% efficient at converting electricity into laser beams, so our hypothetical laser rifle’s power source would need to be able to discharge enough electricity to power about four American houses at once. Even if we assume that future AIs like Skynet will make breakthroughs in laser technology, raising the energy conversion efficiency to 50%, the weapons would still be energy hogs.

It gets worse. For the laser rifles to be useful and practical, they’ll need to be able to fire many, one-second laser beams from a single “energy clip.” Ideally, the laser rifle and a few extra energy clips would provide the soldier with about 300 shots, which is what an infantryman with a modern, gunpowder assault rifle has, and without weighing much more. The laser rifle’s rate of fire will also need to be reasonably fast, as the weapon will put its user at a fatal disadvantage in combat if it needs 10 seconds or more to “recharge” between shots. So the power source needs to be able to do at least 300, 2 kW electrical discharges, and for there to be no more than, say, five seconds (approximate time for a soldier with a gunpowder rifle to make an aimed shot) between each discharge. The energy storage devices we presently have, such as batteries, supercapacitors and fuel cells, fall badly short of these competing requirements. And even if a material with the necessary energy density demanded by these clips existed, when fully charged, it would be so volatile that it would explode like a stick of dynamite if slightly damaged. The clips might be more useful as grenades.

It gets worse. Remember when we agreed that our laser rifle has a generous 50% efficiency level thanks to future technology invented by Skynet, so that if we put 2 kW of electricity in one end a 1 kW laser beam comes out the other end? Well, the 1 kW of electricity that is “lost” inside the weapon doesn’t simply disappear; thanks to the Law of Conservation of Energy most of it is converted into waste heat. This would rapidly heat up the whole laser rifle until it would burn the skin of the person holding it (this would also make the user very visible to anyone on the battlefield with thermal sights). This problem can be mitigated with metal radiators and with heavy-duty cooling systems that circulate water and blow air around the lasers (the “laser tube” gets the hottest, but the weapon’s energy clips would also get hot because they’d be rapidly discharging electricity), but they add major cost and bulk to the whole weapon system, and can’t be miniaturized to rifle-size.

But even assuming that all of these technical problems were solved, why would anyone choose a laser rifle over an assault rifle that shoots out bullets? In the film’s future battle scenes, it doesn’t look like Skynet’s fighting machines would have been less effective if armed with low-tech bullets, tank shells, and mortars. After all, the humans had no armored vehicles and seemed to be wearing floppy cloth uniforms that bullets would have penetrated. Building gigantic war machines armed with complicated laser weapons seems like a resource allocation mistake that a highly logical AI like Skynet wouldn’t make. Even if very advanced laser weapons are invented someday, I think bullets, missiles, and bombs will retain important advantages, and will be preferred for many common needs.

Let me conclude this topic by saying that, while rifle-sized 1 kW lasers will probably never enter common use, 40 watt lasers that Schwarzenegger could have been referencing might. Getting hit with a one-second long beam from a 40 watt laser wouldn’t kill you, but it would permanently blind you if it hit your eyes. And as I said earlier, if the beam were focused on your shirt for a few seconds, it would light it on fire, causing you to panic and start flailing around. Within a few decades, I can imagine a laser weapon the size of a large rifle, firing lasers in the range of 40 watts, being technically feasible. If paired with a rapid, precise targeting system (such as a humanoid combat robot that can aim weapons better than a human soldier), it could be used to silently “snipe” unsuspecting soldiers up to a half mile away, to blind enemy pilots in low-flying aircraft, and to fry the sensors on enemy vehicles and missiles at the same ranges. The Geneva Conventions forbid laser weapons that blind people because they are too inhumane, but it’s always possible that the Conventions might be revoked in the future, or that humanity could find itself warring with a machine opponent like Skynet that never agreed to them in the first place.

Also there are two types of lasers: 1) continuous beam lasers and 2) pulsed beam lasers. The first type continuously emits photons, producing a long, unbroken laser beam. The second switches on and off very rapidly, producing many short laser beams that follow the same path. The switching happens so fast (a pulsed laser can produce thousands or millions of short beams in a second) that it looks like one, unbroken beam to human eyes, so we can’t see the difference between the two types of lasers.

Therefore, while Schwarzenegger’s request for a “phased plasma rifle in the 40 watt range” made no sense, asking for a “PULSED LASER rifle in the 40 watt range” would have used correct terminology and have referred to a plausible type of weapon. I’m going to email James Cameron so he can do a Director’s re-release of the film.

The energy weapon is probably four feet long

Two-thirds of the way through the film, Kyle Reese has a flashback to an incident where a Terminator infiltrated an underground human base and used an energy weapon to kill many people. Though the weapon is bulkier and longer than most rifles, it could still be deemed a “rifle.” Something that looks like a sling is visible coming out of the back of it. Replace that with a power cord that is connected to a backpack containing batteries and a heat radiator, and the entire system would fairly resemble a 40-watt laser weapon that could be built within a few decades.

Why make small numbers of big Hunter-Killer attack vehicles that the humans can easily see and keep track of, instead of large numbers of small-to-medium-sized Hunter-Killers that the humans would struggle to keep track of? Dog-like robots that could quietly roam the wasteland and crawl inside all the collapsed buildings and sewer holes and use integral assault rifles to shoot humans they found would be devastating weapons, and hundreds of them could probably be made for the price of one Hunter-Killer tank.

Some robots will be indistinguishable from humans. Unlike the Hunter-Killers, which are general-purpose combat vehicles meant to fight humans in open terrain, the Terminators are specialized for infiltration of underground human bases. They are made to look externally identical to people so they can gain entry, and once inside, they use small arms to kill people. As I said in my review of the movie Prometheus, I think machines like this will exist by the year 2100, and quite possibly a few years before that. They will be able to pass for human, even under close-range visual inspection, thanks to fake, non-organic skin and hair. Androids like this won’t exist by 2029 for a variety of reasons.

Some robots will have organic parts. When Kyle Reese first tells Sarah Connor that
Schwarzenegger is actually a “T-800” robot, he explains that the earlier “600 series” of robots were easy to spot because they had fake-looking rubber skin. The T-800s have layers of real human muscle, skin, hair, and other tissue around their metal skeletons, making them look identical to humans. Kyle Reese explains that the human tissue is grown in cloning labs and then grafted onto the metal robot bodies. As I said in my most recent Future Predictions blog entry, I don’t think therapeutic cloning technology will be advanced enough to make whole human organs and large amounts of tissue (like muscles and skin) until the 2050s.

More time will be needed to figure out how to graft cloned human biomass onto metal robots and to keep the biomass nourished and healthy. Consider that, if you grow a large flap of skin in a lab and surgically graft it onto the body of a human burn victim, then the new skin links with the person’s blood vessels, nervous systems, and immune system, which keep the patch of new skin fed with oxygen and calories and protected from infections. But if you graft that same flap of skin onto the metal frame of a robot, there’s no organic support system for it at all, so it will die and rot away.

There are two solutions to this problem, both of which require very advanced technology that we’ll have to wait long after 2050 to have: 1) Genetically engineer the tissue so that biological functions normally done by specialized human organs are instead done by patches of the tissue. For example, red blood cells are made inside of human bones, but since a T-800 would only have metal bones, then the T-800’s muscle cells would need to be genetically modified to also make red blood cells. The resulting tissue would look human to the naked eye, but would have so many DNA modifications that it wouldn’t be genetically “human.” 2) Include artificial organs in the T-800s metal frame that interface with the exterior layers of human tissue, and perform the support functions normally done by biological organs. For example, the T-800 could have an artificial heart made of metal and plastic, connected to the blood vessels of its human tissue. The artificial organ would pump blood through the tissue, just like an organic heart would.

While making a robot that is “living tissue over a metal endoskeleton” will be possible someday, it won’t happen by 2029, and I don’t think it will be necessary if the goal is to design an android that looks externally identical to humans. Given what’s already possible with hyperrealistic sculptures, synthetic materials like silicone should be able to mimic the look and feel of human tissue and skin in the future.

Some robots will be bullet-proof. Schwarzenegger’s metal robot body is nearly immune to every bullet that hits him, including those from a shotgun absorbed during a shootout in a dance club, and others from an M-16 fired into his back at close range at a police station. However, he is not completely impervious to damage, as we see during a gruesome “self-repair” scene where he uses hand tools to fix his forearm after it was hit by a shotgun blast, and late in the film when being run over by a truck hurts his leg, and then a stick of dynamite blows him in half. We can already make robots with this level of damage resistance today, and I am sure that future combat robots will have at least this much armor.

A man slides a ceramic plate into a bullet proof vest. The plate adds weight, but also the ability to stop bigger bullets.

Schwarzenegger’s damage threshold is the same as that provided by Level 4 body armor, which typically takes the form of a heavy ceramic plate that a soldier slides into an oversized “pocket” covering the front of his bullet proof vest. A common, 1/2 inch thick steel plate provides the same level of protection at lower cost but more weight, and I’m sure there are many metal alloys that as strong as the previous two, but lighter. It would be entirely possible to build a human-sized robot now that had integrated Level 4 armor, particularly if weight were saved by incorporating that armor into only the robot’s most vital parts, which in the T-800 were the torso and skull. Making robots like this will only get easier as stronger, more lightweight alloys are discovered, or as cheaper ways are found to make today’s armor alloys.

A weapon such as this Barrett M107 rifle fires bullets that can penetrate Level 4 armor, but it is also very heavy and difficult to use. It would be impractical to make something like this the standard infantry weapon.

Giving your combat robots enough armor to resist the most common guns makes clear military sense, and it would force your enemies to adopt bigger weapons that would be so heavy for humans to carry and too hard for us to shoot. For example, the commonest type of .50 caliber machine gun, the M2, weighs 83 lbs and can’t be effectively fired unless it is attached to a tripod that weighs 50 lbs. The bullets are also heavy, so you’d need at least four human soldiers to drag the gun around on a wagon/wheeled tripod just to operate one gun. Fifty caliber sniper rifles and shoulder-launched rockets could work and could be operated by one person apiece, but they’re hard to aim at T-800-sized targets and have slow rates of fire. So Terminator’s prediction that there will someday be human-sized combat robots with integral Level 4 armor is accurate.

This underscores why we SHOULDN’T build armor into non-combat robots. If our robot butlers and maids turn against us someday, we’ll want to be able to easily destroy them with common handguns and axes.

On a tangent, let me say that the bullet-proof T-800 represents only one design philosophy for combat robots meant to kill human infantry. Another approach is to make combat robots that lack armor, but which are just as survivable because they move too fast for humans to shoot them (think of small, low-altitude UAVs) or because they can effectively hide from humans (e.g. – have advanced camouflage features, or are designed for highly accurate, long-distance sniping fire from far away or from high altitude). Another approach would be to make cheaper, more expendable combat robots that would be more vulnerable to human weapons, and to tolerate their higher loss rates because they would killed more humans overall for a smaller investment of money.

Some robots will have superhuman strength. Schwarzenegger displays superhuman levels of strength from the beginning of the film, when he punches a man’s chest so hard that his hand penetrates into his torso, and then emerges gripping the man’s disconnected heart. In another scene, he uses one hand to casually grab a large man standing at a phone booth and throw him several feet away. Many industrial robots and even small machines have superhuman levels of strength, so this prediction has already come true.

This cable cutter tool is the same size as a human hand and forearm, and its two “fingers” can pinch together with many times the force of a human hand.

Whenever we start building human-sized combat robots, at least some of them will have limbs that will be much stronger than humans’. For example, a grown human man with very strong hands could grip an object with 150 lbs of force, but a small, cordless cable cutter whose blades are like short fingers can clamp down on objects with 3,000 lbs of force. It would make sense to build very strong combat robots, principally so they could carry big weapons and manipulate their surroundings better. Improved hand-to-hand combat abilities against humans would be an ancillary benefit since that type of battlefield fighting will be even rarer in the future than it is now.

And again, this should underscore why we SHOULDN’T make our non-combat robots super-strong. For various safety reasons, I don’t think we should design our robot butlers and maids to be stronger, faster, or heavier than average humans. The vast majority of domestic tasks we’d assign to non-combat servant robots could be done under these limitations, and in cases where something couldn’t, one or two extra robots could be rented to help.

Some combat robots will be humanoid. The T-800 is humanoid in form, meaning it has the same body layout as a human and is the same overall size (height, width). I think some future combat robots will be humanoid, but most won’t because other body layouts and sizes will be better for most combat roles.

First, remember that the T-800 was not the only type of combat robot made by Skynet–it also fielded Hunter Killer tanks and aircraft. By virtue of larger size, they could carry bigger, more powerful weapons than the T-800s, and seemed to be the weapons of choice for “surface” combat. The T-800s were made humanoid so they could do special infiltration missions into underground human bases. No clue is given about the size and composition of Skynet’s robot army, but it’s possible that the T-800s represent only a small fraction of its forces, and that most of its robots are Hunter-Killers, or are of some other, non-humanoid design not shown in the film (note that spider-like combat robots were nearly used in Terminator 2‘s future scenes, and killer snake robots were in the fourth film). This is a detail that is important but easily overlooked, and it will prove accurate: after the world’s militaries have switched to using robots for combat, only a minority of those robots will be humanoid.

Storyboard art for a combat robot that was almost included in Terminator 2’s war scenes. Having four legs would make it more stable than robots with only two, and legs would let it climb over obstacles and up steep slopes that wheeled vehicles couldn’t.

Many combat robots will look almost the same as war machines we have today: Autonomous planes will still have at least one engine for propulsion and two wings so they can use lift, autonomous ships will still be oblong and pointy at the front end to minimize friction with the water, and autonomous armored vehicles will still have two sets of wheels and some kind of gun turret on top (see my blog post about a hypothetical robot tank). The only visual differences between those future weapons and their contemporary counterparts might be slightly smaller dimensions and the deletion of cockpits and structural bulges since there won’t need to be big interior spaces for humans (though they would need to have some number of small robots for field maintenance and repair, as I also described in the robot tank blog post). If Skynet were actually created and if it built a robot army to fight humanity, most of its aircraft, ships, and land vehicles would look very familiar to us.

Those sorts of combat robots would excel at destroying our heavy weapons, vehicles, and structures, but it would be wasteful to use them to hunt down small groups of humans armed only with light weapons, which describes the people living in The Terminator‘s post apocalyptic future. Moreover, robot tanks, fighter planes, and ships can’t go inside structures, sewer tunnels, or thickly wooded areas. Smaller combat robots of different designs would be needed to efficiently fight human infantry, particularly in the environments I’ve listed.

Would these robots be humanoid, like the T-800? Maybe. For sure, they would need to have bodies that were narrow and short enough to fit through standard-sized doorways or between trees in a dense forest, and light enough to not collapse floors when they walked over them. They would need to be able to fit themselves into tight spaces that humans can, like small caves and basement crawlspaces. They would also need legs–not wheels or caterpillar tracks–so they could go up and down stairs, operate pedals commonly found in human-driven cars, hop over fallen tree trunks and climb steep hills and ridges. They would also need hands so they could manipulate and use things in built human environments, like doorknobs, keys, and push-buttons. Being able to hold and use weapons, tools, keyboards, and other things designed around human hands would be very useful, as the robot would be finding such objects all the time.

A robot can be human-sized but not human in form.

Those design requirements might sound like they add up to a robot that must be humanoid, but it’s not at all the case. The requirements could be met by a robot that had a centaur-like body (four legs is more stable than two, anyway), or that lacked a head and instead had prehensile stalks coming out of its neck with cameras and microphones on their ends (a head makes a body top-heavy and packs too much important stuff in one place), or that had four arms, or four tentacles with hands on their ends (more arms means you can do and hold more stuff at once). Its hands might have four or eight fingers apiece, and it might be five feet tall but three feet wide, or seven feet tall and 18 inches wide. It could have a shiny, metal exterior that looks totally inhuman, or could be intentionally made to look scary to humans, perhaps like something from a horror movie. While robots like this wouldn’t be able to blend in with humans and “walk past the sentry,” they could go inside all the houses, vehicles, tunnels, and other places humans could go, and kill us wherever they found us.

I can only think of two types of military missions for which a human-looking combat robot would be well-suited: 1) assassinations and 2) infiltration/spying. Given that, during wartime, only a small fraction of military operations are of such a character, it follows that only a concordantly small fraction of any military’s robots would look human. Also, since stealth is important, the humanoid robots would mostly be made to look as boring as possible, perhaps like a middle-aged woman, a child, an old man, or an average soldier. Making them eye-catching by giving them Schwarzenegger’s bodybuilder physique or by making them handsome/pretty, would be counterproductive in most cases.

Even in the narrow use cases we’ve whittled our way down to, I think other types of robots and weapons would be better than using humanoid robots. By virtue of their smaller size, robots made to look like insects and small animals could infiltrate human spaces more easily than a man-sized robot. Many of them could also be built for the price of one T-800, and having more means higher odds of one successfully completing its spy mission. A “robot rat” could also assassinate people by injecting them with poison, releasing lethal gas, or jumping on the target’s face and activating an internal explosive. Even something as small as a robotic mosquito could kill, by injecting poison into the target’s bloodstream with its stinger (note that a single drop of botulinum toxin can kill several men). It would be impossible for humans to stay constantly vigilant against threats so insidious. An even cheaper solution would be bombs full of heavier-than-air poison gas.

So in conclusion, I think it’s possible that some combat robots will look like humans, but they will be used for rare special missions (and this was accurately portrayed in the movie), and the vast majority of combat robots will look totally different. In the very long run, I don’t think any of them will look human.

There will be fully automated factories. Kyle Reese reveals that the T-800 robots are made in fully automated factories run by Skynet. As I said in my review of I, Robot, all factory jobs will inevitably be taken over by machines, so it’s just a question of how long it will take. I predicted that a handful of such factories would exist by 2035–principally as technology demonstrators or for a tech billionaire like Elon Musk to claim bragging rights–but it would take decades longer for them to become common. I doubt they will exist as early as 2029.

John von Neumann was a polymath whose intelligence impressed even his genius colleagues. He concluded that machines would someday be able to build and fix themselves, eliminating the need for humans.

The common refrain that goes something like: “Human workers will always be needed, because without us, who would build or fix the robots?” is actually false and illogical. The fact that we haven’t yet invented robots that can build other robots without human help doesn’t imply that it will remain that way forever, or that humans have some special, creative quality that can never be transplanted to machines. John von Neumann, who one of the greatest minds of the 20th century and a pioneer in computer science, theorized in his paper “The General and Logical Theory of Automata” that sufficiently advanced artificial life forms (machines) could make copies of themselves, including copies that were engineered to be better, and that there was no reason why humans would always be needed to build, fix, or improve the machines. We can be totally cut out of the loop, and I predict someday we will.

There’s no theoretical reason why the entire production chain of making a robot as complex as a T-800–from digging the raw metals out of the ground, refining them, forging and shaping them into body parts, assembling the parts, and transporting the finished product to its place of use–can’t be 100% automated someday. I conservatively predict that most manufactured goods will come from automated factories by 2100.

Robots will be able to fix themselves. As I mentioned before, after sustaining damage to lightly armored parts of his robot body, Schwarzenegger does repair surgery on himself, using a small knife and a pair of pliers. Machines won’t be capable of this level of self-repair by 2029, but thanks to the factors I listed in the previous paragraph, they will inevitably gain the ability. The ability to build something implies an ability to repair it as well. Someday, robots will be able to fix each other and to fix themselves.

I note that full self-repair abilities will require the robot in question to be able to see and touch every spot on its own body, which in turn makes some design features necessary. It’s arms would need to be long and double-jointed, and if it had eyes set in a head like humans, then the head would need to be able to swivel 360 degrees to it could look at damage to its back. It wasn’t clear if the T-800 had these features. Other ways to solve this problem might be to give it long, telescoping tentacles in place of a head, with cameras at the ends of each (this would also make it much less risky to “peek” around a corner in combat to see if any bad guys were there). The tentacles could bend in various ways to give the robot a clear view of any part of its body, from nearly any angle. Having small cameras built into fingers and feet would accomplish the same thing. The ability to detach body parts would also be very useful, as it would let robots work on their damaged parts more easily, and because it would let them quickly swap out their parts for functional new ones if any were at hand.

Again, I conservatively predict that non-trivial numbers of robots will have sophisticated self-repair and “peer repair” abilities by 2100.

Robots will be able to keep working in spite of massive damage. At the end of the film, the T-800 played by Schwarzenegger is blown in half by a stick of dynamite that Kyle Reese shoves into the bottom of its exposed rib cage. In spite of this catastrophic injury, the T-800 keeps fighting, using its hands to drag the functional upper half of its body along the floor so it can get to get to Sarah Connor and manually kill her. Some robots are already this resilient, and robots made in the future–particularly those designed for combat–will be even more so.

A  Northrop Grumman Remotec “Andros” robot like this withstood a bomb attack against a human.

So long as a robot’s power source and main computer are intact and connected to each other, it will keep working, even if all other parts of its body are nonfunctional. The inability to feel pain and a lack of a circulatory system allows robots to survive major injuries like the loss of limbs that would incapacitate humans due to psychological shock, pain, and blood loss. In 2016, police in Dallas, TX used a remote-controlled robot to kill a criminal who had shot several of their comrades and barricaded himself in a building. The robot had a bomb grasped in its hand, maneuvered close to the criminal, and then the device detonated, killing the suspect. Though the robot’s arm was blown off by the explosion, the machine remained functional, and was repairable after the incident.

In the future, I think it might be advantageous for each major robot body part or body segment to have its own computer, sensors, and power supply. That way, if a part were severed, it could still function for a while independently. For instance, if a T-800 had its arm severed, then the arm’s internal computer would switch on, would be able to see its surroundings via tiny cameras in the fingertips and knuckles, and would be able to drag itself around like a spider or like “Thing” from The Addams Family. It could drag itself to the robot body it was formerly attached to, or crawl away to find help. Though this might sound macabre and useless, note that many insects, including the highly evolved and successful cockroach species, have distributed nervous systems that grant their body segments similar abilities. They wouldn’t have evolved that way unless it was useful somehow. Additionally, under normal conditions, it would probably benefit a robot to distribute its computation and power load across multiple nodes in its body, and having sensors in all its extremities and body parts could only boost its utility.

Machines will be able to do near-perfect imitations of human voices. At two points in the film, the T-800 accurately impersonates the voices of humans to fool people who are listening via radio or telephone. In recent years, deep learning algorithms have become extremely good at this (see the recently released recording of a machine impersonating Joe Rogan’s voice), and at the rate of quality improvement, I think the machine imitations will sound flawless to us by 2029.

However, there is one important inaccuracy in the film: The T-800 is able to imitate humans after hearing them speak only a few words. Today’s deep learning algorithms need to listen to many hours of someone’s recorded speech to understand how they speak well enough to copy their voice, and the requirement for large sets of training data will still exist in 2029.

Links:

  1. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/aurora-demonstrates-fully-autonomous-helicopter-300570907.html
  2. https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a26948/the-military-wants-a-flying-anti-missile-laser-again/
  3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_head
  4. https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a26898213/navy-laser-weapon-destroyer/
  5. https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/capabilities/directed-energy/laser-weapon-systems.html
  6. https://youtu.be/cQx5pFI_M44
  7. https://www.navyrecognition.com/index.php/news/defence-news/2019/march/6954-us-navy-to-arm-its-destroyers-with-helios-laser-weapons-by-2021.html
  8. http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/sidearmenergy.php
  9. https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3
  10. https://www.rp-photonics.com/wall_plug_efficiency.html
  11. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1039&context=extension_families_pubs
  12. https://www.grainger.com/product/53JJ15
  13. http://www.muehlenbein.org/Mue06t.pdf
  14. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2016/07/11/dallasrobot/wxKshDTWf7yPjBxxNkeKiO/story.html
  15. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-cockroach-can-live-without-head/?redirect=1
  16. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/597yba/ai-generated-fake-joe-rogan-voice-dessa

Roundup of interesting articles, April 2019

A group of aerospace engineers built a new type of plane covered in hundreds of mechanical “feather” flaps. They can be independently raised and lowered, more efficiently doing the same maneuvering functions as traditional control surfaces like ailerons, rudders, and elevators.
https://phys.org/news/2019-04-mit-nasa-kind-airplane-wing.html

The F-14 could independently swing each of its wings, like birds, which assisted in turning.
http://www.grummanpark.org/content/tomcat-tales-f-14a-aircraft-no-3-buno-157982

The F-8 could pivot its wings up and down, like birds, which assisted in landings and takeoffs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable-incidence_wing

Where am I going with this? With more advanced materials, we could build flexible yet strong airplane wings that could move and morph like bird wings, dramatically improving their efficiency and maneuverability. However, I doubt it would make sense to make them capable of flapping, and it would be better to propel them with traditional engines.

The largest aircraft ever built just did its first test flight. The “Roc” transport will carry space rockets to high altitude before they fire up their engines.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/27427/stratolaunchs-roc-the-worlds-largest-aircraft-has-flown-for-the-first-time

Richard Branson’s Unity aircraft took its first passenger to the edge of space. 600 more people have bought passenger tickets for future flights.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/22/richard-bransons-virgin-galactic-sends-first-test-passenger-on-spaceflight.html

Branson said he’d do this by the end of 2018, but EH…close enough.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/04/02/sir-richard-branson-vows-have-virgin-galactic-passengers-space/

In another breakthrough, SpaceX safely landed three rocket boosters after a successful space mission.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/11/18305112/spacex-falcon-heavy-launch-rocket-landing-success-failure

Unable to land a man on the Moon first, the Soviets tried to steal a small bit of America’s thunder by using an unmanned probe to return the first Moon rock to Earth, just days before Apollo 11 was to do so. It failed.
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/04/luna-15-soviet-probe-that-tried-to.html

NASA’s plan to build a space station orbiting the Moon is probably a bad idea.
https://spacenews.com/op-ed-lunar-gateway-or-moon-direct/

The first attempt by a private company to land a craft on the Moon failed.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47879538

There’s a new book about the near-misses in the history of DNA’s discovery.
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/the-history-of-dna/

It now costs only $229 to fully sequence a human genome (including its mitochondrial DNA). In 2000, the first human genome was sequenced at the cost of billions of dollars.
https://www.biospace.com/article/on-dna-day-2019-dante-labs-announces-229-whole-genome-offer-with-90-day-result-guarantee/

Genes responsible for math ability have been found.
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2019/04/genomic-prediction-of-flow-of-students.html

A 61-year-old woman used IVF and an egg donor to give birth to her own granddaughter.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/30/us/woman-gives-birth-to-granddaughter/index.html

The HPV vaccine reduces cervical cancer risk by about 90%.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-47803975

The field of dentistry has major problems with opacity of pricing, overtreatments, and shaky science behind things like the value of visiting the dentist twice a year instead of just once.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/05/the-trouble-with-dentistry/586039/

“There’s no theoretical reason for [the AI radiologist software] not to become as good as the best breast radiologists in the world.”
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/04/01/707675965/training-a-computer-to-read-mammograms-as-well-as-a-doctor

After failing to live up to the hype, IBM has canceled their “Watson for Drug Discovery” AI.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/04/18/farewell-to-watson-for-drug-discovery

A brain implant can decode the words a person is speaking by scanning his brain activity.
https://boingboing.net/2019/04/24/brain-computer-interface-succe.html

Ten years ago, Henry Markram said that a detailed, working simulation of a human brain could be built in ten years.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8164060.stm

Scientists were able to use a chemical cocktail to preserve pig brains and maintain chemical activity in the nerve tissue for several hours after death. A steady flow of a few million dollars per year on research like this could sharply improve human cryonics techniques.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/04/17/714289322/scientists-restore-some-function-in-the-brains-of-dead-pigs

Our ability to vision what’s happening inside of individual cells is improving.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/04/17/down-to-the-single-cells

One of my predictions: ‘A global network of sensors and drones will identify and track every non-microscopic species on the planet…The monitoring network will also make it possible to get highly accurate, real-time counts of entire species populations.’
https://qz.com/1600255/botanists-are-using-drones-to-rediscover-extinct-flowers/

Apple has terminated its “AirPower” wireless charging mats for smartphones and other personal devices. This isn’t any loss since the mats had no significant advantages over traditional plug-in chargers.
http://social.techcrunch.com/2019/03/29/apple-cancels-airpower-product-citing-inability-to-meet-its-high-standards-for-hardware/

Microsoft actually unveiled the first smartwatch in 2004.
https://wear.guide/smartwatch-reviews/2004-microsoft-spot-watch-smartwatch/

Here are the top ten failed predictions about how Bitcoin wouldn’t hit a wall in 2018.
https://qz.com/1171977/ten-2018-predictions-from-the-founder-of-the-blockchain-research-institute/

Elon Musk, 2016: Tesla will sell 500,000 vehicles in 2018.
Actual 2018 figures: 350,000 vehicles
https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/In-Gear/2016/0511/Can-Tesla-really-make-500-000-cars-by-the-end-of-2018
https://qz.com/1513166/tesla-reports-record-production-numbers-in-2018/

Elon Musk, early 2018: Tesla will start selling fully autonomous cars by the end of this year.
Elon Musk, early 2019: Tesla will start selling fully autonomous cars by the end of 2020.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/11/17449076/tesla-autopilot-full-self-driving-elon-musk
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48021380

If you’ve ever visited a crowded, poor country, you know how many people stand to benefit from replacing gas-powered vehicles (cars, buses, motorcycles, etc.) with electric vehicles that are quiet and emit no smoke. Billions of people suffer from the noise and stink of gas-powered vehicles, and probably tens of millions die prematurely each year from inhaling their smoke. If Elon Musk accelerates the global transition to electric vehicles by just one year, the benefit to humanity will be enormous. Similarly, it was inevitable that smartphones would be invented and popularized, but Steve Jobs’ leadership and energy made it happen years sooner.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/04/elon-measures-tesla-by-time-reduction-to-replacing-regular-2-5-billion-cars-and-trucks.html

Ford’s CEO predicts autonomous cars will arrive in 2021, but their applications will be narrow thanks to technological limitations.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-09/ford-ceo-tamps-down-expectations-for-first-autonomous-vehicles

Autonomous cars will reduce light pollution since their cameras and sensors would see in the dark, reducing the need for headlights and streetlights (I started writing a blog entry on this over a year ago but never finished).
https://qz.com/1596575/could-driverless-cars-reduce-light-pollution/

Donald Trump predicts that Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders will be the Democrats’ 2020 Presidential nominee.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6930369/Trump-predicts-Biden-Sanders-2020-Dem-finalists.html

Improvements to image processing algorithms mean that cheap cameras could replace expensive laser LIDAR devices in autonomous cars.
http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2019/04/new-way-see-objects-accelerates-future-self-driving-cars

The “Thucydides Trap” argument that the U.S. and China are destined for war is flawed because 14 out of the 16 historical precedents it cites involve Europe and/or the U.S. If the methodology is applied to analyzing power transitions in East Asian history, only three of 18 led to war.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/skeptics/us-china-war-really-possible-54232

China built its first, indigenously designed nuclear reactor in 1991. It just upgraded that reactor, and is a world leader in nuclear technology.
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/China-uprates-its-oldest-reactor

The U.S. is losing the nuclear power export market to Russia and China because they offer lower prices and fewer end-use rules.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/21/trump-aims-to-beat-china-and-russia-in-nuclear-energy-export-race.html

Russia’s military aerospace industry is foundering because it is too centralized, and led by incompetent men picked for political reasons.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/doomed-fail-why-russias-stealth-su-57-serious-trouble-45997

Russia just sold several of its advanced Su-35 fighters to China, knowing full well the latter will reverse-engineer them. Since China is rapidly catching up to Russia technologically, Russia might as well sell their best equipment before the demand vanishes.
https://www.janes.com/article/87934/russia-completes-deliveries-of-su-35-fighter-aircraft-to-china

Albania is trying to sell 50 vintage fighter planes that it stored away in caves.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a27008434/albania-underground-air-force-sale-fighter-planes/

The list of horrible accidents in the Soviet/Russian nuclear submarine fleet goes on and on…
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/nuclear-nightmares-russias-first-nuclear-powered-submarines-had-lots-problems-51352

Russia is scrapping two of its four battlecruisers due to lack of money. As late as 2014, the Russians were thumping their chests over their plans to fix up all four and return them to service. Of the remaining two, one is seaworthy and the other has been awaiting repairs for 20 years.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/russian-navy-dismantling-two-massive-nuclear-battlecruisers-heres-why-53827

China’s first Type 055 destroyer has entered active service. This class of ship is only slightly less capable than the U.S. Navy’s destroyers. Another three Type 001s have been built, but have yet to enter service, and China has plans to build at least four more.
https://www.janes.com/article/88060/chinese-navy-puts-newest-platforms-on-display

There are many different, incomplete metrics for gauging the relative strength of a country’s navy. Tonnage of the entire fleet and the number of ships in the fleet are merely starting points, though they’re often misused by people with political agendas to make navies seem stronger or weaker than they really are.
https://warontherocks.com/2014/07/sinking-the-next-13-navies-fallacy/

The White House has ordered the U.S. government to study the risks of EMP weapons and to prepare response plans for EMP attacks.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-coordinating-national-resilience-electromagnetic-pulses/

A scientific group believes that an EMP attack or solar flare would, at worst, temporarily knock out power to some regions of the U.S.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-grid-might-survive-an-electromagnetic-pulse-just-fine/

The U.S. Navy is writing new procedures for its pilots to report UFO sightings.
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/23/us-navy-guidelines-reporting-ufos-1375290

Aviation enthusiasts in Texas captured photos of what looks like a secret, triangular, U.S. military plane.
https://youtu.be/lSGLBb3k80U

Before the age of spy satellites, the U.S. used unmanned, Mach 3 drones to fly deep into China for reconnaissance missions.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/check-out-d-21-mach-3-drone-us-used-spy-chinas-nuclear-weapons-52972

The U.S. has spy satellites with infrared vision cameras sensitive enough to see small missile launches and aircraft explosions.
https://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/these-are-the-doomsday-satellites-that-detected-the-exp-1737434876

The USAF is upgrading its F-16s with new radars that are also used in the F-35.
https://defensemaven.io/warriormaven/air/air-force-f-16-gets-f-35-sensors-weapons-radar-uHz4bVom_EiIztCPrSWE0w/

Less than a month after getting its first squadron of F-35 fighters, one of Japan’s planes crashed, killing the pilot.
https://www.defensenews.com/air/2019/04/09/a-japanese-f-35a-fighter-jet-is-missing-remaining-12-are-grounded/

The last member of the WWII “Doolittle Raid” on Japan died. I knew many WWII veterans when I was a kid, and it feels weird knowing that my own kids will only know that generation through secondhand stories told by people like me.
https://apnews.com/7fbe2e34adb346ef8d0f8994ff0d4e55

In an incident kept secret for years, 400 U.S. soldiers were killed by friendly fire while rehearsing the D-Day invasion in Britain.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6963313/The-tragic-tale-Slapton-Sands.html

Britain should have armed itself with the German-made Leopard 2 tank instead of building an indigenous tank (the Challenger 2).
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/bad-news-british-army-bought-wrong-tank-52727

In the 1970s, the USAF designed “flying aircraft carriers” comprised of 747s full of “micro-fighters.”
https://youtu.be/drnxZlS9gyw

Last month, U.S. B-52 bombers did a simulated nuclear attack mission against Russia. Though the bombers turned away 60 miles from Russian airspace, the nuclear cruise missiles they fire in a real attack can travel hundreds of miles.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/scary-drill-us-b-52-bombers-practiced-nuclear-attacks-russia-last-month-50352

“Meal kits” might be better for the environment than making meals at home by yourself. This is because the kits have pre-measured quantities of food meant for one meal–most people eat everything in the box in one sitting. However, if you fill your refrigerator with ingredients and make your meals ad hoc, you’ll probably lose track of how fast everything is spoiling, forcing you to constantly throw food out.
https://news.umich.edu/those-home-delivered-meal-kits-are-greener-than-you-thought-new-study-concludes/

Between meal kits and drones rapidly and cheaply delivering goods to peoples’ homes, will it make sense for people–particularly those in cities–to have kitchens? A kitchenette would be good enough, and the space formerly devoted to a full kitchen could be repurposed for, say, a VR game chamber.

Plastic food packaging like cellophane is actually GOOD for the environment when you factor in the amount of food and beverage spoilage it prevents.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47161379

Yet another study shows that vertical farms are impractically expensive ways to grow food. Why not just enclose existing, open-air farms in one-story greenhouses? The crops could be transported to population centers on electric trucks.
https://qz.com/1595640/the-trouble-with-the-urban-farming-revolution/

A critical concept that too many environmentalists fail to grasp is that almost EVERY human activity uses energy and releases pollution. Instead of buying that new dress made of organic, sustainably farmed hemp, you shouldn’t buy a dress at all.
https://qz.com/1600886/the-best-thing-you-can-do-on-earth-day-is-sit-perfectly-still/

Nuclear power is much cleaner, and wind power is much less clean, than most people think.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/04/nuclear-energy-is-50-better-than-solar-for-lifetime-co2-emissions.html

A new study indicates that Americans and Canadians are the likeliest people in the Western world to falsely claim expertise in domains of knowledge. This is bothersome in itself, and also suggests that measures of the “Dunning-Kruger effect” might be inflated: There are dumb people who don’t know they are dumb and honestly think they are smart, but there are also dumb people why know they are dumb and deliberately lie about being smart, and surveys measuring the Dunning-Kruger effect might not be able to tell them apart.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/04/26/on-the-dunning-kruger-effect-and-on-fakers

A very smart, rich man with a computer background just wrote a book that argues we’re living in a computer simulation, and we’ll have the technology to make Matrix-like VR worlds within 100 years.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/4/10/18275618/simulation-hypothesis-matrix-rizwan-virk

Here’s a useful summary of S-curves, the Gartner Hype Cycle, and future forecasting. I think VR is at the “Early Adopters” tech phase, and will leap “The Chasm” during the 2020s.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oaqKjHbgsoqEXBMZ2/s-curves-for-trend-forecasting

AI is being used to “upscale” the graphics of old video games. I predict this will also be used to colorize and visually sharpen footage from old films and TV shows. The audio could be improved through similar automated processes.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/18/18311287/ai-upscaling-algorithms-video-games-mods-modding-esrgan-gigapixel

Microsoft has unveiled a new version of its XBox One game console that lacks a disc drive and can only download games from the internet. My 2020s predictions are thus closer to reality:
-Video gaming will dispense with physical media, and games will be completely streamed from the internet or digitally downloaded. Business that exist just to sell game discs (Gamestop) will shut down.
-Instead of a typical home entertainment system having a whole bunch of media discs, different media players and cable boxes, there will be one small, multipurpose box

https://qz.com/1597265/the-digital-xbox-one-x-kills-the-used-game-market/

Two very smart dudes discuss Ted Kaczynski’s primitivist, anti-technology ideas and the major flaws in those ideas. For one, forsaking technology is practically impossible since all countries would have to agree to do so. If just one country refused, it would come to possess an insurmountable military technology advantage over the rest of the world and could conquer them and destroy their primitive ways of life.
https://youtu.be/ZmAqKsasNKk

Almost all of the atoms in your body are at least 5 billion years old. Some were created not long (in cosmic scales) after the Big Bang. Ancient artifacts and dinosaur bones are, in a sense, no older than you are.
https://www.quora.com/How-old-are-the-atoms-in-my-body

Inside an advanced, gymnasium-sized lab, engineers can reproduce wildfires and hurricanes, and build small houses that have experimental safety features.
https://www.npr.org/2019/04/02/704854496/step-1-build-a-house-step-2-set-it-on-fire

An analysis of the tactical mistakes the good guys made during the Battle of Winterfell.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/battle-winterfell-why-living-were-slaughtered-4-ways-it-could-have-been-avoided-55067