From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Sun Jul 14 2002 - 03:54:16 MDT
On Sat, Jul 13, 2002 at 12:59:41AM -0600, marc_geddes wrote:
>
> Er... an 'exit strategy' is not what I had in mind. I certainly don't think
> that transhumanist Mars colonies would entail 'cutting ourselves off from
> the
> economic infrastructure of the larger society' . I was thinking of something
> along the lines of Robert Zubrin's ideas.
The "exit" in the name is not so much about total isolation as relative
isolation, see below. It would be just as true for building an oceania
in the Caribbean - a break with the current political systems, easily
economically isolated.
> We would still be trading with Earth and we would own space based businesses
> on Earth. We would be in constant contact with Earth, including full
> exchange
> of information via Earth and Mars based internets.
The lag is around 15 minutes. This rules out web surfing and using most
Earth sites interactively.
What would Mars sell to Earth? Obviously not much matter due to the
transport costs (although martian stuff would at first be a very
expensive novelty item - who wouldn't want a *real* Mars rock?). So it
has to be information: at first scientific data, then location footage,
documentaries and virtual realities. Really-really-off-site storage
might be an idea :-) But what more? It doesn't sound like that could be
enough to bootstrap a truly independent economy - self-sufficiency takes
a lot of time.
Even if you are not entirely cut off, you will find yourself largely cut
off from Earth economy and culture by the lag and transport costs. It
would even be a problem at L5.
Where are the antimatter rockets when we need them? (On the other hand,
if people start using macroscopic amounts of antimatter I want to leave
this solar system immediately! :-)
> The reason I advocate the Mars colonies is to escape restrictive regulations
> on technology, reduce the risks of techno-disasters (by relocating
> state-of-the-art-research to Mars), and experiment with new political
> systems.
Why do you think these restrictions will not be applied to Mars? I
suggest reading Greg Bear's _Moving Mars_ for a take on it, but a far
likelier scenario is along the lines "Well, if you in the Mars
Consortium want to use any launch sites in a WTO signatory nation, you
have to sign this agreement on only using DRM technology and not
allowing any human germline engineering".
The risk reduction by relocating in space is a good point, and could be
a revenue source. But why can't it be done using teleoperation in Earth
orbit? OK, maybe not for that grey goo experiment, but the nanocomputer
using ebola and AIDS viruses as components it would make sense.
The political systems bit is likely the least troublesome part. You can
do that *here* as long as you don't overtly break laws (witness the
polygamy movement). Most of the interesting issues of new political
systems do not relate to current laws in any case, and you would want to
try them out on a small scale at first in any case before trying to turn
them into full-scale polities.
> I don't think so. Remember that even on Mars we can have full access to
> Earth
> based research via the internet so we will know everything going on back
> home. Further more, we will not have to work under restrictive Earth-based
> regulations. I have read a paper somewhere (and I will try to find the
> article) which claims that 50% of all valuable scientific research is done
> by
> the brainest 1% of the academic community. (or some such figure) My bet
> would
> be on the 10,000 transhumanists to beat the ten billion normals.
Why do you think we are the brainiest 1%? We would like to think so, and
we are on average better educated and smarter than the average
population (assuming the surveys on this list are correct), but I
see no evidence that we are *that* smart. Besides, I doubt you could get
10,000 transhumanists today without scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Research isn't just about being smart, it is also a lot about teamwork
and slogging through experiment after experiment. That some authors are
very productive doesn't mean their work stands on their own (and many
are simply department heads that get their names on every publication).
Developing (say) a nanodevice hinges on building on top of a lot of
concurent work in chemistry, materials science, physics and computer
science.
>From http://www.abo.fi/~sungern/comm00.htm :
Bradford.s law has been most applied of these laws. It has
mainly been used as a tools for planning and evaluation of
information systems. Lotka.s law which concerns scientific
activity states that the number of authors to n publications (p)
in a specific population is 1/n2 of the number of authors who
have produced only one publication or
P (n) = k/n2, k = constant
Price (1963) has interpreted the law by saying that half of the
scientific publications has been produced by the square root of
the total number of authors in a subject field.
A rough estimate is that today, in first world nations around one in a
thousand is a researcher (I would like to see some up-to-date
statistics, this seems to be low). If we assume around one billion
people in first world nations, that gives us one million scientists. So
we can expect half of the publications to be produced by a group of a
thousand very productive authors, 0.1%. But it is rather unrealistic to
assume that all of these would be transhumanists and willing to move to
Mars. It is also unlikely that they would be as productive there; sure,
there are potentiation effects by putting bright people together, but
they also tend to get in each other's way and need a lot of "igors" and
undergraduates to do the boring stuff.
> Well, it's the fear of techno-disasters that anti-tech groups claim to be
> most
> concerned about. Why should they worry when the research is space-based?
> On
> Mars there is no eco-system to destroy, and the people in the colonies would
> be volunteers.
Remoteness breeds distrust. If you work at a remote place with stuff you
acknowledge are dangerous and also make it hard to check out what you
are doing, especially since you are playing around with your own
political system that doesn't acknowledge the "self evident" values held
by people on Earth and don't restrict the research, don't you think they
will get a teensy bit paranoid?
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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