Newt Gingrich and space

Why unfair?

Organic life on earth has autocatalytic, self-replicating, and self-repairing properties that all technologies invented by humans (thus far) still lack. In the immortal words of Bruce Sterling, a sci-fi author of some fame, "People still have to carry the can for technology." The astronauts on the ISS (International Space Station) spend an inordinate amount of time doing basic housekeeping and repair work. And in their brief leisure moments, the most popular pastime is wistfully watching the earth go by through the windows.....

Until we can build a waste-disposal plant on earth that is fully autonomous, able to repair and maintain itself without human intervention, the whole idea of moon colonization is pure folly. It is also quite possible that human-invented, inorganic technology is intrinsically "entropic", and that no such waste-disposal plant can ever be built.

Whereas, as the ecologists would say, when you take a dump in a forest, the forest provides "ecosystems services" for free, and automatically cleans up after you.

Planet earth is a nice place to be. We need to take care of her.

It's unfair to biosphere technology. It's very true that we 'have to carry the can for technology' - but all that means in this context is that a lot of employment in any space colony will revolve around what, on Earth, would be ecosystem services. Now it might be that it's very hard to raise worker productivity in a closed biosphere enough to create the surplus time and workers to provide high-quality leisure activities, but that's something we'll find out by developing closed biospheres on larger scales. A fully autonomous, self-repairing waste-disposal system isn't necessary because we can employ humans to maintain and run it.

Your point about technology being 'entropic' is misguided for the very simple reason that life is also entropic. Put simply, life takes in (low-entropy, high-frequency) light, and gives out (low-frequency and hence high-entropy) heat, and powers all its astounding complexity and beauty off that entropy gradient. It is a dissipative system. And there is no reason why human-invented technology shouldn't be able to eventually match its capabilities, if necessary by using biological systems - which is in fact precisely what a closed biosphere habitat is all about.

Planet Earth is very much worth taking care of, but the rest of the universe contains an unlimited amount of real estate.

Dear Guest,

Good reply.

Notice that I put "entropic" in scare-quotes, because although I am not a scientist, I am fully aware of the extent to which non-scientists habitually mis-use the concept of "entropy". By your reply, I take it that you are indeed a scientist ("entropy gradient"), so I will switch immediately to question-mode.

"Entropy", and its opposite concept "Negentropy", are not really the concepts I want to use. There is an excellent article by Stanley Freske, on the NSCE website, that speaks to this issue: "Creationist Misunderstanding, Misrepresentation, and Misuse of the Second Law of Thermodynamics", at http://ncse.com/cej/2/2/creationist-misunderstanding-misrepresentation-m... . Laypeople constantly confuse "entropy" with increasing messiness, increasing disorganization, decreasing order, and decreasing complexity. But physicist friends of mine suggest that this is not really what the concept of “entropy” is about. Concepts like "messiness", "disorganization", "order", and "complexity" are too qualitative, some of them will argue, to be quantifiable by physics.

Fair enough. But in that case, I will want to search for concepts different than “entropy” and “negentropy”. The motivation behind the search should be intuitively obvious. Life on earth just is qualitatively more complex now, than it was 4 billion years ago. Sure, this claim is a value judgment, but I am a humanist by training, so I give myself permission to make such judgments. If one does not want to call life’s movement towards increasing complexity, "Evolution in a negentropic direction", then what should one call it instead?

This is a genuine question. I do not know that answer. But I am willing to strongly affirm that life on earth has become more complex over 4 billion years.

Along similar lines, everyone has an intuitive sense that all inorganic machines constructed thus far eventually break down, that is, unless human beings intervene to repair them. This is why anarcho-primitivists will argue that Civilization and Technology are Faustian to the core: we lose just as much, or even more, than we gain (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-primitivism and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book:Anarcho-primitivism ). When we were hunter-gatherers the forest disposed of our crap, and grew food for us, leaving most of our days free to smell the roses. Whereas now we have to punch clocks processing crap at the waste-disposal plant.

From this perspective, humans have increasingly become the last remaining "negentropic", natural element in the “technosphere”: a technosphere that is radically parasitic on humanity’s negentropic contribution (repair, maintenance, etc.); a technosphere that enslaves humans more than it liberates them. This is the basic "apercu" that runs through the most interesting work in 20th century “Philosophy of Technology, and is often called “The Autonomous Technology Thesis”. See for instance Jacques Ellul's book, "THE TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY”, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Ellul and http://www.amazon.com/Technological-Society-Jacques-Ellul/dp/0394703901/... .

However, please understand that I am no anarcho-primitivist, and I do not think we can go back to hunter-gathering via “relinquishment”. I think humans are “technologically inscribed” creatures to the core. Hominid morphology evolved over millions of years in concert with our increasingly sophisticated tool-use: we probably lack enormous canines in contrast to chimpanzees, because we used hand-choppers for millions of years instead. I also do not romanticize hunter-gatherers, and I hold them directly responsible for the megafauna die-offs in Australia and the Americas. Humans are ecologically destabilizing creatures “all the way down”, and as such, it seems foolish to romanticize one period or another in humanity’s cultural history.

But even still, I have some trenchant questions about technology that won’t go away, questions intensified by failed experiments such as Biosphere 2. Can human-invented technology ever resemble organic life? Will it ever prove genuinely auto-catalytic, self-replicating, self-repairing, and self-stabilizing? I want to ask, Will human-invented technology ever prove “negentropic”, even though “negentropic” is the wrong word.

CONTINUED IN NEXT POST

Like Bruce Sterling, I want to ask even bigger questions:

1. “Is the advent of intelligent life in any planetary ecosystem, always and necessarily an entropic event, one inevitably accompanied by a huge species die-off and ecosystem collapse?”

Or more compactly:

2. “Is the emergence of intelligent Mind an entropic or negentropic phenomenon?”

But again, in deference to physicists, I know that “entropy” and “negentropy” are not the right concepts to use. So in his article, Freske tries to get more detailed and precise in his description of life's unique properties: "auto-catalytic", "self-replicating", "self-maintaining", and so on. Right now, inorganic technology is none of these things.

As such, Moon-Base Gingrich strikes me as the sort of nightmare that only a workaholic could love.

***************************

PS -- I also go by the moniker, "archigen".

OK, thanks for your interesting and thoughtful reply! I think you're making a mistake in suggesting that there is any natural tendency for technology to fall to bits simply because humans made it. Obviously the technology we have right now cannot sustain itself without human intervention. But it does not follow that we cannot create technologies that do have that capability.

More broadly, the trend of technological advance is to replicate and improve upon the capabilities of living things. Aeroplanes, for example, fly faster and higher than birds do. Cameras can detect far more frequencies of light than any living eye. Moreover, technological change is in the region of half a dozen orders of magnitude faster than biological evolution. It would be unwise to predict that we will never be able to build a machine capable of sustaining, replicating and improving upon itself (whatever your criteria for 'improving' may be). In fact, a worry as pressing as Ellul's is that, in the next couple of hundred years (assuming we don't destroy ourselves), we will create machines that can do everything for us, leaving human beings with no useful function in the economy and in society, and hence robbed of a sense of purpose and self-worth. (Incidentally, this is a pretty good argument for transhumanism - we will need to increase our own capabilities in order to remain =important=. There's a fun argument to be had about this but this is not the time or place.)

This links into Moon-Base Gingrich being 'the sort of nightmare that only a workaholic could love'. If the astronauts' every waking hour was taken up with sustaining the biosphere, with no time left over for other activities, that would be true; but there's no reason to suggest that this would be the case. The deeper reason I disagree with you, though, is that given enough time and facilities for R&R there is no reason why a life spent working at a worthwhile job (say, helping sustain a moonbase) should be something regrettable, compared with hanging around on Earth smelling roses. Quite the opposite: if we were to compare a lunar recycling worker and an Earth-based layabout, the all else being equal we'd find a lot more to admire in the former than the latter.

People's wellbeing is not proportional to how much free time they have. Unemployment is depressing, even in places with generous benefits systems, whereas if your job is rewarding - and with the constant knowledge of the grand project of which they are a part, the work of the first space colonists will be - working even fairly long hours is not a problem. Hence the work that has to go into achieving these things is not necessarily 'enslavement'. I can see why Ellul, being a Christian, might consider the equation of the two trivial, since the Christian idea of 'happiness' is quite close to 'rest'; but that's just not psychologically accurate. And nor should it be - better to be a happy high achiever than a happy underachiever. (This matters because the criteria for people's happiness is malleable by social, and perhaps eventually technological, factors.)

(The above is not a justification for a moonbase, by the way, just an attempt to clear aside one objection. The justification of space colonisation is an interesting question with many potential answers, but we can go partway there by pointing out that whilst the vicinities of some long-lived stars will be habitable temperature-wise for something like 100 trillion years, the Earth will only be habitable for another few billion. This makes space colonisation the moral equivalent of saving the life of a days-old baby, except that baby is all the life there is. Also we're part of the baby. The comparison is not perfect.)

As for the questions in your last comment - I'd say in answer to 1) yes, probably, since tool-making intelligence grants its bearers all sorts of power without immediately showing them the consequences of its use; and 2) interpreting 'entropic' and 'negentropic' as terms of art meaning 'tending to increase or decrease, respectively, the complexity of dissipative structures', that there is likely no single tendency beyond an initial 'negentropic' phase which we are right now on the cusp of escaping.

What minerals aside from Helium 3 are likely to be found?

Is it known whether the moon is like some classes of asteroids (I think type S or M), with a bunch of platinum,nickel, cobalt?

Or more precisely, is it being guessed at?

Also, what would be the environmental impact of electromagnetically launching packages of mined material to Earth (the rail gun concept)?

How would reentry be accomplished? Use thrusters to put it in orbit and then bring the package down with the assist of parachutes?

What would the insurance look like, to insure against contingencies like packages going off course and hitting a residential area?

@ Spookpada -

"What are these payloads and where are they going?"

If you are selling launch services that doesn't really matter, any more than what's in the box matters to FedEx. But just for example suppose Company A needs a tonne of solar panels in orbit. Launch cost from Earth might be $10 million. But you could launch that same tonne from the Moon for a few thousand $ worth of electricity. There is a lot of silicon on the Moon...

"Any money could just be transferred wirelessly"

That is precisely the point, there is no reason to ship anything back to Earth. When I wrote "All you really need to ship back is money", I was being facetious. You would most likely be transferring it between people who never left Earth.

I don't like Mr Gingrich's politics any more than you do, and I certainly don't plan to vote for him. But in this case he is right.

The U.S. only spends $19 billion per year on NASA, while Medicaid alone sucks in $200 billion in JUST federal outlays (the individual states pay as well). Canceling NASA's entire budget wouldn't do help anything that past trillions haven't already tried to help. Dreams on the other hand are priceless. Better to die in pursuit of a dream then live your entire life in comfort but miserable.

Why?

we'd have to throw up equipment that can actually withstand the torture for long periods of time. also they aren't protected from solar flares and radiation as we are here on earth.

I think he meant the far side, and his comment about a telescope is not outlandish - there's zero earthshine there.

Actually Doug Reason in his book "The E-Bomb" (not the best title) seem to suggest sufficient skill has been achieved in maintaining beam quality. Over long distances in the atmosphere . Not sure about maritime conditions though - the Navy was interested in this stuff too and had the Unified Navy Field Test Program.

He made reference to adoptive optics and tuning in the section on drawbacks/obstacles, as well as in the deeper dive on the Airborn Laser.

If I remember correctly (and relating this correctly), a target beam is sent to illuminate a target; the distortion is analyized, and then adoptive optics are applied to distort the main laser to compensate for whatever turbulence in the atmosphere is transpiring.

Otherwise, military proved that people couldn't just buff up the skin of a missile to make it reflective - Had no impact absorption level it seems (still too bumpy, can't match the polish quality of mirrors).

In the vacuum of space, not sure what power levels were needed. Seems the military was focusing on weakening the skins of rockets rather than outright burning wholes into warheads with the airborn laser.

However, MTHEL (mobile tactical high energy laser) encompassed a Deuterium Floride laser that was supposed to heat/damage warheads. The program had been cancelled though.

Obviously, solid state heat capacity lasers are of lower power than the ones tested in the programs mentioned above. But seems like some significant progress has been achieved with high energy weapons.

Hrm, all of the star wars stuff suffered the same problems. Counter measures are cheap and easy to deploy. The design of one system to beat counter measures made it completely victim to counter measures takng the opposite strategy.

Which countermeasures, and for what applications? The "make missiles shiny" turned out to be bogus.

As for tactical applications with solid state lasers, we shall see.For artillery and katusha rockets are they going to fire off dumby shells along with live ones?

The star wars stuff was decades ago. And some concepts were dubious from the start, like the X-Ray laser.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think things are perfect. However, if you have to deal with missile technologies, it may be worth finding something faster than a bullet to hit a bullet; and that would be light.

Rifling a missile, so no part of its skin gets any long exposure. And if dummy shells work, I dont see why it wouldnt be developed. Putting anything in orbit is the worst place to base a weapon. Its asitting duck in open space.

The US has shot down a bunch of artillery shells with chemical lasers. I assume they were rifled, or behaved like rifled bullets during their trajectories.

Is that not the case?

If I may ask, where did you hear about rifling a missile?

Also how much exposure is necessary? I thought we are still talking seconds here?

True about space based weapons vulnerable to a bunch of things, like kinetic weapons, emp pulses, or maybe in the future ground based lasers (maybe now) or some other interference.

A base theoretically would comply, especially if it was an international undertaking. I was speaking in context of his discussion of appropriating a portion of the moon as US territory, which would violate the agreement.

It's hard to argue with you there, it's not exactly a widely known agreement even in the legal and political communities. This is especially apparent after Newt's speech because apparently nobody on his staff was aware either.

Nonetheless, even if it is not generally known and even fewer care about it, it is still a binding international agreement validly entered into by the United States and thus must be upheld under US law through Art. IV p.2 of the Constitution. Additionally, the ban on appropriation in Art. II of the OST is one of the most important underpinnings to the international legal regime, and has been recognized and upheld as a valid obligation by US Courts.