What is the Future of Pseudoscience?

“We live in an age of information, it is said again and again. But that doesn’t mean we live in an age of good information” ~ Rebecca Rosen

The above quote nicely sums up where we are right now. We need better ways of analyzing the veracity and integrity of the multitudes of information we meet with everyday in greater quantity. Skeptical readers perusing the Internet try, and often fail—not that it’s a bad thing, it only shows their human—to separate the good information from the bad information; the good science from the bad science; and the meaningful statistics from the meaningless statistics. This paradigm, of needing to verify and to fact-check everything, is going to change soon. Some time ago, I had the clever little thought—I don’t have many so I have to cherish them—that one day soon, someone will invent, or create, the Universal Fact Checker (UFC), most likely, as a browser plugin (an app for your browser that performs a task). Recently, something similar has been created, but I’ll get to explaining that shortly. First, I want to explain what I think the UFC will be. I envision it as an artificial intelligence (AI) that scours what you read informing you of dubious, false, or outdated claims, providing instant fact-checking on the spot—just as Fact Check does for US politicians; just like medicine does to snakes oilmen; and what science does to non-science. The key difference being is that it is with you at all times at the point of contact, as you absorb new information. You will not have to seek it out, or even to remember to seek it out, it will just be there karate-chopping bullshit in the face, like Penn & Teller, but, always there. Let’s face it, how many of us spot-check everything we learn? Not a single one of us. There simply isn’t enough time to do so even if you wanted to, and even if you had to. In such scenarios that we are in almost every day, the logical solution is not to accept it as fate, but to invent a technology that alleviates the problem—inability to check and retain every piece of information provided to us—and performs the necessary tasks orders of magnitude better than we could.

How Might It Work?

Picture this: imagine you’re reading some pseudoscientist’s take on autism, intelligent design, theistic evolution, quantum healing, or whatever other woo you can shake a scientific stick at, but never makes it goes away (as not everyone will read it, or even have the scientific training to understand it) but, as you browse and absorb, your trusty little UFC scours ahead, subjecting every word, statistic, number, sentence, and paragraph on the page against empirical, peer-reviewed science and academic works highlighting the paragraphs that profess false certainties or provide dubious claims. In other words, MMA’ing the hell out of pseudoscience (I had to put a bad pun in somewhere). Only the strongest claims—evidence-based claims—will survive; what we would otherwise call good science; which is, what we would otherwise call—for lack of a better word—the truth.

Consider an example: (1) A website details the increase in autism rates in the last several decades (true). (2) It then goes on to say vaccines contain thimerosal (partially true). (3) It, then, continues on to say that since thimerosal contains the neurotoxin mercury (true), comes to the conclusion: (4) vaccines cause autism (false). So, how might the UFC access such a claim?

(1) The first section, after having been UFC-assessed, remains untouched because there really has been an uptick in autism rates. Though, if you happen to hover your mouse over it, you will be informed that much of the uptick has been due to a redefinition of autism, and, doctors becoming more aware of autism, thereby, increasingly diagnosing it instead of the condition going unseen or misdiagnosed. So, it is quite likely that the uptick in autism rates is not really an uptick at all, but merely, properly accounting for it for the first time, though still comparing it to the previous underestimated counts. (Of course, it will also tell you that it is a hypothesis, the leading hypothesis, but still not decidedly proven, yet far in advance of any other leading hypothesis.)

(2) The second section being somewhat factually based, is highlighted in orange. As a curious observer you, again, hover your mouse over the highlighted paragraph and a side-bar appears informing you that thimerosal was removed from vaccines by the summer of 2001, excepting the flu and tetanus shots. So, the statement, being as it is a generalization, has tried to lull you into a false certainty—and in this case, failed. You become slightly more suspicious of everything else the article professes to know.

(3) You move on to the third section, and notice that, it too, is highlighted in orange, with a sidebar informing you that methyl-mercury is a neurotoxin, but it (methyl-mercury) is not found in those few vaccines that still contain thimerosal (or any vaccine that ever contained thimerosal), as mercury in thimerosal is bound as an organic ethyl-mercury; it thereby being rendered impotent and easily filtered out by your kidneys, and, therefore, cannot be a neurotoxin. Your suspicions continue to increase.

(4) The fourth section, you’ve now noticed, is highlighted in red as the conclusion does not follow the logic deductively, but rather, inductively, and even then, in a series of inductive leaps with no evidential threads to support the leap from one to the next, so it’s closer to say that they are purely imaginative leaps. The sidebar will inform you that studies looking for any causal thread, which have cumulatively looked at millions of children, have found not even a simple correlative example between thimerosal (or vaccines in general) and autism, or any other disorder. It will tell you that in studies that looked at vaccinated and non-vaccinated kids, they have the same rates of autism, but overall, vaccinated kids get less sick. You now close the webpage and never visit the website again.

Ramifications

Now, wouldn’t that be a sight. Every creationist, anti-vaxxer, homeopathic, quantum healing, feng-shui, talking-to-the-dead website would be littered in orange and red paragraphs. The websites of the Thinking Mom’s Revolution; of Joe Mercola; of Natural News; of Age of Autism; of Reasonable Faith; of Answers in Genesis would become virtual ghost-towns, almost overnight (well, so the theory goes). They will cry foul, they will bitch, they will whine, and complain about being censored, and that it is all a conspiracy to keep the truth from you, because of course, only they have it. Some will listen, I hope most don’t. It will be true, their future babble about censorship, that is. But it will be censorship by good science, and since good science is what nature has regarded as true, it will be censorship by nature, or as I prefer to call it, the universe. (When people refer to nature, they refer to the insignificant speck of dust that is the Earth, but the Universe is where the action is at.) Michael Specter said it best in his book Denialism: “What can be understood and reliably repeated by experiment is what nature regarded as true.” Indeed, there will be a conspiracy, there will be censorship, but, it will be imposed by nature, and therein shall we find the truth.

I’ve meant to write this post for some months, but never got around to it. I finally did so after reading two interesting articles in close succession: one in The Atlantic by Rebecca Rosen, Is It Journalism, or Just a Repackaged Press Release? Here’s a Tool to Help You Find Out, and the other on the open-source science journal PLOS ONE titled, Text Mining Effectively Scores and Ranks the Literature for Improving Chemical-Gene-Disease Curation at the Comparative Toxicogenomics Database. (I highly recommend you read both before continuing, but if you don’t have time to read the articles, I will summarize—inadequately I might add, so read them.)

The first is a tool, named Churnalism, and it has been created to identify plagiarism in the media. It will allow users to submit or post articles and have the language checked against press releases, Fortune 500 companies, and government sources. This will help the would-be reader separate the wheat from the chaff, the original from the copied, and the reportage from the self-congratulatory, and subjective, press release. You’ll have front-row seats as the reportage, reporters, blogs, and online media without integrity fall to the wayside. In short, it is a simple way to instantly check the integrity of those whom we trust with reporting the truth. This tool has the potential to cull those with false pretenses. (You can even install it as a browser plugin so it automatically identifies those articles that have plagiarized. Just as I hope the UFC will do one day—hopefully soon.)

The second is yet another tool created to serve a specific need performing a different, though equally important, task (at least for scientists, though if it helps them, it helps us all). There are thousands of scientific studies being published every day. (The open database, PubMed, alone publishes a new study every minute, and there is, perhaps, 50 million studies published somewhere.) No scientist can keep up with it, though it doesn’t stop them from trying. But, an inordinate amount of time is wasted weeding out non-relevant studies. If scientists could find a reliable way to accurately and quickly accomplish that task, it would, well, free up more time for them to do more science. So, a few scientists created a sophisticated algorithm that read through 15,000 papers going back to 1926 on metal toxicology and, using inputted indicators of article relevancy, novel data content, interaction yield rate, mean average precision, and biological and toxicological interpretability (you don’t need to know what these means) was able to, 85% of the time, rank the studies accurately in their relevance so that precious research time (and PHD students) could be focused towards those studies most conducive to their ends. Now, that is cool! (Also useful, but cool invariably comes first.)

What’s Next?

As I made the case earlier, this seems to be the beginnings of the left-hook out of left-field that pseudo-scientists will receive, and, hopefully, a lot sooner than many expect. These two programs, pieces of information technology, will not sit around unused and stagnant; others will take it, play with it, evolve it, and twist it to new purposes, and I hope one of those gifted folks turns it full-force towards the elimination of pseudoscience. Nothing is more relevant today than removing the influence of pseudoscientific jibber-jabber from the discourse we should be having on vaccines, nutrition, more importantly climate change and biotechnology, and perhaps even economics and politics. I can see no barriers to its implementation (aside from cost, which, as I’ll explain in a few paragraphs, is only a short-term problem).

I’m sure, by now, that most people know about IBM’s Watson beating two human opponents (the two best human opponents I might add) in Jeopardy; a game based on the nuance of human language. Watson, an AI, was able to deconstruct the language, understand grammar and syntax in the context of a question, and probabilistically match it to information it ascertained from Wikipedia. (That is, it wasn’t trained to play the game and had to figure out the answers all on its own in a similar manner to how our brains work.) Watch this video to see just how formidable Watson is (4-minutes long). You’ll even see most of the time that when Watson is beaten to the punch that he had the correct answer as well. Watson is now being trained as a medical assistant, and will be most instrumental in analyzing the totality of medical research and new studies coming out every day that a doctor could not hope to keep up with, and helping said doctor in correctly diagnosing patients reducing errors and cost, increasing health, and improving lives along the way. Watson, the fact checker, could be, in a few years, capable of the reasoning in our vaccine example above, if not already. And if IBM is this far, then other companies aren’t far behind. In fact, Ray Kurzweil, the futurist, is working to fully develop a personal, super-intelligent, and always online virtual assistant at Google that can read and understand the semantic content of the web at large. At that point, it will be possible that you’ll no longer have to search for stuff. You’ll just ask questions instead and empirically relevant, sound answers will be displayed. (Perhaps, this explains why Google is moving into hardware: Google Glass, self-driving cars, and the takeover of Motorola. No search results when you ask a question, but that is merely uninformed speculation.)

Benefits

Instead of searching for when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, where you may have several moon-landing-was-a-hoax results on the first page, you’ll only get the real, empirical answer: July 20th, 1969 alongside a photo of him, you know, actually standing on the moon.

Instead of spending long hours trying to research vaccine safety, where, as a non-medical professional, you can’t tell who’s giving you sound advice and who isn’t; and where, subsequently, a lot of good information is mixed, and lost in, a mountain of bad information, you’ll simply ask: “Is the DPT vaccine safe for my child?” The unambiguous answer will be yes, linking to the multitude of peer-reviewed studies (and only peer-reviewed) on the subject as well as, perhaps, explaining the pro’s and con’s of the quality of the studies, their methodology, any biases, statistical significance, and so forth. It will do this, perhaps, while also showing you the statistical advantage and risk-benefit analysis of not vaccinating your child, so that you may make your decision within the full context of available information bypassing your human heuristics that often ignores several important factors in valuing and acting on information.

Instead of having to filter through creationist babble about when and how the Universe was created, instead, you’ll ask “When and how did the Universe come into being?” The answer will be: “13.82 billion years ago. This data was ascertained with help from the Kepler and Hubble space telescopes, from WMAP, experiments in particle accelerators etc etc etc, and the best-supported hypothesis of creation at this time is a quantum energy fluctuation that instantiated itself into a system of net-energy zero that then forced negative space to expand to compensate for the positive energy instantiation, so that the system (Universe) remained at net zero energy.” (Of course, the super-intelligent machine will find a way to say this, or whatever the correct answer is, if it has changed or been refined, in a far more precise and succinct way than I have.)

But, where will these answers come from? From empirical, peer-reviewed research of course. From the hard and soft sciences, from academia, from open-source journals, and the avalanche of historic data just sitting around drawers waiting to be digitized, analyzed, and parsed through.

While the scenario I provided above—the autism example—is probably not going to happen for some years; for it takes an immense amount of computation and advanced algorithms. While these exist, they are supremely expensive, and considering that the UFC would be most useful as a free plugin—just as I have the churnalism plugin in my Chrome browser that automatically warns me if plagiarism is found—there is, as yet, no profit motive. (However, the profit motive is only necessary when the technologies are expensive. As they get cheaper, it will no longer be necessary.) But, because technology, particularly information technology (IT), is so awesome, it’s only a matter of time before it becomes cheap enough. (As IT’s price-performance per constant-dollar roughly doubles every year like clockwork. Therefore, in 10 years, the technology will be 1000 times more powerful while costing the same, adjusted for inflation, as now.) It’s only a matter of time before it is cheap enough.

Bye-Bye Pseudoscience

Mark the calendar friends, Churnalism and the Science Text-Miner are only the first step. When the UFC arrives, it will come out of the gate swinging. At first, it will be simple, but it will iterate quickly and quicker until it encroaches upon, enveloping and suffocating, all the fields of pseudoscience, and real science will win. How could good science not win? It offers unlimited expansion, untold benefits, improves our lives in a very real way, and—again, for lack of a better word—has the good manners of being true. Pseudoscience appeals only to our vanity and ego and little more, it can only win in an environment where it is not selected against, such as the current (and past) environment where only a small percentage of the population are scientifically trained, but as soon as the tools of skepticism become available to one and all, it will be relegated to the dustbin of history, a future bedtime story told to kids who understand that having bad, non, or no science is as scary as the bogey monster now is to many… (If you doubt the sincerity of that statement, as I’m sure many will, then I invite you to move back to the Rift Valley in Africa and live without the benefits that observation, replication, and innovation have bought us, and which have resulted in the tools of our survival and eventual ascendancy. Those tools, which have bought us prolonged healthy life, increased food production, clean water, reduced infant and maternal mortality, and this webpage did not come easy. Billions worked, and died, for them so that we may be where we are now. See how long you last without shelter, tools, binoculars, night-vision, vaccines, weaponry, clothes, wheels, and, most importantly, fire.)

Timeframe

Impossible to say, but, it is only a matter of time. There is nothing forbidding it, our AI’s today are quite powerful, and information technology is getting cheaper predictably, every single year, so, it follows that our AI will only become more powerful, exponentially so. It is only a matter of time. When it does come, either next year, in five years, or in ten, hilarity will ensue, but more importantly, good science will finally and fully claim its status in the game of thrones played for with truth-claims for millennia  Nothing will unseat it thereafter; well, nothing without a regress to the past. Lives will be improved and prosper; economies will grow and become more efficient; and, for good and all, better knowledge will have a selective advantage, and false knowledge will, for the first time in 200,000 long, agonizing, and painful years, have a selective disadvantage. Good riddance! The byproduct of our dear UFC will be, that, our minds will almost seem to perform as if on steroids. That is something I’d sign up for in an instant.

“Science is not a democratic process. Scientists don’t line up and say ‘gee,’ we really like this theory, let’s all vote for it. That’s not how it works. What we do in science is we find what explanations work.” ~ Eugenie C. Scott (Biologist)

 

GMOs are Unnatural? And Other Thoughts on Biotech

My last three posts have been about GMOs. I took a bit of flak for it—I even got some thank you’s and well done’s, mainly from scientists and farmers. In copping the negative flak however, the consensus seemed to be that genetically engineered foods and GMO technology are unnatural, therefore bad, and this is usually wrapped up in the guise of the naturalistic fallacy (anything natural is better than anything manmade). I find this naturalistic argument rather short-sighted, and a non-sequitur (conclusion does not follow from the logic). (I’m not saying that its wrong to eat organic foods, merely that the argument doesn’t stand up to scrutiny in the way it is presented. If you want to take what nature offers, then have at it without need of rationalizing it.) I also find that the stated goals of many an activist organization would, almost without question, lead to outcomes in-conducive to the stated environmentalism that those who hold the argument adhere to. Let me detail why I think so, as well as get into a dissection of biotechnology, nature, evolution, and a few others subjects (I got a bit carried away and before I knew it, this post was almost 5,000 words).

GM in Nature

Let’s take the basic premise: nature makes stuff better than we do—arguably the root of the organic movement. Starting at the beginning: some 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago, there existed a single-celled replicator that is the common ancestor of everything alive today. Harken back to the thought that recombinant rDNA technology is unnatural, which would mean that nature doesn’t do it. For, if genomic modification was unnatural, then we could confidently say that we wouldn’t be here. Since nothing could have evolved from that original replicator. It would just be replicators ad infinitum, one after the undifferentiated other. Nothing would change, because random changes and mutations would not occur. Even the original replicator would not have evolved so we wouldn’t have gotten that far. Nature is the original Engineer. (If you’re wondering why I capitalized engineer, then you haven’t watched Prometheus. Yes, I know I’m a nerd.) In order to go from that replicator to a 100-trillion celled human being, nature had to employ genomic engineering, albeit by accident. The only difference between nature’s style and our own is that nature’s is directionless and purposeless—there is no end goal in mind; whatever happens, happens. For every animal that exists, for every animal that was born, for every animal that lived out its short life, there were billions that met untimely, and quite likely, painful ends. Of all the species that ever existed, 99.9% are today extinct. Nature is not the benign process we think her to be, and though it is very easy to say that mother nature should be our guiding light (or spirit, or mother), but I submit to you that the 1.7 billion people who died of natural infectious diseases in the 20th century alone would not agree (if they could disagree, that is), or the 1.97 billion people who died of non-communicable diseases. If we were to compare our own body count: all the wars, crime, subjugation, and intolerance of mankind, to natures, we’d find that she more than trebled our own count, which stands at some 980 million people. Surely, nature does put us to shame with her 3.67 billion death tolls. Be that as it may: it follows that we are here because of the natural process of genomic modification and there is nothing inherently unnatural in the process. Mutations happen: either nature makes them happen with no thought to the outcome, or we control for them with genetic engineering.

Nature Does It Best

Let’s again take the basic premise that nature makes stuff best. From that first replicator, and then every step along the way, nature haphazardly selected for organisms preferentially selecting for those with beneficial mutations (allowing them better success in passing on their genes), selecting against those with detrimental mutations, and being ambivalent towards those with benign mutations until, eventually, in the Rift Valley some few million years ago, primates began evolving intelligence along with the spectacularly lucky coincidence of an opposable thumb. These two lucky outcomes allowed their descendants to manipulate their environment with an ever-increasing degree of control using said, gifted intelligence. (One theory is that intelligence evolved as a courtship device; watch this video by Jason Silva for a 90-second primer.) Therefore, our intelligence and the manipulation of our environment are thus given to us by Mother Nature…arguably to have it used. Every animal on this blue-green dot we call Earth uses to its advantage every trick and tool nature endowed it with. (After all, those that don’t often do not pass on their genes.) To categorically state that nature makes stuff better than we do so that we should bow down to her wisdom is to willingly ignore that nature made us the way we are to do what it is we do, which is the propagation our genes using our selective advantage (intelligence and environmental manipulation). It follows then, that, everything we do is, concordantly, natural. (Unless of course, you believe you have free will, which you don’t.) We are made by nature, therefore everything we do is natural and, therefore, everything we are doing now is the best possible solution because it is natural. As you can see, this line of reasoning (natural > human-made) is a slippery slope and is, plain and simply, ill defined. The distinction between nature, human culture and technology is an arbitrary distinction. We do the things that we do now because of our naturally endowed capacity. But, another way to put it is that after 3.8 billion years, an animal (Homo sapiens) evolved its own evolvability (technology) thus continuing the process of selection in the process superseding natural selection becoming the dominant selection process. We are the first species that does not live entirely within the constraints of natural selection, but that does not mean we don’t live in a selection process, just that we override natures and institute our own. In time, we rely less and less on natural selection and more on environments of our own choosing—but it is so because nature made it so. Ants make anthills, beavers make dams, birds make nests, and Homo sapiens make technology, and it’s all natural. (Note: I’m not saying we need to colonize the Earth and have everything submit to our mighty republic. Yes, I just finished watching Spartacus.) Only that within our domain, we have already done so to our own advantage, and there is nothing wrong with this—it is natural even.

Selection

Remember that evolution happens regardless of whether we rework it to our advantage—biotech crops—or leave nature be.

• Evolution is natural selection by random mutation
• Pre-Industrial (i.e., organic) agriculture is artificial selection by random mutation
• Conventional agriculture is artificial selection by accelerated random mutation
• GM agriculture is artificial selection by purposeful mutation

The changes are changes in degree, not in kind. To label one unnatural is to label them all unnatural. It is evolution, continued. Something has to fulfil both the selection process and the mutation process in evolution. It’s either nature, which has neither direction nor purpose, and evidenced by her 3.67 billion person death toll in the 20th century from just 2 categories, has neither your health or longevity in mind; or we fulfil the selection process, which nature gives us the ability to so.

While the result of recombinant rDNA technology may be labelled unnatural (merely because it doesn’t exist in nature, not because it can’t). The same cannot be said of the technology that produces such food. We are co-opting nature’s methods to make food, not playing God. (You may dispute the fact that I said that it could exist in nature by saying that a fish gene could never wind up in a tomato, but you’d be wrong. Your genome is the combined genome four times over of the amphioxus fish-like marine chordate. A 1cm little fish’s genome mistakenly copied twice over on itself has resulted in every land animal today, and you. If nature can turn a little fish into you, then why is it so distasteful that we put cross-species genes where we need them? Uncertainty may be the first thing that comes to your mind, but nature had no idea what she was doing either.)

The Point

There is a movement to demonize GM technology and even conventional agriculture, with the wish to return to the agricultural past. Organic agriculture is fine, there’s nothing wrong with it, but we can’t feed the world with it. Remember Paul R. Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb? It stated in 1968 that in the 70s and 80s, mass famines would ensue as we wouldn’t be able to make enough food, and any efforts to avert such a disaster are a waste of time and should be scrapped. (Thomas Malthus said much the same thing in 1798.) Ehrlich wrote, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” Why didn’t the predictions of mass starvation and disaster come to pass? Well, they would have if we listened to him and did nothing. Instead we developed the technologies that allowed us to increase yield to a stupendous degree.

Context

Since 1961, we’ve increased yield by 300% using only 12% more land. How? We used technology to make drastically increase yield and avert the predicted disaster of Ehrlich and many others. Said differently, if we kept farming organically, mass famine would have ensued. Without such yield increases thanks to plant science, we would have had to use two Latin America’s of arable land to compensate, or, more likely, the predicted mass starvation would have occurred. If in the 1960s when the world population was less than 3 billion people, the propagation of organic farming as the sole agricultural method would have resulted in disaster, how it will help us now when we are 7 billion people and on the way to 9-10 billion people? The majority of that increase in yield has come from plain ol’ conventional agriculture, but now our yields are coming up against a glass wall for that type of plant science, and GE foods are the next process to take us forward to surmount the coming set of problems. And, while we still have a starving billion today, it is not because we can’t create the food, but we can’t get it to them. The solution to world hunger is for those most afflicted by it to be able to grow their own food, instead of relying on food aid and handouts as band aids applied to a broken bone. Organic farming will not suffice for Sub-Saharan Africa; they need heat-tolerant and drought-resistant strains. (They already don’t have any biotechnology or conventional agriculture, ergo, organic farming, which is what remains, has failed them.)

Future Problems

In the next 40 years, we need to double yield without an increase in land usage—in fact we’ll need to decrease land usage (agriculture is one of the biggest contributors to climate change). We will not accomplish this by going back to low-input agriculture—though it won’t go anywhere for those who still want it. I make the case in my book that Vertical Farming (VF) will do the trick. VF certainly is capable, but what if the mass migration from horizontal farming to vertical farming never takes place? The technology was invented in the 50s by the US military and then nobody did anything with it for 60 years. What if that no-usage scenario repeats itself? We cannot afford to stand idly by and hope that everything will go according to plan. We need contingencies and redundancy. One of those is GM agriculture. We have been eating GM food for 20 years: in that time, we’ve spared the environment 438 million kilograms of pesticide use. (Don’t forget, organic farming uses pesticides too, and organic pesticides aren’t automatically better for the environment. Some are thousands of times more toxic.) In 2010, 19.4 billion kgs of CO2 was not released into the atmosphere because of GM technology (the equivalent of 8.6 million cars removed from the roads for a year). Over half of the economic benefits of GM seeds have gone directly to farmers in developing countries helping them rise up out of subsistence farming and poverty. In America, the country that eats the most GM food, cancers over the last 20 years have gone down 20% so the promised health apocalypse that many have warned about were coming have not materialized.

If we want to solve the problem of population growth, we have to realize that living in poverty is what propels the world’s poor to have more children, and food insecurity is a major factor. As Peter Diamandis wrote in Abundance, poor families living in subsistence need at least 3 kids, and they aim for male children. Why three? Well, as distasteful as it sounds; one may die, one will tend to the farm and look after the parents as they age; and the other is sent to get an education to break the cycle and make money enough to hopefully lift them out of poverty. The best solution to breaking out of a life of subsistence is food security. People in Sub-Saharan Africa can’t use organic farming (which, as mentioned earlier, if defined only by lack of conventional tools and biotechnology, then they are already organic, and food insecure).

Potential Benefits

Recently, we passed peak farmland, which unlike peak oil or peak water actually has positive connotations for us, but especially, the environment.

See the blue section in the above graph? That is the actual farmland used since 1961 to get us the aforementioned 300% yield increase. See the upward sloping green section? That’s how much land we would have used if we didn’t use conventional agriculture to create todays food. It is the equivalent landmass of the USA, Canada, and China, and try to imagine the destruction of forestry that that would have entailed. To be an environmentalist is, by definition, to support the conservation of nature. To support the conservation of nature should be, by definition, to support conventional agriculture as it uses less land to grow that food—going forward, this will entail supporting, or at least supporting the possibility of using, GMOs.

If we continue on our current path of increasing yields using science and biotechnology, the authors of the Peak Farmland study conservatively estimate that we could return 146 million hectares to nature by 2060, with high estimates that 256 million hectares could be restored (roughly double the area of the USA, east of the Mississipi). None of this even takes into account the potential land and resource reduction benefits of IV meat (which I detail here), or the coming generation of biotech crops, many of which will have: significantly reduced pesticide use (some using no pesticides at all), reduced nitrogen use (reducing river pollution), increased nutrition along with many other benefits. But, many such seeds are locked away due to the intense furore to GMO use, allowing only those few that the seed giants can afford to push through the regulatory burden. PG Economics noted that if, in 2010, those biotech crops already available were removed from the market, farmers would have had to plant an additional 5.1 million ha of soybeans, 5.6 million ha of corn, 3 million ha of cotton, and 0.35 million ha of canola to keep production steady, equivalent to an additional 8.6% of arable land in the US. Yet, this is what activists would have us do, remove all GM crops, necessitating the further destruction of forestry and nature for human purposes.

So, if we move forward into the future, we’ll give back hundreds of millions of hectares of farmland to nature, and if we move forward with biotechnology, we’ll do likewise.

Big Ag

But, are there problems, real problems, with biotechnology that have been covered or up concealed? With the technology, we find no problems that aren’t present in other forms of agriculture. As the National Academy of Science, and many prestigious scientific organizations concluded, the process itself is no more inherently risky than any other method. Biotech crops usually have between 1 and 3 genes altered, but every new generation of organic and conventional crops will have a few different genes in there too. (They are inevitable: a DNA copying error, a passing cosmic ray etc., will, and do, induce genetic mutations. To say there is uncertainty in GMOs is likewise to admitting that there is uncertainty in any new generation of plant or animal. The average human offspring carries about 100-200 mutations, but they are still people. Food with 1-3 added genes is still food.)

On the business side is where we find many that many folks have a priori problems. But these problems are indicative, and suggest the need of, business reform, patent reform and competition, and not the outright banning of the technology (which is just not possible, anyway). This business problem ended up co-mutating into advocacy against GMOs in general instead of where it should actually be directed, lack of competition due to the overbearing regulatory burden on GM crops which was instituted due to the initial advocacy, and round and round the circle we go, as the increased advocacy only exacerbates the problems activists think they are trying to stop. The intense backlash against biotechnology has only cemented the power of those few who first began exploring the field. Even then, the scale of abuse, often levelled at Monsanto, rivals the misinformation that the Catholic Church spouts against condom use on the continent most ravaged by aids, likening condom use to be a greater danger than the ravages of aids. (A sensible approach to Monsanto was detailed by activist Ellen of One Hundred Meals.)

We need to stop pretending that only Big Ag and Monsanto lobbies, undercuts, and undermines democracy; the organic movement spends $2.5 billion a year on advocacy. We need to stop thinking that Monsanto is after world domination: the global GM seed market in 2012 was $14 billion ( that is world domination with 0.0002% of global purchasing power), while organic food sales are $60 billion worldwide. (The total value of those GM crops when harvested is around $65 billion.) We need to know that all farms strive to use the least amount of pesticides required, as it is their biggest expense, and that synthetic chemicals are not a priori worse than organic chemicals, in fact, quite the opposite. In other words, we need to get real, and deal with the facts as they are, not as we want them to be.

For whatever problems we have today, the solution is not to ban it, it is to weigh the risks vs. the rewards and act appropriately. It is to study and to research, and to have reasoned debates among experts on the pros and cons; but above all, keeping in mind the effects on people far and wide around the world. Food security and a heavy disease burden (usually going together) undermine society at every level of its functioning. To fix them is to advance significantly in all other matters of societal dysfunction. Who knows how many Newtons, Einsteins, and Curies we are losing to lack of food, clean water, and education every year while we bicker over functionally equivalent types of food. If you don’t want to eat it, don’t, but don’t stop others from making their own choice. The liberal movement in America and Europe is pro-choice when it comes to matters of female reproduction—and rightfully so! —Yet, move the topic to food, swiftly change to being anti-choice, even though the ramifications for billions of poor people around the world are far worse than for a women in a forced pro-life environment.

But instead of focusing on legitimate problems with the business, competitive, and legal environment, red herrings are thrown this way and that: that organic food is nutritionally superior; a meta-analysis covering 162 studies over a 50-year period says their not, and any nutritional differences are unlikely to have a significant outcome on health. Facts are thrown out stating that organic is environmentally superior to all other forms of farming, despite the fact the answer is far more nuanced. We are told that farmers are using GMOs to lather their fields in Roundup, yet the National Academy of Science wrote, “When adopting GE herbicide-resistant (HR) crops, farmers mainly substituted the herbicide glyphosate for more toxic herbicides.” (A report from the National Research Council even gave an impressive list of GM benefits including: improved soil quality, reduced erosion and reduced insecticide use, but everyone focused instead on the little nuggets of bad news instead of the load of good news.) In using GMOs we use less toxic pesticides, and the result is a net environmental benefit, as glyphosate usually replaces atrazine (a pesticide 200 times more toxic). Instead of learning about real yields on GMO, we get the Union of Concerned Scientists telling us that ‘intrinsic yields’ haven’t increased since the inception of GMO, even though intrinsic yield tells you nothing, but total yield really has increased. But the most destructive effect of this headline-grabbing debate fiasco is as Pamela Ronald, professor of plant pathology at the University of California wrote, “as it now stands, opposition to genetic engineering has driven the technology further into the hands of a few seed companies that can afford it, further encouraging their monopolistic tendencies while leaving it out of reach for those that want to use it for crops with low (or no) profit margins.“

Red herrings are red for a reason, they are meant to distract you, not inform you. We need some green herrings.

Choice

Those of us with the ability to read this post have the luxury of choice when it comes to choosing between organic, conventional, and GM agriculture. (‘Certified Organic’ also means GMO-free, so, we don’t need to go through the hoops of requiring even more labels.) But more than 800 million people who go to bed hungry every night (16 million people of whom will die of hunger this year) will not have that luxury. Half the planet’s population remains malnourished, then the one to two million people (670,000 are under five years of age) who will die from Vitamin A deficiency this year who, in point of fact, will not be thankful to Greenpeace for their 16-year blockade of GM Golden Rice that could save them—they’ll die slow, painful deaths instead, only to be replaced by more kids to replace them, many of whom will die too. To fix that problem—which is not only a moral necessity—reduces the burden of increased population growth. (The response to both of those claims—starvation and vitamin A deficiency deaths—is that we shouldn’t be feeding them unhealthy food instead. Those saying this have clearly never gone without food for longer than a few hours, let alone the few weeks it takes to die of starvation, or the years over which blindness sets in from vitamin A deficiency, which then goes on to kill half those afflicted. And, of course, it assumes that GM food really is less healthy or less nutritious, which it isn’t.) It’s time we got out of our First World bubble.

There is, despite the hysteria, a scientific consensus on the safety and risk profile of GM technology. Almost every scientific organization, from the National Academy of Sciences to the Royal Society thinks it so and 600 peer-reviewed studies back up the claim. Aside from a few deniers, we trust our scientists on climate change, don’t we? They are shouting from the rooftops about the dangers of climate change, and how little time we have left to reverse course. You’d think if there were a comparable danger from biotech, you’d have more than a handful of scientists speaking up. So, why don’t we trust them on biotech?

Norman Borlaug—father of the Green Revolution, who saved one billion lives using plant science—had this to say about the food fight we in the West are squabbling over: “If the naysayers do manage to stop agricultural biotechnology, they might actually precipitate the famines and the crisis of global biodiversity they have been predicting for nearly 40 years.”

While we endlessly bicker and sensationalize, people are dying of starvation. It does no good to deal in hypotheticals such as: if we wasted less food, there’d be enough for everyone (you wouldn’t be able to ship it to them); if more people were charitable, everyone would be ok; if we switched to organic agriculture, we could feed everyone (wrong), along with many others. Despite the fact that many of them are wrong or idealistic, they presume people being rational, informed, and having access to and accepting unadulterated and uncensored good, reliable information. Is that likely to happen anytime soon? The cries of the anti-vaxxers are still putting kids (and society at large) in danger; the chant of the climate-deniers only delays needed progress; but on issues of food security, arguably the most important of all, we’ll all see reason?

Changing People or Inventing Technology—Which is Easier?

Is it easier to change the hearts and minds of billions of people with all their complexities and interrelationships or is it easier to invent new technologies that solve the issues for those affected? The climate movement has struggled to change the hearts and minds of people and politicians for over twenty years and we’ve got very little to show for it. Let’s not continue making the same mistake with food. Changing the consumption habits of one billion westerners—if that is even possible—will take a long time with no certainty of success. Meanwhile, the people dying of starvation will keep dying. The technologies to feed them using less land and cheaper inputs are here and now, they are safe, they are capable, and they are predictable, regardless of how shrill the opposition to them is from well-fed oppositionists who’ve never felt the sensation of hunger. It’s time to deal with the facts, but above all, it is time to value human lives consistent with the evidence and facts we have. The intentions and hearts of the bored, guilted sensibilities of Western activists who grumble at a skipped lunch is in the right place; their proposed solutions and flawed reasoning are not.

They are plenty of problems we face in agriculture. The vehement backlash against biotechnology is distracting from those issues. Biotechnology won’t solve every problem, but they will help substantially. In fact, the co-use of biotech crops alongside organic crops—in what is called a refuge zone—significantly curtail pest resistance. It may be that the bright agricultural future within our grasp uses both systems side by side.

“The next generation of GMOs could boost nutrition, reduce nitrogen fertilizer use, and boost yield, letting us feed the world without chopping down its remaining forest. Indeed, it’s easy to imagine ‘bio-organic’ farms that don’t use synthetic pesticides or fertilizer, but that do use these genetically enhanced seeds.” ~ Keith Kloor (Science Writer)

Whatever is the case, we need to realize that feeding 7 billion, let alone 9 to 10 billion people in the near future, isn’t going to be easy. If it fits on a Facebook photo as a caption, you can rest assured it will solve nothing. This post is 4,600 words long and is barely scratching the surface. Some silly shared photo on Facebook demonizing Monsanto or chemical use not only shows you things out of context, they detract from the conversations we should be having.

[Updated to remove superfluous text]

Q&A – The Lowdown on GMOs With A Biotech Firm

Greetings and salutations my fellow readers. It’s been a bit of a roller coaster ride publishing the last two posts on GMOs, so I thought to myself, where should I go next? Dive further into the rabbit hole (making myself ever more unpopular), or switch topics? I have an interview with a scientist, check! With a farmer, check! Biotech firm? Bingo! An opportunity thus presented itself, so down I went further down the rabbit hole.

So, to round out—and conclude—my trifecta (or triumvirate—a much cooler word that makes me sound smarter than I am) of posts about GMO, I have just finished up an email Q&A with the CEO and founder of Okanagan Specialty Fruits (OSF), Neal Carter, whose company makes Arctic Apples (apples that don’t brown). In my two previous Q&As— with a scientist here and with a family farmer here—I had commentary and concluding thoughts; this time, I prefer to let their positions stand on its own two feet, as it is more than capable of.

Do note, however. I am not trying to convince anyone to not eat organic food, or to eat GMO food, so don’t get your knickers in a twist.

---

1) What prompted your company to create a GM nonbrowning apple? Why not, for example, try to do the same with hybridization?

Our motivation for developing biotech apples, and all our other projects under development, is to introduce value-added traits that will benefit the tree-fruit industry. We have chosen to focus specifically on nonbrowning Arctic® apples as our flagship project for a number of reasons. One of the chief ones is that apple consumption has been flat-to-declining for the past two decades and we are confident the nonbrowning apple trait can create a consumption trigger while also reducing food waste throughout the supply chain.

Another key motivation is ever-increasing demand for convenience. Arctic apples are ideally suited for the freshcut market, which is expensive to enter because of the browning issue. We often refer to the consumption trigger that convenient “baby” carrots created – they now make up 2/3rds of all U.S. carrot sales!

As for why we use biotechnology to achieve this, it’s because we knew we could make a comparatively minor change safely, relatively quickly, and precisely. We silence only four genes, specifically, the ones that produce polyphenol oxidase, which is the enzyme that drives the browning process. We do so primarily through the use of other apple genes, and no new proteins are created. If we were to attempt to breed this trait conventionally, we could easily spend decades trying with no guarantee of success.

2) What benefits will the Arctic apple bring to the food market? Are there quantitative studies that can predict how effective it could be?

In addition to addressing stagnant apple consumption and tapping into the underutilized freshcut and foodservice markets, Arctic apples offer plenty of other benefits throughout the supply chain.

For growers and packers, nonbrowning apples can help significantly reduce the huge number of apples that never make it to market because of minor superficial marks such as finger bruising and bin rubs. So much of the food produced today is wasted purely for cosmetic reasons. This extends to retail where the nonbrowning trait can have a big impact on shrinkage and making displays more attractive while also offering exciting new value-added apple products.

Consumers will also benefit from throwing away far less fruit at home – how many apples get bruised up on the way back from the grocery store or in kids’ lunchboxes? Our goal is helping consumers, especially kids, eat healthier and waste less food. Last year, one grade 2 teacher wrote about how excited she is for nonbrowning apples, explaining she sees countless perfectly good apples and apple slices thrown out by her students due to minor browning and bruising. Consumers will also enjoy other tangible benefits like new opportunities for cut apples in many cooking applications.

As for quantifiable evidence showing the value of these benefits, food waste has been a major issue over the past year with recent estimates from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization suggesting around one-third of food produced is wasted. The numbers are even worse for fruit, where around half of what’s produced never ends up getting eaten.

As far as the potential to create a consumption trigger, the produce industry is full of examples of how making fruit more convenient, especially for the foodservice industry, results in huge consumption boosts. We mentioned how baby carrots now make up two-thirds of carrot sales and reports tracking major fruit and vegetable consumption trends frequently emphasize convenience. One example explains one of the most prominent, ongoing trends “is a consumer demand for foods of high and predictable quality that offer convenience and variety.” Arctic apples satisfy all these requirements.

For apples, specifically, there’s lots of attention given to how various chemical treatments can slow browning and plenty of attempts to conventionally breed low browning varieties (though this is quite different from being truly nonbrowning). For instance, a notable 2009 publication from the Journal of Food Engineering discusses how “the market for fresh-cut apples is projected to continue to grow as consumers demand fresh, convenient and nutritious snacks”. Yet it also explains that the “industry is still hampered by-product quality deterioration” because when “the cut surface turns brown; it reduces not only the visual quality but also results in undesirable changes in flavour and loss of nutrients, due to enzymatic browning.” Again, Arctic apples address these issues.

Finally, some of the most convincing evidence that the nonbrowning traits will provide substantial value – both apple producers and consumers have told us so! In 2006/07 we surveyed a number of apple industry executives, 76% of whom told us they were interested in Arctic apples. In focus groups, we have found that over 80% are positively interested in Arctic apples and 100% of participants wanted to try them. Even more encouraging, when we surveyed 1,000 self identified apple eaters in 2011, we found that their likelihood to buy Arctic apples continued to increase the more they learned about the science behind them!

3) How many, and how intensive, were the studies performed to show Arctic apples are as safe as other apples? Were the studies peer-reviewed? If so, by whom? (You may wish to discuss what was and/or wasn’t changed.)

Before getting into the specifics, it’s important to put things in perspective to show how rigorous the review truly is; particularly arduous for a small, resource-tight company like ours: (See timeline)

So Arctic apples, our very first project, still haven’t been commercialized 17 years after we were founded and over a decade after we proved the technology and planted them! That means we now have over ten years of real-world evidence that Arctic trees grow, respond to pest and disease pressure, flower, and fruit just as conventional trees do.

Over this time, our apples have likely become one of the most tested fruits in existence. This makes detailing all of the specific tests impossible here, but we encourage anyone interested to view our extensive, 163-page petition on the USDA’s website, which provides full details.

Quickly highlighting some of the key ones:

• Trees were closely monitored by a third-party horticultural consultant for any difference in their response to pests
• Agronomic data including how fast trees grow, how much fruit they produce, etc. was recorded by a third-party
• Experiments were completed to monitor pollen spread and potential for cross-pollination, resulting in two peer-reviewed papers
• Nutrition and composition of mature fruit was tested and deemed equivalent to controls
• Possible presence of novel proteins tested and confirmed none present

These tests were performed by a variety of reputable groups and individuals, some third-party, some in-house. Our field trials were monitored and data was collected by independent horticultural consultants and an Integrated Pest Management specialist.

Of particular importance is the fact that there are no proteins in Arctic fruit that aren’t in all apples. This shows there’s nothing “new” in our apples that will affect consumers. This is expected as we silence the genes that cause browning, rather than introduce new attributes. To give an idea of how sophisticated the tests used to prove this are, they would be able to detect a single penny amongst 100-250 ton coal-sized rail cars! We are confident Arctic apples are safe, and soon, we anticipate FDA’s confirmation of this.

So what has all of this extensive testing taught us? Exactly what we thought it would – Arctic trees and fruits are just the same as their conventional counterparts until you bite, slice or bruise the fruit!

4) Can you name a few of the misconceptions — if any — that people associate your company with, or accuse your company of, when they find out you’re a biotech company? If there are misconceptions, why are they wrong or miss the big picture?

Absolutely – just as there are countless misconceptions about biotech foods in general, there are also plenty of myths about our company and Arctic apples. In fact, one of our most popular blog posts ever is titled “Addressing common misconceptions of Arctic orchards and fruit”.

We invite readers to visit that post and explore our site in general for more details, but the two most common misconceptions about Arctic apples are:

1. Arctic apples will cross-pollinate with other orchards, causing organic orchards to lose organic certification: No organic crop has ever been decertified from inadvertent pollen gene flow. Even if pollen from an Arctic flower did pollinate an organic or conventional fruit, the resulting fruit is the same as the mother flower….not that of the pollen donor. Additionally, we are implementing numerous stewardship standards to ensure cross-pollination won’t occur, including buffer rows, bee-hive placement, and restricting distance from other orchards.
2. Because Arctic apples don’t brown, they will disguise old/damaged fruit: The opposite is true! Arctic apples won’t experience enzymatic browning (which occurs when even slightly damaged cells are exposed to air), but the decomposition that comes from fungi, bacteria and/or rotting will be just the same as conventional apples. This means that you will not see superficial damage, but you will see a change in appearance when the true quality is impacted.

Other accusations we hear somewhat frequently from a vocal minority who oppose all biotech foods are “we don’t know what the effects will be down the road” or that we’re “messing with God/Mother Nature”. Regarding the first claim, the science tools we now have are truly amazing and we have an unprecedented level of precision, control and analysis when developing biotech crops. They must be meticulously reviewed before approval and around three trillion meals with biotech ingredients have now been consumed without incident. As to the messing with God/nature charges, biotech-enhanced crops are really just one more advancement in a long history of human-driven food improvements – and even the Amish and the Vatican support these advances!

5) As an insider, you are privy to the goings-on and workings of the biotech industry, what do you envision the future of biotech to be? What new seeds are coming down the line and what potential advantages or disadvantages might they bring?

We foresee biotech continuing to be the most rapidly adopted crop technology ever, as it has been for the past 17 years. We also anticipate already realized benefits from biotech crops to continue, such as those highlighted by a fifteen year study including increased net earnings of $78.4 billion for farmers (mostly from developing nations), a reduction of 438 million kg of pesticide spraying and the equivalent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions as removing 8.6 million cars from the road for a year. Two major categories in particular where we’ll see further advancements are in environmental sustainability (reduced pesticide use, carbon emissions, food waste) and higher crop yields under adverse conditions (from pest resistance, drought-tolerance, etc.).

Another major trend you’ll see is the increased presence of biotech foods with direct consumer benefits, particularly nutrition. We will see many new projects following in the footsteps of crops like Golden Rice, which is fortified with beta-carotene; a precursor to Vitamin A. The World Health Organization has identified that around 250 million children under the age of 5 are affected by Vitamin A deficiency, which can cause blindness and death. Biotech crops like Golden rice can potentially save millions of lives by helping address this, and efforts are already underway to produce other Vitamin A enhanced crops including bananas and cassava.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, though, as there are many other exciting developments on the way including many other nutrient-enhancements for cassava, numerous drought-resistant crops, blight-resistant potatoes and many more. I actually highlighted some of these crops in a TEDx talk I gave in October 2012 on the value of agricultural biotechnology, which is available to watch online.

6) As a biotech company, do you bear the brunt of the anti-GMO backlash nominally directed at Monsanto and DuPont? If so, how has this affected you? Please be specific.

All companies who develop biotech crops have to deal with a certain level of backlash from the vocal, emotional minority who oppose biotechnology.

We are quite unique because when consumers discuss biotech companies, names like Monsanto and DuPont, as you mention, are the first ones that come to mind, rarely small companies like ours. Using Monsanto as an example, they have approximately 22,000 employees – we have 7. Because most organizations in this industry are pretty massive, they do get the lion’s share of attention. That being said, if we were to create a ratio of media attention to company size; ours would be through the roof!

One key reason we likely get more than our fair share of attention is that we’re dealing with apples. When we’re talking about something as popular and iconic as the apple (e.g., “an apple a day”, “American as apple pie”), it’s going to get people emotionally charged. Genetically, our enhancement is relatively minor compared to the majority of crops out there; yet even so, when our petition was available for public comment along with 9 other biotech crops in the U.S., we received around three times as many comments as all 9 of the other petitions combined!

In terms of how all this attention affects us, we can dictate that to some extent. On one hand, we could simply choose to ignore it. The review process is evidence-based (and rightfully so!), meaning we could keep our heads down and let the science speak for itself and not worry about what people are saying. That’s not how we operate, however, as we believe in the benefits and safety far too much to keep quiet. We want to do our best to make sure accurate, evidence-based information is out there to counter-balance all the myths and misinformation. This may mean that we spend more time and resources on education than others might, but it’s too important of an issue not to.

We’ve made a concerted effort so transparency is the core of our identity. We know we have a safe, beneficial product and we’re happy to explain the truth around previously mentioned misconceptions. We make it a priority, no matter how busy things get, to keep active on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, maintain a weekly blog, make timely site updates, respond to every single sincere email we get and invest in delivering presentation such as last year’s TEDx talk. (Embedded below.)

We believe everyone in the science and agricultural industries have a responsibility to help educate the public on the facts of biotechnology. Sometimes that results in more backlash, but it’s worth it.

7) Some scientists state that the anti-GMO backlash has cemented Monsanto’s grip upon the market because only they can afford the regulatory burden, do you find this to be true in your experience? And how does this affect the greater biotechnology field?

Well, we’ve touched on how rigorous the review process is and how much smaller we are than the big industry players, so yes, it is tough for smaller companies to bring a biotech crop to market. It’s challenging to raise funds, produce needed data, spend the resources providing education, and it’s just a much bigger overall risk.

While the regulatory burden is heavier for small biotech companies, I think we’re an example that it’s still possible for the little guys to make it through, but it’s not easy. Not only do you have to successfully develop a fantastic product, but you must be focused, persistent and very patient. There is no rushing the review process, but here we are a decade after first planting Arctic trees and we expect to achieve deregulation in the U.S. later this year.

Even though we’re helping demonstrate it’s possible for small companies to commercialize a biotech crop, the high regulatory burden certainly does affect the industry as a whole. With such an intimidating outlook in terms of high investment, both in time and resources, there will obviously be far less small, entrepreneurial companies than would be ideal. In a field in which innovation should be embraced as much as possible, we are missing out on many potential innovative companies and value-added products because the barriers are so high.

Really, what it comes down to is the regulatory process is (and should be) extremely rigorous, but it is indeed possible for companies that aren’t multinationals to accomplish commercialization. Ideally, once biotech crops add further to their exemplary track record of safety and benefits and the scientific tools continue to improve; these barriers will gradually be lessened.

8) Lastly, what is your relationship to the government and governmental agencies. It has been alleged that agencies like the FDA are in the pocket of big biotech organizations and are willing to look the other way. Do you find any truth in those statements? If not, why not?

If we had to select one word to describe the multiple regulatory bodies we’ve dealt with over the past few years (USDA, APHIS, FDA, CFIA) it would be “thorough”. There’s certainly no looking the other way and nothing casual about the review process. If these government agencies were in the pocket of biotech companies, we wouldn’t still be awaiting deregulation more than ten years after we first developed Arctic apples!

Some people will see that some of the agencies have former members of biotech companies and immediately distrust the whole system; this misses the point. Of course they will have some former industry employees. These companies have thousands and thousands of employees and plenty of them are well-credentialed with first-hand experience in multiple facets of agriculture. In most fields, movement between private and public spheres is common, and most working aged citizens will have at least 10 different jobs before they turn 50. Some overlap is inevitable.

The truth is, you will hear a very wide range of arguments from those who don’t like biotech crops and this is just another one on that list. Luckily, there is more than enough evidence to show that biotech crops are indeed safe and beneficial, including over 600 peer-reviewed studies, around one-third of which are independently funded. The best advice we can give to consumers is to do their own research, but always with a close eye on the credentials and reputability of the sources!

For more information on OSF or Arctic apples, please visit www.arcticapples.com

---

Neal Carter is the CEO and founder of OSF. Thank you for your time Neal. I am, well, me; a curious fellow trying to make sense of the world (and I just released the 2nd edition of Random Rationality: A Rational Guide to an Irrational World for Kindle). It’s working out so far, and quite fun too.

So, would you eat an Arctic Apple?

Q&A – The Lowdown on GMOs With A Family Farmer

In reading about GMOs in the last several years, I also read lots of reports about how farmers are disadvantaged, slaves to Monsanto, and for the most part, I blindly accepted them. But I had never heard from a farmer before. It was time to change that. It occurred to me recently that we live in the (mostly) free-market. The Big Ag BioTech companies can’t force people to buy their products, they have to convince them; with results, with cost-savings, or whatever else that a farmer needs that I know nothing about. The 95% of GM acreage in America isn’t a Monsanto empire, the farms bought into it not because they were forced to, but because they saw a benefit in it, and they keep buying the seeds not because they are obligated to, but because they still see benefits. On my last post when I interviewed a molecular biologist, Brian Scott (his photo is the featured image), a fourth generation family farmer, was kind enough to let me ask questions about how he farms and why he uses biotech seeds, and what specifically was his relationship to Monsanto from whom he buys some of his seed types. I wanted to know what really happens between a farmer and the evil company everybody talks about, and not hear about it from activists who’ve probably never set foot on a farm. While this is only one story from one farmer, it is enlightening. Also, do check out his blog, The Farmers Life, where he blogs about running his farm.

---

Fourat (Me) – Why do you use GMOs?

Brian –  I like to call GMO a tool in my toolbox. Biotech isn’t a silver bullet for every problem, but it’s still a powerful tool. We use traits like Bt and Roundup Ready (RR) on many of

our acres, but not all of them.  All our soybeans are generally RR, while only some of our corn carries that trait. Popcorn and wheat, our other crops, are not available in GMO varieties. Some of our corn acres are dedicated to waxy corn production, and we generally don’t buy them as RR.  Built in insect resistance in Bt corn along with seed treatments mean it’s a very rare event that we have to treat a crop in season for pests.  That means we prevent soil compaction by keeping another piece of equipment out of the field. It also means a sprayer doesn’t need to filled with water, fuel, and pesticide which is good for the earth and the wallet.

Me – What incentives are there for using GMOs?

Brian – There can be incentives such as buying traited crops and certain chemistry (herbicide, etc) as a bundle to receive price discounts. Some crop insurance plans also offer a biotechnology discount. I think that says a lot about the effectiveness of GMO. If an insurance company is willing to give you a discount, they must believe those crops lead to less crop insurance claims.

Me – As many activists allege, are you a slave to Monsanto once you sign their contract?

Brian – I’m certainly not beholden to any seed company. I can plant what I want and manage it how I see fit. Do I sign an agreement that stipulates certain things when I buy patented seeds? Yes. Do patents only apply to biotechnology? No. These agreements are not nearly as binding as people would lead you to believe. The most viewed post I’ve put online is an outline of my 2011 Monsanto Technology Use Agreement. In the post I break down the line items in my own words, but I also provide the reader with a scanned copy of the agreement pulled straight from my filing cabinet. This allows anyone to read the agreement for themselves. In short, if I buy seed from Monsanto, Pioneer, etc nothing binds me into buying seed from them the following season. Nothing says I have to use their brand of herbicides or insecticides. Believe what you will about farmers being slaves to seed companies, but you’ve got to talk to a farmer before your mind is set in stone. My post can be found here. (Fourat: Definitely a worthwhile read.)

Me – Do you think you should be able to reuse the seeds you purchase from Monsanto? If not, why not?

Brian – That’s a tough question. For my purposes, if I wanted to save seed it would be soybean seed. All of our corn is hybrid corn. Hybrids don’t necessarily produce seed identical to the parent plant. Therefore, planting that seed the next season would give you an unknown result.  Soybeans self-pollinate so they remain true to themselves genetically. If I saved seed I would need to take a little extra care and expense to clean and possibly apply seed treatments to protect young seedlings. Right now my view is that of a division of labor. Farmers are great at producing high quality and high quantities of crops. The seed companies have the know how and resources to breed great plants. I think that’s a great combination for success. I’m not saying farmers couldn’t develop their own seed. Successful farmers are some of the smartest people I know, and can do anything if they choose to. [Fourat: I’d never thought about it this way. Farmers can save time and money by not having to clean and protect the next crops seeds. Funny how simple things evade the mind to those of us not actually involved in the industry.]

I also believe since it takes several years and millions if not billions of dollars to bring an innovative new variety to market, that any breeder large or small should be entitled to benefit financially from said variety for some period of time via a patent system.

Me – What is the most glaring factual error, if any, made by activists when discussing GMO seeds?

Brian – I often ask people what they think about crops that produce their own chemical defenses naturally, and I find a good number of people aren’t aware that some crops do this.  For example cereal rye has an ability to suppress weeds. This quality is called allelopathy. Many plants are naturally resistant to herbicides. Think about your lawn. Spraying 2,4D on your grass to kill dandelions and other weeds won’t harm your lawn. Grasses, which include corn and wheat, have a natural tolerance to that chemistry. Biotech may be allowing plants to do new things, but we are really just mimicking something nature has already shown us is possible.

I see many people say that seeds are soaked in glyphosate which is the active ingredient in Roundup. I’m not really sure where that idea comes from, but seeds are not somehow filled with herbicide. I think it’s possible people are confusing herbicides and insecticides thinking Bt and Roundup are the same thing. Bt traits protect crops like corn and cotton from pests like European corn borer.

Another fallacy is that GMO crops failed in the drought of 2012.  As if somehow during the worst drought since 1988 or maybe even the Dust Bowl era nature was supposed to give us a normal yield because our crops are able to protect themselves from pests and be resistant to certain herbicides. Drought tolerant varieties of corn were not widely available to growers in 2012. I’ve grown Pioneer’s version of drought tolerant corn in a test plot. It beat everything else in the plot hands down. Wide availability of drought tolerant corn varieties will spread in the next year or two. Drought tolerance and water use efficiency could be game changers for water use in the highly irrigated areas of the Great Plains. It should also be noted that all the corn being marketed as drought tolerant was brought to fruition by conventional breeding techniques except for Monsanto’s. Theirs will be the one genetically modified version.

Farmers make plans on how to plant and manage their crops several months before actual fieldwork begins.  In the end we all understand that weather will be the ultimate factor in determining the success of those plans. In agriculture there are countless variables in play when managing a crop, and the one thing you have no control over is the weather. It can rain too much or not enough. Temperatures may be great for crop growth, or they may be too hot or too cold. Farmers must do all they can to realize the potential of a seed, but nature will always dictate a large portion of yield.

---

So, do you still think Monsanto is an evil empire out for world domination? Why don’t we just leave it at a company like any other, trying to make money. Some people call this greedy, but the rest of us also spend most of our lives making money. So if you dislike (or hate) Monsanto, then maybe it’s time to encourage other bio-tech innovations to make seeds better, cheaper, or both, to offer to Brian and other farmers like him a better deal. (As Dr. Kevin Folta told me in my interview with a scientist, there are many seeds paid for with tax dollars sitting on shelves around the country that are better in several respects than what Monsanto has provided us. As long as they are shielded from competing against these seeds, farmers do have limited choices. You can read my interview with him here.) Competition and a dynamic marketplace is what gives consumers the most choice and power, and now, Monsanto pretty much stands alone having cornered a majority of the market. Much of their practices are rooted in this power and laws (not in the science and seeds), so let’s go about encouraging innovation and competition.

And if you are against the consumption of GMO foods, there is no need for it. There is already a label that tells you the exact same thing, ‘Certified Organic’ is another way to say “GMO free.” GMO food is in 80% of your supermarket, so it’s a safe bet that anything you see in the supermarket has a GM ingredient in it. There is no need to create ever more regulatory hoops to label GMO food, when the opposite label means the same thing. As for me, though I live for the moment in Europe where I can’t get GMO food, even if I wanted to, I’ll not shy away from it in my travels, it is my opinion that they are the future of food. (Note: I am not saying I think organic production is going away, or that everyone should eat GMO food because I said so; as long as there is a market, there will be self-interested people looking to make money by providing that product.)

Biotech seeds have been the fastest adopted agricultural technology in history. Pandora’s box has been opened, there is no closing it, only managing it, so let us manage it better, and that will only occur if farmers are convinced. So if you have issues, have them not with the science or technology, but the handful of controlling companies who are only responding to the incentives the market has provided them. Competition is needed, not an outright ban, which is probably impossible anyway. But, it is heartening to me, that family farmers are not disadvantaged by using what is available now. (I know that Monsanto has disadvantaged other family farmers, or just farmers, but this is not a bias against GM seeds, it is against the company, and it doesn’t mean they are out to screw everybody else as well. They act in their own interest as does any other company.) And as for the subject of chemicals that always comes up, let us put them in the proper context:

“Every compound you can name, no matter how scary has a safe level; and every compound, no matter how natural, has a toxic level.” ~ Brian Dunning (Author)

Thanks Brian, for making food for the rest of us. We, or at the very least I, are grateful, and I trust that you know what you’re doing.

[UPDATE: Part 3 in the series: Lowdown on GMOs with a Biotech Firm can be read here.]

Future of Work

This is the last chapter of my book. To those who have read this far, I am forever grateful. (If anyone wants to read the Introduction and Conclusion, just leave me a comment and I’ll email it to you. For now, I won’t be posting it online.)

Sub-chapter #20, of Chapter #5, Technology, of my ongoing rewrite and open editing process Random Rationality: A Rational Guide to an Irrational World. I would greatly appreciate any feedback, corrections, criticisms, and comments. If you want the full PDF of the book, then you can download it by clicking here—if you provide constructive criticisms in return, and live in the US, UK, or EU, then I’ll ship you a paperback copy of the book free of charge when it’s published. If you wish to read the previous chapters in one convenient place online, please follow this link, and lastly, thanks for reading!

---

 

A FUTURE OF WORK

Last but not least, what might become of our jobs? If we play our cards right, one day in the near, or far, future, jobs—as we know them today—will become obsolete. Let’s find out why, and why this will be a good thing, perhaps the best thing to ever happen to humanity.

We are partway through a trend that once concluded, will result in a new renaissance (last time, I promise). An event that will be remembered for all time as the defining point when the potential of our creativity was unbounded by the limits of society and a new global culture was born.

First off, a bit of history. For all of humanity’s existence, we’ve had to work to survive, just as all other animals do. Whether that meant hunting for food, tending to crops, trading for goods, foods, or gold, and so on until we find ourselves working the 9-to-5 in the here and now—well, the lucky amongst us. By the way, this is how work will change. It will move from becoming a necessity to a leisure.

During this epoch, a trend has slowly, quietly and unnoticed, unfurled in the background: the ratio of man-hours relative to productivity or work done. From the start of civilization until the Industrial Revolution, a span just shy of some seven-thousand years (depending on which history book you read), this ratio has stayed fairly constant. That is, the amount of man-hours vs. work accomplished didn’t deviate far from the historical norm.

Of course, civilization still prospered in some cases and progress was evident. This progress, while not increasing the work done per person, increased the quantity of workers in a concentrated area, often resulting in slavery, the moral black mark on our history, and all those extra hands were able to carry out those gigantic tasks, such as building Rome, Washington DC, and other such cities of antiquity. Though contrary to popular belief, the pyramids of Egypt were not built by slaves, but paid Egyptian laborers.

When the Industrial Revolution kicked off in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, this ratio started positively increasing. That is, the same amount of man-hours constituted increased work, otherwise known as Productivity Growth (PG). This was due to the machines and industrial processes created: steam engines, coal plants, light bulbs, medicines, and factories that became extensions of our hands and minds allowing us to work smarter, travel farther, more productively, and in better health.

This trend is responsible for almost everything we have today. Technology started replacing human labor and this trend has continued to this day, allowing us to have that little thing we call comfort, and this trend, unhindered, will continue to progress further and exponentially faster with time as it has been since it began. None of the tragedies of the 20^th century even put a dent in exponential increase of computational progress—that includes WW1, WW2, The Great Depression, and others.

We went from manual labor farming to horse-drawn ploughs to tractors, to automatic irrigation and soon to underground farming. From hauling stone slabs on sleds, to the wheel, to the horse-drawn cart, to the electrical car, to the internal combustion engine, and hopefully back to the electric car soon. I know what you’re thinking, yes the electric car was invented first and these are just a few examples among many thousands.

This positive increase, or negative depending on your viewpoint (either short or long-term), which depends on the type of job you have, has an ugly consequence. People have been losing their jobs for the last 150 years as machines replaced their profession; from the elevator man to the soot-shoveler, to the autoworker to many, many others.

Though so far, there has been a technological caveat. As society has progressed, new jobs have been created, continuing economic expansion. However, this trend of new jobs replacing old jobs is beginning to stutter. In 1993, there were 194 million Americans in the labor force, and by 2000, this number had increased to 213 million. During these eight years, 22.7 million jobs were added along with the 19 million new workers leaving a surplus of 3.7 million jobs. Between 2001 and 2008, labour participation went from 215 million to 234 million people, but with only two million jobs added in that same time period. A deficit of 13.7 million jobs, and since 2008, we have lost just over half-a-million more jobs (4.317 million lost vs. 3.765 million regained in mid-2012). So the total deficit is 14.25 million jobs, and this is just in nineteen-years.

Every month, the labor force expands by approximately 125,000 people due to population growth, so that’s 125,000 new jobs that the economy needs to add, just to keep the unemployment rate steady. By 2050, the labour force is projected to be 45% larger than today, or approximately 339 million people. That’s more than 100 million new jobs that need to be added by then, just in the USA. In the rest of the world, the population is projected to increase by at least two-billion, and perhaps three-billion according to UN projections. Where are the jobs going to come from? From nowhere it seems.

Counter to the population increase, the technology we are creating (and which shows no sign of stopping but increasing) is only getting exponentially better, smaller, and smarter to the point where it will literally be able to out-think and out-flex us. This shift, this realignment, this relentless progression of automation will continue until the only thing left for the human mind to do will be to wonder, imagine, and explore the Universe—which also happens to be the things that we are best at. Eating, drinking, and sex not withstanding!

“[Carl] Bass points out that we are now at a great inflection point in the automation of labor. Extraordinary breakthroughs in the areas of artificial intelligence, robotics, and digital manufacturing are all converging upon one another yielding a world full of technologies plucked right from the world of science fiction.” [Emphasis mine] ~ Aaron Frank (Writer)

We are going through an epoch unseen before in human history. We are in the midst of transitioning from a manual-labor society to a knowledge-generating, machine-operated society. We‘re currently in the transition period, because as is plainly obvious, we still have billions of people working, though many of them struggling to scratch a living out what they are given, or able to take. But the underlying trend is undeniable.

But there are those who wish to roll back the dial, or want to stop the buck here creating a static society. Of course, being oblivious to the fact that every static society has collapsed, because problems invariably crop up and a static society cannot hope to innovate their way out of them. The American economist Robert Solow earned a Nobel Prize for showing that economic growth does not come from people working harder, I.e, just working longer hours, but from working smarter. By getting more from less, and in the process freeing up time to do other things impossible beforehand. Stopping or slowing technological growth, and implementing employment for employments sake is a straight path to disaster, reminiscent of 20^th century communism.

Back to basics. The reasons for the increasing mechanization in society are simple. It costs much less to have a machine do a person’s work than a person, especially with the increasing cost of labor, and companies having to contend with trillions of new currency units floating around the world and doing everything in their power to not raise their prices, so they decrease costs. Machines have no health insurance bills, don’t get sick, need vacation days, smoke breaks, and aren’t distracted by their inner monologue, along with various other factors that retard productivity. These are all ancillary reasons, however. Many of the background processes of our world today can only be done by machines and  artificial intelligence, such as aviation, computer science, heavy industry, and even in finance.

While the main rationale often used to replace a person with a machine is to improve a company’s profit margin and time to market, and not the automation of society, does not make the result of these decisions any less real (or inevitable).

In the past, as people have become displaced from one profession, they have moved to other professions that could not be automated or that were created due to new technologies invented.

In the twentieth century, as manufacturing jobs were becoming mechanized, factory workers moved en masse into the services sector. For the last fifty-odd-years, the services sector has exploded, most notably in the USA, but also in much of the developed world, be it the restaurant industry, or the financial services world. The services sector is now beginning to bloat, and it simply cannot absorb the mass numbers anymore. Parallel to this, the wheels seem to be coming off the major world economies, and fourteen-million jobs have been lost in the last eleven years alone in the USA, putting an extra squeeze on companies who now see automation as a way to reduce costs and improve their profit margins.

Foxconn, manufacturer of Apple’s iPads and iPhones, are planning on introducing one million robots to replace 100,000 workers in the next three years. The irony in this is that as more and more people are laid off and replaced by machines, the fewer products the company can sell in the long run. For a period of time, the company might improve its profit margins, as the rest of society hasn’t yet succumbed to this transitionary period, but this can only be temporary in nature.

As more and more of society’s jobs are automated—and it will happen one way or the other, for the consequences will be worse than allowing it but I’ll get to that soon—has the effect of removing the employees as consumers from the market. In a free market, employees, consumers, and employers are interchangeable; they are all one and the same. These former employees will no longer have the earnings to buy these increasingly mechanized products or services. Thus, we (theoretically) will reach a point where we can produce almost everything via automation, but there will be no one to buy the products (of course, we’ll never actually get there, as something will give beforehand).

What is going to happen to the millions of factory workers when 3D printing becomes affordable, fully capable, and factories a twentieth century relic? To miners when nanotechnology is economical and we can turn any material into anything else, and build anything we dream of? To farmers when we start growing our food; fruits, vegetables, and IVM underground in luminescent rooms, allowing it to grow at a fraction of the time needed above ground, not to mention land owners (40% of the arable land in the world is used for farming or meat consumption, which will become  essentially valueless), and then to the pesticide companies we’ll have no more use of, as food production now moved underground is out of the reach of insects? Not to mention the transportation companies that ship foods to market, and the factories that wrap and prepare the food?

These are all questions we need to be answering now instead of when the time comes. Otherwise, we’ll do what we always do when we come to something different; we’ll try to destroy it or vote into office, goldfish who want to destroy it for political gain. We aren’t exactly the brightest bunch when it comes to making decisions with our guts, instead of our brains, which is why history so often rhymes. I don’t think that any society could stop it or destroy this trend, even if it tried. If America were to outlaw technological progression, after a little while, the Chinese would be so far ahead that the American people would get shaky feet living under the yoke of a seemingly ever-increasing Godlike country on the other side of the world marching forward. Bullet trains, towering skyscrapers (they’ll be building the worlds tallest tower: almost 3000-feet, in ninety-days around the end of 2012, moon base, space station, electric cars and the list will go on). Short of full-scale nuclear war, or a worldwide dictatorship, the inexorable march of technological progress will continue. However, politics will stand in the way, and that may be a difference of maybe years, or a decade, between the society that was, and the society that will be. In the society that will be, where disease, cancer, and death are all history, a delay of even a few years could mean millions of people who should have lived but came up short. Consider for example, the controversy met with Golden Rice by anti-GMO activists and environmentalists around the world. Golden rice is a strain of rice modified to carry vitamin A (Beta-Carotene). A lack of vitamin A is estimated to kill one to two million people per year, of which 670,000 are children, as well as producing 500,000 cases of blindness, where one cup of golden-rice is enough to supply them enough vitamin A. Rice leaves naturally produce vitamin A due to photosynthesis, but the endosperm (edible part) does not, so scientists transferred two genes to make it do so. The new breed of rice had scientific tests performed, and was found that the vitamin A absorption was as good, or better, than other forms of the supplement. But anti-GMO activists successfully stopped its adoption and distribution to the parts of the world where it would have saved millions of lives per year! Think of the absurdity and stupidity of such a position. We were willing to put two modified genes inside a strain of rice, before the lives of millions of people per year, every year, until the situation is remedied because of some idealistic, bombastic, and shortsighted view of nature. Again, as we saw in the chapter, Future of Food, almost all our food today has been upended from natural selection as it is; it has been shot with radiation, hand-selected for breeding, and saved from extinction because of human intervention. The very process of planting crops is a slap in the face of mother nature, but no one is protesting farms, just the future of food, which they do not understand. And after all this, genetic engineering has not been stopped, nor can it, but the lives of those poor souls were indeed wasted. This is the inherent danger in rolling back or just delaying the wheels of progress; accidental genocide. There are many people who advocate the relinquishment of technological progress (as if such a thing were possible anyway).

The costs of many services, products, and food will continue dropping until one day they hit zero in terms of human energy input, and shortly after, almost zero from a material perspective. Once we are  at that point, we will have a choice to make, the biggest choice any society of humans has ever had to make, and with consequences that will span centuries and affect billions of human lives.

We can transition to a resource-based economy, where people are simply given everything they need or want at no cost since it doesn’t cost anything to produce from a labor standpoint, and with very little energy due to Moore’s Law of energy use—as computers increase in power, doubling every 18 months while halving in size and staying at the same price, the amount of energy consumed by them is going in the opposite direction, e.g., if the 2011 MacBook Air, had the efficiency of a 1991 computer, it’s battery would last all of 2.5 seconds, instead of seven hours. The difference is algorithmic in nature: better, more efficient algorithms doing more work in fewer cycles. What will be the point in money if nothing costs anything?

Or, the elite, or whichever section of upper-society comes into their momentary hold of power, whom are narrowly short-sighted to their own benefit (and think they know better), much as the rest of us are to our own benefit (and think we know better), will invent some other form of currency and keep the charade going round and round, convincing us that it is a necessary function of society to have government and classes. Go watch the movie In Time and you will get an idea of what could pass. I don’t personally think this will happen, but the situation cannot be entirely ruled out in advance, especially given what we’ve fallen for in the past. Just think of the French Revolution, they threw out Louie, and installed Maximilien Robespierre, who gave the world his ‘reign of terror’. Then they threw him out too, and installed the power-hungry Napoleon.

In such a world, where scarcity is no longer a natural function of the world, economies built on scarcity will (or should) break down. The function of price is to assign value to a scarce product; the more expensive the price, the more scarce the product, either by way of overwhelming demand, scarce materials, or high cost of production. Aluminum used to be worth more than gold, even though 8.3% of the Earth’s crust is infused with its ore, but the means of production were amazingly expensive and energy intensive, until electrolysis came along. The sciences and continually improving technologies have been nibbling away at scarce materials and the means of production for the last hundred-fifty years, making once-scarce resources plentiful. It doesn’t matter whether it is food, metals, silicon, electricity, or anything else. You name it; it is more bountiful today than yesteryear (perhaps except human reason).

So when we have the technology to remove the human element and increase yield to such a degree as to remove all elements of scarcity, what purpose will the free market have? What purpose will private industrial property have? Or any (by this point outdated) technology that allows you to have sway over another persons right to life? The key technological trend that has accompanied our evolving society, is that technology is both a resource-liberating force, and a democratizing force du jour. When the gun was invented, the poor peasant suddenly had a way to thwart the armored knight harassing him. Gutenberg’s printing press broke the stranglehold the Catholic Church had established for itself for over a thousand years, and the fax machine broke the Soviet Union’s monoploy on information.

Much in the same way that the threat of violence is illegal in almost all cultures today, so it will be so with the means of production in the future. There will be no benefit for a man or woman to own a technology that holds sway over others save for the sake of power, which may very well come to be regarded as a mental disorder in the future: a disruption to societies balance that cannot and will not be tolerated for the inequality, fear, and violence that may spring forth from it.

Think about crime today, almost all of which is motivated in one way or another, by money. Either directly in the acts of stealing, drug turf wars, or actual wars between nations over resources. Or indirectly, through the emotional suffering inherent in unequal societies, and the stress, cortisol, and lost family time to name a few effects. What will happen to crime? Person-on-person violence is at an all-time low, the twentieth century was the most peaceful century of human history (accounting for both World Wars), as shown by Steven Pinker’s TED talk, The Myth of Violence, and there is no reason, given future projections and technological progression, that it won’t dive even further.

Technology is accelerating at an exponential rate and will continue in such a manner for as long as human co-operation continues. Our current forms of politics, governance, and society cannot, perhaps will not be able to transition into such a futuristic society. We need new ways of governing that don’t conflict with the fast-changing means of production that will start changing in increasingly smaller periods of time, with each cycle bringing with it greater change than the last (the Law of Accelerating Returns).

Transitions are painful, an unfortunate fact of life. Especially for local and linear oriented biological life as are we. Not to mention we don’t deal well with change, which is why we tend to end up in societal systems for far longer than we should, and why history repeats itself with dictators, tyrants, monarchies,  economic fantasies, and republics of the people who end up serving the state first, the people enough to placate, and war after war needlessly conducted to the detriment and distraction of said placated people. As remarks one of America’s literary genius’s, Mark Twain “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.” A sad fact of the human condition. However, this will be the first time in the history of civilization that we will truly have an alternative, an option not bound to the fallacies and falsities that are inherently created when millions of people converge on a society with their dreams, desires, ego’s, and jealousies. Once we arrive at that critical juncture, we will have the ability to free everyone from the confines of manual labor and mindless repetitive work and set people free.

We will be able to truly provide everyone on this Earth with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, instead of having them as words on paper paraded through the wheels of time as if they actually meant something.

A common point made in response to such claims, is that people derive meaning and purpose from work. Assuming that in a world where mindless work is not done, people would sit about the couch all day watching television re-runs of an age gone (since apparently people will stop making media). But this is a shortsighted notion. For one, people today do all kinds of things without the incentive of a monetary reward. Wikipedia and Linux are just two visible examples of thousands of volunteers contributing millions of man-hours freely to building something of considerable value. Aside from those, people of all stripes and colors regularly and without want or need of reward regularly read and write books, gather knowledge, learn, collect trinkets and widgets, exercise their body and mind, create art and media, and contribute to many millions of activities and hobbies. In a world free of the unnecessary (and time-sucking) jobs of today, we would have far more energy and time to focus such activities, as well as with our family and friends, and on other efforts we truly enjoy. Lifelong learning may become the new universal occupation.

“The role of work will be to create knowledge of all kinds, from music and art to math and science. The role of play will be, well, to create knowledge, so there won’t be a clear distinction between work and play.” ~ Ray Kurzweil (Inventor)

There is a lot of unnecessary pain and suffering in this world today, and there probably will be more before this transition is over, and yet more still if we collectively make the wrong choice. Though the pain of this transition, if done right, will be infinitely less than the pain of stopping or rolling back the wheels of progress.

Money may very well be a thing of the past one day. Here is to the future, and to the people and technology that will abolish human suffering once and for all. We can only dream for now, but the future is fast upon us. Without knowledge, wisdom, and a steady resolve, we cannot push into the future for there will always be those holding us back, either for immediate personal gain or an irrational fear of the unknown.

“Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.” ~ Carl Sagan (Astrophysicist)

Future of Tech

This is probably my favourite chapter. Here be sub-chapter #19, of Chapter #5, Technology, of my ongoing rewrite and open editing process Random Rationality: A Rational Guide to an Irrational World. I would greatly appreciate any feedback, corrections, criticisms, and comments. If you want the full PDF of the book, then you can download it by clicking here—if you provide constructive criticisms in return, and live in the US, UK, or EU, then I’ll ship you a paperback copy of the book free of charge when it’s published. If you wish to read the previous chapters in one convenient place online, please follow this link, and lastly, thanks for reading!

---

FUTURE OF TECH

 

The future is going to be very bright, brighter than a lot of us can imagine, though that is predicated on getting out-of-the-way of the engineers, scientists, and companies that will make it happen. (Not that we shouldn’t keep a watchful eye.) And if we do, the stars are the limit.

This chapter will focus on two emerging technologies that have the potential to bring about a beautiful future, and try as hard as I might, it will more than likely be an under-estimation because well… I’m dumb. You think I wrote this book? I was compelled to write it by something claiming to call itself free will, but I digress…for the last time…maybe.

 

3D Printing

3D printing has the potential to render the factory obsolete, and for very simple reasons; technology is beginning to move past economies of scale. Economies of scale refers to making so much of one product that the individual cost per unit is brought down by the mass quantities, which can be sold for a cheaper price, thus selling more quantities and increasing the likelihood of turning a profit.

A physical book makes a fine example (so long as I ignore print-on-demand). When a book is published, a certain number of books have to be printed, bound, distributed and subsequently sold to entail pricing it at say, thirty-dollars. Otherwise, the manufacturers’ and publisher take a loss. If that manufacturer is only printing a quantity that is one-quarter as large, the price results in a book that costs four-times as much, which makes recouping the initial investment increasingly difficult. Making more books allows each individual book to be sold cheaper and therefore increases the chances of recouping the investment, turning a profit, keeping people in work, and, in at least this case, increasing overall knowledge.

With eBooks, there is no such restriction on the cost per unit of the product as it is digital, and there is no difference between having one copy or one million copies. It is a simple command between the two quantities. An eBook has become a digital information technology. This is happening to objects. Physical objects are becoming (slowly for now, but increasing in speed) a digital information technology.

Today, every Jane and her Joe has a printer in the home; this printer is capable of printing rudimentary, usually multicolored, characters onto a 2D sheet of paper.

The future of printing goes well beyond this seemingly simple technology; we will soon be printing physical 3D objects. The 3D printer, otherwise known as an additive printer, will be able to ‘print’ any object that can fit within the length, width, and height of its laser-equipped arms; the user will be able to make three-dimensional, solid objects from digital files.

The first consumer 3D printers were released in 2012, but big corporations have been using these magic machines for decades for the purpose of prototyping. If they needed to make a spanner, a spare car part, an intricate widget, or whatever else tickled their fancy, they simply printed it out to touch it in real life. No theory, no spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to have it custom-made in a special factory somewhere far away, but created, tested, and demonstrated to management and engineering without lag time or exorbitant costs right there in the office, allowing many more innovative and riskier projects as a result of the cost savings. Before 3D printing, the shoemaker Timberland had to spend $1,200 and one week to create a prototype sole.Today, it takes them ninety-minutes and costs them $35. The airliner, EADS that makes the iconic Airbus A380 (the largest plane in the world), are printing shoe-sized titanium landing-gear brackets for use in their airplanes. Normally, such a device would be made via a process called subtractive manufacturing, which results in ninety-percent of the titanium being wasted (since you have to start with a square block and titanium ain’t cheap, and whittle it down to the final design). Additive printing is the complete opposite, which also allows more efficient structural changes and integrity. They eventually hope to print out an entire aircraft wing! The savings in material and reduced time to production is enormous. 3D Systems (which invented additive manufacturing twenty-five years ago), is involved in a consortium printing hundreds of parts for the F-18 and F-35 fighter jets: clearly machines that demand the utmost precision in their capability. If it’s good enough for some of the most expensive machines in history (between $154 to $236.8 million a pop), then surely our home accessories and cars will be more than satisfied.

Slightly off-topic, something similar—decrease in cost and production time—will soon be happening with semiconductors (used in computer chips, batteries, and solar panels), where a new manufacturing process has been demonstrated, in which gallium arsenide semiconductors are assembled by growing them from freely suspended nano-particles of gold, instead of using the more traditional subtractive methods from silicon wafers, accelerating their creation by thousands of times. This tech, while not explicitly part of the 3D manufacturing framework operates on similar principles (by reversing the subtractive process) and is expected to be operational within two to four years, and will result in just as significant a cost-savings. By the end of this decade, computer chips will cost about a penny, and they’ll be used with throw-away mentality. We’ll be able to afford to put them in everything; clothes, tabletops, walls, you name it. A simple way to think of the increasing speed, efficiency, and clockwork reliability of the exponential increase of computers is like this: we are using computers to build faster computers, which we then use to build faster’er computers and so forth. (The same goes for 3D printing, which is why I went on this little detour. )

Back to 3D printing. The manner in which additive printing works is quite simple. An object (encoded as a digital file) is selected and sent for printing. The printer then goes to work building it one two-dimensional layer at a time from the ground up, using (in the first mainstream devices) a plastic resin that is laid down and heated with focused lasers, solidifying in the process. This process continues, layer by layer, creating multitudes of two-dimensional layers that gradually build up until printing is completed, and a three-dimensional object stands revealed. The size of the object is limited only by the 3-Dimensional space of the arms, though nothing will stop you from assembling objects piece-by-piece; such as a table, chair, or plane.

This technology, once it comes down in price for the mass-market will explode. The first ones that are rolling onto the consumer shelves are of the world of plastic, and therefore, only able to print, or create, products in plastic. With time, silicon, metals, et al. will be added to the mix, then eventually all of them will be combined in one to be able to print electronics, watches (Rolex anyone?), cars, food, drugs, and has recently been used to print human body parts; a human lower jaw, blood vessels, bones (five-to-ten years away),  teeth, and even DNA. The tech that goes into making the 3D printer, is subject to Moore’s Law. (Doubling of price-performance per 12-18 months, so ten years from now, they will be approximately one-thousand more powerful and intricate.)

These products are functional now; the one obstacle that remains is of making them mainstream. Something that technology is exceptionally good at doing. Forty-years ago, a normal (or back then, state of the art) computer was a building in size and cost $100 million. Today, a phone a million times smaller and a thousand times more powerful is probably in your pocket as you read this. This is known as Moore’s Law. Every twelve-to-eighteen months, the computational capacity doubles for the same price (adjusted for inflation), and 3D Printers are subject to this exponential increase in capability without a subsequent cost increase, and if you forego the increased capability, the cost of any current technology becomes half the cost in the same time frame. The same goes for solar panels, every year they become roughly thirty-percent cheaper (compounded), and fifty-percent more efficient (also compounded). Since 2009, solar costs have dropped seventy-five-percent, even while contending with the Global Financial Crisis.

Decades ago, Bill Gates stipulated his dream of having a computer in every home. The new dream is to put a 3D printer in every home and with the exponentially declining costs and increasing capability, we may be no more than a decade or two from this goal.

 

“The rate at which the technology is getting faster is itself getting faster.” ~ Peter Diamandis (CEO)

 

Maybe one day you’ll break a mug and gasp; it was your favorite mug. There are no more stores to sell such antiquated mugs because you’re living in the future! Who knew? So you jump on your computer, open AutoDesk (or some other consumer-friendly program), and design the same mug again, perhaps adding your signature this time or a picture of your girlfriend. Perhaps you made a digital backup of it, or took some photos that can now be converted into its digital equivalent to save the work of designing it again. With that finished, you send it to your printer, and off it goes layering, resining, and laser’ing your new mug, layer by incremental layer. Voila! A few minutes later, you’re making yourself a new cup of coffee. Imagine the possibilities: toys, tables, chairs (assembled piece-by-piece), plates, cutlery, bikes, cars, or anything else you have in your home, or that you can dream of. Recently, a pair of students printed off a plane part-by-part, assembled it themselves, and flew it at a hundred-mph (it was unmanned), at a cost of $2,000. Just five-years ago, a plane of similar size and capability would have cost $250,000 to build. Imagine what we will be able to create five-years from now when it is another order-of-magnitude cheaper to print and create. This technology is taking a hammer to the rich-poor divide, though it will not completely obliterate it. (Something else will, and I’ll get to it in a few paragraphs.)

Now, some might think that we will be utterly dependent on the companies who will make these nifty, life-giving contraptions, much as we are to the energy conglomerates now, but technology sometimes has a funny way of being made of pure awesomeness. When your printer nears the end of its life, you’ll be able to print yourself a new one. Todays 3D printers can print off seventy-percent of the parts to create a new model of itself. Five to ten-years from now, it will print one-hundred-percent of its own parts. It will be next to impossible to monopolize this technology, and even if safeguards were built into it, the hacker mentality will sprout up to circumvent such restrictions. You will more than likely be reliant on someone for the printer cartridge. Though, the feed should be easy enough to make so that a distributed market is created out of it, with no one entity having a monopoly.

Economics will be thrown out the door in so violent a manner; it will be the Italian Renaissance all over again, with far-reaching consequences: negative in the short-term for working people, positive in the long-term for everyone. Look at what the printing press did to the dark ages. Gunpowder to knights. Cars to horse carts. Planes to boat travel. The cellphone to the landline. The CD burner  (and Napster and Bit-torrent and consumers and artists) to the music industry. iPads to netbooks, and I leave you with the homework of imagining what will happen to every industry once the 3D printer is mainstream.

iPrint, therefore I am?

The most groundbreaking example of this technology is what the Italian Enrico Dini, has set his life’s purpose to. He can print a house! Albeit only a small one for now as the technology is still in its infancy, but again, this technology exponentially increases in capability, so we won’t have to wait long. Imagine having the home of your dreams built exactly the way you want, to exacting specifications, with high-quality materials, no human labor, and no supply chain (save the cartridge). What previously required the work of a dozen men working tirelessly for months could be done by one man in one day! No more living with your in-laws while you wait for your dream home to be completed. Not to mention that within the three-dimensional reach of the printer, you will not be restricted to the boxy walls and triangular roofs we’ve grown accustomed to. All number of shapes, contours, and home-types will be possible. Want an upside-down fish bowl home? No Problem. Wavy home? Easy. Roman Pillars? Call me when you’re ready to start using your imagination. Again, numerous prototypes of 3D-building homes (also called contour crafting) exist around the world in many companies and inventors. What remains is bringing it to the mass-market, and I imagine the developing world will be the first to embrace it. Just as they did with mobile phones, completely skipping the antiquated resource-intensive landline telephone. There are several other people and companies pursuing this technology. One among them, Professor of Systems Engineering at the University of Southern California, Behrokh Khoshnevis, though he calls it by the latter name, Contour Crafting. (I highly recommend you watch his TED Talk on the subject. Google ‘contour crafting TED’, but suffice it to say; plumbers, electricians, and constructions are going to have a tough-time of it.)

3D printing, Additive Manufacturing, Contour Crafting, or whatever we want to call it will snatch from the future and bring into the present an economy with very little waste, unimaginable possibilities, huge economic and energy savings, and most importantly very little lag time between creativity and creation (see quote below). This will allow the ingenuity of humankind to spring forth and create a beautiful world not bound to the rules and bylaws of monopolistic practices that have manifested themselves as a result of the consolidation of knowledge, influence, and power into the hands of a few, and subsequent protection of that monopoly through government conscription. Human creativity, in short, is becoming unbounded, and technology is the great equalizer that makes it so!

As the futurist Jason Silva ruminates in his short-form video, Imagination, “If you were able to look at human progress, as if through a timelapse of the last hundred years, you would see that literally thoughts spill over into the world in the form of technology. We engage in feedback loops with that technology, which then extends our ability to instantiate new realities.” 

 

Nanotechnology

Nanotechnology is considered to be the technological Holy Grail. If nanotechnology were to fulfill its ideal, then every single material problem we’ve ever had or ever will have will disappear, or simply not exist to begin with. Nanotechnology, in its simplest form, is building with computers on an atomic level, usually between 1 and 100 nanometers (nm). To put that in perspective, the DNA double helix is approximately 2nm wide. It is essentially creating, or building things a few atoms at a time from the bottom up, with zero waste.

Some examples: carbon nanotubes assembled in this fashion into solid metallic-like objects are one-hundred times stronger than steel, yet six times lighter. Someday in the future, cars and airplanes will be made with them, increasing fuel efficiency and passenger safety. Some scientists want to build a space elevator with this miraculous substance reaching 22,000 miles into space. The cost of putting objects into space would drop from thousands of dollars per pound down to a few tens of dollars, which would begin a third space renaissance (Apollo and SpaceX were the first two)—and I’ll stop using renaissance now.

In medicine, current research is pointing to nanobots programmed to attack only cancerous cells and viruses, carrying the required medicine directly to the point of contact, thereby affecting only the targeted unhealthy tissue, leaving healthy tissue nearby unaffected—no more balding chemotherapy patients! The bandana industry is going to suffer—rally the goldfi…uh politicians to protect their jobs! And as I alluded to in Fear of Fission, we can get down into the nitty-gritty radioactive waste, rendering inert—or isolating—the oxidative ions that are stripped away forming the radiation, leaving behind an inert, harmless substance.

Nano-tech surgery is on the horizon. Infinitely more precise and able to perform functions such as diagnosing and correcting internal disease or trauma, free of slips of the surgeons’ hands, potential infections, and without need of surgical cuts, all from the inside out. (And if you recall from Future of Food, antibiotic super-bacteria are evolving that will make surgery all but impossible potentially within the next decade.) That is, individual intelligent nanobots will be able to travel to the trauma; assess the damage, and repair only the affected tissue, while skipping over healthy cells. We will potentially enter an age where life expectancy takes another huge leap, much as it did in the twentieth century, from a worldwide average of forty-years to kissing eighty years, and in some parts of the world, moving beyond. It’s helpful to note that in twenty-five years, computers (nanobots as we may call them then) will be a hundred-thousand times smaller than the iPhones and Android smartphones we use today, as well as being a billion times faster, i.e., they will be the size of blood cells.

We may even reach a point where a person never dies of old age and is kept in optimal health by an array of nanobots floating throughout his or her body, attaching to cells and repairing them daily. We could stay twenty-five forever! Consider this quote by the Foresight Institute:

 

“Nanobots work like tiny surgeons as they reach into a cell, sense damaged parts; repair them by reformatting new atoms, and leave. By repairing and rearranging cells and surrounding structures, nanobots can restore every tissue and bone in the body to perfect health – including replacing aging skin with new, resilient skin, restoring youthful looks and good health.”

 

That’s a future they think is possible by 2020. Eight short years away, but a more realistic timeline by Ray Kurzweil, inventor and futurist, is the late 20s. I’m already counting down the days because as a non-theist heathen, there’s no heaven waiting for me, just a boring eternal darkness where I can’t even get bored—how boring! Now, to not accidentally die in the next eight to eighteen years is the task I have given myself…

Don’t make the mistake of thinking this technology is only for the rich. The concept of poor and rich exists only in environments of scarcity, as does the concepts of the trading and price. While the rich will most surely have first access to miracles such as nanotechnology, as they will be the investors—so thank you rich people!—the concept of nanotechnology is that each nano-computer, or nanobot, can turn anything else into another nano-computer. It defies the very laws of scarcity and economics that we live in today.

One nanobot becomes two, two nanobots becomes four, four become eight, eight become sixteen, sixteen transmute into thirty-two, and forty-four steps later, thirty-two is 5,600,000,000,000,000 nanobots. Try assigning a price to that!

Now, there are numerous dangers in having unrestrained nanobot replication in the world; known as The Gray Goo Scenario, in which the biomass of the Earth is turned into dead matter. The envisioned controls are a bit beyond the scope of this book (as well as my limited expertise), but such control systems would more than likely involve Artificial Intelligence and centralized replication servers that keep things in check by doling out permission or denial requests for nanobots in light of the predisposed environment and usage. Perhaps using quantum cryptography security systems: unbreakable codes generated by quantum entangled states, which take advantage of a quantum state known as quantum superposition, where a change in one particle (after it has been entangled with another), invokes an instantaneous (and equal) change in the other entangled particle; thus if an eavesdropper listens in, he or she irreparably change, by way of observation, the quantum state. The security system is just a guess on my part, and there will undoubtedly be many layers of increasingly difficult to crack security to protect us from the harmful effects of nanotechnology, and ensure only the positive effects are unleashed into the world, to the benefit of all. For a more in-depth primer on this, exploring in far greater detail, the pro’s and con’s of nanotechnology, Ray Kurzweil’s, The Singularity is Near, is an excellent read on the subject (as well as on biotechnology, additive manufacturing, increasing computational capacity, turning the Universe into God et al).

The potential of the human race is being realized, and it will usher in a future brighter than any one of us can imagine. There will be pains along the way, especially economic (though due to technology, per-capita income worldwide has tripled in the last century), and the usual social unrest that accompanies such pain, but technology, as it has done so in the past, is the only thing that will alleviate us from the woes of the twentieth century, and all those that came before it, and the only thing that can provide a beautiful life to all seven billion people on this little blue rock, so it must be embraced with open arms and from a platform of knowledge, as opposed to ignorance, as is usually the case when we enter turbulent, exciting times. It is, and perhaps always will be, easier to invent new technologies, than re-programming the irrational hearts and rationalizing minds of billions of people.

 

“We didn’t stay in the caves, we didn’t stay on the planet, and we won’t stay with the limitations of our biology.” ~ Ray Kurzweil (Inventor)

---

Note: the book is fully sourced, but because of the writing program I use, the links don’t transfer over to WordPress, and I can’t be bothered inserting them in one at a time. The final book will have all the relevant sources in the proper locations.

The Future of Food

Almost at the end, then my readers can stop getting annoyed at my incessant posting as I go back to my bi-weekly or monthly schedule. (Even I’m looking forward to that.) This is sub-chapter #18, of Chapter #5, Technology, of my ongoing rewrite and open editing process Random Rationality: A Rational Guide to an Irrational World. I would greatly appreciate any feedback, corrections, criticisms, and comments. If you want the full PDF of the book, then you can download it by clicking here—if you provide constructive criticisms in return, and live in the US, UK, or EU, then I’ll ship you a paperback copy of the book free of charge when it’s published. If you wish to read the previous chapters in one convenient place online, please follow this link, and lastly, thanks for reading!

---

A FUTURE OF FOOD

Food security is a very big deal these days, with many countries, most publicly the UN, trying to fix it to ensure future food security. Even my dad and girlfriend are helping, working at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

According to projections by the UN, by 2050, there will be at least nine billion people on this planet. Water demand will increase by 70-90% with current crop technologies. Agriculture, as it stands today, accounts for thirty-percent of human green house gases (more than the transportation, electricity, and manufacturing sectors, making it the single-largest contributor, as well as accounting for 70% of sustainable water use).

Each of these statistics is scary in and of themselves, and taken together, paint a bleak picture of the future of food and by extension, humanity. As a result, many countries around the world are actively implementing more of the same policies to ensure they get their slice of the pie, instead of embracing smarter technologies so that everybody gets a slice of the pie. (Did we need more evidence government is ill-equipped to deal with the problems of the 21^st century?)

The Chinese, the Saudi’s, the Egyptian’s, and the Emirati’s, among others are buying up farmland in different areas of the world to supply food to their own populations. It almost sounds like they are trying to placate their people for fear of social unrest—undoubtedly the biggest motivator in revolutions past, and those ongoing in 2012 and 2013.

So where is all this extra food going to come from to feed these two billion extra hungry mouths, let alone the billion hungry people we have today?

It’s not like you can just grow food anywhere; you need certain types of soil, climate, sun-exposure, fresh-water, fertilizers, pesticides, tractors, plows, farm hands, trucks, and last of all, seeds. And those are only the vegetables. Animal-meat requires far more in resources: 15 oz of meat on average requires 100 oz of vegetable protein. None of that is easy.

Running any farm is a lot of work. Then there is the added factor that food today travels an inordinate distance before reaching its destination. Every one of the above factors is linked to the price of oil; from the petrochemicals in the fertilizer to the diesel that runs the tractors and trucks, to the delivery of goods to factories, to the packaging of those foods and re-delivery to distributors and then to supermarkets. Food is going to get very expensive the further we move away from peak oil, unless things are drastically changed. Thankfully, this is beginning to happen.

It is not a reasonable course of action to simply rely on big corporations and governments to solve the problem of these essential services. Especially as they mismanage our remaining resources and politically misprioritize urgent national agendas—well, from our perspectives, at least (climate-change has been on the agenda since 1992 with little—some may say, if any—progress since then).

On governments, people who usually don’t have a clue how things work have a funny habit of running for office in the latter stages of democracy, and people who want to use that ignorance to further a private agenda tend to surround them like leeches. Governments are also wasteful and prone to unending expansion, as Mother History tells us. As such, conscripting government is usually a dead-end, at least until after results are demonstrable by the private sector, where they’ll swoop in and claim some of the credit. This makes it easier to justify spending. It’s very similar to a tragedy that cost lives spurring legislation to be voted on. Before the tragedy; no politician cared. After the tragedy, they had to show they cared.

On corporations, let us not believe the over-generalized meme that all corporations are evil. The truth is more likely that some might be evil, others are good, and most are benign. However, individual corporate philosophies tend to favor maximizing profits in an ever-competitive and increasingly economically troubled world, and this does not bode well from a qualitative perspective with what we will want to put into our bodies. You are what you eat, and this author doesn’t want to be cheap genetically modified anything (without the relevant long-term scientific studies attesting to its safety), unless superpowers come with it. However, I make that statement with a caveat. Most people don’t realize that most food, even organic, is genetically modified. To be more exact, the process of natural selection by random mutation (evolution), has been co-oped by humans for ten-thousands years. We’ve been effectively breeding what we want into the plants, and leaving out undesirable traits. Genetic Engineering is merely the same process done on a condensed timescale. With our selective breeding, some of the plants we routinely eat would not have survived in the natural world; such as corn, which without us, would have gone extinct, though I hear of no anti-GMO activist pushing to let natural selection run its course for corn. In the beginning of the 20^th century, mutation-induced radiation was all the rage (and still is), beginning in 1920 by Dr. Lewis Stadler at the University of Missouri and continuing still to this day in dozens of countries around the world. And thanks to this process, we now get to enjoy new varieties of rice, wheat, barley, pears, peas, cotton, peppermint, sunflowers, peanuts, grapefruit, sesame, cassava, and sorghum. In the words of William J. Broad of the NYTimes, “The mutations can improve yield, quality, taste, size and resistance to disease and can help plants adapt to diverse climates and conditions.” Radiation breeding co-opts natural selection and accelerates it (not adding or removing anything that nature wouldn’t add or remove herself), and has saved hundreds of crops around the world from disease, potential extinction, and thus people from famine. GMO however, involves silencing genes (nature often does no different), or inserting foreign genes, which is what scares everyone. However, there is nothing inherently wrong with the process, it is how it is used. Technology has always been a double-edged sword; it can be used for good or bad. But since it exists and is not going away, we must endeavor to push the corporations using it to focus it on the good side, not merely to ban it. This chapter may at times seem anti-GMO, though I have endeavored for it not to, but that is just selection bias—I talk more about the bad GMO’s than the good ones.

Cost-cutting of corporations is the biggest issue we have from a nutritional standpoint, with the plethora of unhealthy foods so prevalent in the western world and working their way into the developing world, causing obesity and diabetic health problems that ‘encourage’ economic expansion in the form of insurance and medical expenses—hardly frontier pushing. It is rather disturbing that eighty-percent of the 600,000 items in the US food supply are laced with added sugar. (I can’t help but feel that most anti-GMO activism is rooted in the false equivalence of cheap, unhealthy food with GM food. Indeed, you can engineer unhealthy garbage, loosely refer to it as food, and sell it, though that in no way, makes the case that all GM food will likewise fit under such an umbrella.)

In the end, a corporation’s goal is to reduce the cost of production, in the process undercutting competition. In food production, the methods used to achieve such aims (so far and in the majority) are deleterious on all save the short-term economic viewpoint our capitalism has seemingly devolved into.

On the production of meat: animals are kept rounded up in factory-farms their whole lives, never see the sun, are injected with antibiotics, often live in their own feces, and are pumped full of steroids and growth hormones. All while eating an unnatural diet that makes them fat and sick instead of strong and healthy. While these methods are detestable, it’s all part of cutting costs and providing to the consumer a cost-effective product. It’s up to the consumers to vote with their wallets. As far as the corporation can tell, their product is selling. And so far, it seems, people either don’t know yet,  are ok with it, or are unable to afford better-quality food. Not to mention that the practice of giving animals antibiotics (as well as human abuse of antibiotics) is causing normal bacteria to evolve into antibiotic resistant super-bacteria. In the next decade or so, if we are lucky, our current crop of antibiotics will cease being effective worldwide. (That is almost the only reason needed to overturn the meat industry: worldwide pandemic? No thank you!)

On the plant side, it’s much more cost-effective to plant a lot of one variety of plant than a multitude of different varieties as the industrial process can be streamlined to fit one crop type. As we produce more and more food, and as the farming business becomes ever more dominated by big agriculture (Big Ag), crop diversity is decreasing. And as we increase usage of arable land due to geographic reorganization, companies like Monsanto are genetically engineering plants to increase yield and resistance to insects to stave off naturally declining yields, which are only adding to the problem (think of the soil as a drug addict: petrochemical fertilizers are added to increase yields, but more has to be added every year as the soil becomes even more dependent on the fertilizer, as improper crop rotation is not allowing the soil to replenish itself naturally, and ever more amounts of fertilizer are needed). In India, 200,000 farmers have taken their own lives since 1997 because of the debt they have to take on to afford these seeds and fertilizers, and unable to pay back their debts, they end their own lives instead.

Decreasing crop diversity is dangerous in so many ways, as it is inherent in nature for a reason; everything in this world is susceptible to something else. The less variety there is within a particular species, the more likely its extinction is. There are billions of different types of fungus, bacteria, and insects that eat, affect, or infect different types of plants; some plants are resistant to some but not all. The danger in reducing our crop diversity is that it increases the chances that a singular cause can wipe out a huge proportion of our food supply, and mass famine would ensue.

Small farmers, such as the Indian farmers, contribute to this important crop diversity by virtue of being decentralized relative to each other and they are being driven out of business due to the economies of scale that work in favor of Big Ag. And Monsanto isn’t helping by not allowing farmers to re-use their seeds, eating into their already razor-thin profit margins, thereby increasing the dominance of the handful of companies that can afford them and the Roundup pesticide that only Monsanto sells, which only works with their seeds.

These few companies will—and basically pretty much already do—control our food supply with present processes and methodologies, and have little incentive to update their processes for as long as it is profitable.

A few examples of cost-cutting strategies used today:

• Honey is cheap, ultra-filtered, and pollen-less to mask its origins. Pollen-less honey is not considered honey by the FDA (hint: shady companies in China)
• Plumping chicken-meat with saltwater solution to increase the weight and therefore price (average weight increase is thirty-percent)
• Meat scraps which would otherwise be thrown away are being glued together and sold as prime meat (yes, glued. Though the glue is not the problem, but the leftover scraps being misrepresented)
• Farmed salmon are artificially dyed to make them pink, making it appear to be wild salmon that is considered healthier
• Majority (75%) of the world’s olive oil is diluted with sunflower oil. Real olives only making up between 10-30% of the product

It’s all a bit depressing, but this chapter is titled, Future of Food, so let’s move on to the optimistic side for the positive news.

There are three new and exciting technologies and methodologies that will allow us to feed everyone with healthier, cheaper food while having a drastically smaller environmental footprint, perhaps even a surplus of food, which would alleviate the motherly induced guilt of having leftover food on the plate when there are starving kids somewhere else. In time, it might even lead to the demise of the multinational conglomerates of the food industry if implemented correctly, as food production would (or should) naturally move into the local arena. All of the following three solutions to be discussed are parts of what is called Vertical Farming (farming upwards in skyscrapers as opposed to outwards in land).

First up, the low-tech solution: aquaponics. It is, at its simplest, merely two pools of water, one with small fish in it and the other with floating pods in little pods, with plants growing out of them. The water circulates through the two pools in a circle-of-life manner. It can be in a spare bedroom, outside in a greenhouse, or on acres of space outside. It can be as small or as big as you like.

The fish poop in the water, and that water is routed to the plants, where the plants use the poop as fertilizer, cleaning the water to be circulated around back to the fish. In this manner, the fish aren’t poisoned by their own feces and have clean water to live in, and the plants receive free fertilizer, filtering the water, and grow.

Water is only added to compensate for what the plants themselves use, or the small amount of evaporation that happens. Aside from this, it is essentially self-maintaining and uses very few resources. It also becomes in time, an organic environment that supports itself, much as a lake does, creating a thriving ecosystem of bacteria and other life forms that support the healthy development of both plant and fish.

An aquaponics system uses about five-percent of the water that in-ground farming uses for the same output, has 90% less land requirements, uses electricity instead of diesel fuel (so it can be coupled with renewable energy if need be), eliminates waste, and even with the right kind of fish, can eradicate mosquitoes in a large surrounding area if its usage is widespread. All the while growing dozens of different types of fruit and vegetables from bananas to lettuce to tomatoes and many more.

Aquaponics is a cheap, economical, sustainable method of food production that anyone can learn and set up, either in a spare bedroom, backyard, skyscraper, or on a farm. No stage of production is utterly reliant on oil or fossil fuels unless that’s where your electricity comes from, and this can be just as easily converted to run using renewable energy sources. On top of aquaponics, there is also aeroponics (pioneered by NASA). Instead of plant pods floating on water and sucking up the nutrients expelled by the fish, a watery mist is used to deliver nutrients to the plants in an indoor environment that has the same benefits of aquaponics, using UV lights for the plants to perform photosynthesis. They are similar processes, though aeroponics requires more high-tech equipment than does aquaponics.

The second solution is a little on the high-tech side. In the Netherlands, a company called Plantlab has created an entire underground farm lit up by blue and red LED lights specifically tailored to each plant, such that it instigates the fastest growth possible.

It turns out that plant cells are more effective at converting certain wavelengths of light (in combination with carbon dioxide and water) to energy than others. The underground setup of this Dutch company is designed to maximize those wavelengths of light tailored specifically to each plant, providing the perfect conditions in every respect in order to get us the food we need faster, with less energy, no pesticides, reduced fertilizers, no tractors, no plows, or pollution, ninety-percent less water, and a fraction of the required labor. They also use plant science, mathematical models, and carbon dioxide models to regulate the fresh weight, dry matter, and developmental speed of their plants. They also use automation to control the climate so it stays perfect, and record thousands of data points for each growing cycle to distill and capture the most efficient patterns of growing. Pretty much a farm on steroids, using Big Data to create ever more efficient models of plant growth, nutrient feed, and food quality.

It looks like the effervescent fauna from Pandora in the movie Avatar, with fluorescent vegetables, herbs, and fruits abounding.

Above-ground farming is dependent on nature, and is surprisingly inefficient; from the water runoff, soil depletion, inability to grow at night, vast land requirements (forty-percent of the world’s land surface), geographical reorganization (contributing to desertification and droughts), and the oil-dependent machinery to plow, seed, and harvest the food. Then natural photosynthesis converts approximately nine-percent of the available light into energy, while Plantlab is able to currently convert approximately twelve to fifteen-percent, with a goal of eighteen-percent—doubling the yield, using a tenth of the land requirements and water, and no negative environmental impacts. Amazing!

Lastly (and luckily scientists didn’t forget about us meat-lovers), current research is pointing towards the inevitability of In-Vitro Meat (IVM) to accommodate those who will never, or can’t ever, give up their meat.

First, let’s look at the price we pay for meat today. The full price, not just the supermarket price, which doesn’t account for externalized costs such as CO2, environmental degradation, and so on:

• Worldwide meat consumption was approximately 326,200,000,000kg of meat in 2011, and increasing every year, expected to double by 2050
• Each kilogram of meat (2.2 pounds) requires 6.6 kilograms (14.5 pounds) of plant protein
• Eighty-percent of the worlds antibiotics are used on livestock, and seventy-five percent of those antibiotics are not absorbed by the animals, leading to the evolution of super-bacteria, which will render conventional surgery obsolete in ten-years
• Factory farms contribute negatively to surrounding environments by creating dead-zones in rivers and oceans (killing millions of fish), and are known to poison fresh-water supplies
• Worldwide, livestock accounts for eighteen-percent of greenhouse-gases, 40% of methane gas emissions (twenty-five times more potent than CO2), and sixty-five percent of nitrous oxide emissions (three-hundred times more potent than CO2)

There is a growing organic movement in the West to move towards more sustainable practices. With meat, that entails switching to pasture-raised animals that have been fed real food (by real, food that they are evolutionarily programmed to eat, i.e., grass, not corn or grain) and have been given freedom to wander around in the sun. While this is a step-up for human health, it is not for environmental health. These animals generate more emissions (per animal) than those cooped up in the factory farm hell hole, and require even more land. We currently use forty-percent of the world’s arable land for farming and raising animals for meat consumption. If we switched to pasture-raised animals in the West (where we eat the most amount of meat), that forty-percent would most assuredly increase along with the environmental consequences that go with it.

So let’s start with IVM; first by detailing what it is. It involves growing meat using stem-cells that envelop and grow around a string of animal-tissue (this is what nature does if it sounds gross, using DNA instead of tissue). Scientists take a string of tissue from an animal painlessly (and without killing it), from an area such as the rump or breast or any such desirable area. Simultaneously, they’ll extract the animals own stem-cells, or reverse-engineer stem-cells from other cell-types (a Nobel prize was given out for demonstration of this process in 2012), and put the two together in a scaffolding that binds them. The stem-cells naturally take on the exact genetic properties of the meat, and begin to grow out onto a biodegradable or edible scaffolding, which feeds nutrients into the meat, and stretches and twists it, stimulating muscle development and increasing tissue-strength. The result? A steak, chicken breast, or pork sausage indistinguishable from a cut of meat that came from a living, breathing mammal. And this is where some get a bit confused, it will actually be indistinguishable at a genetic level; it won’t be imitation meat, or fake-meat, but real meat!

“Once we get over the fact that IVM is oddly disembodied, we’ll be thankful that it doesn’t shit, burp, fart, eat, over graze, drink, bleed, or scream in pain.” ~ Humanity+

The only way that this process differs from nature, is it’s done without the biological machinery of two parent animals, using human-engineered machinery instead. Otherwise, it is the same process that nature uses. The mother and father animal pass on their DNA via egg and sperm, and nature employs stem cells and nutrients to grow a new animal that’s a genetic variant of the inputted DNA. We’ll take a tissue sample of an animal along with its stem-cells, and create more tissue just like that without artificial chemicals, antibiotics, possible transmission of disease (bye-bye mad cow disease and salmonella), and without the waste and pollution that current practices emit.

In-Vitro Meat Facts:

• Reduce energy use by 7-45%
• Reduce greenhouse emissions by 96% (the emissions that remain can be used to generate electricity potentially allowing 100% reduction)
• Reduce land-use by 99%
• Reduce freshwater use by 96%
• Genetic manipulation to speed up life-cycle or ratio of edible meat to weight would be unnecessary
• No more outbreaks of swine flu, mad cow disease, avid flu, tuberculosis, brucellosis, or any other animal-to-human plagues
• No more unnecessary suffering for animals and people like. There’ll be no need to kill animals, and the transmission of diseases to humans will essentially cease

Coupled with agricultural vertical-farming, forty-percent of the Earth’s arable land currently utilized for agricultural and livestock purposes, could be returned to nature increasing biodiversity, pollution sequestration, and perhaps put a damper on the sixth great extinction, occurring overwhelmingly due to habitat-loss (a Belgium-sized chunk of the Amazon rainforest is cut down every year to be used as grazing grounds for cows to name one example among many). All that is being done with IVM is the same process and outlook humanity used to invent and propagate agriculture some twelve-thousand years ago. That is, appropriating nature’s laws in such a way as to be conducive to humanity, and which will, unlike with agriculture, reduce our ecological and environmental footprint. Healthier humans. Better off animals (and less disease). Happier planet! Who could object to that?  More pointedly, who’d want object? There will come a time soon when IVM becomes economically competitive with slaughterhouse-steaks, and I’ve a feeling people in the future will look upon us as barbarians for killing our food. Even Winston Churchill saw it coming six-decades ago.

“Fifty years hence, we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.” ~ Winston Churchill (Former Prime Minister)

Very soon, we will be able to economically grow any type of food locally using climate-controlled, 24/7 underground/indoor farms and save all that energy we currently use shipping exotic foods from one side of the planet to the other, on more productive pursuits.

This food revolution is long overdue. Above-ground farming has a cost, from increasing desertification, to agricultural runoff creating dead zones in our oceans, plus the inordinate amount of energy required from start to finish that drives up the base product that our economies run on: oil.

In late 2012, Singapore unveiled its first Vertical Farm (VF), growing half a ton of vegetables per day, at just 10-20 cents higher than conventionally farmed produce shipped in from overseas, with a goal of two-tonnes of fresh, local chemical-free produce by mid-2013. The VF uses 120 twenty-feet tall rotating cylinders, and is rated at between five to ten times more productive than agricultural farmland per square foot. With just a small-scale implementation, the price differential is astoundingly small. Imagine how cheap it would be on a larger scale, when economies-of-scale takes over?

The traditional farm may very well become a distant memory, as it moves into skyscrapers, people’s homes and into underground basements in various locales around the world in cities providing fresh, chemical-free, cheap, and local organic food all year round without the waste or the environmental degradation that accompanies traditional agriculture. This will simultaneously alleviate the concerns, often unfounded, of anti-GMO activists, of our bodies, of our dear planet Earth, and our wallets.

---

Note: the book is fully sourced, but because of the writing program I use, the links don’t transfer over to WordPress, and I can’t be bothered inserting them in one at a time. The final book will have all the relevant sources in the proper locations.

Driving and Flying

This is sub-chapter #17, of Chapter #5, Technology, of my ongoing rewrite and open editing process Random Rationality: A Rational Guide to an Irrational World. I would greatly appreciate any feedback, corrections, criticisms, and comments. If you want the full PDF of the book, then you can download it by clicking here—if you provide constructive criticisms in return, and live in the US, UK, or EU, then I’ll ship you a paperback copy of the book free of charge when it’s published. If you wish to read the previous chapters in one convenient place online, please follow this link, and lastly, thanks for reading!

---

DRIVING AND FLYING

I promised you positivity, enough to outweigh the tedium of the preceding chapters, and here it be.

What do planes and automobiles have in common? Well, right now, not so much, aside from getting you from point A to point B. But soon, a whole lot more, and it will make life easier and better for everyone.

Let’s start with airplanes today and extrapolate out into the near future with cars. We don’t have everyone today clamoring to own an airplane, as we do with cars, because they are excessively expensive to buy, to maintain, and to fuel. Instead, large companies are built around them that own and lease them out on an as-needed basis for those who need to travel. In order for these companies to keep costs down (and thus, keep ticket prices as cheap as possible), they routinely fly their airplanes as often as is safely possible. Airplanes often have about a ninety-six percent usage rate (cars have approximately a ninety-six percent idle rate).

That’s why we don’t have a billion airplanes everywhere, but why we do have a billion cars. Cars are dumb machines, much as a phone used to be, only able to send and receive calls and SMS. (It’s almost difficult to remember such phones.) A car needs to be driven everywhere by a human driver. Also, we humans aren’t nearly as rational, safe, and proficient as we like to think we are, and we often make mistakes. Sometimes we hit other cars or other people. Sometimes we drive ourselves off the road, or neglect to take local weather conditions into account and various other factors that cause a significant amount of damage around the world, both personal and monetary. (Why I’m bringing up bad and dangerous driving will make sense soon.)

That’s all about to change. Google is developing and testing the self-driving car, and to conclude the phone analogy above; it is the iPhone of cars. It has had over 300,000 miles of road testing with nary a hiccup to its name, or the equivalent of driving twelve times around the world. (It was involved in two accidents, but was being manually operated both times.) The necessary legislation that will allow it to drive on the road has already been approved in three US states; Nevada, California, and Florida. (And I’m sure many more to come; the one thing you can count on politicians to do is try to play catch-up)

These self-driving G-cars are a miracle in disguise, and in more ways than one. Imagine never needing more than one car per household (or per street). Imagine accidents being a thing of the past, or driving to the bar to get your drink on and back home risk free. Imagine traffic jams and congestions being a distant memory. Imagine all the money you won’t spend on insurance and parking tickets. Imagine never losing a dear friend or loved one at the wheels of a drunk driver or wet road. Imagine not having to worry about your teenage child going out late at night and all the other positive consequences I’m too dumb to think of.

Ninety-three percent of all automobile crashes are wholly or indirectly attributed to human error; intoxication, texting or calling while driving, and various other human factors. Global traffic accidents are in the range of fifty-million per year, and deaths as a result of those accidents are in the neighborhood of 1.3 million per year according (to the World Health Organization, though there are other estimates that put the number at $230 billion). Not being able to count the human cost of such tragedy (nor should one try), the millions of injuries incur costs of roughly $100 billion per year. By 2019, human deaths are projected to hit 1.9 million. The potential for change with the driverless car is nothing short of huge.

Here is a fictional scenario of a family of three in a not-too-distant future.

Husband, on his drive in to work in the morning; checks his work email on his smart phone, listens to the news on the dashboard TV, and sips his coffee with nary a glance at the road. Upon arriving at work, he instructs Car, as one would a pet, to return home. Fifteen minutes later, Wife gets a message that Car has returned as it pulls into the driveway, so she walks Kid outside and helps him hop aboard, telling Car to drive him to school, as one would of a chauffeur. Car drives with Kid in tow, while Wife goes back inside to finish her now-peaceful morning coffee. Car drives smoothly through traffic and, at full speed, straight through a roundabout without stopping thanks to its array of sensors on-board that monitor the environment in every direction thousands of times per second, as well as keep in contact wirelessly with nearby cars; all of whom, in unison, plot a course so that, with minimal disruption to speed, they criss-cross with ease and nary a hiccup. Coming up to a red light, it smoothly glides to a stop. As the red light turns green, all the other networked cars simultaneously start driving forward; their radars and 3D cameras preventing them from ever hitting each other, eliminating congestion on the once-chaotic roads. What was once a thirty-minute drive is now a relaxing twelve. As Car arrives at the school and stops at the sidewalk, Kid hurriedly shouts at the car to go back home as he disembarks and runs to the playground to find his friends. Twelve minutes later, Wife receives another message, picking up her handbag as she reads it; she strolls out onto the driveway, jumps in, and says, “Take me to work.”

Once cars become self-driving, it will be feasible, cost-effective, safer, and environmentally friendlier to have a handful of cars service multiple households, perhaps an entire street. In fact, there may well be  citywide car-sharing companies (using Big Data and statistical analysis), determining how many cars can service the entire population: the city of Paris is currently in such trials, though the cars they are using are not self-driving. Time, traffic, parking, accidents, and congestion cease to be problems anymore. You might not be able to stroke your ego with your big new car anymore, but your small personal loss will result in the long-term gain of the human race and our biosphere.

That is a future that can be made possible due to the driverless car, and it could not have come at a better time either.

According to the International Energy Agency, global peak oil was reached in 2006. So we’re officially past the halfway mark of the world’s cheap oil supply, with an increasingly energy-hungry and population-heavy developing world competing with the developed world going forward for what remains. China and India are spending tens of billions of dollars buying up oil-fields around the world. Using nothing more than logic, we can be sure that the second half won’t last nearly as long, nor be nearly as cheap, as the first half, though this does not preclude us from using dirtier oil sources such as Tar Sands and Heavy Crude etc, though they are far worse for the environment, human health, and far more expensive. The act of making a car in itself is a hugely oil-intensive task, let alone filling up the tank, and this will only become more so.

If a technology such as self-driving cars makes the transition from development to mass-market adoption; we’ll have fewer cars on the road, efficient roads, no accidents, no injuries or deaths, no congestion or traffic jams, and perhaps even no traffic lights. The cost savings that will result from a resource, medical, productivity, and environmental standpoint will be enormous and could potentially reinvigorate lagging economies (by repurposing money sunk into oil, cars, congestion, etc., into new businesses and investments), and we will all be better off—that is, if money still exists at this point (more on this in the Future of Work). Larry Page, the CEO of Google, recently went on the record that it would save Google itself hundreds of millions of dollars in parking costs. Imagine what it will save the rest of the world? And this, rather greedily and perhaps shortsightedly, speaks only of cash.

There may even come a time—nay, will if mass-adopted—that governments (perhaps even insurance companies) forbid manual driving due to the danger it poses others. Taxi, bus, and truck drivers, and traffic light repairmen et al, will be out of work, and it is unfortunate that such progress comes with such pain, but unfortunately, there is no way around that. As Gary Marcus from the New Yorker writes, “it would be immoral of you to drive, because the risk of you hurting yourself or another person will be far greater than if you allowed a machine to do the work.”

Everything has a cost, and that cost must be paid in full, for the sake of progress and the betterment of all human life.

---

Fear of Fission

So, here is sub-chapter #3, of Chapter 1, Science, of my ongoing rewrite and open editing process of my book, Random Rationality: A Rational Guide to an Irrational World. Sub-chapters #1 and #2, can be found here and here. I made the mistake of not throwing up the Introductory chapter online, so I’ll take a brief paragraph to describe the overall narrative of the book. The book takes twenty seemingly random subjects, attempting however poorly, to thread them together. In the process, attempting to make sense of the world we live in today. It is a very macroscopic worldview, as the whole book fits into two-hundred pages, but it aims to tickle the intellects of people just enough so they may go on to study more in-depth the subjects of their liking. The narrative really tries to inspire the abolition of thinking in isolation, i.e., we so often talk, discuss, and debate topics in isolation and assume that the same points prevail in the real world where nothing exists in isolation: such as the relationship between science and religion/society, fission with politics and economics, technology against government, and how they subtly, sometimes drastically, affect each other.

Would greatly appreciate any feedback, criticisms, and comments. If you want the MOBI, ePub, or PDF, then please let me know in the comments—if you provide constructive criticisms in return and live in the US, UK, or EU, then I’ll ship you a paperback copy of the book free of charge when it’s published.

Note: the book is fully sourced, but because of the writing program I use, the links don’t transfer over to WordPress. At the conclusion of the twenty chapters, I may throw up a post with all hundred-fifty+ sources, but the final book will have all the relevant sources in the proper locations.

---

 There was a dream once, of atomic energy. It is as yet, unrealized. Our current energy portfolio, primarily consists of about eighty-eight percent coal, oil and natural gas, with nuclear power just shy of five-percent, and renewable energy making up the rest.

We will probably be using coal, oil, and natural gas for a while to come, especially natural gas as it is being found everywhere in huge quantities, but they should have started phasing out decades ago. Though because of our short-term irrational fear and hatred of things we do not understand, the safest, cost-competitive energy source, nuclear fission, was never given legs to stand upon.

We all know that coal, oil and gas are pollutants: the first two much more so than the third, so it is an environmentally favorable trend that so much gas is being found, as it will result in a downward trend of pollutants from the prior two. Though even natural gas pales in comparison to the safety and efficiency of nuclear power, which we shall see now.

“Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts.”  ~ Daniel Patrick Moynihan (Sociologist)

 

First off, let’s look at some overlooked statistics of our current energy sources at 2011 usage levels:

• Coal, which comprises 30.3% of world energy: causes 161 deaths per TWh (Terra-watt hour)
• Oil, which makes up 33.1% of world energy: thirty-six deaths per TWh
• Natural gas, 24.8% of world energy: four deaths per TWh
• Nuclear power, 4.9% of world energy: 0.04 deaths per TWh

 

For every twenty-five TWh of power generation, one human death will occur because of nuclear energy, compared to 3,220 for the equivalent amount of energy from coal, 720 from oil, and eighty from natural gas. Yet, every time there is a nuclear accident, there is a global outcry to shut them all down. Even though they are, by far, the safest means of generating power and the cleanest, in relation to immediate environmental degradation and climate change, which are somehow always overlooked.

Since the first nuclear reactor in 1952, there have been only six accidents that resulted in a loss of human life; seventy-one people died as a direct result of these accidents. Compare that to the triumvirate of coal, oil and gas, which are linked to the deaths of 4,020 people for every seventy-five TWh. Coal, all by itself, kills around 24,000 people in the USA per year. And yes, eventually four-thousand people may die as a result of Chernobyl in the next twenty-years, which is an increase of one-percent compared to other spontaneous forms of cancer. But the biggest nuclear catastrophe in sixty-years, killed fewer people than one single year of coal in one of the most developed nations in the world—keeping in mind the distinction between ‘four-thousand people may die’ and ‘twenty-four thousand people die every year’. The data, when expanded worldwide indicate that coal-related deaths are at least one-million people per year, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). 

Of course, the nuclear accidents that do happen grab so much attention that we are irrationally coerced into a state of fear. But let’s critically examine the three biggest nuclear accidents of recent history without the scepter of hysteria influencing our collective amygdala: Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima. The reasons for the disasters were: human stupidity, human error, and human arrogance respectively. Notice that none of them are technological in nature.

In dressing down Chernobyl, I prefer instead to quote an article from Cracked Magazine, titled ‘The 7 Most Mind-Blowing Places Science Has Discovered Life.’

 “The lesson of Chernobyl is that the most dangerous substance in the world is human stupidity. If everyone who whined about nuclear technology actually understood it, the world’s average IQ would increase by 50 points. When idiots drink and drive and kill thousands, we don’t ban cars. But when idiots run emergency shutdown tests with an untrained night crew without telling the designer of the reactor or nuclear authority scientists, then deliberately drive the reactor into the nuclear equivalent of balanced on tiptoes on a stool perched on a stepladder on a table…made of plutonium, suddenly all nuclear power is evil…“

 

 The events of Three Mile Island were somewhat less extravagant in comparison. What transpired was an obscure mechanical gauge failure that became compounded by a lack of training. The operators’ manually overrode the automatic cooling system—Why this is even an option befuddles the non-nuclear engineer in me—because they mistakenly believed there was too much coolant—nor can I see what’s wrong with this—which turned an otherwise fixable event, into the ‘disaster’ that hurt no one and killed nobody. The problem was correctly diagnosed and subsequently fixed upon the arrival of the next shift, whom spotted the odd readings the dashboard was giving, and having the proper-training, began reversing the situation. Overall, people living within five-miles of the reactor, were exposed to no more radiation than one would receive on a commercial flight. 

 

 The Fukushima plant in Japan, which underwent a reactor meltdown in 2011 is over forty-years old, and was built with fifty-year old technology. The owners knew what the plant’s shortcomings were and were even told by the courts and the government to fix them. To make matters worse, TEPCO, had a record of changing the layouts of the cooling systems without bothering to document them. So when the tsunami hit, the previous plans had the utility of soggy toilet paper in finding out what was happening. Only through sheer incompetence did the Fukushima reactor fail, using decades-old technology that has since been surpassed, and only alongside the naive human thought, ‘it’ll never happen here,’ compounded by ignoring the law, and the docile Japanese culture.

 

 A report released by the mouthful of a commission, the aptly named Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission, confirms that thought.I will highlight the opening salvo, “The nuclear accident at Fukushima was a preventable disaster rooted in government-industry collusion and the worst conformist conventions of Japanese culture.” And then there’s this little nugget a little later on, “Although triggered by these cataclysmic events, the subsequent accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant cannot be regarded as a natural disaster. It was a profoundly manmade disaster – that could and should have been foreseen and prevented…” End of discussion you’d think, but alas. A few months later, Germany announced they were shutting down all of their nuclear reactors by 2022.

 The reasons for our three meltdowns are, as mentioned, primarily human error. Not an inherent danger in nuclear fission technology. Nuclear reactors are among the safest, most secure facilities in the world because engineers know to build them that way. It’s the managers, governments, and the presidents that end up breaking things, and the people are induced by a frenzied-media into blaming the reactor as a scapegoat to sleep better at night, which politico’s then go on to exploit for votes, and ever the cycle continues. And as a result of all this, nuclear power was never given the stage it deserved. So the market did what it does best. It routed around this obnoxious intervention, in the process increasing oil, coal, and gas power generation to feed our increasingly energy-hungry ways, because renewable energies were not yet cost-competitive. All of which come with the added bonus of pollution, disease, millions of deaths (per year!), resources wars, and the destruction of our environment which will results in tens of millions of more deaths…all because of seventy-one deaths and a few weeks of media coverage.

 Even the second point that a lot people, and environmentalists are especially guilty here, make against nuclear power—the storing of dangerous hazardous material that stays radioactive for thousands of years—is a moot point. Radioactive waste is stored in highly secure vaults underground, in mountains, or other equally secure areas with no immediate effect on the environment or to us. With the eventual mastery of nanotechnology sometime this century, it will cease to be a point at all. We will be able to sub-atomically rearrange the atoms that make the waste radioactive and render it inert and harmless, but more on that later. And even were that not the case, wouldn’t having the waste stored and put away for 10,000 years, out of sight and harms way, be better than pumping far more waste directly into the atmosphere—and into the lungs of every person, animal, and plant—as we do now with coal, oil, and gas? And causing irreversible climate change to top it off…Yeah though.

 

The folly of fearing fission, over coal, which powers thirty-percent of modern civilization:

• A 1,000 MWh (mega-watt-hour) of nuclear fission generates twenty-seven tonnes of radioactive waste per year, stored out of sight and harms way—in some cases, ninety-seven percent can be reprocessed so only, leaving three-percent (1,500 lbs) needing storage. The same amount of power from a coal plant generates eighteen tonnes of radioactive waste spewed directly into the atmosphere, while also vomiting forth 3.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, 400,000 tonnes of ash, 10,000 tonnes of sulfur dioxide (acid rain), 10,200 tonnes of nitrogen oxide (smog), 720 tonnes of carbon monoxide(toxic), 170 lbs. of mercury (extremely toxic), 220 lbs. of arsenic (poison), and 114 lbs. of lead (toxic)
• Between 1970 and 2008, there were 1,686 accidents that killed more than five people at coal power stations. On the nuclear side, only one
• One TWh of nuclear energy releases 30 grams of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. An equivalent amount of power from coal releases 1,290 grams (forty-three times more)
• Uranium provides sixty-thousand-times as much energy per kilogram compared to coal. One kilogram of uranium will power a 60-watt light bulb for 685 years. An equivalent amount of coal will power that same light bulb for four days

 

 Nuclear power is, in the popular vernacular of the green movement today, exceedingly efficient, needing sixty-thousand times less units—or eleven-thousand less if measured against crude oil—for an equivalent amount of energy. It can, should be, and always should have been part of our energy portfolio. It is much safer and cleaner than the other forms of energy we use today, all the while, having no short-term ramifications to the environment, and manageable, trivial almost, long-term ramifications, along with a proven economic record. 

 Another disconcerting fact is continued government interference, initially stemming from the Manhattan Project, but really exacerbating the situation throughout the Cold War, has greatly and destructively cemented uranium as the fissile material of choice in nuclear fission reactors, as opposed to thorium, which shares many of uranium’s beneficial characteristics and none of its ugly ones:

Thorium’s Advantages:

• It is four times more abundant in nature
• Produces 10 to 10,000 times less long-lived radioactive waste
• Cannot sustain a continuing nuclear chain reaction, so fission stops by default in any emergency that shuts down the power, I.e., Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima would not have happened
• Generates more energy per ton and its enriched material cannot be used for a nuclear bomb
• Does not require enrichment, therefore usability is 100% of the isotope as it is found in the ground, compared to 0.7% for uranium, which must be enriched to U-235 (which can then be enriched to P-239, i.e., main ingredient of an atomic bomb)
• The supply will not be exhausted for a thousand years at today’s energy levels

 

 Thorium reactors are finally beginning to catch on, with India leading the way, but the technology is still in its infancy. Norway has recently started a four-year trial of a Thorium reactor to work out the economics and make the theoretical efficiencies into practical realities. Were it not for the destructive nature of our species, the Manhattan Project, and the subsequent Cold War, we would probably already have clean, abundant, cheap, and safe energy, with no climate change. Imagine that. 

 This chapter has barely begun to scratch the surface on nuclear energy, without even mentioning ongoing nuclear fusion research, which aims to replicate the energy source of a star, the ‘perfect’ energy source. There is also the traveling wave reactor that aims to use the ninety-nine percent of waste left over from a normal uranium fission reactor, which Toshiba is aiming to have in production by 2014, financed by Bill Gates. It is just a taste, a mind-opener, and a realization that a future is possible; it can be bright and it doesn’t need to revolve around hydrocarbons or the destruction of our environment.

 

“We fear things in proportion to our ignorance of them.” ~Unknown

Infinite Frontier

So here is sub-chapter two, which is part of Chapter 1, Science, of the Random Rationality rewrite. The book is called Random Rationality, so it won’t start making sense until a ways in, so don’t be worried if you see no relation to the first chapter, which can be found here. Would greatly appreciate any feedback, criticisms, and comments. If you want the MOBI, ePub, or PDF, then please let me know in the comments—if you provide constructive criticisms in return and live in the US, UK, or EU, then I’ll ship you a paperback copy of the book free of charge when it’s published. If you share the same love of space as I do; consider signing the petition for increasing NASA’s budget here, or if you’re American, here. Enjoy the read.

 

regards, 

a Humble Idiot

---

In 1903, the Wright brothers were the first human beings to fly in a heavier-than-air machine, flying their garage-made contraption a total of one-hundred-twenty feet. Sixty-six years later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon, traveling 828,752 miles, or an increase of 3,704,811% in total distance travelled over and above the Wright brothers’ historic virgin flight. We stopped pushing this boundary in 1972, relegating ourselves to an earthly existence, though occasionally venturing out to Low-Earth Orbit (LEO). That, I and many other space enthusiasts, believe was a mistake.

Let’s play a guessing game extrapolating out the exponential progress from 1903-1969. Accounting for the one-third less time we’ve had, since that sixty-six year period, and assuming that the increase in distance travelled due to technological advancement relative to that sixty-six year period is lineal—which it more than likely wouldn’t be. We may have been able to travel 2,413,740% farther than the distance Apollo 11 travelled to get to the moon relative to the Wright brothers’, or approximately 2,012,051,840,341 miles, as the crow flies—or space monkey floats. That’s beyond Pluto…though it wouldn’t get us to Pluto due to the zigzagged nature of space travel (flying around planets using their gravity to slingshot around giving a free speed boost to the spacecraft).

While the number I just came up with is about as valuable as monkey excrement, it’s only meant to make you think big, space big.

Had we continued with the frantic pace of research and development that started in 1957 with the launch of the first manmade satellite, Sputnik, into orbit by the USSR, there is little doubt that there would be footprints on Mars, though they wouldn’t last long, as Mars actually has weather unlike the moon.

Perhaps we would have created different means of interplanetary transportation, and the exponential rise of technology would have propelled us ever forward, creating unparalleled economic growth in its wake. Instead we got the moving around and creation of electronic zero’s on computer screens on Wall Street.

We could have potentially mined asteroids by now, which are chock-a-block full of yummy resources that we want and/or need. Even a relatively small asteroid a mile across has approximately $20 trillion of resources. That’s one-third of 2011 world GDP in one little space rock, and billions of these rocks are just floating around between Mars and Jupiter.

So why did we stop pushing the space frontier? Why did we stop going beyond LEO in 1972? Well, we stopped going for geopolitical reasons. A travesty of politics—beginning the main theme of governmental shortsightedness this book will continually find itself in the midst of.

Throughout the entire history of Homo sapiens, an epoch of some 200,000 years, we have continuously pushed the final frontier. Expanding outwards from the Rift valley in Africa, we pushed into the vast expanse of the Mideast, then to the wetlands of Asia and to the extremes of Europe, making a final push to the lush Americas, and the remote Oceania. Overcoming our limitations and exploring the frontier is a quintessential aspect of human nature.

The frontier need not always be physical either. When we stopped exploring geographically outwards; we started downwards, inwards, and upwards. Downwards into the rocks to determine the age of the Earth and all manner of fossils. Inwards into our bodies to extend both the length and quality of life. And upwards into space to explore our place in the cosmos. 

We found fossils of ancient monsters, exploited the Atom, discovered mathematics, geology, medicine, and physics. In the process expanding our mental horizons, which allowed us to make sense of our little corner of the Universe, and it just so happens that the pursuit of such endeavors made life better for everyone in the process.

Thankfully we haven’t stopped expanding our mental frontiers. We stopped long ago pushing its sister, the physical frontier, and who knows what insights and discoveries we have missed out on as a result. 

Political expedience should not be a factor in discovering new—or more—knowledge. Neither should naïve thoughts that we have too many problems down here to go exploring up there, otherwise we’d never have left Africa! We need to access such endeavors objectively and with standards, though even that has its shortcomings. Nobody could have foreseen the implications of discovering the atom, and the scientist who discovered it, when pressed, would have been unable to properly articulate a satisfactory answer, yet out of the atom came nuclear power and the atom bomb. Out of Quantum Mechanics (QM), came integrated circuits and information technology, and now thirty-five percent of the US economy exists because of QM. Out of Einstein’s relativity, we discovered the means to keep satellites in orbit in tune with equipment on the ground (GPS). Problems down here are often solved by problems up there! When the Hubble Telescope had a malfunctioning mirror, scientists had to make do with observing a blurry Universe, but in the process, they created image-processing algorithms to clear up some of the blurriness, which was later used in mammograms down here on Earth, allowing earlier detection of breast cancer, potentially saving the lives of millions of women. Because of a mistake!

Be that as it may, did problems in the motherland stop Christopher Columbus, Captain James Cook, or Marco Polo, from exploring and discovering new sections of the Earth. It certainly didn’t stop the Iraqi and Syrian farmers who left the Fertile Crescent ten-thousand years ago due to over-utilization of resources and travelled to modern-day England and everywhere in between? (Eighty-percent of the current British population are descended from those Iraqi and Syrian farmers) 

 No, the problems of their time didn’t slow them down, but spurred them on, and possibly helped to alleviate their problems. For example: 

• Need more efficient shipping routes, sail the seven seas, map the coastlines, create maps, and plan better next time (We then went onto invent GPS, cars, ships, planes, and meteorology)
• Old World becoming stagnant, cross the Atlantic and start the New World, which eventually went onto become the dominant financial and military superpower of the world
• Minerals and resources becoming more expensive and/or scarce, mine deeper or farther away using new techniques and technologies

New, useful and beautiful things are always discovered when pushing that final frontier ever farther; therein lays its significance and the crux upon which our seven-thousand year old civilizations stand. Without it, we are cave dwellers, rendering the 1.6% genetic difference separating us from chimps nothing more than an unnecessary and wasted gift. It’s that mix of new problems in the face of old ones that forces upon us a different mode of thinking, along with practical experimentation that can then be taken back to society, allowing for its economic or geographic expansion. This is the foundation of human prosperity, where new processes, tools, social orders, and technologies spring forth as a result of new understandings. Without this engine of discovery and growth, history has shown us time and time again that society rots from the inside out and empires crumble. You can only coast on the achievements of your forefathers for so long.

 Why do all empires decline? Every single empire in the history of civilization has fallen from its peak due to a failure to anticipate change, and the propensity of government to maintain the status quo—a lesson to be learned in today’s heated political climate. To anyone afraid of change, history shows us that those who fear and push back against economic, scientific, and social change are on the losing side of that battle almost hundred-percent of the time. What are you pushing back against today?   

 It’s not religion, communism, monarchy, government, or any other factor of society that drives this innate human desire to discover—in point of fact, they are its antithesis with their desire for the status quo. It is change that is the instigator, and nothing forces change more than the unknown.

 Our final frontier, if you can call it that, since it is infinite, is space. We’ve conquered LEO, with the manned International Space Station, but we must not stop there. We should aim for permanent habitation of the moon and its exploration, which is chock-a-block full of helium-3—which will became necessary with nuclear fusion technology coming online in the coming decades. We should aim for capture of an asteroid, landing a person on Mars to establish humankind as a multi-planetary species, and have a back-up of Earth’s biosphere in case of a calamity, and then march, actually coast, ever forward. 

 Space doesn’t end. It is infinite and at each turn, there will be a blessing in disguise, maybe in the form of new resources, vast energy reserves, or new scientific understandings expanding our view of the Universe. And who knows, perhaps life, maybe even a sentient alien race. But we are guaranteed something, and the human race as a whole will be the benefactor. 

 This is not to say there will be no risk. Crossing the road entails risk. Getting into a car entails risk, but the rewards will far outweigh the risks, especially in our desolate solar system.

 Space has untold riches just waiting for us. We could diversify our eggs and sperm out of the proverbial single basket that is Earth, thereby increasing the chances of long-term human survival in the event of disaster. The technologies that we would invent to survive in space would be applicable to all our problems here on Earth, and it would greatly accelerate the day we live in a sustainable economy that doesn’t destroy the fragile ecosystems of our small home.

 Through our exploration of only a small section of space, we have already invented technologies that have served a multitude of needs down here at ground level:

• More nutritious infant formulas that allow a better quality of life for those infants unable to be breast-fed
• UV sunglasses protecting our eyes from harsh sunlight
• Memory foam used in helmets and prosthetic legs, saving countless lives and treating injuries
• Camera optics used in a third of all cell phone cameras capturing life’s beauty
• Digital imaging techniques such as CT scans and MRIs, potentially saving the lives of thousands, if not millions
• GPS and weather forecasting, allowing the efficient transportation of goods and people worldwide, increasing the quality of life of billions
• Smoke detectors that have saved countless people from horrible deaths
• And 1,723 other inventions that NASA has catalogued with the addendum that this list is far from exhaustive

Space exploration is the most awe-inspiring work that can be undertaken by humankind, simultaneously inspiring a new generation into becoming scientists and engineers instead of bankers and insurance salesmen, and expanding economies and horizons in a real sense. The understanding it brings fosters human innovation in a way that benefits all of humankind, not just those living in the void of space.

 Thankfully, private companies are stepping up to the plate in droves to take over where once government solely had the means. In 2012, SpaceX successfully launched a private spaceship and docked with the International Space Station twice. Another new company, Planetary Resources, has been formed to mine asteroids sometime this decade or next. Last;y, the newly formed company, Golden Spike, is offering tickets to goto the moon for $1.5 billion by the end of this decade. Though the niche they are creating is yet a delicate newborn that needs support. 

 

“Exploration is the most sublime expression of what it is to be human, and space exploration is the ultimate expression of this humanity.” Elliot G. Pulham and James DeFrank