Linketies: Science Friday
It's hard to predict the future. While that should go without saying, many people naturally believe that they have an intuitive grasp of the future. Partly this is because we perceive our journey from the present to the future as a straightforward linear progression that we can easily wrap our heads around.
But many changes are exponential. You don't notice them because in the early stages of an exponential curve, it's hard to notice that anything is happening. Then the change seems to explode on the scene, leaving people ill-prepared for it. Other changes are so disruptive that they send history off on a tangent that we could not have imagined. Still others happen in fits and starts, so you're left with huge setbacks followed by sudden uneven leaps forward.
Alvin Toffler hypothesized forty years ago that there are limits to human adaptability. He coined the term "future shock" to describe the extreme anxiety and disorientation that many people experience as the world goes through dramatic change, similar to the "culture shock" experienced by some foreign travelers.
Besides the obvious impacts on society, all of this has the effect of making it very difficult to write science fiction. I've always thought that sci-fi can be a useful tool in helping us to understand and cope with the future and I've always bristled at the notion that science fiction somehow isn't "real literature". But the people who write science-fiction have a tough job trying to guess what the future might hold.
No one in the present day would buy a communicator like the ones on the original Star Trek series. Sure, they look cool when they flip open and they make a neat sound. They must have looked incredibly futuristic to a generation accustomed to land-line rotary phones that would strangle you with their cords if you moved around too much as you talked. But you couldn't check your email or surf the web or keep track of your contacts or play "Angry Birds" with them. To our generation, they seem like quaint little artifacts. And Star Trek was made forty years ago and was set 300 years in the future.
So before getting to this weeks articles, I'd like to share some of my favorite books about trying to predict the future. Some of the predictions may turn out to be uncanny and others will surely be far off the mark. But all of it gives us a great deal to think about.
Future Shock, The Third Wave, and Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century by Alvin Toffler
The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil
Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next 50 Years by Bruce Sterling
And now on to this week's articles:
But many changes are exponential. You don't notice them because in the early stages of an exponential curve, it's hard to notice that anything is happening. Then the change seems to explode on the scene, leaving people ill-prepared for it. Other changes are so disruptive that they send history off on a tangent that we could not have imagined. Still others happen in fits and starts, so you're left with huge setbacks followed by sudden uneven leaps forward.
Alvin Toffler hypothesized forty years ago that there are limits to human adaptability. He coined the term "future shock" to describe the extreme anxiety and disorientation that many people experience as the world goes through dramatic change, similar to the "culture shock" experienced by some foreign travelers.
Besides the obvious impacts on society, all of this has the effect of making it very difficult to write science fiction. I've always thought that sci-fi can be a useful tool in helping us to understand and cope with the future and I've always bristled at the notion that science fiction somehow isn't "real literature". But the people who write science-fiction have a tough job trying to guess what the future might hold.
No one in the present day would buy a communicator like the ones on the original Star Trek series. Sure, they look cool when they flip open and they make a neat sound. They must have looked incredibly futuristic to a generation accustomed to land-line rotary phones that would strangle you with their cords if you moved around too much as you talked. But you couldn't check your email or surf the web or keep track of your contacts or play "Angry Birds" with them. To our generation, they seem like quaint little artifacts. And Star Trek was made forty years ago and was set 300 years in the future.
So before getting to this weeks articles, I'd like to share some of my favorite books about trying to predict the future. Some of the predictions may turn out to be uncanny and others will surely be far off the mark. But all of it gives us a great deal to think about.
Future Shock, The Third Wave, and Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century by Alvin Toffler
The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil
Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next 50 Years by Bruce Sterling
And now on to this week's articles:
We begin this week with a word of caution. In science, there is a good reason that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. For instance, take this article, which seems to strongly imply that the ice age led not only to the development of cooking, but also to the development of agriculture. The evidence presented isn't much more than soot marks on a few old pieces of broken pottery.
The writer needs to either do a better job of presenting the evidence in proper context or of explicitly stating which claims are strongly supported by evidence and which are merely wild speculation. Also, the writer seems to base conclusions on the mere coincidence of pottery fragments dating from a time when the Earth was experiencing an ice age. Believing that correlation is the same as causation is, of course, a common logical fallacy.
If the Harvard professor in the article mentioned any such words of caution to the article's author, those quotes are not mentioned. And because of such obvious flaws, the article becomes unusable because we are left with serious doubts about its trustworthiness.
So why do I mention a useless article in Science Friday? Because it is just as important to point out examples of bad science as it is to highlight good science.
Researchers at Rice University are working on a spray-on paint that acts as a battery.
A private consortium has proposed launching a space telescope to watch for asteroids that may be a danger to Earth.
At Brookhaven National Laboratory, physicists have produced a plasma from colliding gold ions that reaches temperatures of 7.2 trillion degrees--250,000 times as hot as the core of the sun and the highest man-made temperatures ever produced, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.
A team at Boston Children's Hospital has developed particles of oxygen and lipid layers that can be injected directly into a patient's veins to restore oxygen in the bloodstream. If the particles make it through further rounds of testing, they could save a lot of lives.
From the remains of the 1969 Allende meteorite in Mexico, scientists have discovered a new titanium dioxide mineral that is believed to be one of the oldest minerals in the solar system.
Livescience.com asks whether finding evidence of extraterrestrial life would shatter religious beliefs. My personal guess? Religious teachings were wrong about something as basic as Earth not being at the center of the universe. Religion has been wrong about many basic scientific facts over the centuries, so it would probably survive the discovery of aliens just fine. After all, a reliance on things that no one can see combined with a knack for revisionist history can go a long way.
One of the biggest challenges to human space exploration -- or even space tourism for that matter -- has long been figuring out how to feed ourselves out there. It seems that mankind cannot live on Tang and astronaut ice cream alone. Slate.com explores how various science fiction authors have addressed the problem.
In Star Trek IV, during one of their famous feuds, Spock asks Dr. McCoy why we always assume that humans are the only intelligent life forms on earth. When we do acknowledge animal intelligence, we tend to associate it with how closely a particular animal is related to humans. But it turns out that dolphins, vastly different from humans, can understand zero (considered a major advance in human mathematics) and you don't necessarily have to be a primate to be smart.