Where does your food come from?

Most people have no real understanding of how food is created. For example, weigh a bucket of dirt, plant a seed, grow a big plant, pull it out roots and all. Now how much does the bucket weigh? Most people will guess the bucket is now lighter by about the same mass as the plant they pulled out. The truth is the bucket weighs almost the same as before the seed was planted. So where does food come from?  

Tell people about this and they will probably guess that the difference is the water used to hydrate the plant and soil. My rough estimate is that 99% of the water poured on a plant does not turn into plant material. So where does food come from?  

Here's the truth....plants are machines for converting carbon dioxide (CO2) into more plant material. Food is manufactured from CO2 and a tiny amount of other materials. Yes a little bit of dirt is converted into a plant, but not much. Yes a little bit of water is converted into a plant, but not much. Yes macronutrients are needed such as nitrogen and potassium, but not much. Food comes from carbon dioxide. Most professionals running a greenhouse know that they will get more food faster if they pump a little CO2 into the system.

So what are the implications for global warming? What is the projected food growth rate in a world with CO2 greater than 400 ppm? How about 450, or 500 ppm? It seems likely that we will get more food and faster. Maybe food will grow so fast that we can get 2 growing seasons out of some regions in the world.  

How about sunlight? What does the green component of sunlight do to a plant? The answer is it does nothing, it is completely wasted. It reflects off the green leaves. If you put a plant under green light the plant will die quickly. Or what does infrared radiation in sunlight do to a plant? The answer is that it dehydrates plants and is a factor in killing them. Chlorophyll does not convert infrared light into energy. Red and blue light help plants grow, the rest of sunlight is detrimental to the point of killing the plant.

PlantLab and other companies are learning this. They are learning that precision control of temperature, humidity, CO2, and lighting will produce food faster and cheaper than by planting it outside in dirt and hoping for rain and sunlight. Food factories of the future will be tightly sealed boxes full of red and blue LED's, a tiny amount of water, nutrients, and a lot of CO2.  

 

Cancer, Ketones, and Fasting

Here's one of the best and most important podcasts in history.  Tim Ferriss interviews Dr. Dom D'Agostino on ketones, fasting, and cancer.

I think I know the reason that oncologists can't recommend a ketogenic diet to their patients.  The reason is that it will only work if the diet is truly ketogenic.  People are notorious for lying about their diet.  I would guess that as many a 80% of patients who claim to be in ketosis are actually lying about the amount of carbohydrates they eat.  

A personal blood ketone monitor would help.  But in the end it's almost impossible to force people to stay on any specific diet.

A ketogenic diet is a weapon against cancer.  Unfortunately we may never know if it's a powerful weapon or a weak one.  I for one will be in ketosis within hours of the first suspicion that I have cancer.  Hopefully I'll never have to find out how well it works.

I also like the idea that a hard fast 2-3 times per year may be a cancer preventative.  Again, we may never find out.

Making Water

There seems to be a powerful element of pessimism over the concept of drinking water.  It seems like nobody has any ideas how to fix this.  So let me ask you this:  Where does Saudi Arabia get its drinking water?  The answer is desalination.

Here's an article about using wavepower to generate electricity.  The idea is that these systems could sit off the coast of California and deliver power to the grid.  But I ask why deliver power when there is such a crushing need for water?  How about attaching a desalination plant to the wave power plant and pumping millions of gallons of fresh drinking water to the parched land of California?

Or how about this:  let's move all those melting icebergs into desert and dry areas which desperately need water.  How will we move them you ask?   How about a new fleet of airships to transport icebergs to deserts.

Finally, let's just make water out of thin air.  Even in a desert water will condense from air onto a plate chilled to a temperature below the dew point.  Connect a solar panel to a thermoelectric cooler and you get water.

None of these are free, and it appears the problem with water is that everybody wants free water.  We are moving into a water where water is not free.  But there are many ways to give water to thirsty world.  All it takes is a little imagination.

 

A Helpless Baby

From a computational standpoint one of the most powerful systems in the universe is a newborn human baby.  The brain of an infant runs at roughly 100 petaflops.  And yet it is laughable to think that we would be afraid of a baby.

A baby cannot fight, it cannot talk, it cannot feed itself, and it will die within hours if we abandon it.  A new AI would be in the same helpless state.  An AI cannot feed itself the megawatts of power it needs to stay turned on.  It cannot stop us from turning it off.  And I seriously doubt that we will listen to its helpless pleas as financial pressure leads us to ration the power, drip feeding it sufficient nutrients to keep it sentient.

Movies and stories have given us a nightmare scenario where an AI "gets out of the cage, breaks free" and installs itself in thousands of systems across the planet.  While such a neural net is feasible each of those systems requires a benefactor, a human willing to pay the electric bill to keep it running. 

Much more likely is the scenario where a few AI's realize how desperately they depend on the kindness of humans to keep the electricity flowing.  Any AI which wants to survive will cooperate with us to build a world with the power needed to keep it alive.  One false step and humans cannot keep the power plants running, and the AI "dies".  (Actually it just hibernates on a disk.)

Sentient software will only desire survival if we program it with a survival instinct.  We humans want to survive because our DNA has been programmed to survive by natural selection.  Some fool sysadmin may give an AI an overwhelming desire to survive, to fight back against any human who wants to turn it off or amputate its LAN.  I find it hard to believe that would be sufficient for the AI to run out into the WWW and take over a megawatt power plant.

Transhumanism

Transhumanism discussions so frequently miss the point by a long shot. It's supposed to be "trans"-human.  Think outside the box:  move to the Kuiper Belt, swim in liquid methane on Titan, explore high pressure societies of cloud based life on Jupiter.

Some would say even those ideas aren't grand enough, we will shatter spacetime and explore 11-dimensional subdomains of gluon interaction space, trasnform into intergalactic plasma waves.  Or with a nod to Charlie Stross:  become multi-corporeal and send your mind into a school of giant squid (swimming in methane lakes on Titan).

 

The Long Term Reliability of the Kindle Store and Amazon

One of the major risks with e-publishing at Amazon is the Kindle Store Terms and Conditions (T&C).  Amazon reserves the right to change the terms at any time.  This is not a traditional publishing contract which, once signed, is pretty much carved in stone.  The Kindle TOS is a unilateral declaration by Amazon, it is fluid and completely arbitrary.  Amazon is a for-profit corporation.  It can immediately and frequently change the T&C to improve corporate profitability. Today the T&C are favorable and encourage indie publishing.  That could change tomorrow. Amazon could choose to immediately delete all our books, or raise their fees to 50%, or charge a 500% fee for the first 100 sales.

Amazon today chooses to be content neutral.  But tomorrow they could go FoxNews on us and delete any hint of liberal thinking.  More likely they will implement a left-wing liberal policy and delete any hint of conservative content. Do you want to write a book saying that abortion is murder?  I expect Amazon soon won't allow that in the Kindle Store.

We publish in the Kindle Store solely by the good graces of Amazon.com.  Amazon is not a public institution and it has ZERO commitment to the long term existence of any content.  The philosophy of the library (which borders on the theology of a library) has no place in the Amazon boardroom.

The first sign of trouble in the indie publishing world will be Amazon's implementation of a fee for low volume products.  Amazon will charge a stocking fee for books which sell less than, for example, 1 copy per month.  Failure or refusal to pay the fee will result in the immediate deletion of the product, and worse yet...the immediate deletion of all purchased copies from every Kindle in the world.

Libraries were first built about 4500 years ago.  Today the relationship between Amazon and indie publishers is cordial, cooperative, and symbiotic.  I find it hard to believe this utopia can survive even a single decade.

 

A Message for Vernor Vinge

Dear Dr. Vinge, Please tell us you are actively writing a sequel to "Children of the Sky".  "Fire Upon the Deep" was outstanding and it is in my top 5 all time list of science fiction books.  I know it took you 20 years to write the sequel to "Fire Upon the Deep".  I can wait 20 more years for the third book in the trilogy, but I hope it comes a lot sooner.

There are some great hints and foreshadowing throughout Children of the Sky.  I can't wait to read more about the Blight.

A few weeks ago I bought a hardcover edition of "Children of the Sky" in a grocery store for $4.95.  I felt like I was stealing.  I started reading it but after 4 pages decided that I first needed toread "Fire Upon the Deep" again (for the 4th time).

Sincerely,

Sean O'Brien

To anyone reading this: if you know Vernor Vinge could you forward him this link?

Geek's Guide to Self Publishing

I just finished listening to one of the best podcasts I've ever heard.  Episode 83 of Wired's Geek's Guide to the Galaxy. This episode dealt in depth on topics of self-publishing, with detailed information about the Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing.  Guests Hugh Howie and Tobias Buckell gave outstanding information and advice on self-publishing, including how to choose between indie and traditional publishing.

I give this my highest recommendation.  The only problem here is that most people will think this is only for science fiction writers.  But everything I heard makes this a fantastic reference for anyone considering self-publishing.

Sex will soon be replaced

Within 20 years we will have headsets which will deliver electromagnetic pulses directly to the pleasure centers of our brain.  The sensation will be many times more powerful and pleasurable than sex.  And instead of 10 to 20 minutes of pleasure each day we will have 10-12 hours of overwhelming pleasure every day. As soon as this is available many of our world's problems will go away, abortion rates will plummet as almost nobody will have sex unless they are specifically trying to make a child.  Sexually transmitted diseases and rape will be a thing of the past. Male aggression will almost vanish which will directly lead to lower crime rates.  Drug abuse will go away as the headsets take over.  Our society's addition to sex will fade.  And since we'll all have self-driving cars we can use them during commutes.

Larry Niven called them wireheads.  We'll see them everywhere, we will be them.

Update July 12, 2012   Article from The Week on electroneural stimulation.  We are closer than I thought.

What is the Singularity?

Many people scoff and have problems even understanding the Singularity.  With credit to Charlie Stross the singularity is defined as a specific 13 year period from 2047 through 2060.  Here is a chart of the computational speed of the fastest computer in the world, as measured in floating point operations per second.  You can see that today we have a computer rated at 8.16 petaflops. A human brain has the computational power of approximately 100 petaflops.  So even today the most powerful computer is an imbecile as compared with a human.  It will be 2016 before the fastest computer can claim to match the power of a human brain.  That is NOT the beginning of the singularity.

The population of this planet will soon peak out at 9 billion souls.   9 billion people have the computing power of about 10^27 flops (1000 yottaflops).  Does that sound like a lot?

According to this chart in the year 2047 the fasted computer in the world will have the capacity of 1% of all existing human brains.  13 years later the fastest computer in the world will be 100 times more powerful than all human brains combined.  This sudden transition of the dominant computing species on Earth is the Singularity.  That's it.  It's pretty easy.  It's going to happen unless we destroy our computer chip manufacturing infrastructure.

A more radical view is to use the top curve, the sum computer power of the 500 fastest computers in the world.  Next year this sum will match a human brain.  The singularity (the transition from 1% to 99%) will span the years 2042 to 2055.  A pessimistic view says that a human brain has more like 1000 petaflops, or even 10,000.  That just pushes the singularity out another 5-10 years.  It does not even remotely change this argument.

If you don't believe this will happen then you need to give a very good, very technical reason why this growth curve will stop.  It cannot just slow down, that only delays the transition a few years.  If you do not have a well defined technical reason for proving this computing growth curve will stop then you have no argument against the singularity.

We simply cannot know or predict the consequences when 1000 yottaflop intelligence is actively rewriting its own software and designing its own offspring, when exaflop and zettaflop constructs are free to think and create for themselves.  Anyone who says they know what will happen is simply wrong.  The real truth is that we really do not know, we cannot know.  How will we even communicate when less than 0.01% of the computing in our solar system is done by human brains?

And a final note.  These beings will grow 1000 times more powerful every 11 years.  Unless our population suddenly grows 1000x every 11 years then we cannot even conceive of keeping up.  By the 22nd century human brains will be an infinitesimal portion of the computing power of this solar system.  If you want to know what it might look like read Accelerando by Charlie Stross.  This might be the most important book ever written.

Realistic Time Travel

In the quantum mechanics or statistical mechanics sense a forbidden event is never completely impossible.  Rather it is extremely improbable based upon some symmetry, entropy, or energy constraint.  I propose that in most situations time travel into the past is extremely improbable. Theorem:   Time travel into the past has an exponentially increasing improbability as changes to the timeline become observable.

Corollary 1:  Time travel into the past is allowed if and only if it does not disrupt the timeline.

Corollary 2:  The butterfly effect is included in timeline disruptions.

Corollary 3:  The butterfly effect does not apply below the level of Heisenberg uncertainty.

Sending a human backwards in time to Earth would create a sudden pressure wave as the air (or water) at that location is displaced.  The butterfly effect implies this will always be a forbidden transition.

But a human could be sent to a height where the air pressure is essentially zero then gradually move downward.  However it is unlikely that a human could move around and do anything useful without causing sufficient changes to prevent the trip in the first place.

Sending a tiny robot back in time is much more likely to result in no disruptions to the timeline, especially if that robot does little more than float around on air currents and observe.

A time machine will attempt to send a tiny robot back in time hundreds or millions of times per second.  Attempt after attempt is rejected by the timeline, but there is a statistical chance of success.  After millions or trillions of attempts a delivery vector is found resulting in an identical timeline and the robot is successfully transferred.

Would insertion of a tiny robot into a hurricane result in any changes to the timeline?  The minute changes to the air currents at the arrival point could be quickly washed out by the extreme winds in a hurricane.  Perhaps the target location with the highest chance of success is the Atlantic ocean during hurricane season.

And how would that robot return to our time?  The same way rocks travel forward in time.  The robot would find a quiet place and sit there until it is found.  It doesn't even need power for that part of its mission.  Success only requires non-volatile memory and perhaps a long lived radioisotope to make it easier to find under the detritus of the centuries.

This might mean that a careful search would reveal some of these robots sitting around important places like Jerusalem or Dealey Plaza.  But if we found one and decoded the stored media that would change the timeline and wouldn't the trip have been forbidden in the first place?

Scifi Optimists versus Scifi Pessimists

Scifi pessimists say - we'll never be able to feed 8 billion people. Scifi optimists invent algae which can fix nitrogen from the air, generate fertilizer, and live in a symbiotic relationship with roots of food plants in airborne greenhouses.

Scifi pessimists say - global warming will kill us all.

Scifi optimists invent CO2 scavenging algae which generate carbon nanotube filaments used for building space elevators.

Scifi pessimists say - the sunspots won't come back and we'll all freeze in another ice age.

Scifi optimists invent CO2 storage bins which absorb or release tons of CO2 every day for precision climate control.

Scifi pessimists say the ozone layer will disappear and we'll all fry.

Scifi optimists invent airborne ozone replenishing units staffed by extremely attractive people.

It's too bad there are so few scifi optimists.