Tens for the Tens: Fermi's Paradox

It is an odd thing that, for all we actually know, the Solar System could be teeming with life. OK, probably not intelligence life of the chimp- or dolphin-type, but we don't even know that for sure. In the 1970s, James Lovelock predicted that the Viking landers would not find life on Mars: the atmosphere is in chemical equilibrium and life is such a fundamental and integrated driver of planetological evolution that any planet that does possess life should posses it obviously. Life has certainly modified the environment on Earth profoundly. But we don't know that that level of impact is a universal. Life might thrive in redoubts - geothermally-heated aquifers or liquid droplets in clouds.

It now also seems that the Martian atmosphere is not precisely in chemical equilibrium: where is that methane coming from? And although we might dismiss the ambiguous results from Viking, we know that Mars was much wetter and warmer in the past. Maybe we really have detected the traces of nanobacteria in Martian meteorites. Perhaps life flourished briefly on Mars and that it has tenaciously maintained a tenuous grip for hundreds of millions or even billions of years. Perhaps the Mars Science Laboratory rover and, if they are ever funded, the Astrobiology Field Laboratory and ExoMars probes will provide evidence unambiguous enough to convince even the most hardened sceptic.

And then there are the mysterious spectra from the upper reaches of Venus's atmosphere. Certainly plenty of opportunity there for complex chemistry - as in the atmosphere of the gas giants and inside all those tidally heated moons: it is not just Europa and Enceladus. Consider Io. There are plenty of hot volatiles there. And do volatiles really need to be hot? What about Titan? Or even Mercury and the Moon. Volatiles in permanently shaded craters over planetological time might get buried, moved, heated (from above and below) and cooked. As on Mars, there could be redoubts on Mercury and the Moon.

Twenty years ago, when I was postgraduate astronomy student, we didn't even know whether there were any planets around other stars. Now we know of hundreds, none of them, as yet, very Earth-like or any of the planetary systems very Solar System-like. One of the interesting things about the Solar System is just how many different kinds of things there are in it. It is just such a pity that it is so difficult to get around the Solar System and that all you can do there are planetological field trips (well, perhaps there will be dolphin-analogues floating in the atmosphere of Saturn, but that is not one for the Tens). And the other planetary systems found so far have been quite different from the Solar Systems, full of exotic objects such as eccentric Jupiters, hot Neptunes and super-Earths. But it is likely that we will find terrestrial planets within the next decade, including ones in the so-called habitable zones. We might even learn something of composition of their atmospheres. Of course, for much for its existence the Earth did not have an oxygen-rich atmosphere, so we will have to look for other signatures (such as, perhaps, methane) as well. Even if we did discover a planet with an oxygen-rich atmosphere, I am sure the chemists would soon produce plausible scenarios for a non-biological origin of the gas. The only way of knowing for sure it is life would be go to there and see for ourselves and we aren't going to be doing that in the Tens. So by the end of the Tens, we might know there is life on Mars and have good evidence for it it, say, in the atmosphere of Venus (I doubt we will have had the chance to uncover lunar redoubts by then).

The main argument for our cosmic solitude is an extension of Lovelock's argument about Mars: the universe does not appear to be out of chemical equilibrium (and we don't see obvious evidence of large-scale engineering works): there seem to be no Kardashev Type II civilisations nearby or Type III ones in our light zone (but then we aren't really looking). Of course, that might be because life is rare or intelligent life is rare or technological civilisations are rare or interstellar travel is difficult or large-scale engineering works are expensive. Given Tens technology how far away from the Solar System could one detect our Tens civilisation (given that we are generally speaking not explicitly broadcasting - or narrowcasting - signals)? The best resolution to Fermi's Paradox is to assume that civilisations "go away" (or are made to "go away") either through a Singularity or some other existential event. I don't think that we are going to detecting the unmistakeable signal of early warning radars from one of the moons of 23 Librae b in the Tens, but pace Charlie in Accelerando, imagine discovering something weird in the signals from the active nuclei of distant galaxies - perhaps in their infrared or millimetre wave emissions. How frustrating to eavesdrop on heavily encrypted messages from the Forerunners, billions of years old.

Martin Harwit in Cosmic Discovery (1981) argues that there is a limit to how much we can know about the universe on information-theoretic grounds. There are only so many modalities that we can detect and there is only so much information that can be conveyed by each modality. Following Harwitt, we could detect signals consistent with biological processes from other planets, but we could never be sure how they had actually been produced. Clearly in the Solar System, we could go to the other planets if we wanted to, but this is not an option for planets in other systems. We are in rather philosophical (or theological) Dick Cheney/Karl Popper territory here - Known Unknowns (one could think of these issues as being undecidable within the system of the world to which one has access) Perhaps xenobiology/bioastronomy will become like string theory - something like that one believes in philosophically (or theologically) rather than scientifically.

The universe might be teeming with life. There might be all sorts of general principles that be derived from a comparative study of biological systems of different kinds (including systems of natural general intelligences). It is possible that such principles must remain forever necessarily unknowable to us. They are likely to remain unknowable to us through the Tens. Unless, of course, we stumbled on an Encyclopedia Galactica feed (not necessarily for our galaxy or epoch). We would I think be happy to have such a thing even if we hadn't been granted edit privileges.

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Tens for the Tens: Pakistan

There are eight declared nuclear states plus Israel. Of these nine, only one is a candidate for a failed state. (OK, OK, I don't suppose North Korea isn't a great place to live, but it does not appear to be a failed state. In fact, rather the opposite. Of course, that could change and change quickly. Which might not be a good thing if you live in Seoul, which is only about 20 miles south of the DMZ. As I understand it there are thousands of artillery pieces ready to rain shells down on Seoul at a moment's notice. Yes, North Korea is a candidate for the a Serbia - the source of the spark of the next world war- of the Tens.) Surely the only reason why Pakistan is allowed to have nuclear weapons is because the US intelligence knows the location and status of them at all times. Doesn't it? Doesn't it?

The US chose to invade Iraq, which didn't have a WMD programme and wasn't really a state sponsor of terrorism on any significant scale. The US chose to invade Afghanistan, which wasn't in a position to have a WMD programme even it wanted one, but was certainly happy to harbour terrorists. Iran on the other hand does have a WMD programme and is a major state sponsor of terrorism. Given the US's performance in Baghdad, it is perhaps as well that didn't go to Tehran in the Noughties. But give that there is likely to be a Republican president in either 2012 or 2016, it is quite likely that the US - and the UK and what other bits of the Coalition of the Willing can be cobbled together - will be doing what Real Men do and going to Tehran - and Islamabad in the Tens.

The borders between Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan are more or less as arbitrary as they are porous to the populations that live there. The remit of Islamabad barely runs in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, especially North Waziristan and South Waziristan, and the United States is unable or unwilling to do much to help. Osama bin Laden disappeared in to the tunnels of Tora Bora in 2001 and it has to be assumed that he was of more value to the US as a (probably) living (if impotent) bogeyman than as a corpse or problematic future martyr in US custody.

The future of the world might hinge on a rugged hills of South-West Asia. The concerns of the Pakistani military, intelligence and political elites might be more focussed on a symmetrical standoff with arch-rival India than fighting a proxy war for the US against recalcitrant tribespeople. Pakistan was founded as a Muslim state in 1947 and the US has reaped what it sowed through its encouragement of militant, fundamentalist Islam as an ideological weapon with which to beat the Soviets in Central Asia. If India does become the new China in the Tens, the tension between a vibrant, democratic, multicultural nascent superpower and repressive, kleptocratic, fundamentalist candidate failed state might lead Pakistan to increasing desperate adventures in sponsoring terrorism in India and some in the military might prefer a honorable fight with the old enemy (with the insidious hope of glorious and unexpected victory or at least the manevolent consolation of a smoldering Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore) to constant corrosion and slow decay.

Pulled, pushed and prodded two ways, something might give in Pakistan. That give might lead to a nuclear warhead inbound for Kolkata or on a container ship to Seattle. Perhaps Web of Everything-type technology will eventually give the US a decisive enough advantage over the indigenous irregulars. Perhaps the West will be able to devise innovation solutions that resolve the issue - economic, political, social and cultural - faced by the people in the region. But something needs to be done. It is all too easy to imagine US and UK conscripts fighting and dying in the hills of Baluchistan and the North West Frontier Province in an unending war in a decade's time.

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Tens for the Tens: Web of Everything

I remember when I used to work near Farringdon/Chancery Lane and I used to get the 341 back to Waterloo (in the end, it turned out to be easier to get the Hammersmith and City Line from Farriingdon to Goldhawk Road and then the 237, but that is besides the point). Sometimes, I would see some random hole in the ground and I would think to myself "I wonder what that is going to be?" as well as the inevitable corollary "What used to be there?" Clearly what was needed was some kind of smartdust. Each mote after it has been scattered would think to itself "Where am I?" This it would determine by triangulation from other motes (so you would need a reasonable number of them as the range of their radios in transmit mode presumably would not be very far) and location reference nodes that incorporate (satellite) positioning system functionality, perhaps incorporated into mobile phone basestations. Once the mote knows where it is, it then has to find what is there. This might require some kind of smart search functionality. "I am at Latitude 51.5162 degrees North, 0.1092 degrees West. That means I am on somewhere along Fetter Lane, close to 110 Fetter Lane. And, yes, I can see from the satellite data that I am in fact near an eleven story office block with 29 courtrooms and judicial accommodation that has been built on the site of what was called Rolls House from 1961 to 2007 and before that Geraldine House, where from 1920 to 1961, the Daily Mirror lived through its glory years." So when I was passing on the bus I could issue a query and find out just what it was I was going past.

You don't need NMT for smartdust. We already have nanoradios. The motes don't have to particularly small and in fact might benefit from not being (to contain an energy source - battery, capacitor or fuel cell)  and will be manufactured using more or less off-the-shelf electronic component fabrication techniques at a cost of, perhaps, a few dollars per mote and sold to organisations like utility companies that might want a few thousands or tens of thousands for their needs.

I know what you are thinking. "You don't need smartdust for that, just a location-based lookup table on a server." Indeed. Of course, it is a good thing to migrate the intelligence to the edge of the network. But the motes do lots of other things beside serving up gobbets of psychogeographical trivia. Which is why IBM and HP and Cisco are interested in this kind of technology and Cisco signed an agreement with Imperial College to work together on Planetary Skin, regardless of whether the consortium that Imperial was part of was awarded the EIT Climate KIC. Now, Cisco want to sell switches and HP and IBM servers (and consultancy). The kinds of sensors will be installed in the first wave of the Web of Everything will mostly be quite different to my motes. And what they will doing is generating massive amounts of data - temperature, humidity, pressure, rainfall, water depth, water velocity, water quality, strain, anything and everything you can think for the different kinds of sensors in pavements, roads, railways, rivers, storm drains, sanitary sewers, etc, etc.

Thanks to Moore's Law, we are likely to have the raw computing power to handle all that data. And maybe we need AGI-like tools to mine the unexpected out of it. Of course, it won't just be the big IT companies and the world's leading science universities who will benefit from the Web of Everything. Never again will we have to worry about having left the gas on and attach an RFID to your glasses (in 2019? Won't be all be on smart contacts by then?) and never again will you mislay them under the sofa.

But, of course, if people are going to be randomly scattering smart dust around our cities and countryside, it is going to be the security and intelligence apparatus that is the major stakeholders. There are obvious privacy concerns from having universally accessible smart motes - with audiovisual functionality that some of them would certainly offer - just lying around everywhere. So they will be strongly regulated. And if smartdust is outlawed, only outlaws - and the security and intelligence apparatus - will have smart dust. The Tens could see the end of privacy, destroyed the mote in the spy's eye (public or strictly private).

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