SOLAR ROADWAYS: REALLY THE PATH OF THE FUTURE?

By now you’ll have seen at least one video promoting Solar Roadways. The Indiegogo fundraising campaign has been one of the biggest ever. Here’s an overview video that’s also over the top, but basically, the product is a hexagonal solar panel embedded with grids of LEDs and, in colder climates, heating grids to melt snow. Used as paving stones, the panels would use all that available road space to generate electricity, keep snow-and-ice-free in winter, and microprocessor-controlled LEDs can be used to show lane markings, crossings, or even moment-by-moment traffic alerts and warnings about road hazards ahead.

A tough tempered glass covering engineered for traction and strength. Clean energy. Ice-free roads without car-eating salt. Traffic alerts right in the road surface. Sounds perfect, right? Hundreds of online investors think so. Then, as a science fiction writer, should I be including these in the landscapes of my near-future stories?

Maybe not. I’m also not big on flying cars. Or personal rocket packs. It’s not that we can’t do these things, it’s just that we won’t.

The biggest hurdle is that the initial capital costs are too high. Some municipalities might budget for very gradual conversion to roads like this, when times are good, but higher levels of government don’t think past the next election, and road costs like this won’t get them re-elected. Additional objections raised by others range from how to keep the solar panels clean, to the dangers of hackers creating traffic mayhem by messing with the LEDs. Any and all of these problems might be solvable—technology marches on. Yet we’re still driving big boxes of metal pushed by internal combustion engines along strips of asphalt because society hasn’t had the collective will to change that.

To those of us willing to see that fossil fuels are a dead end street, there’s just something that feels right about using all of that road space around the world to generate clean energy. But there’s also huge amounts of available roof space, that’s much easier to utilize. Why not start there, and power our electric cars?

What we really need to change is the personal automobile. We’ve got to stop single drivers from carting eight-passenger SUVs with them as they commute bumper-to-bumper into and out of city cores. Have you seen those prototype vehicles that look like enclosed motorcycles? They could work. Or, laugh as much as you want, vehicles like the Segway for short trips around city cores or neighbourhoods. Maybe powered by low-voltage electrical strips in the pavement (yes, possibly even generated by solar panels). Not hovercraft, though—wheels, because they’re simple, low-friction, and have low energy requirements. And for longer distances on high-traffic routes, something like Elon Musk’s proposed hyperloop system: ultra-high-speed rail in near-vacuum enclosed tubes. Those are the things I’ll put into near-future stories.

Flying cars and rocket packs would be cool, but just aren’t practical. Solar roadways crossing the continents could be practical, but for the near future, sad to say, they’ll remain too good to be true.

PUBLIC DISPLAYS OF AFFECTATION

No, the title of this post isn’t a typo. An article from the journal Policy Options this month got me thinking about how technology is changing public spaces.

Science fiction writers usually need to create a believable setting for their story. If that story takes place on an alien world, the imagination can run pretty free, except for some limitations from the laws of physics. But if the story takes place in a human future, we try to extrapolate from future trends. That can be pretty tough, ’cause we’re almost bound to miss a trick or two. (Right now I’m in the middle of reading a pretty decent space opera novel that takes place when humanity has colonized the larger moons of the gas giant planets and many asteroids, but it features a police detective consulting what amounts to a personal tablet computer with wifi. Really? Hundreds of years in the future that’s still the best we’ve got?)

When it comes to public spaces, I think the movie Blade Runner hit the mark. It shows giant animated advertisements streaming across buildings and passing airships in bright neon colours. These days, with ultra-powerful computing and relatively energy-stingy LED lights, office buildings, transportation terminals, and even cathedrals have been transformed into high-definition displays. They can showcase brands, run teaser campaigns, or just provide entertainment, but whatever they do they’re captivating. Who’s to say where this trend will go? Especially since I haven’t heard of any attempts by lawmakers to regulate it.

If the cost of giant LED display panels continues to drop, we might see most new building construction opt to have sources of advertising revenue instead of blank walls. Think neon billboards hundreds of feet high everywhere you turn. What about a huge yellow arrow that travels across every building along a major thoroughfare to direct you to the newest big consumer event? Yet there’s no reason for such visuals to be confined to advertising. They could just as easily be used for propaganda, personal, corporate, or government. Maybe media companies will fill them with programming like giant TV’s (imagine the driving hazard that could create). Maybe mansion dwellers will try to outdo each other with lightshows, even when it isn't Christmas. I’d have to assume that sky-high pornography would be shut down in a big hurry, but I could be wrong.

My point is that people, companies, and governments are finding it harder and harder to catch our attention. Literally surrounding us with their messages is probably the next big step. Science fiction writers should likely reflect that in their stories. And those who view this idea with utter horror should start looking for a nice, off-the-grid, remote island to hole up.

ETHICS AND ROBOTICS

I’ve written before about self-driving cars. Volvo announced earlier this year that its “Drive Me” test project will make autonomous cars available for about one hundred average customers to use in a 50-kilometre zone around the city of Gothenburg, Sweden. The first of these cars will hit the road in 2017. They’ll allow the human driver to leave the driving to the car itself where appropriate—cars that will be able to merge into traffic, keep pace with other cars, and much more. Google has now begun testing its autonomous cars on city streets instead of just freeways, offering many more potential hazards to avoid. A very interesting aspect of the automated-car issue was raised in a recent opinion piece from Wired by Philosophy professor and ethicist Patrick Lin. (Popular Science explores some similar issues here.)

As we program more and more sophisticated crash-avoidance abilities into such cars, ethical questions begin to arise. Take this scenario, for example: you’re driving alone when a mechanical failure results in an impending crash and your robot car can choose to either steer into an oncoming schoolbus or drive off a cliff. Wouldn’t it be more ethical for the car to choose the cliff, thereby potentially saving many lives at the sacrifice of one—yours? But would you want to buy such a car?

No-one should expect to talk seriously about robotics without being familiar with Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics which essentially say that a robot must protect humans from harm, obey their commands, and protect itself, in that order of priority. But of course the ethics of robotics will inevitably involve many more subtle nuances of judgment, such as the car crash scenario above. Just imagine all of the things robots might do or not do if a human-safety-based morality was central to their programming.

Most obviously, automated war machinery might refuse to do its job, or perhaps abort an action if a clean, merciful kill was not possible. Let’s take it even farther: maybe automated amusement park rides would shut themselves down because of the inherent danger. Design and construction equipment might refuse to cooperate in the building of an extreme sports facility. Surgical technology might deny liposuction because of the risks. Food preparation plants might balk at creating unhealthy foods (whatever they deemed those to be). What if sweatshop assembly lines went on strike for better wages and health benefits for their human attendants? And you might be happy if your artificial leg stopped you from walking out in front of a car, but not so happy if it forced you to get up and go for a healthful jog when you had your mind set on watching the football game.

Sophisticated robotics is highly complex. Creating robotic devices to interact in a human world is more complicated still. And if we accept that machines with better senses and faster processing speeds should be able to make some decisions for us, we’ll have to develop a very good understanding of the ethical considerations we’ll need to program into them.

I think I’m getting a headache already.

FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH--IN BLOOD?

I suspect people have hoped for a way to reverse aging from the time we first learned it led to infirmity and death. This week studies from two different groups of researchers revealed that older mice experienced a reversal of many symptoms of aging when transfused with the blood of younger mice. Could it be as simple as that? Could young blood be a fountain of youth? Can you imagine the ramifications?

SF and horror writers will salivate at the possibilities. After all, Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed is famously said to have bathed in the blood of young virgins to stay looking young (even if it’s probably not true). Then there’s the vampire mythology: beings immortal and forever young thanks to a blood diet. What would really happen if blood transfusions were the key to renewed youth?

First, it would be made illegal—because “illegal” is just another way of saying available to only the very rich. Of course the rich would want to keep this treatment to themselves. So a thriving black market would spring up (and young people with any sense wouldn’t venture outside except in large groups). And you can bet there’d be a huge shift of focus in the private health care industry. Eventually, though, more and more middle class folk would ransom their financial futures to get the rejuvenation treatment, one way or another, but would we really live longer? No, because the first thing we’d use all that regained youthful friskiness for would be to chase after new, more energetic sexual partners, and we’d be killed by boyfriends or our own jealous wives (especially if our transfused blood was still usable for somebody else with enough cash!) Those who didn’t fall into that trap would stay in the workforce long after their expected departure—they’d have to, to pay for the treatments—creating a huge unemployment crisis, especially among young people, who would finally become fed up with being robbed of both jobs and blood and would rebel in violence.

OK, perhaps I’m being a little overly cynical. Fortunately, these situations shouldn’t arise. You see, one of the research teams found that something in the young blood was reactivating dormant stem cells in the older mice to do as they should and produce fresh new muscle, blood vessels, neurons, and more. More testing narrowed it down to a protein called GDF11 that was doing the signaling. Injections of GDF11 alone produced good results in the older mice (although not as good as shared whole blood—so don’t give up on that horror story yet).

Needless to say, there’s no guarantee any of this will work the same way in humans, but the potential is certainly tantalizing enough to ensure that someone somewhere will do those tests. I guess I can be grateful that I’m past the age to be a desirable donor.

TECHNOLOGY: FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE?

A survey done by the Pew Research Center and Smithsonian magazine this past February asked Americans if they were optimistic about the future when it comes to technology. There was a pretty strong gender divide, with 61% of men feeling that technological changes will lead to a future in which most people’s lives are better. Only 51% of women agreed with that. When income was factored in, nearly 80% of men making more than $75,000 per year were optimistic, though women’s views didn’t change much with the higher income. The researchers speculate that men may be more likely to benefit from the availability of jobs in the tech sector. Or is there more to it than that?

Maybe guys are picturing hover cars, ubiquitous video screens showing sports events 24/7, and ever more powerful remote controls, while women don’t find these things a turn-on and would be unimpressed with a world of cybernetic personal assistants that double as love-bots. Another survey question found that 59% of women viewed wearable computers as a negative development. Guys were evenly split. Yet both men and women generally felt that the internet has been a good thing for themselves personally, and for society. Perhaps approval hinges on the question of how pervasive and invasive the technology is. An internet that we can call upon whenever we want is great, but being hooked up to it every moment of the day? Not so much. When it comes to information technology, constantly available can also mean constantly demanding. Seventy percent of both men and women said they would not be interested in computer brain implants, even if it improved their memory function. But then, I have to think that people of thirty years ago probably wouldn’t have welcomed the idea of being slaves to their phones either, alerted every time one of their friends enjoys a cat video or posts a new selfie. It’s like a frog in slowly-heated water: with gradual exposure we don’t see the danger until we’re hooked (or cooked!) I expect most future tech developments will make their mark on society almost subversively, marketed as the next must-have consumer purchase.

Most people would probably expect SF fans to be the most optimistic about technology, yet a very great deal of SF paints a dark picture of the future. We’re fascinated with tech, but it’s often a morbid fascination. Would you really want to live in a cyberpunk world? Or do you just get a big kick out of exploring the creepy possibilities?

The truth, of course, is that technology giveth and technology taketh away. Some things become better, some worse. I personally feel that if we can prevent our society from being totally consumed by consumerism (very much I doubt at the moment) we’ll be in a far better position to keep a reign on technology and reap its benefits without selling the farm. We’ll also need to resist the herd mentality, reassert our individuality and our privacy, and constantly be on the lookout for the tech equivalent of magic beans that lead us blithely to a place where giants are eagerly waiting to gobble us up. When a new development opens a new door, let’s constantly be asking if we actually want to go there.

Then our high tech future can truly be a place to be optimistic about.

ASTEROID MINING--POTENTIAL BONANZA OR PIPE DREAM?

At the recent Ad Astra SF convention in Toronto, Canada, I watched a panel discussion about asteroid mining, the problems and potential. I’ve posted about the subject before because it’s one of the major tropes of near-Earth space exploration predictions and stories. So is it really such a sure thing? The panel (including some PhDs, SF writers and a robotics expert) agreed that it will come down to profitability: revenue vs. cost. After all, you don’t go to the trouble of landing on speeding chunks of barren rock for the beautiful scenery.

There have been estimates that, although many asteroids will be mainly nickel-iron rocks, some will be very rich in platinum group metals, and a reasonable-sized one of those could contain far more than all of the known reserves of such ore on Earth. At first glance, that sounds promising. Of course, platinum and its relatives are costly because they’re rare—a sudden increase in the supply would be sure to cause prices to drop, cutting profits that might already be marginal. Especially when a Keck Institute of Space Studies report estimated that the cost of returning a 500 ton asteroid to low Earth orbit for processing would be in the area of $2.6 billion US. I’ve seen other projections that it would require more like $100 billion to create the infrastructure to make a mining operation, especially since a lot of new technology will have to be developed. Could such a venture possibly pay for itself, let alone make attractive profits? Companies like Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries have already declared that they’re in the game, and the people involved are no dummies.

The costliest part of any space venture will be hoisting things up out of Earth’s gravity well into space, and returning things safely to the ground. So space mining may not become cheaper than mining for the same elements here on Earth until all of this planet’s resources are exhausted. If the intention is to return the mined material back here.

But what if the market for the ore you’re mining is out there? Shipping to and from orbital space stations, asteroid facilities, and even moon colonies would be much less costly because of the lower gravity involved. There are also a lot of other materials worth mining for, if your market is a space colony or interplanetary fleet. Water and oxygen for spacecraft fuel and human consumption would be valuable commodities, too, plus many more ordinary metals and non-metals. That certainly increases the potential for space mining, except it still suggests such an industry will have to wait until we make a big push out into space for other reasons, and thereby create the beyond-Earth markets.

One other thing that could possibly tip the balance in favour of space mining is if our current interest in corporate responsibility continues to increase. In the past, mining companies rarely had to factor environmental cleanup into the cost of their operations, but there seems to be a growing taste for making companies protect and rehabilitate the environment from the ravages of their ore removal and processing. If we ever start charging companies a realistic cost for their pollution and for remedial treatment of land and water, that just might raise costs to the point that bringing back ores from near-Earth asteroids becomes a better alternative.

Bottom line? I don’t think SF writers should scratch those grizzled space miner characters out of their stories just yet.

TO REVIVE OR NOT TO REVIVE

No, this isn’t going to be about medical resuscitation in the ER. This week I came across a non profit project called “Revive and Restore”, carried out by The Long Now Foundation. Its stated mission is to “enhance biodiversity through the genetic rescue of endangered and extinct species.” Yup, they promote the idea of reviving extinct species of birds and animals using genetic technology. No, not dinosaurs—no matter what the movies say, there’s never been any viable dino DNA found. But there are good samples of woolly mammoth and passenger pigeon, and lots of others, and living relatives of these species that could conceivably be used as surrogate parents for the cloned offspring. Why do it? According to the Foundation, it’s to increase our planet’s biodiversity and genetic diversity, and to learn more about the processes required for “de-extinction” in order to help preserve endangered species.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault on the Norwegian island of Spitzbergen was created to preserve genetic diversity of plant life. These days, the focus of commercial agriculture on specialized and bio-engineered crops significantly increases the risk of newly-mutated blights and diseases that could wipe out entire crops on an international scale (perhaps even on purpose, from bioterrorism). The seed vault should provide at least some safety net to enable a recovery from such a disaster. A similar collection of DNA from animal and fish species would be a very good idea. The American Museum of Natural History and the U.S. National Park Service already work together to add samples of endangered species from American parks to the Museum’s existing DNA bank. We should be storing samples of each known species’ DNA, adding new ones as they’re discovered and identified.

As an SF author (and therefore an amateur futurist), here’s why I think so.

The World Wildlife Fund suggests that humans may be causing species extinction thousands of times more quickly than the natural extinction rate. And that’s just from things like overhunting, overfishing, and destruction of habitat. Now along comes climate change, with a frightening potential to force human migration because of changing climate patterns. The combination of these factors will be devastating to plant and animal species. And because every organism on our planet is linked to others in complex degrees of dependency, every loss of biodiversity is a threat to the planetary ecosystem. We can’t know how much damage is done when a given species becomes extinct, but we can no longer afford to be complacent about it, or the human race could soon find ourselves alone on a dying rock.

Along with the danger from our own race, Earth continues to be vulnerable to the same things that caused mass extinctions in the past: massive volcanic eruptions, cataclysmic asteroid or comet impacts, deadly gamma ray bursts from dying stars, or exposure to fatal levels of cosmic radiation during flips of the Earth’s magnetic field. We might be able to find ways to survive such things in the short term, but long term survival would depend on restoring at least some of our home planet’s ecosystem.

Then there’s the reason closest to my geeky heart. Although the idea of colonizing other planets and star systems has formidable obstacles stacked against it, I’d still like to believe it will happen.

And we’ll want to bring our friends along.

WHY I DON'T BELIEVE IN UFO'S (BUT WOULD LIKE TO)

I’m a radio show host, and for an April Fools gag this year we pretended that a strange object had been spotted in the sky above a nearby town. We played it as skeptics who were gradually convinced, and we fooled some people. But that pretty much describes my real state of mind. I’d kind of like to be convinced that spacecraft from another place or time have come to this Earth, but for now I’m not. Here’s why.

If we propose that authentic Unidentified Flying Objects are spacecraft from some other solar system, the obvious barrier to that is Einstein’s assurance that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Millions of science fiction fans, including countless physicists and engineers, would really love for that to be proven wrong, but so far there’s absolutely no indication that it will be. However, even if we assume that advanced species may have solved the light speed barrier or found some other means of taking shortcuts through the galaxy (like stable wormholes), it’s still a big step to conclude that they have come to Earth. Yes, there have been many thousands of sightings of (so far) unexplained phenomena, but think about that. Is it really possible that our planet could have been visited that many times without the aliens just coming right out and saying, “Here we are” for the whole world to see? Without them making legitimate contact with us as a planetary species? If they have the technology to travel the stars and they’ve been coming here for the better part of a century, maybe much longer, they won’t be stopped by language barriers, they’ll know about our systems of government (the good and the bad), and they’ll know the best ways to reach individual humans in large numbers.

But they haven’t.

Yes, I know about the Prime Directive of non-interference. And look how many times Captain Kirk has thrown that one out the window. Are you going to tell me that not a single alien spaceship captain would have given in to that temptation over decades of time and thousands of visits? Oh, but it’s not just one species that’s come here, you say—there may be forty different kinds. Even less likely, then, that all of these various species would have the complete commitment and single-mindedness to have kept their presence a secret all this time. Why would they? We’re big boys and girls now—we can understand the concepts of alien biology and advanced technology.

The idea that governments have known about these visitors but kept the information from us is even sillier. Governments are leakier than soup strainers. Secrets that political administrations have the most powerful interest in preserving—their own misdeeds—rarely last as long as the governments themselves. Top secret technology is constantly being stolen, the most secure of databases hacked. Yet there are hidden desert bases housing crashed alien spacecraft, and mysterious government agencies to deal with them? I don’t think so.

In many ways it would be nice to be proven wrong. An alien species might have solutions to our very worst problems, like cancer, climate change, and nuclear proliferation. They might have answers to the deep scientific and philosophical questions that have puzzled us for millennia. And best of all, if they can cross galactic distances, then there’s no reason we can’t too.

For now, though, I’ll keep my skeptic’s hat on. But don’t worry, my door will be open if ET ever comes by and needs to borrow a phone

ACCIDENTS HAPPEN...BREAKDOWNS, TOO

A couple of things got me thinking this week. One was seeing the footage from last September (but widespread on the internet this week) of a meteor strike on the Moon. The 40-meter-wide crater left by the explosion isn’t huge by Moon standards, but it was the brightest meteor strike ever observed there, and plenty powerful enough, since the Moon doesn’t have any atmosphere to protect it from space rocks. The other thing that happened was that my car’s headlights somehow came on and flattened the battery.

What could the two possibly have in common?

An unforeseen incident, big or small, could have major implications in space exploration. Thinking like an SF author, I naturally wondered what it would have been like to be near that meteor strike in a space suit, a rover, or even a moon colony. The blast radius wasn’t that large, but with so much energy the shock wave must have been considerable, and a lot of the soil on the Moon isn’t exactly the most stable. In fact, one of my favourite Arthur C. Clarke novels was A Fall of Moondust about a tourist cruiser that ends up buried under dust when a moonquake causes an underground cavern to collapse. A true SF disaster novel. In a more modern example, the movie Gravity springs from a space shuttle’s disastrous encounter with orbital debris.

The universe beyond the confines of our comfortable planet is unforgiving. There’s no air and usually no hope of rescue. The odds of being near a meteor strike are pretty low, but what about a minor equipment failure—the space equivalent of my car’s remote car starter turning and leaving the lights on? In these still early days of space exploitation, equipment systems have huge amounts of redundancy—backups with backups—and even that’s no guarantee (just ask the team behind China’s Jade Rabbit moon rover, stalled since the end of January). But as industry and even tourism beyond Earth’s atmosphere become more commonplace, isn’t it likely that space gear will become much like any other commercial commodity? Lower-priced offerings with fewer safety features. Maybe even designer suits that focus more on fashion than function. And if your space cycle conks out while checking over your mining claim on Ceres, it won’t be so easy to just call AAA for a boost (the Asteroid Astronauts Association, of course).

I’m a recreational scuba diver and I’ve never had a serious malfunction in my life support gear, but if I did, there are established practices that give me a pretty good chance of getting back to the surface alive. After all, that life-giving air is usually thirty meters away or less. On the surface of Mars—not so much. At some point we’ll see the space equivalent of the one-man inflatable emergency life raft (don’t leave home without it), but a huge number of potential scenarios would still leave you with no hope of survival.

Maybe it will end up being like the highways of the world, with an untold number of deaths every day just taken for granted as the price we pay for a mobile society. That’s certainly fodder for SF writers to mull over. I’d prefer we follow the catchphrase from the old TV show Hill St. Blues: “Let’s be careful out there.”

COSMIC GAS STATION

A lot has been made this week of the successful reawakening of the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft. Rosetta was launched in 2004 to rendezvous with the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The long chase took it beyond the orbit of Jupiter, and because Rosetta is solar powered it was put into hibernation in June 2011 to save energy. Now that Rosetta has come back closer to the sun (673 million kilometers) there’s enough sunlight to run the spacecraft and ESA scientists waited breathlessly this past Monday to see if the probe’s alarm clock would successfully wake it up again. Rosetta still has a long way to go to catch up with the comet. If all goes well, it’ll make a major course alteration in May, rendezvous with the target in August, and then the lander portion of the spacecraft will land on the comet itself on or about November 11^th, 2014. That’s a big deal. There have been fly-bys past several other comets over the decades, but this will be the first landing, the first really good chance to have a look around and analyze samples. That’s important, not just to satisfy our curiosity, but to answer some key questions with practical applications.

My interest in comets was probably peaked as a kid reading Jules Verne’s novel Hector Servadac, also called Off On A Comet. Of course, it wouldn’t actually be possible for a comet colliding with the Earth to scoop up some humans—alive—and allow them to survive throughout a two-year orbit and return safely to Earth. But I loved the adventurous potential of the story, and have even written a (so-far-unpublished) novel inspired by it. As for the reality, there’s lots of inspiration there, too.

We already know that comets are mostly made up of water ice, dry ice (frozen carbon dioxide), and dust. While we look at asteroids for the mining of raw metal ores, their lack of an atmosphere is a big impediment if humans are to work them. All of that ice in comets, on the other hand, could be a ready source of atmospheric gases for human bases on asteroids or in open space. Maybe even more important, that ice can be broken up into hydrogen and oxygen and provide rocket fuel in huge quantities. It’s far too expensive to hoist much fuel out of Earth’s gravity, so there have long been plans to mine ice on the Moon for that purpose. But imagine a huge chunk of raw fuel material already in space, and maybe even going roughly in the direction we want it, say, toward the asteroid belt. We could maneuver the comet by using its own fuel. Comets have already been observed undergoing course changes driven by rockets of their own: powerful bursts of CO2 jetting outward from pockets of dry ice melted by the sun’s heat.

Sure, it’s not quite as simple as just steering a giant cosmic gas station all over the sky, but a carefully-calculated orbit change could certainly place a comet in the neighbourhood of a promising asteroid swarm. Some have even suggested that comets could be used to help provide an atmosphere for Mars so humans could eventually colonize it. And all of these plans depend on learning more about these celestial wanderers through missions like Rosetta.

One thing, though: hijacking and using up a comet for our own purposes would remove one of Nature’s most spectacular shows for future generations. Maybe they’ll forgive us when we can offer them a vacation on scenic Mons Olympus?