UK Ministry of Defence on Human Augmentation

This report on human augmentation from the UK Ministry of Defence does not represent the “official policy or strategy” of the UK Ministry of Defense. They also consulted with the Germans. So you heard it here first – the English and Germans are working together to breed drug-fueled, Ironman-suited super soldiers.

I’ve taken a screen shot of a key image below. Hopefully the authors would approve of my sharing it, since they made the report public. They rated each technology by familiarity of policy considerations (how risky or ethically fraught is the technology?), transformative potential, and technological maturity.

UK Ministry of Defense

We have drugs and computers right now, and I assume we are using them. They don’t seem all that excited about the Ironman exoskeletons. “Non-invasive brain interfaces” are maybe a little farther along than I would have thought. Monkeying with genetics and brains is the science fiction stuff. It is a little surprising that they think monkeying with the microbiome would be fairly transformative.

China and thorium reactors

China is moving ahead with thorium-based nuclear reactors, at least at the pilot scale. It is based on a design that the U.S. pioneered and then abandoned.

When China switches on its experimental reactor, it will be the first molten-salt reactor operating since 1969, when US researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee shut theirs down. And it will be the first molten-salt reactor to be fuelled by thorium. Researchers who have collaborated with SINAP say the Chinese design copies that of Oak Ridge, but improves on it by calling on decades of innovation in manufacturing, materials and instrumentation…

Molten-salt reactors are just one of many advanced nuclear technologies China is investing in. In 2002, an intergovernmental forum identified six promising reactor technologies to fast-track by 2030, including reactors cooled by lead or sodium liquids. China has programmes for all of them.

Some of these reactor types could replace coal-fuelled power plants, says David Fishman, a project manager at the Lantau Group energy consultancy in Hong Kong. “As China cruises towards carbon neutrality, it could pull out [power plant] boilers and retrofit them with nuclear reactors.”

Nature

I’ve come around to the idea that it was misguided for environmental activists in many countries to essentially shut down a shift toward nuclear power over the past 50 years or so. Whatever the short-term risks, they would have been smaller than the long-term risks of fossil fuels, many of which are now locked in. Maybe thorium and molten salt are technologies we should be making available to developing countries to ease nuclear weapons proliferation pressure. We still need to double down on progress toward true renewables at the same time.

golf carts

Why don’t we drive around in low-speed city traffic in something like golf carts? Bikes are great, but there are times you need to move heavy bulky items around, and I applaud people who bike around with small children but have not found that practical on a daily basis. Golf carts would save tons of space, and would eliminate a lot of noise and pollution if they were electric.

I can think of two reasons why we don’t use them. First is that we want highway vehicles so we can get on the highway and leave the city at at moment’s notice. But if we live, work, shop, and study in our cities, we only need to leave occasionally. In that case, it makes sense to rent that larger vehicle just when we need it. We would also be more likely to pick buses, trains, and planes for those weekend trips when it makes sense, because we wouldn’t have sunk all that money in private cars and feel like we need to make use of them. (I’ve heard this is 100% illogical and also 100% normal human behavior.)

The second reason is the perception that we need big, heavy, fast vehicles to protect us from other big, heavy, fast vehicles. Well, mutually assured destruction is no way to run our cities and lives. If everybody switches to golf carts, we won’t have this problem, but nobody wants to be the first and end up a stain on the pavement. And most cities won’t dedicate streets and lanes to smaller vehicles because the big vehicles need so much space for driving and especially parking. And no, I don’t think golf carts really belong in our protected bike lanes, where we are lucky enough to have those, because they are still big, heavy, and fast enough to run over bikes, I think.

Just reminder, though, that we still need to get off our butts and walk most places, most of the time. Riding around on quiet, clean, safe motorized vehicles isn’t going to help with things like diabetes or obesity.

water, energy, and food in macroeconomic models

Here’s an article on how water, energy, and food fit into macroeconomic models. My basic understanding is that traditionally, they don’t. Production functions focus on labor and capital because these are assumed to explain most of the output, and including water, energy, raw material, and even land prices does not make enough difference to bother with. So the methods exist, but economists generally don’t bother because historical data shows these things don’t make a difference. We have certainly seen short-term and regional price shocks in food and energy that have affected economies. We haven’t really seen a sustained, long-term rise in prices of water, energy, or food, in fact the long term trend has been clearly the opposite. Will climate change begin to reverse this at some point? Or is it already happening but our technology is keeping up? Or is it happening slowly, we are adjusting, but the system is becoming more fragile and we are headed for a sudden panic at some point? Like dead wood building up in a forest – the forest may look okay for a long time, and then one day there is a spark, followed by an intense crisis, and then you are left with ashes…

Critical Reflections on Water-Energy-Food Nexus in Computable General Equilibrium Models: A Systematic Literature Review

The paper analyses how the Water-Energy-Food Nexus is treated in Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models, discussing their design, importance and possible ways of improvement. The analysis of their structure is critical for evaluating their potential efficiency in understanding the Nexus, which will be particularly effective for gauging the importance of the topic, the reciprocal dependency of its elements and the expected macroeconomic, demographic and climatic pressures that will act on its components. General equilibrium models can be useful devices to this end, as they are specifically built to track interdependencies and transmission effects across sectors and countries. Nevertheless, the review showed that most CGEs in the literature struggle to represent the competing water uses across sectors and, in particular, those concerning the energy sector. Therefore, it highlights the need to resolve this issue as a necessary step toward improving future research.

Environmental Modeling and Software

How do you climate proof a city?

In the past couple days, I’ve read a couple articles on how to manage flood risk in cities (New York City, in particular). In my opinion, and to oversimplify, a lot of it is about managing elevations in building codes for private property and in design standards for public property, and avoiding or carefully managing development in floodplains.

From MIT Technology Review:

  • “more permeable architecture, like green roofs and rain gardens” – I think this is a great idea, and full disclosure, it is part of what I do for a living. But it doesn’t help that much in really enormous storms, or in flooding of major rivers and coastlines. It helps to manage small- to medium- storms, which cause a lot of inconvenience and damage over time, and it helps to manage water quality.
  • Also, “less concrete”. Amen to this, although one idea of a city is to build at a high density in one spot so you can leave a lot of other spots undeveloped. We don’t do this well in the U.S. because of political fragmentation and the car/highway/oil industry propaganda we are bombarded with on Monday Night Football.
  • “upgraded pumps and drainage pipes” – well, yes. Figure out what you think the peak flows are going to be 50-100 years from now, and then modify your building codes and design standards to move or temporarily store that amount of water. Then, as your long-lived infrastructure gradually wears out, upgrade to the new standards, always keeping an eye on changes in projections and changes in technology.
  • “sea barriers and coastal protections” – a no-brainer, but not much help in a storm like Ida which was a rainfall-runoff and river flooding event in the Northeast. If anything, you want to get the water to the ocean quicker so you don’t want anything in the way! Of course, sea level rise and storm surges can come from the ocean side at the same time, so you have to take all of this into account based on your risk tolerance and the value of property you are trying to protect.
  • “proposed solutions ranging from social strategies, like educating local city councils on flood risks” – because political fragmentation, you can only ask nicely and hope other jurisdictions do something. You would also like homeowners/businesses to minimize runoff where practical and have insurance to cover their losses.
  • “green infrastructure like floodable park walkways, as well as a basketball court designed to hold water during major flooding.” – good idea, this is like an engineered floodplain, which you can dry out, hose off, and use for something else most of the time when it is not raining. It’s hard for these measures to deal with truly enormous quantities of water, but they can help in more localized urban flash flooding events.
  • Legalize basement apartments, because people who live in illegal ones tend to be ineligible or afraid to get help.
  • The story also references a flood risk study done for NYC by the Danish. This is always a good idea – collect data, map vulnerable areas, have computer models up and running to assess future risks (again, full disclosure, you can pay me to do this…) The Danish are good at this. So are the Dutch, and yes, my fellow geographically challenged Americans, the Danish and Dutch are different (but either will do).

Another article in Slate lists a couple more ideas for NYC:

  • “expand upon the modeling completed for this effort and continue developing a citywide hydrologic and hydraulic (H&H) model to better estimate runoff flow for various climate scenarios to be included in the drainage planning process.” Slate calls this “policy gibberish”. Okay Slate author, just leave it to the experts if you don’t want to try to understand it.
  • “Plant more trees” – I love trees. Again, mostly helpful in smaller to medium size storms, and for water quality. Also great for cooling, habitat and biodiversity, carbon sequestration, and mental health among many other things. During big storms they will actually cause some damage and even deaths. But the benefits of trees far outweigh the costs. They need to be cared for.
  • “Pick up the trash”. There was a lot of talk in Philadelphia too about storm drains clogged with trash. This is absolutely an issue. I am not sure it is a decisive issue in a massive storm like Ida, when all the pipes are full whether storm drains are open or not. But it would help during the 99.99% of the time we are not experiencing the remnants of a major tropical storm. Source controls and modernizing trash collection are also a big deal for getting the plastic out of the ocean and for quality of life in cities. The only losers are the rats, so let’s get this one done!
  • “Protect the subway” – I saw this done well in Singapore. Every subway entrance, and every building with an underground parking garage (which is most there), has a “crest elevation”, which is basically a little ramp you have to walk or drive up before you go back down underground. This works. It actually pushes flash flooding onto streets, which the public and politicians don’t like very much, but it is a practical way to deal with very large events. In civil engineering we call the streets the “major drainage system”, acknowledging that every once in awhile they are a good place to park water temporarily.

The one major thing not listed here is managing (avoiding where possible) flood plain development. You might think major cities don’t have much space left to develop in floodplains. But in Philadelphia, a lot of the flooding that made national news during Ida was flooding of recently built developments in floodplains. You want to leave those as park land, natural land, or agricultural land when you can. When you do allow development in the flood plain or you are dealing with historical floodplain development, you need to think about the elevations of entrances as mentioned previously.

Even with all these measures, disaster planning and response will still be needed. We are going to be doing more of this so let’s have plans in place and get good at it.

checking in on the “nuclear rennaissance”

This article focuses on one particular failed nuclear power project in the U.S. but it checks in on the idea of a stalled “nuclear rennaissance” overall.

The South Carolina legislature conducted hearings about the project’s collapse. But it has fallen to the United States Attorney for South Carolina to outline internal decisions that led to project abandonment—via court filings, plea agreements, and indictments. These filings are proving to be the best documentation so far of criminal behavior related to projects that were part of a much-hyped “nuclear renaissance” that began in the early-2000s but has since petered out in the United States…

The fault for the shocking AP1000 misadventure falls squarely on the shoulders of Westinghouse and the involved utilities. They all fell victim to their own reactor-promotion propaganda but lacked the technical and management competence to pull off the projects as envisaged. With pursuit of large light-water reactors in the United States all but dead, the nuclear industry is now endlessly touting an array of “small modular reactors” and a dizzying menu of so-called “advanced reactors,” all of which exist only on paper. It’s unclear if there’s a path forward for this nuclear renaissance redux, and if there is, whether taxpayers will be put on the hook for financing some of it.

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

I can imagine an alternate history without Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and where climate change was understood and taken seriously by the public and governments much earlier. Nuclear energy was embraced on a vast scale, homes, buildings, and transportation were mostly electrified, and the world economy grew for 50 years without the devastating carbon emissions that are now starting to wreck our planet’s ecology and threaten our food supply. No doubt, there are some accidents and waste storage/disposal problems in this world, but with an honest accounting of the cost of carbon pollution would this world be worse off? Maybe nuclear weapons proliferation would be worse in this world, but then again, maybe a world where civilian nuclear technology was more shared but controlled by international safeguards would feel less pressure for proliferation.

The other issue with nuclear power plants is they have incredibly high up front costs and are incredibly long-lived. As technology progresses, a nuclear power plant is going to be obsolete (i.e., not based on the latest technology) by the time you design it and get it in the ground, and then you are stuck operating it for the next 50 years. So you have to take a really long range view, governments have to shoulder a good portion of the risk, and you have to keep the R&D going in parallel even though you know it takes decades to pay off. All this is doable, it just takes leadership and discipline, which our species and civilization mostly lacks.

Elon Musk and space-based solar

Charlie Stross says Elon Musk is trying to corner the market for space-based solar power.

Musk owns Tesla Energy. And I think he’s going to turn a profit on Starship by using it to launch Space based solar power satellites. By my back of the envelope calculation, a Starship can put roughly 5-10MW of space-rate photovoltaic cells into orbit in one shot. ROSA—Roll Out Solar Arrays now installed on the ISS are ridiculously light by historic standards, and flexible: they can be rolled up for launch, then unrolled on orbit. Current ROSA panels have a mass of 325kg and three pairs provide 120kW of power to the ISS: 2 tonnes for 120KW suggests that a 100 tonne Starship payload could produce 6MW using current generation panels, and I suspect a lot of that weight is structural overhead. The PV material used in ROSA reportedly weighs a mere 50 grams per square metre, comparable to lightweight laser printer paper, so a payload of pure PV material could have an area of up to 20 million square metres. At 100 watts of usable sunlight per square metre at Earth’s orbit, that translates to 2GW. So Starship is definitely getting into the payload ball-park we’d need to make orbital SBSP stations practical. 1970s proposals foundered on the costs of the Space Shuttle, which was billed as offering $300/lb launch costs (a sad and pathetic joke), but Musk is selling Starship as a $2M/launch system, which works out at $20/kg.

antipope.org

It just makes sense that you could intercept enormous amounts of solar energy in space and beam it down somehow. The sun is so unimaginably vast that only a miniscule fraction of its energy ever strikes the Earth. If you can position solar panels in orbit so they are not shading the Earth, it seems like there would be no practical limit to how much energy you could gather. Then you have the problem of beaming it down. The engineers who look into this assure us that it can be done at a low enough intensity that we would experience only a pleasantly warm sensation if you happened to walk through the beam, and they can do it in the middle of nowhere so that doesn’t even happen. Of course, members of the public are likely to be very skeptical of this if and when it does happen. Still, if most people are skeptical, a small country or multi-national corporation or two could create a nice carbon-free heavy industry setup and either out-compete or charge everybody else to use it.

Saying something smart about Afghanistan?

As I write on Monday, August 16, it appears the government of Afghanistan has surrendered to the Taliban with no or few shots fired. I am sure there will be an enormous number of words written about this in the coming decades, and many of them will be smarter than anything I could say now. Nonetheless, here are a few thoughts:

  1. Invading the Graveyard of Empires is not a good idea. Check on the current status of the British and Russian empires. Maybe we will look back on this moment in retrospect as the symbolic end of the U.S. empire (long live the republic!)
  2. I am not sure there is any such thing as humanitarian war. Both the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions were sold on humanitarian objectives, but both almost certainly caused more death and suffering among civilians than they prevented. Diplomacy, economic and trade pressure, humanitarian and peace-keeping missions may be the better way to go, even when they seem frustrating and relatively ineffective.
  3. I still think the Powell doctrine of limited objectives, overwelming force, may be right after all. That was unsatisfying in the case of the first Gulf War, but it was a quick, relatively successful conflict. What would that have looked like in Afghanistan? Well, if we had captured bin Laden early on, there might have been an excuse to leave. When that didn’t happen, we got bogged down with no way out that would not cause chaos. In the end, we just got out and let the chaos unfold. This looks bad for Biden, but it took some guts to make the call and carry it through.
  4. The U.S. just really doesn’t understand other countries. We seem to have trouble putting ourselves in other peoples’ shoes. I don’t fully trust what I see on the news, not because I necessarily think it is lies, but because I don’t trust our government and media to appropriately interpret events and present them to me. I don’t know what to do about this other than seek out a lot of different types of information and try to piece it together. Study history, travel and interact with people from other places when practical. Give expert opinion some weight, while also evaluating the evidence independently using tools like logic and system thinking. By the way, I don’t think censoring the internet is a way out of this. I want access to information and freedom to interpret it, even if there is some danger in everyone having these freedoms at the same time.
  5. What other lessons do we need to heed from past conflicts? Should we maybe invade Russia from Eastern Europe, or engage in some Pacific island hopping, hoping it will put pressure on a large, powerful, proud opponent to give in short of nuclear war? NO!!! Let’s not do this.

What do I think the U.S. should do? Unwind the empire, close foreign bases while providing training and equipment (not necessarily for free) to allies who really want that. Focus on diplomacy and trade. Reinvigorate the UN, or replace it with something better. Make sure we can defend our physical shores, and up our intelligence, cybersecurity and biosecurity games. Dial back and eventually eliminate the nuclear weapons worldwide, and figure out a plan to deal with bioweapons long-term. A war tax is an idea – fund all emergency appropriations with a clear tax that Americans see every day, for example a sales tax that is printed on our receipts, credit card statements, and pay checks. If we don’t deal with short-term geopolitical instability, it will occupy all our attention and leave us no capacity to deal with the longer term threats like food security and inundation of coastal population centers.

astrobiologists on what aliens might actually look like

Well, astrobiologists don’t know what aliens might look like, because they haven’t observed any. But they do have an idea what conditions on other planets (“at least 100 billion in our galaxy alone”) might be like, and by assuming the principles of evolution and natural selection will apply, they can theorize what kinds of organisms might inhabit them.

Darwin’s aliens
Making predictions about aliens is not an easy task. Most previous work has focused on extrapolating from empirical observations and mechanistic understanding of physics, chemistry and biology. Another approach is to utilize theory to make predictions that are not tied to details of Earth. Here we show how evolutionary theory can be used to make predictions about aliens. We argue that aliens will undergo natural selection – something that should not be taken for granted but that rests on firm theoretical grounds. Given aliens undergo natural selection we can say something about their evolution. In particular, we can say something about how complexity will arise in space. Complexity has increased on the Earth as a result of a handful of events, known as the major transitions in individuality. Major transitions occur when groups of individuals come together to form a new higher level of the individual, such as when single-celled organisms evolved into multicellular organisms. Both theory and empirical data suggest that extreme conditions are required for major transitions to occur. We suggest that major transitions are likely to be the route to complexity on other planets, and that we should expect them to have been favoured by similarly restrictive conditions. Thus, we can make specific predictions about the biological makeup of complex aliens.

Cambridge University Press

Shouldn’t the abstract give us some idea of what those “specific predictions” are? Luckily, this is an open access article. There are some fun passages about why my hands are willing to help my testicals reproduce, rather than trying to reproduce themselves. This is because “their interests are aligned”, and my testicles have (or once had, at the risk of providing way too much information to the reader…) the potential to produce more hands at some point. Like a termite colony, I have gone through a transition to a complex organism, and my various parts are not out for themselves but are working together in a harmonious whole. (That’s the theory, although I’m not sure those testicles were aligned with my brain during my teenage years…)

So there might be simple alien life out there, in the form of single-celled viruses, fungi, bacteria, algae, or whatever. What we are really interested in is complex alien life, which would consist of “a nested hierarchy of entities, with the conditions required to eliminate conflict at each of those levels”. They could have complex individual bodies along the lines of ours, or some kind of creepy colonies made up of simpler organisms, more like ants or termites but with more tentacles. There are some pictures in the paper, have a look.

Universities have astrobiology departments, and it seems like a fun thing to study. You get to learn about biology and astronomy, combine theory and observation.

tipping points

A new article from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences goes through eight climate change tipping points that have studied, and tries to assign an economic impact to each. I’ll list them here in order of highest to lowest impact according to this study (see Table 2). They use the change in social cost of carbon as their key metric.

Two tipping points have major potential impacts and represent over 80% of the total risk from the eight, according to this study:

  • ocean methane hydrates
  • permafrost carbon feedback

Four tipping points have relatively modest expected impacts, at least modest compared to the truly existential threats represented by the top two:

  • West Antarctic Ice Sheet
  • Greenland Ice Sheet disintegration
  • Indian Summer Monsoon
  • Amazon dieback

Finally, two actually have small positive impacts on the (human) economy according to these authors:

  • Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation slowdown (AMOC)
  • Arctic sea ice / Surface Albedo Feedback

They don’t include “nonmarket effects”, so if you just feel that the death of the Amazon forest is profoundly sad, that is not reflected here. The authors are explicit about this so I guess it is okay.

These results are mismatched with my impressions, which are most likely driven by the amount of media coverage given to tipping points. I have probably read the most about ice sheets, the AMOC, and the Amazon, and these somewhat surprisingly do not make the top of the list. I feel like I have some basic grasp of the scientific concepts on each of these other than the methane hydrates. I understand why releasing massive amounts of methane would raise temperatures. I just don’t yet understand the feedback loop that would cause it to happen, whereas with the permafrost thawing it is pretty clear. Are the methane hydrates just frozen and expected to melt? I suppose in that case they are very similar to methane under the permafrost, with the difference being land and water. So the release of vast amounts of trapped methane is by far the biggest impact identified by this paper. For the most part though, the solutions to address any of these tipping points are going to be the same – drastic greenhouse gas emissions reductions and/or drastic geoengineering. Nothing else is going to reduce the amount of heat and solar energy melting ice, thawing permafrost and undersea frozen methane hydrates, and affecting ocean currents across vast chunks of the planet.