Lee Billings

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“Our Society Will Approach An ‘Information Barrier'”

September 11, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

My problem with the late Polish author Stanislaw Lem stems from his disdain for Franz Kafka, an early influence whom he ultimately deemed “repugnant“–and he meant it in a negative way! 

Lem, of course, was brilliant, a Hoover of knowledge with a jet pack inside his head, his attentions rapidly moving far and wide. His 1964 nonfiction work, Summa Technologiae, which wasn’t wholly translated into English until 2013, serves as the foundation for Lee Billings’ latest wonderful essay, the Nautilus piece “The Book No One Read.” (I’ll acknowledge I’m one of those impoverished souls.) Billings argues that Lem is something of a Digital Age Cassandra, warning us that past a point we’ll no longer be able to manage our technological progress if we don’t engineer what might be termed a posthuman superintelligence. In a sense, we will be the end of us, and that’s the most hopeful outcome. As Billings states, Lem was asking a very fundamental question: “Does technology control humanity, or does humanity control technology?”

An excerpt:

In its early stages, Lem writes, the development of technology is a self-reinforcing process that promotes homeostasis, the ability to maintain stability in the face of continual change and increasing disorder. That is, incremental advances in technology tend to progressively increase a society’s resilience against disruptive environmental forces such as pandemics, famines, earthquakes, and asteroid strikes. More advances lead to more protection, which promotes more advances still.

And yet, Lem argues, that same technology-driven positive feedback loop is also an Achilles heel for planetary civilizations, at least for ours here on Earth. As advances in science and technology accrue and the pace of discovery continues its acceleration, our society will approach an “information barrier” beyond which our brains—organs blindly, stochastically shaped by evolution for vastly different purposes—can no longer efficiently interpret and act on the deluge of information.

Past this point, our civilization should reach the end of what has been a period of exponential growth in science and technology. Homeostasis will break down, and without some major intervention, we will collapse into a “developmental crisis” from which we may never fully recover. Attempts to simply muddle through, Lem writes, would only lead to a vicious circle of boom-and-bust economic bubbles as society meanders blindly down a random, path-dependent route of scientific discovery and technological development. “Victories, that is, suddenly appearing domains of some new wonderful activity,” he writes, “will engulf us in their sheer size, thus preventing us from noticing some other opportunities—which may turn out to be even more valuable in the long run.”•

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“If We Ever Did Make Contact, What Social Problems Would That Meeting Force Us To Face As A Species?”

January 25, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Lee Billings, author of the wonderful and touching 2014 book, Five Billion Years of Solitude, is interviewed on various aspects of exoplanetary exploration by Steve Silberman of h+ Magazine. An exchange about what contact might be like were it to occur:

Steve Silberman:

If we ever make contact with life on other planets, they will be the type of creatures that we could sit down and have a Mos Eisley IPA or Alderaan ale with — even if, by then, we’ve worked out the massive processing and corpus dataset problems inherent in building a Universal Translator that works much better than Google? And if we ever did make contact, what social problems would that meeting force us to face as a species?

Lee Billings:

Outside of the simple notion that complex intelligent life may be so rare as to never allow us a good chance of finding another example of it beyond our own planet, there are three major pessimistic contact scenarios that come to mind, though there are undoubtedly many more that could be postulated and explored. The first pessimistic take is that the differences between independently emerging and evolving biospheres would be so great as to prevent much meaningful communication occurring between them if any intelligent beings they generated somehow came into contact. Indeed, the differences could be so great that neither side would recognize or distinguish the other as being intelligent at all, or even alive in the first place. An optimist might posit that even in situations of extreme cognitive divergence, communication could take place through the universal language of mathematics.

The second pessimistic take is that intelligent aliens, far from being incomprehensible and ineffable, would be in fact very much like us, due to trends of convergent evolution, the tendency of biology to shape species to fit into established environmental niches. Think of the similar streamlined shapes of tuna, sharks, and dolphins, despite their different evolutionary histories. Now consider that in terms of biology and ecology humans are apex predators, red in tooth and claw. We have become very good at exploiting those parts of Earth’s biosphere that can be bent to serve our needs, and equally adept at utterly annihilating those parts that, for whatever reason, we believe run counter to our interests. It stands to reason that any alien species that managed to embark on interstellar voyages to explore and colonize other planetary systems could, like us, be a product of competitive evolution that had effectively conquered its native biosphere. Their intentions would not necessarily be benevolent if they ever chose to visit our solar system.

The third pessimistic scenario is an extension of the second, and postulates that if we did encounter a vastly superior alien civilization, even if they were benevolent they could still do us harm through the simple stifling of human tendencies toward curiosity, ingenuity, and exploration. If suddenly an Encyclopedia Galactica was beamed down from the heavens, containing the accumulated knowledge and history of one or more billion-year-old cosmic civilizations, would people still strive to make new scientific discoveries and develop new technologies? Imagine if solutions were suddenly presented to us for all the greatest problems of philosophy, mathematics, physics, astronomy, chemistry, and biology. Imagine if ready-made technologies were suddenly made available that could cure most illnesses, provide practically limitless clean energy, manufacture nearly any consumer good at the press of a button, or rapidly, precisely alter the human body and mind in any way the user saw fit. Imagine not only our world or our solar system but our entire galaxy made suddenly devoid of unknown frontiers. Whatever would become of us in that strange new existence is something I cannot fathom.

The late Czech astronomer Zdeněk Kopal summarized the pessimist outlook succinctly decades ago, in conversation with his British colleague David Whitehouse. As they were talking about contact with alien civilizations, Kopal grabbed Whitehouse by the arm and coldly said, “Should we ever hear the space-phone ringing, for God’s sake let us not answer. We must avoid attracting attention to ourselves.”•

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“If Indirect Observation Is All That Is On Offer, Then Astronomers Must Make The Best Of It”

January 7, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

One of the best books I read during 2014 was Lee Billings’ Five Billion Years of Solitude, a volume both extremely heady and deeply moving. It tells the story of the quest for exoplanets which resemble Earth, places which could possibly provide refuge for us when our mother planet finally dies. Even if we never manage to leave our solar system, just the intellectual odyssey itself is fascinating. From “Searching for Pale Blue Dots,” an Economist article about other-Earth discussions at this week’s American Astronomical Society meeting:

“IN 1990 Voyager took a photograph of Earth that was striking precisely because it showed so little. The spacecraft was six billion kilometres away at the time and the image it sent back was memorably described by Carl Sagan as a ‘pale blue dot,’ Imagine, then, how pale such a dot would be if the planet in the picture were 113,000 billion kilometres away. Yet this is the distance to the nearest confirmed exoplanet—a planet orbiting a star other than the sun. That gives some idea of the task faced by those who study these bodies. Only in the most special of circumstances can they actually see their quarry. Mostly, they have to work with indirect measurements, like watching for slight dips in the intensity of a star’s light when a planet passes in front of it, a phenomenon known as a transit.

But if indirect observation is all that is on offer, then astronomers must make the best of it. And, as numerous presentations to a meeting of the American Astronomical Society held in Seattle this week show, they have both done so, and have plans to do better in future.

The most successful planet-hunting mission so far has been Kepler, a satellite launched in 2009 by NASA, America’s space agency, which collected data using the transit method until 2013, when a mechanical failure disabled it. It has since been revived, but has only recently begun transmitting data. However, combing of the data it collected in its first incarnation continues, and Douglas Caldwell of the SETI Institute, in Mountain View, California, who is one of the mission’s chief scientists, announced to the meeting the discovery of eight new planets. Three of these lie in their solar systems’ habitable zones (that is, they are at a distance from their parent stars which makes them warm enough for water on their surfaces to be liquid, but cool enough for it not to be steam). One of these three, known as Kepler 438b, is thought particularly Earthlike. It is a bit bigger and a bit warmer than Earth, but is probably rocky. It is therefore likely to be the subject of intense future scrutiny.”

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“No One Can Say Whether It Is A World Like Ours, With Oceans And Life, Cities And Single-Malt Scotch”

November 26, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

A couple of days ago, I posted an excerpt from Five Billion Years of Solitude, the first book by science journalist and exoplanet enthusiast Lee Billings. In “War of the Worlds,” his new Wired piece, the writer details the internecine struggle between two groups of astronomers to lay claim to the discovery of the very first Earth-esque planet beyond our solar system (a topic also covered in Solitude). The opening:

“NO ONE KNOWS what the planet Gliese 667Cc looks like. We know that it is about 22 light-years from Earth, a journey of lifetimes upon lifetimes. But no one can say whether it is a world like ours, with oceans and life, cities and single-malt Scotch. Only a hint of a to-and-fro oscillation in the star it orbits, detectable by Earth’s most sensitive telescopes and spectrographs, lets astronomers say the planet exists at all. The planet is bigger than our world, perhaps made of rocks instead of gas, and within its star’s ‘habitable zone’—at a Goldilocks distance that ensures enough starlight to make liquid water possible but not so much as to nuke the planet clean.

That’s enough to fill the scientists who hunt for worlds outside our own solar system—so-called exoplanets—with wonder. Gliese 667Cc is, if not a sibling to our world, at least a cousin out there amid the stars. No one knows if it is a place we humans could someday live, breathe, and watch triple sunsets. No one knows whether barely imagined natives are right now pointing their most sensitive and far-seeing technology at Earth, wondering the same things. Yet regardless, to be the person who found Gliese 667Cc is to be the person who changes the quest for life beyond our world, to be remembered as long as humans exist to remember—by the light of the sun or a distant, unknown star.

Which is a problem. Because another thing no one knows about Gliese 667Cc is who should get credit for discovering it.”

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“I Don’t Think We’ll Ever Colonize Other Stars”

November 24, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In his excellent book about exoplanets, Five Billion Years of Solitude, Lee Billings speaks with astronomer Frank Drake about the scientist’s attempts at sending messages, via radio signals, to other technological civilizations out there, something he’s been working on since 1960, thinking this sort of contact more likely than an interstellar meet and greet. In one passage, Drake explains why he believes it likely humans will die along with the sun. An excerpt:

“Some techno-prophets spoke worshipfully or fearfully of computers becoming sentient and gaining godlike powers. Others speculated that someday humans would break free of their carbon-based chains by uploading their minds into silicon substrates, where they could, in some manner, live forever. All seemed to agree that if humans themselves weren’t destined to inherit the Earth, they would certainly author whatever ultimately would. A few even conjured up the bygone Space Age dreams of Drake’s youth, envisioning a new golden era of prosperity and exploration in which humans would travel with their intelligent machines throughout the solar system, and perhaps someday to other stars.

‘Yeah, I’ve heard all that stuff,’ Drake replied. ‘It would be nice if we made it to Mars. But I don’t hold with the hypothesis that we’ll all slowly become or be replaced by computers. And of all the things we might someday do, I don’t think we’ll ever colonize other stars.’

I asked why not.

‘I don’t think computers can have fun,’ he said. ‘I think joy is a quality not available to computers. But what do I know?’ He laughed. ‘Interstellar travel, on the other hand, I’ve worked on that quite a bit. Putting a hundred humans around a nearby star costs about a million times as much as putting them in orbit in your own system. You’d have to be pretty rich to pull that off. 

‘Let’s say you have two colonies ten light-years apart–that’s probably the typical distance between habitable planets, I’d guess. The fact is, you can’t really go faster than about a tenth of light-speed. At speeds higher than that, if you hit anything of any substance whatsoever, the amount of energy released approaches that of a nuclear bomb. So you’re limited to about ten percent, a speed we can’t currently come anywhere close to, and that means your looking at journey times of at least a hundred years. The distances, times, and speeds are daunting, but the most daunting thing of all is the cost. Take something the size of a Boeing 737 plane, which is about the smallest that might make a reasonable crewed expedition, and send it at a tenth the speed of light to a nearby star, okay? Now just work out the kinetic energy that’s in it. It turns out to be about equal to two hundred years of the total electric power production in today’s United States. And that’s assuming a one-way trip, where you don’t even slow down and enter orbit on the other end. The inherent difficulty of interstellar travel is one of the big reasons why looking for things like radio signals is so appealing.’

‘So you think we’re stuck in the solar sytem,’ I said, thinking of distant days when the swollen red sun would sterilize Earth. ‘This is it?’

‘Yeah, I think so,’ Drake somberly replied. ‘You have to admit, though, that it’s pretty good while it lasts.'”

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“His Proprietary System Of Gleaming Mirrors And Flashing Lenses Will Transform The American Southwest”

September 9, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

This month is the one-year anniversary of the launching if Aeon, the digital magazine that has quickly become the best producer of essays I can find in print or online. Congratulations to Paul and Brigid Hains, who founded the publication, and to all their contributors.

From “Catching the Star,” Lee Billings’ new Aeon essay about astrophysicist Roger Angel, who wants to transform the American Southwest, which is getting closer to dying of thirst, into one of Earth’s chief solar-power stations:

In the first decade of this new century, Angel began to shift his focus from planets around other stars to the planet that we live on, the planet that was growing parched and crowded before his eyes. He has spent years devising a three-decade plan to build and launch 16 trillion tiny, autonomous spacecraft to form a sunshade to cool the Earth to pre-industrial average temperatures, thus counteracting anthropogenic greenhouse heating. The associated expenses would amount to some $5 trillion, although Angel hastens to point out that this would constitute less than one per cent of the world’s gross domestic product for the project’s duration — a bargain compared with the much higher projected costs of allowing global warming to proceed unabated.

No one could find technical flaws with Angel’s audacious plan: the physics was eminently feasible. It was also meticulous. Angel had considered practically every relevant physical variable and technological scenario. Even so, he considered it little more than ‘a Band-Aid’, something that could buy perhaps a century of cooler temperatures. More sustainable long-term adaptations would be needed to deal with the recent spike in greenhouse gases, which promise to linger in the atmosphere for tens or hundreds of thousands of years.

“The sunshade may seem like mad science,” he quips from time to time, “but the fact is, we live upon a mad world.” Not mad enough, however. Not yet. Few would seriously contemplate building anything like Angel’s sunshade until catastrophic warming and sea-level rises are already well under way, and by then, it may be too late. Angel himself prefers that it never be built at all. He believes that cutting carbon emissions would be considerably cheaper in the long run.

To that end, Angel has been working on a new project since 2008, an effort less ambitious than blotting out the light of the sun but audacious enough. He wants to make grid-scale solar power that costs about a dollar per watt — as cheap as or cheaper than electricity from burning coal or other fossil fuels. Moreover, he thinks he has found how to do it, and has even formed a company, REhnu, to gather capital investment and develop the necessary technology.

In years to come, if Angel has his way, his proprietary system of gleaming mirrors and flashing lenses will transform the American southwest and other sun-drenched regions into the 21st-century powerhouses of the globe, driving markets to leave all the world’s remaining coal in the ground. He has attracted several research grants from government agencies, as well as a considerable number of backers from the upper echelons of US astronomy and energy research who, having seen Angel build the Mirror Lab from nothing, prefer to bet with rather than against him.•

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