Rewriting the Past

September 15, 2010 3 Comments

“I don’t believe in yesterday, by the way.”
-John Lennon

The past is set in stone, right?  Everything we have learned tells us that you can not change the past, 88-MPH DeLoreans notwithstanding.

However, it would probably surprise you to learn that many highly respected scientists, as well as a few out on the fringe, are questioning that assumption, based on real evidence.

For example, leading stem cell scientist, Dr. Robert Lanza, posits that the past does not really exist until properly observed.  His theory of Biocentrism says that the past is just as malleable as the future.

Specific experiments in Quantum Mechanics appear to prove this conjecture.  In the “Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser” experiment, “scientists in France shot photons into an apparatus, and showed that what they did could retroactively change something that had already happened.” (Science 315, 966, 2007)

Paul Davies, renowned physicist from the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University in Sydney, suggests that conscious observers (us) can effectively reach back in history to “exert influence” on early events in the universe, including even the first moments of time.  As a result, the universe would be able to “fine-tune” itself to be suitable for life.

Prefer the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of Quantum Mechanics over the Copenhagen one?  If that theory is correct, physicist Saibal Mitra from the University of Amsterdam has shown how we can change the past by forgetting.  Effectively if the collective observers memory is reset prior to some event, the state of the universe becomes “undetermined” and can follow a different path from before.  Check out my previous post on that one.

Alternatively, you can disregard the complexities of quantum mechanics entirely.  The results of some macro-level experiments twist our perceptions of reality even more.  Studies by Helmut Schmidt, Elmar Gruber, Brenda Dunne, Robert Jahn, and others have shown, for example, that humans are actually able to influence past events (aka retropsychokinesis, or RPK), such as pre-recorded (and previously unobserved) random number sequences

Benjamin Libet, pioneering scientist in the field of human consciousness at  the University of California, San Francisco is well known for his controversial experiments that seem to show reverse causality, or that the brain demonstrates awareness of actions that will occur in the near future.  To put it another way, actions that occur now create electrical brain activity in the past.

And then, of course, there is time travel.  Time travel into the future is a fact, just ask any astronaut, all of whom have traveled nanoseconds into the future as a side effect of high speed travel.  Stephen Hawking predicts much more significant time travel into the future.  In the future.  But what about the past?  Turns out there is nothing in the laws of physics that prevents it.  Theoretical physicist Kip Thorne designed a workable time machine that could send you into the past.  And traveling to the past of course provides an easy mechanism for changing it.  Unfortunately this requires exotic matter and a solution to the Grandfather paradox (MWI to the rescue again here).

None of this is a huge surprise to me, since I question everything about our conventional views of reality.  Consider the following scenario in a massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) or simulation.  The first time someone plays the game, or participates in the simulation, there is an assumed “past” to the construct of the game.  Components of that past may be found in artifacts (books, buried evidence, etc.) scattered throughout the game.  Let’s say that evidence reports that the Kalimdors and Northrendians were at war during year 1999.  But the evidence has yet to be found by a player.  A game patch could easily change the date to 2000, thereby changing the past and no one would be the wiser.  But, what if someone had found the artifact, thereby setting the past in stone.  That patch could still be applied, but it would only be effective if all players who had knowledge of the artifact were forced to forget.  Science fiction, right?  No longer, thanks to an emerging field of cognitive research.  Two years ago, scientists were able to erase selected memories in mice.  Insertion of false memories is not far behind.  This will eventually perfected, and applied to humans.

At some point in our future (this century), we will be able to snort up a few nanobots, which will archive our memories, download a new batch of memories to the starting state of a simulation, and run the simulation.  When it ends, the nanobots will restore our old memories.

Or maybe this happened at some point in our past and we are really living the simulation.  There is really no way to tell.

No wonder the past seems so flexible.

back_to_the_future_poster_224

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Jim and Craig Venter Argue over Who is more Synthetic: Synthia or Us?

May 28, 2010 2 Comments

So Craig Venter created synthetic life.  How cool is that?  I mean, really, this has been sort of a biologists holy grail for as long as I can remember.  Of course, Dr. Venter’s detractors are quick to point out that Synthia, the name given to this synthetic organism, was not really built from scratch, but sort of assembled from sub-living components and injected into a cell where it could replicate.  Either way, it is a huge step in the direction of man-made life forms.  If I were to meet Dr. Venter, the conversation might go something like this:

Jim: So, Dr. Venter, help me understand how man-made your little creation really is.  I’ve read some articles that state that while your achievement is most impressive, the cytoplasm that the genome was transplanted to was not man made.

Craig: True dat, Jim.  But we all need an environment to live in, and a cell is no different.  The organism was certainly man made, even if its environment already existed.

Jim: But wait a minute.  Aren’t we all man-made?  Wasn’t that the message in those sex education classes I took in high school?

Craig: No, the difference is that this is effectively a new species, created synthetically.

Jim: So, how different is that from a clone?  Are they also created synthetically?

Craig: Sort of, but a clone isn’t a new species.

Jim: How about genetically modified organisms then?  New species created synthetically?

Craig: Yes, but they were a modification made to an existing living organism, not a synthetically created one.

Jim: What about that robot that cleans my floor?  Isn’t that a synthetically created organism?

Craig: Well, maybe, in some sense, but can it replicate itself?

Jim: Ah, but that is just a matter of programming.  Factory robots can build cars, why couldn’t they be programmed to build other factory robots?

Craig: That wouldn’t be biological replication, like cell division.

Jim: You mean, just because the robots are made of silicon instead of carbon?  Seems kind of arbitrary to me.

Craig: OK, you’re kind of getting on my nerves, robot-boy.  The point is that this is the first synthetically created biological organism.

Jim: Um, that’s really cool and all, but we can build all kinds of junk with nanotech, including synthetic meat, and little self-replicating machines.

Craig: Neither of which are alive.

Jim: Define alive.

Craig: Well, generally life is anything that exhibits growth, metabolism, motion, reproduction, and homeostasis.

Jim: So, a drone bee isn’t alive because it can’t reproduce?

Craig: Of course, there are exceptions.

Jim: What about fire, crystals, or the earth itself.  All of those exhibit your life-defining properties.  Are they alive?

Craig: Dude, we’re getting way off topic here.  Let’s get back to synthetic organisms.

Jim: OK, let’s take a different tack.  Physicist Paul Davies said that Google is smarter than any human on the planet.  Is Google alive?  What about computer networks that can reconfigure themselves intelligently.

Craig: Those items aren’t really alive because they have to be programmed.

Jim: Yeah, and what’s that little code in Synthia’s DNA?

Craig: Uhhh…

Jim: And how do you know that you aren’t synthetic?  Is it at all possible that your world and all of your perceptions could be completely under programmed control?

Craig: I suppose it could be possible.  But I highly doubt it.

Jim: Doubt based on what? All of your preconceived notions about reality?

Craig: OK, let’s say we are under programmed control.  So what?

Jim: Well, that implies a creator.  Which in turn implies that our bodies are a creation.  Which makes us just as synthetic as Synthia.  The only difference is that you created Synthia, while we might have been created by some highly advanced geek in an other reality.

Craig: Been watching a few Wachowski Brothers movies, Jim?

Jim: Guilty as charged, Craig.

CraigVenterGod

Filed under AI, Future Tech, Life, Nanotech, Programmed Reality, Robotics, Science Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

How to Walk Through a Door

September 27, 2009 2 Comments

I had a brainstorm the other day on how we might someday be able to walk through a door.  And I don’t mean from a metaphysical standpoint, I mean really physically walk through the door.  If you think about it, there really should be a way to make it happen.  After all, our bodies and the door are almost 100% empty space.  I would argue that Programmed Reality says it is completely empty space, but that topic will have to be for another post.

An electron, in Newtonian mechanics, can be stuck on one side of an impenetrable barrier.  In QM, however, its wave function can be partly on one side of a barrier and partly on the other side at the same time, which allows for the possibility of “tunneling,” a common effect in semiconductors.  In fact, were it not for the wave function nature of QM, transistors, and therefore cell phones, computers, satellites, and all other sorts of modern technologies would not even exist!

tunneling

Interestingly, this theory does not only apply to subatomic particles, but also to macroscopic objects like me, you, and Donald Trump’s hair.  Since our bodies are composed of particles, each of which are just wave functions, your body is simply the superposition of these zillions of wave functions, thereby creating its own “macroscopic” wave function.  Theoretically, for this reason, you have a finite probability of passing through a wooden door, much like the electron tunneling effect.  But, don’t try it.  Because, when you sum up all of your constituent particles’ wave functions, there is a mathematical tendency for the probabilities of large-scale anomalous quantum effects to be extremely small.  It is analogous to flipping pennies.  The odds that a single penny comes up heads (electron passes through the barrier) is 50-50, but the odds that 1000 pennies all come up heads (you pass through the door) is 2^^1000 (equivalent to a 1 followed by 301 zeros, an impossible to imagine large number) to 1.  And you have a helluva lot more than 1000 subatomic particles in your body.

But what if those particles in our bodies and/or the door were made to be coherent?  That is, in our penny analogy, all pennies behave the same behavior.  Impossible?  Not so fast, Einstein.  LASERs are a great example of coherence, where all photons are of the same frequency and are in phase.  Aren’t particles of matter just a different form of particle from the photons and could they be organized to be coherent as well?

Turns out that is exactly the case and it is known as Macroscopic Quantum Tunneling.  U of Illinois researchers have demonstrated such an effect with electrons (real matter) in a nanowire.  Superconductors, superfluidity, Bose–Einstein condensates are examples of properties that seem to defy conventional physics by having their constituents occupy coherent states.  Macroscopic Quantum Coherence is a predicted property, yet to be observed in the laboratory, but probably inevitable, whereby all atoms in the piece of matter observing that property are in-phase and are described by a single quantum wavefunction.  Well, that wavefunction allows for the possibility of matter being anywhere, or “tunneling” through a thin enough membrane of material.  Let’s say that, not unlike a laser, we could get all of the atoms in our bodies to be coherent.  Might it not be possible to “tunnel” through a thin membrane of coherent material?

Effectively, we would have walked through a door!

Yes, I know that all of the different atoms in our bodies might not be made to be coherent with each other.  Then again, think about radio waves of different frequencies.  In general, they can’t be in phase with each other, except at one particular point.  Fourier analysis of a waveform with a discontinuity, like a step function or a delta function, has, at the point of the discontinuity, all frequencies in phase.  Could there ultimately be a way to accomplish that with the mere several dozen atomic frequencies present in our bodies (And who cares if that stray bit of Uranium in your spleen is left behind on the other side of the door.  Would you really miss it?)  So maybe the trick is to pulse the coherence into your body just as you walk through the door.

Then there is the problem of how to get each planar sliver of your body to have the same tunneling capability sequentially.  Like, so you don’t end up with a door stuck in your chest, all Jeff Goldblum-like.  Seems to me that maybe it’s just a matter of applying continuous pulses of coherence into your body as you walk through the door.  For each planar sliver, one of the pulses will eventually make you progress to the next sliver.  Just hope the machine doesn’t break down midway through.

So, there you have it.  One, ultra high frequency multi-atomic coherence pulser.  And you’re walking through walls.

walkingthroughawall

Filed under Future Tech, Nanotech, Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Science Tagged with , ,

Just when you thought Physics couldn’t get any Stranger

September 7, 2009 1 Comment

Tachyons, entanglement, cold fusion, dark matter, galactic filaments.  Just when you thought physics couldn’t get any stranger…

– THE VERY COLD: Fractional Quantum Hall Effect: When electrons are magnetically confined and cooled to a third of a degree above absolute zero (See more here), they seem to break down into sub-particles that act in synchronization, but with fractional charges, like 1/3, or 3/7.

– THE VERY HIGH PRESSURE: Strange Matter: The standard model of physics includes 6 types of quarks, including the 2 (“up” and “down”) that make up ordinary matter.  Matter that consists of “strange” quarks, aka Strange Matter, would be 10 times as heavy as ordinary matter.  Does it exist?  Theoretically, at very high densities, such as the core of neutron stars, such matter may exist.  A 1998 space shuttle experiment seems to have detected some, but repeat experiments have not yielded the same results.

– THE VERY LARGE DIMENSIONAL: Multidimensional Space: String theories say that we live in a 10-dimensional space, mostly because it is the only way to make quantum mechanics and general relativity play nicely together.  That is, until physicist Garrett Lisi came along and showed how it could be done with eight dimensional space and objects called octonions.  String theorists were miffed, mostly because Lisi is not university affiliated and spends most of his time surfing in Hawaii.

– THE VERY HOT: Quark-Gloun Plasma: Heat up matter to 2 trillion degrees and neutrons and protons fall apart into a plasma of quarks called quark-gluon plasma.  In April of 2005, QGP appeared to have been created at the Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC).

My view on all this is that it is scientific business as usual.  100 years ago, we lived in a smaller world; a world described solely by Newtonian Mechanics, our ordinary everyday view of how the world works.  Then, along came relativity and quantum mechanics.  Technological advances in laboratory equipment and optics allowed us to push the limits of speed and validate Relativity, which ultimately showed that Newtonian Mechanics was just an approximation of the larger, more encompassing theory of Relativity at slow speeds.  Similarly we pushed the limits of probing the very small and validated Quantum Mechanics, which showed that Newtonian Mechanics was just an approximation of the larger, more encompassing theory of Quantum Mechanics at large scales.  In the 1960’s, we pushed the limits of heat and energy, discovered  and found that our Quantum Mechanical / Relativistic Theory of the world was really just an approximation at low temperatures of a larger theory that had to encompass Quantum Chromodynamics.  Now, we are pushing the limits of temperature, or the slowing down of particles, and discovering that there must be an even larger theory that describes the world, that explains the appearance of fractional charges at extremely low temperatures.  Why does this keep happening and where does it end?

Programmed Reality provides an explanation.  In fact, it actually provides two.

In one case, the programmers of our reality created a complex set of physical laws that we are slowly discovering.  Imagine a set of concentric spheres, with each successive level outward representing a higher level scientific theory of the world that encompasses faster speeds, higher temperatures, larger scales, colder temperatures, higher energies, etc.  How deep inside the sphere of knowledge are we now?  Don’t know, but this is a model that puts it in perspective.  It is a technological solution to the philosophy of Deism.

The second possibility is that as we humans push the limits of each successive sphere of physical laws that were created for us, the programmers put in place a patch that opens up the next shell of discovery, not unlike a game.  I prefer this model, for a number of reasons.  First of all, wouldn’t it be a lot more fun and interesting to interact with your creations, rather than start them on their evolutionary path and then pay no further attention?  Furthermore, this theory offers the perfect explanation for all of those scientific experiments that have generated anomalous results that have never been reproducible.  The programmers simply applied the patch before anyone else could reproduce the experiment.

Interestingly, throughout the years, scientists have fooled themselves into thinking that the discovery of everything was right around the corner.  In the mid-20th century, the ultimate goal was the Unified Field Theory.  Now, it is called a TOE, or Theory of Everything.

Let’s stop thinking we’re about to reach the end of scientific inquiry and call each successive theory a TOM, or Theory of More.

Because the only true TOE is Programmed Reality.  QED.

Filed under Cosmology, Future Tech, Physics, Programmed Reality, Quantum Mechanics, Science Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Inferring the Existence of the Soul?

March 5, 2009 1 Comment

The following is an excerpt from my book, “The Universe – Solved!”  It is a thought experiment that seems to prove the existence of the soul…

Given that in the primate world there is a continuum of neural complexity from lemurs to humans, it is safe to say that somewhere there is a species with roughly half the neural complexity of a human.  Per the atheistic way of thinking, such a species would therefore have half the consciousness of a human.  Let’s arbitrarily define the level of neural complexity on a scale from 0 to 1, 1 being human.  Out primate friend would then have a neural complexity, and therefore, consciousness, of .5.  Later in this chapter we will present the strong evidence of the distributed nature of the brain; namely, that there is no single specific place where a memory resides or a specific component of a visual image is captured.  From the cases involving brain tumors and brain loss due to injuries, it is clear that we could remove half of a human’s brain and that person would continue to be conscious.  Maybe only half as conscious as before, not unlike waking up on a beach in Cancun during spring break after a night of bad tequila.

Here comes the thought experiment part.  Imagine the possibility of a brain transplant.  It’s not hard to do, given that the brain is simply an organ, like the many others that are routinely subject to transplant with today’s surgical techniques.  There are certainly a lot more connections to a brain compared with, say, a liver, but it’s really just a matter of time before it is possible and then ultimately perfected.  Just as the cloning procedure is working its way up the species complexity scale (lab mice, sheep, humans), so will the brain transplant procedure.  A head transplant, for example, was performed by Case Western Reserve University neurosurgeon Dr. Robert White on a rhesus monkey in 1970.  It survived for eight days and exhibited many normal functions.  Cross-species transplants, also known as xenotransplants, have long since been proven to be possible, with chimpanzee kidneys in humans, pig livers in humans, cynomolgus monkey hearts in baboons, and baboon hearts in humans all achieving some level of success.  The main reasons that experimentation and advances in that field are slow to progress are the controversial ethical issue (it is right for pigs to become organ factories?) and the fear of cross-species viral infections.  But, ethical and safety issues aside, it is reasonable to assume that with sufficient technology, it will be possible to transplant a human brain or portion thereof into our primate that nominally has a .5 consciousness level.  Let’s further imagine that the process could become fairly straightforward, like plugging a new motherboard into a computer.  As long as the interfaces line up from a physical and networking standpoint, the procedure is “plug and play.”

So let’s imagine our human subject, Nick, and 2 lesser primates, Magilla and Kong.  We remove Nick’s brain and attach it to Magilla’s body.  Nick should retain his memories and consciousness, but feel really different, since his sensory input is completely new.  We would have to conclude that he maintained a continuous, albeit altered, stream of identity.  If Karl Pribham and others are right, we could theoretically put half of Nick’s brain into Magilla and the other half in Kong.  Where is his identity now?  Which body does the old Nick feel that he is in?  If we took the biological reductionist point of view, we would have to say that his consciousness is in both primates.  That must be very confusing, receiving two separate sets of sensory stimuli and two distinct developing sets of new memories.  Given that the state of the two primates is fairly consistent with the state of two similar natural primates, namely that they each have a brain of .5 neural complexity, why should there be a single conscious identity occupying both bodies in the case of Kong and Magilla, but two distinct identities in the natural case?  My answer is simple, invoking Occam’s Razor.  Nick’s soul simply chose which primate to move into along with his brain.  Alternately, his soul could have said, “This is ridiculous.  I’m returning to the spirit domain.  Let some other souls fight over those abominations.”

baboon brain transplant

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The Singularity Cometh? Or not?

October 8, 2008 1 Comment

There is much talk these days about the coming Singularity.  We are about 37 years away, according to Ray Kurzweil.  For some, the prospect is exhilarating – enhanced mental capacity, ability to experience fantasy simulations, immortality.  For others, the specter of the Singularity is frightening – AI’s run amok, all Terminator-like.  Then there are those who question the entire idea.  A lively debate on our forum triggered this post as we contrasted the position of transhumanists (aka cybernetic totalists) and singularity-skeptics.

For example, Jaron Lanier’s “One Half of a Manifesto” published in Wired and edge.org, suggests that our inability to develop advances in software will, at least for now, prevent the Singularity from happening according to the Moore’s Law pace.  One great quote from his demi-manifesto: “Just as some newborn race of superintelligent robots are about to consume all humanity, our dear old species will likely be saved by a Windows crash. The poor robots will linger pathetically, begging us to reboot them, even though they’ll know it would do no good.”  Kurzweil countered with a couple specific examples of successful software advances, such as speech recognition (which is probably due more to algorithm development than software techniques).

I must admit, I am also disheartened by the slow pace of software advances.  Kurzweil is not the only guy on the planet to have spent his career living and breathing software and complex computational systems.  I’ve written my share of gnarly assembly code, neural nets, and trading systems.  But, it seems to be that it takes almost as long to open a Word document, boot up, or render a 3D object on today’s blazingly fast PCs as it did 20 years ago on a machine running at less than 1% of today’s clock rate.  Kurzweil claims that we have simply forgotten: “Jaron has forgotten just how unresponsive, unwieldy, and limited they were.”

So, I wondered, who is right?  Are there objective tests out there?  I found an interesting article in PC World that compared the boot-up time from a 1981 PC to that of a 2001 PC.  Interestingly, the 2001 was over 3 times slower (51 seconds for boot up) than its 20-year predecessor (16 seconds).  My 2007 Thinkpad – over 50 seconds.  Yes, I know that Vista is much more sophisticated than MS-DOS and therefore consumes much more disk and memory and takes that much more time to load.  But really, are those 3D spinning doodads really helping me work better?

Then I found a benchmark comparison on the performance on 6 different Word versions over the years.  Summing 5 typical operations, the fastest version was Word 95 at 3 seconds.  Word 2007 clocked in at 12 seconds (in this test, they all ran on the same machine).

In summary, software has become bloated.  Developers don’t think about performance as much as they used to because memory and CPU speed is cheap.  Instead, the trend in software development is layers of abstraction and frameworks on top of frameworks.  Developers have become increasingly specialized (“I don’t do “Tiles”, I only do “Struts”) and very few get the big picture.

What does this have to do with the Singularity?  Simply this – With some notable exceptions, software development has not even come close to following Moore’s Law in terms of performance or reliability.  Yet, the Singularity predictions depend on it.  So don’t sell your humanity stock anytime soon.

 

Mac Guy, PC Guy

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Would it really be that bad to find life in our Solar System?

May 15, 2008 1 Comment

Nick Bostrom wrote an interesting article for the MIT Technology Review about how he hopes that the search for life on Mars finds nothing. In it, he reasons that inasmuch as we haven’t come across any signs of intelligent life in the universe yet, advanced life must be rare. But since conditions for life aren’t particularly stringent, there must be a “great filter” that prevents life from evolving beyond a certain point. If we are indeed alone, that probably means that we have made it through the filter. But if life is found nearby, like in our solar system, then the filter is probably ahead of us, or at least ahead of the evolutionary stage of the life that we find. And the more advanced the life form that we find, the more likely that we have yet to hit the filter, which implies ultimate doom for us.

But I wonder about some of the assumptions in this argument. He argues that intelligent ETs must not exist because they most certainly should have colonized the galaxy via von Neumann probes but apparently have not done so because we do not observe them. It seems to me, however, that it is certainly plausible that a sufficiently advanced civilization can be effectively cloaked from a far less advanced one. Mastery of some of those other 6 or 7 spatial dimensions that string theory predicts comes to mind. Or invisibility via some form of electromagnetic cloaking. And those are only early 21st century ideas. Imagine the possibilities of being invisible in a couple hundred years.

Then there is the programmed reality model. If the programmers placed multiple species in the galaxy for “players” to inhabit, it would certainly not be hard to keep some from interacting with each other, e.g. until the lesser civilization proves its ability to play nicely. Think about how some virtual reality games allow the players to walk through walls. It is a simple matter to maintain multiple domains of existence in a single programmed construct!  More support for the programmed reality model?…

(what do you think about the possibilities of life elsewhere? take our polls!)

Martian

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Wacky Ideas from my Past – #3 The Anti-Nitrogen Cruiser

April 8, 2008 1 Comment

In the standard model of particle physics, every particle has an antiparticle, a particle which has opposite properties, such as charge (e.g. a positron is the antiparticle of the electron).  Currently, it takes a fairly high energy particle accelerator to generate antiparticles artificially and actual antimolecules were created only recently (at CERN in the 1990s).  When an particle encounters its antiparticle, they annihilate each other and release a burst of energy equivalent to e=mc^^2.  As this is the most efficient conversion of fuel possible, it was a source of fascination for endless science fiction writers, especially with respect to the anti-matter drive, which is based on the idea of generating energy via the annihilation of matter and antimatter.

My idea, however, was sort of the reverse idea – that once somebody figured out a good energy source and a reverse reaction that would produce a steady stream of matter and antimatter, there was a great opportunity for a clean and efficient engine for a flying car.  It starts with the generator of nitrogen and antinitrogen.  Since air is 78% nitrogen, if you shoot your stream of antinitrogen out the front of the vehicle, it will annihilate the nitrogen in the air, creating a vacuum that sucks the car into it, propelling the car forward.  At the same time, the other byproduct of the reaction, nitrogen, can be shot out of the back of the car creating additional propulsion in the same direction.  Since the same amount of nitrogen would be created as destroyed, there would be no harm to the environment (ignoring for the moment all of the high energy gamma rays emanating from around the car).  Through a network of plumbing, the stream of antinitrogen could be squirted out of the bottom of the car (for lift), top of the car (descent), sides of the car (parallel parking), simultaneously from a front bumper to the side and the opposite rear to the other side (banking), and any other kind of maneuver that you could desire.  The possibilities would be endless.

Limitless fuel, high efficiency, ultimate maneuverability, and eco-friendly (again, except for the gamma rays).

So where are we in relation to this technology?  CERN has their antiproton decelerator, perhaps the closest system to trapping antiprotons for study.   But it is still a few hundred meters in diameter, barely controls enough antiprotons to be useful, and only generates one kind of antiparticle.  We area a long way from the Anti-Nitrogen Cruiser.  I predict seeing one in the showrooms around…

2050

Jetsons car

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Wacky Ideas from my Past – #2 The Nuke Core Neutralizer

April 7, 2008 1 Comment

This one felt really important during the height of the cold war.

All H-Bombs have an A-Bomb at their core.  The A-Bomb is needed to generated the million of degree temperature to begin the fusion reaction in the H-Bomb fuel.  So, all nukes, therefore, have at their core, a hunk of fissionable material, generally Uranium-235 or Plutonium-239.  U-235, for example, works well as a nuclear fission fuel because when the nucleus absorbs a neutron, it becomes unstable and splits into two smaller nuclei (e.g. Barium and Krypton), releasing more neutrons which then generate more reactions.  A critical mass of fissionable material will explode because the number of neutrons needed to maintain the reaction is exceeded by the number generated.  But, U-235 can also safely absorb a neutron and not undergo fission, transmuting in non-fissionable U-236 before further decay.  But if some process (for example, creating the perfect neutron energy) were to be discovered that caused absorption rather than fission, the core of the nuke could be neutralized.

So, my thought was to blanket the earth with a “rain” of the right particles to neutralize all nuke cores, regardless of where they are buried or hidden, thereby ending all fear of nuclear strikes.

My naivete may have been to think that we could generate enough particles at high enough density to neutralize a nuke core at any given point on the earth without having that particle beam have an adverse effect on plant and animal life.

So where are we today?  Actually, there are a number of nuclear remediation technologies (for example see Gary Vesperman’s “Comparison of My List of 27 Methods of Neutralizing or Disposing of Radioactive Waste with PACE’s 9 Methods“) that can clean up cores of nukes or fissionable material in general.  None can be accomplished on the “earth blanketing” scale that I envisioned.  However, maybe nanotech can come to the rescue.  Imagine a healthy swarm of nanobots, all carrying the materials needed for a nuclear remediation technique, such as RIPPLE Fission, and instructed to seek out all U-235 and P-239 and unleash the neutralization technique.

Time frame?  I’m thinking…

2040

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Wacky Ideas from my Past – #1 The Invisibility Cloak

April 3, 2008 3 Comments

When I was a geeky teenager, I remember dreaming up these wild inventions that I though could revolutionize the world in some way.  Since that was 30 years ago, I thought it might be kind of fun to take stock of the likelihood of these ideas it today’s time.  Please try not to laugh.  Here was idea #1 – The Invisible Cloaking Device…

My thought was this – how cool would it be to be somewhere and put on a jacket and just become invisible.  Of course, the back pages of Popular Mechanics always had see-through glasses but of course, they were a gaff.  But I wondered if the cloaking concept could really work.  I didn’t see why not.  The way I figured it, if they could make transistors that were pretty much microscopic, and LED’s that were based on transistors, why not little cameras that were just as small?  All you had to do is put zillions of these cameras all over your cloak as well as zillions of LEDs.  But the LEDs had to be able to generate any color of light.  And each point of the cloak would have many cameras pointing in each direction, the signals of which were collected at a central computer.  The computer would figure out what part of the cloak was at the exact opposite position for each camera and each direction of view.  And so, that signal would get routed to the LED so as to generate the image that was the same as if you were looking through the cloak.  An engineering nightmare to be sure, especially in determining the position of every point of the coat.

So imagine how excited I was in 2006 when I first heard of experiments being done with cloaking devices.  Unfortunately, however, the technology is still woefully weak.  As shown in the figure below, you have to put a camera directly behind the subject and a combiner device between the viewer and the subject and it only works in one direction.  So, nobody is going to get fooled any time soon.

But still, the resulting effect is kind of cool.  See below…

So when will we have true invisibility?  I have seen projections of 10-20 years for single color with a cloak of a well-defined shape.  “Sometime this century” for a Harry Potter type invisible cloak.  I think that nanotech will facilitate the process by enabling microscopic devices that can image in all directions and are self aware of their position.  So, I say…

2030

Filed under Future Tech, General, Science Tagged with , ,

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