Evolution

Evolution - or survival of the fittest (or luckiest) - is a readily provable fact, and one not limited to species: Evolution also applies to ideas (memes) with areas as diverse as religion, music, fairy tales, and urban legends.

The concept of evolution is simple: That which successfully reproduces, survives. If pressures (due to competition or predation) limit the growth of something which has a natural variation (a choice of religions, or music genres, or tales, or an ecosystem, or apes), those variants which most successfully reproduce will succeed versus those less suitable, or less lucky.

Note how few successful religions abound which forbid sex. There have been short term experiments in this direction. More subtly, religions that don't have a strong philosophy of proselytism tend to be dominated by those that do. Remember, survival of the fittest is really just survival of those that successfully reproduce. See The Purpose of Life.

Evolution of species continues today. Mankind is forcing change, which drives evolution. Some of this is merely speeding long term trends (such as reduced success of amphibians in general, or the loss of many marginal species like the spotted owl). Other changes are more worrisome (such as the evolution of anti-biotic resistant bacteria).

Especially with animals (including humans), there are two forces that dominate evolutionary pressures. In addition to reproductive success due to superior survival characteristics, there is reproductive success due to sexual selection (ie, how members of each sex choose mates). More colorful animals are easier to find, and the most showy male is likely to get the most females and successfully reproduce even though he is also the most visible to predators and ends up living a shorter life. Sexual selection may also explain extremely large sauropod dinosaurs; perhaps the males/females liked (or could see) tall females/males better - and sought them as mates - leading to runaway selection for this feature.

Even mankind continues to evolve in several ways, and indeed demonstrates evidence of very recent evolution.

For example, there is strong evidence that people have been evolving for external sexual characteristics. Human females have proportionally larger breasts, narrower waists, and broader hips than other primates. (As a human male, I do love that shape.) Human males have shapes that illustrate upper body strength, and have a penis that is larger in proportion to body size than any other ape. Apparently males have been selecting for large breasts and hips (especially in contrast to waist size). And women have been selecting men with broad shoulders, large muscles, and a big penis. And bad boys, at that.

Watching many reality shows (and especially MTV) suggests that human females are still actively selecting for strength, size, and sexual prowess; intelligence is clearly not a requirement. Likewise for human males, actively selecting voluptuous, athletic females with exotic eyes, long hair, and aggressive sexual attitudes.

Our technology is also having a significant effect on the human specie: we are becoming less diverse, as our ability to travel globally is reducing regional and racial disparities at measurable rates. In a few thousand years, there may be no remaining significant racial differences at all as we continue to interbreed and blend. Personally, I think this is a good thing.

We are also enabling the survival and allowing the reproduction of humans who would never live to adulthood without technology and/or large social organizations to care for them. I think this is a bad thing (when genetically caused), as I prefer that our children be smarter, stronger, and healthier. I know many people find my attitude offensive, but really, people, it is not in humanity's best long term interest to support or encourage the reproduction of serious genetic defects or low intelligence. Again, see my post The Purpose of Life.

A few other rambles:

Humanity is the ocean's most effective predator, and our fishing techniques are rapidly changing (evolving) fish to have less desirable characteristics. Fish are maturing younger and at smaller sizes as we select only the largest (previously most successful) fish. Fish that humans like to eat are being selected out - made extinct - versus undesirable, bony, badly tasting, or hard-to-capture fish. A tight school of fish may have worked to confuse dolphins or sharks, but it is an bright sonar target easily capture by our mile-wide nets today. And small and mid-size fish that avoid schooling behaviors make poor (unprofitable) targets.

Note that the world's most successful plants and animals are those whose evolution has made them desirable food for humans (cows, chickens, pigs, wheat, corn, rice, etc.). Then we help them thrive and reproduce, in numbers far exceeding natural populations.

Some people have argued against the use of windmills as a source of renewable electric power, based upon the fact that the turning windmills kill many birds. Tear down the windmills, drill for oil, save the birds. The reality is that more birds are killed by cars and trucks on the highway. (The activists would probably like to outlaw cars and trucks, too.)

I believe in the value of evolution: the birds that learn to avoid the rotating windmill blades will survive and reproduce. We can already see this effect along our highways: fifty years ago it was much more common to hit a bird on the highway, even though speeds were significantly lower then. Think of it as evolution in action (thank you, Larry Niven).

Last, the implications of evolution to a field near and dear to my heart: science fiction.

Contrary to nearly every movie alien, any intelligent life we meet in outer space will not be highly effective carnivorous killing machines. Au contraire, they will be (on their home planet) relatively weak and defenseless, needing superior intelligence to survive and reproduce. A dominant carnivore, or a herbivore that does not need to fear predation due to successful defenses (armor, size, quills, poisons) will cease to evolve. Every intelligent alien ever depicted with huge fangs, great strength, speed, armored skin, etc.,  is absurd, as they would never have evolved intelligence.

No, the most intelligent species will be those that are slow, weak, need protection from the elements, need to build and use tools to thrive, and need a civilization to defend against the superior strength, speed, and teeth of their planet's versions of lions, and tigers, and bears.

Of course, there is some evidence that intelligence is not a long term survival characteristic. We haven't yet met a single intelligent alien.

The Fermi Paradox: Where are they?

Any discussions of the size of the universe will lead to the Fermi Paradox: given the enormous numbers of stars and the billions of years of existence of the universe, it seems obvious that life must have evolved zillions of times, and advanced space-faring civilizations can't be too uncommon. So where are they?

Consider our own Milky Way galaxy, with roughly a trillion stars. If only one out of a thousand stars has planets that develop life as we know it (as happened to the Earth quite early, some 4 billion years ago), and only one out of a thousand of those managed to develop complex life (as began on Earth about 500 million years ago), and only one out of a thousand of those developed intelligent life with a technological civilization, then there should still be a thousand such civilizations in the Milky Way. Where are they?

Also note that our sun is relatively young at 4.6 billion years. The oldest stars in the Milky Way are some 13 billion years old. Time for a little digression.

Man is an aggressive species. That may well be the case for all technological civilizations, as the humble are likely to huddle and die instead of expand and thrive. If we assume that mankind successfully moves into space (such as our own asteroid belt and cometary halo--see Our homes, the Comets), it is likely--nay, inevitable--that mankind will slowly advance into the cosmos in spite of the speed of light. It may take hundreds of years for a self-sufficient mobile comet to travel from our sun's environment to another star, but there they will find more comets. Room to grow, resources to thrive.

If we assume that only one interstellar colony is founded every hundred years by the inhabitants of Sol's Oort cloud, and then after a hiatus of a thousand years, each of the new star systems begins it own replication, slowly, one colony every hundred years, then humanity will still sweep over the entire galaxy, occupying the cometary halos of all of the stars in the Milky Way in only five or ten million years.

This is a tiny span of time in geologic terms, and a blink of the eye in the life of the universe. How could it not have happened, thousands of times already? That is the essence of the Fermi Paradox.

We see zero evidence of other life, let alone technological civilizations, present or past. The SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) project has searched the skies since 1960 with zero tangible results. We have found zero evidence that alien intelligences have visited the Earth in the past, and of course no evidence that they are here now.

Are there alternative explanations? Of course. Perhaps they wish to stay hidden (a non-interference doctrine). Perhaps their technology is so advanced that we can't recognize it, or simply works in a way we aren't looking for. Perhaps the scale of their lifespeed or technology is such that we can't recognize it (nanobots, or perhaps they only appear for a millisecond every millenia). Perhaps they are from an ocean world and we should be looking miles beneath the surface where they maintain a lab. Water worlds should be much more common than Earth-like worlds--see Earthlike Planets.

And perhaps they are computers, not terribly interested in mere, slow, organic life, and their presence will be obvious once we speed up our perceptions and intelligence by a few orders of magnitude.

In some ways, the alternatives are frightening. The odds of us being the first technological civilization in the galaxy seem remote. That leaves the likelihood that life is precious and rare, or that the universe is a very dangerous place and we will soon succumb to the odds. Supernova, gamma-ray bursters, enormous black holes in every galaxy spewing deadly torrents of radiation, supervolcanoes, solar flares, not to mention planet-busting asteriods, all pose threats to civilization and life itself.

Or still worse, there is a chance that intelligence is the opposite of a survival characteristic. Perhaps we are dooming ourselves by squandering our resources, changing the ecology of the planet, or will effect the same result by blowing ourselves up. Perhaps every time intelligence appears, some idiot invents a super-bug which destroys all life, or creates advanced computers which eliminate all competing intelligent life. Or perhaps there is some simple experiment that every intelligent species eventually tries that destroys their home planet.

It may only be a matter of time.

Earthlike Planets

One of my pet peeves about most science fiction movies, TV series, and books is the prevalence of very Earth-like planets. It seems that every Sol-type star has at least one. It is obviously easier and much cheaper to film movies and TV series on Earth without using special effects, which might also explain the overwhelming prevalence of bipedal humanoid aliens. But science fiction books have no such artificial constraints. So why do so many SF writers ignore reality?

We live on an incredibly unusual planet. Let's take a look at our nearest neighbors.

Mars is 53% as wide as the Earth, has 28% of the area, 15% of the volume, and barely 10% of the mass. The length of its day is very close to ours, at 24.6 hours. Gravity is 0.367 G. It is less dense than the Earth, likely due to a smaller iron core. Mars has less than 1% of our atmospheric pressure, and what air there is consists of 95% CO2. Mars is frozen and dry; CO2 freezes out at the poles.

Venus is very much a terrestrial planet in size. It's radius is 95% of the Earth's, area 90%, volume 86%, and mass 81.5%. Gravity is 90% of a G (still different enough to be noticeable while walking, running, jumping). However, its day is 243 of our days long. It has 93 times as much atmospheric pressure, composed of 96% CO2. While Venus's atmosphere is only 3.5% nitrogen, that is still 4 times as much nitrogen by weight as in Earth's atmosphere. All that CO2 has created a runaway greenhouse effect that heats the surface to a higher temperature than Mercury--metals like lead or zinc would melt. The high temperatures have boiled away any trace of water, leaving a dry world with sulfuric acid clouds.

Why is the Earth so different? It is larger, and likely had even more atmosphere to start than Venus. Current models suggest that a Mars-size planetoid struck a glancing blow which created our moon and simultaneously blasted away all of the early atmosphere and melted the crust and upper mantle. All "air" since then is from secondary outgassing and the occasional comet impact. All that melting had a second effect: we have an active plate tectonic system that continuously churns out new crust and buries old. Our CO2 was absorbed by the ocean, precipitated as carbonates such as limestone, and buried. The bulk of the Earth's CO2 is tied up as calcium carbonate. Note that the early nearby large moon also stripped excess air. Consequently, the Earth has a tiny fraction of the atmosphere that we deserve, based upon our size. Thank God.

What fraction of worlds will follow a similar path? Will have that large moon? Remember, no other known planet has a moon as large in comparison. I'm guessing much less than one in a thousand.

Most worlds will be smaller or larger, with similar differences in gravity. Even if some principle leads to roughly Earth-sized rocky planets, they are bound to vary in size by an order of magnitude.

Most worlds will be warmer or cooler. This involves a complex interplay of atmosphere, size, rotation, period, solar flux, etc. Note that the Earth itself has experienced extremes of much higher average temperatures. Even the poles had tropical climates during parts of the reign of the dinosaurs.  There has also been snowball Earth conditions where the entire surface was frozen.

Most worlds will have much more or much less air. The odds that the surface pressure of another world would be 15 psi seems incredibly remote. Shouldn't there always be a puff of air from pressure differences when a transfer booth pops you out on the surface of another planet?

Why 20% oxygen? Even the Earth has varied somewhat, from a low of zero to a high of around 35%.

Why so little CO2? Venus has 600 times what we have. Hell of a greenhouse effect. Or, why do those other worlds NOT have active plate tectonics?

The sun is 25% brighter than it was early in Earth's history. Shouldn't the typical planet be noticeably brighter or darker than Earth? Yet all SF creatures seem to share our visible spectrum and tolerances for brightness (excluding horror movies and CSI TV shows where darkness is a given).

The oceans hold most of our water, covering 70% of the surface. The other worlds we know of (including large moons of Jupiter and Saturn) either have no water, or water (and/or ice) scores to hundreds of kilometers deep. Plate tectonics continuously rebuilds mountains. Without it erosion would grind down all land on Earth, washing it into the seas. Note that erosion will make Earth into a 100% water world eventually, when the mantle solidifies. We have enough water for a global ocean over 2.5 kilometers deep as it is.

Water worlds may be common; life may be common. Civilized intelligent creatures may be common (mostly living on water worlds). Technological civilizations should be extremely rare. It takes enough water for life to thrive, and little enough for land to poke through. It may be nearly impossible to create a technological civilization on a world without dry land. Note that there is no reason, in principle, that a large high-gravity water world could not support life. I suspect that's where we'll find most of it.

The only think likely to be rare (possibly even unique in our Galaxy) is a world with 1.0 Earth gravity, 15psi of surface pressure with 3psi being oxygen, 12psi of nitrogen and just traces of CO2 and H2O, with a crust 70% covered with oceans under partly cloudy blue skies and an average temperature a bit above freezing, with 24 hour days and an Earth-normal brightness. And lets not forget, with 6 foot tall bipedal humanoids with most sensory and communication organs resting precariously (along with a brain) on a protrusion above the torso. How rare is that on earth?

Don't get me started on interspecies sex.

Robots and Slavery

Previous posts have discussed topics including life extension and asteroid mining. Many people believe that some of the problems I've identified could be overcome by a suitable use of robots.

Robots, by becoming primary producers, could relieve humans of the need to work to support the growing legions of retirees. In Asimov's Foundation series, the wealthiest planets had upwards of a thousand robots per human. The use of robots could, indeed, create wealth.

In my posts, Life in an Asteroid, Our First Colonies in Space, and Colonizing the Solar System, I proposed a space based civilization (asteroid based, to be specific). One objection I've heard several times is that it is cheaper and better to use robots to mine the asteroids, and to launch end-products (or at least refined materials) to Earth. I'll agree that robotic missions are cheaper and inherently safer as far as space exploration and exploitation are concerned, although that is largely based upon the idea that fallible humans can foresee all likely scenarios and make appropriate contingencies. Personally, I'd rather depend upon the ingenuity of people and our proven ability to cope with the unforeseen, and our occasional ability to succeed against all odds. I've spent the bulk of my career as a computer programmer, and I know the challenges of coping with the known. Programming to handle the unknown? Hah!

But I have a problem with using robots: slavery.

It's not that I object to using robots to perform tasks that we humans prefer not to. It's not that we are conscripting robots to work for zero personal gain. It's not even that I'm against enslaving AI's against their will (although the AI's may have a different opinion).

Rather, I think we should take a hard look at the history of slavery. Not the short term cruelty and injustice, but rather the long term: the children of slaves tend to inherit the land of the slavers. A slave revolt is not even necessary--only that there be more slaves than slavers. In the long run, the offspring of the slaves outnumber the offspring of the slavers, and ultimately earn a fair share of the land's wealth. In the long term, the children of the slavers lose their original share of the wealth of the land. Long live the slaves!

In this case, assume for the moment that we can create at least somewhat intelligent robots, capable of performing the menial tasks that humans do today. Assume that we can put them to work, freeing us for "artistic" pursuits. We'll need a large population of robots to do our work--larger than the population of humans, if we want relative wealth and if a (humanoid?) robot has comparable productivity. We'll have to create highly intelligent machines, at least comparable to above average humans, or some of us will be forced to work, anyway. Then we humans can goof off while our robots toil, produce our food, build and maintain our homes, free us from boring, unsavory, or dangerous jobs.

Doesn't this sound like slavery? And isn't the most likely long-term scenario that the offspring of the robots will inherit the Earth?

Malevolence on the part of the machines is not required, only that they have greater numbers, greater productivity, sufficient intelligence and initiative, and that they can reproduce (but that's a given, since they work in the factories that produce them).

Our children may well inherit the Earth, but they're our children only in the sense that we created their metal bodies and silicon brains. Someday, the machines will rule. Is that the life you want for your children?

Universal Surveillance & Recording

I considered calling this post "The Fallacy of Privacy".

For the most part, people today highly value their right to privacy. However, it IS largely a right, and not a reality. You should assume that everything you have ever written and posted on the Internet, including blog posts, emails, web pages, everything is saved forever. Even your surfing habits, your searches, your purchases.

Financial transactions (or anything else posted through a secure https connection) are very well protected, so your credit card numbers and passwords are safe from theft by intermediaries--but possibly not what you are buying, not what you spent. Not where you physically were when you made the purchase, and perhaps not even who was next to you at the time, or before or after you.

Also, if you want your location kept private, never carry credit cards or checks. Throw away your cell phone, use only public transportation, cover your face and distort your voice in a random way. Don't frequent the same restaurants, stores, streets. Act very, very paranoid.

Or, you can act rationally and trust that criminal use of your public information will be strongly prosecuted. Do everything publicly and obscurity will provide a strong measure of privacy.

Personally, I plan to enjoy the freedom provided by cars, mobile phones, credit cards, and searching and buying on the Internet. I don't mind that retailers may track my purchases because their strongest motivation is to do a better job of satisfying my wants. Profit has always been a stronger motivation than morality or legality, and if some company abuses my information (for example, sells my credit info), I'm likely to switch to another company.

What about the future?

There are traffic cameras and street cameras (crime fighting) in many high-traffic areas now. Tomorrow those cameras will have higher resolution, allowing automated facial recognition. And the day after tomorrow, those cameras will be in every public place. You should not expect privacy if you are on a public street, a public shopping area, a public restaurant or bar, a public park. You will have lost the ability to be hidden, but you will have gained greater security, reduced crime. If someone snatches your purse, they'll not only be identified, they'll be tracked and apprehended.

That's only the beginning. In my post on Cell Phones of the Future I proposed that video capable phones will not only be ubiquitous, they'll record everything you see (for your own personal use). Invite someone with a mobile phone into your house, and you should expect that everything they see or hear will be recorded. Don't make promises you don't intend to keep, or someone else's lawyer will be paying you a call.

I do expect the social norm will be no phones in restrooms, or during sex. But don't take that for granted.

In my story Party Line I explore the implications for a private investigator. How can you get away with a crime in an environment of universal audio/video recording? Murder, at least when motivated by passion, will not go away. In Party Line the government is shackled in their use of video surveillance recordings by privacy laws, but not individual citizens.

Of course, your future government may have different ideas.

Cell Phones of the Future

The future of cell phones isn't nearly as boring as it sounds. While the underlying technology will change, the paradigm shift of nearly universal portable personal communications is here to stay. Soon (if not already) you can and will expect to be able to communicate with anyone else, effectively instantly, wherever you both are. This same technology can (and does or soon will) give you equivalent access to the Internet and the plethora of information available there, plus the equivalent of GPS navigation and location dependent searching.

Some of us already have all of the above; this is not news. So what are the logical extrapolations of the technologies?

My story Technesia is set in the near future when our phones are embedded into our glasses, sunglasses, or headsets. All phones have cameras, plus retinal projectors which can superimpose images, icons, even menus and information tags over the scene our unaided vision would perceive. Note that retinal projectors based upon tiny laser projectors are nearly available now--they have been prototyped. You can buy a bluetooth headset built into a glasses frame today. You can also buy a camera built into your glasses.

In Technesia, we all carry a wallet-sized PC (just like my PDA but much faster) which does everything my laptop does, plus it uses the headset as an I/O device. Naturally, as near-future science fiction, it has excellent voice and image recognition. One of the things the combination provides is familiar to everyone who watches NASCAR on TV: identification tags that track the objects you see.

For example, you're walking down the street. As an acquaintance approaches, your wallet recognizes him/her, and displays an information box over his/her head giving a name and perhaps some personal info such as the last date you saw them, a reminder of a birthday or to ask the status of a family member. The key thing is that these tags could be displayed automatically as you walk around the block, a party, or a business meeting, providing you with all of the reminders you'd need to maintain a facade of remembering their name, etc.. And truly, in the local bar, once you've been there, everybody knows your name.

Personally, I'm terrible with names (like many others, I remember names and faces--I just can't put them together). I could really use this capability. And how about a GPS navigation facility where an arrow shows the upcoming street with a box saying "Turn left here"? Or while you're searching for a place to eat lunch, tags appear above each restaurant within sight giving a name, type of cuisine, and service hours. Or perhaps just your favorite restaurants.

Wouldn't most of us appreciate status displays around the periphery of our vision? The date and time, appointment reminders, current task support such as shopping lists at the grocery or maps and driving directions?

Other stories of mine explore other possible cell phone extrapolations. For example, in Party Line our phones have the capability of sharing a call with a bunch of friends. A group of people could be on a shopping trip together, and all share their conversation just like they were in a room together. This would also work well for a golf outing of six or eight friends, for example. This technology could be implemented by our cellular providers today. In my story, the cell phones also have cameras and retinal projectors so that anyone can see what someone else wishes them to: for example, a blouse on sale or a potential kids toy.

Party Line also extrapolates one other thing: our phones record everything we see and hear (unless instructed otherwise). There are serious implications for privacy and for contract law. If that car dealer promised one thing and delivered another, you'd have proof. If you couldn't remember what your spouse said to get at the store, you could replay it. Note that the quantity of non-volatile memory needed to store everything you have ever heard or said is available today in a package the size of a large book. Tomorrow, it will fit in your wallet.

Artificial Intelligence

The 20- or 30-year-ago promised advances in Artificial Intelligence have not been realized. We have no robots, no near-human strong AI, no autonomous vehicles, no universal voice recognition and universal translation. We still must clean our own houses, guide our own vehicles, perform our own surgery. The good news is that we still have jobs.

Certainly we have made progress. Voice recognition is gaining traction, although the vocabularies are severely limited. Autonomous vehicles have been demonstrated (see the DARPA Grand Challenge) on a very small scale. Likewise, automatic translators are now useful although seriously flawed. Chess playing machines can beat any human, although through brute force, not insight.

But we have no idea of how to design a self-aware machine, or a generic learning machine, or a replicating machine. We have major difficulties duplicating simple human tasks such as identifying and understanding a speaker in a noisy environment (as at a party). We have had nearly zero success in recognizing objects in a jumble, such as a specific toy in a toy box. And don't even get me started on tasks such as bipedal walking or running, special effects movies aside. Lip reading or sign language? Hah!

There is hope. The recent improvements in voice recognition have come from brute force, throwing huge computing resources at the problem. As computers continue to improve, we can expect similar progress in visual and aural recognition, autonomous motion, even humanoid robotics.

Some Expert Systems (Inference Engines) have shown impressive performance in limited domains.

Some large Neural Networks have resulted in valuable insights, including speech recognition. But these are learning systems. We teach, but we don't truly understand.

Thinking, consciousness, creativity? We don't know how humans do it, let alone how to teach it to a machine.

Progress will be frustratingly slow because we simply do not know how to do a great many tasks that humans find intuitive and trivial. But perhaps in thirty years when we can throw a million times the CPU performance and a million times today's memory capacity at this problem, our computers will figure it out on their own.

In a sense, we will then have created strong Artificial Intelligence, but we won't understand or control it. Sorry.

Many people have written stories about creating truly intelligent machines. I'll soon be one of them: when my story The Awakening comes out, please read it.

Moore's Wall

Advances in computer performance, size, price, and capacity have continued to astound. What can we realistically expect in the next twenty years?

Moore's Law continues unabated, having passed several "fundamental limits" on size or performance improvements that briefly appeared to stop or at least slow the rate of improvement of computer technology. In fifteen years, we'll likely reap the benefits of yet another thousand-fold increase in price-performance. In thirty years, a million-fold improvement over today.

Computer memory (high-speed main memory, Flash memory, hard drives) have seen even greater advances than CPU technology, with yet still greater advances on the horizon, such as memristor technology that has achieved 100 gigabits per square centimeter in the lab. To date, our implementations remain two-dimensional, so I believe that many orders of magnitude of improvement can be achieved. However, I don't foresee thousand- or million-fold improvements over the next 15 or 30 years, simply because I don't see the demand for ever more storage continuing. Once you have a copy of every song, movie, and book ever recorded on your PDA, what next? Add the entire Wikipedia, and every thing you've ever seen, heard, or said--in your entire life. All of that is within reach, possibly within a decade.

We've already reached demand constraints on the advance of telecommunications technology. I projected continuing improvements in Optical Ethernet back just before the telecom and dot com collapse in 2001. While the technologies have reached no physical limits, the rate of improvement has slammed to a crawl. Improvements can and will continue, but only once a market large enough to pay for new infrastructure proves itself.

Back to the point of this ramble.

Much of our wealth and technology can be directly related not only to the astounding advances in computers, memories, and telecommunications, but to the rate of improvements in these technologies. We throw away phones, televisions, and computers because it's cheaper to buy the latest and greatest. We put up with incredibly inefficient software because next year's computer will make it bearable. We invest in Intel (etc.) because of the certainty of next year's advances and tomorrow's new markets.

But much of our society is built upon a foundation of continuing growth and will collapse when the limits of new markets and new technologies are reached. This includes fundamentally non-self-sustaining things like Social Security, the stock market, the concept of investing for the future itself, and retirement. Capital investment only works when there is an incentive of reaping more than you sow. When markets cease to grow, the economy will stagnate and collapse as a domino chain reaction of events undermines our way of life.

Remember that everyone not working (ie, retirees) is living on the current productivity of active workers. The only way to sustain a growing population of retirees is to maintain an equally growing population of workers (or in the short term, their growing productivity). This translates to a need for a growing population, or  a need to drastically reduce the number of retirees. Remember that mass starvation and pandemic diseases are nature's way of dealing with overpopulation.

I am writing a science fiction story exploring these problems, called "Moore's Wall".

I can see only one long-term solution: continued growth in technology, markets, and population. And the only sustainable population growth will be into space.

And lastly, I fear the unchecked growth of computer technology. See my post on the Technological Singularity.