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:
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.
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.
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.
Energy resources. Mostly, this means underground fossil fuel reserves.
There are three more key points worth mentioning:
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).
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.
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.
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/
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
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 “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
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 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/
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
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
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 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
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/
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
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/
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
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/
‘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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
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/
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
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/
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’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 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
“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 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
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
From a biological perspective, the meaning of any organism’s life is to dominate its species’ genepool. That can be done by eliminating or subduing rivals and/or by producing as many offspring as possible that survive to adulthood. Though we humans resist thinking that this applies to us, a passing familiarity with evolutionary psychology makes it clear that the instinct to dominate others (or at least reduce others so they are less powerful) and to reproduce underlies countless aspects of our thinking and behavior. In the short term and long term, a human’s goal is to increase his “slice” of the human genetic “pie” as much as possible.
A question I’ve been pondering lately is how present and future technology could be best used to satisfy this biological imperative. Donating your eggs or sperm to people who want to use IVF to create children is probably the smartest strategy right now since the amount of effort (especially for sperm donation) is minimal, but the genetic payoff is large since someone else bears the costs of raising your offspring (note that this implies that you adopting a genetically unrelated child is the worst strategy). If sperm and egg banks reject you as being beneath their donor standards, there’s always the wonderful world of direct, private donations (one example: https://www.justababy.com/ ).
Failing that, or in addition to it, you should of course conceive and raise biological children of your own. If this is impossible due to infertility or an inability to find a partner, technology again offers solutions. Convincing a close blood relative to donate their sperm or eggs to you for IVF would allow you to conceive a child that shared much of your DNA. If your problem is singlehood, then the solution is going to a sperm or egg bank (though this is a much more expensive option for men since they have to pay surrogate mothers to bear the child). It goes without saying that you should pick a donor that has high reproductive fitness.
Once it becomes possible to clone humans, it might make sense for you to do that instead of having children the normal way. From a genetic standpoint, a child conceived the normal way only shares 50% of your DNA (with the other 50% coming from your partner or “donor”), whereas your clone would share 100% with you. In an important biological sense, making a clone of yourself is as good as having two children with someone else. Your genes don’t get diluted from one generation to the next. Moreover, since intelligence and personality traits are heavily genetic, it would probably be easier for you to raise a clone since you’d already know your offspring’s strengths and weaknesses and because you’d think and act similarly.
Pushing the technological envelope farther, it would be even better if you made genetically engineered clones of yourself. When your clone was still just a fertilized egg, you would use genetic engineering techniques to change genes that coded for your known flaws, like defects of appearance or a congenital health problem. The resulting person wouldn’t be a true clone since it would have these “tweaks,” but it would still be incredibly similar to you. It’s probably better to have a “99.9% clone” that lacked some of your weaknesses than a 100% clone that had them, as the latter would be likelier to live long, reproduce, and attain the social and financial means to support their own offspring better.
Taking advantage of technologies that extend your lifespan and maintain your health also supports your biological imperative. It leaves you with more time and ability to raise children of your own, and even after your own reproductive years are done or you’ve gotten too infirm to be a primary caregiver, to also care for your grandchildren and other blood descendants. So long as you are a positive presence, your efforts will advance their survival, and hence the proliferation of your genes. Of note is the fact that cryonically preserving yourself upon death is included among the array of technologies that could extend your lifespan. Even a 1% chance of being resurrected to continue spreading your seed and/or helping your descendants is better than the 0% chance you get by not opting for cryonics.
Finally, an overlooked way to use technology to perpetuate your genes is to sequence your genome and then ensure the data survive after your death, so hopefully someone might use it to clone you in the future. Because gene sequencing costs are dropping, most people will be able to easily afford this within ten years. Taking pains to protect the data–perhaps by making several backups and periodically cross-checking them for fixity–and arranging for the file to be made public or transferred to a major genetic database in the event of your death would be the second element of the plan. Attaching a message to it saying you wish to be cloned would raise the chances of it happening (again, 1% is better than 0%).
I used to view the project to catalog the genomes of humans as special a thing unto itself, somehow more mystical and important than the rest of the scientific enterprise, but then I realized it was just part of the much broader, millennia-spanning effort to gather data on everything around us. The body of science and of known facts expands, and it’s almost incidental that our knowledge of human genetics is included. Today’s internet already represents a massive store of such knowledge, and the future internet (or whatever the internet evolves into) will be even bigger and more detailed. I can imagine a day when very advanced genetic labs will have access to the genomes of trillions of unique humans and animals, and could use the genomic data to synthesize any one of the individuals from scratch.
And there you have it. Even if the product of such a synthesis procedure wouldn’t be “you,” it would be a clone of you, and if the perpetuation of your genes is the ultimate meaning of your life, the creation of a clone of you in the far future would advance your interests.
Robotics company “Festo” has built a new, highly dexterous robot arm made of soft components, and trained it in 3D virtual environments on how to handle objects in the real world. For safety reasons, I predict house robots will need to be soft and as lightweight as possible to work around humans. https://gizmodo.com/this-remarkably-agile-robot-hand-teaches-itself-how-to-1832960417
Uber has been found not criminally liable for last year’s accident where one of its self-driving cars fatally struck a homeless woman. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47468391
After we build the first AGI, I guess the plan is to have it read “Cyc”: ‘Cyc is the world’s longest-lived artificial intelligence project, attempting to assemble a comprehensive ontology and knowledge base that spans the basic concepts and “rules of thumb” about how the world works…’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc
Sheep sperm that was frozen for 50 years was just used to impregnate several female sheep. The birth rate was as high as that of sperm frozen for only one year. There’s no known “shelf life” for frozen mammalian sperm and eggs. https://phys.org/news/2019-03-ram-sperm-frozen-years-successfully.html
China just cloned one of its finest police dogs. ‘A police officer [said] that preserving the police dog blood has always been a challenge for breeders, as traditional breeding methods would dilute the original, and the next generation’s genes will be largely beyond control.’ http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1142709.shtml
The size of your brain positively correlates with your IQ. (Your hat size provides a rough approximation of your brain size.) https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2019-lee.pdf
This population analysis of the genomes of people living in Iberia is interesting, but also hits home that the region has been a melting pot of different ethnic groups for so long that there’s little value in trying to trace back anyone’s lineage. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47540792
A German study shows that wind turbines are not as cheap and don’t make as much electricity as thought only a few years ago. Many people forget that wind turbines (and solar panels) slowly wear out and lose efficiency until they have to be replaced. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0211028
Coastal marshes could turn into gigantic carbon sinks as the planet warms, offsetting the impact of climate change. There are so many things we don’t yet understand about how the planet’s climate works as a system. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47472602
A Star Trek fan used a machine learning program to digitally enhance clips from Deep Space Nine, effectively converting them into HD footage. I predict that techniques like this will be used to clean up footage of old films and TV shows, and it will become possible to enhance the audio as well. Eventually, there will be highly accurate colorizations of black-and-white footage. https://io9.gizmodo.com/a-fan-made-attempt-to-create-hd-deep-space-nine-using-1833301127
A small community of “digital hoarders” have amassed enormous amounts of data on all kinds of eclectic things (what about preserving human DNA for future resurrection?). I’m sure the vast majority of these hoarders are men. Thanks to their obsessions with highly specific subjects, I wonder if it’s useful to think of these people as “specialized processors” that could someday be optimized for doing relevant types of work as part of something like a Matrix of minds. https://gizmodo.com/delete-never-the-digital-hoarders-who-collect-tumblrs-1832900423
Ukraine developed a pretty extensive upgrade package for the T-54 lineage of Soviet tanks (and China’s “T-59” clone). T-54 mass production started in 1950! http://www.army-guide.com/eng/product1907.html
America’s dream of returning its WWII battleships to service is thwarted by miles of leaky pipes and hoses, and by countless crumbling seals and manifolds. Also, no one remembers how to operate their equipment, so training crews is very slow and expensive (but what if the Navy had intelligent machines that never forgot anything and that would work for free, replacing old pipes, hoses and seals?). https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/i-served-battleship-these-are-all-reasons-they-wont-ever-make-comeback-49322
Noisy machines like air conditioners and vacuum cleaners could be encased in special plastic housings that would eliminate almost all of the sounds they make. The casings would be shaped to reflect the sound wave back to their sources to cancel them out. https://journals.aps.org/prb/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevB.99.024302
After years of delays and legal challenges, a company has gained FDA approval to sell genetically engineered salmon in the U.S. There’s no scientific evidence that genetically engineered foods are less safe for people to eat than “natural” foods. https://apnews.com/1be7085378684f4990e240870e7c546c
Richard Feynman’s “Imagination in a straitjacket” comment perfectly accords with my Rule for Good Futurism #6: “Be very skeptical of predictions that hinge on future discoveries that fundamentally change the laws of science.” https://youtu.be/IFBtlZfwEwM
Flying cars have been a part of the popular imagination since the 1960s, maybe earlier.
Ah, flying cars, a staple of science fiction since The Jetsons, how I hate thee. Let me count the ways…
First, let’s define what we’re talking about: A “flying car” is a vehicle that can fly through the air like an aircraft AND ALSO drive on roads like an ordinary car. Thus, though it might take off and land vertically like a helicopter, a flying car is different from a helicopter because it can also move long distances on the ground.
In theory, flying cars would be more versatile than land-only cars and air-only aircraft, but their dual-role nature would impose design compromises that would make them far less efficient than either of the other two. For example, a flying car’s wings would be useless dead weight and bulk when the vehicle was driving on roads, and its wheels and transmission would be useless dead weight and would produce major drag when the vehicle was flying through. As a general rule, flying cars would be heavier, slower and less fuel efficient in the air compared to small aircraft, and more prone to breakdowns, less safe, and less fuel efficient on the ground compared to normal cars.
The Jetsons aired in 1962, and popularized the idea that there would be flying cars in the future.
Without getting into any more detail, we can say that flying cars are a flawed concept, and there’s no reason why this shouldn’t have been obvious to engineers in the 1960s (or earlier) when The Jetsons aired and implanted in the popular consciousness the idea that flying cars would be common in the future. Unfortunately, none of those engineers spoke up (or maybe they did, but they were ignored), and flying cars went unchallenged. I think it’s unfortunate that so many works of science fiction featured flying cars, as they created an unattainable expectation in the minds of millions of people, which has led to predictable disappointment with the way things actually turned out and helped to prop up the false arguments of cynics and declinists. Peter Thiel’s famous quote aptly expresses this misguided disillusionment: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”
I don’t like flying cars because their failure to appear by the deadlines set by works like Blade Runner is often held up as proof that technology is not improving and our lives aren’t getting better with time. As a student of history, I know that is badly wrong. I also don’t like them because they’re examples of bad futurism–They’re a future technology that sounds superficially cool, but that can also be shot full of holes by any reasonably smart person who spends a few minutes thinking about it critically, as I’ll now do in detail.
Using a thought experiment to build a hypothetical “flying car” from existing technology puts the problems in stark relief. Let’s start with a classic, reliable small plane–the two-seater Cessna 150–and mod it to be a flying car. The first problem we run into is that the wheels at the ends of their three landing gear aren’t connected to the engine by a transmission, meaning the pilot can’t make the wheels spin like he could in a car. Instead, pilots do ground taxiing by increasing the power to their engines, and the spinning of the propellers or jet blades pull the aircraft forward, just as they do when the plane is up in the air. Steering on the ground is done through differential braking of the wheels, and at higher ground speeds, through use of the rudder. While this is fine for traveling a few hundred meters from an airport hangar to a runway, it’s grossly unsuited for driving on roads with normal car traffic.
The iconic and frighteningly small Cessna 150.
We have to add a transmission that connects the Cessna’s engine to at least one of the plane’s wheels, and we also have to add some kind of mechanism to the engine that can disconnect it from the propeller when the craft is in “ground mode.” After all, driving down a residential street with a loud, spinning propeller at the front of your vehicle is obviously unsafe to pedestrians and would violate noise ordinances. We also need to add a feature that makes the wings fold up at the push of a button so the plane can be narrow enough to drive on standard roads. Installing the transmission, disconnector, and swivel mechanism adds weight, cost, and mechanical complexity to the Cessna.
Small planes can have folding wings for more compact storage. Our hypothetical flying car would need an automatic fold ability to make itself narrow enough to drive on roads.
So now, we’re ready. You put your modded Cessna 150 into “ground mode” and take it out for a spin. After a few minutes, you realize it’s the worst car you’ve ever driven. Your engine is literally five times louder than the cars around you and you’re constantly getting stares and seeing pedestrians around you covering their ears. Your “flying car” handles worse than a loaded dump truck (poor acceleration, wide turning radius, very mushy steering), struggles to reach highway speeds, and gets awful mileage. Finally, its small wheels and lack of a suspension system ensure every pothole and small rock on the road jolts your spine up into the base of your skull.
Though the vehicle folds up its wings at the push of a button to make itself narrow enough for you to drive on the road, it can’t shorten its 24 foot length, which dwarfs massive road-only vehicles like Chevy Suburbans (ONLY 18.5 feet long) and gives you a huge turning radius. But paradoxically, your Cessna 150 flying car doesn’t have any more interior space than an ultra-compact Smart Car: There are just two front seats and enough cargo space in the back for a full load of groceries. The ride is cramped and uncomfortable, you can’t use the flying car to transport any kind of big cargo, like a piece of lumber from Home Depot that you need for a simple home improvement project, and it can’t be an all-purpose family vehicle if there are more than three people in your household.
And worse yet, when you decide to forget that stressful experience by switching the Cessna to “air mode” and taking to the skies for a fun ride, you notice the plane is much slower, less maneuverable, and can’t travel as far on the same amount of fuel as before. All the mods you added to the plane to make it better at driving on roads have weighed it down, and it suffers in flight. Other small planes designed exclusively for air travel zip by you.
If this sounds like a sucky thought experiment so far, realize it actually gets worse. Your modded Cessna 150 would need more mods to meet car safety laws, like airbags, bumpers, and crumple zones, all of which add more weight, cost, and complexity. Granted, if this thought experiment is set in the distant future and car accidents have become very rare thanks to autonomous drive systems, it’s possible that some safety feature laws will be eased or eliminated. But not all of them, and for sure your Cessna would need more mods.
And as a person with discerning tastes, you’d doubtless want to install bigger wheels and a suspension system under your craft so every drive to the local store didn’t feel like mountain biking over a jagged rock trail. Which means–you got it–even more weight, cost and complexity.
After finally transforming your super-modded Cessna 150 so it drives as well as a low-quality car, to your horror, you discover that it has become so heavy and non-aerodynamic that it can barely take off into the air anymore! Maybe it can’t fly at all! Uh-oh! And now to fix THAT problem, you have to do a totally different set of mods…and you see where this is going.
Put simply, aircraft and land vehicles have totally different sets of role requirements, and making a “flying car” that can do both forces major design compromises, and it will never be as good in either role as specialized craft. This is true regardless of whether the flying car has wings like a small plane, or rotors like a helicopter.
Speaking of that, I forgot to mention that another limitation of your modded Cessna is that it will only be able to take off from long runways. Unless you are part of the ~2% of the population that lives on a large plot of flat land in the countryside, this means you’ll have to drive to an airport every time you want to go flying. The extra time spent driving your Cessna flying car to and from airports will be an inconvenience, and will actually make it faster to use ground driving mode to travel short- and even mid-distances.
But if your flying car were instead based on a two-seat Robinson R22 helicopter, you’d be able to get around that problem and take off from your suburban backyard, or from the roof of your apartment building, right?
Kinda…maybe…sometimes.
The Robinson R22–another classic
This brings us to two very important but overlooked problems with VTOL-based flying cars: noise and downdraft. Helicopters are very loud, and it would violate noise ordinances and cause people hearing damage if helicopters routinely landed and took off in their neighborhoods. Helicopters can be made quieter by giving them things like exotic main rotor blades, and cowlings around their tail rotors, but these design features are very expensive and only reduce noise levels by a few percent. Rumors that the U.S. military has top-secret “silent helicopters” are unsubstantiated, and I doubt it’s even possible to make helicopters that are “quiet enough” to land in your suburban backyard without jolting your neighbors out of bed. If big chunks of spinning metal are slicing through the air at hundreds of miles per hour, it will make a lot of noise no matter what.
But even if very quiet helicopters could be made, the next show-stopping problem is downwash. A helicopter is able to go up because its main rotors blow air down at the ground with enough force to overcome the force that gravity is exerting on the helicopter. During takeoffs and landings, when helicopters are flying low to the ground, the downwash can be strong enough to blow over nearby lawn furniture, break tree branches off, blow off roof shingles, kick up big clouds of dust from the ground, and blow small pieces of debris like pebbles around at high speed. The attendant risk of injuries and property damage will ensure that it stays illegal for people to have personal helipads in their suburban backyards.
We can calculate an R22’s downwash by using this equation:
In spite of the fact that our hypothetical R22 is modded with a transmission going to its wheels, an engine-rotor disconnector mechanism, auto-folding rotors, air bags, and all kinds of other stuff to make it roadworthy, I’ll be really nice and say that thanks to use of futuristic weight-saving materials, its overall mass (including passenger[s]) is just 1,200 lbs. That yields a downwash of 22.5 ft/sec, but unfortunately, it’s actually worse than that:
“Keep in mind that this speed [derived from the equation] is at the rotor disk. As the column of air is forced down below the rotor, it constricts, much like molasses being poured out of a pitcher does. In doing so, it reaches its maximum velocity at 1.5 — 2 rotor diameters below the disc.” https://www.rotorandwing.com/2011/11/29/calculating-rotor-downwash-velocity/
So our “R22 flying car” produces a downwash of 45 ft/sec, which is 30.6 mph. That’s not hurricane-force, but it’s strong enough to kick up clouds of dust, blow common objects over, and hurl pebble-sized debris into a nearby bystander’s eye with enough force to send him to the hospital. If the approach route to your backyard helipad requires you to fly low over someone else’s house or any sort of public space, then the clock will be ticking on someone suing you. So unless you have a very large yard that you’re willing to build a helipad in the middle of, forget it. While we can debate what the pace and direction of technological and scientific development will be in the future, there is no debate that people will continue getting more litigious and fussy with time. Someone will sue you because your flying car is too loud, or because it hurt them by blowing debris at them (even if the claim is a lie).
This helicopter’s downwash is evident by looking at the grass beneath it.
The dust cloud beneath this Harrier jet also reveals the power of its downwash. The Harrier doesn’t have a main rotor like a helicopter, but it still hovers the same way: by blowing vapor at the ground.
Let me insert an important caveat, which I first noted in my Starship Troopers movie review: The noise and downwash of VTOL flying cars are only problematic if we assume they’re to be used in a future world full of humans. If, on the other hand, we assume the future will be populated by machines and not humans, then noise and downdraft won’t be obstacles at all since machines won’t have finicky senses or frail bodies that can get hurt by little pieces of high-velocity debris. It might also be possible to reduce some safety features in aircraft intended for machines that have bodies that are more durable than ours. However, it’s also likely that machines will be very rational and won’t have the same problems we do planning their actions in advance, so from a resource usage standpoint, they would rarely use flying cars as it would be too wasteful a means of transportation. Traditional vehicles like boats, railcars, and big trucks will remain cheaper ways to transport cargo than aircraft.
And if you’re wondering whether we could avoid these problems by inventing some kind of anti-gravity or gravity-cancelling device that flying cars could use to go up and down with blowing air at the ground or needing long runways, realize that such technology is impossible because it violates the laws of science. Our understanding of how the force of gravity works provides no avenue for it to be controlled in such ways (and even if it were possible, it might require impossibly large amounts of energy). If your craft is heavier-than-air, and if you want it to do controlled flight, you either 1) need to give it wings and an engine so it can take advantage of lift, or 2) need to give it a downward-facing fan or rocket nozzle to blow vapor down hard enough to overpower gravity. Those are the only options.
Cars that can silently hover in the air without blasting some kind of vapor at the ground are impossible.
Finally, in “ground mode,” our “R22 flying car” would have the same inefficiencies and problems as the “Cessna 150 flying car,” such as poor performance and handling, excessive length but deficient interior space compared to ground-only vehicles, etc.
The British “Merlin” helicopter can fold its main rotor and its tail to reduce its overall length, but it is still quite long. An R22 with these features would still have a “folded up” length comparable to a full-size SUV, but less interior space than an ultra-compact car.
Another problem is that the standards for “airworthiness” are much more stringent than the standards for “roadworthiness,” so minor damage from something like backing your flying car into a concrete pillar in a parking garage, or having your side window broken by your neighbor’s kid throwing around a baseball in his yard will ground the vehicle until it is inspected and fixed. Flying cars would surely have advanced and extensive internal diagnostic systems to detect such problems, and they will refuse commands to take to the air if there were even a minuscule chance of in-flight mechanical failure. This means the autonomous drive systems would have to be almost totally perfect to ensure even the slightest accidents never happened. And even if that technology existed, you’d have no way to stop vandals or reckless people from disabling your flying car’s ability to fly by inflicting small amounts of damage on it. The availability of “flight mode” would not be reliable, and you’d always be at risk of getting stranded hundreds of miles from home after flying there and then suffering minor damage to the vehicle.
Bad weather will also keep flying cars grounded much of the time–just as is already the case for small aircraft–undercutting them as reliable means of daily transportation. Since piloting a small aircraft is very hard and dangerous, it’s unrealistic to expect a large fraction of the population to learn how to fly flying cars, so the vehicles will need to have advanced autopilot computers. For legal liability reasons, the computers would be programmed to fly very cautiously, and they would refuse to take off if there were even a small chance of hitting bad weather. Unless you are lucky enough to live in a part of the world with very mild, unchanging climate, this means your flying car will only be able to take to the air in fits and starts, preventing you from creating a daily lifestyle organized around the ability to fly from one place to another. This throws a monkey wrench into visions of a future where we all live on big estates in the countryside where land is cheap, and fly into the big city each day for work (also, why not just telework?).
Of course, even if you were assured of a safe landing, you probably wouldn’t want to fly a small aircraft through bad weather, since by virtue of their size, small planes and helicopters suffer worse turbulence than the big passenger planes most people fly on. Being flung around the inside of the cabin by every shifting gust of wind is upsetting for most people, and enduring that while also knowing your life is in the hands of a computer autopilot would be unbearable for a great many (this feeling of not being in control disproportionately frightens humans for complex psychological reasons). Most people can barely muster the courage to climb a ladder to clean their house gutters, let alone fly in a small aircraft. Fear of flying will be a big obstacle to flying cars, and an even bigger obstacle to flying motorcycles and personal jetpacks.
I’m still not done! Flying cars also make no sense for short-distance transportation, like moving around your own town or city. The extra time spent getting to cruising altitude and then landing would make it faster to just stay on the ground and use the roads. The fuel costs of vertical takeoffs and landings also would also be much too high to justify short-distance trips that could be done cheaper and (almost) as quickly with land-only vehicles. These problems both get worse if you assume lots of people in your town or city have flying cars, since that would lead to the equivalent of traffic jams in the sky, and you’d have to fly slower and hover while you waited for a helipad space to open at your destination.
Flying cars also wouldn’t make sense for long-distance transportation over intercontinental or even cross-continental distances, because their fuel tanks wouldn’t be big enough for the journey, and because taking a traditional passenger plane would be much cheaper and faster. Consider that the Boeing 787-900 at full 362-seat capacity gets 87 miles per gallon of fuel, per passenger (https://paullaherty.com/2012/05/25/boeing-737-vs-toyota-prius-this-might-surprise-you/). In comparison, a Cessna 150 gets about 44, and a Robinson R22 gets about 22 miles per gallon of fuel, per passenger. A Boeing 787-900 also flies at 560 mph while the Cessna 150 and R22 fly at 122 and 110 mph, respectively, so the big passenger plane will get you to your destination much faster.
Cessna 150 spec sheet from which I derived the 44 mpg-per-passenger figure.
R22 spec sheet from the Robinson website from which I derived the 22 mpg-per-passenger figure.
This leaves sporadic mid-range travel, which I’ll define as trips between 100 and 400 miles in length, as the one transit niche where it might make sense to use a flying car. But how many people need to frequently travel such distances? If you live in a metro area (including suburbs and exurbs), you’ll be able to satisfy the vast majority of your recreational and social needs without having to travel more than 100 miles from home. And as I established earlier, if you work far from home, it would be a much better idea to telework from your house instead of flying to and from your office building every day (and in any case, at random intervals, bad weather would block you from flying to work, so you couldn’t rely on it).
Flying cars would definitely make it easier to take vacations to the farther-flung parts of your geographic region. As a resident of greater Washington, DC, if I had a flying car, I would go to New York City and the beach more often each summer since both would be quick day trips, negating the need to stay overnight and pay high hotel rates. I would also explore southeastern Canada, and go to my favorite Appalachian hiking spots more, but all of this would only translate into a few extra weekend trips per year. Like most adults, I have responsibilities that often keep me pinned down, and sometimes I’m just too lazy to leave town even when I technically could. If I had a flying car, most of the time I’d be using it in “ground mode” for short-distance trips, and would be griping over its poor performance, uncomfortable ride, and limited utility. I’d probably be better off saving money by just sticking to a ground-only car and accepting a reduced ability to go to New York and the beach.
The counterargument, which is “Just keep your normal car for everyday road travel, and buy a flying car for sporadic regional travel,” makes me realize that there is a different transit model that is better than the “one flying car per person” model shown in many sci-fi movies: What if we don’t build any flying cars at all, and instead build a dense network of airstrips and helipads that people could quickly and cheaply travel through using autonomous, rentable, “air-only” aircraft? What if we paired this with an autonomous carsharing model that would quickly move people to and from those helipads and airstrips? Such an arrangement would provide all the advantages of the “one flying car per person” model without any of the downsides.
For trips in and around your metro area, you would rent self-driving Uber cars that would stay on the ground. Since most (or all) of the other cars on the roads would also be autonomous, they would precisely coordinate traffic flows, meaning there would almost never be accidents or congestion. Cars would traverse the roads much faster than they do today. Additionally, since these vehicles would be designed solely for ground use, they would be optimized for that role and would be safe, fuel efficient, and comfortable inside.
If your job were far from your home, you would telework by using technologies that already exist, or, if that were inadequate for some reason, by using virtual reality technologies that will exist in the near future. The amount of energy required to power your teleworking equipment would be much less than what would be required to fly to your work site each day in a small aircraft or flying car, and if you teleworked, you wouldn’t lose any time at all commuting.
On the rare occasions when you wanted to go somewhere outside your metro area but within 400 miles–let’s say to meet with a very important client at the office building you normally telework to, or to take a weekend trip to the beach or a different city–you would have one of the self-driving Uber cars you normally use take you to the nearest airstrip or helipad. Assume this scenario is happening a few decades from now, and your country has invested money during the interim increasing the number and density of airstrips and helipads, so most of your citizens live within a 20-minute drive of one. They are typically sited just outside of towns or in industrial areas so no one is close enough to hear the sounds of the aircraft landing and taking off. It’s also very common for large buildings to have rooftop helipads.
Your self-driving Uber car takes you to the local helipad or airstrip, where you exit and walk a short distance to a waiting self-driving Uber helicopter or plane. Since the aircraft is a two-seater, and either you’re traveling alone or with only one other person, you don’t have to waste time going through a security check: You can’t take over the aircraft in flight since there are no manual controls and can’t do significant damage by blowing it up. The small aircraft flies you to the airstrip or helipad closest to your destination, and when you disembark, there is a second self-driving Uber car waiting for you nearby. Moreover, since the small aircraft is designed only for flight, it is totally optimized for that role, and is much more fuel efficient than a dual-role “flying car” would be.
Alternatively, we might use high-speed, autonomous Uber cars for 100 – 400 mile trips. The cars would be very streamlined and low to the ground for optimal performance at, say 100 mph. They wouldn’t be much slower than small aircraft for many journeys, and would be safer and possibly cheaper for passengers. If all of the cars on the roads were driven by machines networked to each other, then high-speed cars like this could safely share the roads with slower cars.
Cars designed to spend most of their time driving at high speeds could ferry people over mid-distances.
And finally, if you needed to quickly travel more than 400 miles, you would have a self-driving Uber car take you to the nearest big airport, where you’d disembark and go through the same process that exists today to board a large passenger plane.
In conclusion, I think flying cars are a flawed concept; it’s unfortunate that they’ve appeared so much in science fiction and created an unrealistic vision of the future for many people; and a transit model based around autonomous small aircraft, networks of helipads and small airstrips near population centers, and autonomous road-only vehicles ferrying people to and from the helipads and airstrips would be better than giving everyone a flying car. Moreover, I think the speed and efficiency of ground transportation could be greatly improved by autonomous cars, negating the need for flying cars to move people around cities that have bad road congestion today, and also opening the door to rapid ground transit across mid-distances. While flying cars and small aircraft can be redesigned to reduce their noise signatures (for instance, by using electric engines and installing helicopter tail rotor cowlings), it’s probably impossible to make them quiet enough to land and takeoff in densely populated areas without disturbing people to the point that they take legal action. I also think flying cars would be more feasible in world full of intelligent robots but no humans, but still wouldn’t replace older modes of transit.
‘This combination of un-manned sea travel — plus a complex, remotely-managed rocket launch — is a clear demonstration of what’s to come. China’s successful test heralds a new era of at-a-distance robotics: with applications in defense, search + rescue, exploration, off-shore drilling, ocean fleet management, environmental protection, and a variety of command-and-control systems.’ http://www.kurzweilai.net/digest-ship-without-sailors-worlds-first-weather-rocket-launch-from-robotic-vessel
The sad case of a young woman who died and then had her family ignore her wishes to be cryopreserved should impel us to change the pertinent laws. In absence of any legal changes, I think a person could ensure compliance by writing a will that disinherited any next of kin who obstructed their wishes to be frozen. https://qz.com/1555363/cryogenics-is-facing-legal-trouble-with-body-preservation/
A scientific team at the renowned Salk Institute used a CRISPR gene therapy to significantly slow down aging in mice. It boosted their lifespans by 25%. If there were a pill that could extend your life by just five years, how much would you pay for it? https://www.salk.edu/news-release/putting-the-brakes-on-aging/
Not only is obesity partly genetic, but so is the distribution of fat within a person’s body. This has implications for aesthetics and health, since storing too much fat in the hips and around visceral organs heightens the risks of many serious disorders, including heart attacks and diabetes. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-02-dna-variants-significantly-body-fat.html
If the NHS offered free genomic sequencing to everyone in Britain, there might be a positive ROI since many people would have genetic diseases caught in their early phases, when effective treatment is relatively cheap and easy. http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2019/02/precision-genomic-medicine-and-uk.html
Scientists have made stable DNA strands composed of the four natural nucleotide bases along with four synthetic ones. Such engineered strands would be more “information dense” than normal DNA strands, and could have medical uses. https://www.livescience.com/64829-hachimoji-dna.html
Computer simulations of chemical reactions are getting more accurate thanks to Moore’s Law and better algorithms. In a recent study, millions of “virtual reactions” between random chemical combinations were run, and a respectable number of them were verified as correct through real-world duplications of those experiments. https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/02/11/virtual-screening-as-big-as-it-currently-gets
A new study strengthens a belief I’ve had for a while: The utility that people gain from leisure time is subject to the law of diminishing returns, and actually becomes negative past a certain amount. This casts doubt on the notion that a post-scarcity future world where machines did all the work and humans had endless free time would be utopian. https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/02/free-time-life-satisfaction/583171/
An advanced image-editing program has been invented that converts simple doodles to realistic alterations of human faces. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.06838.pdf
A Tweet worth considering. I call this the “Technological Unemployment Tipping Point,” and I also think that rather than trying to guess which career field you should aim for, it will someday make sense to just ask the machines which jobs align the best with your skills and interests, and will not become obsolete soon. (You might not like the answer.)
The number of buildings in the world will double by 2060 to accommodate a bigger and richer human population. An enormous amount of CO2 will be emitted thanks to all that construction. https://www.gatesnotes.com/2019-Annual-Letter
‘The Lunar Library™ represents the first in a series of lunar archives from the Arch Mission Foundation, designed to preserve the records of our civilization for up to billions of years. It is installed in the SpaceIL “Beresheet” lunar lander, scheduled to land on the Moon in April of 2019…[it] contains a 30 million page archive of human history and civilization, covering all subjects, cultures, nations, languages, genres, and time periods. ‘ https://www.archmission.org/spaceil
After recovering from a serious head injury, this guy found he had acquired a talent for playing the piano. Very advanced brain surgeries and stimulative brain implants could someday enhance peoples’ intelligence, mental skills, and alter their personalities. https://denver.cbslocal.com/2019/02/10/derek-amato-acquired-savant-syndrome-piano/
This chart of how prices of various goods and services have changed over the last 20 years in the U.S. shows the impact of Moore’s Law, trade, private sector competition (or lack thereof), and government regulation. https://www.aei.org/publication/chart-of-the-day-or-century/
The U.S. cancer death rate has been declining for 25 consecutive years. It mostly owes to people quitting smoking, and would be even lower if it weren’t for a rise in obesity-induced cancers. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-46822429
A new deep learning AI called “DeepGestalt” can scan images of human faces for the telltale signs of over 200 genetic disorders like Down Syndrome. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-018-0279-0
There’s evidence that primitive human societies become less violent by killing off violent males and/or refusing to let them breed. Impulsive behavior–which can lead to violence–has a heritable, genetic component, and measurable changes to a human genepool can happen after just three generations of consistent natural selection. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/how-humans-tamed-themselves/580447/
Scientists genetically engineered mice so they only gave birth to females. If successfully applied to farm animals, the technique could lower the cost of meat and avert the extermination of billions of male animals per year. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/515064v2
Bird lungs are more efficient at respiration than mammal lungs. With radically advanced genetic engineering, could we make humans that looked no different on the outside, but had bird lungs on the inside? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2662944/
Yemeni rebels flew small UAV into a group of government soldiers and detonated it, killing six. It’s useful to think of these sorts of weapons as small guided missiles, which illuminates the fact that their use is just part of the decades-long trend for the technology to get smaller and cheaper. Small groups of people can now afford them. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-46822429
The nearly-forgotten Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 was the first instance when two, modern armies equipped with machine guns clashed, and old infantry tactics were shown to be terribly vulnerable to the weapons. Unfortunately, few generals heeded the war’s lessons, and the same mistakes were made ten years later in WWI. http://weaponsman.com/?p=23151
After the U.S. started building a Space Shuttle, Soviet scientists and economists correctly determined that NASA’s claims the Shuttle would launch cargo into orbit cheaper than rockets were false, and in fact, it would cost more. This led the Soviets to conclude that the Shuttle in fact had a clandestine military purpose, and they found it could serve as a very high-speed nuclear bomber and that it could snatch Soviet spy satellites in orbit. The Soviets didn’t consider that Shuttle in fact had no military function, but that the U.S. government would waste billions of dollars chasing an unattainable goal (but we did). https://youzicha.tumblr.com/post/181657051514/my-favorite-part-about-the-economically-dubious
China landed a rover on the dark side of the Moon and did an experiment where it sprouted seeds in a sealed container full of soil, demonstrating that crop plants can be grown on the Moon. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-46873526
A brain-computer interface (e.g. – a skullcap embedded with electrodes that monitor the wearer’s brain activity) was used to decipher spoken words a person was hearing based on their brain waves. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/350124v2
