"When a poet
dies, the Moon in heaven is his paradise."
- Cyrano de
Bergerac, Act 5
The
nation that dominates in technology dominates the world, or so it seems
today. Technological prowess is
attributed by some to native inventiveness and intelligence, to confluences of
history and resources, to good luck, and to many other things. But a deep and useful understanding of how to
direct and control technology is not quite ready for prime time. Directly related to this and affected by it
is the subject of space exploration.
There are certain obvious scientific rewards for going into space – for
example, you are not going to understand the geology of the Moon or of Mars if
you do not actually send probes there.
But for many, the economic justification of space exploration is
relegated to “spin-offs”, technological leftovers that we hope to glean from
the explorers’ table. The economic
value of spin-offs may (or may not) justify exploration, but is this
technological debris really the main economic driver for space
exploration? Or is this debris merely a
portent, just the first wave in a potential avalanche of new ideas? Is there something about space exploration
that makes it fundamentally transforming in a way that other technological
efforts are not?
Having asked these questions without giving immediate
answers, it should not be surprising that the history of technological change
is perplexing. It is true that if one
reads a good history of technology, the steps from one idea to the next often
seem somewhat natural. But still, there
is a great sense of randomness, chaos and unpredictability about changing
technology. A better word is
uncontrollability. For the most part,
technology seems to go whither it will, when it will. If historians catalogue change but do not seem to help us
understand why change happens, then it is certainly true that others also are
of little help. A contemporary
economist noted "technological progress is the source of long run [economic]
growth [but] there is not …much agreement about how one causes technological
growth" [9].
Even the seeming exceptions to uncontrollability such as the
Manhattan Project that built the first atom bomb or the 1960s Moon race or the
end of the twentieth century race to document the human genome are not clear
examples of humans wresting control of technology in a broad sense. It is true that huge sums were spent on very
focused objectives, but these objectives would have been literally unimaginable
as well as infeasible if they were not the culmination of a long chain of much
more random, chaotic and quite uncontrolled events. In short, they were examples of our control over the details but
not necessarily the broad direction of technology.
One of the objectives of this book is to make a framework
for talking about technology, one that is not just a lot of lists of facts
combined with prayers to the demons of randomness when our vision fails. We seek a framework or model that at least
helps separate the areas of change that are truly uncontrollable from those
that are not and that helps us see what we can do to redirect or enhance
change.
Another objective is to talk about living on the Moon and
what that would mean to life on Earth.
This second objective makes sense because, as it happens, talking about
the problems of living on the Moon brings critical issues about technology and
change clearly into focus. It also
happens to be a lot of fun.
Living extra-terrestrially - on the Moon as we discuss in
this book, another planet or as some have recommended in free space itself away
from any planet or moon - is widely viewed as a two-step process. First, one must overcome the huge technical
and economic barriers to making permanent settlements possible. Then, like the pioneers of the American
West, one wrests hold of the environment and transforms it to one's
desires. A near desert or wilderness
becomes, like Denver or San Francisco, a sophisticated hub of cultural and
economic activity. Life goes on there
much like life in the Old World of Boston or Paris or Shanghai. It is only the details of the seasons and
the view out one's window that make life noticeably different after
civilization has taken hold.
A key theme of this book is that nothing could be further
from the truth. The technical
challenges of the initial barriers are huge and overcoming them will yield – at
great cost – technological and possibly economic benefits. Life in space after the pioneers have done
their work will remain uniquely different from life on Earth. This difference will be inherent and
immutable, existing in the technological and economic core of an
extraterrestrial society; and this difference will, in the long run, have the
greatest impact on Earth society.
Depending on one's momentary viewpoint, these statements may
seem obvious or more likely wrong.
After all couldn't we use technology to duplicate the conditions of our
life on Earth? The answer is yes, we
could, but we would not. To make the
case for this takes some effort and investigation of technological change in
general. It is this effort to explain
that links the space theme to the other key theme of this book, i.e. why
technological change is so unpredictable and just how, in a limited way, this
unpredictability can be controlled. The
investigation of these themes will require us to consider surely the most down
to Earth discipline imaginable – economic geology – and take insights from
arguably the pinnacle of human daring and technology – the lunar landings of
the late sixties and early seventies.
With the technical base set, we will then need to tunnel through the
underworld of the dismal scientists and even glance at Darwinian theory before
we can set the hook and reel in our quarry.
Lunar Impact has a doubly intertwined structure. First, parallel themes of understanding the
Moon and understanding technological change interweave. We begin with a look at the Earth's geology
and a comparison to the Moon, but the issues this raises quickly cause us to
look at more general issues of change.
Second, the main chapters alternate with chapters that are
"vignettes". The vignettes
are intended to be interesting and a change of pace, but they also play a
crucial role in developing our story.
Each vignette gives an example that directly or by analogy will be
important in understanding technological change.
Yet another way to think about the organization of Lunar
Impact is to compare it to a musical composition. The general theme of understanding technological change is like
the ground bass figure of a passacaglia.
The popular Pachelbel's Canon is actually a passacaglia. In a passacaglia, also known as a chaconne
or simply as a ground bass, a melody and / or specific harmonic combination is
heard in the lower voices, repeating over and over again. By itself, this would quickly become
monotonous, but in combination with appropriate musical variation in the higher
voices, the repeated bass figure adds structure, continuity and beauty. Like a ground bass figure, the theme of
technological change repeats over and over throughout the book, sometimes muted
or modified but always there, providing structure and a constant reference
point.
On the other hand, the theme of life in a lunar colony is
more like the main musical theme of a rondo.
In a rondo, a key melody is introduced and then repeated at intervals
throughout the rest of the piece. Like
the ground bass figure, this repetition is meant to provide a sense of
continuity to the piece – to help tie together all the other things that are
going on. Similarly to a rondo theme,
the theme of lunar living is introduced early in Lunar Impact and
elaborated at length. It then
disappears only to reappear at intervals, sometimes only briefly, other times
at great length. At the end of course,
both themes are sounded together, building to a contrapuntal climax. In that climax, we try to drive home both a
better understanding of what space exploration can offer to humans on Earth and
a better understanding of how technology evolves.
“…a space faring
civilization … will establish communities on the Moon.”
- from the Web
pages of The Moon Society
This
book is not about how to live on the Moon and it only has a modest role to play
in suggesting why one might want to do so.
It is, in part, about the effects of long term, permanent
extraterrestrial living on the inhabitants and on Earth society. However, some mention of motivation – a
quick review of what others have suggested as motivation for lunar living –
seems necessary.
There are those who think you can make a profit off of the
moon. Certainly, a lot of money is
being made from space in the form of telecommunications, weather, scientific
data collection, and spying. Tourism is
even playing a role. At least now multimillionaires
and popular music stars (almost but not quite synonymous) can buy themselves a
ride to the International Space Station.
Tourism and mining seem to be the two main, near term
business reasons for going to and living on the Moon. After all, you can hardly expect to make money owning a five star
Lunar Hilton if the concierge must be flown back to Earth at the end of her
shift! Substantial, permanent
accommodations would be required, including farms, medical facilities, sewage
treatment plants … even jails.
Organizations such as the Artemis Society and the Moon Society actively
promote these ideas, and respectable institutions such as the Colorado School
of Mines have devoted resources to researching the possibilities of mining
space. Power generation for Earth
consumption also is suggested as a lunar business activity, but orbiting
stations probably would be better suited to this than would stations situated
on the lunar surface.
Be that as it may, near term business cases for lunar
colonization still have some time to wait before lift off.
Gerard O’Neill [46] arguably was the greatest champion of
living in space because it was the best place to be. He and Isaac Asimov called our attachment to the Earth “planetary
chauvinism”. To be accurate, O’Neill
only thought of the Moon as a secondary player in his grand vision, but it was
important nonetheless.
His argument was that in space one could retain access to
the best things on Earth – (pseudo) gravity, light, air, water, open space –
but have enormous economic advantages by also being able to access the solar
energy that is dimmed on Earth, the vacuum and zero gravity (or merely low
gravity on the Moon). O’Neill and his
associates made convincing engineering analyses to show that, with existing
technology, huge, free floating space colonies could be constructed and turn a
profit.
A key element of O’Neill’s proposals was to create solar
power stations in orbit and to beam this energy to Earth. This was the critical economic driver to
justify the project. However, in the
long run O’Neill envisioned life in space as taking on an economic and cultural
life of its own and becoming completely independent of Earth. Much as the first colonists of the New World
came to serve their King (and themselves) but ended up creating new countries,
O’Neill’s orbiting power plants would eventually grow beyond Earthly
subservience and become their own raison
d’etre.
Given this, the Moon – in O’Neill’s vision – was a crucial
supplier of raw materials to his free floating space colonies. With low gravity and no atmosphere, rail
guns (mass drivers as he called them) could launch supplies to the floating
colonies far more cheaply than could be done from Earth. In effect, the Moon society would be the
mines from which vast numbers of free-floating space colonies would be
built. Other authors have made related
proposals. For example, Paul Spudis in
his wonderful book about lunar geology [59] suggests that the Moon would be an
ideal location for us to learn how to live in space and to supply the raw
materials to explore the further reaches of space. However, his vision is a little less Utopian than O'Neill's; the
materials to be supplied were more along the lines of rocket fuel and oxidizer
than of raw materials from which to build fully functioning, fully independent
free space colonies.
O’Neill’s ideas have, of course, not come to pass. One reason is simply a lack of vision and
nerve on the part of our society.
Equally critical, O’Neill’s economics were thrown off significantly by
the failure of the Space Shuttle to provide relatively inexpensive access to
space. But, this probably was not an
absolutely crucial problem. Equally
problematic was the need – in his vision – to invest really large sums of money
before gains could begin. Coupled with
a lack of vision, this economic risk may have been the fatal flaw.
Paul Spudis [59] also epitomizes the scientific argument for
living on the Moon. Two of the four key
reasons he gives are in this category (the other two have been alluded to
already).
A Natural Laboratory for Planetary Science
Unlike the Earth, Mars and Venus, which have undergone
tremendous and continuous erosion and deformation since they were formed, the
Moon is a geological treasure trove of ancient history. Events from 4 billion years ago are still
recorded there. It was the analysis of
lunar rock samples that made possible our general acceptance of how the Moon
was formed. The size distribution of
craters, which not coincidentally happens to match the size distribution of
space debris, helped reinforce the idea that the Earth has been and continues
to be a target of space rocks both small and – rarely – very large indeed. This in turn has promoted our current
research into Near Earth Objects and has informed our conceptions of biological
evolution. The history of collisions
still preserved on the Moon’s surface is also the history of Mercury, Venus,
Earth and Mars.
There is much more to be learned and only detailed,
intensive and extensive study will suffice.
For example, rock samples are needed from many craters to help date the
various collisions and other events that have occurred there.
A Platform to Observe
the Universe
With no atmosphere, essentially no seismic activity and low
gravity, the Moon would be a wonderful place for a telescope. Moreover, the far side of the Moon is
electromagnetically quiet – radio, TV, radar, beepers and cell phones are all
blocked by the Moon’s mass. Thus, the
Moon could be a last refuge for radio astronomers in a way that a radio version
of a floating telescope such as the Hubble could not be.
The fundamental problem with these arguments is
economic. Earth people are willing to
throw a few bucks at space science, but getting a colony started on the moon is
going to run into real money. Science –
unless there are clear patent opportunities and a business case that a venture
capitalist would approve – just won't pay the way.
If
you are a compulsive long-term planner with tendencies towards depression, then
the doom of the human race is another reason for colonizing the Moon. Serious minds have taken this matter, well,
seriously and there is something to it.
Given that today, polio viruses can be synthesized in laboratories and
minor countries controlled by minor madmen can obtain nuclear weapons, it is
quite imaginable that the human race will send itself back to the Stone Age
sometime in this century. Keep in mind
that it took only a few new diseases, brought over by European explorers in the
late 1400s and early 1500s, to destroy perhaps 90% or more of the native
population in the New World. It was a
terrible but unplanned human catastrophe and destroyed our chance to learn
about many civilizations before we had the chance to meet them. Imagine a planned act of madness today and
what it could do to people and to modern civilization. All that learning – thousands and thousands
of years – could be lost if a really nasty virus got out of hand or a massive
exchange of warheads were somehow triggered.
And other, more cosmic threats exist. In the past decade, several large Near Earth
Objects (NEOs) have passed distressingly close to Earth – even closer than our
Moon. Some have been large enough to do
a huge amount of damage. In June of
2002, an asteroid the size of a soccer field passed within 75,000 miles of
Earth. Another asteroid (designated
2002 NY40) is about ½ mile in length.
It was discovered on July 14th, 2002 and at its nearest
approach in mid-August, scarcely a month after discovery, the asteroid at
350,000 miles was just outside the Moon's orbit.
We
know that very large collisions have happened.
For example, there is good reason to believe that the Chicxulub crater
buried under the Yucatan peninsula is the scar from an NEO that got much too
near and provided the coup de grâce
for the dinosaurs. (Whether the
collision was critical to their demise or merely helped them on their way remains
a subject of debate.) Less clear at the
moment, the extinctions at the end of the Permian may have been triggered by a
huge collision at Bedout, Australia or some other location.
Close encounters such as the one with 2002 NY40 seem to
happen about once every 50 years or so.
Very, very rough estimates of collision probabilities indicate a
collision rate of once per 100,000 years for an NEO large enough to kill about
¼ of the world’s population. Even being
conservative and reducing the collision rate by a factor of ten, that works out
to an “average” death rate of about 1,000 people per year from NEOs. On average, asteroids are more dangerous
than flying in airplanes. But of
course, the deaths from asteroids come in rather nasty clumps interspersed with
very long periods of quiet. Deaths
would occur not just from the immediate impact, but also from longer term
environmental impacts and economic disruptions. Less frequently, an impact would eliminate the entire human
species.
Putting an independent colony on the Moon comes close to
eliminating these risks. Nuclear
exchanges between Earth and Moon could happen, but are hard to imagine. Germ warfare could spread to the Moon;
perhaps infected transport ship crews would bring it. Presumably the outbreak would be detected and Earth-Moon
transports halted before this happened.
And, an NEO collision with the Earth would damage a lunar colony only in
the most unlikely of scenarios where a caroming fragment manages to land right
on the populated portions of the Moon.
Such an unlikely game of cosmic pool would spell trouble with a capital
T indeed.
But as before, the economics are not in this solution, if
what you want to do is to justify building a lunar colony. People are notoriously cheap about insurance,
and besides, if an NEO solution is to be found, you can be sure that people on
Earth will want the solution to protect them, not just to insure that humanity
and Earth culture will endure in some extraterrestrial safe house.
In the end, lacking really solid economic or political
drivers at this time, the best argument may be to use the American historians'
banner of Manifest Destiny and just to admit to ourselves that living on the
Moon would be really, really cool. As
we will see later, there are in fact other reasons - reasons that could benefit
everyone and maybe even put a few coins in some folks’ pockets.
"… out of the
old fields must come the new corne."
-Sir Edward Coke,
Chief Justice
under James I of England
It was not that long ago that biology was on the fringe of
technology at best. Biologists were
mostly thought of by the public as taxonomists and too often confused with
taxidermists to keep their egos fully inflated. Today biological science is on a roll and is BIG technology, but
still Mother Nature’s original version of biology isn’t usually thought of as
technology. It should be. In fact, the evolution of natural
"technology" will provide ideas that are essential if we are to
understand how our own, human technology evolves.
About 540 million years ago - estimates vary - biologists
had their equivalent of the Big Bang.
It was the Cambrian explosion, a time when the diversity and complexity
of life literally exploded. Nature was
rapidly expanding its tool kit of technologies, each variation having pluses
and minuses in any particular environment.
Most of the work – the main blast of this explosion – may well have been
completed in a mere 5 million years.
|
Geologic Ages of the
Earth
|
|
Era
|
Period
|
End (millions of
years ago)
|
|
Cenozoic
|
Quaternary
|
|
|
Tertiary
|
2
|
|
Mesozoic
|
Cretaceous
|
65
|
|
Jurassic
|
144
|
|
Triassic
|
210
|
|
Paleozoic
|
Permian
|
245
|
|
Pennsylvanian
|
286
|
|
Mississippian
|
320
|
|
Devonian
|
360
|
|
Silurian
|
408
|
|
Ordovician
|
438
|
|
Cambrian
|
505
|
|
Pre-Cambrian
|
|
540
|
Prior to the explosion life had existed on Earth for at
least 3.2 billion (thousand million) years but probably not much longer than
3.5 billion. In fact, life may have
started much earlier and been repeatedly destroyed by the heat from Earthly
collisions with large asteroids, comets and minor planets. We will never know for certain. In any case, it is clear that life existed
as not much more than bacteria for a very long time. This great age of bacteria should not be trivialized. It lasted as long as it did for at least
three reasons.
First, the Earth was not a very stable place. Large collisions probably continued to wreak
havoc with the environment, and just to confuse things, the Earth even may have
frozen over from time to time as well.
Second, the environment probably did not have much oxygen
for a very long time - at least 2 billion years and maybe much longer. Later on, we will be able to say that life
was stuck with a lousy "production possibility frontier" and could
not progress far until a new distribution of resources opened up new
possibilities for technological innovation.
In an event that by analogy has great portent for things to come in this
book, the introduction of substantial amounts of free oxygen into the
atmosphere created a new "frontier" for life and led to rapid
bio-technological advance. But that is
a story that will be developed in subsequent chapters.
The third reason that this great age of bacteria lasted so
long is that first steps are often the hardest. This was a time when the basics were being worked out. Things like sex had to be invented. As we will see later this may have been
critical if the technology of life was to evolve rapidly and flexibly. Much later we will find that even the
geekiest of engineers have found a place for sex - or rather its mathematical
equivalent - in evolving new technologies.
For all we know, there may have been competing schemes of
life even at the level of deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA). DNA is the blue print for all that a cell is
and does. It is the design template for
every protein. Amazingly, the primary
ingredients in this template are just four nucleic acids: Adenine, Cytosine,
Guanine and Thymine.
These four "bases" occur only in pairs. Adenine is always paired with Thymine (A-T);
Guanine is always paired with Cytosine (G-C).
In effect, DNA is like a computer memory or a computer program,
consisting of only zeros (say the Adenine-Thymine pair) and ones (the
Guanine-Cytosine pair). An encoding
might be:
A G C T
| |
| |
T C G A
…. or in binary 0-1-1-0 ….(actually, position on top or bottom does
matter - CG is not the same as GC - but we are going to ignore this rather than get side tracked by base 4 arithmetic)
After nearly 3 billion years of preparation, the complexity
of life forms exploded in the Cambrian as Nature explored the space of possible
living technologies. Precursors of
nearly all modern forms were present (with one exception, Bryozoans apparently
appeared a little later): bacteria, algae, sponges, shellfish, creatures with
exoskeletons such as crabs, creatures (chordates) with spinal columns. Some of these creatures were very
strange. One, named Hallucigenia
is a type of creature called a velvet worm (phylum Onychophora). Today, velvet worms are tiny, caterpillar
like creatures that live in wet leaves and similar damp places. The creature is certainly a bit odd looking,
but its reputation is overstated. The
first fossils were badly distorted and initial efforts at depicting the
creature had it up side down and worse.
The appearance was so strange it seemed a
"hallucination". In the end,
additional fossil evidence allowed paleontologists to give it a more
reasonable, albeit still strange appearance.
Hallucigenia may not have direct descendents living today,
but its basic construction is familiar enough.
Other creatures of the Cambrian existed that have no known analogs
today. Their body plans did not survive
the test of time. Examples include
Wiwaxia 
and Opabinia 
. Wiwaxia was tiny, 0.12 to 2 inches in
length. It had spines and armor on top
and jaws up front on the bottom with two rows of teeth. Wiwaxia probably crawled on the bottom. Opabinia probably did too, but may have been
able to do some swimming as well. It
had five eyes, a trunk up to an inch long, and a body up to three inches. It wasn't a giant, but it certainly was
interesting. In any case, these body
plans seem to have been dead ends in the technology space that was being
explored – ultimately less suited to survival in the Cambrian than were the
others. However, it is conceivable that
if the environment had been just a little different, or a twist of fate had
come out differently, then we might be living with substantially different
types of creatures today. Perhaps we,
ourselves, would have the proboscis of an Opabinia ancestor instead of the
atrophied primate noses that we now carry.
"In a cavern, in a canyon, excavating for a mine …"
- from the song "Clementine"
To
understand the Moon, one first must understand something about the Earth – what
we know and how we know it. Cast almost
from the same mold, at nearly the same time, the Moon and the Earth are
strikingly similar, yet dramatically different.
Geology is the science that tells us what the Earth is made
of and how it got there. It can be
broken into a variety of overlapping specialties: physical, historical,
structural and economic among others.
Economic geology is the science / engineering discipline concerned with
ores and oil and where mines and oil wells should be built. As such it is very important to our
particular quest, in that economic geology will be most closely tied to the
impact of Earth resources on all other aspects of our society.
Pick up a popular book on geology – say one of the roadside
tour books - and you will get rather explicit descriptions of what kind of
rocks are found at a certain locale: what kind of rock they are, how old they
are, how they were formed. How does a
geologist know this? Of course, the answer
is that the geologist does not "know" in the sense of having absolute
certainty. In fact there may be a lot
of uncertainty. As an example, in one
recent incident, it took over a year and a substantial and careful analysis by
specialists to determine that a rock was igneous in origin – made from molten
rock at some distant point in the past.
Other geologists had initially believed that the rock in question held
fossils of some of the earliest life on Earth.
The final analysis was disappointing – no real fossils – but it
illustrates that amateurs should not expect to identify a rock at a glance and
that geology is not an easy or perfect science.
So geology, as opposed to say chemistry or physics, is more
of a historical science than an experimental one. Its job is to take the evidence that nature has provided – the
rocks, cliffs, sea floors and whatever else – and put this into an overall
scheme that makes sense of the details.
Epistemologists might say that geological truths are determined to a
great extent by their consistency within a total view of other geological
truths and facts derived from other sciences.
Geologists seek broad principles that must translate into specific
predictions. Some examples:
·
Superposition. When one rock lies on top of another, the
oldest rock is on the bottom.
·
Plate tectonics.
The Earth’s surface is divisible into parts, called plates, that tend to move
as one unit and that interact (collide or separate from) the other plates. Continents are part of the plates; although,
separate plates may have parts that appear to comprise one continent. For example, the Eurasian continent actually
has multiple plates in it. The continents are composed mainly of relatively
light rock that "floats" on top of the heavier rocks of the mantle
and ocean basins. These continental
plates move slowly, sometimes colliding and sometimes ripping apart.
·
Slow processes
(uplift, weathering and erosion – the things we see everyday operating at a
miniscule rate) form most mountains and explain most surface features. This principle was strongly and controversially
argued by Charles Lyell and others.
Of course, geology is not completely non-experimental. For one thing, theories must be consistent
with known laws of physics and chemistry.
Although this makes sense in general, sometimes geology has run ahead of
other sciences and been stymied. The
slow processes principle suffered for many years because physics at the time
did not know about nuclear energy. As a
result, leading physicists applied their best knowledge of thermodynamics to
the Sun and Earth and concluded that they would have to cool down fairly
quickly – a solar lifetime measured in tens or hundreds of thousands of years
was plausible but the millions of years needed for slow geological processes
seemed impossible. This was a strong
argument against the geological principle (and against Darwinian evolution
theory) until Einstein opened the theoretical doors to understanding nuclear
energy, Otto Hahn discovered fission, and Hans Bethe wrote his paper nailing
down the details of exactly how the Sun could convert hydrogen into helium plus
heat. Suddenly, the physically tenable
biological lifetime of the Earth had become billions (thousands of millions) of
years.
In addition, geologists can do experiments of various
sorts. For example, the material
characteristics of rocks deep in the Earth not only can be estimated with
models but can be duplicated with a diamond press. This isn't easy. The
pressures deep in the Earth are tremendous, as are the temperatures. For some time, great pressures could be
obtained only with huge, expensive machines, and these were limited in what
they could accomplish. But eventually,
tabletop science scored a major coup when someone realized that forcing the
tips of two diamonds together with a pair of pliers would generate enormous
pressure where the tips met. The
instrument required to do this in practice is a little more complicated than
described, but tiny quantities of suitable materials placed between the diamond
tips can be observed at extreme pressures.
The transparency of the diamond allows the material to be observed, but
of course knowing what it is that one is seeing is nontrivial and requires
considerably more sophistication than a magnifying glass and a Scout's mineral
manual.
The geological principles form a broad theory, and
observations must be generally consistent with theory if the theory is to be
accepted. In particular, one must
eschew using catastrophes and accidents whenever possible, since these are inconsistent
with the "slow processes" principle.
The mundane (slow processes) must be depended on in the vast majority of
cases. Here we need to address a
problem faced by any historical science.
Exceptions – observations that at least superficially appear to be
inconsistent with geological principles – are to be expected and do not
necessarily refute the principles. As
geologist Eldridge Moores said [40] “Nature is Messy. Don’t expect it to be uniform and consistent.” In other words, weird things happen in the
course of hundreds of millions of years, and the observable bits and pieces
that are left over may appear to be a contradiction of principles only because
we don't really have the facts. So an
ancient granite boulder found lying on top of young sedimentary rock does not
refute the superposition principle. It merely reminds us that glaciers can carry
large objects for long distances.
Similarly missing layers of rock or rare occurrences where the layers
seem inverted do not destroy the principles.
But, there is a gray area. Stray
bits of contradictory observations are rightly taken to be noise, but just
where the buildup of evidence converts noise to contradictory evidence is a
matter for judgment.
"Average" or "typical" are words that
hardly seem to apply to Earth. It is a
planet of infinite diversity, indescribable with averages. Nonetheless, we need to have a basis of
comparison, so some guess at what is typical must be made. The following table gives a rough feeling
for the composition of a “typical” rock in the Earth’s crust.
|
Element
|
% by weight in a typical rock
|
|
Oxygen (O)
|
47.00%
|
|
Silicon (Si)
|
27.00%
|
|
Aluminum (AL)
|
7.50%
|
|
Iron (Fe)
|
5.50%
|
|
Calcium (Ca)
|
4.00%
|
|
Potassium (K)
|
2.50%
|
|
Magnesium (Mg)
|
2.00%
|
|
Titanium (Ti)
|
0.50%
|
|
Manganese (Mn)
|
0.15%
|
|
Sulfur (S)
|
0.02%
|
|
Vanadium (V)
|
0.02%
|
|
Chromium (Cr)
|
Trace*
|
|
Zinc (Zn)
|
Trace
|
|
Nickel (Ni)
|
Trace
|
|
Copper (Cu)
|
Trace
|
|
Lead (Pb)
|
Trace
|
|
Carbon (C)
|
Trace
|
|
Other (water …)
|
6.50%
|
|
* Trace means
about 0.01% or less.
|
|
What typical means is hard to say. The basalts underlying the oceans are very different from the
Devonian shales of upstate New York, which in turn are very different from the
granites and gabbros of the Rocky Mountains.
Basalts tend to be high in iron and magnesium and maybe titanium. Their raw material comes from the mantle and
they are mostly melted and rapidly cooled versions of the minerals olivine and
pyroxene. Shales are the stuck together
debris of whatever rock they weathered from, but having been formed by
sedimentation in lakes or on seabeds it's likely, at the least, that they contain
relatively high amounts of carbon and calcium, not to mention water. Granites tend to have less iron and a lot
more aluminum, calcium and potassium than do basalts. They come from lighter material that floated up from the
interior. And the table ignores the oceans and atmosphere entirely (lots of
hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen!).
Averages don’t work well on Earth because the planet has
been busy differentiating itself – separating unique deposits – then remixing
and re-separating them ever since the planet formed over 4.5 billion years
ago. One obvious differentiator is gravity
(see the figure at the beginning of this chapter).
Because of gravity, the heavy stuff sinks and light objects
float. Nickel and iron and a lot of
heavy, radioactive things like uranium sink towards the core. Varying amounts of pressure combine with
high temperature to make the inner core solid but the outer core liquid. Relatively lighter materials, minerals such
as olivine and pyroxene that nonetheless have a fair amount of iron and
titanium, end up in the middle layer – the mantle. And the crust gets the lightest stuff; gases such as oxygen,
carbon dioxide and nitrogen float on top to form the atmosphere; water (lots of
hydrogen in it) floats just beneath in the oceans and is chemically locked in
most crustal rocks; rocks rich in silica (e.g. granite) float on the mantle and
even manage to rise above the water, forming continents.
But gravity is not the only differentiator. Counter intuitively, an evenly mixed mass of
molten lava -–the primordial Earth – can separate into a very complex structure
and not just into a set of shells of varying density. How apparently homogeneous systems can spontaneously generate
complex, even chaotic variety has fascinated scientists for a long time and
remains an area of active study.
Prigogine, in his book devoted to the subject of spontaneous diversity
and order [49], describes Bernard convection.
This can be illustrated in just a small flat dish with fluid sandwiched
between the top and bottom covers. Heat
the bottom slightly and not much happens.
Heat the bottom more and suddenly convection kicks in. However, the whole container doesn’t move as
a mass. The convection varies across
the surface and yet is organized too (see figure).
It is not hard to imagine something similar happening in the
Earth. Huge columns of heat driven
material would rise in some locations and cooled columns would sink
elsewhere. Thus, heat driven convection
in the Earth not only remixes the material, preventing gravity from giving a perfect
separation based on weight but also opens up the possibility for other kinds of
diversity. At the upwelling of a cell,
the materials will be much like the deep interior. Thus ocean floors, which are the cooled upwellings of magma
forced out at the ocean rifts, tend to be much like the mantle. Much of this rock is basalt. At the downwellings, material may aggregate
that can float on top of basalt ... granite and the like … leaving the rest to
sink below.
Even the individual upward flows may generate
differentiation due to seemingly chaotic processes that can take place in
flows. The Kármán vortex street is a
wonderful example of how something very simple and smooth can nonetheless
generate surprising complexity [61] (see figure). If you have ever watched water flow by rocks in a brook, you are
likely to have seen this effect. If the
water is flowing slowly, then nothing is obvious; the water seems to and indeed
does flow smoothly around any rock in its way.
But increase the water speed enough and suddenly you'll have whirlpools
forming behind the rock, breaking off and flowing downstream. The rotational direction of the vortices
alternate, so there is a large scale pattern to the whirling. Increase the speed even more and chaotic
turbulence will result. It is easy to
imagine similar vortices forming as magma rises, perhaps spinning off magma to
rise elsewhere or to get stuck and solidify deep underground.
Weathering, both chemical and biological, also contributes
to the differentiation of rocks and minerals on Earth.
Placer gold deposits are an easy example of weathering's
effects. Gold flecks, widely dispersed
in rock, are broken free from their entombment by the cracking of ice and the
blast of wind and water over the millennia.
These heavy flecks are then driven by fast flowing water only to fall to
the bottom and settle in mass wherever the water slows. Thus were formed the deposits sought by the
Forty-Niners in California.
How did the gold flecks get into the rocks in the first
place? Amazingly, gold dissolves in
water. Well, not very well at ordinary
temperatures and pressures. Imagine
water deep within the crust and under enormous pressure from the miles of rocks
above. Add heat from upwelling magma
and this water becomes capable of dissolving even gold. The gold is carried with the water upward
through cracks that have formed in the overlying rocks. As the pressure and temperature decline, the
gold may drop out of solution, filling in voids in the path upward.
Sometimes, the chemical differentiation is simply a matter
of being left behind. In a process that
is also important on the Moon in forming something called KREEP (more on this
later), some elements simply don't fit well into crystalline minerals. They are too big or otherwise chemically
repellant to fit neatly into the lattice patterns demanded by the
crystals. Imagine then a mass of magma
trapped and slowly cooling. Crystals
slowly form: pyroxene, olivine,
muscovite, biotite, quartz, feldspar and others. As these crystals form, they squeeze atoms such as the rare earth
elements out of the space they occupy.
The remaining magma becomes a broth that is ever increasing in its
content of minerals such as uranium as the more common minerals crystallize and
drop out of the broth. Eventually, the entire
mass cools and the left over dregs solidify into what may be a mineable vein of
ore.
Life and chemistry have sometimes combined to form
ores. Long, long ago when life was
still getting a foothold, the Earth's atmosphere is thought to have been a
"reducing" one. Reduction is
the opposite of oxidation, and simply put this means that there was little or
no free oxygen in the atmosphere. It is
thought that the Earth's atmosphere remained low on oxygen until about 2.2
billion years ago. In such an environment,
iron can dissolve in seawater in mass quantities, and the oceans probably were
chock full of this element. As
photosynthesis kicked in, oxygen slowly became more plentiful in the
atmosphere. But building up a
concentration of oxygen was an up hill battle at first. All that iron in seawater tended to react as
soon as an O2 molecule became available. The result is rust, which settled to the bottom of oceans and
seas, eventually forming massive deposits that we mine today as iron ore. When most of the iron was used up, oxygen
levels could rise and the world made a giant leap toward being more like the
world we know today.
Finally, the most obvious examples of life acting to
concentrate certain elements are in the huge deposits of coal, oil and natural
gas that are spread around the world.
Plant and animal remains from countless ages were piled up, covered with
sediment, crushed and cooked to produce these concentrations of pure carbon and
of various simple and complex hydrocarbons.
5
A Technology Vignette:
From Chant to Computers
"… [Bach]
made copies of Palestrina, Frescobaldi, Lotti, Caldara, Ludwig, Bernhard Bach,
Telemann, Keiser, Grigny, Dieupart and many others."
- Albert
Schweitzer
The fall of Rome in the 400s CE began a steep decline in
European civilization. Much knowledge
was lost forever and much was saved (and returned considerably later) only
through the efforts of Islamic scholars.
Of what learning did remain in Europe, it was for the most part the
Catholic Church that takes the credit.
The Church was the repository of knowledge, both ethereal and practical,
on religion, science, administration, agriculture and husbandry, art and other
subjects, and being about the only large organization left standing, the Church
exercised enormous influence.
This influence was very strong in music. It is true that non-Church music had a life
of its own, but for a while these were mostly just peasant songs about swilling
beer and chasing women – the usual thing you hear in music videos today but
with often crude instrumental accompaniment or none at all. If you wanted to do serious music, then you
had to do Church music. Early Church
music was of course devotional; in fact it was fanatically devoted to serving
its purpose of instilling calm, encouraging meditation, and stamping out
lustful thoughts. Thus arose
compositions known as Plainchant but often called Gregorian Chant: monophonic in nature because it used one
melody at a time, no harmony, no instrumental accompaniment, and just about no
beat whatsoever. Plainchants such as
Ave Mare Stella (which after translation from Latin and then decoding for
religious key words means "Hail Mary" and has almost but not quite
nothing to do with the football play of the same name) are soothing to modern
listeners and have a pleasant if not really memorable melody. There is very little sense of rhythm;
certainly no solid back beat like a good piece of Rock. At their worst, the melody and rhythm of
Chant are almost not even there. For
most listeners, chants are like Beatrix Potter's lettuces:
"soporific".
Because
of its power – power to excommunicate and power in the sense that they were the
only paying gig in town - the Church could have kept music in Europe in a
Zen-like trance forever. Gradually,
Church standards loosened and music did become more complex. One of the next major stages was
polyphony. Polyphony is the use of two
or more melodies at the same time. The
melodies must mesh (sound good) in a musical sense, but polyphony is about
multiple melodies much more than it is about harmony. Although harmonies (the chords every beginner strums on a guitar)
seem natural to us now, the techniques to do harmony took a long time to
develop and came much later. At first,
polyphony was not accepted in Church music and individuals such as Marchettus
of Padua (circa 1300) had to plead its case.
In any case, polyphony, which is the simultaneous singing and/or playing
of multiple interacting melodies, really caught on in the end. This was fortuitous for technology in the
twentieth century, as we will see.
As we indicated, polyphony did not have an easy path to
widespread acceptance, but after it did gain a foothold, it got out of
control. Composers began writing very
complex and distracting polyphonic works for Church services. Even Bach – long after the polyphonal crisis
had passed – was accused of wild and distracting improvisations on the Church
organ. The situation reached such a
point that Church leaders almost banned it on the grounds that polyphony
inherently interfered with the true religious messages that were the intent of
the religious services. Fortunately, a
truly great musician / composer / theorist known as Giovanni Pierluigi da
Palestrina (1525-1594) managed to prove to the satisfaction of the Church
authorities that polyphony could be used in a way that enhanced the religious
experience. Thanks in part to
Palestrina, European music did not head back towards Plainchant.
Palestrina not only made the world safe for polyphony, but
indirectly he also did so for musical instruments such as the organ that were
important performers of polyphonic music in Church.
Instruments were not always used in Church, but they
gradually became more accepted. Like
polyphony, the road to acceptance was not an easy path. For example, early church organs were
primitive affairs that were mainly used to get the singers started and to play
an intervening chorus or two. Without
the technical demands placed on the Church organ by polyphonic music, it might
have remained a relatively crude device.
The organ did improve, but for technological and other reasons, the
organ still had many detractors. One of
the other reasons was that, as the organ got better, organists started showing
off to the detriment of the religious service itself. Thomas Aquinas (1224?-1274) "declared war on it" [57]. Martin Luther (1483-1546) was a great lover
of music but seems to have only tolerated the organ, and the Council of Trent (1545-1563) tried to throttle
substantially the organ's use. That
council also was responsible for the turmoil surrounding polyphony to which
Palestrina managed to find an answer.
With all these problems, it is not hard to imagine that the
organ and similarly complex instruments might never have developed. In the end, they became instruments of
fearsome mechanical complexity.
Certainly, one does not find comparable musical devices being
constructed on any other continent until well after 1492. If the Church had retained its focus on
music as a tool only to direct meditation, then the organ might never have been
created. Similarly, if the Church had
totally rejected polyphony, then the organ might have disappeared along with
all knowledge of how to make it. But
these things did not happen, and the primitive organ came into being, evolved
and survived. By Bach's death in 1750,
organs were widespread, complicated machines.
In fact Bach, besides being a master musician and (at the time
considered to be) a second or third rate composer, was also a prominent organ
repairman. So much for music critics.
By the end of the Baroque period in music, usually
considered to be Bach's death in 1750, Europe was in the middle of another
aesthetic event in addition to music – fashion. Weaving had been important for utilitarian purposes since times
long past, and artisans could create tremendously impressive and expensive
pieces such as the tapestry shown in the figure. The Netherlands was particularly important in tapestry weaving
during the Renaissance, but France and Italy also played significant
roles. The figure shows a detail – a
very small segment from a large tapestry known as Saint Michael Overcoming
Satan - woven in Brussels in the workshop of Willem Dermoyen somewhere
between 1553 and 1556 [7].
By
Bach's time (1685-1750), ornate, complicated weaving was demanded not just to
hang on the walls of castles, but also to decorate the tables, and beds and
ones own body. Doing all this weaving
by hand was a royal pain.
France was important but not necessarily the most important
country for tapestry weaving (recall that the Netherlands had this distinction
during the Renaissance). However,
France was particularly noted for the quality and quantity of its silk weaving.
(England was also
influential, Spitalfields located in
London being particularly prominent for the quality of its silk cloth.) Demand was very great and placed great
pressures on the producers. An example
of the kind of work done is shown in the figure of the silk brocade. These producers relied on looms that were
essentially manually controlled; although, some improvements had been made to
speed the job a little. In 1725 Basile
Bouchon made an important step forward.
He was able to do so thanks to a technology transfer from music. His father was an organ maker, and organ
makers used a device similar to the device that Bouchon built to control a
loom. Bouchon cut a pattern of holes in
a piece of paper and used this (placed on a wooden cylinder) as a guide to
control the action of the loom. Where
holes were cut in the paper, pegs were inserted and these pegs then controlled
some of the weaving process. Since
prior to this, young children were often used to perform a similar task – which
worked if they were not tired and were paying attention - these pegs probably
represented a substantial step forward in quality control. Other improvements were made in 1741 by
Jacques de Vaucanson, but there was tremendous resistance from loom workers and
the ideas of Bouchon and Vaucanson essentially sat in a museum for half a
century. If worker resistance had
continued to grow or if a conservative religious upheaval or economic collapse
had put an end to high fashion, then the invention might have sat there
forever. However, an ecological niche
opened up – a fortuitous combination of environment and the right evolutionary
changes – that allowed the automated loom to evolve, survive and prosper.
In 1800 Joseph Jacquard began a restoration of Vaucanson's
loom. Adding improvements, he created
the Jacquard Loom. Holes or lack
thereof in paper guided the movements of wooden sticks. If a hole was present, the stick would sink
into a hole in a block; if not, then the stick would extend further out from
the block's surface than the other, sunken sticks. The sticks in turn linked into the loom and controlled the
placement of threads. A key innovation
was that multiple paper cards were used, each with its own particular
combination of holes. The cards were
tied together and passed one after the other through the loom. A change in the "program" could be
effected by removing, replacing or adding cards.
In spite of worker resistance, the Jacquard Loom eventually
came into widespread use. Moreover, the
basic control idea became widespread as it was borrowed by engineers for other
entirely different purposes. Being
widely known was critical to the future of this technology. In the mid-1800s, Charles Babbage devised an
"analytical engine" (a computer) that would use punch card
inputs. It was never built, but it did
provide inspiration later. In 1880, J.
S. Billings became concerned about the time and effort needed for the U.S.
Census in that year. Knowing something
about weaving, he suggested to Herman Hollerith
that the loom control idea might be put to use to help reduce the time and cost
of the next census. Hollerith thought
over the idea and developed a punch card method for storing data and a card
tabulating machine. Instead of storing
information about how to weave cloth, the cards now were being used to store –
in encoded form – information about individual people such as age and sex.
Hollerith's invention was enormously successful when used in
the 1890 census, and various mechanical business machines based on punched
cards came into use in the decades thereafter.
By the 1940s, substantial resources were being devoted to developing
automated computing, initially mechanical but moving rapidly to more and more
electronic components. A key part of
these machines was the punched card, used for input, output and for high volume
information storage in an age when affordable and feasible high speed memory
was measured in bits not mega- or gigabits.
Thus, Chant, polyphony, organs, looms and the punch card are
woven together as part of a single braid of thought. There were many opportunities for the braid to be cut short or to
stop growing, but in the end this woven braid of ideas helped keep the notion
of automatic computing visible in the critical days of the twentieth century
just prior to the birth of computing.
It was a long strange trip, but evolution can be that way.
"Gold is much less valuable to us here than is water"
-Space alien in "Godzilla Vs. Monster Zero", 1965
The
moon appears to be a totally alien world, as different from the Earth as night
is from day. In some respects that is
true, but in reality the similarities are as striking as the differences.
We understand the Moon in three ways.
First, we have Earthly experience to draw on. Geologists use this experience to help them
interpret other sources of data about the Moon.
Second, we have Earth based observations of the Moon. Observations with the naked eye have been
made since Australophithecus africanus and Homo erectus walked the plains and
mountains of Africa. It was Galileo
(1564-1642) who made the first telescopic observations, and ever since then
people have worked to develop ever more detailed and accurate maps. Mountains, hills, craters and valleys can be
detected in this manner. Importantly,
one can also determine relative ages of features. When a lunar crater is formed, a mass of material is ejected in all
directions leaving a blanket of dust, rubble and smaller secondary
craters. This blanket lands on top of
older formations and older blankets.
Later events will deposit themselves on top of this blanket. Careful observation of the blankets of
material and secondary craters can allow one to determine which of two craters
formed first. In fact, an extensive
historical record of relative ages of most moon features was available before
any direct samples were taken.
Finally, we understand the moon by going there. Moon rocks have been returned to Earth and
analyzed at great length. Sophisticated
orbiters such as Clementine (built using spy technology) provide detailed maps
of surface chemistry. Seismometers
placed on the surface have given us a (limited) look inside the Moon. And careful tracking of many lunar
satellites have allowed us to map the gravitational field and infer the
underlying rock densities. This data
collection process was the result of one of the great adventures – arguably the
greatest – in human history and the culmination of an economic and
technological effort that pushed the limits of everything from materials
science to computer aided design to microchips to project management to sheer
guts and bravery.
In broad features, the Moon has much in common with the
Earth. The romantically named Seas of
the Moon (a.k.a. maria or in singular mare) have no water and never were real
seas, but they are a layer of rock quite similar to the basalt that underlies
the seas of the earth. The lunar
highlands (terrae) are similar in composition to the Earth's continents – rocks
related to granite are found there, with a rather substantial variation from
region to region.
The
lunar features formed a long, long time ago.
Various theories for lunar formation have been proposed, including
coalescence from the same cloud that formed the Earth, splitting off from the
spinning Earth, and accidental capture of the Moon after it formed
elsewhere. None of these work
well. When you do the math, it's really
hard to get the Moon into it's present orbit with these theories and the
chemical composition of the Moon is hard to explain. But one theory works pretty well – the "big
whack". About 4.5 billion years
ago – not long after Earth formed – the big whack theory calls for another
planet to hit the Earth. This planet
would have been about the size of Mars.
The resulting collision would have substantially altered the Earth's
rotation, merged much of the impacting planet with the Earth, and sent a huge
mass of Earthly material into space.
A
negative side of the theory is that it does require a rare event – a
catastrophe of planetary proportions.
As we've discussed, geologists (and other scientists too), look with
disfavor on such explanations as a rule.
Sometimes, if more prosaic theories just don't work and the evidence is there
to support it, then catastrophes will be grudgingly admitted. For example, the occurrence of large
collisions (asteroids and comets) with Earth and the potential for dramatically
affecting life on Earth was a concept living on the margins of scientific
credibility for many years.
It took a great deal of effort just to determine that
"obvious" features such as Meteor Crater in Arizona were in fact
meteor craters and not volcanic. And
even then, the idea that really large impacts could and did occur was not taken
very seriously until most recently.
When Louis and Walter Alvarez and others reported in 1980 the presence
of iridium in a boundary layer between the Cretaceous period (the last days of
the dinosaurs) and the Tertiary (sans dinosaurs), the issue became
mainstream research. After many years of
debate, research and searching, the smoking gun was found – a huge buried
crater in Yucatan. It now is generally
recognized that enormous collisions do occur every 100 million years or so with
sufficient energy to substantially redirect the evolution of life on our
planet.
The big whack was similarly a marginal theory that rose to
prominence only after a long, agonizing period of study of alternatives. Eventually it became clear that the other
theories were fatally flawed and the only known hypothesis that could work was
the big whack.
The big whack is very helpful in understanding the average
composition of the moon. If you go back
to the table of percentages for a typical Earth crust rock, this works well for
the moon except:
·
You need to make adjustments for the basalts that will
be found in the Maria. These have lots
of iron, lots of magnesium and sometimes lots of titanium, but otherwise they
are not too different from the table.
·
You need – and this is a BIG difference – to take out all the volatiles!
So what are volatiles, and what exactly is going on here
anyway? When the Moon formed in the big
whack, it is thought that a huge spray of material was ejected and went into
orbit. At the time, the Earth and
probably the other colliding planet were not any too cool and colliding didn't
exactly help cool down this ejecta either.
It was probably a very hot gas cloud that went into orbit, along with
some seriously hot chunks of rock and magma.
It's believed that this cloud quickly coalesced into the blob that
became our Moon. Hugely stupendous
quantities of material had to collapse into a ball very quickly. When that happened, the energy the material
had as separate pieces gets converted into heat. So the moon started out tremendously hot. Everything was melted and if it could not
take the heat it vaporized. The end
result was that volatiles – anything that is easy to vaporize – did so and
literally boiled themselves right off the moon. Some of this boiled off gas would have been captured by the
Earth; some would have blown off into deep space. In short, Moon rock was made the same way you make holy water –
it had the Hell boiled out of it.
You see this lack of volatiles in the samples of rock
brought back from the Moon. In fact,
the composition of these rocks was one of the driving factors that pushed the
big whack theory into prominence.
Analyze a moon rock chemically and its pretty normal, except there's not
a trace of water. The water boiled
away. Since most hydrogen seems to have
reacted with oxygen early on forming water, there's not a trace of hydrogen in
Moon rocks. Carbon itself doesn't boil
all that easily, but it reacted with oxygen too, and the carbon dioxide boiled
away … so did nitrogen, sulfur, lead and zinc; although, traces of the last
three can be found in certain lunar rock types.
Note that just because an element is a gas, does not mean it
is a volatile from a lunar perspective.
For example, there is lots and lots of oxygen on the Moon. It's locked up chemically in minerals such
as feldspar and quartz. This oxygen is
not easy to get at, but if you have plenty of energy, you can break it out of
the rock.
Given that the Moon probably started as one huge liquid
mass, it's not hard to believe that it solidified into a fairly uniform
mass. Indeed, this was the opinion of
some greats, such 
as
chemist Harold Urey. The situation
turns out to be not quite that bad, however, but it isn't like Earth. One expert [6], estimates that 90% of the
ways in which ores form on Earth do not happen on the Moon. This is mainly because water, weather and
life – all contributors to ore formation down here – simply are not present on
the Moon. But the Moon is not an
amorphous mass.
As it cooled, heavier materials tended to sink and lighter,
granite-like materials rose to the surface.
This gave the crust a granite-like composition, rich in aluminum and
relatively scarce (but not devoid) of iron, magnesium and titanium. On the moon this crust is the Lunar
Highlands, the terrae, and is the dominant lunar surface type. On Earth, these crustal rocks would not be
used as ores – there are much more economical alternatives; however, by using
very high temperatures and electrolysis, oxygen, aluminum, silicon and the
rarer elements could all be obtained from these granite-like lunar rocks. The Highlands are mountainous – mostly the
result of eons of collisions.
Deep
under the crust is the mantle; apparently, with a composition much like the
Earth's mantle. It's basically basalt –
the common stone that the world's oceans are built on – and that means it has
lots of the minerals olivine and pyroxene, and lots of iron and magnesium. In some cases ilmenite, a mineral that is a
combined oxide of iron and titanium (FeTiO3), will be present,
adding titanium to the mix. The lunar
Seas formed when huge magma flows brought molten mantle to the surface, pouring
out on top of the lighter crust. The
presence of large amounts of iron, magnesium and titanium should not get
prospectors excited. On Earth, similar
rock types are used as gravel, not ore.
As with the rocks of the Highlands, extreme heat and electrolysis could
provide a lunar colony with oxygen, iron, magnesium, silicon and other elements
just by processing the rocks of the Maria.
Other extraction methods, relying more on chemicals and less on
electrolysis, might also be used [6].
Besides the titanic flows that created the Seas, there also
is evidence of smaller flows – volcanoes – that create special mineral
opportunities. For example, the
astronauts on the moon discovered strangely colored rocks – orange was particularly
exciting and was due to a large concentration of titanium – which turn out to
be colored glass beads, ash from volcanic fire fountains. The colors are due to small amounts of
certain minerals. In addition, this ash
often has small amounts of volatiles such as lead or zinc clinging to the
surface. Not specifically volcanic but
somewhat related is KREEP. Bits and
pieces of this material have appeared in many of the lunar samples. The letters stand for potassium (K), rare
earth elements (REE) such as uranium, and phosphorus (P).
KREEP forms in a process that also occurs on Earth. A rough analogy – pegmatite – is readily
observable as the granite-like rocks forming The Needles near Mount
Rushmore. In fact, the formation of
pegmatite and KREEP are similar enough that KREEP-like material is sometimes
found in pegmatite. The formation of
pegmatite starts with magma trapped below ground and slowly cooling. Crystallization occurs at different
temperatures for different minerals. As
they crystallize, the heavier minerals tend to sink and the lighter ones to
float higher, separating themselves from the magma broth. Thus the chemical composition of the broth
slowly changes. Pegmatite results from
very slow cooling and typically has large crystals of mica (both the well known
white kind called muscovite and the darker version known as biotite), of quartz
and of feldspar. By the time pegmatite
crystallizes, its magma is unusually rich in some compounds such as water. Its composition, while more extreme than
some other granite-like rocks is less unusual than its large crystal
sizes. But KREEP really is chemically
different.
As the magma broth continues to lose material to
crystallization, it becomes richer and richer in elements that just don't
crystallize well or that don't fit well into the crystal structures of the
dominant materials such as feldspar and quartz. That is what KREEP is, the concentrated leftovers, including
things such as uranium and thorium.
In
theory, one should be able to find veins of KREEP and mine it. But on the Moon there are some problems with
this approach. First, prospecting isn't
as easy as taking a donkey and a pick ax out into the hills. Second, the surface of the moon is mostly
covered with many feet of regolith – dust, rocks and an occasional boulder. Much of this is of local origin, but not
necessarily originating from just a few feet away. Instead, meteors blasted the surface, excavated material and
threw it around. Most fell near by, but
any rock you pick up has a chance of coming from far away – miles away or even
rarely from the far side of the moon.
As a result, prospecting is confounded by the fact that finding a
mineral bearing rock only indicates that there is a vein nearby, but it could
have come from any direction and traveled for miles.
Finally, as if the regolith is not enough, there is
megaregolith. This is a region of
fractured and tortured rock lying below the regolith and extending possibly
miles below the surface all over the Highlands. It probably lies beneath the lava flows of the Seas as well. Whereas the regolith includes a lot of fine
material – the result of eons of sand blasting from micrometeorites, the
megaregolith is more the result of very early, massive collisions. The bombardment that created this mess
churned the surface of the highlands, creating mountains from ejecta, pressure
waves and induced volcanism. The net
result is that the crust is a pretty confusing jumble and this confusion
continues a long, long way down. In
fact, most of the surface rocks are breccias – conglomerations of the fragments
of the older, original surface that have been blown apart, melted, shocked and
compressed or otherwise tortured before being glued into a new rock mass. All in all, it will be hard but perhaps not
impossible to find a mineable vein of KREEP on the Moon.
In the end, one is reduced to the ephemeral – the solar wind
and comet dust – to provide a guaranteed, mineable storehouse of the volatile
elements. The Sun sends a constant
stream of particles out from its surface.
This solar wind is mainly hydrogen, but helium and many other elements
are in it too. Without a protective
atmosphere or magnetic shield, the Moon is struck broadside by this wind, and
the regolith – lunar surface soil – has been slowly collecting these elements
over the eons. Not that there's much
there, mind you. The concentration
might be around say 40 parts per million by weight for Helium. This is slim pickings, but there is enough,
conceivably, to be mineable. Hydrogen,
helium, chlorine, fluorine, nitrogen, and sulfur are present in roughly equal
amounts, and noble gases such as Argon are present in slightly lesser
amounts. Conceivably, machinery could
shovel the regolith into a large container where it would be heated by
concentrated solar energy. The
volatiles would be driven off and collected and the "cleansed"
regolith dumped back on the surface.
The existence of solar wind volatiles is not conjectural,
but accumulations of comet dust remain a conjecture at this time. There are some places on the Moon – near the
poles – where the Sun never shines.
Conceivably, water from comets may have collected there, freezing to
cold rock surfaces. Remote sensors
indicate this may be the case, but definitive evidence is not here yet. If true, then ice mining could be a real
possibility; although, the total quantity of water available may be modest.
Because they will have a significant role later, we need to
briefly address some less geological resources that are unique to the moon.
The Vacuum. If nature abhors a vacuum then it surely has
little love for the Moon. The Moon does
have a tiny atmosphere, but it is so thin that the exhaust of visiting research
rockets actually has the potential to substantially alter its composition; there
is no need to wait for million car traffic jams and belching factories to
drastically affect the Moon's atmosphere.
In many respects, lack of an atmosphere is a problem. But used creatively, the vacuum could be put
to work. After all, many processes –
e.g. microchip manufacturing – need a vacuum and some processes such as rail
gun satellite launchers would work much better on the Moon than on the Earth.
No Weather and No
Moonquakes. There is more to a
vacuum than just not having air. It
means there is no weather. No pesky
uncertainty about the temperature, or whether there will be rain. There would be no winds, tornadoes or
hurricanes to worry about. Moreover,
the Moon is seismically very quiet. As
far as we can tell, there are no active volcanoes. There is no active equivalent to the San Andreas fault or to the
Indian subcontinent, which continues to push its way into and under the belly
of Asia, raising Caine and the Himalayas in the process. All this means that surface structures don't
need the extra strength added on Earth to accommodate Nature's surprises.
Low Gravity. From a human health perspective, the low
gravity of the Moon (1/6th that of Earth) will probably be a lot of
fun and a major health issue. But from an
engineering perspective, it creates many possibilities. Tunnels can be huge and towers
enormous. Machines whose designs on
Earth are constrained by weight can be made much larger and maybe entirely
differently on the Moon.
Solar Energy. Much is made of the huge amounts of solar
energy available for use on the Moon. A
little thought makes this seem less obviously an advantage than at first
blush. After all, the Earth is bathed
in the same solar glow, and solar energy isn't the most economical energy
source down here; although, of course all fossil fuels ultimately are just
stored solar energy. Moreover, most
places on the Moon are pitch dark for two weeks straight every month. Off setting this is the fact that solar
radiation intensity is substantially higher in space than on the surface of the
Earth (almost a factor of ten higher), because the Earth's atmosphere manages
to reflect or absorb a substantial amount of radiation. Also, the Moon's other aspects could make
collecting solar energy very attractive.
In particular, the extreme temperatures (+100 ºC in the daytime to –150
ºC at night) and the ability to build very large, light weight mirrors (because
there are no winds, no earthquakes and Moon gravity is weak) could make the use
of solar energy unusually effective on the Moon.
No Ecology. Finally, greedy lunar entrepreneurs can set
their engineers free of many of the environmental constraints on Earth, because
there is no environment. Dumping
chemical wastes won't pollute the water – there is none. Radioactive storage sites are guaranteed
safe because there is no groundwater to leach it away, no moonquakes to disturb
it, no erosion to expose it, and nothing to poison anyway. Yes, those irritating conservationists might
be left behind at last. But then, there
would be geologists urging preservation of the surface for historical and
scientific purposes, and the "grays" who would not want to see the
surface of the moon littered with discarded hardware and tire tracks that
endure for a hundred thousand years.
Business is never easy.
"Exactly how [the
foods] interlock and in what quantities for the most advantageous results for
every one of us is another puzzle we must try to solve …"
- Joy of Cooking
Wassily Leontief (1906-1999) was born in Czarist Russia (St.
Petersburg) and educated until age 19 in Leninist Russia. As if that was not bad enough, he was an
economist. Among economists, however,
Leontief was a great man, earning the Nobel Prize in 1973. To the populace, his name is most closely
associated with what are called Leontief input-output matrices [38]. This sounds formidable, but really he was
just doing what Betty Crocker does, only on a grander and more sophisticated
scale.
Born when he was and raised and educated where he was – in a
Marxist / Leninist state dedicated to central planning – Leontief's work on
input-output relationships is not surprising.
If you want to direct – in detail – the economic life of a nation, then
you need to know exactly how much of every output to produce and how much of
every input you'll need to produce the output.
Once you know this, it is a minor detail to send out the orders to the
factories, and if Marx was right and you didn't make a mistake, then another
5-year plan hurtles the nation ever farther down the path to material
prosperity.
So the Soviet economists might use the mathematical
shorthand of linear algebra and pretend that
Required Inputs = Leontief's
Matrix times Desired Outputs
tells you everything you need to know about the Soviet
economy. By linear we mean roughly that
everything is thought to be proportional.
Need to double the output? Just double the inputs. There are no “nonlinearities”, no economies
of scale for example.
So really, these economists were just using a cookbook. One entry in the cookbook would be something
like "to make a ton of stainless steel you need 10 tons of ore and 20 tons
of coke and …". Cooking
temperatures were not part of the matrix, but someone presumably knew these
details. Of course, there would be
many, many entries because you wanted to make more than just one thing, and you
had to be clever to deal with certain problems. In fact it was this cleverness plus the mathematical rigor that
really made Leontief famous, since the basic cookbook approach goes back at
least to Francois Quesnay (1694-1774) in his "Economic Table"
published for the king of France in 1758 [45].
As an example of the problems that require further adjustment consider
coke for furnaces; coke might be both an input and an output. And there were resource limits on some
things (e.g. people can not work more than 24 hours a day, no matter how brutal
a slave driver you are). Somehow you
have to take into account that the coke needed to create the steel must itself
be made and that there are only so many trees to chop down to make coke, in
addition to accounting for the coke that you might have planned to make for,
say, sale overseas. But that's a
detail, albeit an important one. Leontief did it with what is called linear programming. LP as it is nicknamed is a mathematical
method for finding the best way of doing things, when you have choices and constraints. It was invented by George Dantzig, who
developed the technique just as the computer revolution was beginning. LP is a branch of Operations Research, a
subject we will return to in later chapters.
For now, the point is that you can in theory do these calculations for
everything needed or produced in a nation.
When you are done with your calculations, you will know how
much of each input is needed to make the outputs you have chosen.
In a sense, this entire discussion about Leontief is a
digression; although, if a lunar colony were ever to be established, it is
likely that its planning would be facilitated through the use of Leontief
matrices. One can imagine
space-economists listing everything that would be needed in such a colony,
right down to floor tiles and bubble gum and meticulously building the matrix to
assure themselves that the colony would be self-sustaining. More relevantly for this book, however,
Leontief's work is important because it will lead us on – motivate us – to take
certain, necessary steps. Let us see
where this leads us.
Given the world view of Leontief and his model, just how do
you fill in the cookbook? How do you
know what is needed to make steel and just how much of each item? The easy response is that you keep good
records of how things are actually done.
You get the data from real life.
There are (at least) three problems with Leontief's
approach.
First, it's a huge job. Even today, with computers and data networks, the idea is
daunting. Imagine what it was like in
Leontief’s day when a Commodore 64 and a 300 baud thermal printer would have
seemed like something from an alien spaceship!
Mountains of paper must be processed, mere accounting to be sure but a
tremendous amount of it.
Second, you cannot push the model too far. Like weather forecasting, a linear model
usually works well if you are only computing for the next day. But if you try to push your model to
extremes – far into the future or even just to production output levels that
are substantially different from the present – then you are asking for
trouble. The real world has a habit of
being surprisingly messy, sometimes in very simple but devastating ways.
The "baker transformation" (yes, cooking analogies
have pervaded mathematics as well as economics) is a good example of this
messiness. It shows that simple
processes – things common to every day life – can make prediction nearly
impossible.
Suppose you have a piece of dough and mark a spot on
it. If you stretch it or roll it out,
the spot moves in a nicely predictable manner – the relationship of the old position
and the new position is pretty much a linear one. However, if you knead the dough, chaos quickly follows, even if
you do it as neatly and cleanly as possible.
The following example illustrates what happens; as an example, it is set
up to work particularly simply but be assured that any real situation is even
more chaotic.
Start with a 1 foot square of dough and place on it a small
lump of chocolate just slightly off its lower left corner at 0.01x feet from
the left and the same from the bottom. Note that we are not assuming a perfect measurement. We do not know x. The actual location may be
.010 or .015 or even .019.
Now roll this dough until it is ten times as long as at the
start, …
… and cut into ten equal squares. Note that because the first digit in the chocolate's position was
a 0, the chocolate blob ends up in square #1.
If the first digit had been a 1, it would have gone to square #2, etc.
Finally stack the squares and get ready to do the whole
thing again.
Before we go on, note what has happened. When rolled out, the blob of chocolate went
into the first square because of the value of the first digit in its original
location (.01x). Its new position, as
measured from the edge of the stack of squares is now .1x; By stretching the dough and then cutting it up, we've
dropped the first (leftmost) digit and shifted all the other digits to the left
by 1 position.
Rather than repeat the pictures over again, let us just
think through what will happen if we repeat the rolling and cutting. The next time the chocolate blob will end up
in square 2 because the first digit in its starting location (.1x) is 1.
Suppose we did this yet again – try number 3. In what square would the chocolate blob
go? The answer is that we haven't got a
clue. The rolling and cutting has
erased all the information we had about the blobs location in only two rolling
operations! Any prediction about where
the chocolate would be would be only a guess.
Of course, we could try to beat the problem by measuring more
accurately. Instead of just 2 digits,
we might be really precise and do it to 5 digits: perhaps .01325x instead of
.01x. But it takes only 3 more rollings
to leave us where we were before – clueless.
And remember, this process was kept nice and neat. In a real world – kitchen or national
economy – the kneading process is much messier.
Third, what if you want to do things differently? How can you know how production should be
done to do it better? This certainly
was a problem for the Soviets. Factory
managers got only so much raw material and capital and were expected to produce
a set amount of goods with it.
Exceeding your output quota with what you were given was great, but the
factory manager wasn't in much of a position up front to ask for a change in
inputs calculated in Moscow. So there
was some room for innovation, but not a lot.
More to the point, where in this model of Leontief's do you
direct technological change? How do you
know the right ratios of inputs as opposed to simply copying what has always
been done? The answer is that you
don't.
“The ideas of economists and political philosophers …are
more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little
else.”
- John Maynard Keynes
The
discussion in the lunar resources chapter should have hinted that life on the
Moon would be very different.
Certainly, there would be huge challenges just in keeping alive. How do we know that these challenges would
not be overcome and life become essentially normal in the sense it would
closely resemble Earth life? It is here
that we must beseech the oracles of the dismal science and enter the realm of
economics to give us a last piece of our puzzle. As dark as the journey may seem at times, it will be worth it,
for the trip into this underworld ultimately will lead us to our own Lost
World, a sort of technological Jurassic Park.
We began the sections on Earth and on Lunar resources with a
short discussion of how we know what we know; and, generally, excepting for
those who insist that the Earth really was created in seven days, the brief
discussions we gave should be enough to convince readers that we really do have
a pretty solid understanding. Economics
is different. This is not to say that
it is less important or that its practitioners don't try as hard. But economics suffers from very real,
practical difficulties that make certainty hard to come by. In other words, don’t expect too much.
Like geology, economics can be subdivided into several,
overlapping fields: microeconomics,
macroeconomics, monetary theory, mathematical economics, econometrics, and the
history of economic thought are just some of them. We stated that geology was mostly a historical science – one that
takes the evidence provided by nature and seeks to explain what is and what has
been by means of a general theory of how the world works. Geologists don't spend a lot of time predicting
the future; although, some do try to predict earthquakes and volcano
eruptions. And geologists don't do a
lot of controlled experiments, but certainly some do manage this.
Economics is a little like geology in that it relies for the
most part on the evidence that nature provides. Controlled experiments are few and far between in economics, but
not unheard of. In fact, Vernon L.
Smith shared a Nobel Prize in economics "for having established laboratory
experiments as a tool in empirical economic analysis, especially in the study
of alternative market mechanisms".
In many respects, the historical record for economists is
far slimmer than for geologists. True,
erosion and ocean plate subduction have been destroying geologic information
for billions of years. Still, there are
lots of useful details left lying about, and the fundamentals don't really
change over time. For the economist,
however, the details disappear as rapidly as old newspapers yellow, and tax
records are burned after the mandatory retention period passes. Moreover, it is difficult to believe that
all economic principles are the same today in, say the United States of
America, as they were in, say Stalinist Russia or in Europe before currency and
banking became common.
Having made these excuses, how do we know anything in economics? There are several ways.
Mathematical economists have produced wonderfully
comprehensive and rigorous models of how an economy should work. Books such as Gerard Debreu's Theory of Value: An Axiomatic Analysis of
Economic Equilibrium [14] are impressive but the mathematics makes them
inaccessible to most. Many others –
starting with Adam Smith and his Wealth
of Nations [58] – have
created less rigorous but much more readable versions. The rigorous basis of modern economics gives
us reason to believe that the science does have something to tell us. The problem is, of course, that in the real
world the assumptions used by the economists are never rigorously met. So there's a perpetual problem of having to
start with the rigor and then back off.
Like geologists who prefer the slow process view of Lyell but must
acknowledge the existence of catastrophes, economists must walk a tight
rope. They must stay close to their
rigorous principles but adapt them for the real world. When they do so, they like the geologists
always risk going too far and letting the need for an occasional exception
become the excuse for wanton acceptance of practically any idea that comes
along.
Supporting the theorists are the econometricians. These economists have built up a powerful
set of statistical techniques. If you
study a classic source such as Goldberger [21], it becomes clear that
econometricians were keenly aware of the problems they faced. Inadequate theoretical models, little or no
ability to run controlled experiments, and huge amounts of noise in the data
presented a daunting challenge.
Econometricians responded with practical methods that had very clear
assumptions associated with them …
"This method gives you a Best
Linear Unbiased Estimator only when errors are on average zero and the errors
are uncorrelated and …". The
net result is an admirable set of methods, rigorous, created with eyes wide
open, but applied to a world that is so messy that one would shout Eureka! to find an economic journal
article that clearly draws a conclusion.
Still economics can be persuasive, particularly when you
stick to the basics and use that to drive your thinking.
Economists have developed methods to address technological
change, at least in part. The methods
are elegant and believable, but from the perspective of Leontief input-output
matrices there is a price to pay, as we will see. To attack this problem, we use the method of divide and
conquer. First we will look at demand –
what do people want as final outputs.
Then we will look at technology – what can people produce. The two parts will snap together in the end,
filling in the puzzle for our purposes but not helping Leontief very much.
But first this word of encouragement. What we are going to do will look
mathematical, but it really won't be bad at all. There are no equations to solve.
So if mathematics is not your cup of tea – even if it is in fact your
cup of hemlock – carry on. What follows
is relatively painless.
More Scene Setting.
In a moment, we will be discussing utility functions and production
possibility frontiers. These have
imposing titles, but after a little thought the reader should find that these
are really very simple ideas. In fact,
the reader may think the ideas seem trivial, but this is not so. Many key ideas appear simple. Consider the mathematical definition of a
group. Keeping the mathematical
formalities to a minimum (for details see a suitable reference such as Herstein
[29]) a group is
A set of things (e.g. numbers) and
some operation that can be done to pairs of these things (e.g.
multiplication). The numbers and
multiplication are such that multiplying any two numbers always gives you
another number in the set (i.e. the set {2, 3} won't do because 2 x 3 = 6 and 6
is not in the original set) and such that when multiplying more than two
numbers together the grouping does not matter (i.e. 2 x 3 x 4 is the same as 6
x 4 and 2 x 12). The number 1 is in the
set, and finally if x is some number in the set, then its reciprocal, 1/x, is
also in the set.
This sounds deadly dull and likely to lead nowhere, but the
concept of the group turns out to be extraordinarily powerful in
mathematics. In part this is because
the definition just happens to capture the essence of something that turns up
seemingly everywhere. Moreover, it just
happens to do this in a way that turns out to be very practical – you can do
things with the idea that you cannot do with other approaches.
Utility curves and production frontiers are similar. They let us look at human preferences and at
technology in a way that manages to usefully disentangle the two. Here is an example of how entanglement can
happen. Consider the following figure,
which shows a "demand curve".
A demand curve is one way of looking at consumer preferences, and it can
be very useful. It shows what price
consumers would have to be offered to get them to buy a given quantity of some
good. But in the real world, how would
we know what the demand curve is? Of
course we would expect it to slope downward to the right as shown, but what
data would let us actually draw it with some precision?
Let us cheat and make things simple by imagining that we
knew that the demand curve really was a straight line. Let us also pretend that – if we could get
some data – the data would be accurate.
No noise or other errors are allowed.
So if we could get measurements of the demand curve at two points, we
could draw a straight line through those two points and actually know what the
demand curve is like (see the next figure).
Now the problem is that we cannot get the kind of data that
we want! In fact, we will only see one
point. Besides the demand curve (the
consumer's view of the world), there is also the supply curve (the producer's
view of the world). A supply curve
tells you what price consumers would have to pay to get manufacturers to
produce a given quantity of some good.
Unlike demand curves, which slope downward to the right, supply curves
slope upward to the right. Where demand
and supply curves intersect is where the market is most likely to settle – at a
price and quantity that are acceptable to both consumers and suppliers.
The
quantity and price at the intersection is what we will see in the market place
– it's the kind of data printed in the business section of the New York Times 5
days a week. But this is just one data
point! We need two data points to draw the
demand curve. How can we get it? Unless you are clever or very lucky, you
cannot get the data, because the only way for a different point to appear is
for something to change; either the demand curve or the supply curve must
shift, or both. So if you do get a
second data point, it just might belong to a different demand curve than the
one you originally were looking at … Or maybe the supply curve shifted … Or
perhaps both things happened! This is
not going to be very helpful, because supply and demand, when looked at this
way, are so tightly interlocked that you cannot separate them and you cannot
tell what is changing when a change does happen.
Utility functions and production possibility frontier avoid
this problem, not by being magical but just by looking at things in a little
different way.
Utility Functions. Economists often like to discuss personal
preferences by talking about "utility" or sometimes about
"utility functions". The two
are not quite the same, particularly for the mathematically rigorous, but we
don't need to be rigorous here. Utility
in its most basic form must date back to the time when humans first thought
about something that we might call trade or economics or psychology. Utility is a way of describing how useful a
person thinks various things are. In
particular, it tells what kinds of trades this person might make. However, a good mathematical foundation for
utility did not come into use until the 1800s.
The economists Carl Menger (1840-1921), William Jevons (1835-1882) and
Léon Walras (1840-1910) are generally credited with inventing the theory of
marginal utility, which means that they were able to apply the concepts of
differential calculus at least in a semi-quantitative way. This was a major advance and is essential to
us. Calculus is all about change. Change is what the Leontief model
lacked. Having a theory of marginal
utility means you can start talking about change. However, it was Francis Ysidro Edgeworth (1845-1926), a somewhat
eccentric Irishman, who developed the view of utility that we will use
here. His approach lets us talk about
change without writing out a lot of messy derivatives and integrals and yet
without compromising the model either.
For our purposes in understanding utility, we'll just be
satisfied with the idea that we want to be able write down (or draw) something
that sums up how some individual feels about two different items – maybe tea
and coffee. If you had the chance to
have a cup of coffee or a cup of tea (made to your specifications) but only
one, which would you take? What if the
coffee cup was twice as large as the tea cup – which then? How about vice versa? Writing down
all the possibilities would be pretty tedious – a picture worth a thousand
words would be better if you could do it.
But how should it be drawn? A
nifty trick is to draw lines called isoquants.
In the word "isoquant", iso means "remaining the
same" and "quant" is short for "quantitity". In other words on an isoquant, the numerical
value of something stays the same. We
use isoquants in many other applications.
Air pressure isobars (lines showing where a fixed level of air pressure
can be found) on a weather map and the contour lines on a topographic map
(lines showing a constant altitude) are examples of isoquants. Economists usually call utility isoquants
"indifference curves", but we'll just stick with the term
isoquant. It does not sound any better,
but at least it is shorter.
Here
in the figure is a possible utility isoquant for some hypothetical person. Our hypothetical person would be equally
happy with any combination of tea and coffee that falls on the curve. A point below the curve is less good than
any point on the curve. A point above
the curve is better.
So, if we are to believe the chart, then the individual in
question seems to like both coffee and tea and also values variety: 2 cups of each is quite a bit better than 1
cup of coffee and 3 cups of tea. It’s
also better than 1 cup of tea and 3 cups of coffee. On the other hand, having, say 1 ½ cups of coffee and 2 2/3 cups
of tea would be just fine – an even trade for 2 cups of each.
Note that there is no mention of cost or technology
here. That is one of the benefits of
this approach. We, as economists, are
simplifying things by looking just at preferences and not letting these other
issues confuse things – yet.
Also note that the general shape of the curve – its cupped
shape bending down and to the right is to be expected of any utility
isoquant. The precise details may
change, but in general if you have X amount of one good and Y amount of another
and someone offers you a trade of this basket of goodies for another basket
with X-1 units and Z units of the two goods, Z had better be greater than Y.
Utility is complicated and a single isoquant is not nearly
enough to show all the details. Our
caffeine lover has other isoquants also, here are two more.
Of
course, there are actually an infinite number of isoquants, but there is no
point in trying to draw them all. Just
note that a curve upward and to the right is “better” – there’s more utility –
than a curve downward and on the left.
Naturally, people try to get themselves onto the rightmost curve that
they can manage. They do this by
seeking out the best deals possible – the best job they can find, the best
price for a car, etc. This is an
important concept, as we see shortly, but before that technology must be
addressed.
The Production Possibility Frontier. So far, we have a way of thinking about
utility – personal preferences – in isolation from prices and how things are
made. Now let us look at technology.
Leontief
used a “cookbook” approach – just double the ingredients to get twice the
output. Actually, this is unfair. There were also explicit resource constraints
built into Leontief’s approach, but the model did not go far toward addressing
how other changes might affect production.
When generality and economy of expression are needed, economists turn to
the production possibility frontier.
The idea, shown in the figure, is simple.
Any combination of goods (coffee and tea in this case) that
lies below and to the left of the curve (the frontier), can be produced.
Anything to the right or above is, well, right out. At least with the resource constraints and
the technology available, you can want but you cannot have what lies to the
right of or above the frontier.
Like the utility isoquant, frontiers have a natural
shape. They start out high on the left
(you can make a lot of tea if you plow under the coffee plantations and plant
tea bushes), slope down to the right and generally drop off precipitously at
the far right. Getting that last extra
cup of coffee means giving up a lot of tea because:
1.
You plow under the poorest producing tea plantations first and
save the most productive for last, so when they go a lot of tea goes with them;
2.
Suitability for growing coffee is another factor in choosing
which tea plantations to convert to coffee.
Converting the very last tea plantations to coffee may not make a lot of
sense. The soil may be wrong, as may
the climate; so you can’t expect a high level of coffee productivity.
Regardless of the products considered, the production
possibility frontier has roughly the shape shown. Details are determined by resource limitations – arable land,
hours of sunlight, hours in the day to work, access to water, coal, oil, iron,
etc. Besides resources, how-to
knowledge – i.e. technology – plays a decisive role as well. Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon humans had access
to roughly the same resources as modern Europeans, but the production
possibility frontiers for these peoples are not the same.
So if you want to speak very generally, that’s all there is
to technology. Now let’s put technology
together with preferences.
The Grand Synthesis. An interesting thing happens if you draw the
utility isoquants and the production possibility frontier together. You immediately see just what society is
going to do with its resources – how it is going to consume them and what it
will produce. Here is how it works.
Looking
at the figure, our caffeine lover has a choice of producing any combination of
tea and coffee desired – provided the quantities stay on or below and left of
the frontier. Being an insatiable
guzzler (a pretty general assumption about consumers that most economists
routinely make), our drinker is going to arrange manufacturing to be right on
the frontier – but where on the frontier?
Now the isoquants are needed.
Our consumer knows what he or she likes (another basic assumption of
economics). Working on the frontier at
point X won’t do for long. Our consumer
will decide to move to a better production ratio – to a higher isoquant – because
the consumer likes it better. Point Y
is better than X, but in the end, nothing will beat point Z. It is the highest isoquant the consumer can
get to without asking the economy to produce more that is technically possible.
Caveat Lector. Before moving on to the whole point of this
book, we need to say a little more about the economic theory we described.
First, we’ve cheated a little bit. After all, the utility isoquants we described have been for an
individual but the production possibility frontier seems to represent an entire
economy. How can you mix the two? Well, you can’t, not really. Still, you can imagine that there would be
some sort of combined utility function representing everyone in the economy and
that is really what the isoquants are that we have drawn. Throw in Adam Smith’s invisible hand to
direct things and a bunch of mathematical details and caveats, and the whole
thing works roughly as before.
Second, we need to be fair to Leontief. The utility function / production frontier
concepts we have described are wonderful – very general, very powerful, very clean
and neat intellectually – but it is just about impossible to actually draw
these things, that is to put numbers on them.
There are many reasons for this.
One reason is an obscure statistical matter called by econometricians
the identification problem. Although we
did not call it an identification problem, our brief discussion of demand and
supply curves dealt with this. The gist
is that econometricians can collect all the supply and demand data that they
want, but nature has operated to confound them. It turns out that, unless they are lucky or clever, more than one
underlying model – more than one set of numbers – can be made to fit the
data. As a result, it’s hard to tell
exactly what customer preferences are.
Another reason is the shear mass of data needed. You just cannot begin to get enough data to
understand the curves. In the end,
Leontief knew what he was doing. He
wanted to get down and dirty, to make real decisions. To do that he had to make some compromises in order to be able to
put real numbers into his models, but in return he got an approach that you
could build a 5-year plan on.
At this point, we understand from an economic point of view
how resources will be allocated in a society; i.e. we have a qualitative model
that would be quantitative if only we had enough data to compute all the
curves. The model lets us see clearly
why different societies might produce different proportions of various goods
and use different proportions of resources.
How does this relate to technology?
Technology is more about methods ( "know-how" ) than it is
about lists of inputs and outputs.
Beyond that, technology is not fixed – it changes all the time. Can this economic model tell us anything
about the change of technology?
The answer is (not surprisingly for the reader, we hope)
yes. Let us look again at the
production possibility frontier (see the figure).
We
have changed the products from tea and coffee to automobiles and microchips,
because the technology issues are probably more familiar for these
products. Let us imagine that there are
three basic ways of making each product:
a low volume approach, a medium volume approach and a high volume
approach. This translates to three
zones on the figure. Of course these three
categories are chosen just for convenience in this discussion – there really
are many more ways of making the products and a huge number of zones.
In Zone 1, low volume techniques are used for microchips and
high volume techniques are used for automobiles. Low volumes usually imply more manual effort and less emphasis on
highly automated devices. High volume
operations imply the opposite:
production lines like those of Henry Ford and billion dollar, ultra clean
chip factories. In low volume
operations, there will be less emphasis on fine tuning certain details. For example, in high volume automobile
manufacturing, shaving a fraction of a penny off the price of each car by
selecting just the right screw or bolt for each job may result in substantial
savings … substantial enough at least to justify paying an engineer to actually
figure out which screws should be used in each spot on the vehicle. In a low volume operation, the manufacturer
is more likely to go with just a few standard sizes and not try to optimize
each one.
Where on the production possibility frontier one wishes to
operate in effect determines the technology – the zone – that will be used.
Putting
utility isoquants back into the picture, we see in our example that we will be
operating in Zone 2. As we already
discussed, Z is the point on the production possibility frontier where the
isoquant just touches the frontier. Z
is called the point of tangency or the tangent point. You could drop to a lower isoquant, one that would intersect the
frontier at two points rather than one, but why would you? Doing so just makes you less satisfied for
no particular reason. It would be nice
to get to an even higher isoquant, but you can't do it – such an isoquant would
be above and to the right of the frontier and as we've said, we don't have the
technology and/or resources to get to these points. That's what the frontier means, after all.
The tangent point Z is where the economy will actually
operate and the technologies used will be those most appropriate for the output
levels at Z.
Now let us consider what this means to technological
change. First of all, there is a big
payoff to anyone who can improve the technologies in use at Z. Zone 1 and Zone 3 don't really matter – no
one is using those technologies, so no one will pay to improve them. But Zone 2 is hot stuff. So research dollars will pour in to look at
the processes and materials used in Zone 2.
Zone 2 technology will improve rapidly and Zones 1 and 3 will
languish. Remember that our example is
contrived – there really would be many more than 3 zones – so henceforward let
us refer to Zone 2 in the figure as the Tangent Zone or perhaps the Tangent
Technology Zone when we are feeling long winded. Regardless of the number of possible zones, the Tangent Zone is
always the one of economic interest.
The other zones will be called Forbidden Zones because the economy will
not work there, research and development will ignore them and for the most part
they will be poorly known to us. To us,
they might as well be Lost Worlds of technology.
That does not mean that we will only get incremental
improvements to The Tangent Zone, however.
Surprises and radical changes will happen, but The Tangent Zone will
determine what these technological changes are. Here is an example.
William Perkin made an exciting chemical – a mauve dye – out of coal tar
in 1856. At the time, chemistry had a
long history but was far from being a hot bed of intense research, particularly
not research with a practical orientation.
Perkin's discovery triggered a revolution in this point of view, as well
as triggering research that led to a host of important chemicals being
discovered in or made from coal tar.
Resources poured in and chemistry really took off.
Now that is all well and good, but why was Perkins looking
at coal tar? Why did he have any in the
first place? The ultimate reason is
that coal was an absolutely essential part of the technology of the time – it
was part of The Tangent Zone. Everyone
used it; everyone knew about it. Given
that, it was only a matter of time until someone started messing around with
the stuff in a lab and eventually stumbled on something useful. What if coal had not been ubiquitous and
prominent? What if the world happened
to have huge vents of hydrogen gas and all of industry were driven off that? If so, then Dickens' London would have been
a lot less grimy. Beyond that, coal
would probably have remained for a very long time little more than an
interesting rock sitting on the shelves in various geology museums. The chemists would have walked by with their
children in hand on tours, eyes glazed over and thoughts of how to keep Timmy
from bashing Tommy pushing out any thoughts about the chemical potential of the
dusty, black rock they are passing by.
Thus, the Tangent Zone drives technology in a very decisive
way, but that doesn't mean you can forecast where technology is going. You just know that certain opportunities –
things that would have been discovered in Zone 1 or Zone 3 – are going to be
delayed or missed entirely.
Finally, it is very important to note that just because a
technological development "belongs" to one zone, this does not imply
that it would not be useful in another.
Going back to our coal tar example, even in a world powered by vents of
hydrogen, the ultimate results of investigating coal tar would still be
tremendously important. It is just that
these particular discoveries would be less likely to be made in the hydrogen
powered technological zone than in a zone powered by coal.
"It's obvious
you won't survive by your wits alone."
- Scott Adams
When one thinks of computers today, digital computers are
always what one means. However, another
kind – analog – has played an important role and may do so again. Analog computers come in many varieties:
mechanical including the slide rule and car odometers; hydraulic;
electronic. We will focus on electronic
here.
Analog electronic systems take advantage of every nuance of
voltage or current in an electrical circuit.
For example, in the basic telephone the handset converts waves of sound energy
into an analogous set of waves of electrical energy and transmits these waves
on wires towards the telephone company's Central Office. Today, it is likely that these analog
electrical waves will be converted into digital signals either immediately upon
entering the Central Office or in many cases even before that. But in the past, analog waves were
transmitted through the Central Office and across the country and around the
world.
Similarly,
analog electrical computers process electrical waves. In some cases, these machines were essentially creating
electrical emulations – think “analogy” when you hear the word analog – of the
problems they were meant to solve, but more general machines are possible
also. The figure illustrates a simple
electronic circuit [4].
The circuit consists of an input signal (a voltage source),
a resistor and a capacitor. The
resistor does what its name implies; it resists the flow of electricity,
slowing it down and generating heat in the process. The capacitor is sort of a holding tank. Current flows into it and piles up until the
tank is full or the flow reverses and starts draining the capacitor. What is crucial here but not obvious (you
need to do the math of circuit design to really understand) is that the voltages
across the capacitor and across the resistor have very interesting
relationships to the input voltage. The
voltage across the capacitor "integrates" the current of the input
signal. Integral is a fancy way of
saying cumulative sum. A car odometer
integrates the cars speed to give total distance traveled. The voltage across the capacitor does
something similar, but instead of working on car speed it works on whatever the
input current is. So it sums up the
total current that has been put into the capacitor. The opposite of integration is differentiation (think of a
speedometer instead of an odometer), and that is what you get if you measure
the voltage across the resistor; specifically, the voltage across the resistor
is the derivative of the input voltage.
Integration and differentiation are very fundamental mathematical
operations and being able to produce them with an analog circuit guarantees
that analog electronic computers can do some important things.
Analog computers have been used in many situations. Initially, of course, these devices were
primarily mechanical. Examples include
the differential analyzers built by MIT in the 1920's, 1930's and 1940's and
the fully electronic system known as ANALAC built in the 1950's [33]. Even in the late 1970's, there was an
important manufacturer of analog computers adjacent to a Bell Laboratories site
in New Jersey. Today however, analog
electronic devices are relegated to the backwaters of computing, appearing
mostly in limited but useful roles in devices that are physical intermediaries
between real world systems and digital computers – modems, digital signal
processors, joy sticks and the like.
Except for this ecological niche, it looks like analog computers may go
the way of Wiwaxia and Opabinia, being technological dead ends that die out in
the face of the greater survival and reproductive characteristics of their
competitors, the digital computers.
Exactly what makes something "digital" is not
always that clear, but the essence is that in a digital computer (or a digital
communication system for that matter), one intentionally gives up some
opportunities for precision in return for other gains. For example, the voltage in an electrical
circuit can take on an infinite range of values, even if limited between some
maximum and minimum voltage (say between plus and minus 1 volt). The temptation is to use this infinite
variability to represent an input or calculation with tremendous precision.
Digital systems do NOT do this! Instead, they might let +1 volt represent the number 1 and –1
volt represent the number 0. Other
schemes are possible, but the idea remains the same. For example, when negative voltages cannot be used – as in an
optical transmission system – then zeros may be represented by an absence of
light (0 voltage) instead of a negative voltage.
At first glance digital sounds like a bad idea. Clearly, there is a lot of wasted
potential. But, in the end, flexibility
and manufacturing advantages have made digital technologies overwhelmingly
successful.
Is this the end for analog?
Possibly if digital's domination were to continue long enough, knowledge
about analog technology might become so obscure as to be essentially unknown to
future generations of computer scientists.
Thus, even though it would surely live on in the interfaces, it might
never resurface in a major way. But
this has not happened yet, and continuing advances may yet bring some variation
on analog electronics back.
One of these advances may be quantum computers. Highly controversial, developing rapidly and
with a long, long way to go before they compete with digital computers, these
devices are particularly interesting because they work on waves. Unlike the electrical waves processed in the
resistor-capacitor network we described, these waves are waves of probability
(see the figure [24]). Simple
calculations have been done using prototype quantum computers, including one
design that is truly bizarre. In his
book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy [1], Douglas Adams
inadvertently describes a fictional computer that is so improbable and yet so
similar to an actual quantum computer as to be almost self-referential. Adams' computer uses tiny but
noninfinitesimal amounts of probability (finite improbability as he calls it)
to do its work. That work to be done is
the design of an infinite improbability drive, but that is a detail of fiction
that does not concern us here. To
generate the improbability it runs on, a portion of the computer is placed into
a cup of really hot tea. The Brownian
motion of the tea (all the jiggling around of the molecules) is the driver
providing the randomness.
Getting
back to reality, a working (just barely) quantum computer was in fact built
using what might as well have been a cup of hot coffee or tea [19]. Unfortunately, changing to espresso, hot
cocoa or herb tea does not improve the computer's performance.
Regardless of design, the interesting aspect of a quantum
computer is that it seeks to use the multivalued nature of the wave for its
calculations. The quantum computer
waves are different, but there is a logical commonality with the analog
electronic computers. If the technology
can be made to work, then this particular body plan in the space of technology
may not follow Wiwaxia's lead after all.
"Not your father's economy."
- paraphrase of a popular saying.
Wood
and paper are mostly cellulose with a chemical formula of C6H10O5
– that is mostly water with a large dash of carbon. Humans are mostly water too, with large dashes of carbon and
nitrogen and traces of other elements.
So are steaks, seafood and leafy green vegetables. PVC, the common plastic, is CH2:CHCl
– all hydrogen, carbon and chlorine.
The high quality glass screens on our TVs and computers are 50%
lead. Lead is the key ingredient in the
batteries that start our cars and trucks and that keep telephone networks
working when commercial power fails.
Carbon – zinc is a well known type of electric battery commonly used in
flashlights. Oil and natural gas are
mostly hydrogen and carbon. Coal has
even more carbon. These things – the
elements that overwhelmingly constitute the core of our economy and our very
beings – are all volatiles from the perspective of lunar geology. On the Earth, these elements are not always
abundant in a relative sense but nature has graciously concentrated them for us
in oceans and air, in plants and in
veins of ore.
All
these elements – even lead and zinc - exist on the Moon in only the scarcest
amounts. They were boiled away in the
cataclysm that formed the moon. Imagine
the most inhospitable land possible, perhaps the empty quarter of Saudi Arabia
at high noon at the summer solstice.
Temperatures can pass 120 F by day and drop below freezing at
night. Sand dunes average over 650 feet
high and can get as high as 1000 feet!
This barren land will seem to be a lush oasis of life, teaming with
water and other mineral resources in comparison to the Moon.
We know this from our discussion of Earth and the Moon. Clearly, living on the Moon would be a
challenge. To exist there at all, one
would have to take full advantage of the solar energy resources, of the large
amounts of oxygen, silicon, iron, aluminum and titanium, of the vacuum and the
low gravity. But, given that this were
somehow accomplished, would not technology be harnessed to make life on the
Moon ultimately almost identical to life on Earth? Now is the time to apply our economic theory and to answer
NO! Maybe we could duplicate Earth's
technology zone, but we would not.
The figure on the left is a rehash of our tea and coffee
example, but with the products changed to something more relevant – hydrogen
and iron. On the right is a
modification to show how this might change on the Moon. Utility isoquants do
not change; presumably people will be people wherever they are. On the other hand, the production
possibility frontier is different; lunar hydrogen is much harder to come by. Producing large quantities of hydrogen has a
very high cost in terms of foregone production of iron. As a result, the society shifts away from
using hydrogen. It isn’t foregone
completely. Hydrogen’s high value uses
would be retained, but low value uses would be curtailed and novel techniques
and substitutions made to reduce its use.
Of course, we don’t actually know how these curves would look, but the
qualitative aspect is real. Hydrogen
would be used "significantly" less, as would carbon, nitrogen and all
the other volatiles. Moreover, the effect
is permanent. When materials are rare
and expensive they always will be used less than when they are common and
cheap. What is striking about this
obvious fact is that it has huge implications for the long term direction of
lunar technology and lunar society.
One of the curses of economic theory is that it can be very
effective in making broad, qualitative conclusions, but it tends to be pathetic
when specific details are required.
Recall Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's statements about
"irrational exuberance" in the 1996 stock market. He was correct in the long run, but economic
practice did not allow him to predict the moment the bubble would burst. About three years later, his predictions
came true. Thus, if we rely on our
economic theory, we find that we cannot draw the actual production possibility
frontier for a lunar world and do not know precisely how life on the Moon will
differ from life on Earth, but we can speculate about some
specific impacts.
In the late ‘60s movie The
Graduate, the main character, played by Dustin Hoffman, was admonished by a
family acquaintance to start a career in plastics. As we’ve noted, plastics such as PVC are pretty much entirely
volatiles, literally worth their weight in gold on the Moon. A lunar Hoffman is more likely to have heard
”ceramics" or perhaps "glass" as career advice.
Plastics are so ubiquitous and useful a technology that
making limited use of them is difficult to imagine. Aluminum, common enough on the Moon, could be a substitute in
some cases. Even cheaper would be glass
and various ceramics made from melting or otherwise processing moon rocks and
soil. Perhaps frothy masses of glass
entraining oxygen might be used to get strength with lightness. The glass would be abundant, and the gases
would be automatic byproducts of producing metals. Noble gases such as helium and neon might also be used. As
already noted, these gases are trapped in lesser but roughly comparable quantities
right along with hydrogen in lunar regolith, and would be natural byproducts of
hydrogen production.
Innovations – new directions - are conceivable too. Some have speculated that Moon glass –
because it would be made from rock that is devoid of water – might be
extraordinarily strong, better than steel.
If so, this would present interesting design tradeoffs in many
areas. Also, the rarity of carbon would
stimulate research on silicon analogs to organic chemistry.
As a popular concept in science fiction, silicon based life
relies on the proximity of silicon and carbon in the periodic table. Fiction writers suggested that on very hot
planets, silicon rather than carbon could be the basis for life – Venus was a
popular venue for this when the writers were not assuming that it was really a
steamy tropical jungle. In other cases,
the silicon life form simply lived deep within the planet; e.g. one early Star
Trektm episode (“Devil in the Dark” - 1967) featured a Horta. The Horta was intelligent, based on silicon
rather than carbon, and had a habit of killing human miners until a combination
of force and telepathy provided an opportunity to negotiate a mutually
beneficial relationship.
Carbon and silicon do have some strong chemical
analogies. Methane (CH4) has
its silicon analog in silane (SiH4). Ethane (C2H6) corresponds with disilane (Si2H6)
and butane (C4H10) with tetrasilane (Si4H10). Some of these gases are commercially
important. Silane is used in the
electronics industry. It is a mildly toxic,
very explosive gas, with an unpleasant odor that one manufacturer describes as
"repulsive".
Like carbon, silicon can form polymers. Silicone, widely used, is a polymer chain
with the backbone consisting of alternating silicon and oxygen atoms. And long chains with silicon backbones and
organic compounds hanging off the backbone called polysilanes have interesting
properties such as conducting electricity and withstanding high
temperatures. Going the other way (from
silicon to carbon), there is slowly rising interest on Earth in the use of
carbon crystals (specifically diamonds) in lieu of silicon in the construction
of microchips. Silicon is of course the
crystal of choice for most microchips; although, germanium is sometimes
preferred. Artificially growing silicon
crystals is much easier than growing diamonds, but substantial progress is
being made.
Why silicon and carbon have some chemical similarities can
be understood using the Lewis-Langmuir electron shell theory and looking at the
periodic table of the elements. Simply
put, the theory says that electrons in an atom arrange themselves in shells and
it is only the outermost shell that interacts chemically. Elements with the same number of electrons
in their outermost shell will have the same number of electrons to use in
chemical reactions; hence, they will behave (somewhat) similarly
chemically. In the periodic table, each
column corresponds to a particular number of electrons in the outermost shell. Carbon and silicon, along with germanium
(Ge), tin (Sn), and lead (Pb) all have four "valence" electrons –
four electrons in the outermost shell that are available for use in chemical
reactions.
Unfortunately, simply counting valence electrons is not all you
need to do to understand the chemical nature of an element. It's obvious, but to see the point clearly
consider the oxides of carbon and silicon.
CO2 is a gas at normal temperatures and pressures and a
component of the Earth's atmosphere.
SiO2 is ordinary glass – a solid – and a common component in
the sand of the Earth's beaches.
Clearly, being close together in the periodic table is not enough to
guarantee identical chemistry.
We now know that carbon based microbes are more likely to be
found in abundance deep within the Earth than are Hortas. Carbon is really a unique and amazing
element, and finding useful silicon analogs to organics has not been enormously
successful; although, they certainly are used in important niche
applications. But why even try on
Earth? Carbon is cheap and enormously
flexible. Only on the Moon would there
be real incentives to push the research envelope.
O’Neill, in his book The
High Frontier [46], envisioned domed space farms that used lunar soil
enriched with artificial fertilizer and farmed with space versions of
traditional farm gear – tractors, plows, combines. Perhaps true, but there most likely would be bigger differences
than just farming under a lunar dome.
In Guns, Germs and Steel [16], Jared Diamond describes the impact
of environment and mineral resources on agriculture and technology in
general. In one example, he discusses
the range of Polynesian societies. On
Chatham Island, they were hunter-gatherers with very simple tools and simple
societies. In New Zealand's north
island, technology was much more complex and farming was used extensively. On islands such as Hawaii, large complex
societies developed. All these islands
were populated by people from the same culture with the same initial
technology. Chatham is too cold to
support farming as the Polynesians understood it. They failed to develop new methods suitable to Chatham, so they
ended up living a simple life with a low population density. In contrast, New Zealand's north island was
compatible with the agricultural techniques known to the Polynesians and it
had, unlike Chatham, a wealth of mineral resources as well. As a result, the north island became densely
populated, and its people developed a comparatively sophisticated technology.
We and our food are composed mainly of volatiles. The Moon is poor in these elements. Dealing with the costs implied by this will
redirect agriculture in surprising ways if lunar inhabitants are to avoid the
mistakes of the Chatham Islanders.
Hydroponics
Lunar regolith probably would make a fine starting point for
farm soil. After all, it is formed from
rock types that are common enough on Earth.
Soil has a disadvantage, however - fertilizer and water applied to it
adheres to it. It’s like using a large
sponge to moisten postage stamps. It
works well, but at the end of the day there is a lot of water left in the
sponge. Unfortunately, the water and
the nitrogen and other volatiles in fertilizer would be expensive. No lunar farmer trying to make a living
wants to leave all that just sitting in the soil. To minimize the overhead, farmers would be more likely to opt for
hydroponics. In this arrangement, plant
roots are occasionally dipped or sprayed with water and fertilizer, but need
not be permanently immersed in anything other than air. Anything not absorbed can be captured and
sprayed on other plants.
Breeding for speed
and low bulk
Anyone who is familiar with farming knows that there is
quite a bit of extraneous plant and animal material produced on the way to
market (the author has personal experience of this, having walked through feed
lots while working as a surveyor!).
Wheat rises majestically on tall stalks. After harvest, the stalks are just straw, low in food value but
great for preventing erosion and for
occasional use in crafts. Corn grows on
tall, thick stalks. These stalks are a
little more useful. Cut a fresh corn
stalk – even one from a variety intended to produce cattle feed – and suck the
end. It is deliciously sweet. Corn stalks are mainly water and cellulose
with a nice bit of sugar added. Cut up
and stored, these stalks become silage that is good food for cattle, but not of
much direct interest to human consumers.
The point of this is that on the Moon, there will be strong
incentives to breed out this surplus.
Wheat and corn would be bred to grow on short stalks. Apple trees might be more bush-like than
tree-like. Protected under their domes
from wind and flood and hail and living in low gravity, drastic changes in crop
structure could be made and should be expected.
Just as important would be the time from seed to
product. Halving the size of the stalk
is great, but only needing that stalk for ½ the usual time is good too. Again, careful control of the environment
and elimination of pests should allow breeders to stress crops to the max,
forcing seed-to-harvest times down to absolute minimums.
More vegetable and
less animal production
Pity the lunar carnivore.
Animals add a whole new layer of costs into the food production
process. That means extra baggage (the
animal equivalent of wheat stalks) and extra time from seed to consumable
harvest.
No meat won’t disappear, but it will be eaten less because
it will be expensive and there will be intense interest in plant-based
substitutes. As much the domain of
cooks as of farmers, one can only wonder what would happen when a whole society
focuses on finding really good tasting, high plant content food.
The ultimate fast food
– just-in-time farming
Finally, the entire production and processing schedule of
agriculture would be altered. Today, we
are used to a seasonal cycle. Yes, it’s
true that in the more developed countries, foods are flown from around the
world, allowing tables to be graced with fresh fruits and vegetables at all
times of the year. Still, huge masses
of food product are produced on an annual cycle and stored. Walk along the tracks of any railroad town
in Nebraska or Kansas and you will see huge grain elevators – skyscraper size
cylinders - placed there for the sole purpose of storing the massive output of
the fields until it is needed.
On the moon, Kanban – the "just in time' production
techniques pioneered in Japan –should be much more common in food production. There would be no real seasonal constraints
in producing food, so one would expect that the capital costs of storing foods
would be minimized by storing as little as possible. Daily harvests would bring just about the right amount of
everything needed that day and little more.
Management of the production flow would be a prime concern and an area
for constant research and improvement.
Given the paucity of some critical elements, citizens of the
Moon must find some resource to be overwhelmingly abundant if they are to live
a life that is not nasty, brutish and short.
If anything, energy is that resource.
Solar and Geothermal
In space near the Earth, including the Moon, the intensity
of solar radiation is almost ten times that found on the Earth. Here on Earth, the atmosphere blocks a
substantial amount of it, reflecting it or absorbing it before it hits the
ground. Unfortunately for us, solar
cells remain quite expensive, but improvements have been and continue to be
made. Solar energy, while not for
everyone, is finding applications in remote sites and elsewhere. A factor of 10 increase in raw energy
density should go a long way to making solar cells attractive on the Moon, but
it is not clear that this would provide the energy gold mine that is needed to
make life there chic and not merely
survivable.
However, solar energy production is not tied just to solar
cells. Traditional heat engines could
work also. O’Neill suggested that a
type of generator based on helium, a Brayton cycle device, might be appropriate
for generating electricity. O’Neill
made his suggestion in the 1970s, but one can still find references to Brayton
cycle engines in NASA research today.
The original open cycle Brayton engine was proposed by George Brayton in
1870. A closed cycle version that would
be appropriate on the moon consists of a compression stage, a constant pressure
stage where heat is added, an expansion stage including a turbine to generate
electricity, and finally a stage in which left over heat is given up to a low
temperature source. Variations of the
Brayton cycle are widely used in industry [10].
A heat engine for electricity generation works by taking a
“source” of energy that is hot, transferring this energy into a fluid, piping the
fluid into a piston chamber or turbine, then cooling the fluid in a “sink” that
is cold. The piston or turbine moves,
driving an electric generator. On
Earth, heat engines have a mixed reputation because of their inherent
inefficiency. A typical device is going
to convert at the very best 1/3rd of the fuel energy to electricity,
usually much less.
However, heat engine efficiency goes up
dramatically as the difference between the energy source temperature and the
sink increases. On the Moon, sunlight
could be focused using large mirrors to generate extremely high temperatures,
so the source temperature could be quite high, making the heat engine generator
potentially very efficient.
Helium might make an ideal fluid for such an engine for
several reasons. First, it probably
would be cheap. Helium is nearly as
common as hydrogen in the regolith and would be produced as a byproduct of
hydrogen production. Unless novel uses are found, there really is not much else
that can be done with all that helium.
On the Earth, we mainly use it to fill up toy balloons.
A second reason to like helium is that it is inert. Unlike other compounds that might be used,
it will not react with and hence will not corrode the internals of a heat
engine. Given this, if the moving parts
can be made to float on magnetic bearings, then the electric generator might be
essentially maintenance free.
Finally, helium remains a gas over a huge range of
temperatures. This is important because
during the two week long night, the high temperature energy source goes
away. If helium is used as the fluid,
it may be possible to use another source, perhaps pumping heat out of the
Moon’s interior and into the bitter cold of space. If so, then energy production could be continuous; although,
nighttime output levels might differ from daytime levels.
Although exactly how solar energy would be harvested remains
unclear, it is clear that this resource is one of the few in which the Moon
would really excel. Large structures to
concentrate the sunlight could be built relatively easily because of the low
gravity and lack of an atmosphere.
Thus, it might be that providing lunar inhabitants with a really
extraordinary quantity of energy per person would be both practical and the key
to making life on the Moon pleasant.
Nuclear
Nuclear power on the Moon is highly speculative but a
possibility. Some discussion has taken
place over the possibility of mining tritium, a radioactive isotope of
hydrogen, and using it on the Moon and/or the Earth. But tritium must be fused to generate power, and generating power
with controlled fusion remains as it was half a century ago, still half a
century in the future, if it ever becomes possible at all. So for the present only nuclear fission
using uranium or one of its relatives need be considered.
On the Earth fission has been important but also something
of a mixed blessing – expensive, dirty, dangerous and a potential contributor
to terrorism but a major energy source nonetheless.
On the Moon, the situation changes a great deal. The attractions of nuclear power include a)
being available during the lunar night, b) filling a role as a back up energy
source, c), being the only game in town other than solar and maybe geothermal,
and d) having a substantially lower risk than on Earth. With no ecosystem and no air or groundwater
to pollute, a fission plant that went into meltdown would not present
overwhelming problems. Similarly, finding
suitable storage sights for spent fuel and other radioactive debris would be
much less of a problem than on Earth.
This is not to say that care would not be needed. It would still be possible to be really dumb
and to build a power plant in the heart of a population complex. Also, there is the issue of marking storage
sights for the future when they may remain dangerous for tens of thousands of
years.
The most critical issue for fission based power probably
would be the availability of nuclear fuel.
These fuels are present in KREEP, but as already discussed, finding long
veins of anything will be difficult, because the regolith and megaregolith have
been shattered and churned. Hence, the
practicalities of mining uranium remain to be determined.
Energy Storage
Finally, energy storage presents technical challenges and opportunities
on the Moon. First, there is the long
lunar night to get through. While ways
of producing energy during the night will no doubt be found, stored energy will
surely have some role to play. On
Earth, mass energy storage is done with chemicals – organics such as oil and
coal and lead in storage batteries.
This is unlikely to be economical on the moon because these compounds
are entirely made from volatiles. The greener
solution of storing hydrogen also will be costly for the same reason; thus,
other alternatives must be explored.
Pure metals such as aluminum, silicon and iron can provide substantial
amounts of energy when oxidized and these elements would be common on the Moon. Also, flywheel technology would present new
design options there. On the Earth,
flywheels play modest roles. Their
spinning masses are used in mechanical devices both to store energy and to
stabilize rotation speeds. Efforts to
use them extensively for heavy-duty energy storage have not been hugely
successful. High rotation speeds are
required if substantial energy is to be stored in a compact device, and these
high speeds can tear the flywheel apart.
Alternatively, a massive but slow moving flywheel can store a lot of
energy, but the problems of supporting the mass introduce cost and
friction. With 1/6th the
gravity, massive flywheels might find a technological niche on the Moon.
A very speculative but interesting possibility is the use of
superconducting storage rings. On
Earth, these superconductors are important for scientific purposes, and the new
high temperature (high TC) superconductors have found some
commercial power applications. But even
high TC superconductors must be cooled to approximately the
temperature of liquid nitrogen if they are to work. Nitrogen liquefies (at normal pressure) at –195.8 ºC, which is
about –320 ºF. Since at night the Moon
is already down near –150 ºC, massive rings might be feasible which would not
be practical on Earth.
If it were possible, a lunar colony would have many things
it would want to import. Volatiles are
the most obvious, but other things would be desired also. Certainly, specialized skills that could be
provided by an extreme version of telecommuting would be desired at least until
the population became quite large. But,
there are really large problems with trade, and oddly enough the problem lies
less with the Moon than with the Earth.
The Moon probably could offer a considerable number of
different types of goods in trade:
Raw Materials such as titanium
might be mined and processed on the Moon using the (hopefully) abundant solar
energy. The materials could then be
packaged in an ablative coating and launched by rail gun for Earth. With low gravity and no atmosphere, rail
guns might be very effective launch devices.
Add a few basic controls into each launch vehicle to provide some
minimal landing guidance while using the Earth's atmosphere to slow the vehicle
and the minerals could be "gently" crashed into the ocean or some
uninhabited area of Earth and retrieved more or less intact.
Space Exploration and near
Earth space applications such as communication satellites might be built and
launched more cheaply from the Moon.
The rail gun would play a key role here too, as would the low gravity, the
vacuum, and the fact that the Moon is already quite a ways out of the energy
well that is Earth's gravity.
In addition, nuclear powered space ships for deep space exploration could
be launched from the Moon much more easily than from Earth or from near-Earth
orbit. On Earth, nuclear power carries
with it the risk of major contamination if a worst case failure were to happen
– Chernobyl from space. But a launch
from the Moon would be much less risky.
With no environment to pollute and no atmosphere or ocean to spread the
pollution, a crash into the Moon of a nuclear reactor would be only a
problem. A crash of a nuclear, Moon
launched vehicle into Earth is conceivable, but much, much less likely than a
crash of an Earth launched vehicle.
Subatomic Physics might
even be done on the Moon more cheaply than on Earth. With a ready made vacuum, access to extreme cold at night, and
large open tracts of land, a superconducting supercollider would not require an
enormous tunnel – much of it could be above ground. Its diameter could be larger, reducing the power requirements in
its magnets, and in the dark of night, the Moon itself would protect delicate
equipment from solar radiation (but not from cosmic rays).
Although the Moon might have products to offer the Earth,
what could the Earth offer the Moon?
Everything and nothing. Until a
major breakthrough occurs, the cost of transporting material goods from the
Earth to the Moon is just too great. It
is true that importation of volatiles – not from Earth but from comets and
asteroids – has been proposed. Asimov
suggested that such an object might be coaxed into a gentle collision with a
crater at one of the lunar poles, after which the debris might be collected. Effecting a gentle landing that would not vaporize
most of the cargo and spread whatever did not vaporize all over creation is an
engineering challenge that remains to be worked. Just as seriously, goods sent from Earth not only must be worth
the substantial lift costs. They also
must be worth the cost of gently landing them on the Moon. A gentle landing implies rocket fuel
(there's no atmosphere to glide down on) and sophisticated controls. In other words, both going up and coming
down are expensive.
So on the face of it, trade with or importation of anything
to Moon sounds like a lost cause. It is
not quite that bad, however.
Intellectual property has relatively low transport costs and both
parties would have intellectual property of great interest to the other.
Intellectual Property
as opposed to ideas that any one
can use if they can get them has a relatively short history. In Europe during the Middle Ages there was a
vaguely related concept in place, but it amounted to little more than Kings and
Queens granting monopolies on certain products as a reward for favors or
friendship. This sort of thing of
course got out of hand, and led eventually to a revolt in England in the 1600s
over a newly created monopoly on salt production, which then led to the Statute
of Monopolies. This statute finally
began to recognize the importance of the creative act in determining who should
have a (temporary) monopoly on a product [47].
By the mid-1700s, intellectual property concepts were advanced enough to
be applied to fashion – the French copyright law of 1787 gave a copyright life
of 15 years for furnishings and 6 years for dress fabrics [25] – and to be
prominently mentioned in the U. S. Constitution
"The Congress shall have power …to promote the progress of science
and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the
exclusive right to their writings and discoveries."
By the twentieth century, patents and copyrights were all
the rage. At Bell Laboratories, a
former pinnacle of research and patent generation, all new employees received
their own copy of a book dedicated to intellectual property [47] and other
major corporations worldwide were just as keen to capture the value of the
ideas they generated. By the end of the
century, patents were being issued on genes, software, common business
processes, arrangements of buttons on web pages, and how to swing sideways on
the playground swing set [62].
Be that as it may, the Earth will have a great deal of
information that inhabitants of the Moon will desire: daily news, entertainment, technical information, historical
information, books from the Library of Congress, etc. Similarly, the Moon society would be creating information of
interest on Earth. Remember that the
lunar production possibility frontier is fundamentally different from the
Earth’s. As a result, lunar society is
working in what is to Earth a Forbidden Zone of technology. Through the Moon’s culture, a “Lost World”
of technology becomes vicariously accessible to Earth. So lunar technical developments and patents
would be of interest because they would often go in directions unanticipated on
Earth, but news, literature, etc. would also be exportable.
Curiously, the greatest hindrance to trade in information is
likely to be legal. After all, it does cost
money to, say, digitize a book and then transmit its contents. This will not simply happen in either
society; someone must be found to pay for it.
But as already discussed, it will be difficult for Earth to export
anything other than information and it is not clear that the Moon will actually
have other export options. Thus, if a
thriving trade in intellectual property is to occur, those sending information
will need to receive information in return as payment and their ability to
copyright or otherwise protect the received information would be required. But legal rights pertaining to anything
extraterrestrial have yet to be explored in the courts.
The quantities of information exchanged between Earth and
Moon need not be equal, but the value received in the exchange would at least
need to cover the cost of engaging in the exchange. Provided legal arrangements were established protecting
copyrights and patents of material created off the Earth and facilitating the
granting of exclusive rights to designated parties elsewhere, the exchange of
information could be a self-supporting business. In fact, if an extraterrestrial society were to become
sufficiently populous, the amount of exchangeable information might become very
large indeed.
"Sex is the
mathematics urge sublimated."
– M. C. Reed
Art imitates life or so someone said. In any case, technology certainly imitates
nature whenever convenient. Genetic
Algorithms (GAs) are wonderful examples.
In brief, a GA is a method for designing something – say a machine – not
by mimicking nature’s designs but by mimicking the process nature uses to
design. Like the DNA of some common
species of bacteria, the design is allowed to mutate, undergo unnatural
selection, and evolve.
The code of life is stored in DNA as base pairs: Adenine-Thymine and Guanine-Cytosine. As it so happens, this approach matches
perfectly with the way data and programs are stored in modern, digital
computers. Computers store this
information in bases of 0 and 1. The
physical storage may be as a burst of electric or magnetic energy, but the
match with the two base pairs in DNA is perfect at the logical level.
Genetic algorithms were developed in part because they are
neat ideas and the analogies with nature are just too good not to try out. More seriously, the traditional methods that
engineers use to find the best possible design among a large set of
alternatives have problems. They don't
always work. The methods fall in the
subject area of Operations Research (OR) and OR will be considered again
later. For now, it suffices just to say
that the best OR methods sometimes get stuck or find only second best
solutions. One way around this problem
is to add randomness into the solution – kind of like shaking the pinball
machine to make the ball go where you really want it to go. Genetic algorithms are a way of doing this,
but they also are a way that has intuitive appeal and over 3 billion years of
use to back them up.
The idea of using Nature's approach to design was suggested
(at least) as early as the 1960s, but John Holland [31] is generally credited
with actually inventing Genetic Algorithms a few years later.
Suppose you want to design a machine. The first step in GA and the one where art
and skill really come into play is to make up some DNA for the machine. Our DNA is just a pattern of 0s and 1s, but
there must be a method for translating the pattern into the actual machine design. Finding a good way – a good pattern – to
describe the machine may be tricky. For
example, a 1 for the first bit might mean add a teaspoon of sugar (maybe we're
designing a recipe for brownies), and a 1 for the second bit might mean add
another teaspoon of sugar. A 0 in
either place would skip that teaspoon of sugar.
The next step is to find a way to evaluate your design. Engineers usually know how to do this. They can quantify how well the design would
work and how much it would cost. For a
brownie recipe, we probably would fall back on experimentation – we'd actually
cook and taste test each version (it's a tough job, but someone has to do it!).
At this point, it is time to let the GA start running. To do that, we must occasionally mutate our
DNA. We start out with a small population
and at random let a few of the 0s and 1s change on a few of the members of the
population. We test the changed
versions and "kill" the really lousy ones. We also let our population of designs have sex. Two designs may come together and create new
designs by copying themselves, and interchanging parts of their designs (i.e.
by gene swapping).
We test the new designs that result from this culinary
conjugation and again kill off the worst designs in the total population.
Interestingly, it is important to keep the mutation rate
very low. A high rate of swapping DNA
is more useful in finding a good design than is letting the DNA mutate. Interchanging 50% and more of the DNA
appears to be appropriate to get the best results quickly. Apparently, most mutations are dead ends;
although, mutation is necessary to feed the process. It isn't a proof, but the importance of gene swapping in Genetic
Algorithms hints strongly at why sex was invented in the first place and also
emphasizes the similarities between natural technology (life and evolution) and
human technology. Both operate in a world of trial and error and survival of
the fittest. Presumably, creatures that
had sex – and thus were capable of gene swapping – were much more adaptable
than were their asexual relatives. When
times and conditions changed, those creatures that did sex also evolved,
survived and not coincidentally passed on their inherited interest in sex. The chaste, they died young.
Genetic Algorithms let nature take its course so to speak on
the drawing board. At each iteration of
the reproductive cycle some design mutation and a lot of gene swapping occurs
and the population of designs grows.
The least successful designs are eliminated (survival of the fittest),
trimming back the population and the process repeats. Eventually, we terminate the process and use the best design in
the lot. Just as in nature, good
designs often develop using GA, but there is no guarantee that the best design
will be found. Even if Opabinia could
ultimately lead to the greatest creature of all time, GA just might kill it off
early, just as Nature did in the Cambrian.
"If I knew the jazz of the future, I'd play it."
- a musician
Technological change is difficult to explain. Economists have a grip on how some of it
works – the tangential production possibility frontiers and utility isoquants
do tell you a lot. But the shape of the
frontier is as much due to knowledge as to any inherent physical
constraints. If physical constraints
were all that mattered, then Japan would be an impoverished nation. There’s far more to it than that. In addition, the shape of the frontier
changes over time. But how and why?
Authors such as James Burke [5] make an interesting argument
that the detail of technology today is very much the result of pretty much
random events that just happen to come together in a useful way. It's all about "connections" of ideas,
some natural, some accidental. The
original (pre-divestiture) Bell Telephone Laboratories was a hotbed of
innovation: transistors, lasers, the UNIXtm operating system,
information theory, and much, much more came from “The Labs”. A common story there – sort of “Labie” folk
wisdom - was that nothing of breakthrough significance had ever come from the
countless, carefully managed projects that were funded there – all the really
useful stuff was serendipitous or skunk work, started out on the side and not
in the main stream of planned activities.
It was an exaggeration, but not entirely wrong.
So how are we to go beyond simply writing change off as
chaos bounded broadly by the frontier / isoquant theory of economics? If we could do it, we would like to develop
a dynamical theory of change that is every bit as sophisticated as the
physicists’ models for space shots. But
could we ever hope to have a model that explains the historical path of
technology and projects that path forward into the future?
One step in the right direction might be to draw analogies
between technological evolution and biological evolution. In a sense, we are arguing in this book that
true extraterrestrial living would give us something like a Jurassic Park, that
access to Forbidden Zones of technology is potentially as exciting as access to
a Lost World. Imagine the intellectual
richness of Earth life if we could move at will between Mesozoic and Cenozoic
ecosystems, learning from and enjoying each.
Terran and Lunar technologies would be analogous to these Mesozoic and
Cenozoic worlds. Unfortunately, the
analogy carries unwanted emotional baggage.
We tend to view any older life as more "primitive" in the
sense of being less advanced, less complex and less well adapted. This is not the case, and we certainly don’t
want to imply with the analogy that Terran (or Lunar) technology would be more
primitive than the other. In fact the
biological meaning of "primitive" simply means it originated well in
the past. Sharks are
"primitive" fish, but they have survived not in spite of their
primitiveness but because their primitive design is incredibly efficient,
robust and adaptable. So
"primitive" can mean "sophisticated" just as easily as it
can mean "obsolete".
In his book Full House
[22], Stephen Jay Gould addresses the bias that old life is primitive in a
pejorative sense. He also provides a
probabilistic way of looking at evolution and the complexity of life that can
be useful in thinking about technological evolution. Summing up and rewording, Gould's viewpoint might be expressed
like this:
There
is a huge "space" of possible life forms of varying complexity. Reality imposes limits, however, so certain
levels of complexity will be common. Other levels of complexity (extremely high
for example) will be much rarer, and some levels will be essentially
impossible. Within this space (see the
figure), life began as microbes on the far left where design complexity is the
lowest consistent with even being called alive. As time passes, individual species evolve in a fairly random
way. Sometimes they get more complex;
sometimes they get simpler. Sometimes a
worm develops a backbone; sometimes it becomes a parasite incapable of living
outside its host and having hardly more than a mouth and a gut (or if you are a
certain deep sea vent tube worm, then no mouth, no gut and no anus). Exactly what happens at any moment depends
on accidents of random mutation and gene swapping and accidents of
environment. However, the end result of
this random walk is to slowly fill out – to explore – ever larger areas of the
allowed space of possible life forms, including those regions that are the
domain of very complex life. Thus, over
time evolution gives the appearance of being driven towards more complex life
forms, but the occurrence of greater complexity is a result of other processes
and is not a feature that is inherently associated with the evolution of any
specific species.
Let us make a few substitutions in these ideas:
|
Biological Term:
|
Replace With:
|
|
Species
|
instances of technology
|
|
DNA
|
information stored in designs and processes
|
|
random mutation
|
new ideas on how to make things
|
|
sex (gene swapping)
|
idea sharing
|
|
Environment
|
available resources, known technologies and consumer wants
(isoquants)
|
|
survival of the fittest
|
technology must be economically useful at the point of
tangency of the production possibility frontier and a utility isoquant
|
If we do that, then we have a nice analogy between
biological and technological evolution.
Gould’s diagram even works. At
the dawn of humankind, technology is concentrated at the far left – crude stick
and stone tools are all we know. Random
events occur that allow us to discover new technologies and add them to our bag
of tricks. We don’t always move towards
more complicated tools – sometimes it becomes appropriate to adopt something
simpler. Remember Chatham Island! Whereas on some other islands in the
Pacific, Polynesian society became more technologically sophisticated over
time, the reverse was true on Chatham Island.
A combination of climate and a complete lack of suitable minerals (not
even flint for stone tools was available) caused the Chatham Islanders to
revert to a simpler technology set.
With only oral traditions to support them and no motivation / ability to
maintain the original technology, many skills and capabilities were forgotten
completely. On the other hand, if there
are good libraries or other means of recording what has been learned, then
techniques that are no longer in the Tangent Zone need not be forgotten
completely. In that case the explored
technology space fills out and moves to the right, toward more sophisticated
and complex techniques. If our society
is one that rarely forgets what it has learned, then the knowledge acquired
inevitably shifts the production possibility frontier outward.
But
Jurassic Park is not in either figure.
We need to extend Gould’s ideas a bit to understand why not. In the case of biological evolution, the
reason why we do not see both Mesozoic and Cenozoic life forms coexisting has
to do with ecological niches and who got there first.
Not
all regions in the space of possible life forms are mutually compatible. Some regions have big signs up “you can’t
get here from there”. For example,
mammals and dinosaurs seem to be roughly equivalent in terms of biological
viability – their ability to evolve, adapt, and survive. But dinosaurs got the jump on mammals at the
beginning of the Mesozoic and locked up a lot of important ecological niches
before the mammals could take their best shot.
As a result, for a very long time nature explored only a tiny portion of
the space of possible mammalian life forms.
We basically hung out as shrews for a couple of hundred million
years. Talk about lollygaggers! It wasn’t until volcanic upheaval and a
really big flying rock blew away the non-avian dinosaurs about 65 million years
ago, that mammals finally got their chance.
With the dinosaurs gone, ecological niches were suddenly vacant, the surviving
mammals moved right in, evolving in a few million years to explore far more of
their life form “space” than they had in the entire preceding 200 million
years. Today, mammals rule and the
birds cannot find the right niches to let them evolve back to their glory days
as T-Rex.
Technology
has an analogous problem, but you can’t see it in economist’s frontiers and
isoquants. There is no equivalent to
the eco-niche barrier there. These
economic curves are inherently nicely shaped and the best solution possible is
the inevitable outcome. The messiness
is hidden.
To get a feel for where the messiness lies, we will take a
quick, engineering look at the mathematical foundation of economic theory,
known as optimization theory, operations research (OR) or sometimes as
mathematical programming. Consider the
figure and imagine that it shows how the cost (vertical axis) of manufacturing
some good varies as one varies some input (the horizontal axis). That input might be temperature, or cooking
time, or perhaps the number of skilled workers. The example is make-believe, but the problem it illustrates is
all too real. Looking at the figure,
how would you find the best solution – the amount of input that gives the
lowest cost?
Well, looking at the figure makes it trivial. You just pick the lowest valley and put your
finger on point A. But in real life
that is cheating. In real life, you don’t
have the figure drawn out for you.
Remember Leontief and his huge cookbook? In real life, there are many, many inputs and you cannot even
begin to draw the figure.
So how do you find the best solution? Operations Research (OR) has developed
numerous techniques to do this. Linear
Programming – that thing mentioned when we first talked about Leontief – is one
of these techniques. It works
wonderfully well, when it works, but Linear Programming only works for certain
problems. That is one reason why
Leontief’s ideas look like cookbooks and not like curved frontiers and
isoquants. He needed something
practical, something that would work with Linear Programming.
Although it does have limitations, Linear Programming works
at a high level in much the same way as other, more general techniques. Appropriately, given that we started this
discussion with Gould’s ideas on evolution, the general technique can be
explained by talking about a beetle.
Imagine a small beetle that can walk back and forth on the
curve, following it up and down.
Further, suppose that this insect is trained. It never walks up hill on the curve, only down. Start the bug at point B and it will walk
down to the optimum at A. This is the
general technique of OR. Even with very
large, complicated problems, it is generally possible to make a computer take
small steps, always down hill, over and over until the bottom is found.
Of
course there’s a problem with this.
Start the beetle or the computer at C and it doesn’t walk to A, it walks
to D. When you start at C, the entire
region to the left is an unreachable, unexplorable space of technical solutions. It is like the Mesozoic Jurassic Park that
we, living in the Cenozoic, cannot find again.
The only way to get to A from C is to make a mistake. In our example, perhaps someone sneezes and
blows the beetle off course. In OR,
random noise is sometimes added intentionally in the hopes of avoiding getting
stuck at D or methods such as Genetic Algorithms are tried. However, there is no general method that
guarantees you will find point A; you can never be sure that you have found the
best possible solution.
In real life – that is to say both inside and outside the
design lab – noise is added to the search for new technologies by random
coincidence. A few examples:
·
Meteorologist Edward Lorenz developed his critical
insights into chaos theory in part because in 1961 he entered a copy of
simulation data into his computer inaccurately. The resulting tiny errors led to large differences in the
computer output – a weather simulation – and this in turn led Lorenz to realize
that some systems were chaotic, i.e. inherently unpredictable.
·
William Perkins was trying to make quinine from coal
tar. The purple dye he got instead was
quite unexpected.
·
Roy Plunkett was trying to make a refrigerant from
tetrafluoroethene gas when he discovered Teflon.
·
Polyethylene was created by several chemists due to the
appearance of impurities (oxygen in this case) in their reagents.
·
The toy "slinky" was invented by Richard
James in 1943. He was working with
springs to solve a nautical problem – how to keep some devices steady while in
a rocking boat – when by accident he noticed the peculiar way the springs
dropped off tables, steps and the like.
·
Guncotton was discovered in 1842 when a chemist named
Schoenbeim made a mess in his home while experimenting. Spilling a mixture of acids, he wiped them
up with his wife's apron and hung it to dry near a fire! It blew up in front of his eyes.
·
Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928 only
because some dirt managed to land on a petri dish in which he was growing
bacteria.
The problem of getting stuck in holes – local optima as they
are called - is quite real to engineers, statisticians and the like. It’s not at all uncommon to design something
that turns out to be suboptimal not because you made a mistake but because you
got stuck on a local minimum and couldn’t see the best spot just over the
hill. But do these problems have
meaning beyond the design labs with their CAD systems and breadboard
mockups? In fact they do, and whole
societies can become fundamentally stuck in a technological hole.
Mayan
civilization gives us a wonderful example of how science and technology
potentially can become stuck.
Independently of Asian, African and European cultures, the Mayans developed
a practical mathematics, including a symbol for zero and its use as a place
holder in their number system. Even the
Romans did not have this. Their
calendar was sophisticated and capable of making predictions more accurately
than could, say, Copernicus working on the theory that the planets traveled in
circles about the sun. It was so good
that other locals (Aztecs, Toltecs) borrowed the calculation mechanism. There was no theory behind it; it was purely
a marvelous, ad hoc tool that worked. Without
theory to give insights and suggest refinements, Mayan astronomy and Mayan
science in general was not going to go much further.
What would happen if some upstart young Mayan astronomer in
training were to propose a theory that the Moon and planets were really objects
orbiting the Sun in huge circles?
Richard Feynman [17] proposes this possible conversation:
"Yes,"
says the astronomer, "and how accurately can you predict
eclipses?" [and the upstart replies] "I haven't developed the thing very
far yet." Then says the astronomer
"Well, we can calculate eclipses more accurately than you can with your
model, so you must not pay any attention to your idea …"
The upstart would be on the right track, if only he could
pursue it far enough then all the ideas of modern physics could unfold from his
approach. It would take someone with
the genius of Kepler and Newton to make the leap and beat out the Mayan
calendar in a practical sense. The
Mayan calendar was just too good. So
the Mayan astronomers, if they believe in proving their ideas with cold hard
facts, are stuck. Because they cannot
evolve, their ideas – while very successful for a time – face the same
extinction threat as Wiwaxia and Opabinia.
Our modern energy technology may be similarly stuck
today. Petroleum production and
gasoline powered automobiles, coal and natural gas production and generating
electricity by burning them – these are techniques that have been researched
and refined for decades. Billions of
dollars have been lavished on their improvement. Open the hood of any modern automobile and the intricate machine
you see – combined with the fact that it generally works – tells you that you
are looking at a refined and sophisticated mechanism. As is well known, it would be wonderful if these gas and coal
guzzling devices could be replaced with renewable energy sources (say wind) and
more eco - friendly fuels (say hydrogen).
Progress is being made in this regard, but the years of time
and billions of dollars to refine the old technology puts us deep in a local
minimum where oil and coal have clear economic advantages. If the same time and effort had been devoted
to wind and solar and other green technologies, then it is likely (but not
proved) that they would be fully competitive with oil and coal. But history did not happen that way, and in
fact oil and coal have been very good choices for most of our history using
them. Now, we – like the Mayas – are stuck
for better or for worse.
"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -- I took the one less
traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."
- Robert Frost
The Moon is a funny place and discussing the implications of
its peculiarities has led us down a long road. No atmosphere, no water, no carbon, low gravity, no ecology, high
and low temperatures – all these aspects of the Moon make it a difficult place
to live but also present opportunities for innovation. If the opportunities are great enough, for
example if a tenfold increase in solar energy is a big advantage, then a
practical and pleasant existence on the Moon may be possible.
A thriving lunar society would have tremendous long-term
impacts on Earth. To understand this,
one needs a model for technological change.
The model we have used has several key components:
Randomness
There is a strong element of unpredictability in
technological change, at least at the detailed level. Obvious inventions may be simply missed (what we miss entirely, we
will never know) or delayed (penicillin) or stifled by custom, law or vested
interest (the Vaucanson loom). On
occasion, a brilliant insight leads us to discover something that by all rights
we should have never found (General Relativity probably belongs here, some say
String Theory is in this category).
Interconnectedness
Current usage – i.e. the technology of the tangent zone –
sparks other inventions. Sometimes
there is a clear cut transfer of knowledge (from organ making to loom
making). Other times, the invention is
fortuitous, happening by sheer force of common association (coal tar becomes a
dye, Teflon is made by accident while experimenting, etc.). As with missed random inventions, we will
never know those inventions that we do not make because the interconnection
with current usage is too weak to facilitate their discovery.
Evolution
The evolutionary model of biology – if not pushed too far –
is a valuable way of looking at technological change. Randomness and Interconnectedness are like mutation and sex (gene
swapping). New ideas and variations on
old ideas are created by the randomness and interconnectedness of the invention
process. And as in biology, there is a
natural selection process too: being or
not being in the tangent technology zone determines whether an invention will
live or die.
Tangent Technology Zone
Human
preferences, expressed as utility isoquants, interact with the existing
technology, expressed as the production possibility frontier. The highest isoquant that still manages to
touch the frontier defines at the point where they touch – at the tangent point
– what we have called the Tangent Technology Zone. This is the set of methods, processes, etc. that will be used in
the economy – the technology set that will actually be used. Methods that may be known but that are
uneconomical – that are not going to be used – are excluded from the Tangent
Technology Zone. It is the methods and
processes of the Tangent Zone on which randomness and interconnectedness are
most likely to act. Technologies in
other zones may yield new inventions, but they are much less likely to do so
than those in the Tangent Zone simply because they will be unused and thus
relatively unknown.
Technological Jurassic
Parks
The
Mesozoic is a world toward which the real world on Earth today cannot evolve,
at least not without a cataclysm comparable to the one that killed the
dinosaurs 65 million years ago. There
is a barrier that prevents dinosaurs from returning – their old ecological
niches have been filled by mammals.
Similarly, there are technologies that cannot be developed because the
chain of events necessary to discover them are only likely in a technology zone
which happens – on Earth – not to be the Tangent Technology Zone. These undeveloped technologies exist only as
possibilities in the Forbidden Zones of the production possibility frontier.
Controllable and Predictable vs. Uncontrollable and
Unpredictable
Many aspects of technological change are uncontrollable and
unpredictable. Certainly the random
elements are. However, the changes that
happen through association are slightly less so. You never know what you will get, but you can exert a little
control by putting resources to work on specific issues, specifying the
research. One might say that this is a
call for extending the political concepts of pluralism and diversity to
technology as well. In effect, you can
force associations to happen; you just do not know what will result. However, all this takes place within the
context of the Tangent Zone. The things
that you think of, the things that you will associate together in research are
largely the result of what you know about; i.e. they derive directly from the
technologies in the Tangent Zone. There
is another level of control possible, but it is only really offered by space
exploration and extraterrestrial colonization.
That control is to create new Tangent Zones. To do that, you need a new environment with constraints and
opportunities that are different than on Earth.
Conclusion
Things that do seem to be essential to technological
progress are activity – technical and economic growth and change – and lots of
it, combined with an intermixing of ideas of all kinds, and an attitude that
things can and should be done better.
It is in this sense that the Moon may offer the greatest opportunities
and benefits. By having a distinctly
and permanently different production possibility frontier, lunar technology
will inevitably explore byways untrodden on Earth. The "road not taken" on Earth will become available
through the exchange of intellectual property with other worlds, creating a
larger universe of ideas from which both societies can benefit and push forward
their respective technology frontiers.
Of course even when a discovery or invention generates a
clear and obvious path for future research, that action may hang on a knife’s
edge, perhaps never to be taken, perhaps just delayed.
The germ fighting capabilities of penicillin in Penicillium
mold were discovered by Alexander Fleming in 1928. He published his results, but little else happened for many
years. Finally, in 1938, Ernst Chain,
Howard Florey and Norman Heatley began investigations at Oxford
University. The urgency of World War II
brought resources and attention to bear on the mold. Soon production engineers were hard at work finding ways to grow
penicillin faster and samples of soils were being collected from around the
world in a search for better, faster growing varieties. The rest is history, with a huge number of
additional types of antibiotics being discovered or manufactured in the years
since then. Arguably, penicillin did
not just give us a new class of medicines, it kicked open the door to a whole
new type of medicine and a whole new way of doing medical science.
Many other examples could be cited, but Christopher Columbus
provides one of the best examples of delay in discovery. When asked to fund his "R&D"
effort, many European heads of state rebuffed him. In his case the rejections were more justified than some. After all, the circumference of the world
was in fact well known, and Columbus had it wrong. He was cooking the books to make his plan to sail west to India
and China look feasible. But in the
end, he convinced one pair of European rulers (a Spanish King and Queen), and
that was all he needed.
Whereas some Italian rulers may have wished later that they
had exploited Christopher Columbus’ offer to sail for them, by the next century
these rulers would not hesitate to exploit castrati for the musical qualities
of their unique voices. The Chinese had
more practical matters in mind for their eunuchs. Many became powerful members of the Chinese court with unique
access to the emperor; some even became dictators. In 1405 and almost a century before Columbus sailed, Zeng He
(also known as Admiral Chêng Ho [51]), an important and powerful Chinese
eunuch, commanded a great fleet of over 300 ships and almost 30,000 men. A total of six such expeditions were
launched by the Emperor Yongle (1360-1424) between 1405 and 1421. Exploration went as far as the east coast of
Africa. With ships as long as 400 feet,
the numbers and technology involved showed China to be vastly superior to the
comparatively puny oceanic efforts of the Europeans at that time. They had the resources, technology,
administrative abilities and will to make it happen. But when Yongle died, so did these great voyages [53].
It seems that China’s voyages of discovery, vast as they were
and backed as they were by huge resources and governmental commitment, were
nonetheless driven mostly by politics and short term needs. Technology was not an issue. They had that. But, there was no long term vision and no clear economic driver
to sustain them. So the voyages
ended. If they had continued, China
might have colonized Europe or discovered the New World, claiming this vast
domain for themselves. They did not
continue, and it was only stubborn tenacity and pure luck that let the Europeans
discover the New World when they did.
After repeated rejections, the Spanish throne only had to say no to
Christopher Columbus and the world might have waited centuries before some
Incan or Aztec sailor managed to wash up on the coast of the Old World and
“discover” it.
In Yongle’s and Columbus’ day, the great discoveries of
wealth in gold and of the long term riches of new countries, new forms of
government, and new cultures hung by a thread for want of vision or an economic
justification … and so it seems to be with the Moon. The drivers of the Moon race in the 1960s were too political and
short term to sustain the effort. We
know that there are no gold mines on the Moon, but there is a door there to an
undiscovered country with new technologies and new societies waiting …waiting
to be created by us.
"Parting is
such sweet sorrow …"
- Shakespeare
(Romeo and Juliet)
In this epilogue we address a few ideas that need mentioning
but just did not seem to fit in elsewhere.
We also provide a guide to additional reading.
What About Mars? Some
readers may naturally wonder how our conclusions would differ if we had looked
at Mars instead of at the Moon. The
Moon is a convenient choice because it is relatively well understood and
because it has a very clear-cut and striking set of differences from the
Earth. Mars, in contrast, is much less
well known, and its differences from Earth, while very great, are not as clear-cut.
Mars has volatiles.
The atmosphere has so much carbon dioxide that it actually has been
observed to act as laser, much like the CO2 lasers that are used on
Earth. The presence of carbon indicates
that Mars, unlike the Moon, probably did not boil off everything that was not
tied down. There is clearly some water
on Mars, but how much is not known. It
may be only traces locked up in the polar ice caps or the amount may be very
substantial. Evidence indicates Mars
may have had great seas of water at one time.
In any case we can expect that volatiles and all the other elements will
be found on Mars.
We also know that Mars has had some significant geologic
activity. Olympus Mons for example is a
huge, dormant volcano. Geologic
activity combined with the possibility of large quantities of water in the past
means that Mars, unlike the Moon, may have duplicated some of Earth's more
common ore forming processes. But we do
not really know.
So Mars appears to be more like a poor relation of Earth than
a cousin of the Moon. Its production
possibility curve would be almost everywhere lower than on Earth but the shape
might not be all that different. This
raises an interesting question: Why
would anyone want to colonize Mars if it has so few advantages to make it
attractive for living? Even solar
energy is less there than on the Moon – approximately 1/3rd of the
Moon's intensity but still 3 times the intensity on the surface of the
Earth. The honest answer may be that
Mars is a great place to do science but a lousy place to live.
Rather than considering Mars, O'Neill's proposals for living
in free space are probably more interesting from the perspective of readers of
this book. O'Neill argues that resource
constraints in free space would be much less than on Earth:
·
Non-volatile materials would be obtained from the Moon
or asteroids. If the Moon were used, a
rail gun could propel raw material to a rendezvous with a free-floating colony.
·
Volatiles could be obtained from certain types of
asteroids and from comets. Because one
does not need to make a soft touch down on a large body such as the Moon in
order to retrieve this material, even Asimov's ideas about bringing in an
entire comet are not completely far fetched.
·
Solar energy would be twice as abundant as on the Moon,
because there would be no night in free space.
·
Colonists would have access to extreme heat, extreme
cold, and a variety of pseudo-gravitation levels, ranging from zero-g to
Earth's 1G (or higher if needed).
Theses variations make possible the use of entirely different
technologies than are common on Earth: high temperature superconductors could
be used to make manufacturing equipment highly efficient; energy generation
could take advantage of the high and low temperatures to drive up efficiency;
very low gravity could be used in manufacturing to facilitate moving massive
objects.
·
While being near Earth would certainly have advantages,
free floating colonies could even be moved to orbit other planets, providing a
base from which to mount extensive, human directed exploration of Mars, Europa
or even Titan.
On the whole then, life on a free-floating space colony
would be quite different from life on either the Earth or the Moon in a
technological sense. Creating such a
colony would create yet another, unique Technology Zone.
Other Models of Change. The model for technological change that we have presented is a
good one in the sense that it covers a great deal and it makes
predictions. Some readers may feel that
"prediction" is too strong a word.
Certainly, nothing very detailed can be predicted – you will not be able
to write next week's Science Times headlines using the theory. But you can use it to make some broad policy
decisions and you can use it retroactively to say "Ah, that's why that
happened!". Sometimes.
The economic basis for the model is very much part of the
mainstream capitalist orthodoxy. This
mainstream is certainly not in danger of rejection today but there are
alternative views.
Historical / Sociological: Perhaps the most famous theory of technological change is given
by Thomas Kuhn in his book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” [35]. Kuhn's approach is focused mostly on major
scientific changes – paradigm shifts – but also addresses the day-to-day work
of scientists. To summarize this too
briefly, Kuhn views scientists as typically working within the confines of a
"paradigm" that defines what is interesting and useful to do. This paradigm might be viewed as an aspect
of what we have called a Technology Zone.
The experiments they perform and the questions they ask (or do not ask)
are developed within the context of this paradigm. Only rarely do events conspire to cause a crisis of confidence in
the paradigm and throw open the gates to radical scientific progress. The crises that led to the theory of
relativity and to quantum mechanics are two examples.
Kuhn's work is not inconsistent with the economic theory
used in this book. It is a
complementary way of looking at change and one that could be useful in
explaining the details of how ideas evolve.
After all, the economic theory we used explains which technological
ideas will be kept for future use but only partially explains which ideas will
be thought of initially. Kuhn's theory
helps in that regard.
Marxist Views:
Extending Hegel's concept of the dialectic and calling it dialectical
materialism, Marx would probably emphasize two things in looking at
technological change:
·
First, is the importance of class in determining where
technology (and everything else) will go.
The social class in power will control and direct the resources that
bring about change and avoid technologies that might empower other classes. This idea might be most appropriately
applied to large efforts such as the Moon race or the Manhattan project, where
a large, focused will was required.
However, calling this an issue of social class is debatable.
·
Second, technology would be viewed as driven by a
dialectical process. An invention
(thesis) would immediately suggest its opposite (antithesis) and the
interaction between the two would lead to some sort of final conclusion
(synthesis) that would in fact serve as a new thesis to continue the process ad
infinitum. This is not a bad point
of view. Certainly, any engineer with a
dash of innovative spirit immediately begins questioning the design assumptions
of any new idea they run across. So
thesis and antithesis are real and imagining the antithesis is a way to
anticipate some new directions that technology may head off to. Sticking to technology as opposed to social
or political antitheses, one example is the participation of astronauts in
various undersea living experiments.
Going up into the vacuum of space just naturally led some to think of
going down into the water as well.
Thesis yields antithesis.
Business
Views: Modern business practices
often model products and by implication some technologies with a life cycle
curve, as illustrated in the figure.
This figure is based on a Bell System source [52], but similar diagrams
can be found in almost any product planning organization in any industry. The idea is simple and appealing; new
products (or technologies) appear and at first have limited acceptance. They then begin a period of rapid growth, as
their advantages become better understood.
Rapid growth is followed by a period of stability, but ultimately new
technologies begin to compete and the product's or technology's use declines.
The life cycle model has appeal because it adds some
predictive capabilities to our model at a level of detail that we cannot
address. However, some of this is
illusory. Life cycles vary
tremendously. When will the lever or
the wheel enter their "decline" phase? Compare this to 8 track tapes.
Still, if it is used with common sense, this is a valuable concept to
add to the tool kit.
Institutionalist View: Members of the Institutionalist school of economics often have
significant reservations about the validity or usefulness of mainstream
economic theory. Thorstein Veblen is a
noted early example of such an economist.
Among the public, Veblen is almost as well known for chasing his
academic companions' wives and having sex with a coed on the Stanford campus as
he is for his economic theories. He was
a man of many talents. In economics,
Veblen's main focus was on class, in particular he is noted for his theory of
the leisure class and custom (conspicuous consumption is a phrase coined by
him). However, he also viewed engineers
as a class and seems to have felt that they exerted substantial control –
control driven by the realities of technology (whatever that is) as opposed to
the crass, money mad objectives of the entrepreneur. For those who have seen it, H.G. Wells' 1936 movie Things to
Come probably captures this view very well. Unfortunately, there is no obvious predictive use for this view,
so it does not seem to be a useful addition to the model presented in this
book.
Institutionalism, however, should not be shrugged off as
having no future role in a model of technological change. Mainstream economics does not deal well with
the huge differences in technological progress that are obvious today between
countries (but see the discussion of Jared Diamond's book below). Why has Japan gone from feudalism to
modernity in a century while some other countries languish? What causes one country, rich in oil, to do
well while another seems to dissipate its earnings faster than they can cash
their checks? Some institutionalists
argue that the devil is in the details of a country's social, business and
political structures and that we will have only limited ability to control our
progress or lack of it until we understand which details matter (see the
reference to De Soto further below).
Further Reading:
We ended the chapter "Why?" by noting that none of the reasons
listed there for colonizing the Moon had enough economic or political oomph to
make it happen. Our own sojourn has,
perhaps, added a little more oomph but there is still a long way to go before
settlers start heading for the launch pads – if they ever do. Still, the issues are interesting and there
is much more that can be learned.
Readers wanting a better introduction to geology may be best
advised to start with any high school "earth sciences" book or a
Geology 101 text found in the bookstore of a nearby college. However, if you want to have a lot more fun,
then the books of John McPhee are a great resource. His books such as In Suspect Terrain [42], Assembling
California [40], Basin and Range [41], and Rising from the Plains [43] teach a great deal about geology, while
providing fascinating stories and insights into the lives of geologists and the
people of the various subject regions.
McPhee also manages to capture in an artistic and enjoyable fashion the
love of geologists for prose – words of every kind imaginable to describe every
geological characteristic imaginable.
Besides McPhee, there are many other possible sources. Never buy a geological dictionary without looking
at it first – some of them are obfuscatory and self-referential in the
extreme. There are many small books on
minerals, gems and the like that can be useful, but scan them before buying. The Simon and
Schuster's Guide to Rocks and Minerals [50] was created in
cooperation with the American Museum of Natural History and is worth looking
at. Finally, the various Roadside
Geology books (e.g. Roadside Geology of South Dakota
[36]) can be quite good, particularly if you are traveling in the state and
take the time to use the book and look at some of the features.
For information on evolution, Darwin's original The
Origin of Species [11] is still a good, albeit a long read. Keep in mind that Darwin had no clue about
DNA or even about Mendelian concepts of genetics, so his presentation while
informative will not be at all modern.
But Darwin knew his basic biology!
A modern but even longer presentation is given in Stephen Jay Gould's The Structure of Evolutionary Theory [23]. Gould is very, very up to date on the issues
– and has a point of view about them – but at about 1400 pages, this is not a
book for everyone.
For lunar geology, the book of choice is Paul Spudis' The
Once and Future Moon [59]. It is
authoritative, readable and enjoyable, and has a great set of references for
further reading. The NASA web site also
has a considerable amount of information and graphics, but the structure is not
nearly as coherent as is Spudis' book.
Readers wanting to learn more about economics, especially
utility and production frontiers, have a long row to hoe. There are many interesting introductions to
the subject. Friedman [18], Hazlitt [26],
Heilbroner [27], Thurow [28] and many others have written such books. Many but not all have their own ax to grind,
so readers will want to make selections suiting their own biases. Also, introductions are invariably
nonmathematical in the extreme – there probably will not be a utility curve in
sight. The introductory text that I
remember best (now out of print) was for an Economics 101 class and it took 200
pages of serious grinding before it showed a utility curve. A readable but dated economic view of
technology is provided by Mansfield [39].
For those who are really committed, a microeconomics text suitable for a
college economics 201 type of class is likely to provide a good but not a light
hearted explanation of the economics used here. For those interested in Instititionalism, there is now a good
alternative to Veblen. To be scathingly
fair to Thorstein, I've always found his writing so boring as to be
intolerable. Consequently, I probably
do not really understand his work, having spent more time sleeping with it than
reading it. On the other hand, there is
a very readable, modern book by Hernando De Soto that I believe falls in the
institutionalist camp. His book The
Mystery of Capital [15] probably is not quite the total solution that it
purports to be, but it is a wonderful and important advance, and a good read.
The situation is even worse for those seeking more
information about Operations Research (OR).
I know of no books that go beyond the introduction given here, that are
useful, and that are not mathematical in the extreme. However, Paul J. Nahin's When Least is Best: How Mathematicians Discovered Many Clever Ways
to Make Things as Small (or as Large) as Possible at least purports to be
for written for the masses, but only those masses who still remember their
calculus [44]. If you want to pursue
this subject further, brush up on your differential calculus (integral calculus
isn't needed much in OR) and your linear algebra and have at it. If you get that far but still want to try to
go a little easy on yourself, look for an introduction to the subject that is
written for engineers or for economists – both use OR in their own professions
but usually do not need to understand it at the depth expected of a
mathematician. Because readers'
backgrounds will vary substantially, it is better not to suggest books but
rather to encourage the reader to browse the web, general bookstores and local
college bookstores before making a selection.
Finally, technological change has been addressed by many
authors and in many ways. As mentioned
earlier, Mansfield [39] provides a readable view by an economist. There are numerous histories that are, in
the end, pretty much boring lists of facts.
In contrast, James Burke's Connections [5] has lots of facts and
is also very much a fun book to read.
Burke does an excellent job of illustrating the interactive, intertwining
nature of technological evolution and makes a good case that chance and
association play a substantial role.
Another decent read is Cardwell's Technology [8]. Like Burke, Cardwell covers a huge range of
material and has his own points of view that are worth hearing. However, readers with specific interests may
be happiest if they go to a source that is more focused. Ancient Greek and Roman technologies are
described in Landels' book [37], and Gimpel [20] provides a similar service for
the Middle Ages. Interested in Medieval
mining technology? Then try De Re
Metallica, authored by Agricola and translated by the late U.S. president
Herbert Hoover, who was himself a mining engineer [2]. For an example of biological revolutions,
try Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle [12] or Watson's book The
Double Helix [63]. Interested in
the moon race? Then try Don Wilhelm's To
a Rocky Moon [64].
Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel [16] is
also about technological change. As
with Burke, he makes a case that chance plays a role, but Diamond's focus is on
how the environment – weather, mineral, plant and animal resources – can affect
technological development and other aspects of society as well. This impressive book provides a very
specific, Earth-based example of how resources drive human progress.
Whereas Burke emphasizes connections, one might say that
Edward Tenner emphasizes disconnections in his interesting book Why Things
Bite Back [60]. In a sense this is
about technological evolution, but the book emphasizes that there is a lot more
going on in "improving" technology than just moving forward to a
better world.
Finally, we should mention memetics. Memes are, roughly speaking, ideas that
transmit themselves and evolve, and memetics is the study of memes. Richard Dawkins is generally credited with
introducing the concept of memes in his book The Selfish Gene [13]. Richard Brodie is a popularizer of the
concept (Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme
[3]). The ideas presented in Lunar
Impact were not developed with memetics in mind; indeed, most of the
concepts on which our approach is based were developed long before memes came
along. Still, there are
similarities. One might say that we
have taken the basic meme concept, restricted it to ideas about technology, and
then embedded it within a theoretical framework of economics. That framework is not as precise or
predictive as we would like, but it does provide a specific model for meme
evolution – where and how it tends to happen and which memes survive.
“The ability to
quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.”
- Somerset Maugham
The quotes at the beginning of the chapters can stand on
their own, but a few words of explanation, even exegesis, may be of interest.
15.1Title
If "in which geology and
space become an excuse to talk about Sex, Money and a Hot Cup of Joe"
is not a blatant attempt to sell books by pandering to the baser instincts,
then what is? But, viewed forgivingly,
there is some truth to this piece of Madison Avenue chicanery. Sex is discussed – gene swapping and its
analogy of idea sharing are important components of the technology evolution
model. Money in the form of economics
certainly plays a big role in the book, and "a hot cup of Joe", well
that is a reference to the quantum computer mentioned in the chapter "A
Technology Vignette: Sex and Genetic
Algorithms".
This snippet is from a mere snip of a poem by Walt Whitman
"Look down
fair moon and bathe this scene, …
Pour down your
unstinted nimbus sacred moon."
It seemed to be an appropriate way to begin. The words themselves have a sense of
incantation … a request for aid from the Muse in the work to
follow. The fame of the author adds
credibility albeit undeservedly.
Finally, the obscurity of the poem itself adds a certain air of mystery.
In truth, the quote is also a bit of macabre,
self-deprecating humor, but this would be undetectable by any other than the
cognoscenti of Whitman's work. Walt
Whitman lived during the American Civil war and was active in it as a
caregiver. He saw a great deal of the
horrors of war in the damage it had done to the patients he tended. The actual poem is
"Look down
fair moon and bathe this scene,
Pour softly down
night's nimbus floods on faces ghastly, swollen, purple,
On the dead on
their backs or arms toss'd wide,
Pour down your
unstinted nimbus sacred moon."
Given that the reader has reached this point in the book, we
can hope that the reading was not as ghastly as the scene referenced in the
poem.
In real life, Cyrano de
Bergerac was an accomplished person who himself wrote about traveling to and
exploring the Moon. In the play by
Edmund Rostand [55], a fictionalized Cyrano is the epitome of bravery,
chivalry, wit and intelligence. It is
only fit that we begin with a quote from such an amazing persona:
"When a poet
dies, the Moon in heaven is his paradise."
There are many translations of Rostand's play and some others
keep the general idea but are less suitable for the purposes of a brief quote
that leads into our book.
Originally, we considered a quote from Arthur O'Shaughnessy:
"We are the
music makers, and we are the dreamers of the dream. Wandering by lone sea
breakers, and
sitting by desolate streams. World losers and world forsakers,
for whom the pale
moon gleams."
The beginning of Arthur O'Shaughnessy's poem is well known
but possibly a bit too saccharin and Pollyanna-ish. Nonetheless, it sounds well and seemed appropriate as a means of
adding just a little bit of a romantic feel to the book. Not all of the poem sounds this well, at
least to me. For example, the second
verse:
"With
wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the
world's great cities,
And out of a
fabulous story
We fashion an
empire's glory:
One man with a
dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and
conquer a crown;
And three with a
new song's measure
Can trample an
empire down."
has rhyming and rhythm that sounds like a dittie and is not
very pretty to my sensibility or ear, I fear.
Of course, the fact that O'Shaughnessy mentions ditties in the first
line of this stanza probably means he knew quite well what he was doing, but it
ruins the effect for me.
Cyrano seemed, in the end, to be a better choice.
This quote from the Moon Society's web page
“…a space faring
civilization … will establish communities on the Moon.”
is representative of the kind of material that can be found on
the World Wide Web and of the attitudes of the many private organizations
seeking a place in the history of space exploration. Participants range from serious developers of novel rockets,
amateur and professional organizations searching for Near Earth Objects and
extraterrestrial life, legitimate efforts to evaluate business opportunities
such as space mining, and of course the bizarre fringes as well.
Below are a few of the graphic icons for well-known private
organizations associated with space exploration (no endorsement is implied).
The Planetary Society:
www.planetary.org
The Lunar Planetary
Institute: www.lpi.usra.edu
The National Space Society: www.nss.org
The Artemis Society
International: www.asi.org
The Moon Society: www.moonsociety.org
The quote of Sir Edward Coke beginning this vignette
"… out of the
old fields must come the new corne."
was taken from A Concise History of Common Law [48] and
alludes to one of the major themes of Lunar Impact, namely that the new
always develops out of the existing.
Coke lived in the late 1500's and early 1600's and was the Chief Justice
during one (of many) times in England when the Monarchy and the Parliament were
at odds with each other; each trying to enhance its own power at the expense of
the other. Coke, in his role as a
principal of the English legal machinery, was inevitably drawn into this
conflict. His approach was to delve
into the ancient Rolls and other medieval legal documentation and to use this
existing base of legal precedent as the starting point for the new legal
principles that could guide the relationship between King and Parliament in his
time.
Coke is certainly not the only legal scholar to have an
appreciation for the necessary link between the past and change into the
future. For example, Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Jr. was a famous United States Supreme Court justice who wrote a widely
read book called “The Common Law” [32].
In that book he notes that “To
know what it is, we must know what it has been, and what it tends to become.” That is a dynamical view of being that would
make even Prigogine [49] proud. The
original was written in 1881, and the text of my own copy (part of the 51st
printing copyrighted in 1923) was unchanged from the original. Holmes’ book is very much focused on how
legal practices evolved, and makes the point that this evolution has been messy
but not without an underlying, understandable mechanism. Holmes’ book makes no
effort to compare legal evolution to Darwin’s theory or to our views on
technological evolution, but re-read today, the similarities are there to be
seen.
The line from Clementine "In
a cavern, in a canyon, excavating for a mine …" is meant to be more
than cute. It was chosen to emphasize
the great geologic differentiation of material that has occurred on Earth,
making mines common enough. This
contrasts with the Moon, which while not being homogeneous, is not nearly as
differentiated in mineral terms as is the Earth.
15.7A Technology Vignette: From Chant to Computers
Sometimes in our modern age it can seem impossible to us
that those who lived in the past could be widely aware of their contemporaries
and their own history. After all, books
were expensive, communication slow, travel very difficult, and life hard. Given that, how could ideas from the distant
past effectively percolate through to later years except in the rarest of
cases? The quote
… [Bach] made copies of Palestrina, Frescobaldi, Lotti, Caldara,
Ludwig, Bernhard Bach, Telemann, Keiser, Grigny, Dieupart and many others.
from Albert Schweitzer's book [57] illustrates that the past
was not lost – at least not to the industrious and intelligent. The linkage of the present to the past
remained intact.
Most science fiction is quickly and mercifully forgotten,
but some creations have managed to capture the imagination of multiple
generations. Among these are Frankenstein's
monster, Star Trek, Star Wars, and Godzilla.
Combining Godzilla with extraterrestrials, as is done in the 1965 movie Godzilla Vs. Monster Zero creates
opportunities for wonderful quotes such as
"Gold is much less valuable to us here than is water"
In our case, this is entirely appropriate as a lead into the
chapter on lunar resources, since water is incredibly scarce on the Moon. The quote sets the stage well by emphasizing
the stark contrasts with Earth.
Well, this quote from Joy of Cooking [54]
"Exactly how [the
foods] interlock and in what quantities for the most advantageous results for
every one of us is another puzzle we must try to solve …"
is an attempt to be cute, but it also serves a
purpose. Readers can be put off by
mathematics and by economics. The quote
is an attempt to say right up front that the essential ideas of this chapter
are no big deal and are accessible to everyone. It also mimics – in cooks' language – the efforts of economists
such as Quesnay and Leontief.
Keynes was one of the great economists and his ideas had a
powerful albeit belated impact on our interpretation of the Great Depression
and the responses of capitalist economies to subsequent economic
downturns. The quote from him
“The ideas of economists and political philosophers …are
more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little
else.”
is taken from his classic The General Theory of
Employment, Interest and Money [34] and is a mixture of truth and
hubris. Economists have been
influential; just look at Marx and the huge impact on global politics that he
has had. On the other hand, economists
and their theories are often incapable of effecting much real change. In particular, Keynesian ideas are less well
received today than in the past, largely because the political will and self
control needed to implement them is rarely on hand.
15.11
A Technology
Vignette: Analog Computers – Wiwaxian
Dead Ends?
"It's obvious you won't survive by your wits
alone." certainly applies to Wiwaxia, in fact Wiwaxia should not count on
its physical beauty or sheer brawn either.
The statement by the cartoonist Scott Adams says something about the
perils to survival and was written by a person who is very familiar with
technology and what can happen even to a "well adapted"
organization. Adams is best known for
his off the wall humor in the cartoon strip Dilbert, but he derives a lot of
his views from career experience in the former Bell Telephone System and the
spin offs from it after divestiture in 1984.
Watching what was once arguably the most technologically sophisticated
and best-run industry in the world descend into chaos has provided Adams with a
lot of comic material and a unique perspective on what it means to be a dead
end.
I believe the original to "Not your father's economy." was "Not your
father's rock and roll." but
am not certain of the true origin. In
any case, it seemed very appropriate.
Incidentally, the title of this chapter is a literary allusion to “A
Republic of Insects and Grass”, the first chapter of Schell’s book “The Fate of
the Earth” [56]. His book received
considerable notoriety during the Cold War era because of its description of a
devastated Earth. Even so, that
post-apocalyptic world would be less challenging in many ways than living on
the Moon.
The quote "Sex is the mathematics urge
sublimated." is absurd, funny and entirely appropriate to a chapter
that is in detail about a mathematical or computer technique (genetic
algorithms) but in general about evolution and the importance of sex – mutation
and recombination – in the process of evolution. The quote is attributed to M. C. Reed.
The quote "If I
knew the jazz of the future, I'd play it." is wonderful. It captures with
wry humor the mystery of change and the impossibility of predicting in any detail
what that change will be. The quote is
originally from a fairly obscure source and attributed to an unidentified
musician but was lifted by me from Tenner's book Why Things Bite Back [60].
Perhaps the quote from a Robert Frost poem that begins this
chapter
"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -- I took the one less
traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."
is too common and too sentimental – every school child knows
it – but it catches a key idea in Lunar Impact. The technological developments of the future
are inevitably but unpredictably the results of our choices today.
15.16
Epilogue and Further
Reading
"Parting is such sweet sorrow …". In this case, let us hope that it is!
15.17
Notes on the Quotes
Like the poem by Whitman used in the prologue, the
attribution to Somerset Maugham “The ability to quote is a serviceable
substitute for wit.” is a little more self-effacing wit.
15.18
References
First the serious view – a chapter consisting entirely of
references certainly justifies a reference to librarians. More importantly, if you have a severely
distorted sense of humor, then you probably also love the movie scene
referenced here with an extremely musculatured Conan the Librarian exclaiming
to a confused user of the library
“Don’t you know the Dewey Decimal System?” The scene is of course from Weird Al Yankovic’s comic movie
masterpiece “UHF” and it has absolutely nothing to do with this book.
“Don’t you know the
Dewey Decimal System!?!”
- Conan the
Librarian
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[2] Agricola,
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[3] Brodie, Richard,
"Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme", Integral Press,
1995.
[4] Brophy, James
J., "Basic Electronics for Scientists", McGraw Hill Text, 1996.
[5] Burke, James,
"Connections", Little, Brown and Company, 1978.
[6] Burt, Donald M.,
"Mining the Moon", American Scientist, November-December, 1989.
[7] Campbell, Thomas
P. et al, "Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence", Yale
University Press, 2002.
[8] Cardwell,
Donald, "The Norton History of Technology", W. W. Norton and Co.,
1995.
[9] Carroll, Christopher D., The New York Times, February
18, 2003, page C2.
[10] Çengel, Yunus
A. and Michael Boles, "Thermodynamics: an engineering approach",
Mcgraw-Hill, 2002.
[11] Charles,
Darwin, "The Origin of Species", Grammercy, 1998.
[12] Charles,
Darwin, "The Voyage of the Beagle: Journal of Researches into the Natural
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Beagle", Modern Library, 2001.
[13] Dawkins,
Richard, "The Selfish Gene", Oxford University Press, 1990.
[14] Debreu, Gerard
and Gerand Debreu, "Theory of Value: An Axiomatic Analysis of Economic
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[15] De Soto, Hernando, "The Mystery of Capital",
Basic Books, 2000.
[16] Diamond, Jared,
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and Company, 1997.
[17] Feynman,
Richard P., "The Character of Physical Law", MIT Press, 1965.
[18] Friedman,
Milton and Rose Friedman, "Free to Choose: A Personal Statement",
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[19] Gershenfeld,
Neil and Isaac Chuang, "Bulk Spin-Resonance Quantum Computation",
Science, February 1, 1997.
[20] Gimpel, Jean,
"The Medieval Machine: The
Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages", Penguin Books, 1976.
[21] Goldberger,
Arthur S, "A Course in Econometrics", Harvard University Press, 1991.
[22] Gould, Stephen
Jay, "Full House: The Spread of
Excellence from Plato to Darwin", Harmony Books, New York, 1996.
[23] Gould, Stephen
Jay, "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory", Harvard University
Press, 2002.
[24] Hanna, Melvin
W., "Quantum Mechanics in Chemistry", Benjamin / Cummings Publishing,
1981.
[25] Harris,
Jennifer, ed., "Textiles: 5000 Years", Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1993.
[26] Hazlitt, Henry,
"Economics in One Lesson", Three Rivers Press, 1983.
[27] Heilbroner,
Robert L., "The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives and Times and Ideas of the
Great Economic Thinkers", Touchstone Books, 1999.
[28] Heilbroner,
Robert L. and Lester C. Thurow, "Economics Explained: Everything You Need
to Know About How the Economy Works and Where It's Going", Touchstone
Books, 1998.
[29] Herstein,
Israel N., "Topics in Algebra", John Wiley & Sons, 1975.
[30] Hofstadter,
Douglas R, "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid", Vintage
Books, 1979.
[31] Holland, John
H., "Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems : An Introductory
Analysis with Applications to Biology, Control, and Artificial
Intelligence", MIT Press, 1992.
[32] Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr., “The Common Law”, Little,
Brown and Company, 1923.
[33] Ifrah, Georges,
"The Universal History of Computing: From the Abacus to the Quantum
Computer", John Wiley and Son, 2001.
[34] Keynes, John
Maynard, "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money",
Prometheus Books, 1997.
[35] Kuhn, Thomas
S., "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", The University of
Chicago Press, 1970.
[36] Lageson, David
R. and Darwin R. Spearing, "Roadside Geology of South Dakota",
Mountain Press Publishing Co., 1988.
[37] Landels, J. G.,
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1978.
[38] Leontief,
Wassily, "Input-Output Economics", Oxford University Press, 1986.
[39] Mansfield,
Edwin, "Technological Change", W. W. Norton and Company, 1971.
[40] McPhee, John,
"Assembling California", Noonday Press, 1994.
[41] McPhee, John,
"Basin and Range", Noonday Press, 1990.
[42] McPhee, John,
"In Suspect Terrain", Noonday Press, 1991.
[43] McPhee, John,
"Rising from the Plains", Noonday Press, 1991.
[44] Nahin, Paul J., When Least is Best: How Mathematicians
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[48] Plucknett,
Theodore F. T., "A Concise History of the Common Law", Little, Brown
and Company, 1956.
[49] Prigogine, Ilya, “From Being to Becoming: Time and
Complexity in the Physical Sciences”, W. H. Freeman and Company, 1980.
[50] Prinz, Martin,
George Harlow and Joseph Peters, editors, "Simon and Schuster's Guide to
Rocks and Mineral", Simon and Schuster, 1978.
[51] Pyenson, Lewis
and Susan Sheets-Pyenson, "Servants of Nature: A History of Scientific
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[52] Rey, R.F.,
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AT&T Bell Laboratories, 1983.
[53] Roberts, J. A.
G., "A Concise History of China", Harvard University Press, 1999.
[54] Rombauer, Irma
and Marion Rombauer Becker, "Joy of Cooking", Bobbs-Merrill Company,
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[55] Rostand, Edmund
translated by Humbert Wolfe, "Cyrano de Bergerac", Peter Pauper
Press, Mount Vernon, NY, 1941.
[56] Schell, Jonathan,
“The Fate of the Earth”, Stanford University Press, 2000.
[57] Schweitzer,
Albert, "J. S. Bach", Bruce Humphries Publishers, 1911.
[58] Smith, Adam,
"The Wealth of Nations: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes",
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[59] Spudis, Paul
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[60] Tenner, Edward,
"Why Things Bite Back", Vintage Books, 1996.
[61] Tritton, D. J.,
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·
Cover: A
modification of a Copernicus Crater photo from Apollo 17, NASA.
·
Thanksgiving on the Moon: background is from NASA; foreground is detail from Norman
Rockwell's 4th Freedom, SEPS Curtis Publishing Company.
·
Earth and Moon – An Intertwined Pair, Apollo 11, NASA
·
A 1970s NASA Vision of a Space Colony, NASA.
·
An asteroid (IDA) and its moon – NASA.
·
Known and Suspected Large Meteor Impacts in the
Contiguous, Continental USA, U.S. Geological Survey and National Atlas of the
United States®
·
Halluciginea from the Smithsonian National Museum of
Natural History
·
Wiwaxia from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural
History
·
Opabinia from the Smithsonian National Museum of
Natural History
·
Coal and Iron Mines, Plants and Reserves in the
Contiguous, Continental USA, U.S. Geological Survey and National Atlas of the
United States
·
Detail from a Hand Woven Tapestry by Dermoyen, Circa
1553 from page 439 of Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence [7]
·
Hand Made Silk Brocade Circa 1740-1760 detail from page
183 of Textiles: 5000 Years [25].
·
Lunar South Pole taken by NASA's Clementine Probe,
NASA.
·
Meteor Crater, Arizona, USA from "The Worlds
Greatest Wonders", 1930, public domain.
·
Moon Craters – Apollo 10, NASA.
·
A Moon Mountain – Apollo 17, NASA.
·
Sea of Tranquility – Apollo 11, NASA
·
Regolith Dust & Boulders - Apollo 14, NASA.
·
The Empty Quarter, NASA,.
·
A Calendar Based on Mayan Astronomy from
webexhibits.org,
National Atlas of the United States is a registered
trademark of the United States Department of the Interior.
Star Trek is a trademark of Paramount Pictures Corporation.
UNIX is a trademark of The Open Group.
