How about this for Conservatism?

See, the ChiComs need their economy growing. They need people driving around, moving around. They need people to be able to afford fuel, so they’re subsidizing fuel. They’re not bailing people out of stupid home mortgage messes. They’re buying their gasoline for them, because they need an economy. Know what energy means to this, the whole subject of economic growth. So meanwhile, the ChiComs, a country certainly growing, certainly on the rise, but it ain’t the United States of America. How does it make you feel that Zhang Linsen has a big Hummer with nine speakers blaring as he pulls out into a four-lane road with so much smog he basically can’t see the car in front of him, and you are trading in all of your cars and trying to go out and find basically a lawn mower.

So when the free market sets gasoline prices high, the United States should start buying our gas for us to keep up with the Chinese???

Sorry Rush, I prefer to let market forces push America toward alternative energy sources to the idea that the United States should borrow more money from China to give it to the Middle East.

“Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know.”
– M. King Hubbert

I’m going on five years of blogging now, which gives me enough material to go back and grade my own aptitude at prediction. My favorite bit of personal futurism was my article, Bring on the High Gas Prices, posted August 14, 2005. This idea was not mine at all, I was merely throwing my weight behind M. King Hubbert’s predictions that oil would run out in Texas, which it did. I reviewed the competing hypotheses, and I threw my support behind the idea of Peak Oil based on the data. I’m glad I got it right, but the idea was not mine.

April 2007 I officially threw my lot in with those who accept the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming. I reviewed the data, and was convinced that (1) It’s happening (2) We’re causing it. How fast? How much? Where? When? I don’t know, the models are being improved and the Earth’s symptoms monitored. Things are getting really bad, and things are going to get much much worse. Again, not my idea, but I knew which horse to bet on.

In my book, The Spiraling Web, originally written in 2002, I talked about two super computers battling it out on a Chessboard in order to solve the game once and for all. Chinook would solve Checkers just a few years later, but the idea of “solving” games was not a new one. I would later find that it is a topic of great interest to computer scientists who are actually working on solving Chess and other games. My idea, but others had it to. So great minds think alike (or fools seldom differ).

My bad predictions are harder to find, because I’m so resistant to posting predictions unless I feel 99.9 percent certain of their veracity. My unposted political predictions are usually wrong: “Hillary will be President” (2008), “John Kerry will be President” (2004), and “George Bush will slip on a banana peel and die in an amusing fashion before he can do any harm” (2000).

Although I never came out and said it on this blog, all of my talk about panspermia, Von Neumann Machines, and extremeophiles was a prelude to the Mars Phoenix Lander. I was working to preempt the discovery of life on Mars. I was 99.9 percent certain Phoenix would find microbial life in the Martian soil.

No such luck, but I’m still hoping. I can’t fathom Mars not having microbial life thriving on it. That seems almost an impossibility to my mind.

Cybernetic Interface Credit: _MaO_

The American Heritage Dictionary defines a cyborg as, “A human who has certain physiological processes aided or controlled by mechanical or electronic devices.” Under this definition, people who wear glasses, hearing aides, and even drive cars are cyborgs. With physiological defined as “consistent with the normal functioning of an organism,” we would also consider people who use computers, calculators, and even wristwatches cyborgs for aiding their normal cognitive functions with technological solutions.

The Wikipedia entry for Cyborg defines it as “an organism that has both artificial and natural systems,” but then goes on to muddy this definition by excluding contact lenses, arguing they make us no more cyborg than a spear, but does include insulin pumps because they require feedback. This opens a whole semantical can of worms as we attempt to define what constitutes “feedback.”

Science fiction cyborgs are easy to define: anything part animal, part machine that’s too advanced for present technology. As a human living in a life support suit, Darth Vader is a cyborg. As a robot living in human skin, the Terminator is a cyborg. This definition is easy because it makes cyborgs a state of being always out of reach; however, it also makes the word doomed to obsolescence as we will inevitably one day create the cyborgs of science fiction dreams.

Gian-Cyborg Credit: Roberto Rizzato

The etymology of “cyborg” is Cybernetic + Organism. “Organism” is easy, but “cybernetics” isn’t. The word Cybernetics comes from the Greek word for steersman, kybernetes (controlling-governing), as in one who pilots a ship is a cyborg. The steersman controls the boat, ‘but the boat interacts with the steersman.’ They create a system, the steersman feeling the wind and the tilt of the boat, the boat responding to the steersman’s adjustments. Together, they become a cybernetic organism that is millennia old.

Cybernetics is a fuzzily defined academic study. Norbert Wiener founded Cybernetics as the study of ‘Control and communication in the animal or in the machine.’ Heinz von Foerster emphasized the word ‘circularity‘in describing cybernetics as a discipline, the feedback loop. Principia Cybernetica’s authors seek to narrow cybernetics to the search for general principles that govern complex, self-regulating systems.

The Earth is a cybernetic system, the organisms living on it modifying its environment, and the environment shaping the organisms in turn through natural selection. This makes evolution a cybernetic principle that explains the emergent complexity of the world around us.

We are each of us organisms. We are each of us complex systems of feedback and control. Are we therefore cyborgs at birth, before we have even supplemented our physiology with clothing to keep us warm?

Further Reading:

Oil Derrick with Statues Kneeling Before It Credit: skampy

Back in 2003, politicians told us the Iraq invasion would pay for itself with all the oil the country would produce, so much so that US Forces allowed looters to ransack three major Iraqi cultural institutions in Baghdad because they had to concentrate on protecting the National Ministry of Oil.

Then that didn’t happen. Instead, oil prices went up. So politicians tried giving the Oil Industry $18 Billion in tax cuts, hoping it would translate into lower gas prices for stressed out consumers.

Instead, it translated into world-record-breaking $40.6 Billion profits for ExxonMobile last year. Meanwhile, gas prices continued to regularly break all-time records, now at $4.00 a gallon at the time of my posting this.

Now politicians want us open our natural wonders to oil drilling. Why not? We’ve traded our National Security and pardoned oil companies from paying their fair share into our Democracy. Why not trade our forests, clean air and water, and health too? After all, drilling for oil has to lower gas prices, right?

Oklahoma Offshore Oil Production Credit: FreeWine

It’s possible that there is as much as 3.5 billion barrels of oil underneath the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve, almost enough oil to supply America for a half a year. Oil Reserves off the coast could supply America for 11 years, or they might not, since no one has ever drilled an exploratory well to find out. If the ban were lifted today, it would be six years before the first exploratory wells were drilled, and the “U.S. Department of Energy, estimated last year that opening the coasts to offshore drilling would have no significant impact on oil prices before 2030.”

Oil reserves in the Gulf give us an idea of what oil companies will claim to find when they do finally explore. In 2006, Chevron declared a major oil discovery in the Gulf that would increase American oil reserves by 50%, but further independent analysis was highly skeptical of the claim. Such claims always seem to pop up just as governments are preparing to vote on offshore drilling. Oil companies are doubly motivated to announce massive oil discoveries for the way such announcements make their stock prices skyrocket.

When Bush says “Drill! Drill! Drill!” oil prices go down. That’s because, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, “oil prices are determined on the international market, however, any impact on average wellhead prices is expected to be insignificant.” It’s all just speculation, completely out of our hands, but politicians have too much to gain from happy Oil Companies, who line their pockets with campaign contributions in return for the tax cuts and resource exploitation.

Grangemouth Oil Refinery by Night Credit: Bryan Burke

So we’ll give up our beaches, nature hikes, and clean air to keep getting our oil fix, and when this fails to bring down gas prices, the politicians will come back to us and ask for even more drastic measures. Of course we’ll acquiesce to them, because our immediate convenience is much more important than our children’s futures. As Roger Blanchard, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Northern Kentucky University, said, “It will be like burning the furniture to keep the house warm in mid-January.”

My pretty-much dead website waygate.com (which I’m not linking to because it’s got malware right now), where I was keeping an ever-expanding list of science links, hasn’t been updated in over six months. So it makes sense that I wouldn’t notice this has taken over it:

Waygate.com Hacked

There was a momentary “WHA!?!?” moment upon seeing this, but once I verified the hackers hadn’t taken down any of the other accounts I host, I calmed down, and thought about it.

How freakin’ cool is this???

They uploaded a 3kb “index.htm” file to the site, which my anti-virus software gives me a malware alert when I try to download it, and I get an error when I try to delete it. I’ve submitted a trouble ticket to my host, and leave it in their hands.

Apparently these guys are pretty good at this, as a search for “MazHaR_FasHisT” reveals:

Google Results for “MazHaR_FasHisT”

Maybe I should upset about this, but they haven’t done any real damage, and I get a glimpse of the artists at work.

Note: As someone who works in IT Security pointed out, these are probably not really Iranians.

“Have you ever dissected a stray cat Mr. Archer?” the old mad scientist grinned deviously at the man resembling a living Greek statue, currently bound to the cavern’s rock wall by a small army of spiderbots chain-linked around him.

“Another one of your sick childhood hobbies Doctor X?” Swift Archer jutted his substantial chin out defiantly.

The doctor shrugged, busying himself with the seemingly endless sea of electronics, levers, buttons, gauges, monitors, knobs, and wiring covering the cavern walls, “If you consider high school biology a ‘sick childhood hobby,’ then yes. You see, stray cats are fascinating animals, especially the feral one–those that are surviving wild in nature.”

The doctor looked to Archer for a moment, his maniacal expression and wide eyes contradicting his calm, reasoning tone, “They are quite unlike domesticated felines. House cats are healthy, pristine creatures, just like civilized humans, while feral cats are mangy and malnourished, their bodies infested with parasites and infections.”

“What’s your point doctor?” Archer flexed his huge muscles against his bonds, and the spiderbots contracted painfully in response. An escape plan was starting to form in his mind.

The doomsday device hummed to life and a female voice began counting down. Doctor X ambled in closer to Archer, savoring these last moments for planet Earth, “House cats that are lost in the wild and become feral. Do you think they lament their loss? Does it give them appreciation for all the conveniences modern science furnished them?”

Archer had it then. If he triggered the EMP device his technicians had built into his new wristwatch, it might short circuit the spiderbots binding his arms, creating a weak link in the chain, and allow him to break free. Then he would show this madman the meaning of justice. He just needed a few more seconds of distraction, “You know doctor, what cats and dogs think about has never been a topic of interest for me. Why don’t you elaborate?”

“Too busy playing football to ponder such philosophical conundrums no doubt,” Doctor X shook his head sadly. “I was trying to explain to you the method behind what you see as madness. Why I must take it all away from human civilization.

“Oh well,” Doctor X sighed, waving his arch nemesis off. “Spiderbots scramble.”

Archer had worked his thumb onto the watch, “Now you’ll feel the sting of just–hyurk!”

Archer vanished into a fine red mist, as Doctor X sauntered away to watch the fall of civilization.

“There should have been a Secretary of the Future.” – Kurt Vonnegut

Wired has a great article online covering their failed predictions from the past, which includes the death of brands and online song-sharing. One of their more ridiculous claims was that “futurism is dead.”

Far from dead, Futurism has merely become a more esoteric interest, but it’s something everyone should be concerned with. The Long Now Foundation seeks to find and encourage ways for humans to project where our species, environment, and culture will be 10,000 years from now. Dr. David Brin has called for Prediction Registries, which would not only allow the public to monitor predictions made by public figures and rate their accuracy, but would also legitimize the science of futurism, a science we desperately need in today’s world of runaway technology and unintended consequences.

Futurism and Prophecy are essentially the same thing, and should be held to the same standards. The Bible takes prophecy very seriously:

…when a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word which the LORD has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously, you need not be afraid of him. (Deuteronomy 18:22)

Which is funny, considering what poor futurists the Biblical prophets make. Jesus and Paul both predicted the world would end in their lifetimes. Christians have been predicting the world would end in their lifetimes for 2,000 years. Jews have been predicting a messiah will come for just as long plus a few centuries. I’m sure Islam has lots of poor predictions too, but I’m too lazy to look them up now.

Science makes predictions too. Science predicts when the eclipse will happen, when the Sun will set, when the planets will align, when the tides will rise and fall, and that it takes 365.25635 days for the Earth to go once around the Sun. Science predicts the watched pot will boil at 100 degrees Celsius, that the small stone will fall as fast as the large one, and that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Science predicts those cigarettes will increase your chances of getting lung cancer, those Big Macs will increase your chances of getting heart disease, and those soft drinks will increase your chances of developing type-II diabetes.

Science predicts the oil will run out, the greenhouse gases will warm our planet with disastrous results, and that we are changing our world environment in profound ways.

If you were to place a bet on the future at Long Bets, wouldn’t it make sense to side with the scientists? If schools of thought were rated, science would have the best prediction track record.

Posting this on the off-chance that there is an aspiring comic artist out there who might be interested in collaborating with an aspiring writer. I had found a fantastic cartoonist to work with me on this project, but, unfortunately, real life was making too many demands on his time, but this is our start.

The Safeguard is a mostly-comedic comic that will have a few, very dramatic issues after characters are established. It follows Nisha, Ziggy, and Arnis, three average people trying to play superheroes in the real world and dealing with issues of morality and seriousness of vigilantism, no matter how good the intentions. They battle Caleb, a teen who hasn’t figured out where he fits in, and decides to become the Safeguard’s arch-nemesis. Eventually, an amateur superhero fad takes place in the city.

The Safeguard is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

I’m giving this an open CC license. Take it, rewrite it, make money off it, anything you like. Please keep my name in the credits, and if you are serious, I’ll be happy to write additional issues or outline where this story is going.

Script for Issue 1 of The Safeguard in Microsoft Word Format: this version has pics of Ziggy’s yoga poses.

Script for Issue 1 of The Safeguard in Text Format

Here’s some character sketches from Robert Ricobaldi. Click on any for larger images. As much as I love these for capturing the way I envisioned the characters perfectly, artists are free to interpret the characters in their own ways:

The Safeguard – Most Detailed Concept Art

The Safeguard – Less Cartoony Headshots

The Safeguard – More Cartoony Headshots

The Safeguard – More Cartoony Version

The Safeguard – Full Page Spread

As a child, I was a master at chasing the ice cream man. I remember one time when that big white truck got a good four-block lead on me before I leapt outside in a pavlovian response to its musical tunes (I still salivate when I hear them). That time, the ice cream man let me chase him over a mile, clear into another neighborhood, before stopping to sell me $0.35 worth of sweet tarts. Although I was too young to care at the time, as an adult I look back on that experience and realize how degrading it was.

But no longer! The 2006 Discover article Born To Run explores the hypothesis that human beings evolved to be long-distance runners, allowing us to chase down big game, which could only flee across short distances at high bursts of speed.

I wasn’t some addict kid needing a sugar-fix, chasing after the ice cream truck!!! I was a lean, mean predator, following my primal instincts and running down my prey!!!

Screenshot of DaisyWorld Simulation Credit: GingerBooth.com

Long long ago in a galaxy far far away, there was a cold, gray planet named DaisyWorld orbiting a star much like our Sun. On this planet some aliens scientists sprinkled some seeds that produced only white and black daisies. The aliens were performing an experiment just like James Lovelock’s 1983 thought experiment, which might seem like a really big coincidence, but great minds think alike and there are over a hundred billion galaxies in the Universe and a hundred billion stars just in our own galaxy. So the odds are pretty good that somewhere out there this is a true story.

So could you please just play along for a moment? Thanks.

At first, only the black daisies could survive on this cold planet. Their black coloration allowed them to absorb sunlight as thermal energy, like leather car seats, keeping them warm through the harsh winters, while the white daisies reflected sunlight back into space, absorbing very little of the sun’s heat. DaisyWorld was almost completely covered in black daisies.

The heat absorbed by the black daisies was released to the rest of the planet, which began to heat up very slowly. Over… oh… let’s say a million years, DaisyWorld became warm enough for the white daisies to survive a little bit too.

(It should also be noted that these were special daisies that always reproduced perfectly every time, without mutation, which is why evolution and biodiversity aren’t included in this story to complicate things for us.)

Eventually, DaisyWorld got so warm that the black daisies’ ability to absorb sunlight as heat became deleterious to their survival, and they began to wilt. This left room for the white daisies to thrive, because they could keep cool by reflecting sunlight instead of absorbing it, and soon DaisyWorld was covered in white daisies.

But the white daisies didn’t absorb much sunlight as thermal energy, instead they reflected that light back into space, and in just a few million years, DaisyWorld got cold again.

Again the black daisies thrived, warming the planet, and then the white daisies, cooling it. Back and forth, back and forth, like a swing, DaisyWorld got hot and cold.

But, also like a swing left to swing on its own, each of DaisyWorld’s temperature extremes became less and less severe. Until eventually there was just the right number of black and white daisies to keep the planet at just the right temperature for all of them.

Then all the daisies lived happily ever after—or at least until an asteroid caused a mass extinction or their sun went supernova or the eventual heat death of the Universe.

Even the aliens were happy, because their experiment supported their hypothesis that biological and physical components of a planet form a complex interacting feedback system that maintains conditions in a preferred homeostasis.

The End.

See Also:

• ThinkQuest has a spiffy flash demo explaining DaisyWorld
• A collection of Graphs and Equations explaining DaisyWorld.
• GingerBooth has a DaisyWorld Simulation worth checking out.
• Another DaisyWorld Applet. This one much more complex.
• Also consider the feedback loop our CO₂ and methane emissions are producing on our planet with this video of the last 30 years of Arctic Ice disintegration. Ice reflects sunlight back to space like the white daisies, water absorbs sunlight as thermal energy: